Gin no Saji

Alternate Titles:

Silver Spoon

Review:

When Gin no Saji was first announced it made a large buzz in the anime world because it was the first anime to be created by the famed manga artist, Hiromu Arakawa, who brought us the Full Metal Alchemist series.  Silver Spoon also benefited from having a recently well known director, Tomohiko Ito, at the helm.  Ito is recognized as being the director of the hugely popular Sword Art Online series.  A lot of expectations were set up from the start with this anime because of its “all-star” staff, but does it live up to the hype?

Gin no Saji from the outset couldn’t be more different than the aforementioned Sword Art Online and Full Metal Alchemist.  The famed creator and director find themselves operating in a very different genre, “slice of life”, more specifically agricultural “slice of life”.  There aren’t too many, if any, anime that exist on farms or deal with farm animals so its certainly true that Gin no Saji brings something fresh to the table.

The series takes us through a large number of agricultural and farming lessons that cover such topics as milking cows, dealing with raising chickens, making cheese, making pizza, raising pigs, and of course, coming to grips with the slaughtering of animals to which one may have become attached.  Gin no Saji does all these things and it does it with a good blend of humor, character interaction, and generally crisp and refreshing visuals.

All this seems great but throughout the course of the series, viewers might have found themselves wondering, “where is this going”, “what is the conflict”, and “will there be a climax”?  Unfortunately, this is a slice of life anime, and this genre often depends on internal character struggle to be the overall conflict of the show, the engine that keeps things moving forward.  It should be noted that Gin no Saji doesn’t have a very strong engine.  If this anime were a car, it would be a Prius; all about the environment and not so much about moving things along.  The series truly lacks the kind of internal struggle that one hopes to see in a slice of life story.  Of course the typical theme of “I don’t know what to do with my life”, is present but Hachiken never really convincingly decides where he is going in life.   The one main struggle Hachiken has is with befriending the animals he will inevitably be slaughtering.  However, after several episodes of dealing with this subject, he repeats his initial mistake at the end of the series by naming yet another piglet.  Despite the ironic and humorous names he assigns such as “pork bowl”, one can’t help be feel like, while Hachiken might have learned something, we went in a circle.  This anime falls well short of some of its predecessor anime such as Honey and Clover or Hanasaku Iroha in the department of fleshing out internal character struggle.

In addition to the lack of struggle, in a genre that often depends on it, the show is very much a “flat liner” all the way through.  The series passes the viewer through episodes that focus on individual tasks such as making pizza and how to properly attach the pumping hoses to the teats of a cow but ultimately there is a huge lack of excitement either external or internal of a character  The viewer will find themself waiting for the moment where the series peaks its story, but this moment will come.

So all in all, Gin no Saji is a nice little “slice of life” show that is well made and enjoyable to watch.  The characters are generally likeable but it is held back by lack of a punctuated character struggle and an overall engine that drives the story.  This anime is set to have a sequel in Winter 2013 so perhaps these developments will occur then.

[starrater]