Aim and Fire
Nichijou and A Channel are both proclaimed slice of life series airing in the Spring 2011 anime season. While both are slice of life, the main difference between the two is the approach to humor. While A Channel draws humor from daily situations and the normal interactions between the main cast of girls, Nichijou presents a seemingly normal life and then interjects it with zaniness.
I’ve chosen these two anime (and their manga counterparts) to illustrate the genre of slice of life as a whole. I read SoL manga fairly often and I’ve noticed two distinct types. There is the ‘Regular format’, referring to the panel layout that most manga, of any genre, follow, and the four panel (4koma) manga that has become so popular these days. Nichijou follows the regular format while A Channel uses the 4koma style.
A Channel is a good representative of the 4koma sub type (I would have used K-On in this comparison, realizing its popularity, but I am not very familiar with the anime or manga). It follows four girls, as most 4koma (and SoL in general) do: Tooru, Run, Nagi, and Yuuko. Both interact and play out their lives in strips containing four panels. At the end of every strip is a joke generally centering around the eccentricities of one of the characters.
I draw attention to A Channel because it is a great representative of how humor generally works in 4koma. Since there are only four panels to tell a story the characters must clique and be simplified to allow for easy interaction. The standard 4koma stereotypes are here: Tooru, the emotionless one, Run, the wacky girl, Nagi, the smart one, and Yuuko, the shy one. Such personalities are repeated in many 4koma with little variation: Lucky Star, K-On, and Azumanga Daioh (although you could argue that AD started many of these cliches) all contain elements of these tropes.
The simplified personalities allow the jokes to roll in more quickly. By establishing the backbone of every character’s personality, the author of A channel can allow their interactions to build on this already established character instead of wasting precious pages making them from scratch. In the 4koma manga, space and planning is key. The rule is not to waste a panel, to allow it to contribute to the joke, and to allow each strip to help fill out the characters. It’s a sub genre of efficiency, much different from the laid back atmosphere of Nichijou.
Nichijou follows, technically, a wide array of characters but the main trio consists of Mio, Yuuko, and Mai (pictured above). The series follow them as they play out the very odd episodes that compose their lives. In terms of humor, planning, and excecution Nichijou is very similar to other SoL manga that follow the ‘Regular’ format, such as Yotsuba&!, Strawberry Marshmallow, and Aria.
Since there is no four panels that must tell the story, the plot of Nichijou’s various episodes are allowed to wander and the characters, while starting with tropes, evolve and interact very differently than those of A Channel. The jokes are longer and more drawn out, being allowed to run through one chapter instead of one strip, and the characters seem to contain more quirks, since they can grow throughout the chapter.
Nichijou still has its tropes but the characters and humor are more inventive compared to the ‘classic’ humor used in A Channel. While I’m not one to critisize the 4koma sub genre, I feel that Nichijou is a better comedy for this looseness. While the meandering can seem off putting it allows more material to be put into the sketch. I suppose that Nichijou can be compared to Saturday Night Live, which is composed of sketches, and A Channel can be compared to America’s Funniest Home Videos, which is composed of clips. Is one inherently funnier than the other? That all depends on the person watching it.
