Shelf Life

Mitsuboshi Colors

The good news: Cells at Work is getting a second season! The bad news: the opening theme from the first season has been stuck in my head since I heard the news, and as much as I enjoyed my brain's broken rendition of the lyrics the first three dozen times, it's starting to get old. Welcome to Shelf Life.

Jump to this week's review:
Mitsuboshi Colors

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Action and drama are great, but sometimes you just need a warm and fuzzy slice of life show to help you relax. Mitsuboshi Colors offers exactly that, but does it succeed? Here's my review of the series.

In between the best and worst of each anime season, there's a vast swath of perfectly competent genre titles that never quite make it into the conversation. They're the shows we watch and enjoy in the moment, then promptly forget about once the next crop of contenders arrive on the scene. Mitsuboshi Colors fits comfortably into that “good but not great” category of shows, with a solid grasp of the slice of life basics that doesn't quite translate into anything truly memorable. It does what it does, and that's all that does, for better and for worse.

The series follows the adventures of the “Colors,” a trio of elementary school kids. Yui, Kotoha, and Sacchan (or Sat-chan, depending on which subtitle track or credit listing you look at) have teamed up with the goal of protecting the peace of their hometown. In practice, this usually means exploring the shopping district, taking on “cases” assigned to them by the townsfolk, and finding new ways to annoy Saito, the neighborhood police officer. This twelve-episode season covers a year's worth of the trio's activities, including searching for a panda-colored cat in the spring and instigating a zombie mob on Halloween.

One of the biggest challenges these kinds of shows face is finding the right balance between comedic energy and laid-back slice of life pacing. Mitsuboshi Colors struggles with this a bit in its early episodes, where it falls into the common trap of leaning too hard into the characters' key personality traits. Sacchan occasionally goes too far over the top as the designated troublemaker, while Kotoha overplays the “quirky gamer” routine and Yui is left with little to do beyond reacting to the other girls' antics. The show is still perfectly watchable in these early scenes, but it definitely feels like it's trying to do too much at once in terms of establishing those central character dynamics, and that can make it difficult to really get immersed in the episodic storylines.

Thankfully, the writing and direction find their footing soon enough, and by the fourth episode the series is able to settle into a comfortable rhythm. There's a good balance between natural character-based humor and self-referential jokes, where the girls can riff on one another's roles in the group without knocking too hard on the fourth wall. The central trio is backed up by a reliable supporting cast, with Saito making a good “adversary” while some of the local shopkeepers help to instigate or enable the group's adventures. The pacing and story structure are also handled well, with storylines rarely feeling too short or too long. The seasonal progression from spring through winter helps add some variety to the setting, so it doesn't feel like we're just going through the same handful of locations over and over. The overall vibe reminds me a bit of Non Non Biyori, albeit with a city setting in place of that show's rural countryside.

In terms of the genre fundamentals, then, Mitsuboshi Colors has most of its bases covered. It's entertaining to watch, and it does a nice job of tapping into the nostalgic value of being a kid and exploring the neighborhood with your friends. What it doesn't do, however, is take that next step beyond providing an amusing and relaxing experience. The biggest thing that separates great slice of life shows from merely good ones is their ability to convey insights about life and provide moments of emotional poignance, and I didn't get either of those things out of this series. It's just a little too light on ambition, and never ventures far from the basic genre playbook in its writing or direction. While that low-risk approach helps maintain a consistent level of quality, it also means I can't point to any particular scene that was genuinely memorable.

For the most part, the art and animation are both above average here. The character designs do a nice job of using the three girls' key colors (red for Yui, blue for Kotoha, yellow for Sacchan) without being too blatant about it, and facial expressions and body movements are conveyed fairly well. My only gripe with the visuals is that the backgrounds occasionally look like someone dropped a watercolor filter over a reference photo instead of actually drawing a location from scratch. This Blu-Ray set from Sentai Filmworks includes an English dub, and while it suffers a bit more from the “adult actors playing children” effect than the original Japanese track, the writing is solid and all of the key performances are on point. Extras are limited to the basic clean opening and closing sequences and trailers.

If you enjoy the “cute characters do cute things” approach to the slice of life genre, Mitsuboshi Colors should be right up your alley. It's entertaining and relaxing in equal measure, and I can confirm that it makes for a strong antidote to a stressful week. On the other hand, you won't find much substance beyond the surface-level theme of kids being kids, so I doubt it'll win over anyone who doesn't already enjoy this kind of series. Given a choice between watching it again and trying out one of its many genre stablemates, I'd probably leave this set on the shelf and go for something new.
-Paul[TOP]

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading!