Well humans, if don’t have a lot of time for anime, you need not worry. This series I’m about to review could be watched in under an hour(your pizza could be delivered by the time is done). We’re about to dive into absurdity with the comedy anime, Ai Mai Mi.
This show revolves around three high school girls who are the name sake of the show, Ai, Mai, and Mi. There is also their sempai (named Ponoka) who is heavily involved throughout the series (but I guess her name didn’t flow well in the title). These girls want to work on manga, but always end up doing something else with wacky results. This usually involves bizarre situations like weird inventions and strange creatures.
All this is done with random and absurd humor. And boy do things get strange. They do things like meet magical creatures and go into alternate dimensions. On top of that, they seem to be very non chalant about causing each other physical harm. These girls really love to give a smacking or two (almost guaranteed in every episode).
As mentioned before, the humor is indeed very random in the way it is delivered. Jokes sometimes occur without any real explanation. The setup will be as simple as saying drawing a manga physically hurts somebody else, and left at that. And sometimes you have random, self contained jokes that are only a few seconds, which pop up in between the main story’s scenes. They aren’t the cleverest of jokes, but they all fit nicely, smoothly together in the short running time of each episode.
Some only take a few seconds.
Speaking of the run time, you get three whole minutes (with 13 episodes, making it 39 minutes of bizarre fun!). The framing of the show is that of an explanation of that the show is a telling of how the manga it’s based on came to be (with each explanation being different in every episode). The show ends with a funny owed to classic video games. And also my favorite part, sudden art change.
So that is the craziness of Ai Mai Mi. A lot of non-sensical fun you can watch when you wanna kill a few minutes of time. The jokes work well within it’s time frame, so as not to stretch out gags beyond what it should be. To top off this anime cake, below is a very short video review I did of the show. Not as detailed as this article, but it does have some good clips of this anime. Until next time, humans.
Watch the show for free at crunchyroll.