Back in 2011, Nichijou was an ambitious, bombastic, yet also thoughtful experiment to match the unique style of Keiichi Arawi’s with Kyoto Animation’s equally distinctive—and in some ways opposed—approach to the creative process. Ever since then, both parties have evolved as storytellers, and now it’s time for their next collaboration: CITY The Animation.
Keiichi Arawi’s cute surrealism is one of a kind. Best known for Nichijou, Arawi has gradually perfected a style that eases you in with adorable characters and mundane scenarios, just to pull the rug from under your feet in the most bombastic way imaginable—or, sometimes, nonchalantly turn around and tell you there never was any rug.
When in conversation with the audience, Arawi’s work has reached a point where it benefits from the outrageous nature of absurdist humor, while also establishing a sense of structure not too dissimilar from that you might find in more classical comedy. Right about anything can happen within his skits, so the element of wild surprise always remains. And yet, with just a bit of experience you can’t help but notice the specific cadence of his work, making the comedy just as readable as the most standard of jokes; you may not know what will happen, or even whether he’ll opt for insane escalation or deadpan deflation, but you’ll be able to feel when the turns come. Subversive in nature, but with a formula so polished that you get the best of both worlds. And most importantly: pretty damn funny.
Over time, Arawi’s art has evolved to best fit his approach. His designs have become more stylized, refined into more consistent chunky forms and then twisted through his increasingly more diverse technical skill set. With those well-defined silhouettes as the norm, he’s now able to imply spectacular movement within his unassuming scenarios; you’ll often encounter entire trajectories mapped out within one panel through full-body multiples, more effective smear usage thanks to the otherwise consistent shapes, and lots of comedic elasticity. It’s no surprise that this growth as an artist who can incorporate ideas of motion in comics has been accompanied by impressive stunts as an animator himself.
As he has come to often do for his manga too, Arawi can effortlessly switch from those natural animation principles to exaggerations of flatness for charmingly cartoony purposes. Though he can pack all those qualities into an amusing void, his latest evolutive step has been to maximize his imagination and create dense pictures full of whimsical details. Be it as a mangaka, illustrator, or animator, Arawi has stayed true to his tendency to draw simple shapes, but the way they now come together to build larger settings, communities, or simply more complex reactions make him stand out as one of the best in the business. An evolution from a situational comedian to a curious worldbuilder that, as we’ll see later, has come to influence the type of stories he tells too.
For an author with this strong of an identity, and whose brilliant execution is inseparable from the writing, the idea of an anime adaptation ought to spell danger. Those worries would be assuaged to some degree with the reveal that it was an outstanding team at Kyoto Animation that would take up the challenge—and yet, that choice poised new questions. By the time of this project, no one dared to question the studio’s unmatched consistency; Nichijou had been in the works since 2009 for a 2011 broadcast, right off multiple industry-shaking events in Haruhi and K-ON!, and otherwise amassing respectable hits like they were a given. They had clearly developed a careful model that ensured constant high-quality output, and their unique thoroughness in depicting characters and the worlds they lived in resonated with otaku audiences.
Although those results spanned multiple genres and source material formats, they all vaguely conformed to the same standards of narrative fiction. KyoAni’s extensive location-hunting efforts would reinforce the atmosphere of the story, whether it was going to Hong Kong for Full Metal Panic or a much closer trip that would accidentally turn Lucky Star into an icon of anime pilgrimage. Their team’s nuanced character animation could humanize a cast as ordinary as K-ON’s and a godlike figure like Haruhi all the same, allowing them to sell very different stories with about the same level of impact. But what would happen if they were entrusted with a work with no overarching story, and no particular interest in its characters beyond being a vehicle for ridiculous scenarios? For as down-to-earth, low stakes as the narrative in some of their works had been, it was still a sequential series of events with character growth and a fulfilling goal awaiting at the end—and, as brilliant as Nichijou is, it didn’t really offer any of that.
Much of the discussion preceding the series was about how a creative team with distinct sensibilities would adapt to someone else’s unique, seemingly incompatible flavor. Mind you, that wasn’t just among fans; given the studio’s popularity, there was quite a lot of reporting in magazines like Animedia and Newtype before its broadcast had even started, excitedly pondering how that unusual mix would turn out. In the end, that otaku excitement backfired as Nichijou didn’t make much of a splash within that demographic, who instead embraced new hits by the studio like the K-ON! film, Hyouka, Chu2Koi, and Free!.
