Tamako Market - Delactable

A year or two ago, before I properly got into anime, I tried out Tamako Market. I found it incredibly boring, if admittedly well made, so I dropped it halfway through the third episode and went on to watch some generic shounen action show instead.

Upon getting into this stuff and becoming a raving lunatic who'll sing the praises of Kyoto Animation all day long and especially of director Naoko Yamada, I was rather surprised to find out that that rather mediocre show I dropped a while prior was made by the same person who'd made the frankly life-changing K-On!, the incredibly well-directed A Silent Voice, as well as the person who worked in the background on the incredibly solid Hibike! Euphonium. Naoko Yamada has quickly become one of my absolute favorite creatives alive, so I felt the need to go back and give Tamako Market a second chance.

What I found was a very solid, but somewhat unremarkable little slice-of-lifeish comedyyyyy fantasy? romance thing. Indeed, despite feeling fairly generic, Tamako Market is a show whose genre is hard to pin down. It focuses on the titular Tamako, who lives in the titular market, the daughter of a mochi shop owner. A talking bird with the power to become a projector in search for a bride for its prince suddenly shows up and winds up living with Tamako and getting incredibly fat.

Then the show just kind of goes. For the most part, Tamako Market engages in the same kind of shenanigans as Naoko Yamada's other big show, K-On!, with most episodes being their own little self-contained stories that nonetheless form part of a larger overarching story (think monster of the week, if the monsters were things like making a new friend or participating in a school festival). The little vignettes that make up each episode are usually very effective. There's no episode of Tamako Market that isn't fun, and, whilst the show demonstrates a bit of propensity for forced drama, most of them contain at least one or two genuinely heartwarming moments. 

This is helped in large part by the show's large supporting cast. Tamako and her immediate group of friends and family are fairly well-fleshed out, but most of the show's cast are workers at the market where Tamako's dad's store is located. They all have incredibly one-note personalities, but the show leans very strongly into them by making that one note play at the exact right time, really helping to punctuate both serious moments and jokes. You'll never get a full episode dedicated to the record shop guy, but he's sure to have an amusingly out-of-nowhere pseudo-deep quote and the perfect record to put on when the moment is right. They've also got their own friendships and rivalries between themselves that are often only hinted at via visuals (The croquette lady and the flower shop owner are always hanging out together, for instance). As such, despite being transparently shallow and one-dimensional, these characters manage to become fairly endearing. Combine with this fact their visual designs are spot-on, and that there's a ridiculously large number of them, and the market becomes a lively, believable place, full of people we like enough to be willing to suspend our disbelief in.

However, this focus on the supporting cast (and the larger main cast) means that Tamako Market is nowhere near as in-depth of a character study as K-On!. We don't get to know Tamako and company as well as we do the members of Hokago Tea Time and the one or two other people that make up the central core of K-On!. This would be fine, since K-On! is an incredibly high bar to set, but there's also the problem that the main cast is mostly fairly bland, suffering the same "one trait" syndrome that the supporting cast has. We certainly get to know them better, and their personalities are more multifaceted, but everything they do tends to fit very neatly within their archetype. Tamako is the ditzy energetic protagonist, Yui Hirasawa without the nuance. Dela is the goofily pompous mascot character that always gets his comeuppance, Teddie minus the existential dread. Midori is the responsible normal friend, Kanna is the short deadpan friend (also best girl), Shiori is the shy and kind friend, Mochizou is the childhood friend with a crush on the main character and no idea how to express it, Anko is the bratty but deep down kind younger sister, etcetera.

These characters aren't bland enough to not be able to relate or become fond of them (I definitely have a soft spot in my heart for Tamako's dad and Kanna), but they are bland enough to make the show as a whole rather unremarkable. I see in Tamako Market what a lot of people purport to see in a lot of similar shows, including my beloved K-On!. It's mostly cute girls doing cute things, which is a nice thing to see. A lot of these cute things are very cute, and when the show wants it can be really genuinely heartwarming. It's well made: It looks good, the dialogue mostly works, and the overarching storyline is fairly satisfying. It's not even lacking an identity the way I thought something like Sansha Sanyou did: the market setting is uniquely well executed, and gives the show its own distinct energy and feel.

But that's kind of all I see in it. It's a really, really good one of these, one of the best, but that's all it is. I just can't go beyond "good" on this one, even when I honestly kind of want to. It's a solid story, well told, with its own distinct thing that makes watching it over the millions of similar shows worthwhile, but it never went beyond. It didn't have a couple of incredibly powerful moments that blew me away like something like Death Parade, but it also wasn't consistently beyond just good, like The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It certainly wasn't both things, like is the case with my absolute favorites in K-On! and Cowboy Bebop. It was just baseline good, baseline really really solid the entire way throughout.

Possibly the most frustrating thing about it is that I feel like it's content to be that way. It never really tries to go beyond. The closest it comes is in episode 10, which happens to be the best episode of the entire series, where a plot point that's been foreshadowed since the start pays off and there's a bigger focus on the emotional climax than most other episodes. For the rest of its run time, Tamako Market is obviously content to just be good. That's a commendable thing. "Just" being good is fairly high praise in my book, it's a hard thing to achieve indeed. What makes it frustrating is knowing that Naoko Yamada is able to do so much more. This is by far her weakest work, and I get the feeling that it's that way due to a lack of ambition rather than a lack of talent. I should not feel as robbed by a show that I like as much as I do Tamako Market, but I suppose that's the curse of high expectations.

Final Score: 7/10

Tamako Market is a decidedly good show with tonnes of positives and very few failings, which definitely makes it worth a watch. Unfortunately, that's kind of all it is or ever aspires to be.