"Bocchi The Rock! Season 1" Let Them Cook

 


    It's not hard to get me to like your anime, all I need is some catchy theme song, some over the top characters and I'm set, I could easily watch forty episodes of whatever series thrown my way, and that's how I felt about Bocchi the Rock! season 1. While I might have been skeptical of the series as a whole, that's only because I kept on comparing it to K-ON!,  but once the plot started to pick up I was hooked, this anime is cute, catchy and just generally loveable, the only way you hate this anime is if you hate fun.

    When I say let them cook, I mean the animators and showrunners, because they really had their fill of fun with this series, and frankly I'm all here for it. From a clip where they start running in the middle of the woods to overturn a rock, to Goto randomly t-posing and flying into computer generated cubes like an old Youtube poop made using source film maker, they really do whatever they want. I think that's what really hooked me with this series, the animator are really given free reign.

    One anime I vividly remember doing something similar was Blend S, as I distinctly remember them making the slice of life genre that more interesting, by having intense shonen elements for the most random of things like a cooking tournament between coworkers. Let them cook I say, because the creativity that they producers take when they're portraying Goto's social anxiety never gets old, and I mean that in the best way possible.

    I mean the show isn't some PSA on the struggles of social anxiety, but it does a pretty good job of poking fun at how crippling it could be, and that's where I think the show shines in, the humour. It never takes itself too seriously, I mean there are multiple times where Bocchi just ends up literally turning into dust, or becoming a blob that they have to reshape, and never once does it really "break the fourth wall", everyone acts like Bocchi is this magical creature, and it's cute.

    Frankly, my only complaint is that it takes until the 4th or 5th episode to really get going, because while I do think it's important to show the origin story of the band, it started off pretty typical and I wasn't too impressed with either the music or the story until the band started to come into its own. I remember at first one of my complaints was that it was solely focused on Bocchi instead of the band as a whole sort of like K-ON!, but eventually I started to get over the constant comparisons and enjoy the anime for what it is, it's own thing.

Final Score: 84/100

    What more need I say, watch this anime now. When I saw that this show was the top rated anime of this past season, I was skeptical, who wouldn't be? After all, it beat out some pretty big powerhouses like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (it never really had a fighting chance with Netflix at the helm), Chainsaw Man Season 1 and Spy x Family Part 2. After watching this series, I can see why it won though, it's lighthearted, cute and has humour that I think resonates well, especially with viewers in Gen Z around my age.

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