Himeno Kimihara is living the ideal highschool life. Shes tall shes smart shes pretty enough to appear in magazineswhich she often does she has active extracurricular interests and shes popular with her classmates... But she also has to deal with the trials and tribulations of being a centaur in modern day Japan and while having a booty that just wont quit is generally considered a good thing its really not the same when said dumpy comes with a tail and two extra legs. In a world full of fauns angel folk mermaids and giant reptiles with legs the only thing you really can do is try to live your life the best you can navigating a society thats doing its best to accommodate the needs of its diverse populace and give everyone the most normal life possible... And for better or worse being the only centaur in her class life for Himeno is never going to get boring. Animation Company Emon a Japanese subsidiary of the Chinese Haoliners Animation League is a very young production company. While they began producing online animations in 2013 which theyre still doing today they only ever produced six television anime in a two year period between 2017 and 2018 and of that six the only one Ive actually seen is A Centaurs Life. Thankfully there is one element of the production that I can grab onto that being the director Fumitoshi Oizaki. He was able to cut his teeth on several highly visually striking series as an episode director character designer and storyboard artist before transitioning to lead Director status with 2007s Romeo X Juliet and while I havent seen everything hes worked on I can tell he has a ton of experience with more instinctdriven productions... Anime where instead of following a singular vision the producers were openminded and were able to resolve issues on the fly. This approach works well with A Centaurs Life because while it doesnt feel like Emon had a very generous budget to work with Oizaki does an exceptional job distracting you from this. The primary visual direction with this show was clearly to focus on the intricacy of the designs instead of the fluidity of motion and framing shots very specifically to highlight the immersive backgrounds and the imaginative character designs so you wont notice just how stiff the animation can get or how characters faces often go just slightly offmodel when theyre not moving. Youre not likely to notice that because youre too focused on the different fantasy features every character possesses and frankly a characters horns and wings are a lot more eyecatching than their faces. Having said all that the animation isnt terrible its just pretty mediocre. Oizaki knows how to loop a static shot in just the right way to create the illusion of kinetic movement and he puts that experience to good use here. There are occasional animation goofs... Like theres a closeup of a handshake in the later episodes and thank God its an emotionally powerful moment because their thumbs face right through each other. The English dub is very smooth and natural sounding to the point that the majority of the cast slots right into their roles instead of standing out or demanding your attention. With the exception of small but significant roles from Caitlin Glass Brittany Karbowski and Chuck Huber Funimation decided to fill out the cast of A Centaurs Life with lesser known talent... Both with those actors who havent been with the company long and those who have spent most of their careers playing at a lower billing. Kristin Sutton for example is an absolute joy as Himeno playing up the ditsy airheaded part of her personality while keeping her perfectly likeable and charming and yet youd never guess that this was one of the only lead roles shes ever had... Out of over fifty titles in a career spanning back around fifteen years shes played a ton of memorable bit parts but you could count her main character gigs on one hand. Im also happy to hear a bunch of other lessappreciated Funimation actors that Ive been following get something substantial to chew on... Ive been a fan of Alex Moore since The Devil is a Part Timer so I like seeing her featured prominently... But my favorite performance is probably by Jad Saxton who is somehow able to capture the hissy cadence of a snake girl without hissing once. Its an intriguing dub for voice chasers and for fans of the Funimation stable in general. Starting in the mid 2010s monster girl waifus have been a very enjoyable but also very weird anime trend. Anime where half the cast are representatives of various supernatural creatures have been everywhere or at least it seems that way with a handful of unique titles taking the medium by storm. You have shows like Interspecies Reviewers and Monster Musume sexualizing monster girls and figuring out how a human beingspecifically male because of course would fuck them. You have the downright adorable Interviews with Monster Girls exploring how rare humans with monsterlike mutations would function in modern human society. You even have more specialized anime that explore the existence of certain fringe monster girls like the undead in Zombieland Saga and dragons in Miss Kobayashis Dragon Maid. What all of these shows have in common is that they explore how monster waifus and other fantasy creatures if introduced to modern day earth out of the blue would interact with the human world to various degrees... Kind of like the opposite of the Isekai formula as humans are NOT the fish out of