First Impressions – Kill Me Baby

Kill Me Baby is the most surprising anime of the season, what at first appears to be nothing more than a light-hearted gag comedy is in fact an intelligent and thought provoking look at the pleasures that make us human. In the case of Kill Me Baby’s protagonists, they have a sado-masochistic relationship, which seems to be played purely for laughs, but it’s on further analysis that this reveals itself to be far greater. The apparently dim-witted Yasuna hangs around incredibly dangerous people who constantly hurt her, some may think of this as just a result of her stupidity, but Yasuna merely wants to feel alive, something only the pain her “friend” Sonya can bring her. For Sonya, this is the only way she can find happiness, knowing that someone, no matter how strange, can derive pleasure from her talents which are primarily used for taking lives.

Yeah, that was all a lie, Kill Me Baby is a simple gag comedy, read on to find my thought about what it really is.

The reason I wrote that whole intro is because there’s very little to say on the topic of Kill Me Baby, but don’t take that as an insult, it was actually entertaining and surprisingly far funnier than I thought it was going to be. The second comedy to air this season, it’s a hell of a lot funnier than Recorder to Randoseru, which had two jokes, neither of which were funny, whereas Kill Me Baby can actually muster up a few laughs. For a comedy show, that should be the end goal, to simply be funny, but doing something a bit more can’t hurt, and that’s kinda where the show falls a bit flat.

J.C. Staff is handling a lot of shows this season, one of them was always going to suffer in the budget department, and this season it’s Kill Me Baby. The backgrounds are often drawn in a very simplistic style that looks like a child drew it in crayon. Strangely I haven’t got a problem with this, it suits the light-hearted tone of the rest of the series, but the rest of the poor production values can’t be hidden.

Animation is mediocre at best, when the backgrounds aren’t drawn in crayon, they’re just made up of various patterns in a kind of like what Shaft does but worse, and the music is non-existent for the most part.

Again, this doesn’t have to be a big problem, the show is basically a series of Boke and Tsukkomi routines, so they just have to keep the jokes coming at a relatively fast pace, and the show does this fairly well. The biggest problem being that jokes don’t flow into each other, they’re kept distinctly separate meaning the show has absolutely no sense of narrative flow.

But it’s not bad, like I said, it’s a funny show and you can’t go wrong if you’re merely looking to chuckle each week, and as I said earlier it’s far better than Recorder to Randoseru, with KMB’s great ED being more entertaining than the entire first episode of RTR. Give it a watch, you might just enjoy it.

WILL I BLOG IT?

Nope. I had to make up my opening paragraph for this post now, there’s no way I’m going to have enough to say about this each week. Plus, Another beckons, and I’ll likely only cover one show this season (and I won’t re-pick up Persona 4 for various reasons I’ll go into some other time)