Skip and Loafer

Episodes 1-3

One of my friends in college had a sign on her door: “Think – there must be a harder way to do it.” Mitsumi may not realize it, but that's her unofficial motto in many ways. She's a champion overthinker, anxious to succeed in exactly the way she has planned, and she's got the confidence to pull it off…even if she's not going about things in the best or simplest way. I think a lot of us can probably identify with that. Still, if you can't, there's an excellent chance that one of the other characters will remind you of yourself in one way or another because that's one of Skip and Loafer's greatest strengths: everyone in it is nothing more or less than human.

By episode three, that's very apparent. Mitsumi is the most unapologetically herself, and as our primary protagonist, we know her the best. But Yuzuki isn't the mean or haughty girl others assume her to be, Shima's clearly got a past he's not keen to revisit, and Egashira is revealed to be not so much stereotypical as she is curated. Like Mitsumi, she seems to have a goal for her high school life, and she won't let some duckling from the middle of nowhere barge in and mess up her plans. In both girls' minds, they are the center of their universes; the difference is that Mitsumi can't imagine anything going wrong, whereas Egashira is starting to worry that nothing will go right. She's insecure, much like Kurume, and both girls think they need to rely on appearances for their own happiness or as a tool to judge others by. Kurume quickly learns she's barking up the wrong tree, but Egashira? She's much more mired in her ideas, and it should be interesting to watch and see if and how she can change.

In this respect, Mitsumi is both the story's focal point and the catalyst for the other characters. Her first meeting with Shima, when he rescues her in the train station after she's gotten hopelessly lost, sets them up as two people who can mutually lean on each other. Right now, it's more obvious what he does for her because she's still struggling to adjust to life as a tadpole in the sea after being a whale in a puddle. But if you look closely, you can already see how Mitsumi is also helping Shima. He doesn't have to pretend around her – she's aware that he's handsome, but she's more interested in the fact that he reminds her of her dog back home, and she wants to be his friend more than his girlfriend. It's not that she's unaware of such things, as her conversations with her pal Fumi let us know; it's more that they do not drive her. She enjoys hanging out with Shima, she's thrilled that he wants to be her friend, and that's enough for her. It makes her fun to be around for him, and while he's generally always smiling and kind, we can see the difference in how he acts around Mitsumi versus his middle school friends and the annoying drama club guy who won't leave him alone. The smiles are the same on the surface, but the intent behind them is completely different.

While it would be too simplistic to say that the theme here is “acceptance,” we do have some evidence that it's a theme. Mitsumi's aunt Nao is a good example of this outside of school – Mitsumi tells us that Nao is her dad's sibling. It isn't until episode two, when girls are tittering on the train that we have cause to question Nao's gender, and even then, it's made very clear that we shouldn't question it. Neither Nao nor Mitsumi says anything, but it feels very much like they're deliberately ignoring the chatter; I'm not sure I would have been able to hold myself back from at least glaring at the offenders. Ultimately it doesn't matter “what” Nao is so much as who she is, and Mitsumi's friends meeting her aunt at some point will hopefully be handled with grace and not as a teachable moment.

All of these characters and plot threads come together beautifully in each episode, and my one complaint is that the art makes it look like everyone's been eating jam sandwiches messily. But I defy you to watch that goofy, beautifully animated dance in the opening theme without cracking a smile and being current on the English release of the manga (published by Seven Seas), I can assure you that you won't be sorry if you stick around to watch Mitsumi skip along, with Shima loafing beside her.

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Skip and Loafer is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.