water. Whats a lot more rare is when the monsters themselves are the norm and human society as we know it doesnt exist in the story. Beastars kind of did this... People are replaced with anthropomorphic animals whose base natures are integrated into their characters but while Ive only seen the first half of that series so far it seems more interested with presenting a darker and more adult take on the movie Zootopia than it does on figuring out the larger points of how its world works. Where A Centaurs Life differs from all of the previous titles including Beastars is worldbuilding. According to A Centaurs Life human beings as we know them never existed... Evolution took a drastically different path and while its a path that doesnt make a lick of fucking sense its only mentioned briefly and youre never forced to think about it again. The primary focus of the narrative when its not centered around the characters and their relationships with each other is on how the world around them adapted to suit the individual needs of each race as they all do have tangible physical differences between each other. The removal of normal humans from a story like this is important because trying to interweave the historical existence of fantasy creatures and human/animal hybrids into preexisting human history is an incredibly difficult thing to do. At worst you have a movie like Bright which just lazilly staples the two histories together so that antiorc prejudice that dates back to the conquest of a Dark Lord that existed at the same time as Jesus Christ somehow existed alongside interhuman racism that dates back AT LEAST to the original slave trade. At best you have a show like Bojack Horseman where they know which subjects to avoid to keep the audience from asking too many questions and the unavoidable historical references that dont make any sense are treated very as part of a very selfaware joke. By removing humanity from the equation altogether you gain a lot more freedom to play around with your extended fantasy history and A Centaurs Life takes full advantage of this in some downright shocking ways. It takes uncompromised glee in exploring several bizarre details especially revolving around the titular centaurs... Their oddly shaped clothing their excessive weight their difficulty accessing public facilities even their strange anatomy in one awkward but honestfeeling moment between Himeno and her friends. A Centaurs Life has imagination. It has creativity. It goes out of its way to pay attention to even the smallest details marking itself as easily one of the smartest monster girl anime but these things are not what its famous for. Theres one more thing A Centaurs Life has in abundance and thats balls. When it explores the way different fantasy creatures would exist and interact in the modern world it doesnt just address the complications posed by their diverse anatomies... It goes several steps farther by exploring things like prejudice and racial politics and if reading that made your sphincter clench up youre not alone. Using fantasy settings to address racism is usually a very bad idea. Its fine if people dont think too hard about your work but if they keep their brains turned on theyre likely to notice elements of racial coding and allegory that you may not have even intended to write. Going all the way back to the works of influential creators like JRR Tolkien and George Lucas its hard to ignore certain connections between fictional and real world races with several Star Wars aliens sporting reappropriated racial and ethnic stereotypes and Tolkiens own words connecting the famous orcs to certain kinds of asians. Thankfully this usually doesnt happen in anime which is one of the rare benefits of Japan being a racially homogenous country but even though A Centaurs Life DID go the smart route of not attaching any direct allegorical connections between its fantasy races and any actual real world groups of people the very inclusion of racial politics itself can create a sticky situation if youre not careful with it. Even with the best of intentions you could wind up minimizing or trivializing the actual daily struggles of people whose pain you could never understand... Or you could go the route of pure chaos and have Will Smith beat a fairy to death with a broom while making an awkward reference to the black lives matter movement. Im not saying fantasy allegories for racism cant be good it worked in Roger Rabbit after all but its a high risk play for a reward may not be worth it. For the most part A Centaurs Life keeps its racial commentary vague. In fact it mostly sticks to the issue of equity vs. equality. Should everyone be treated equally or should each group get the specific treatment they need to put everyone on an equal playing field even if it means one group getting more attention than others? Beyond that the issues that are brought up are mostly cultural and any systemic issues affecting minority groups are at best never acknowledged. One characters prejudice against snake peopleAntarcticans dates back to bad representation in an old scary movie and thats it. Laws against racism are presented as more antagonistic in this show than actual racism... Its literally illegal to say racially insensitive things which is actual fascism and it goes so far off the rails that riding on the back of a centaur is illegal regardless of the centaurs consent because riding on a centaur used to be a hate