This Week in Anime

Kotaro Lives Alone Hides a Tragic Underbelly

Steve
Nicky, there's this weird cryptid with huge dead eyes outside my apartment door right now and I'm scared.

He's just standing there. Menacingly.

If that's the case, I'm toast.

But in the scant few moments of life I have left, let's talk about this lil' slugger and his new Netflix show.

It's a skit-based comedy series with a very normal premise: a 4-year-old named Kotaro Lives Alone (hence the title) in his own apartment, and wacky hijinks ensue between him and his quirky neighbors! Ah, what fun. Oh, you wanna know why a 4-year-old is living on his own? Uhhhhh don't worry about it.

It definitely makes for an interesting experience when you (like me) are going into the series knowing absolutely nothing about it. Like, the absurdity of the premise alone primes you for something lighthearted, and Kotaro at first is just this weird kid with loud fashion sense and a penchant for speaking like a feudal lord. It screams sitcom. And then it hits you with this stuff.

So yeah, the series is still what I'd call a comedy, but it's one that mixes jokes about Kotaro's innocence with much heavier explorations of childhood trauma as seen in and through both kids and adults. It's one hell of a potpourri.

Oh, there are way too many variations of "grown man adopts tiny creature, heart warmth ensues" to name, just in animanga alone. Kotaro skirts around that label by being more ensemble-driven and more focused on Kotaro, but Karino for sure fills the surrogate dad role.

Much to the chagrin of other apartment dwellers, I might add.

I dunno, getting bored while watching children's cartoons? Couldn't be me.

I mean it literally couldn't or I'd be out of a job. But I think the strange mix of paternal and fraternal feelings he has for Kotaro dig at what the whole show is about. Kotaro doesn't have his birth family anymore, but he has this found one thanks to the people who live with and visit him. It's a found family full of these much fuzzier relationships, and that leads to a lot of conflict, but overall leaves everyone in a much better place.

I'm a big sucker for found families, too. In addition to their traumas, each character also interacts with Kotaro in their own way, which helps add variety to the skits that make up each episode.


That said, the show definitely has a formula that it hews closely to: Kotaro does a weird thing, five minutes pass, and it turns out he does the weird thing is due to something extremely depressing from his past.

And in addition to that, while a fouor-year-old owning and maintaining his own apartment is maybe just a tad unbelievable, I like that Kotaro acknowledges how perceptive even very little kids can be. It's the kind of character writing you don't see a whole lot of in fiction (or see dumbed down a lot more often), but like, you're definitely a person with your own thoughts and personality by his age. And kids do say the darnedest things.

Oh maybe Fenneko is his wife! We never actually see her, and I can imagine them bonding over how their laughter reveals the extent to which they feel dead inside. This would also be the perfect opportunity to start testing the waters for a Netflix Original Anime Extended Universe. The one stop shop for all your favorite characters where you can watch the protagonists of B: The Beginning and Hero Mask make out.

You're right, I shouldn't joke about that. Worse evils have been ushered into existence based on flimsier shitposts. Anyway, back to the matter at hand, if the boy's blank stare bothers you, trust me, the alternative is much, much more cursed.

And back to my other point, even this sketch ends with the precocious tyke going up to his kindergarten teacher and telling her he can see through her depression mask because he's been there too. Like, it's a little much.

Yeah, the binge format really does Kotaro no favors. Slamming one episode after another makes its tonal shifts feel more formulaic, with lots of stories following pretty much the same arc. This diminishes the effectiveness of the parts that blend their elements together better than the others, because you've already been desensitized to the "twist" element. And then there's the opposite problem, where the heaviness of the subject matter compounds and wears you down so much more quickly. Obviously, that's an avoidable problem if you just space out the episodes, and I recommend you do so. But if there's one agenda I have in this column, it's taking all the opportunities I can to complain about Netflix's anime distribution model.

As long as you're not eating the tissues.

And honestly, even a properly-spaced version of the show is going to have some issues with emotional whiplash. It's unavoidable when you're placing examples of learned self-loathing alongside silly capers about cats stealing underwear. Or, like, the stories about kids who have it even worse off than Kotaro.

The show's been deliberately vague about what exactly caused his family to fall apart, so there's that tiny uncomfortable mystery element to it too. Though in general the writing is more concerned with the effects of trauma and abuse, as opposed to their causes, which is probably the right way to go.

Oh god yeah, hearing stuff like this come out of his mouth is devastating, because you can absolutely believe how a child's logic could come to that conclusion. Hell, adults think like this all the time too.

On the other hand, Kotaro's search for strength leads to some cute interactions with other kids, where he tries to impart on them the code of bushido in various ways with varying degrees of effectiveness.

Like, some of the show's most understated humor comes from comparing Kotaro's woes to those of the "normal" kids in his class.

Kids love things that suck. It doesn't get more authentic than that.

And on the clothes note, I think what makes the Tonosaman thing even funnier is that Kotaro has discerning aesthetic taste in some avenues.

Though sometimes Kotaro can certainly be a little too adult for his own good.

I thought it was funny enough to screencap when the first episode opened with a TV-14 rating, but it put me in my place soon enough.

Needless to say, I was very unsurprised once I actually did research and learned the manga was serialized in a seinen magazine. Don't let its cute exterior fool you. And it can be a very cute exterior.

I feel about the same. Kotaro Lives Alone attempts an extremely delicate balancing act without enough finesse in any department to really pull it off. But its heart is ultimately in the right place, and mine was warmed when it wasn't wearied by it.