The series was quickly branded a commercial failure, which, while true to a degree, mostly speaks of the miscommunication between creatives and producers. Ever since the start, series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario. Tatsuya Ishihara was transparent about wanting to make a series you could catch bits of to unwind after work, rather than one to engage in a more traditional, obsessive otaku form. It was in that family context that it fairly quickly found success; after all, its (admittedly lesser) director’s cut version for NHK-e was so popular that fan demand pushed the station to rebroadcast it just a few months after it ended.
Years later, the series boasts of enduring popularity worldwide. Nichijou keeps flourishing in a more favorable scenario, in no small part because of how easily its bombastic skits can go viral in the age of social media. What it was never prepared for, however, was to justify how companies like Kadokawa and Lantis tried to milk its domestic otaku market in 2011 more than they had for previous KyoAni hits; 13 BD/DVD volumes and a deluge of CDs aimed at audiences that don’t particularly care about those things was a recipe for burning greedy hands, and that it did. Amusingly, performer Hyadain used his appearance in KyoAni’s 2023 Music Festival to thank the studio for keeping character songs alive—not a lie, though it was incidents like this that scared producers away from this tradition.
Besides clarifying the reputation of a title that appears to be so well-liked while also having the reputation of a flop, understanding the actual target audience is important to grasp the team’s creative choices. Ishihara, assistant series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario. Taiichi Ishidate, and series composer Jukki Hanada saw the disconnected nature of Arawi’s skits in Nichijou as something integral to its charm; sewing connective tissue between its gags risked lessening its ridiculous punchlines, restricting what they could realistically move onto next as well. Rather than modeling it after anime or even any other type of serialized storytelling, it was variety shows for the mainstream public that they modeled the anime after. In a lengthy interview for Monthly Anime Style 5, Ishihara namedropped irreverent 70s programs like Calicula Machine and Kyosen x Maetake Gebageba 90 Pun as the influences he had in mind, further adding that Nichijou’s outrageous voice acting cameos were also aimed towards talent that a regular TV viewer might recognize.
And thus, forget adapting Nichijou’s disconnected skits as they were in the manga: the anime would constantly rearrange them, further accentuating that disjointed nature by inserting all sorts of breaks. The staff would emulate Arawi’s illustrations with similarly absurd eyecatches, include other short-form works of his like the iconic Helvetica Standard as means to change up the pace, and create original corners for similar purposes. Those ranged from everything between cute yet surreal rock paper scissors to fixed cameras depicting moving, photorealistic snapshots of the world; though the latter don’t necessarily mean anything on their own, the inclusion of snippets that look close to real life in between stylized, high-octane slapstick would keep the audience mulling over them. For a series that switches between many different styles, Ishihara didn’t consider that they were treading new ground on a technical craft level—if anything, it was this psychological effect in their deployment of distinct styles that he saw as a strength to focus on.
Through this eclectic mix, and while trying to respect the unique timing of its humor, the team intended to translate Nichijou’s appeal into a necessarily different form. By doing all of this, it would certainly stand a chance to feel like Arawi’s work… but would it have a distinct KyoAni flair? As it turns out, that aspect would simply come naturally to its team. In an interview for the July 2011 issue of Newtype, the director introduced a concept that he would often return to when talking about the making of Nichijou: the human instinct to organize a history into one cohesive whole.
Whether Ishihara was correct in labeling that a universal impulse or not, it’s certainly true that most of his peers at the studio have a tendency to thread together stories about people if left to their own devices. Each director may approach them from their own angle, but it’s only natural that a studio built around the philosophy of the late Yoshiji Kigami would look in this direction; when nuanced acting is the backbone of your work, when more humane policies are enforced and to observe people is encouraged, telling stories about characters is what you’re likely to find yourself doing. Rather than completely discard those leanings, Nichijou’s team looked for ways to incorporate them into the adaptation without compromising Arawi’s spirit.
Again, it’s worth noting that this process started in an essentially subconscious way. Ishihara repeatedly stated that he found himself giving more cohesion to the series while in pre-production, as if it were an urge that they had to control. Eventually, they reached a similar conclusion to the mindset behind the deliberate mix of styles: if every now and then you encounter a nugget of sweet character development in the midst of surreal gags, that’s bound to catch you unprepared and stick with you. As they had decided that they didn’t want to compromise on the disconnected nature of each episode, however, the subtle changes had to come from a more structural level. Accordingly, the team proceeded not just to change the order of skits to ensure that every episode constantly changed gears, but also reconstructed originally disconnected events into plotlines that showcased casual, everyday growth across the series.
