The Spring 2016 Anime Preview Guide

Tanaka-kun is Always Listless

Well, it's right there in the title – Tanaka-kun is always listless. He's an existentially sleepy dude whose biggest goal is to make it through the school day while moving as little as possible, relaxing as much as he can, and contributing nothing. With the help of his long-suffering pal Ohta, Tanaka-kun somehow makes it through homeroom and gym class while ruminating on his desire to never be the center of attention or take on any responsibilities. His pals chalk his dedication to staring into the middle distance up to being in love, but that's not it – will anyone ever figure Tanaka out?! Tanaka-kun is Always Listless is based on a manga and can be found streaming on Crunchyroll and The Anime Network Online, Saturdays at 10 AM EST.

Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

I don't understand the appeal of a show where the protagonist is always asleep. I mean, I kind of get that it's a moe-cute thing, and Ohta having to take care of Tanaka inspires plenty of shipping material for fujoshi. I get that it gives animators plenty of opportunities to draw Tanaka's wistfully dreaming face with lens flares and shafts of sunlight. But I don't get how it's supposed to do anything but put an audience to sleep. Given Tanaka's personality, maybe that is the point and this show is a sleep aid like Ani Tore! EX was supposed to get viewers into shape.

Tanaka is essentially a personified cat in a premiere episode that feels like it would have worked better as a short instead of 23 minutes of watching him fall asleep. The appeal of Tanaka's personality type is incredibly specific and really isn't enough to carry a show for anyone but the very specific subset of people who enjoy it. It certainly doesn't make for a compelling watch, as the height of this show's dramatic stakes rest on whether Tanaka is extra grumpy because of a crush or a tooth ache.

The narrative continues on this track for the entire runtime. See Tanaka fall asleep on the gym floor, in the grass at lunch, after completing a work assignment, and on a bench. Follow Ohta as he coddles him through everyday tasks like walking to class and carrying schoolwork. I'm honestly surprised he never spoonfed him.

The only respite I got from the monotony of the main pair's interactions is when Tanaka dozed off and Ohta had conversations with the other characters. The show's opening animation hints the cast will continue to expand, giving some hope that this droll comedy will ease up its focus on the one-note protagonist in favor of more interesting characters.

Nick Creamer

Rating: 2.5

It's kind of funny seeing Haven't You Heard? I'm Sakamoto and Tanaka-kun is Always Listless right after each other. In theory, the two of them are pretty close to the same thing - high school comedies focused on unusual boys with a single quirk, where all the humor is based in mining that one quirk. But while Sakamoto is a JoJo-style, larger-than-life comedy, Tanaka-kun's genre affectation match its protagonist - Tanaka-kun is extremely lazy, and his show is a very laid-back slice of life.

I guess the best way to describe this first episode would be “mostly harmless.” It proceeds almost like an episode of Lucky Star, where very light jokes are built up across offhand, seemingly pointless conversations between Tanaka and his friend Ohta. Tanaka's laziness expresses itself through silly, mild jokes, like how he takes into account the many ways falling asleep in class can go wrong, or how he “works hard” in P.E. in order to get his body prepped for sleeping. And instead of calling him out on these actions, his friend Ohta generally just responds with a thoughtful “oh, so that's how it is,” which actually kind of improves the humor. Instead of punchlines, the show often just sort of fades away, the two characters finishing their conversation as the camera lingers on in intentional anticlimax.

The show is so mild it's almost difficult to talk about it. Many of the jokes here weren't very funny, but it often didn't even seem like they were trying to be - they were just conversations, and you're watching them, and that's about it. It's clearly more dedicated to atmosphere than laugh-out-loud moments, and as far as that goes, Takana-kun's grounded conversations actually made it far more appealing than something like Anne-Happy. Slice of life shows run into issues when their characters just feel like devices, but the friendship between Tanaka and Ohta came off as genuine, even if it was still fairly absurd. And there were a couple standout jokes here and there, like the way Tanaka leading his class in a song ended up slowly fading into a minor-key dirge. But lots of this material also just felt pretty empty, so Tanaka-kun will sadly have to sleep away his future days without me.

Rating: 2

Tanaka-kun has less energy than my thirteen-year-old three-legged cat, and that is saying something. Fiona at least moves when there's food in the offing; Tanaka moves for nothing. That's pretty much the entire premise of this first episode, that high school student Tanaka has elevated listlessness to an art form, rather to the fascination of his classmates. He's even got his own personal keeper: Ohta-kun, the tall, deep-voiced blond to Tanaka's short, gentle-voiced self not only helps to set the two up for possible shipping, which I think of because they look similar to two of the characters in the BL manga Awkward Silence, but also because a large part of Ohta's duties appear to be carrying Tanaka from Place to Place. He just slings Tanaka over his shoulder and hauls him off for everything from class to the dentist, and since that means that Tanaka doesn't have to bestir himself, it seems to be fine with him. There's also a great moment when Ohta walking with Tanaka over his shoulder is used as a scene changer, which is the most visually interesting part of the entire episode.

As you might guess, this is not the fastest moving show out there. While not glacially paced, it does take its time, and Tanaka rarely speaks above a pained whisper or the speed of a snail. In the very beginning this doesn't work quite as well, and there's some drag both then and about halfway through, when Tanaka and Ohta are having lunch. There's also the obligatory metafictional reference to being the main character of your own life, with Tanaka saying that he'd much rather be the side character, since half the time their faces aren't even drawn in, which is of course the cue for the camera to pan back and show us a parade of faceless passersby.

Visually this is actually pretty lazy – whenever there's an opportunity not to draw in a background, it is whole-heartedly taken, with a large number of scenes acted out against plain white blankness. The school, when we see it, looks like the nicest school in the world, with its atriums and huge, manicured lawns, but mostly we're just in a plain yellow classroom or against a white expanse. Given Tanaka's level of energy, there isn't much animation in general in terms of movement. This does work in the episode's favor when something does happen, and these surprising moments of humor are pretty great, especially towards the end when Tanaka hisses at the teacher. In fact, the whole music scene is wonderful, with Tanaka's listless piano playing turning a folksong into a dirge for the country life.

While I'm not fond of the chopped up format for full-length episodes, it does work better here than in some others this season. Tanaka's reduced pace of life translates well into the multi-part format, and it also keeps the episode from dragging too much. It still is very slow and risks losing viewers in a few places, but there's also something oddly appealing about watching Ohta drag Tanaka-kun around while their classmates try to figure the listless boy out, inevitably coming to some wrong conclusions. If you're short on attention span, this isn't a likely hit, but it really has its moments and stands to be amusing overall.