I found a bit of free time so I figured I’d check out the new Spring Anime for 2010. Working!! has gotten a lot of attention so I started by checking out the first episode.
Working!! follows the wacky staff at a Japanese Family Restaurant. Taneshima Poplar is the highschool senior who looks like she’s 12. Takanashi Souta is Poplar’s underclassman, who likes small, cute things. There’s also the girl who’s afraid of men and the manager who seems to have Yakuza ties, and the waitress who carries around a sword on her belt. Oh, and some other male characters, but who cares about them?
The first episode gives you a feel for who the characters are and the quirks that they’ll probably carry throughout the series. Takanashi joined the restaurant because Poplar asked him to, probably because he thought it’d be fun to work with a small cute girl. He denies being a lolicon, though. He likes kittens and puppies and mites and other small things in the same way! This begs the question: if he’s not into Poplar, then which kind of girl is he into?
The scenes in Working!! are short, and I had suspected that the source material was a 4-koma before looking it up. This gives a sort of feeling of discontinuity. It was revealed during the middle of the episode that Takanashi had already been working at the restaurant for a few weeks (without a break). I suppose this means that there won’t be a lot of character development, as it seemed the relationships between characters hardly changed at all given the time jump.
I think Working!! was funny at some points, but I’m not sure if it’s funny enough to keep me watching. It was sort of chuckle inducing, I guess. I want to watch that Arakawa Under The Bridge show because I heard it’s sort of more WTF, which is closer to my brand of humor. Even so, I’ll probably give Working!! another episode because I like Poplar (her eyelashes are cute).
