What are the elements required for Kirara anime?

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The most significant feature of Kirara anime is that it is not required to be serious.
Most of the above hit anime belong to the comedy genre.
Works with less comedic color did not become a hit.

For example, “Gakkogurashi” which is the most serious type of Kirara anime, has sold 2.5 million copies of the original comics and has surpassed Gouchousa and Kinmoza.
However, the anime disc sales are about 2,400 copies, which is much higher than Gouchousa and Kinmoza.
Also, NEW GAME has entered a more serious track in its second season and has lost some of its sales.

On the other hand, the elements in demand are strong personalities and phrases and relationships that are not too dense.
The former can be described as an element that becomes a story on the internet, and the latter as a balance that doesn’t lean too much towards yuri.

Many everyday anime don’t have a thoughtful element to their stories, so the topic of conversation that gets fans excited about each other is the “story element”.
This includes the negative ones.
Mugi from K-On, Chiya from Gochiusa, Chiaki from Yurukan, etc. are often treated as unpopular characters and made into stories, but it can be said that works with such teased characters are easy to talk about and get fans talking about each other.

Some examples of strong phrases are “Untan” from K-On, “Kichikuji Kokeshi” from Kinmoza, and “Zoi” from NEW GAME.
These phrases play an iconic role in the work and can help fans become attached to the work.

Also, the story elements don’t necessarily have to be from the work.
In Machikado Mazoku, lines such as “Shamiko is to blame” and “Monmo”, which are not in the work, are often used on the internet, and fans get excited about them.
The same can be said for Chino’s “Shut up,” and Hidamari’s Yunocchi’s “In you, dear”.

It is easy for these elements to be created in a work to get people excited about it on the internet, and you can enjoy the work even when you are not watching it.
In the case of a daily life anime, this is very important, and the more the anime can improve the quality of the viewer’s daily life, the more sales will increase.
K-On became a bigger hit because of the success of not only the work itself, but the music as well.

It is also important to have a relationship that is not too intense.
If the relationship is too dense, there is a risk of narrowing down the fan base due to the fact that the yuri will be overly depicted, it will be too much of a focus, and it will be too much of a cliché, or it will remove the room for the fans’ imagination.
Even if it is accepted by yuri lovers, if it is not accepted by the rest of the fan base, the sales will inevitably decrease.

Everyday anime is also a conversational drama, so the relationships between the characters are very important.
It’s a field that lacks change in other areas, so there will inevitably be more people watching the process of getting closer to each character.

The one piece of work that has gained popularity because of the distance between characters is Yurukan.
By alternating the solo can, which values personal space, and the group can, which deepens friendship and mutual understanding, it creates a well-balanced sense of distance, and you can enjoy a conversation drama that is neither too thin nor too bad, but is just right for the characters in such a relationship.

This is what makes Hidamari such an excellent work.
Yunocchi and Miyako (Miyako) and Hiro and Sae (Sae) are best friends, but the free-spirited Miyako and Sae’s clumsy personality deters their relationship from becoming sticky.
This makes it a daily tale with just the right amount of saltiness.

The same goes for Shino and Alice, Aya and Yoko, and Alice and Karen in Kinmoza.
The same goes for Cocoa and Chino, Lise and Shalo, etc. from Gouchousa.
Cocoa and Chino are a goofy combination, but they are naturally restrained by the physical distance between them as they are both working in different shops.

What kind of character is required for a daily life animation?

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Nichijo anime is a field where moe and liking for the characters is important.
And I feel that a different image of the character is required than in other genres.

First of all, “characters that are liked by female viewers” is not sought after in general.
The male to female ratio of subscribers to Kirara magazines is about 9:1, and the majority of them are male, so the audience for the anime is is also inevitably biased towards men.
It is only natural that male anime fans want characters that are liked by them.

Not only in anime, but also in live-action works such as dramas, people seem to have a strong tendency to look for competence and strength in characters of the same sex, and weakness and gaps in characters of the opposite sex.
A character who looks cool but is actually charming, or a character who looks strong and cheerful but is actually weak… These are the kinds of goofy charms that we look for in characters of the opposite sex, not in the same sex.
This is why female characters in shounen manga and male characters in shounen manga tend to have this kind of attraction.

Therefore, in the case of Kirara anime, where most of the characters are female and are male fans, it seems that characters with gaps and clunkers tend to be the most popular.
On the other hand, characters that are versatile, calm, and cool are not popular.
When it comes to visuals, characters with glasses tend to have a hard time.

A balance of expectation and betrayal

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Since most of Kirara’s works have female characters, when it comes to romantic feelings and close relationships, there are inevitably many female characters in them.
In most of the manga currently published in Kirara magazines, there is at least one female character of the same gender who has an emotional attachment to the same gender, to varying degrees, that is “more than friendship and less than love”.
That’s one of the selling points of Kirara’s work.

However, there are not so many people who are looking for a strong yuri in Kirara anime.
Speaking of Kirara works that specialize in yuri, “Sakura Trick” was a milestone, but even with this work, it sold just over 2,000 discs.
Slow Start” and “Haruka na Receive”, which have more yuri elements, also sold between 1000 and 2000 copies.

So it’s hard to say whether Kirara works without any yuri elements will sell well in the future.
There are already some standardized elements in Kirara series, and the yuri element is the core of them.
In other words, it’s gone beyond what readers want and has become a “natural” part of the story.

There is a famous catchphrase for Grappler Baki that is used in various mediums as a condition for a masterpiece: “It betrays expectations and does not disappoint”.
When it comes to Kirara anime, this can’t be a requirement for a masterpiece.
There is an assumption that we are exposed to a work of art with the expectation of the elements that have become standard, and therefore disappointing expectations will lead to disappointment.

The key is the balance between expectation and betrayal.

Kirara anime, which has already entered a mature and stable period, is considered to be conventional and rude if it is only formulaic, and works with elements that deviate slightly from the formula have become a hit.
The author of Machikado Mazoku, Ito Izumo sensei, adhered to the colors of the magazine in the beginning of the series and had Shamiko say Kirara-like lines such as “Poe”, but in episode 6 (the third episode of the anime), Shamiko established her own style, and this is when the fun began to double.
In fact, after episode 3, the response of the anime fans had obviously improved and the number of comments had increased significantly.

The conditions for a Kirara work to sell anime are also true.
With the establishment of the “Kirara anime” image with the success of Kinmoza and Gouchousa, and the approaching transitional period with many other works being adapted into anime, a work that has an excellent balance of expectations and betrayal is in order.

Summary

Due to the fact that there are so many standardized elements, few Kirara anime works have extreme personalities, and the boundary between hits and non-hits is blurry.
But if you look carefully, there are definite differences and distinctions to be found.
In addition to the aforementioned, the conversations are a bit eccentric and edgy, and the anime director has a deep understanding of the work and reinforces it with witty, original scenes and dialogue, and so on.

However, that doesn’t mean that Kirara’s works are bad if they aren’t successful as an anime.
There are some works like Yuyushiki and Kill Me that are slowly gaining popularity, and there are also works that just didn’t get lucky or have good timing.

In that sense, the Kirara anime that sell well may be a work that was blessed with luck and good timing.