Mono

Mono started with tremendous promise, captivating me with its distinctive premise centred around a “cinephoto club” (cinema and photography) and exploring intriguing photographic techniques such as 360-degree cameras and timelapse photography. This fresh concept, combined with occasional slice-of-life and comedic moments, initially set it apart and offered a unique and engaging anime. However, as the show progressed, it gradually shifted its focus away from this promising concept and instead leaned heavily into generic slice-of-life territory, using photography merely as a backdrop rather than the main theme. While the slice-of-life content still had its charm, it lacked the spark the show originally promised. It felt like therewas a significant missed opportunity, considering how strongly the anime had initially established itself in the opening episodes. I found myself wishing they’d returned to the creativity of the early episodes, which felt genuinely inspired. This shift also impacted character development. The five main characters had distinct, lovable personalities with potential for depth, yet the show didn't fully utilise this. Conversely, the supporting characters were disappointingly two-dimensional and forgettable, significantly detracting from the overall appeal. Comedy-wise, Mono generally offered average humour while occasionally providing genuinely funny moments. Many of the slice-of-life scenarios were enjoyable, although certain scenes, such as an overly drawn-out video call in episode 7, felt unnecessarily tedious. Despite these shortcomings, the anime did excel in its music. The opening song was nice, and the ending song was great, complementing the overall mood of the series. The animation and art are also excellent, especially for such a new studio. Overall, Mono is a decent watch if you're looking for a casual slice-of-life anime, but it falls short of its initial promise. Perhaps my expectations influenced this disappointment, but it remains hard to shake off the feeling that Mono could have been something truly special; it teased greatness but ultimately played it safe.

mono is a slice of life series from the same author of Laid-Back Camp, Afro. If you love Yuru Camp, then mono is right up your alleyway - a CGDCT anime where the characters travel to various places, eat very delicious food, and soak in the atmosphere. However, instead of camping being the main focus and hook of this series, the main characters use their cameras to take snapshots of their adventures. I don’t have a lot to say about mono other than I really enjoyed this anime. As someone who is a Laid-Back Camp fan, I felt right at home with mono. There iseven some nice Yuru Camp fan service thrown in at times, but I’m glad it’s all just background cameos and silly throwaway scenes that don’t detract from the main focus of this show. This series felt like the author was given more freedom to do whatever they wanted because the types of episodic adventures really varied in mono. Whether it be visiting a wide variety of restaurants across Yamanashi as part of a contest, taking pictures of spheres, characters taking videos of them skateboarding down a mountain, or filming a POV horror short film, there is way more diversity in what the characters do throughout this twelve episode endeavor. The beautiful animation and overall art direction makes both the character interactions and adventures a lot more enjoyable to watch. No joke, this anime probably has the second best animation quality I’ve seen from this season, only behind To Be Hero X. If Laid-Back Camp was very lo-fi in nature in order to let you be immersed in the atmosphere of the show, mono takes that to another level. I only have one minor complaint about mono, and it pertains to the overall premise of this series. As I mentioned before, the characters in this series use their cameras to take pictures and videos as a way to record their memories throughout their adventures. The main reason why the characters use cameras is because they are in the Cinephoto club, so obviously taking pictures and recording videos would be a part of their club activities. This is fine. However, it seems like there were some stretch of episodes where this aspect is *almost* non-existent, and the characters are just hanging out doing whatever. I don’t personally mind this, but I feel like the anime loses its main focus at times, however, it’s not an egregious amount. Hopefully this anime gets another season. If Laid-Back Camp received multiple seasons, a spin-off, and a movie, then I think mono deserves a somewhat similar treatment. The laid-back nature of mono will make any fans of Afro’s other slice of life work feel right at home. Even if this isn’t your type of anime that you would watch, if you at least appreciate art and animation in general, please watch mono.

