Anime Review: "Kill Me Baby"

I found Kill Me Baby when I was cleaning out my plan to watch list, wondered, hmm, why did I add this, took one look at the characters and remembered them from a whole slew of AMV dance mix videos and memes. This series may not be well known, or spoken of specifically, but Sonia and Yasuna, the main characters, are fairly recognizable when you see them together. I figured I might as well watch it. Laughed quite a bit at all the gags, and then looked for what to put on next.

That’s the kind of show this is. It’s good when you’re watching it, but ultimately pretty forgettable.

This anime is based off of a 4-koma comedy manga and has a teeny tiny cast of characters. Sonia, is a JK assassin, Yasuna is her idiot friend, and Agiri is ninja of dubious ability. There is also the “unused character” (played by Rie Kugimiya, arguably the most famous VA on the cast), and a few extras. The series is essentially a slapstick, gag comedy, in the manzai format, which is extremely popular in Japan. Manzai is traditionally a two-person act, with a “tsukkomi” (straight man) and a “boke” (funny man). Occasionally a third party will enter, and the roles can get swapped around with the introduction of this third party, which helps change things up a bit to keep the jokes from getting stale.

In the case of Kill Me Baby, Sonia is basically always a tsukkomi, and Yasuna is a really, really dumb boke. When ninja-girl shows up, she doesn’t change the greater order of things too much, but Yasuna will sometimes play tsukkomi to her. I’d say that honestly, the “dubious ninja” jokes in the show were some of the best gags. I actually found myself laughing out loud, which is super rare for me these days (since I’m mostly dead inside).

All in all, the dynamic isn’t nearly as complicated as it is to explain; what’s important is that it works. It’s a very funny show, the jokes hit well, the running gags provide a nice laugh, and the way they vary those up works well too. Now, unfortunately I might be quite biased. I’m a big fan of manzai, so I enjoy seeing it done well, and this is pretty good in terms of pure manzai anime.

There’s another reason I really enjoyed this series, simply because Sonia’s voice actress Mutsumi Tamura is really, really good; she’s probably most recognizable these days as playing Kobayashi in Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid (which happens to be one of my favorite shows). Her performance here really reminded me of the performance she gave in Dragon Maid, so I might be scoring this show a little kinder than I usually do (and I’m usually pretty easy going when rating anime).

At the end of the day, I recommend Kill Me Baby. It might be better not binging it, but rather throwing on an episode whenever you need a quick, easy, forgettable laugh to cleanse your palette and improve your mood. Watching every episode back-to-back it kind of blends together, and you lose track of things.

On a final note, you can find this on Hidive, which doesn’t have an option to skip the OP/ED, which is really a shame, because I found the opening song for this show to be extremely irritating, while I loved the ending. Guess you win some, you lose some.