Most notoriously, this involved reimagining the lives of robot girl Nano and her inventor, the precocious Hakase. The two of them living together, stuck between the former’s desire to be normal and the latter wanting dessert, remained the same as the original—as did the inclusion of Sakamoto-san, the unfortunate cat they adopted. And yet, the sense of place in their household gave a noticeably different flavor to similar adventures, often acting as cute moments of respite within Nichijou’s madness. While Nano had always wanted to lead a regular life, the anime greatly increased the weight of her wishes by letting them marinate for an entire cours, and then proceeding to slowly bake her friendship with the main trio of Yuuko, Mio, and Mai over the last 13 episodes. Although a summary of their lives in both formats would look similar enough on paper, these small changes made a huge difference; and if you don’t think so, try telling people who only watched the anime that Nano was attending school since the first chapter and observe their reaction.
Just like how Arawi himself adjusted his style to fit his needs, a KyoAni take on Nichijou would have to thread the fine line of altering the aesthetic to amplify their strengths without obstructing the original author’s voice. At first glance, the animation designs by the late Futoshi Nishiya appear similar enough to the manga, but closer inspection reveals a higher degree of three-dimensionality than they originally had, allowing them to believably inhabit the studio’s more tangible world. In a way, this matches the adjustments to the characters themselves—subtly given an extra dimension, literally and figuratively. This allowed the team to gracefully pivot from their careful character animation to classically Arawi moments of flat cartooning, to modulate realism and stylize madness without feeling like they’ve strayed too far from their regular form.
The ending sequence for Zzz is another example of the malleability of Nichijou’s designs; by stripping them from their visible outlines, Ishidate was able to construct a new aesthetic that still feels like it could reasonably exist within the world of the series.
On that note, Ishihara commented about the inclusion of naturalistic character animation in that same Anime Style interview. He admitted that there was no grand initial plan to create contrast between that down-to-earth approach and Nichijou’s deranged scenarios, but rather that it was something they stumbled into when actually producing the show. As a KyoAni veteran, he jokingly referred to this habit of their animators and directors as if it were an incurable propensity, fundamentals so deeply rooted that they’re going to leak into the work one way or another. Again, such things weren’t seen as necessarily a negative; sure, it would take finesse to match this style with Arawi’s worldview, but it was precisely this type of chemical reaction between different elements that they were looking for in the adaptation.
While one series directorSeries Director: (監督, kantoku): The person in charge of the entire production, both as a creative decision-maker and final supervisor. They outrank the rest of the staff and ultimately have the last word. Series with different levels of directors do exist however – Chief Director, Assistant Director, Series Episode Director, all sorts of non-standard roles. The hierarchy in those instances is a case by case scenario. figured out how to organically incorporate those leanings, the other one took a more combative attitude towards the idea that they even existed. It’s perfectly fair to say that KyoAni’s environment has fostered the growth of careful, character-centric storytellers, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s tastes are going to be the same. As a rookie director, Ishidate felt like telling the team that they excel at that type of work was kind of backhanded praise—as if it also implied that they wouldn’t be able to make something different. As Kigami’s most radical disciple, Ishidate had always been the spice in the studio’s work; their most recognizable animator, someone who lashed out and felt proud in doing so. While he gradually refined that edge, neither his promotion to episode director nor this first bout at a series direction level managed to dull it. And so, in his closing remarks for the series he admitted that one of his main goals had been to subvert those expectations.
What did his personal rebellion entail, then? Ishidate pointed at new challenges he attempted, such as the beautifully pointless, proudly complex house of cards skit; a gag with no dialogue for over 4 minutes, where all sound comes from a song that was composed to the rough animation and then adjusted so that they perfectly matched. More than anything else, though, it was his unabashed love for animation that heavily influenced how Nichijou played out. KyoAni productions aren’t stingy when it comes to the movement, but one of their greatest achievements is how well they deploy it—a means to amplify its nuance and regulate its economy in one fell swoop. While he can appreciate that, Ishidate was at the time someone to enjoy the mere idea of moving pictures, so he would always press the team in that direction. As anyone who has watched Nichijou can attest, that influence is very much visible; you may not have known that the series had the most drawings of any KyoAni production at the time, but chances are that this reveal didn’t shock you in the least.
If we’re going through all the adjustments to the aesthetic and the sometimes conflicting ideas behind them, the art direction deserves a note as well. While Ishihara denied having always planned to introduce friction behind careful acting and surreal slapstick, but rather stumbling into that while working, they did always intend to have a bit of a contrast with the backgrounds. In his Anime Style interview, the director expressed that if you were to animate Nichijou with a setting as loosely defined as in the original, you’d risk everything coming out as too farcical, hence why the series’ soothing backgrounds are as detailed as Arawi’s art style allows. By visually rooting scenes in reality to a degree, the surreal would pop out more too, giving it a flavor that not even the original work has. While there’s no close resemblance on a stylistic level, the director compared it to the effect that the technically proficient, realistic shading has in Salvador Dalí’s paintings—one that highlights the oneiric quality of his work, making it resemble what we know yet being so different from it.