Man, I really wanted to like Mono so bad, especially since it was created by the person who made Laid-Back Camp, a show that I never expected to like as much as I do. Laid-Back Camp was the type of rare show that knew what it wanted to be, even if season 3 was a bit of a downgrade compared to previous seasons. Now, I knew that the creator Afro made another manga, Mono, before this, but seeing as I'm still reading a bunch of other manga right now, I don't want to take on too many ongoing series at once. But an anime forit came out this year, so I figured watching it might be a good way to gauge whether I want to read the manga or not. Surely, since Laid-Back Camp was so good already, Mono would be just as good, right? Unfortunately, I might have set my expectations too high, and that's entirely on me. But even beyond that, Mono as a show is...mediocre, and I found it to be so frustrating to sit through, not just because it feels like it's trying to piggyback off Laid-Back Camp's success rather than establish its own identity, but many other things as well. Upon starting high school, Satsuki Amamiya joins the photography club for one reason: The club leader, Makinohara. She spends her days constantly taking pictures of her like a creepy stalker, but when Makinohara graduates, Satsuki finds herself without purpose, and if the club doesn't recruit new members soon, it'll shut down. Through mere coincidence after a camera that Satsuki won in an auction didn't arrive on time, both she and her best friend An encountered Haruno Akiyama, an aspiring manga artist who wants to write a manga with high school students acting as the protagonists. Then, the duo encounter Sakurako Shikishima, the president of Cinema Club. When both clubs are on the verge of closure, the girls made the decision to merge two clubs into one, birthing the Cinephoto Club. Together with Haruno and the motoblogger Kako Komada, Satsuki and her group have a new goal in mind: to take pictures across real-life tourist spots in Japan to help Haruno out for her manga. Honestly, I think it's best if I just get all my grievances out of the way right now, and unfortunately, there will be a lot of comparisons to Laid-Back Camp, though not for the reasons you think. For one thing, for a series that promotes itself as being about photography and taking videos, the actual photography aspect is completely ignored after episode 2, and even when photography and recording videos come up, it only happens on a couple of occasions. 90% of the show consists of the characters just visiting places, and only because Haruno keeps dragging them or ordering them around. Because of this, Mono as a show feels aimless and directionless, like it has no idea what it wants to be. Had it leaned more into its photography angle like Tamayura, it might have been able to establish its own identity and step out from Laid-Back Camp's shadow. Or if it wanted to just be about the girls visiting restaurants and tourist spots, that's fine too! Oh wait, Zatsu Tabi already did that this season. Because Mono can't decide what show it wants to be, it lacks focus, a problem that Laid-Back Camp avoided by not just focusing on camping, but having all the girls' travels and shopping trips revolve around it, so nothing in that show felt wasted or thrown to the side. Not to mention that sometimes Mono shoehorns in a bunch of weird horror/supernatural elements that not only feel completely out of place, but just feel like filler to pad out the show's run time, further adding to its complete lack of focus. Speaking of Laid-Back Camp, the characters make cameos here and there in the show. Actually, let's talk about the characters. Unlike Laid-Back Camp, the characters in Mono are basic stock archetypes who never change, evolve, or develop whatsoever. Satsuki is the level-headed one, Kiriyama is the genki girl, Sakurako is the quiet snarker, Haruno is the walking disaster fail-girl, and so on. Unfortunately, they all lack the charm, nuance, and tight writing that made the characters in Laid-Back Camp so good. LBC actually cared enough to flesh out its characters beyond their initial personality types across its many seasons and movie, whether it be showing what they're like outside of school or camping (Which Mono doesn't. Seriously, where are these girls' parents?!), or adding subtle touches that make them feel like people rather than just moeblobs, like how Nadeshiko, in spite of her airheadedness, actually gets good grades in school and in the movie somehow manages to be good at doing construction work. Granted, Mono only has one season, but it completely fails to make its characters interesting or fun to follow whatsoever. Satsuki has such little presence that she might as well be a side character, and Kiriyama's constant high pitched screaming made me want to put duct tape over her mouth. The biggest black mark on this show, I feel, is Haruno. The show really wants you to love this pathetic little girl failure of a mangaka, to the point of giving her so much undeserved screentime that she might as well be the main character. However, she often spends a lot of time causing problems for other characters and just being an annoying pest. Show, you promised high school girls partaking in photography. I did not come here to watch a grown-ass woman throw a temper tantrum, drag people across several cities, and wasting both their time and her own just to satisfy her curry craving, which results in her missing a deadline that day. This is especially bad when the episode ends with her getting it by going to the convenience store, which was close by, so she not only drove everyone to a bunch of far away restaurants for nothing, she basically screwed herself over and suffered no consequences. She could have just gone to the fucking convenience store the first time and she would have made her deadline! Not to mention the episodes that puts her or her mangaka friends into focus are all mediocre and don't really add anything to her character other than that she has friends. At least it's funny to hear Reina Ueda go full screechy gremlin mode sometimes. With all that said, what does Mono actually have that's good? A few things. The animation is shockingly good, especially considering it's done by a new studio, Soigne. The backgrounds are stunning to look at, character motion is dynamic and kinetic, and it does a decent job capturing all the different locales the characters visit. Seriously, this is what Laid-Back Camp season three should have looked like. The music is also pretty good as well, almost as good as Laid-Back Camp's soundtrack. The voice acting is fine too, Kiriyama's constant high pitched screaming notwithstanding, and Sakurako's antics could be funny at times. Unfortunately, none of that comes close to saving Mono from being anything but just another generic moe show that's clearly trying to ride Laid-Back Camp's coattails rather than establish its own identity. If you want a moe girl show that actually goes into how photography works, has much more of a focused narrative, and stronger characters, just watch Tamayura! It may be more sugary and saccharine, but that actually bothers to explore photography in more depth than Mono ever tries to do!

