One Off

I love Junichi Sato. I really do, despite the fact that I've only been exposed to a few of his works, and Tamayura happens to be my favorite. However...I can't believe I watched this piece of trash! It's a good thing it's only four fifteen-minute long episodes like the original Tamayura OVAs were, and whaddaya know! This is supposed to be a car advertisement, like how Hokago no Pleiades is! Ugh, I can't believe I wasted my time on this dumb OVA. It's such a shame, as this could have been a lot better, and the issues it tackled could have been handled more appropriately.This anime is sponsored by Honda Motors...but how do they start off? By bashing bicycles and introducing characters who are such blatant stereotypes that you can tell just from looking at them for a few seconds that you've seen this type of character before somewhere! A lot of people give Tamayura a lot of flak for supposedly being a K-On rip off, which I don't think is true. Heck, if there's a show haters should be calling a K-On rip-off, it's One Off! The story's nothing special. Basically it's about a girl named Haruno who envies her friends for having dreams and ambitions they want to pursue and thinks she'll never be able to leave the rural town she lives in. Her jobs mostly consist of helping her parents at their restaurant and collecting eggs from chickens. All of a sudden, out appears this random, badly voiced Australian named Cynthia (who I swear to God is a rip-off of Cynthia from Pokemon Diamond and Pearl. Look at their character designs! I'm not even kidding!) who does nothing but shout bad English and shove her cleavage into people's faces. You may think me saying that Haruno's life changes after that might be great, but...trust me, it's not. Is it just me, or is the animation for this anime really blurry? The backgrounds look a lot more faded than crisp, like it was done by someone who couldn't afford money to buy glasses. Not only that, the movement that's there isn't very fluid. But ugh, I need to get this out, I HATE the character designs! Cynthia because she looks like a rip-off of Cynthia from Pokemon, which should be fairly obvious, but the girls' designs I don't like because....one: they look too much like rip-offs of other characters (I swear, Sayo looks almost EXACTLY like Tsuruko from AnoHana, right down to her seiyuu, who does the voice of Tsuruko as well!), two: I hate how anime over exaggerates and glorifies female legs! They always make it look like the top part of the leg, above the knee, is longer than the lower part of the leg, below the knee. You can tell just from looking at the promotional pictures alone that their legs are too odd-looking, which is especially exacerbated by the fact that they all wear skirts so short that if done in real life, you'd be able to see their undies no problem, and...that's NOT a compliment. I mean, look at the way the pig tailed girl is positioned in the promo art! Her legs are obviously too long, and she could be showing off her undies as we speak considering she's wearing a really short skirt and she's in a rather promiscuous position if you take it out of context. I'm not a thin person, and I never wear skirts, but I've looked in the mirror and pictured myself in short uniforms like this while taking human anatomy into account and quite honestly, if people actually wore uniforms like that in real life, then they'd be showing their undies off 24/7 considering the length of the skirt and how ungracefully exaggerated the legs are. And look at the way the blue haired girl is lying on the ground! Her rear end is right in view! See my point? And even her legs don't look right! Then again, none of them do! I wish anime would stop over exaggerating female body parts and making girls wear short skirts and actually respect realistic human anatomy already! It's driving me up the wall! The only remotely good thing about this show is the music. I definitely liked the opening theme, as it's nice and soothing, and the ending themes are nice too, even though they're both a little dull. The rest of the soundtrack...eh, dull. Nothing ground-breaking or bad. Just...dull. I honestly don't remember. The soundtrack in itself is pretty bland and forgettable. I honestly don't remember one spec of it. Ugh, the characters. I won't lie, these have to be the most blatant and most shallow stereotypes I've ever seen. None of the characters are properly or appropriately developed, they follow their assigned gimmick way too much, the very little pieces of personality they do have are obviously ripped off from characters from other anime I've seen before, and they're overall shallow and uninteresting. This is made worse by the absolutely abysmal voice acting! Haruno's seiyuu is trying way too hard, and that blue haired girl just refused to shut her freaking mouth! I wanted to mute the audio every time that stupid, annoying as heck blueberry head opened her mouth! All she did as scream and moan about not having a motorbike and squealing over how hot Cynthia is! Someone cut this character out of the show already! She's too much of a rip-off of Ritsu from K-On! The other characters are just bland and uninteresting. Cynthia has to be the worst Australian portrayal I've ever seen. I've never met an Australian before, but none I know talk in such bad English as she did, and none I know go around showing off their boobs (AND SHE DOESN'T EVEN WEAR A FREAKING BRA!!! WHAT THE ACTUAL FREAKSHOW?!?)! What especially appalled me is that despite her flaws, everyone suddenly likes her! WHAT THE FREAK DID SHE DO TO GET THEM TO LIKE HER?!? Show her boobs, of course! Oh God, even the characters' reactions to Cynthia are inappropriate and unrealistic! If I saw a woman like her showing off her boobs, I'd call the police and get her arrested for public nudity! It appalls me how anime characters love downplaying the flaws of a clearly problematic character and make them into a straight up object of desire for everyone! That must be why the trope Draco In Leather Pants exists. Heck, if anything, I consider Cynthia to be the very in-show embodiment of this trope!...AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY! The rest of the show is just bad, bland, and downright boring. Even the supposed moral of the story is shallow and dumb, even cheesy because of the way it's executed. Everything else is just bad. The way the characters react to certain events: bad and unrealistic. All the coincidences: totally contrived and convoluted. The characters' voices: UGH MAKE THEM STOP TALKING! The whole girls riding motorbikes in the future. I can't see that. But from what I'm hearing, car sales are decreasing in parts of the world, so I guess it was to be expected that advertising companies would go to drastic measures to sell a product. But can we do it in a way that doesn't involve churning out stereotypes and beating dead horses PLEASE? I'm taking a class called Effects of Media on Children and one of my assignments involves analyzing how advertisements rely on gender stereotypes to sell a product and how they affect people of all ages. This is NOT a proper way to advertise a product. Just watch this to consider buying a motorbike. Other than that, give it a miss. It's dumb, contrived, and really not worth your time.

