CENTAUR NO NAYAMI

DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA FantasyCentaur no Nayami

REVIEWS

• 

  TheRealKyuubey

  70/100
  Come for the fantasy waifus, stay for the intricate worldbuilding and thought-provoking social commentary.

  Himeno Kimihara is living the ideal highschool life. She’s tall, she’s smart, she’s pretty enough to appear in magazines(which she often does), she has active extracurricular interests, and she’s popular with her classmates... But she also has to deal with the trials and tribulations of being a centaur in modern day Japan, and while having a booty that just won’t quit is generally considered a good thing, it’s really not the same when said dumpy comes with a tail and two extra legs. In a world full of fauns, angel folk, mermaids and giant reptiles with legs, the only thing you really can do is try to live your life the best you can, navigating a society that’s doing its best to accommodate the needs of its diverse populace and give everyone the most normal life possible... And for better or worse, being the only centaur in her class, life for Himeno is never going to get boring.

  Animation Company Emon, a Japanese subsidiary of the Chinese Haoliners Animation League, is a very young production company. While they began producing online animations in 2013, which they’re still doing today, they only ever produced six television anime in a two year period between 2017 and 2018, and of that six, the only one I’ve actually seen is A Centaur’s Life. Thankfully, there is one element of the production that I can grab onto, that being the director, Fumitoshi Oizaki. He was able to cut his teeth on several highly visually striking series as an episode director, character designer and storyboard artist before transitioning to lead Director status with 2007’s Romeo X Juliet, and while I haven’t seen everything he’s worked on, I can tell he has a ton of experience with more instinct-driven productions... Anime where, instead of following a singular vision, the producers were open-minded and were able to resolve issues on the fly.

  This approach works well with A Centaur’s Life because while it doesn’t feel like Emon had a very generous budget to work with, Oizaki does an exceptional job distracting you from this. The primary visual direction with this show was clearly to focus on the intricacy of the designs instead of the fluidity of motion, and framing shots very specifically to highlight the immersive backgrounds and the imaginative character designs so you won’t notice just how stiff the animation can get, or how characters’ faces often go just slightly off-model when they’re not moving. You’re not likely to notice that, because you’re too focused on the different fantasy features every character possesses, and frankly, a character’s horns and wings are a lot more eye-catching than their faces. Having said all that, the animation isn’t terrible, it’s just pretty mediocre. Oizaki knows how to loop a static shot in just the right way to create the illusion of kinetic movement, and he puts that experience to good use here. There are occasional animation goofs... Like, there’s a close-up of a handshake in the later episodes, and thank God it’s an emotionally powerful moment, because their thumbs face right through each other.

  The English dub is very smooth and natural sounding, to the point that the majority of the cast slots right into their roles instead of standing out or demanding your attention. With the exception of small but significant roles from Caitlin Glass, Brittany Karbowski and Chuck Huber, Funimation decided to fill out the cast of A Centaur’s Life with lesser known talent... Both with those actors who haven’t been with the company long, and those who have spent most of their careers playing at a lower billing. Kristin Sutton, for example, is an absolute joy as Himeno, playing up the ditsy, airheaded part of her personality while keeping her perfectly likeable and charming, and yet you’d never guess that this was one of the only lead roles she’s ever had... Out of over fifty titles, in a career spanning back around fifteen years, she’s played a ton of memorable bit parts, but you could count her main character gigs on one hand. I’m also happy to hear a bunch of other less-appreciated Funimation actors that I’ve been following get something substantial to chew on... I’ve been a fan of Alex Moore since The Devil is a Part Timer, so I like seeing her featured prominently... But my favorite performance is probably by Jad Saxton, who is somehow able to capture the hissy cadence of a snake girl without hissing once. It’s an intriguing dub for voice chasers, and for fans of the Funimation stable in general.

  Starting in the mid 2010’s, monster girl waifus have been a very enjoyable, but also very weird, anime trend. Anime where half the cast are representatives of various supernatural creatures have been everywhere, or at least it seems that way, with a handful of unique titles taking the medium by storm. You have shows like Interspecies Reviewers and Monster Musume sexualizing monster girls and figuring out how a human being(specifically male, because of course) would fuck them. You have the downright adorable Interviews with Monster Girls exploring how rare humans with monster-like mutations would function in modern human society. You even have more specialized anime that explore the existence of certain fringe monster girls, like the undead in Zombieland Saga, and dragons in Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. What all of these shows have in common is that they explore how monster waifus and other fantasy creatures, if introduced to modern day earth out of the blue, would interact with the human world to various degrees... Kind of like the opposite of the Isekai formula, as humans are NOT the fish out of water.

