ナミ

NAMI

ONA

STATUS
COMPLETE
EPISODES
1
RELEASE
January 1, 2000
LENGTH
3 min

DESCRIPTION

An early work of Kei Oyama, co-directed by Go Shimada, Izu Satoh, and Izumi Kojima.

EPISODES

Dubbed

| | |

Not available on crunchyroll

REVIEWS

Ericonator
10/100
A fishy experience from the depths below
"What is anime?" A question many have asked and answered, but what is it really? Today I will answer that question, as well as give some insight as to why you should (not) watch Nami, which ironically enough can't be considered anime. Without further ado, let's begin!

Anime as we know it today is a visual storytelling medium. Consisting of multiple key factors like story, art, animation, characters and sound, the sky's the limit for what can be produced. That does not come without its shortcomings though, whether it's bad directing, faults in the story, jarring art/animation or poor sound, there's always something you can detract from the overall quality of an anime. Even some of the most renowned shows like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood have flaws that can pull them down. However the topic of this review isnot the most renowned anime ever, but quite the opposite, one of the worst "anime" (isn't an anime by definition) ever created. Today I will take a look at the not-so critically acclaimed "Nami"

Raise your hand if you've ever heard this one: A woman is pleasuring herself in her room, when all of a sudden a fish appears out of nowhere and slides inside of her. Raise your hand again if you expected hundreds, if not thousands of other fish to appear and slide inside the woman aswell. If you raised your hand to any of these situations, then congratulations, you've probably watched Nami. The fish appear from wherewhere, from inside the Tv, out of walls, and even places you didn't know fish could be (not like any of the places I mentioned are locations where fish are usually at anyway.)

With the head-scratching synopsis for Nami out of the way, let's move on to something less...strange, if you will. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean less strange in the form of it not being weird, but less strange as in you will at least understand what's going on, as opposed to the wild synopsis. This less strange thing is in fact animation, the very backbone to an anime in many people's opinion. While good animation isn't necessary for an anime to be successful, it can certainly help build up tension or ambiance, depending on how it's done. In Nami however, what you see is what you get, and it is piss poor at that. From censorship (REALLY? Not this again) to awful movements from both the woman and the fish, this is definitely some of the worst "animation" I've ever seen.

If you thought the animation was bad, just wait until you hear the sound. The sounds the fish make are definitely some of the weirdest sounds I've ever heard. It's like a group of people are slurping up something liquidy, except it's much worse and much louder. I had to turn my sound down while watching due to it being painful to listen to.

I didn't think it was possible to find something worse than Pupa, but Nami blew me out of the water with how unfathomable it is. I actually watched Nami twice, because I didn't understand it at first. While I did end up gaining some understanding for it, having to experience it not only once, but twice was an incredibly straining task that I wish I hadn't done, even if it "only" took 6 minutes in total. Don't watch this, you're better off doing absolutely nothing.
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ci30cr
100/100
Nami is a complex metaphorical masterpiece that teaches lessons most anime can't.
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
I'll try to keep this short. Nami is a metaphorical masterpiece. Everything about it is near perfect but I will break this review down into segments to make it easier to read and less like a rant. This short film changed my view on life and can teach a valuable lesson many other anime simply can not do.

SOUND: 9/10 The sound in nami is not something I can praise as 10/10. It works for the film but I can not call it out of this world like the rest of the parts to my review. It works for the film and the fish sounds create suspense from the start. If you listen carefully, you can hear the sounds of fish moving around before they are actually shown and as they move towards the girl they get louder putting you into the perspective of the woman. This helps you understand her mindset at the time which is explored throughout this film.

STORY: 10/10 The story is there for the woman's development and revealing who she is. It gets repetitive but this is a 3 minute long film. The slow buildup of fish going inside her shows her mental state and her continual masturbation during this crisis and lack of effort to stop it shows that she has given up and is a metaphor for dealing with problems in life. Throughout the film, fish repeatedly pile up similar to how in life (specifically her life) problems pile up and are not taken care of. This eventually leads to the death of the woman and then you see all the fish (metaphor for problems) finally come out of her and are gone. The fish piling up was her life, then her death and them coming out was finally all her problems going away. Because in the end her only escape was, death. She wasn't able to take care of all of that anymore, as it had gotten to be too much. Also, her masturbating throughout the film shows her trying to relieve her stress by feeling good with temporary highs like orgasms instead of dealing with problems that she needs to take care of. It is proven that masturbation relieves stress so that is another reason to believe that she was under great stress a the time but did other things to temporarily feel better instead of dealing with it. link to article covering this

CHARACTERS: 10/10 There is only one character in the whole film. I kinda went off topic in the story section and covered her and her character, the complexity and how flawed she was as a person.

