#Bartender anime full#
#Bartender anime series#

It turns out that I would have been better off slogging through Takunomi.

See, I’ve gotten into cocktails over the past couple of years, if my review of Amaro Massimo hadn’t tipped you off to that fact, so I was looking forward to an anime that captured the manifold joys of making and trying new drinks. They even give ingredients, although I don’t think the result will taste very good!

The only other figure present is an old-style Japanese bartender, who makes whatever cocktail was featured in the episode itself, in this case the nonsense concoction ginned up for the finale.

#Bartender anime full#

Natural High’s rock ballad, performed with longing and warmth, is the background to ninety seconds of live-action footage where glowing fish swim around the empty bar where they play (and, if you like the fish, enjoy six minutes of that in the full video of the song). The refreshing oasis in this desert of entertainment is the ED. It’s mostly harmless, all eleven episodes of it, but come on. I defy anyone to watch the final episode, which abandons linear narrative altogether to lapse into a transcendentalist fugue on the nature of bartending in a manner that is vaguely reminiscent of End of Evangelion‘s “Instrumentality” sequence, and not walk away shaking their head. The decision to highlight the artifice there, through a variety of Brechtian flourishes like jarring transitions and direct address of the audience, pushes the whole production further and further into caricature. Unlike a supernatural healer traveling pre-modern Japan or a lone gun surveying post-apocalyptic societies, the problems of Bartender‘s characters are more or less trivial-except for one or two exceptions, they are trials of work and of romance that are so common to us today as to be utterly mundane-and the invariable solution that they find, namely the right drink at the right time, verges on pat when it’s not outright ridiculous. Its format and tone invite comparisons with iyashikei or “healing” works like Mushishi and the 2003 version of Kino’s Journey, but the similarities really end there.

#Bartender anime series#

Now, a month later, I’m doing the same with Bartender.Ī 2006 series adapted from a twenty one-volume manga of the same name, Bartender is not a very good anime. Heck, when I started posting again, I put Record of Lodoss War: Chronicles of the Heroic Knight front and center for that very reason.

If you’ve been reading this series for a while, you’ll probably have noticed that one of my favorite themes is how OPs and EDs can transcend the often-disappointing shows that they bookend. Who knows if I’ll succeed, but here we go! Have you seen the ED for Bartender, “Hajimari no Hito” by Natural High? I’m going to shoot for a shorter one this week.