It doesn’t take any longer than the first 2 episodes to get a good taste of most of those qualities, and they don’t become any less charming for the following 24. After a quick nonsensical gag to set the tone, the series greets you with a look at two of its most important characters: Nano and Hakase. Again, the former’s first appearance isn’t as a quirky schoolmate like in the manga, but through a depiction of her routine at their shared household. It’s a peaceful life and a distinctly KyoAni-like atmosphere shows as much, though it’s also one that makes her catch glimpses of normal children and reinforce her wish for their normalcy; since this is Nichijou, however, those casual encounters with the mundane are literally explosive. This combination of ridiculous slapstick with compelling traces of character writing is the foundation for much of the storyline the studio assembled. Gradually, these gags will bring her closer to actually joining school. Later, and with even more naturality, she’ll begin hanging out with the main trio and forging a nice friendship with them.
Don’t get it wrong, though: any given episode of Nichijou is still going to be an assorted collection of surreal humor, and that much is true since the start. In the first episode, you can already see a multitude of ultra-short segments that the staff felt were necessary to achieve a variety show-like diversity and to disrupt the flow. Sometimes, those are simply akin to 4koma, particularly off-kilter skits inserted in between more extensive gags. At points, the series outright switches to its Arawi sibling Helvetica Standard, with its iconic tunes, a more textured alternative artstyle, and an even quirkier sense of humor.
This first episode also includes the debut of the show’s rock paper scissors mini-series, all sorts of eyecatches, and most importantly, the aforementioned fixed camera shots. Beyond the psychological effect of their inclusion that Ishihara alluded to, it’s immediately obvious that they have practical applications too. For one, they give the audience a curiously realistic look at events happening behind the scenes. By constantly returning to them, it gives an otherwise disjointed show a vague feeling of the passage of time, which it then can use for some punchlines; it’s after seeing these gradual implications that a full day has passed that the kid we saw caught up in an explosion at the start is shown stuck somewhere late in the evening, before he gracefully transitions to the ending. In the following episodes, all these tricks are joined by other short corners like tidbits of romantic films that may or may not be genuine, shout-outs to things the characters think are cool but definitely aren’t, and right about anything the staff would come up with to subvert audience expectations.
If moments like Yukko’s intense lunch struggles in the first episode hadn’t made it clear enough, Ishidate’s arrival to direct the second episode makes a clear statement about Nichijou’s love for animation. We have surreal chases that distort the world itself, plus an abundance of background animation that exploits the show’s stylized look. If that’s not up to your taste, its range of 2DFX extends from comic-like, farcical expressions (something Arawi is particularly good at) to amusingly realistic explosions. If it’s character animation that you’re interested in, you’re in for a treat; there are delicate shots and articulate realistic motion as much as there is exaggeration, be it from a cute cartoony vector to the outrageousness of those action scenes. It’s hard to imagine that Nichijou won’t be able to wow you in some way, because it excels at every field it sets its eyes on—and those are many!
This much is true of the entire show, though different directors approached it from their own angles; a higher emphasis on dynamic camerawork in Kigami’s episodes, overbearing cuteness in Naoko Yamada and Yukiko Horiguchi’s (the staff once again pointed fingers at them as rampaging moe fiends), more radical color usage in Hiroko Utsumi’s, an emotional edge on Yasuhiro Takemoto’s, and so on. Perhaps more than any other show we’ve written about, Nichijou is all about that diverse experience of the moment, so we can only encourage people to (re)watch the rest on their own—ideally with a better grasp of the ideas behind it after this piece. And who knows, perhaps we’ll return to it for closer episode-by-episode analysis. Here is where we wink to the audience to indicate that this will happen, by the way.
Why write about Nichijou’s greatness now in 2024, though? For starters, because it has a timeless charm to it, and its craft—especially from a conceptual level like we’ve attempted to do—is not often explored despite being widely considered a masterpiece of animation. But perhaps more importantly, the studio just so happens to have spent the last year animating Arawi’s follow-up to Nichijou: the urban ensemble of madness known as CITY.
