Dagashi Kashi

Episode 9

Well, this sure wasn't a great episode of Dagashi Kashi. It leaned hard into its weaker elements and didn't really contain any of its strengths, and the end result was about what you'd expect. It wasn't aggressively bad or anything, it was just a fairly bland episode full of overlong and not particularly funny jokes.

Dagashi Kashi's strength as a comedy is that it's not really much of a comedy. The show is based on atmosphere, not wit, and it's at its best when it leans into that atmosphere - focusing on the main characters having fun on a sunny afternoon, or sharing time at a festival like last week. The show's strong sound design, gentle character work, and languid pacing all lend themselves to sequences largely based on letting the audience enjoy time with the cast.

In contrast, when the show tries to go for overt jokes, it stumbles more often than it succeeds. Dagashi Kashi just isn't that clever of a show, and the very gentleness and slow pacing that make its atmospheric segments successful mean it rarely has the punch to land something really funny. And this episode was one hundred percent dedicated to debuting new dagashi and attempting to turn them into punchlines, which turned out about as well as you'd expect.

The show's first two segments featured Hotaru and Saya, as Hotaru ranted about a pair of new dagashi and Saya tried her best to keep up. The episode opened with Hotaru showing Saya her painful canker sore, which Hotaru initially guessed she'd gotten from “lack of sleep from thinking about dagashi too much.” Of course, the obvious answer was that Hotaru had been ruining her health with too many sweets, and so the first segment mainly just featured Saya trying to save Hotaru from her own bad habits. This was essentially one joke stretched out over six minutes, but there were at least a couple decent moments of comedic timing, from the delayed punchlines of Hotaru hurting herself to Saya's various deadpan reactions.

The episode's three other segments all proceeded pretty much like this, with uniformly uninspiring results. The second segment with Saya was “Hotaru is rambling about a dagashi framed as an animal pooping, and Saya thinks this is gross.” The third segment with Kokonotsu was “Hotaru is rambling about a dagashi you can't get in Osaka, and so she's yelling in a kansai accent.” The final segment was “Hotaru is rambling about a dagashi shaped like a boob.” All of the jokes were loud, obvious, and overlong, and more than that, they were all the same joke said over and over again. Hotaru doesn't have to be an annoying character, but when she's leaning entirely into the dagashi fanatic persona, there's not really much to hold onto there.

This was a bad episode, but not an unexpected one. Dagashi Kashi has been having some unusually strong episodes lately by leaning more towards its slice of life instincts, but the show's tendency towards weak comedy is always there as well, and so it was only a matter of time before we got another episode like this. It's pretty much just the cost of entry.

Overall: C

Dagashi Kashi is currently streaming on Funimation.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.