crime. This is all pretty questionable but there is some smart commentary on display. For example merfolk live separately from most landdwellers and as part of their culture both genders are just constantly topless with nobody seeing that level of public nudity as inappropriate... Unless students from a landdwelling school are visiting in which case all the girls wear tops for the foreigners benefit. That might sound like an elaborate yet barely concealed attempt to have their cake and eat it too by shaking some bare breasts in your face that are technically non gratuitous... I kinda got that vibe too not gonna lie... But how many TV shows anime or otherwise actually acknowledge cultural differences at that level? And then you have the big one. The biggest talking point with this anime and the main reason I like to call it one of the ballsiest anime Ive ever seen. Throughout this anime its easy to look at everything it does and say Damn these writers are afraid of fucking nothing. They use uncensored nudity to explore both cultural differences and the anatomy of a centaur. They include an actual same sex couple in the cast to explore casual homophobia instead of just queerbaiting like most anime. They state right at the beginning how the people of this world think everyone would get along if there were no differences other than skin colorshots fired. But even after all of this there is no point that hits harder than when A Centaurs Life addresses the holocaust. If you havent seen this anime yet and youre still mostly blind as to its content I want you to heed this warning: An anime about fantasy creatures going about their everyday lives addresses its alternate universe version of the holocaust. Now I shouldnt have to explain how sensitive a subject matter THAT is right? Sure right wing nutjobs have been using it for the last few years as a hyperbolic metaphor for vaccines and mask mandates but NORMAL people know how important it is to be respectful about one of the cruelest acts ever committed by mankind right? Im not saying you cant write fictional stories involving the holocaust it can be done well and it HAS been done well but its something you have to be absolutely sure about. You should not bring up the holocaust in fiction unless you are 150 confidant in the material and furthermore writing about a fictional holocaust where the inmates are fantasy creatures? That shit should be absolutely doomed to fail and yet I dont think it does. Ill admit Im not the authority on this... I dont have any connection to any victims of the holocaust outside of my grandfather fighting on the good side in World War 2... But as far as I can tell and I am 100 open to hearing arguments on this it felt okay to me. I dont want to spoil any specific details but its part of an elderly characters backstory and it pays off with one of the emotional highlights of the series so what did you guys think? Unfortunately no matter where you stand on its politics and social commentary there is one glaring flaw that I can not ignore. As a slice of life anime it should come as no surprise that this anime has no plot. Thats fine. Thats just part and parcel with the genre. The problem is that it also doesnt have much of a sense of direction. This series is made up almost entirely of random stories or even just pieces of stories cobbled together into an anthology about the daily lives of these characters. Beyond that the narrative honestly feels kinda limp. Moments you would think should be far more impactful are instantly forgotten. Issues that are dealt with never come back. The final two episodes both of which directly follow the afforementioned holocaust episode are so forgettable they might as well have never happened. The final episode is half terrible RPG fanfic half literal armwrestling tournament. I think I get the point of it all... That theres horror and strife in the world and darkness in the past that ultimately lead to the better world we all try to live in... But for an anime that went to so many dark and shocking places it feels so weird to see it end with such a whimper. A Centaurs Life is available from Funimation. The original manga by Kei Murayama is still ongoing and is available stateside from Seven Seas Entertainment. I said it before Ill say it again A Centaurs Life has balls. It does everything it wants to do no holding back no pulling punches no compromises. The drawback to this is that the story is somewhat weak especially in the final two episodes. The characters are by no means unlikeable or badly written but most of them arent fleshed out nearly enough and other than some light prejudices being resolved theres almost no development for any of them. Still I enjoyed most of it. This is one of the most thought provoking anime Ive ever seen. It asks a lot of questions and while you may not always agree with some of the suggestions it makes it never tries to force its own answers down your throat. The only part of the final two episodes that felt kind of substantial was a story that takes place in an art museum where characters discuss the nature and purpose of art from their own cultural perspectives and while I dont want to say this show was pretentiously trying to make a metaphorical statement about itself the comparison does kind of work... Even when a piece of media doesnt provide you with immediate satisfaction it can still leave you with something to think about. I give A Centaurs Life a 7/10.