Squid Girl: Season 1

“I know that the human being and the fish can co-exist peacefully.” – George W. Bush

Squid Girl does something which is very clever – making a villain likeable. It is not often people become keen on someone that wishes to invade and conquer all of mankind, but this somewhat foolish, naive sea creature is just so loveable.

The title character is a humanoid/squid being, who processes powers using her ten tentacles that sprout from her head like hair. Squid Girl is sick of humans polluting the ocean and has thus decided to take action by invading, or rather ‘inkvading’, the surface. As it is the nearest to her home she decides to make the Lemon Beach House the base of her operations.

However, while demonstrating her powers she accidentally makes a hole in the wall of the house. The owners, the Aizawa siblings (kind yet fearsome older sister Chizuru, short-tempered middle sister Eiko, and friendly younger brother Takeru), decide that Squid Girl must work off her debt and become a waitress for the Beach House.

This is just the start of Squid Girl’s problems. Although she has some powers, she is not that good an ‘inkvader’. She is useless with her hands, has great difficultly telling what is real from what is not, has totally underestimated the size of the human race and how powerful it is, and her skills often end up helping people rather than hindering them.

What is more, the other people around her have their own issues. Eiko’s friend Sanae loves Squid Girl to pieces to the point that her adoration of her has become masochistic, while American Cindy Campbell is convinced that Squid Girl is an alien and wants to experiment on her. The only person remotely scared of Squid Girl is Lemon Beach House’s newest employee Nagisa, so she becomes the victim of Squid Girl’s schemes.

There are several noteworthy things about this series. Firstly, you get to learn what the Japanese for “Invade” is, as it is repeated six times at the start of every episode as part of the opening theme tune. It does become a bit of an earworm after a while.

Secondly, there is the structure of the episodes. Each one is split into three separate stories rather than there being one single story throughout the episode, which makes for an interesting, rather diverting change to the norm.

Thirdly, this series is full of fishy puns. Just about all of Squid Girl’s language has some sort of squid-based connection, my personal favourite being her exclamation, “Wait just a kraken minute”. The problem is that after a while these funny puns just get annoying. But eventually you get used to them as if it were just some form of aquatic slang and it just fades into the background somewhat until you don’t really notice it anymore. This fishy language is not actually from the original Japanese version, but has been something which has been added during the subbing/dubbing.

But the main thing about this series is that it is very funny. The idea of some unknown creature coming to the human world and trying to understand just what humans do is quite a simple one, but in Squid Girl it is done rather well. Whether it is trying to understand what an umbrella is or learning to play baseball, it all seems to come together. Then you have the subject of Squid Girl’s physicality. Not only is there her ten tentacles, but she can do other things like spitting up ink, which becomes a hit on the culinary side of the business.

The series also has some glimmers of other comedy anime. The idea of having to work of the damage that the main character has done has appeared in other series too, such as Ouran High School Host Club where the main character Haruhi breaks a priceless vase and also to work the damage off. All these things come together to make a great show. Hopefully the second series will keep this up.