Thoughts about Nichijou, slice of life, and hooks.

I once called Nichijou the greatest depiction of slice of life in television, without really understanding why
I thought that. It just felt right. Naturally most would disagree with this notion, considering how ridiculous
the show is.

Today had one of those moments where many of the thoughts in my head space clicked together into a hopefully
coherent opinion, and I will try to lay it out here and now.

I have long been of the opinion that animation has a certain quality that translates perfectly into slice of
life. In the beginning of the movie Anomalisa the main character arrives to his hotel room, and in a scene we
look from the bedroom into the bathroom where he struggles with the temperature of the shower, tip toeing and
bouncing in the tub while trying to adjust the water from first too hot, to too cold, to too hot again and
then just fine.
Animation is like a lens that takes away all the biases that our brain has when it looks at real people, in
the same way a painting does to a landscape. Our minds understand that what we see isn't a real human being,
but we at the same time accept that it is supposed to represent a human. So when this abstracted version of a
human behaves in mannerisms familiar to real people, our minds get stimulated, and we realize or feel some
essential aspect of what it means to act, move and feel like a human.
This shower scene is enabled and enhanced by animation; a depiction of such a scene by a real actor wouldn't
ring true nearly as well (unless, perhaps, in the hands of a truly great slapstic comedian, though I have my
doubts)
It is for this reason that even though I haven't been in a situation with a disobedient shower head, the scene
in Anomalisa is still extremely relatable. It has a feeling of "yeah that's how people act", and that is in
essence what slice of life is all about. It's a kind of a grounding genre that helps me see some things from
further away, and other things from up close, and nothing that I know does it better than animation is perfect
for it.

Before I go back to Nichijou, I must detour to another topic that I've been thinking about that applies to
almost all forms of entertainment, and specifically to slice of life, which is "the hook".
Entertainment is interesting in the sense that it is rare to stumble upon it spontaneously. The audience is
almost always in search of entertainment: If they want to watch a movie, they must make their way to it, it
wont come to them. If they want to read a book, they must buy it, and then spend the time to sit down and
consume it. It is this small amount of dedication that the audience must commit to that necessitates the need
for "a hook" in all forms of entertainment. A hook is something that reassures the audience that their efforts
of getting there will be paid off. It's a the sense of build up before the chorus in a song, it's the call for
adventure in the beginning of a story. It's the biggest focal point in a painting. A hook tells the audience
"I swear I'll be worth it", and it's required in almost everything in order for a work to be successful.
Slice of life, in its purest form, is everything but a hook. The mundane is, well, mundane. We know what it's
like to peel an orange, hang clothes on a dryer, wait for a bus. Why should "we" care for any of that? That's
why slice of life needs a hook more badly than anything else. The two most common hooks in the slice of life
genre are either a cast of likable, slightly quirky characters, so that we can simply enjoy them goofing
around, or an introduction of a small change in the characters daily lives. Both of these drift away from what
I consider pure slice of life, but it is this dilution that is required in order to make the genre successful.

Nichijou in this regard could very well be considered everything but pure depiction slice of life. Most of the
episodes consist of mostly crazy characters and ridiculous scenarios, but it is what the show does inbetween
these skits that I consider to be hundred percent pure concentrated slice of life. Separating most sketches is
what is called an eyecatch, a kind of a title card or a scene that separates two parts of an episode. Nichijou
spends a few of these eye catches in each episode in a realistic depiction of a scene that subtly develops
through out the episode. It may be a front desk of a bakery, empty in the morning and as the episode
progresses, in the next cut the shelves might be filled with treats, and in the next cut they're empty as the
shop closes down. It may be a scene of an earial view of a neighbor hood, in the morning, mid day, evening and
then night time. A scene might be from the point of view of an ATM camera, looking out to an empty street in
one scene, and a familiar character using it in the next. The setting and developments in these scenes are so
small, so insignificant, that what's happening doesn't matter on even the tiniest of scales. The scenes are so
incredibly mundane that they don't even raise any feelings or thoughts, like the shower scene in Anomalisa
does.*
Without these eyecatches, the story of Nichijou shows scenes of daily lives taking place in an over-
exaggerated depiction of our world. By inserting these almost documentarial scenes of normal, boring, but
aesthetically pleasing neighborhoods of the world of Nichijou, the show grounds itself, showing that Nichijou
is instead a show about subjective scenes of daily lives taking place in a world just like ours. The
eyecatches help me accept the crazy world as mine. In this way, the whole show gives me that feeling of "yeah
that's how people act", without almost ever showing a single scene of people behaving realistically.

Nichijou uses an incredibly powerful hooks, that is, the rest of the show, to trick us into watching small
scenes of the purest form of slice of life you could ever do, and it's hard to imagine any other way of doing
so successfully.**

----------

*of course it must be mentioned, that Nichijou sometimes plays these eyecatches for gags, reversing our
expectations by doing something silly, like a principal being shot by a bazooka.
**there's a point to be made about internet allowing for the successful distribution of slice of life content
that doesn't use a hook at all. If you have ever sat on youtube, or any other side, just sitting and looking
one of those [adult swim] fan bumps, you may understand what I mean. The internet may allow the audience to
bexperience less "tryhard", and more personal storytelling (or lack thereof) that isn't reliant on classical
narrative structuring.