Kyouran Kazoku Nikki should have been one of the greatest shows of its season, but it took a formula for success and misbalanced the ingredients. Let’s take a quick look at what those are. You have a story about a man who has been called to act as the head of a family of potentially dangerous people, beings of great danger to humanity who, if they are not shown the love of a family, could bring about the destruction of the world. Right off the bat it’s got intense family drama written all over it, but it doesn’t stop there. Instead, the family is made up of a shy little girl, a gender confused teenage boy, a talking lion, a severely dense biological weapon, a flying jellyfish that eats sushi, and an extremely hyperactive catgirl who believes that she is an omnipotent god.
Once you have this information, it’s hard to believe that the series could still be a boring drama. Suddenly you’ve got this zany cast in front of you. You start up the series, and your belief that it will be a wacky comedy is immediately gratified by one of the most ridiculous OP’s in recent time. Little cargirls everywhere, high speed bickering, people fighting big robots…it’s insane. So what the hell went wrong? The very first thing they do after fooling you into believing you’re in for a riot is give all the characters dark pasts involving death and torture, and then go on and on about how their lives suck but they need to stick together. And who is the one giving these speeches about being a good family? A fucking catgirl with ADHD.
I think Wildarms explained that problem pretty well. The series was funny when it was funny, but when it wasn’t, it was very hard to take seriously. The entire final arc is some love story involving two characters we don’t even know, one of which arrived out of nowhere just for this arc, and the other of which was a damn jellyfish for most of the series. The worst thing is that such an unusual match should be the basis for hilarious material, but they didn’t even try to make it funny. Talk about having your priorities all wrong.
In the meantime, wonderful side characters get pushed aside in favor of some of the dumbest, most unoriginal characters imaginable. Shinigami-san and the high school girls can get their 30 second cameos, but the retarded catgirl (we don’t need two catgirls in this series!) and Oasis get to play important roles in the final episodes. It’s like the series tried to expand out to a variety of situational comedy settings, and then only pursued the ones where it failed. What. The. Fuck.
Was the series good? No. It was mediocre at best. It had some very funny episodes (which amusingly featured the main cast as side characters), but the inbetween was so dull that I almost dropped the series somewhere around 10 episodes in. If you want to watch a family drama, then you might actually enjoy this, though it’s not like you have a wide selection of series to choose from. I can’t name any other anime off the top of my head that center around a family where no single character holds the lead role. If you can think of one, go watch it instead. It’s probably better.
Kyouran Kazoku Nikki – Let’s watch pointless characters sit around looking even more bored than we do.
