The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

mono

The Photography Club and the Cinema Club are in danger of shutting down until club members Satsuki, An, and Sakurako decide to form the Cinephoto Club. They are asked to be the main characters for manga artist Haruno's latest work centered around action cameras. The girls head out to capture the lovely sights of Japan, experimenting with gadgets beyond photography and film equipment and, of course, chomping on the local delicacies along the way.

mono is based on a manga by Afro. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

It's funny. As a rule, I don't enjoy slice-of-life stories—especially of “the cute girls in school clubs” variety—but mono does a great job of showing there is an exception to every rule. This is because, despite being a part of the genre, there is more to it than simply reveling in everyday youth and cuteness. mono has a message it wants to impart—more than one actually.

The main theme of this anime is the relationship between subject, artist, and art. Satsuki finds herself the subject of Makinohara's art. This, in turn, inspires her to make art out of Makinohara's art—taking pictures of Makinohara as she works. This goes even a step further when we learn that An was taking pictures of Satasuki taking pictures of Makinohara taking pictures. But of course, it doesn't end there.

Once Makinohara leaves the story, we get a new Inception-style cascade. We have Satsuki and An taking pictures. Then we have Haruno, making a manga about Satsuki and An taking pictures. Then you have us, the viewers, watching an anime about Haruno making a manga about Satsuki and An taking pictures.

The point the series is trying to make is obvious: capturing the act of making art can be art in and of itself. Being inspired by others' art and making your art from it is a beautiful and wonderful thing.

The other theme mono touches on is the relationship between technology and art. Photography has been around since the invention of the camera—drawing since time immemorial. Yet with new technology, Satsuki is able to easily get breathtaking shots with minimal effort and Haruno is able to sit at home and do all the work of a manga artist with nothing but her tablet. Technology can support artists in achieving their vision—and even facilitate new kinds of art like strapping a video camera on a cat for a week and seeing what happens. The bar of entry for creating your own art has never been lower.

In the end, I am shocked at how thematically strong this episode is. Beyond that, it has a fun and silly central trio, solid visuals, and some clever humor. While I don't know if this series will be for me in the long run, watching this episode was a real treat and I can't recommend it enough.

mono might have scored higher with me if not for a single scene: Haruno Akiyama, a dopey manga artist who sold the protagonist Satsuki Amamiya her first action camera, gets a text from her editor with instructions for her new series. It must be a four-panel comic about high school girls getting into a hobby. Her editor suggests it includes a scene of them eating a meal together and setting it in her hometown of Kofu in Yamanashi prefecture. How convenient that she just met two high school girls who are getting into action photography, a hobby that involves going to various places in Kofu! And they had even had okonomiyaki together earlier. Well, isn't that tidy.

It was just so… self-referential. Like, I don't think Afro, who also wrote the much-lauded Laid-Back Camp actually sold a camera to a high school girl and then started hanging out with them to get ideas for their next manga. However, I could see them having that exact conversation with their editor and using it as a springboard for their new series. Or maybe it was just an excuse for this grown adult to hang around this group of teenagers and drive them places? I don't know, but it rankled me to see the narrative's seams so nakedly and turned me sour on what is frankly a perfectly fine hobby anime.

To be fair to myself, I wasn't feeling super warm toward it to begin with. Hobby anime are not my genre of choice to say the least; I'm not fully immune to their charms but they have to win me over in some way that mono failed at. The episode was quite pretty—showing off the intricacies of action photography when back in my day, you chose between either a point and shoot digital camera or invested in an expensive DSLR. It only makes sense that an anime about photography would look good; if the skill invested in the show's visuals are subpar, you can't very well make a convincing show of the characters' own skills.

But man, did that episode drag! It felt at least as long as its runtime plus half. The photography aspect is cool, but the characters involved in the hobby left me completely cold. Neither Satsuki nor Ai had much personality other than obsessing over their respective girl-crushes, and Haruno is a stereotypical beer-swilling ditzy adult. I also felt a bit like I was watching a tourism campaign for Yamanashi—and while I like series that take place in parts of Japan other than the metropolises, I don't care for feeling advertised to.

Still, mono did a decent job of depicting what it's like to find a new hobby you're excited to learn more about. ...But seriously, why are those girls getting a random working adult to drive them around? Where are their parents?

mono is the type of “Cute Girls Doing a Hobby” that resonates with me more than the usual fare, though it took me a while to get on to the show's wavelength. A cartoon like this is only as good as its cast, after all, and mono's premiere is slow going to establish its core crew of gals. Satsuki is a perfectly fine protagonist to start with, but she's not an especially charismatic protagonist on her own, so the episode doesn't begin to pick up until we're introduced to her infatuated counterpart, An. Even then, the premiere didn't really click with me entirely until Haruno joined the trio and balanced out Satsuki and An's juvenile personalities with something just a touch more mature (and chaotic).

By the end of this first episode, though, I finally started to get what kind of anime mono is trying to be, and I think I dig it. It's more abstract and roughshod visuals are actually pretty charming, for one, even if they're not the most traditionally “pretty” cuts of animation you're bound to see. If you want a more bucolic anime that contains a more typical veneer of shiny anime polish, then you're likely better off with the other famous adaptation of author Afro's work, Laid-Back Camp. mono is much less about the beautiful vistas and the emotional refuge of camping with your pals, and much more about enjoying the unpredictable mischief that a bunch of teenaged girls can get up to when they've got all this modern photographic technology to mess around with and no shortage of ambition.

I think the scene that sold me on mono was when the girls strapped a helmet-cam to Taishou the cat and made one of those fun video-montages of cats getting into scraps with their local feline competition. It's the kind of unique and genuinely interesting little adventure that makes the audience connect with Satsuki and An's hobbies. When you've seen as much anime as I have, the novelty of the “Cute Girls” part of the equation has long since lost its luster, so shows like mono have to have some legitimately meaningful stories to tell and a cast that has more going for it than decent character designs. mono has those qualities so far and should make for an easy seasonal pick for any viewers that crave something more easygoing to pass the time.