ENJOYMENT: 10/10 This is only a personal thing but I greatly enjoyed nami and my many rewatches. I got something out of it that I hadn't got with any other piece of media in a long time.

And overall this is an easy 10/10 piece of media.
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Pockeyramune919
60/100
Time to face the strange
*Uh, spoilers for Nami, I guess*
What is bad?

A #1 hit by the late, possibly disgraced, yet not dethroned King of Pop.

Okay, but what is badness?

It's a noun meaning "poor quality or low standard” OR “lack of or failure to conform to moral virtue; wickedness; evil." If we pull from the definition of "bad" that I cheekily avoided, we also get the definition "not such as to be hoped for or desired; unpleasant or unwelcome."

I've had little exposure to Nami, yet anime of its ilk will regularly crop up: short videos that are usually disturbing in some way. The reaction will usually be the same — horror or disgust accompanied by cries of something being "the wurst anime evar" or "is this even anime??????"
To answer the latter — I don't think length stops something from being an anime; Anilist logs music videos and opening animations for conventions, after all. As far as content goes — if a glove-puppetry showis on the site, I don't see why stop-motion can't be. As for it being bad?

Not really? First off, I have a hard time finding shorts such as this one terrible. For me to dislike something, and I mean really dislike it, my feelings for something need to stew, need to fester. The shortest anime I've rated to earn an F are Iketeru Futari, Junk Boy, and Itsudatte My Santa, and those are all rated low despite their length. Second, it's really hard for me to consider something bad, harder still for me to find something terrible. When it comes to animanga, I'm easy to please. For something to get anything close to being rated a 1, it not only has to actively piss me off, but has to have no technical prowess to speak of. I still loathe School Days, but as much shit as I give it, almost everything it did to piss me off, it did intentionally. Warlords of Sigrdrifa is incompetent, but as much as I tried to, I really couldn't hate it quite the same way I did School Days. Itsudatte My Santa is similarly incompetent but it's also funny, being the closest thing to unintentionally "so-bad-its-good" that I've seen in anime.

For both these reasons, I don't find Nami terrible. It really doesn't do anything that angers, annoys, or disturbs me. Even if it did, at three minutes (two and a half minutes, sans credits), I wouldn't be with the feeling long. No, rather than bad, Nami is weird.

[Insert some hokey, overly-long story about how you first learned about Nami and omit the fact that, for some reason, you thought this was Nana]

Talking about "spoilers" might feel silly since it's only three minutes, but I imagine a big part of people sharing this anime is shocking them by not telling them what it's about, just telling them not to watch it for their own good. But alas, the show that no one watches must go on. Avert your eyes if you doth not want this heartbreaking work of staggering genius to be ruined for you.

We begin Nami with a fade-in of a woman pleasuring herself on a bed. Like, a real-ass Japanese actor, not an anime character. And she's not under a sheet, no, we see her sitting, bare as birth and uncovered as she stimulates her vagina. Granted, its a bit hard to see thanks to the mosaic blur (the reviewgiving this a 10 out of 100 complained about "censorship," so just as a news flash, every instance of genitalia is censored in Japan, so if you have a problem with that, it's best to take it up with the Japanese Government. Good luck.) and the low resolution. So, we have a live-action woman on a bed masturbating. That's weird enough for an anime, but what's weirder is that soon, we see a mackerel wiggle through a door and across the floor thanks to the magic of stop-motion. The mackerel wiggles up the bed and into the woman's vagina. Then two more come out and enter her. Then five. Then hundreds of them crawl out of VCRs, bags, doors, cabinets, etc. to enter her without much reaction. We then fade to black and fade in before the mackerel rapidly "swim" out of her and cover her body.

And that, folks, is Nami. Is it weird, sure. Is it terrible? Not really. Is it bad? Not particularly.

The main sticking point is the fact that fish are entering some lady's vagina. Call me unempathetic, but I didn't really get a visceral reaction out of it. Probably due to the fact that I don't have a vagina. I didn't feel it in the way I would if a character got kicked in the nuts. Like, yeah, I know a fish shouldn't be in someone's vagina, much less hundreds of them, but I guess I can't really muster horror or pity. The most I can do is raise my eyebrows and think "well that's pretty fucking weird."

