In accordance with its title, Tanaka-kun is Always Listless’ poster child Tanaka-kun is to date one of the laziest characters to ever appear in an anime. Usually when I call a character lazy it means their writing, but beyond Tanaka himself being plenty well written along with the rest of his cohorts, I mean it in the most literal sense of the term: he is almost unfathomably lazy. I’m somewhat incredulous that Silver Link managed to sell a boy who has to be carried anywhere further than two feet away by his best friend, who expends more thought coming up with ways to avoid any minute effort than most people put into their full-time jobs, as the main character. But they did, and they wrote him perfectly, down to his languid speech and constant use of faulty logic to justify his extreme sluggishness. And to complete the picture, they wrote him a perfect best friend, tall and cooperative, imposing but actually kind and soft-spoken, who always looks out for Tanaka’s needs. The joke appears from time to time, but for many of us watching the show it was no joke: Tanaka and Oota were a match made in heaven.
Immediately the bright pastel color palate hits our eyes, making the whole world feel like a dream itself. A playful soundtrack and subdued voices further draw us in, relaxing us, practically inviting us to fall asleep like Tanaka himself will be attempting to do for most of the show. The spacious interior of their high school is both visually attractive and disarmingly wide, making every shot of the students in the hallways feel small. We almost never see a dark space in Tanaka-kun; everything is filled with illumination without glare, the perfect color palate to evoke the feeling of falling asleep in a spring sun.
Tanaka-kun also benefits from having a fairly slimmed-down cast for a slice of life. Towards the end we meet a few characters who won’t show up for more than a few scenes such as Tanaka and Oota’s respective sisters, but after meeting the two central friends in episode one we only really meet two or three more recurring figures, and furthermore their personalities are tooled towards shorter interactions rather than taking up much of the spotlight. The most recurring example is the pint-sized bundle of energy named Miyano, who reveres Tanaka’s lazy manner and wants to learn the secrets of listlessness, much to his dismay, considering the effort he has to exert even to keep her from bothering him. Other than that there are Oota’s childhood friend Echizen and the class representative Shiraishi, as well as a handful of boys in the class whose names are tossed out from time to time, but for the most part it’s all Tanaka, Oota, sometimes Miyano, and then whoever's necessary for the next gag.
What do the gags revolve around? Tanaka plays a scary ghost in the class’ haunted house display at the culture festival while asleep, only to end up failing even to show up for the second half of the day after falling asleep on break. Oota is sick for a day and Tanaka is forced to walk on his own two feet, let alone getting back home from school. The two of them go to the pool for the day only for Tanaka to lose his floaty, but when he does the deadman’s float the kids around him want to learn how he does such a perfectly still drift. All the regular fixtures are in, from the fireworks festival to Valentine’s Day, but watching it all through the lens of someone who just wants to be at home asleep, as well as what his friends do to adjust accordingly having been through this dozens of times before, feels bizarrely fresh and new. Even the smaller scenes, such as Tanaka choosing his seat in the classroom so as to catch the perfect combination of a cross breeze and the warm sun, are short, sweet, and to the point, not to mention downright fun.
Throughout the episodes there are cuts between different bits in a 4-koma-esque style (although the source material itself was a web manga) with the title appearing frequently either over a long silent pause at the end of a scene or over a while backdrop, very reminiscent of Nichijou’s way of shifting. Of course in Nichijou these were the few moments of dead silence, whereas with Tanaka-kun it always interrupts the already quiet scenes at the most awkward of pauses, the perfect transition to signal that the conversation wasn’t headed anywhere better for any of them. Along with spot gags inserted in these title cards—in one episode Oota and Tanaka-kun play the shortest shiritori game imaginable—it further spaces out the narrative, focusing on a punchy one-liner style of humor without any of the speed.
And of course the thing that makes Tanaka-kun work more than anything else is the writing, and specifically the interplay between Tanaka and Oota. They act like two professional comedians who have been on tour for decades, perfectly playing off one another and understanding their dialogue as if they rehearsed it. Moments where Miyano, Echizen, and Shiraishi come into the conversation also work well for the exact opposite reason, namely the visual frustration Tanaka displays at not knowing how to make the conversation work with these outsiders. For as much as it seems like Tanaka is subjecting Oota to slave labor, we see Oota crack the whip when he needs to, meaning that the rest of the time he’s just enjoying the time with his best friend. And of course Tanaka has nothing bad to say about Oota in turn; no one helps him sleep better at night, in class, or anywhere in between.