The Perfect Girl Lives in a Hamster Hoodie
Every season Japan drops a fresh batch of anime and most of it is garbage. Badly drawn characters with dead eyes, the millionth high school kids with superpowers plot, mechas everywhere. I love Neon Genesis Evangelion with something close to religious devotion, but the rest of the giant-robot genre can go. I dig through the first episodes of whatever’s new, drop things without ceremony, and most of it goes in the bin.
What I found this season—alongside the reliably excellent second season of Non Non Biyori, about which I have nothing new to say except that it continues to be the most peaceful television experience available to human beings—is Himouto! Umaru-chan, which is something else entirely.
Umaru is sixteen and appears to be the perfect human specimen: beautiful, top of her class, effortlessly charismatic. Everyone wants to be her. But the moment she steps through her apartment door, something shifts. The tall, luminous girl collapses into a small, hoodie-wearing gremlin who would happily spend the next twelve hours grinding through RPGs on the PlayStation, chasing them with cola and a stack of manga. She has every console, every game, every comic. She holds impressive records at the local arcade. In secret, she is one of us.
Her older brother Taihei—with whom she lives because she can’t afford her own place—gets driven to the edge of reason on a weekly basis. The central tension is simple: Umaru has to maintain the perfect-girl persona at school, while certain classmates are already getting suspicious. If it ever comes out that the flawless Umaru is actually a full-time otaku slob, her social life is finished.
Anyone who has read or seen Switch Girl!! knows roughly the shape of this story. What makes Umaru work is the specificity of her nerd universe—she doesn’t just have games, she has rituals around them, histories with them, strong opinions about them. She inhabits that parallel world the way people who really live it do. And she doesn’t grate. She’s not annoying. She’s the person everyone in this demographic secretly is the moment the front door closes.
If this had aired on Saturday morning television in the nineties, everyone would have watched every episode. She’s a little like Shin-chan, minus the perverse edge and the butt dance. Finally an anime where nobody has to pilot a giant robot to save humanity—just a girl who wants to go home, open a bag of chips, and play video games until the sky turns pink. The show is on Crunchyroll.