One Off is one of those Anime that is ideal if someone has an hour of free time on their hands and is in the mood for a slow paced slice of life storyline that goes at a slower pace then some of the other slow paced storylines out there. The charm of this Anime is in the basic, simple nature of the animation and music that allows the viewer to feel relaxed while watching. Some of the down sides though is the plot isn't as fleshed out as it could be as well as the characters, but then this was an OVA designed foradvertisement purposes so this is rather expected.

In 2011, Subaru got legendary anime studio Gainax to create a web anime called Wish Upon The Pleiades, which turned out to be a nice little gem successful enough to warrant its own TV series. Honda, having seen this, must have wanted a piece of the pie, so they got famous director Junichi Sato to create a similar anime for them: One Off. It would be remiss to say that One Off wasn't inspired by Wish Upon The Pleiades. Aside from borrowing the idea of "cute girls teach us about life to sell vehicles", one of the characters in One Off has almost identical glasses andfacial structure to a character in Wish Upon The Pleiades. Wish Upon The Pleiades did have commercialism and product placement, but they were well-integrated into the anime so that you didn't feel like you were being told "By the way, buy Subaru!". One Off completely fails to do this, with Honda logos plastered everywhere and dialogue that is purely commercialistic, doing little else. Then, there's also the trouble that this has fanservice. Cynthia is unnecessarily sexualized, and the girls also wear unpractically short skirts. I don't understand the purpose for this, as the original Wish Upon The Pleiades shorts didn't do this sort of thing. The story itself, however, was a nice little story about following your dreams, with great character development that would normally take place over several episodes in other slice-of-life series but takes place over only an hour in One Off. That said, there was little to distinguish this from other slice-of-life series, as it is incredibly generic and derivative of both K-On and Wish Upon The Pleiades. The soundtrack was very forgettable, but still serene. Finally, the best part of the series is the amazing motorcycle animation, which is obvious given that the reason for One Off's existence is to sell motorcycles. There are better things to watch in an hour than One Off. There's a reason this wasn't made into a TV series like Wish Upon The Pleiades, and that's because it's just too generic. Girls on highly detailed motorcycles gets pretty boring after a while. Let that inform your decision about whether or not you want to watch this.

At just about an hour total, this anime certainly lives up to its title. One Off indeed. This is a well-made iyashikei CGDCT type fare, with a solid amount of narrative substance put into a set of four 15 minute episodes that really just boil down to an advertisement for Honda motorcycles. One of the girls, Haruno, even has little tufts of hair that are evocative of the Honda Wing Mark. The story is quite simple with a positive message about taking chances and living your life when you have the opportunity to live it, without worrying about looking foolish or messing it up. Thefirst step is in the doing, and everything else will follow. Also, this is prime example of a foreigner in anime with Cynthia Rogers, the traveler woman who comes to help around the house. Not only does she serve as the catalyst to get Haruno out of her shell, but she also serves as the embodiment of how Honda Motors would like to be perceived- spontaneous, glamorous, and adventurous. Also, the way they translated her broken Japanese is hilarious. I got the impression she was American, but apparently she's Australian. I'd say, due to its positive message, and how well they communicated it in such a limited runtime, that the story is the strongest aspect of this anime. The art is solid, but fairly typical. The strongest aspects of the art are the design elements that it's clear Honda was directly involved in, especially in regards to the motorcycles and interior spaces, like the cafe with a tree in it that they keep going to. The sound is good, meeting the basic standards of quality. The characters feel fine, but the fact that you're hyper-aware of their capacity as brand ambassadors for Honda kind of undermines how natural they feel in the grand scheme of things, and makes them feel just a little contrived as a result, even if they're still basically enjoyable. If they took better care to integrate the brand more naturally into their character types and interests, it would have worked out better. Overall, lighthearted, pretty, and cute, especially for an anime that is technically a motorcycle advertisement.

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