Story / Plot: …Wait, there was a plot?
Actually, there wasn’t. Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru was a show made up of a bunch of funny events revolving around our main character, Arashiyama Hotori, the dumbest girl I have ever seen. The show’s name, “And The Town Still Turns”, summarized the show pretty well. A lot of events happen, they may seem dramatic, however in the end, the town still turns and nothing happens…
That was a pretty decent concept to me, however it doesn’t change anything to the lack of plot there was in this show. THERE. WAS. NO. PLOT. At all. The episodes were totally unrelated to one another, and usually even between halves of episodes there was absolutely no link. 12 episodes full of NOTHING. By seeing this, it is evident that this was probably supposed to be a carefree show only there to be funny. The thing is, it wasn’t funny enough for that. The jokes and the stories were so plain stupid that the show ended up being absolutely retarded, and it was boring to watch. I forced myself so finish it in order to be able to write this final impression, and it’s a good thing it was pretty short. I only had to suffer one day in order to catch up –-‘.
So basically, the humour wasn’t very humouristic. Some jokes were good, I’ll have to admit that. I still never got over that triple-hit clumsy combo from first episode. However, for a show based exclusively on humour, it was lacking. A LOT. I mean, the situations were rarely funny at all, the personalities of the characters were weird, heck, the whole show was incredibly weird. It was a failed attempt at making a funny show. Moreover, the situations were usually so damn retarded that the only thing I could do was laugh at how horrible this was getting. That’s not all. The one thing that pissed me off over everything else, the one thing that happened a lot in the show, was when the producers put in some really random story that didn’t have to do with anything. Oh noes, Arashiyama is super tired! Sanada asks why, and she answers with a long story about how she was late at school and everything. In the end however, that’s not the reason why she’s tired. WTF!!!!!!
Alright, so the show was bad, very bad, but after being forced to watch this I actually managed to find some good points to it. Kind of. As much as the narrator at the beginning and end of the episode pissed me off sometimes, most of the time it actually made sense as to what the episode was about. It was kinda random, but it worked out somehow. Kinda.
Basically, for someone who wants to watch this, make sure to expect nothing. Nothing at all. The least you expect, the better this show will get. The whole show is in a category of its own, one called “WTF”. It’s completely different from other shows and would really stand out with its originality if it didn’t suck so much. It was really bad –-‘. You know a show sucks when you’re surprised to find yourself enjoying an episode of this. I basically enjoyed a couple of episodes, but overall the show sucked, and was far from being any good.
The ending actually surprised me, and I have to say it’s the one thing I was really impressed about. It followed the style of the show really well, tied up everything properly, and it was really surprising. Now, you see how much I’ve been dissing this show about the lack of plot? Well, in the last episode, I actually cried. That says something. For a show that bad to give me a feeling of sadness, the ending had to be pretty impressive. The ending was something I actually found pretty enjoyable Moreover, it meant that this horrible show was over and I wouldn’t have to watch it anymore.
3 / 10
Characters: Oh god. Where should I start?
Basically, the main character FAILS. I’ve said it already and will say it again forever and ever, Arashiyama is the biggest failure of a main character I have ever seen in my life. She’s definitely not someone you’d see as a main character, but rather you’d see her as the secondary character that makes the main character look smart. Instead, she’s the main character and so she makes everything look stupid show included. Her only redeeming quality is that she’s a good sister, and takes care of her siblings fairly well. I liked that about her. But then again, everytime she showed that quality and sterted redeeming herself, she’d fail. All the time.
Apart from her, the others were really unimportant and were simply there to keep the story going. There was no character development at all but then again, with no plot you can’t really do anything, and the characters were done in a very basic way. Nothing big, they’re just there. Meh. What’s more, it happened pretty often that the characters said stupid stuff just like Arashiyama would say and their so-called superiority of intelligence over her were completely destroyed, therefore destroying any kind of sustained personality.
The only character that I really enjoyed in this show, and the one character that prevented me from never finishing this, was Josephine. A small Tanuki, Josephine is first of all the main character of intermission. She doesn’t show up anywhere else until episode 5, where we see her in Arashiyama’s backyard, and it takes until episode 10 for us to figure out her name / what she’s doing in the show. She’s in fact Arashiyama’s “dog”.
Basically, my first reaction when I saw her during intermission, saying really random stuff, was “Wtf is this?”. It only took a couple more episodes, however, for me to realize how cute she was, and she rapidly became my most favourite character this season. Why? She’s cute, she says stuff like “I practice my shuriken skills before going to bed”, and says “poco” at the end of each sentence. Isn’t that just the awesomest thing ever? Josephine is seriously the only reason why I would ever recommend this show to someone. She’s just so awesome like that. You have to have seen the show in order to understand her awesomeness.
4 / 10
Josephine counts for 3 of those 4 points.
Technicalities:
OP wasn’t too bad. The song absolutely sucked I hated it, anyways but it matched the show, carefree and with no plot or anything like that. It presented the main characters well. I just never bothered watching it because of the horrid song and horrid art (but that’s not just in the OP).
ED actually had a relation to the story. Or, should I say, a relation to episode 8. So, for more than half of the show, you’ve got this random ending song with the main characters singing in a “band”, and only in the later episodes does it make sense. They probably should have put that episode earlier in the show, instead of making us derp over the nonsensical ending until we got to the end of the show to understand. The lyrics of the song represented really well the characters, it wasn’t deep or anything but it was in relation to the storyline what little storyline there was.
Art: Um… Yeah… The art.
…
HORRID. ABSOLUTELY HORRID. A 10 year-old with any kind of talent could have drawn better than this. All the characters looked really weird, and everything was just drawn out so horribly that I hated taking screencaps for this show while I was still blogging it. Everything looked so freaking bad.
5 / 10
Take out the horrible art and it’s decent.
Overall Impression: This show had a serious lack of money -_-‘. It could have been decent if it had been produced by a company with a good budget. Either SHAFT needed some filler show or they just really hoped they could get away with low budget shows, anyways, this was horrid and I’m glad it’s finally over (I miss Josephine already though :()
4 / 10
Recommended: No
