The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten

Amane lives alone in an apartment, and the most beautiful girl in school, Mahiru, lives just next door. They've rarely spoken—until the day he sees her in distress on a rainy day and lends her his umbrella. To return the favor, she offers him help around the house, and a relationship slowly begins to blossom as the distance between them closes.

The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten is based on Saekisan's light novel series and streams on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Caitlin Moore
Rating:

About halfway through The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten, I was so put off by Amane's behavior that I said out loud, “What the fuck is this guy's problem?” Or I would have, if I weren't on an airplane surrounded by strangers. I did, however, whisper it to my husband because he really is a huge asshole and it needed to be said.

He's not an asshole in a fun way, either. He's the kind of guy who finds something to judge everyone around him for, making assumptions about their circumstances, including that they're better off than he is. He doesn't feed himself right or clean his apartment, until the class angel/his next-door neighbor realizes he's living in squalor. So naturally, she starts feeding him and then cleaning his apartment even though she too is living alone and probably has her hands full taking care of herself. Despite him constantly snarking at her, she does not throw the cleaning supplies in his face and tell him to take care of his own damn self then.

To Mahiru's credit, she does stick up for herself, though that is negated by the wish-fulfillment aspect where she keeps doing things for him, like cleaning his room when he can't figure out even the most basic parts of how to pick up his clothes off the floor. However, the writing is such that instead of entertaining verbal sparring, it mostly serves to create a vaguely tense and uncomfortable atmosphere. I get that both of them are probably coming from a place of trauma, but they're still miserable to be around. Watching the episode feels like being the third member of a triple dorm room, and your roommates don't get along but are just holding themselves back from getting into a huge screaming match so you spend as much time elsewhere as possible. It's not fun.

The vague discomfort that permeates the entire episode is exacerbated by a thoroughly lackluster presentation. The characters barely move around and their facial expressions barely ever change. The animation has this sort of dull sheen to it that makes everything look like cheap satin. It's just so… lifeless. The best part of the episode is by far Manaka Iwami's performance as Mahiru. She truly has one of the most beautiful voices I've ever heard, and does a great job making the character come across as polite but firm and not a pushover. If only the characters were more likable.

On the surface, this anime is pure wish-fulfillment. I mean who doesn't want a physically attractive person to come into their lives, do (or help with) all those monotonous daily tasks we'd rather not do, and expect nothing in return. Luckily, there's a bit more to this show than this would suggest.

Amane is a guy living without parental supervision for the first time. While many of us get the “easy mode” version of this in college, Mahiru has dived right into the deep end and learned the hard way what not having mommy around to cook and clean gets you. The good news is that, while apathetic to start, eating Amane's leftovers each night is having an impact on his health and happiness, giving him the motivation to improve his living conditions in other ways. Hopefully this is the beginning of him at least doing the bare minimum of cooking and cleaning—which likely puts him far above his peers when it comes to making the transition into being a responsible adult.

But as much as Mahiru does for Amane in getting his life in order, she's not some selfless angel—which is actually the whole point of her character. On the outside, Amane is the stereotypical perfect princess. She's rich and beautiful but also kind and humble, and she's always willing to help out when asked. However, that's just a front, a persona imposed by her parents that she puts on to help her get through the day.

Yet, when she is with Amane, she's able to be herself simply because he has no expectations of her. He gave her the umbrella because he wanted to—not because he expected anything in return. She, on the other hand, genuinely wants to do something nice for him in return and helps him out when he is sick. Together, Mahiru and Amane have created a relationship based on mutual self-satisfaction. They help and do nice things for each other not because it is socially required, but because they want to. It is this freedom from expectations that allows Amane to drop her outer façade.

What's most interesting here is that by not expecting anything romantically from her, Amane becomes the person she's most likely to fall in love with. He doesn't place her on a pedestal nor does he pity her. He treats her as an equal when they are alone. And when they are at school, he respects her decision to continue playing the school princess role and leaves her to it.

All in all, this looks to be an excellent romance anime and I can't wait to see how their relationship evolves as things move forward.

One of the unique tasks of preview guide is trying to take just the right screencap to encapsulate a premiere. Usually, it's pretty simple, but occasionally you run into a show like this one, where every single frame is so dull and bland that nothing feels right. I spent the entire episode pouncing at every mildly communicative drawing, desperate for anything resembling a dynamic, interesting, or not horribly flat image. But I failed, so instead, you get one of the dozen dull shots of these kids' emotionless faces staring slack-jawed into the middle distance.

