CITY The Animation

Episode 5

This is the kind of anime episode that makes me wish I could give out a score higher than a 5 out of 5. While I can think of a handful of anime sequences that are more visually impressive than episode five of CITY The Animation, there isn't a single complete work of animation that's more enthusiastic about the medium than this twenty-eight-minute-long episode. I know it's reductive to call a creative work perfect, but even that adjective feels unsatisfactory in describing the joyous and masterful animation packed into this episode.

Starting from where the previous episode ended, Nagumo is transported to the Tanabe Mansion via limo and invited into the Mansion's hospitality towers. Here, Nagumo can enjoy a life of luxury as a reward for catching Officer Tanabe's umbrella in the previous episode, though she can only escape if she completes Game of Death-style challenges on each floor of the tower! After running into the Nice Man from previous episodes and, inexplicably, Wako, Nagumo is dragged along on their escape attempt from the towers!

Also, Tanabe Mansion and the hospitality towers are a real model, and nearly every exterior shot of the mansion is animated in images or videos of this diorama. There was no reason for the folks at Kyoto Animation to go to the trouble of creating a model of the mansion and using stop motion animation techniques to showcase the mansion's exterior, but they did! I can't even imagine how much work this was, but someone on the animation staff is clearly super into creating these kinds of models, and their passion shines in this episode and further embellishes the zest for life that's persisted in every episode of CITY.

As Nagumo and Co. work their way down the tower, each floor's boss hilariously surrenders or is undone through surprising developments, like the magician whose own birds attack him until he realizes he was mistreating them, or the karate master who has to let the trio pass as he broke his arm before their arrival and can't fight. As this is going on, there are several other happenings in the city that CITY The Animation takes place in. Simultaneously to Nagumo's story: Niikura is chasing after her locket as the cat Mimineko runs around with it, Ecchan and Matsuri continue their hunt for Mimineko, Tatewaku and his soccer team discover the mythical and doofy Tsuchinoko, the Adatara family delivers beer to the hospitality towers, additional guests like the manga artist and editor from past episodes are invited to the tower, and Nagumo's landlady infiltrates so that she can collect rent from the young woman.

Also, when I say that this is happening simultaneously, I mean that these events are playing out on screen simultaneously. By dividing up the screen into a growing number of picture-in-picture windows, we see all of these stories concurrently and with the audio jumping between each window's focus intermittently. Once again, Kyoto Animation did not have to go this hard and could have used an easier and more direct means to express all of these events, but they went the extra mile, and the result is more simultaneous animation happening on screen in this episode than maybe any other seasonal anime I've watched.

The episode ends with Nagumo and company escaping the hospitality towers and emerging into another series of simultaneous on-screen animations that coalesce into a massive party just outside of the Tanabe Mansion. This sequence beautifully captures the charm, scope, and community that make CITY The Animation such a delight every week, and I have no idea how the next episode is going to top this one. Especially considering that at the end of the episode, we learn that Niikura's locket did contain the first picture she ever took of Nagumo, which is exactly as adorable and queer-coded as I hoped it would be.

Lastly, don't skip the end credits for this episode! Rather than the usual ending sequence, we get a painting stylized montage of a man presumed to be a Tanabe ancestor, embodying the spirit of hospitality that the family would become known for. Also, it turns out that a frazzled Buddha actually made the hospitality towers, which is very weird, very unexpected, and very funny.

Rating:

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Lucas DeRuyter is the defacto Bad Boy of anime reviews (no one else was using the moniker). He rolls with ANN's This Week and Anime crew, and you can check out his coolest work in his portfolio. You can also find him sticking it to the man on his Bluesky account.

CITY The Animation is currently streaming on Prime Video.