Yutori-chan
January 11, 2015

I find that there's very little to say about Yutori-chan. The idea was to have the three major generations of Japan represented side-by-side in an office environment, to show how they approach work, their lives, and each other differently. We have Yutori, the spoiled and self-centered teenager who treats everyone as a friend rather than a coworker, Tsumekomi, the hardworking but soft-spoken college student who attempts to keep Yutori in line, and Dankai, the middle-aged rambunctious office lady who has a bit too much passion in her work. And every joke that the show attempts in its 25 bite-sized episodes can be summed up by these character descriptions. Yutori acts selfish, Tsumekomi tries to contain her, Dankai sometimes appears, and in the more irritating cases, useless side characters come in for a one-off joke that has no relation to the theme of age or work at all. The only message at play seems to be that teenagers could never survive a work environment, middle aged office workers are overbearing, and Hanazawa Kana is good at playing shy but kind student-aged girls.

To be fair, there are a few bits that illustrate the generation gap in amusing ways, mostly playing off of the toy company that they work for. At the beginning of every episode there is a product advertisement, and these products occasionally find their way into the episode, particularly the youthful tools aimed at older women, which Yutori catches her mom using to great excitement, and the line of superhero toys that finds their biggest fan in Tsumekomi, who could pass off as an otaku any day of the week. Another good bit is when Yutori meets her friends in a family restaurant to host a raid on their game systems, which features all of them sitting in relative silence not three feet away from one another to Tsumekomi’s confusion. These are the jokes that, while not entirely innovative, show that there was some effort made to comically portray an age gap. Unfortunately the office setting, while a perfect way to make this criticism work in theory, actually locks down the potential of the show to hold a wide variety of jokes, and each episode ends up being almost completely rehashed. The characters and the setting have absolutely no care behind them, to the point that replacing them with any other anime character of their age could have made for a better discussion of the topics at hand.

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