City: The Animation Is The Must-Watch Anime Comedy Of The Summer

The summer anime season has been thoroughly stacked this year. From returning hits like Dan Da Dan and My Dress-Up Darling and exciting premieres like Gachiatuka, The Summer Hikaru Died, and Takopi’s Original Sin, there’s an absolute smorgasbord of beautiful new and original series to watch and enjoy. That said, if I were hard-pressed to recommend just one, and only one anime to watch this summer, it would have to be City: The Animation, the highly anticipated spiritual successor to Kyoto Animation’s 2011 hit Nichijou.

Based on Keiichi Arawi’s 2016 manga, City the Animation is a slice-of-life comedy centering on a plucky group of university roommates and their many misadventures in a bizarre, colorful, and Tokyo-coded city known simply as… well, City. Like 2011’s Nichijou, which was also based on Arawi’s 2006 breakout hit manga of the same name, City the Animation leans hard into balls-to-the-wall absurdism and low-stakes interpersonal drama, following the so-called “Mont Blanc Trio” of Midori Nagumo, Ayumu Niikura, Wako Izumi, and an ensemble cast of eccentric tertiary characters as they navigate the day-to-day humdrum and peculiar happenstances that come with living in a major metropolitan epicenter.

Each episode of City consists of six to eight short vignettes, each with their own self-contained storyline or gag that eventually coalesce into one big, anthological “city portrait” (pun-intended) with their own respective cast of evolving character arcs, subplots, and relationships. The real selling point of the series, however, is its absurdly beautiful, over-the-top animation. Back in 2011, Nichijou quickly garnered a passionate fanbase for its creative, detail-oriented animation style that veered on sakuga levels of technical proficiency and stylistic execution (For those unfamiliar, “sakuga” is a Japanese animation industry term that roughly translates to “drawing images,” but is commonly used by Western anime fans to refer to particularly impressive sequences of animation, often attributed to a particular animator). Many of the staff members responsible for Nichijou’s distinctive look and most notable sequences, including director Taichi Ishidate and animation Miku Kadowaki, have returned to work on the production for City the Animation alongside a staff of new and promising animators. So far, every episode of the anime has been an absolute delight, which makes the series’ fifth episode all the more exceptional for its groundbreaking visual presentation that perfectly threads the needle between creative chaos and narrative cohesion.

Unlike previous episodes, City the Animation’s most recent episode is the latter half of a two-part vignette, following Nagumo’s abrupt abduction by a moustachioed butler as she was attempting to retrieve her roommate Niikura’s lost locket. Together with the help of “The Good Person,” an exceptionally kind man with an angular haircut, and Izumi, Nagumo must escape from the “Hospitality Towers” of the Tanabe mansion. The episode crosscuts between several different stories, as Izumi attempts to snatch back her locket from a mischievous cat-like creature and middle school classmates Matsuri Makabe and Eri Amakazari enjoy a day out on the town. So far, so normal; or, at the very least as “normal” as you can expect from an episode of City the Animation. It’s not until the midpoint, however, that the episode shows its hand, as the story bifurcates into a dizzying collage of split-screen cutaways that follow up to nearly eight different plotlines occurring simultaneously.