  What’s a lot more rare is when the monsters themselves are the norm, and human society as we know it doesn’t exist in the story. Beastars kind of did this... People are replaced with anthropomorphic animals, whose base natures are integrated into their characters, but while I’ve only seen the first half of that series so far, it seems more interested with presenting a darker and more adult take on the movie Zootopia than it does on figuring out the larger points of how its world works. Where A Centaur’s Life differs from all of the previous titles, including Beastars, is world-building. According to A Centaur’s Life, human beings as we know them never existed... Evolution took a drastically different path, and while it’s a path that doesn’t make a lick of fucking sense, it’s only mentioned briefly, and you’re never forced to think about it again. The primary focus of the narrative, when it’s not centered around the characters and their relationships with each other, is on how the world around them adapted to suit the individual needs of each race, as they all do have tangible physical differences between each other.

  The removal of normal humans from a story like this is important, because trying to interweave the historical existence of fantasy creatures and human/animal hybrids into pre-existing human history is an incredibly difficult thing to do. At worst, you have a movie like Bright, which just lazilly staples the two histories together, so that anti-orc prejudice that dates back to the conquest of a Dark Lord that existed at the same time as Jesus Christ somehow existed alongside inter-human racism that dates back AT LEAST to the original slave trade. At best, you have a show like Bojack Horseman, where they know which subjects to avoid to keep the audience from asking too many questions, and the unavoidable historical references that don’t make any sense are treated very as part of a very self-aware joke. By removing humanity from the equation altogether, you gain a lot more freedom to play around with your extended fantasy history, and A Centaur’s Life takes full advantage of this in some downright shocking ways. It takes uncompromised glee in exploring several bizarre details, especially revolving around the titular centaurs... Their oddly shaped clothing, their excessive weight, their difficulty accessing public facilities, even their strange anatomy in one awkward but honest-feeling moment between Himeno and her friends.

  A Centaur’s Life has imagination. It has creativity. It goes out of its way to pay attention to even the smallest details, marking itself as easily one of the smartest monster girl anime, but these things are not what it’s famous for. There’s one more thing A Centaur’s Life has in abundance, and that’s balls. When it explores the way different fantasy creatures would exist and interact in the modern world, it doesn’t just address the complications posed by their diverse anatomies... It goes several steps farther, by exploring things like prejudice and racial politics, and if reading that made your sphincter clench up, you’re not alone. Using fantasy settings to address racism is usually a very bad idea. It’s fine if people don’t think too hard about your work, but if they keep their brains turned on, they’re likely to notice elements of racial coding and allegory that you may not have even intended to write. Going all the way back to the works of influential creators like JRR Tolkien and George Lucas, it’s hard to ignore certain connections between fictional and real world races, with several Star Wars aliens sporting reappropriated racial and ethnic stereotypes, and Tolkiens’ own words connecting the famous orcs to certain kinds of asians.

  Thankfully, this usually doesn’t happen in anime, which is one of the rare benefits of Japan being a racially homogenous country, but even though A Centaur’s Life DID go the smart route of not attaching any direct allegorical connections between its fantasy races and any actual real world groups of people, the very inclusion of racial politics itself can create a sticky situation if you’re not careful with it. Even with the best of intentions, you could wind up minimizing or trivializing the actual daily struggles of people whose pain you could never understand... Or you could go the route of pure chaos and have Will Smith beat a fairy to death with a broom while making an awkward reference to the black lives matter movement. I’m not saying fantasy allegories for racism can’t be good, it worked in Roger Rabbit after all, but it’s a high risk play for a reward may not be worth it. For the most part, A Centaur’s Life keeps its racial commentary vague. In fact, it mostly sticks to the issue of equity vs. equality. Should everyone be treated equally, or should each group get the specific treatment they need to put everyone on an equal playing field, even if it means one group getting more attention than others?