Knowing that this manga is another CGDCT from Yuru Camp writer Afro-sensei, you'd probably expect it to be a similarly comfy, heartwarming SoL, perhaps somehow connected to his previous work. Well, Mono delivers on that last point. It's truly a Yuru Camp spin-off. Otherwise, the storytelling, pacing, and aesthetics of this manga are significantly different from Girls Who Love Camping. Despite its somewhat melancholy title, Mono is actually a fairly emotionally diverse, quirkily funny comedy that isn't afraid to experiment. While the first two episodes are more or less reminiscent of "Yuru Camp with camera" theme, this element eventually fades into the background, becoming something ofa connecting but not the main link in the show. The same thing happens with the seemingly light yuri teasing from the first episode, which is smoothed out and disappears so quickly that disconcerted shippers even have to desperately look for its remains in completely chaste other places of the show. Seriously, shipping goggles have long ceased to amaze me, but the search for "obligatory teasing" among any characters who get along with each other has long since become an end in itself. Instead, the show could offer gastronomic tourist tours (seriously, this show is just full of ads for various places where you can eat deliciously or even drink), a whole series of comedy horror and even... well, I won't try to retell the show to you, watch it yourself and you'll see everything. I will only say that all of the characters are quite unique, funny and memorable, so you will often catch yourself specifically waiting for how this or that character will react to some funny or interesting situation, sometimes even revealing to you previously unknown sides of themselves. Mono may be a huge departure from the original Yuru Camp, but Afro-sensei still maintains a high level of quality in character writing. I've never been a huge fan of CGDCT, as all-female titles aren't my cup of tea, but this show was so good that for the first time I was excited to watch a new episode of all-female anime every week. What ended up happening was something of a spin-off that was noticeably different from the main story, but at the same time naturally complemented it. Given Yuru Camp's immense popularity, it was clear that Mono's adaptation would be somewhat overshadowed by the expected comparisons. But while you might not get "Yuru Camp from a side view" or "Yuru Camp in a different region", you'll definitely get a lot of fun and cute pleasure from adapting a manga by someone who clearly knows how to draw quality CGDCT. Oh yeah, and as you'd expect from Afro-sensei, any technical or meta issues in this show are handled with 100% authenticity. You could practically use it as a tour guide to summer Yamanashi.

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