ヨコハマ買い出し紀行 -Quiet Country Cafe-#1 [DVD]

From 1994 to 2006, Hitoshi Ashinano wrote 140 chapters of a manga titled 'Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō', or 'Yokohama Shopping Journal', known in the West as 'Yokohama Shopping Trip', and released as the anime "A Quiet Country Cafe".It’s set in a Japan of the far future, when sea levels have risen to cover most of today’s cities and humanity has declined to a tiny remnant, quietly living amidst the ruins. Strange creatures have appeared — fungi with human faces; flying fish adapted to life out of the water; the Mikago, a human-female-seeming creature that lives in the coastal forest and appears only to children, and the Taapon, a never-landing stratospheric flyer. In addition, there are robots, what would have been called androids, before Star Wars perverted the label. They are constructed humanoids. Indistinguishable from humans, they eat and sleep and excrete and are immortal. Yokohama Shopping Trip is this new world as seen by one of the early model robots, named Alpha.The story is best described as a post-apocalyptic slice-of-life. The pace is calm, slow, lethargic, even glacial. A whole chapter might be dedicated to making a cup of coffee, or driving to the seashore to watch the street lights light up along a highway that is now under water. Alpha runs a coffee shop out at the end of a disused road through an abandoned countryside. Every now and then there’s a visitor. Every now and then she hops on her scooter, and drives into what’s left of Yokohama (the hillside suburbs, mostly), to buy more coffee beans. Her friends include a couple of other robots, an old man who runs a nearby gas station, and his grandchildren. There’s no drama to speak of.This, the first of two OVAs, is a single disc (Japanese with English subtitles), two parts, each of four x eight-minute segments. That’s 64 minutes total, or about three regular anime episodes. The anime is just as slow as the manga, and even more enigmatic. There’s no overlap between the two OVA’s, and because of the slice of life format there’s not much continuity within them. If you haven’t read the manga, you will miss out on half the references. Minor characters from the manga (Taapon, Misago, the pilot) make cameo appearances, seemingly for the sole purpose of satisfying the fans.The artwork gets a B. It looks like watercolor on textured paper. The colors are muted. The depth/distance effects are often based on multiple layers, like an elementary school paper art project. It would make a nice wallpaper, but it doesn’t make the countryside a character, the way Non Non Biyori does.It’s been compared to Aria as a feel good anime, but I think it’s closer to Non Non Biyori. It’s very quiet, very rural, and, to the extent that there are characters, character-based.

値段は張ったけれど、状態が良くてよかった。

前作が良作だっただけに、どうしても比較してしまいますね。まあ私もですが。やはり前作と比べると絵が見劣りします。前作がＯＶＡとして完成されてるレベルだとすれば、今回は毎週30分放送のＴＶって感じ。おそらくこれが１作目だったら、また評価も違ったんでしょうね。やはり、動く・喋るヨコハマ買出し紀行は、原作とはまた違う魅力があります。原作が終わってずいぶん経つから、そう思うだけなのかもしれませんけど。

いやー、原作の読み方の違いなんでしょうが、私はこちらのほうがイメージに近いです。原作終盤の簡素な絵柄のイメージがあるからかな。前作と作られた時代が違いますし、いちがいに比較もできませんが、物語が大展開する旅立ちのシーンのみを扱っており、前作のせわしない詰め込み方にくらべ安心してじっくり見ていられます。風景が水彩画ふうなのがリアリティを損ねてますが、話しにはあっているし、この画風としては美しいです。椎名さんの声は個人的には落ち着きなく演技過剰な感じがしなくもないなあ。

ダメすぎます。俺は買って後悔しました。音楽はいいと思うんですが、アニメの方はクオリティ低すぎです。こっち買うより、前作買う方がいいですよ。