Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun is the ideal parody

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Since most modern anime only run about 12 episodes it’s possible to finish a series in around five to six hours. So with anime being more accessible than ever through streaming services, 'You've got six hours' posts are anime suggestions that are easy for people to watch, and could be finished in a few days or over a weekend.

The line between a great story in a particular genre and a great parody of that genre is incredibly thin. The best examples of parody aren’t simply pointing out the absurdity or problems with the genre’s tropes for humor, but show a deeper understanding of why those tropes exist and work. They aren’t simply deconstructing the genre for humor, but rather finding the comedy in how they reconstruct those parts into something unexpected.


Originally airing in 2014, but coming to Netflix today, Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun is a perfect example of this. The series starts with the standard high school trope of a girl, Chiyo Sakura, attempting to confess to the boy she likes, Umetaro Nozaki, only for her to say she’s a fan of his instead. Which Nozaki mistakes for her being a fan of his manga series, which no one in the school knows about since he does it under a pen name. From there Chiyo quickly becomes involved in helping work on Nozaki’s high school romance manga, because of her desire to learn more about him.

Much of the show’s charm comes from this sort of obliviousness and misinterpretation where characters clearly have feelings for one of the other characters, but neither realizes this is the case leading to comedic results. Tweaked slightly though these moments could just as easily be played for dramatic effect in a more traditional romance story, which is what Nozaki does in his comic.


A lot of inspiration for characters and stories for his comic come from reinterpreting the potentially romantic experiences of his friends and acquaintances, which also involves Nozaki turning the people he knows into characters by pulling out a few key personality quirks and also flipping their gender. This turns his comic into a running commentary for the audience on what the characters' relationships would be in a typical romance story, while also helping those unfamiliar with the tropes of Japanese romance anime and manga understand what the parody is.

I really loved this series when it aired six years ago, and revisiting it over the last two weeks I was surprised at how great and easy it is to watch. The series is not only beautifully animated by animation studio Doga Kobo, but full of lots of great little visual gags and flourishes that help sell jokes and give a ton more personality to the characters. This level of animation feels generally far outside what you expect for most anime in general nevermind a comedy series.



The voice cast is also impeccable with Yuichi Nakamura hitting a perfect stoic but goofball deadpan for Nozaki. Ari Ozawa carries a lot of the show's straight man baggage as Chiyo by managing to hit an incredibly wide gamut of emotional reactions to the nonsense everyone throws at her. And Nobuhiko Okamoto who ends up almost stealing every scene he’s in as Mikoshiba, managing to both deliver completely cornball cool guy lines perfectly along with Mikoshiba’s slow crumble into despair as he realizes how embarrassing it was to say. Each character is full of complexity and nuance, and every single performance captures this.

When I started writing this the idea of Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun being a perfect series hadn’t crossed my mind, but as I think about it now it feels hard to argue against it. The only thing I can honestly fault it for is that in the last six years it hasn’t gotten a new season. Luckily the manga it is based on is still running and so maybe one day more of it will get animated, but until then you probably have six hours to watch it.
Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun was animated by Doga Kobo, directed by Mitsue Yamazaki, and written by Yoshiko Nakamura. Based on a manga of the same name by Izumi Tsubaki. You can watch it streaming on Crunchyroll, HiDive, Hulu, and Netflix.