That's all this episode really is, honestly. Endless scenes of two blank-faced teenagers sharing flavorless dialogue, slowly going through the motions to set up the most boring premise for a romance imaginable. If you're lucky, maybe one of them smiles or blushes before the scene ends, and we cut over to the next lifeless expanse of dialogue. Even if the visuals weren't as dull and cookie-cutter as possible, the actual conversations at play here feel like placeholder material meant to be replaced before the script went out. There's no spark, personality, or even a semblance of individual character to tell these two apart, and nothing they talk about is exciting. The only thing to grasp onto is Shiina being uncomfortable with her “angel” nickname, and even that is so generic it barely registers. Outside of that, she's just a vessel for the fantasy of having a pretty(?) girl enter your life and start doing all your chores for you so that you can imagine one day living in domestic...well, not bliss. Domestic mundanity?

The only thing that grabs the viewer's attention is the opening theme by Masayoshi Ōishi, which was so antithetically upbeat and catchy that I had to check the audio wasn't coming from a different browser tab when the credits started. So I can honestly say my favorite part of this premiere was when it ended. Otherwise, there's nothing here remotely memorable, and I doubt I'll be able to tell you anything about this premiere by the end of the day.

The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten is the kind of anime I would have absolutely loved back in around 2006 or so when I was a naïve little kid who still thought about romance in purely childish, transactional terms. “I want my girlfriend to be hot! And to do all the hobbies and activities that I like! And she should have infinite patience for all of my shortcomings instead of being a nag!” It is a fundamentally juvenile fantasy that isn't even about “love,” or at least, it isn't the kind of love story that I have very much patience for these days because it still frames its central relationship through those same immature expectations of what a partner does, instead of who a partner is.

This is not a problem unique to The Angel Next Door, but it is this particular show's core failing, so far as I can tell. Otherwise, everything else about it is perfectly serviceable. The art is fine. The direction is fine. The music is fine. Nothing particularly offensive, incongruous, frustrating, or otherwise glaringly negative about the dialogue, plot beats, or what have you. The issues are much more fundamental here; Amane and Mahiru aren't really characters at all. They're just ideas. Symbols. Archetypal stand-ins of what an “everyday, generic dude-guy” and a “doting, patient, cute, and altogether angelic” idealized love interest should be. She cleans his house, takes care of him when he's sick, volunteers her status as a single gal almost immediately, and more-or-less devotes her life to this random guy she barely knows for no discernible reason outside of the fact that he was nice to her one time.

Here's the number one thing that most anime rom-coms will fail at: chemistry. You know, that spark of physical and emotional connection that gets audiences invested in the “love” part of a love story? Much like horror anime that utterly fails at being scary, a lot of romance anime are doomed to fail from the start because they cannot overcome that innate combination of physiological and psychological reactions that allow audiences' brains to be tricked into thinking that these collections of shapes and colors that are flitting about on their screens are human people that can, and absolutely should, start smooching. It turns out that chemistry is tough to create when your main protagonist lacks any of the distinguishing emotional characteristics of a likable leading man, and his love interest fares little better.

Look, I'm turning thirty-one next month. My wife and I have been together for ten years. I love a good, sappy romance, but I'm at the point in my life where I'm only interested in love stories between actual people, not cookie-cutter self-insert bros and their almost-certainly-doomed-to-die-of-vague-anime-illness waifus. This is a hard pass for me.

When I read the first of the light novels upon which this series is based for the Fall Light Novel Guide in 2020, my reaction was that it was saccharine and pretty basic. That holds true for the first episode, which, as far as I recall, follows the novel very closely. It's harmless wish fulfillment of the romcom kind, wherein an average guy looks into having the school's angel be his next-door neighbor, and she takes it upon herself to take care of him when she discovers that he's living in filth and can't cook for himself. If that sounds like your idea of a good time, then this will fit the bill.

The chief problem here is that not only is it not doing a lot with a typical genre formula, but its heroine is also not as engaging as a character. There are some hints, such as the way she reacts every time male protagonist Amane mentions her parents. She fully admits that it is her own issue that she's decided to take care of him because she can't stand the idea that he's doing such a rotten job of it himself while living right next door to her. She's also clearly got some hang-ups about guys. While a few of them show her being perhaps excessively innocent, she's also pretty clearly uncomfortable with the sort of male attention that she typically receives. Since Amane does not appear to be romantically pursuing her at this point, she feels more comfortable with him than most other guys at school.

There isn't a whole lot to say about this episode. It establishes that the characters are basic tropes and spends a lot of time lingering over close-ups of Mahiru's face in one of her two expressions. It checks off a lot of the wish fulfillment boxes, with her taking care of him when he gets a cold after he lends her his umbrella, cooking for him every night, and helping him to clean his room, while he repays her by … not hitting on her, washing her Tupperware, and carrying her groceries home from the store? Obviously, something rubs me a little bit the wrong way about all of this. Still, with its buttery color palette and basically harmless narrative, this really is the definition of a perfectly fine episode that fails to make an impression one way or the other.