There’s a lot to be said for mid anime, in quality and in scope. Not an epic sprawling story meant to spin off for multiple seasons. Not a mystery that promises a resolution that it may completely bottle. Not trying to change your life, just trying to get you to tune in and look at some ads and maybe buy a wall scroll or two. Or fill out the extensive entries on the Internet Movie Firearm Database.
Buddy Daddies is a fundamentally a more ‘realistic’ show than you might imagine. It’s an unreality of high speed car chases and gunfights in cities, rather than grand political drama or telepathy and future sight. It’s grounded in that the characters have to spend time dealing with things like day care and clothing options and Japanese cultural assertions about how to blend in. Sometimes there are anime made because it lets them represent transitions between worlds and remarkable special effects and build on a particular visual language, but Buddy Daddies is an anime that doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do in a live action TV show, except doing it very cheaply and conveniently.
Here then, is your pitch: It’s an action comedy about a pair of single dads who adopt the same daughter, and also, they’re professional murderers. Hilarity ensues. Well, mild hilarity. Well there are jokes.
Modest spoiler warning ensues. I’m not about to tell you anything that you couldn’t predict looking at the poster.
I could give you a more detailed outlining of the narrative, the sequence of events in the series, but it isn’t that important. I mean it is important, they give the whole thing texture, and there’s tension about the question of how things work out, but it isn’t important. The narrative is a vehicle to enjoy the contrast of these two assassins with one another, and then the contrast of their job (assassin) and then doing a non-assassiny thing (a three legged race for their adopted daughter’s cheers). Core to this narrative then are the three characters that bear it up and their conflicting needs. One could use a classic ego/superego/id kind of construction to examine them, but given that I don’t want to have to explain that structure and I’m sure as hell not busting out the Hegel, let’s just grab for a more useful frame of reference you’ll get: the Sonic/Shadow/Tails tryptich.
In this tryptich you have a character that perceives themselves as a protagonist because of the traits they have that think make them a good person; you have an alternate mirror to the former, who is inexplicably present in their life despite seeming disinterest; and then you have a kid, who is largely too nice and guileless for either of them to be willing to disappoint. Also, the Shadow and Sonic are fucking (this is canon to Sonic: The Hedgehog of course, but not at all related to Buddy Daddies; it does not serve to inform the model but does present operational utility for the verisimillitude of the structure).
Our Sonic is Kazuki, an assassin who, despite being an assassin, considers himself a broadly Nice Guy. He chats up girls, he develops useful skills for operating in life, he is capable of forming emotional connections with people, albeit briefly, and he
You know I worry if the joke of the abrupt paragraph end doesn’t work for people these days. Anyway,
Our Shadow is Rei, an assassin who, despite being an adult, sleeps in a bathtub and plays videogames all night. He also smokes indoors, and doesn’t emotionally connect to people easily, which is okay because of his abusive father, and also because he’s supposed to be the tormented hot one. Rei is pretty much bad at all the things Kazuki is good at, except that they share skill in the vein of Being Good At Murdering People, which not only happens to be something they can do in different styles, but also something where Rei gets to look cool as hell doing it. Rei feels custom built to be a very specific kind of very attractive. He looks like a lesbian designed an exception. Still, the smoking thing is a deal killer for me, plus it’s just not wise to get people whose traumas match your own.
No my father did not raise me to be an assassin.
Our Tails is Miri, who is a child. Miri is not a child but, a child plus, a child and. Miri is just a child. Her entire worldview is that of a child, and she’s a pretty realistically rendered one. What Miri lacks in world-wise integration into the story of her family she makes up for by being largely not responsible for killing the fun the way that little kid characters are often overused for in other media. Miri does interfere with one job, but it’s in that interference that the boys realise that they have to do things to ensure she isn’t interfering with them during their work — assassins don’t have Take Your Daughter To Work Day, usually.
It is through these three characters interacting that the story happens. Miri’s needs present problems for Kazuki and Rei to solve, and she meets needs they have. Rei needs someone who can connect to him on his level without adult concerns or miscommunications, and Kazuki needs someone who he can care for to assuage his guilt over what you can probably already guess happened to him. Miri needs some chickky nuggies and microwaved hamburger, and you know, clothes and school and social time with kids and time at the zoo. She needs kid stuff.
One of the strangest things about this anime is that it seems to be able to grasp entirely nonstandards family formations, in that Miri clearly has two dads, but it also goes out of its way to point out that, oh, sure, there are two dads, but the dads are not doing it. It’s understandable! Japan is a culture with a very different adoption culture to my own, where it’s pretty normal for a pair of men to adopt a kid, but it’s extremely weird for a pair of men who aren’t in a relationship to adopt a kid. Maybe it’s easy to see a pair of dads co-parenting as long as they can reassure you they’re not gay.
Is that somehow more homophobic? It strange to route around in my head. It’s not like Buddy Daddies likes women much or represents relationships with them as being some kind of fun.
There’s a comparison you can make about Buddy Daddies that is a little uncharitable, because it’s comparing this funny anime about cool covert operators doing covert things and raising a family with another anime about cool covert operators doing covert things. It’s an unfortunate comparison, because yeah, it does apply, but it’s also dreadfully unfair to Buddy Daddies. Buddy Daddies is a show without grand ambitions and challenging narratives. It’s not a cash-in, because that would indicate it seemed to expect to make a giant pile of money; it’s not a spin-off, because it would probably copy that other formula more with more marketable traits. Buddy Daddies is its own thing.
Plus, that other anime knows that women exist and can do cool things.
It’s not an amazing thing, but it is its own thing, and it’s pretty fun!