One of the reasons why it was so important to establish the evolution of the original author’s style is that, by the time of the publication of this new series (2016-2021) it had already drifted away from its predecessor somewhat. The technical improvements are notable, and so is that shift towards more densely populated drawings—and what better application for that than making a series that follows every single inhabitant in a metropolis? Arawi had already shown a penchant for interconnected stories, as seen at the very beginning of Nichijou itself; although the circumstances and execution differ, both manga and anime begin with explosive robot girl Nano running into an innocent passerby, sending everyone flying and landing debris on top of a poor protagonist a couple of plotlines away. If you’ve never experienced CITY, you should expect this type of thing constantly happening at a larger scale, with more characters involved than you could possibly imagine.
This increased focus on the world goes hand in hand with more of an emphasis on overarching storytelling, as well as a greater interest in character arcs; that is, despite having an order of magnitude more of them to potentially develop. Having read about the complex process of adaptation for his previous series, these changes might sound familiar. After all, aren’t they essentially the leanings that Kyoto Animation felt the need to regulate back with Nichijou, and eventually decided to incorporate as much as possible? While this isn’t to imply that Arawi deliberately changed his approach for their sake or because of their influence, it certainly brings this series into a much more natural space for the studio that once again has been entrusted with his work.
And what about the team behind this new project, then? With Ishihara busy elsewhere, it’s Ishidate who revisits the author of his series direction debut—this time around, as the sole leader. Ever since the broadcast of Nichijou, he has been alternating his role of ace animator with that of an increasingly more important director; most notoriously, heading the hit that was Violet Evergarden. The flashiness and rebellious spirit he demonstrated back then hasn’t vanished, but he has found new ways to channel it. At a studio with a reputation for their mastery at capturing the atmosphere of local settings, he was the director who pushed for the same level of precision but for a somewhat fantastical, Victorian Germany instead. Alongside a prodigy like Akiko Takase, he decided to embody the excess of the era within the aesthetic itself, with notoriously detailed designs that nonetheless emoted as needed. His passion for pictures that move is still there and so we should expect CITY’s still preposterous humor to lean into that again, but the director’s quirkiness now manifests itself in a multitude of ways.
Noriyuki Kitanohara has not-so-stealthily been reporting his progress on CITY in the studio’s blog, starting last year and spanning until earlier 2024. He’s a natural fit for Arawi’s hectic nature, as he proved in the 4 episodes of Nichijou he directed as well as in his animation contributions in earlier ones—like one of the most unforgettable skits in the series, where he provided animation precisely for Ishidate.
While recent KyoAni projects have stood out for their ability to incorporate their younger members into positions where they could safely experiment and train, CITY might be the time for a whole bunch of them to have more of a leading role. Tamami Tokuyama had become a favorite of ours because of her noticeably soft touch before she’d received any major role, and adapting Arawi’s adorable creatures feels like it could be the perfect chance to finally occupy such a position. Though you can’t take newcomer debuts like hers for granted, Ishidate’s tendency to personally mentor youngsters he will soon work with is a rather noticeable pattern. Before embarking on that Violet Evergarden adventure, Takase’s first outings as an animation director were on the second season of Euphonium, always alongside Ishidate’s figure. Given that Tokuyama vanished from that franchise’s third season at a suspiciously early point, right after a beautiful episode alongside Ishidate, it’s suspicious to say the least. Either that, or the reliable Kadowaki to the rescue!
It’s also worth noting that she’s not the only up-and-coming artist under Ishidate’s wing who is bound to step up during CITY. Two of the three recently trained episode directors just so happen to be the type of animation otaku that Ishidate started as, which makes a project like this a great canvas for them. While CITY’s relatively more grounded story prevents it from reaching Nichijou’s heights of madness, it is still Arawi through and through, and thus in great need of animators who enjoy going on a rampage. And those would do well under the leaderships of Ryo Miyagi and Kohei Okamura; the former, a direct disciple of Ishidate with a wide range of expression, and the latter, a multitalented creator who has built up a desire to share the joy of moving pictures. The two of them trained in this new role across Eupho S3, and while CITY’s pre-production was finalized, used its blu-ray extras to become fully acclimated to those responsibilities.
Much has changed in the 14 years in between the broadcast of Nichijou and the upcoming CITY. The author himself has evolved, shedding some craziness but becoming a more well-rounded yet highly specific master of his craft. Perhaps through convergent evolution, those changes are comparable to the careful adaptation process that once allowed his unique style and a studio with just as much personality to meet in the middle. That team has also been forced to change, but still preserves a series of storytelling instincts they had to regulate the last time they met Arawi. Now that the two parties are in a closer position, I’m already fascinated by what might happen.
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