Maybe this is an example of anime debasing me, maybe this is a mark of debauchery. Perhaps Nami is a mirror of the soul, showing your reflection, determining if you still walk the path of light or you stumble in the dark, not realizing that you left the road of a normal life. Maybe I'm too far gone, maybe normal people are disgusted and horrified at a woman's sex being filled with fish and my nonchalance is a testament to the monster I've become...
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tl;dr I shrugged and said, "I've seen worse."

It's not like the woman appears in distress at all. From her face, she either looks like she doesn't notice at all or reacts as if she's being pleasured. Some may say it looks like she isn't consenting since she may be asleep, but I'm not really seeing it.

Honestly, the most squeamish I got was due to the sounds. The background audio is loud and uncomfortable. Only during subsequent viewings did I realize that it's the sounds of breathing and the woman fingering her wet sex. It's just so close to the mic that it sounds alien. I'm not an ASMR guy, so it gave me the heebie-jeebies. My problem with the sound melted away when the mackerel came with their wet little wiggles and their goddamn slurps as they enter the woman.

It's hard for me to find Nami bad since every other time I'm watching it, I'm laughing my ass off at the sound of the fish, the absurdity of it all.

And I'm sorry for not being able to make this a joke review. It would have been fitting, given the content, but I guess I'm too serious for my own good. Perhaps Nami really is a mirror of the soul, showing all who watch it who they truly are. I wanted to write a joke review, but I ended up writing a bog-standard, Pisseyramune616 review. It's a testament to how I take everything too seriously, how I can't live a little, how I can't even bring myself to shitpost because I have some grandiose expectation for myself that leads me to think I'm better than I truly am. A perfectionism that no one appreciates, not even myself. A perfectionism that leads to wordiness and over-explanation that makes it so I cannot write a review under 1,000 words even if it's on a fucking three-minute anime. Holy fucking shit. Yet this seriousness is ultimately half-assed, like everything I have done in my life. I cannot, as some blonde dude I used to talk to would say, "commit to the bit." If I can't help being serious, why not go all in and bring some bonafide analysis? Why not try and suss out what this damn thing means? Even if it doesn't mean anything, why not ascribe it meaning, since that's part of the work of being a viewer? I could even make it about masturbation, but take the opposite stance of the actual meme review since I'm a horny little gremlin who will do anything to make him feel better about his own relationship with jerking off, who will do anything to prove that porn can be a force of good even though my own stupid "Pockey Reviews Echhi/Hentai" series shows that, no, it's just for base gratification at best, horrid objectification at worse. Why not dig deeper into the consent angle? Is the actor consenting, I mean, truly? Does she want to be here? I've seen Perfect Blue and thus I am an expert on the idol and gravure industry. Is she made into an object, something to gawk at and laugh at? What are the director's intentions? Is this meanspirited? Is this all for a stupid "lol fishy pussy" joke? Maybe I shy away from digging too deep because it forces me to ask about my own intentions, my own desire to see the mosaic obliterated. Maybe I'm just a creep who, in seeing this woman as attractive, am an objectifying piece of shit. Maybe the reason I don't do deep analysis in my reviews is that I can't. Or maybe I just don't want to because, again, I'm lazy. And in not doing deep analysis, I only talk about my feelings, feelings no one cares about. Thus my reviews end up being shallow, essentially just saying "thing bad" like a creator I enjoy and admire, Lindsay Ellis, refuses to do because she knows it’s boring. I'm boring. And I guess that's the rub isn't it, that in addition to myself, I do write reviews for others. What is this review if not something I decided to do because someone joked and said that I should? I do write reviews in part for others, to try and gain praise and attention. But I don't get them. More often than not, I end up feeling useless, like my time was wasted. I don’t find Nami bad, but Nami reminds me that I find myself bad. It really makes me think. Maybe if I did have a mosaic-blurred vagina, I would too let countless fish swim inside of me. Not for my own pleasure, but for others' pleasure. I'd do it so I could feel useful, so I could make others happy in the vain belief that others may remember me when I'm gone and I won't just fade into oblivion like everyone else......
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Anyway, yeah, this isn't bad, but it's not good either. It's mid.

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