Witch Watch

Episode 8

While Nico and Morihito are the main attraction of this show, Kanshi has proven to be a solid addition to its main ensemble and has done a lot to help elevate its comedy. With that in mind, it's only fitting that our favorite dorky tengu boy gets an episode to himself as he tries his best to keep a stable part-time job. Of course, with Kanshi being a bit of a disaster magnet, this proves to be a task that's much easier said than done—and the ensuing chaos makes for a solid 20 minutes of laughs.

The first of Kanshi's escapades this week begins when Morihito starts dogging him for rent money and demands that he get a job. Since Kanshi is far too lazy to find one, Morihito lands him a gig at a stage show for kids, where Kanshi is thrust into a tokusatsu hero role named Ottoman. According to the director, Ottoman is a hit with both kids and moms and it's easy to see where the latter demographic comes in as all of the non-battle scenes are comprised of such kid friendly material as… awkward tension at home between Ottoman and his wife—or him potentially having an affair with a younger coworker. The funniest part of this by far is Ottoman forgetting his wedding anniversary, only for his wife to “punish” him by using him as a footstool. And while Kanshi here wonders why any of this is being shown to kids to begin with, many of my fellow millennials can attest to being exposed to kids shows with questionable adult jokes and turning out mostly fine, so I'm sure that there's no lasting damage being done here (aside from maybe a handful of these kids awakening to particular tastes later in life).

This tokusatsu-show-turned-soap-opera isn't the only place where there's drama, as during rehearsal, Kanshi ends up having a run-in with a dad who was originally supposed to play Ottoman until he got injured. He wanted to play the part to impress his son, and since this reminds Kanshi of how much he looks up to his own dad, he decides to take pity on the guy and swap roles to play the villain instead. Kanshi plays his part well enough to be a hit with the kids—and given that this show is often as heartwarming as it is hilarious, you'd expect all of this to result in a happy ending. This just makes it funnier when reality sets in, and pulling this stunt costs them their pay. On the bright side, we at least get to see the dad enjoying a moment with his son as they bond over his performance as Ottoman. For Kanshi, the only role he's destined for is playing Morihito's new footstool, for failing to pay his rent. That might be a bit cruel on Morihito's part, but I can't deny it's hilarious, and it's such a surreal image that I couldn't not use it for this review.

Having crashed and burned on one job, the second half of the episode sees Kanshi at his next, as he's tasked with sorting a bunch of screws. This is a job so simple that even he can't fail at it, but it's also so boring that he's desperate to find a way to do it faster. This leads him to ask Nico for a spell that can help speed up his work—and while she indeed has such a spell, it comes with a few caveats: it won't break for three days, he can't use it to hurt anyone, and there's a non-zero chance of this spell leading to a mental breakdown. Kanshi somehow ignores that last red flag and pays for it dearly, as while he can move faster, it also results in time for him going slower. This means that for him, a mere three days is more like 30, and since he moves so quickly that everyone else seems like zombies to him, he has no way of properly communicating the level of distress he's in. In time, Kanshi adjusts to his new reality and figures out how to talk “slowly” enough to communicate with the others, but when the spell finally wears off, he's so used to talking slowly that everything starts feeling too fast for him.

Although I got a few solid laughs out of this segment, I have to admit this is an instance where I think I appreciate the amount of effort that went into the joke more than the joke itself. Kanshi talking at 20x speed for 12 minutes would have been decently funny by itself, but the fact that this short accounts for how Kanshi's perception of time would cause him to consume several days worth of food in a couple of hours, or how all his inability to communicate normally would drive him mad from isolation is some next-level commitment to the bit. It's clear that way more thought was put into this than was needed, and while I do kinda wish that the anime could have done a bit more to enhance the material, editing Kanshi's voice and having him warp in and out of frames, was pretty funny so I can't accuse the staff of not trying at all. As I said last week, if there's anything you can't accuse this show's humor of being, it's stale. Even if I laughed a lot more at the soap opera jokes than the time distillation, the level of creativity with these gags is pretty high. Even when Witch Watch isn't at its absolute funniest, there's so much going on in how it executes its jokes that I can't help but respect the craft.

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Witch Watch is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Sundays.