Let’s get brewing!
Moyashimon is an odd show. Deeply odd. Set at the Tokyo Agricultural Univeristy – a real place, apparently – it concerns the ‘adventures’ of Tadayasu Sawaki, a student with the unusual ability to see germs and microbes. But not, however, germs and microbes in the icky under-a-microscope sense. The germs Sawaki sees are cute, have smiley faces and talk a bit like Tachikoma tanks.
Sawaki ends up hanging around with a strange bunch of scientists and campus slackers, all under the command of a Professor Itsuki Keizo, who’s first scene in the show involves him sucking the blood out of a seagulls anus.
Yes.
So, it really is all abit unusual. Sawaki’s gift/curse/condition doesn’t exactly lend itself to high drama or action, and so the individual episodes of Moyashimon tend not be about much. Sawaki see’s germs. People get surprised about this, often entertaining various ideas of how they can make money out of it. Invariably, most situations end with the main characters getting heavily drunk.
It’s a mix of edutainment (the show has exhaustive amounts of detail on various microbes and their effects on, chiefly, sake brewing) and comedy, with Sawaki’s ability to see the real disgusting grime on every person and in every room leading to bouts of screaming, panic, and whole buildings getting constantly quarantined and decontaminated.
Aside from the microbe business, the comedy here is strange enough to be funny, but no deliriousley mad-cap enough to be annoying (like, say, Excel Saga). At various points Sawaki does battle with the horse riding, fan-wielding student council, gets chased around a field by american football players, and sticks his hand up a cows arse.
It has a serious side of coure, but Moyashimon’s underlying messages about the uncertainty of youth and the need to find direction in life are familiar territory for college-set anime. Moyashimon pulls it off well, however; never diving into melodrama, and focusing more on the quirky, silly side to student life than the tough stuff.
Indeed, even the nature of the characters relationships is handled with a preference towards the slightly absurd and the unusual. Simply Moyashimon seperates itself from normal genre conventions: there’s no “love interest” here, no “desperately suffering loner”, no true, dedicated friendships even. The characters in Moyashimon just know each other, sometimes vaguely get along, and sometimes come into bizarre conflicts which bounce off eachother and spin in wild, mad directions often fueled by booze and the need to get laid.
The microbe thing is great – it’s cute, informative and certainly original – but even without it Moyashimon stands up well as a decent little character-led comedy with a manic sense of humour and fun dialogue covered in lashings and lashings of alcohol.
Recommended.
