Salmon-chan Review

Salmon-chan is a six minute short that’s impossible to find any information on in English. It’s in that awkward group of anime that baffles me because it’s too obscure to be on sites like My Anime List or Anime News Network but not obscure enough to get subbed.

Am I going to fix this failure of sites that rely on user-submitted content to add Salmon-chan to them? Of course not. I’m too busy writing this review that could possibly take you as much time to read as it would to just watch the thing.

The visual style of Salmon-chan is a very simple, moeblob type of style. We’ve got pastel colours all over the place, and sharp edges are hard to come by. It’s really adorable and actually very polished-looking despite the simplistic style.

Salmon-chan is also not afraid to go all-out and use a completely different kind of art style when it feels the events of the story call for it. One such example can be seen in the picture at the start of this post, and it’s obvious from that example that a great deal of effort is put into the art regardless of the style being used at the time.

The animation is decent, for the most part. There are some times, though, when people will move as though they were cardboard cut-outs. It’s jumpy and just didn’t seem to be a main priority, though I’d also probably let you argue that this was even done on purpose, since it seems to actually have been done on purpose. Anyway, the point is that it’s jumpy sometimes but otherwise okay and Salmon-chan’s worst animation is still way better than Psycho Pass’s worst animation.

I really liked the use of music and sound effects in this short. The music, while sparsely used because of the minimalistic style and short runtime, was chosen perfectly for the moments in which it played. I mean they even have some Chopin playing in the background for my favourite scene, and it works so wonderfully. As for the sound effects, they’re a bit more present than in a lot of anime, and that adds to the minimal feel of the short.

Now, for the characters and story. The story is about Salmon-chan. She’s the only character that you really get to know at all (it is only 6 minutes). While she’s very exaggerated, as anime characters tend to be, she’s also a character that I think most humans can relate to. I mean, have you ever been excluded or shunned for being different?

Anime has this strange tendency to attract those who, for a variety of reasons, know exactly what I’m talking about. Because of that fact, I think that Salmon-chan’s story will appeal to the majority of anime viewers. Salmon-chan is, after all, a lovingly-told tale of a young fish-girl trying to get in on everyone else’s reindeer games.

She’s trying to achieve her dream.

Her dream of being eaten.