  Beyond that, the issues that are brought up are mostly cultural, and any systemic issues affecting minority groups are, at best, never acknowledged. One character's prejudice against snake people(Antarcticans) dates back to bad representation in an old scary movie, and that's it. Laws against racism are presented as more antagonistic in this show than actual racism... It’s literally illegal to say racially insensitive things, which is actual fascism, and it goes so far off the rails that riding on the back of a centaur is illegal, regardless of the centaur’s consent, because riding on a centaur used to be a hate crime. This is all pretty questionable, but there is some smart commentary on display. For example, merfolk live separately from most land-dwellers, and as part of their culture, both genders are just constantly topless, with nobody seeing that level of public nudity as inappropriate... Unless students from a land-dwelling school are visiting, in which case all the girls wear tops for the foreigners’ benefit. That might sound like an elaborate yet barely concealed attempt to have their cake and eat it too by shaking some bare breasts in your face that are ‘technically’ non gratuitous... I kinda got that vibe too, not gonna lie... But how many TV shows, anime or otherwise, actually acknowledge cultural differences at that level?

  And then you have the big one. The biggest talking point with this anime, and the main reason I like to call it one of the ballsiest anime I’ve ever seen. Throughout this anime, it’s easy to look at everything it does and say “Damn, these writers are afraid of fucking nothing.” They use uncensored nudity to explore both cultural differences and the anatomy of a centaur. They include an actual same sex couple in the cast to explore casual homophobia, instead of just queer-baiting like most anime. They state right at the beginning how the people of this world think everyone would get along if there were no differences other than skin color(shots fired). But even after all of this, there is no point that hits harder than when A Centaur’s Life addresses the holocaust. If you haven’t seen this anime yet, and you’re still mostly blind as to its content, I want you to heed this warning: An anime about fantasy creatures going about their everyday lives addresses its alternate universe version of the holocaust.

  Now, I shouldn’t have to explain how sensitive a subject matter THAT is, right? Sure, right wing nutjobs have been using it for the last few years as a hyperbolic metaphor for vaccines and mask mandates, but NORMAL people know how important it is to be respectful about one of the cruelest acts ever committed by mankind, right? I’m not saying you can’t write fictional stories involving the holocaust, it can be done well and it HAS been done well, but it’s something you have to be absolutely sure about. You should not bring up the holocaust in fiction unless you are 150% confidant in the material, and furthermore, writing about a fictional holocaust where the inmates are fantasy creatures? That shit should be absolutely doomed to fail, and yet, I don’t think it does. I’ll admit I’m not the authority on this... I don’t have any connection to any victims of the holocaust, outside of my grandfather fighting on the good side in World War 2... But as far as I can tell, and I am 100% open to hearing arguments on this, it felt okay to me. I don’t want to spoil any specific details, but it’s part of an elderly character’s backstory, and it pays off with one of the emotional highlights of the series, so, what did you guys think?

  Unfortunately, no matter where you stand on its politics and social commentary, there is one glaring flaw that I can not ignore. As a slice of life anime, it should come as no surprise that this anime has no plot. That’s fine. That’s just part and parcel with the genre. The problem is that it also doesn’t have much of a sense of direction. This series is made up almost entirely of random stories, or even just pieces of stories, cobbled together into an anthology about the daily lives of these characters. Beyond that, the narrative honestly feels kinda limp. Moments you would think should be far more impactful are instantly forgotten. Issues that are dealt with never come back. The final two episodes, both of which directly follow the afforementioned holocaust episode, are so forgettable they might as well have never happened. The final episode is half terrible RPG fanfic, half literal arm-wrestling tournament. I think I get the point of it all... That there’s horror and strife in the world, and darkness in the past that ultimately lead to the better world we all try to live in... But for an anime that went to so many dark and shocking places, it feels so weird to see it end with such a whimper.

  A Centaur’s Life is available from Funimation. The original manga by Kei Murayama is still ongoing, and is available stateside from Seven Seas Entertainment.

  I said it before, I’ll say it again, A Centaur’s Life has balls. It does everything it wants to do, no holding back, no pulling punches, no compromises. The drawback to this is that the story is somewhat weak, especially in the final two episodes. The characters are by no means unlikeable or badly written, but most of them aren’t fleshed out nearly enough, and other than some light prejudices being resolved, there’s almost no development for any of them. Still, I enjoyed most of it. This is one of the most thought provoking anime I’ve ever seen. It asks a lot of questions, and while you may not always agree with some of the suggestions it makes, it never tries to force its own answers down your throat. The only part of the final two episodes that felt kind of substantial was a story that takes place in an art museum, where characters discuss the nature and purpose of art from their own cultural perspectives, and while I don’t want to say this show was pretentiously trying to make a metaphorical statement about itself, the comparison does kind of work... Even when a piece of media doesn’t provide you with immediate satisfaction, it can still leave you with something to think about.

  I give A Centaur’s Life a 7/10.

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