Umaru-chan’s Double Life Still Holds Up 11 Years Later

Umaru Doma is the best student in her class. She has top grades, good looks and talent in everything she tries. Then she walks through the front door of the apartment she shares with her older brother Taihei, pulls on a hamster hoodie, shrinks into a chibi gremlin, and does not move again for the rest of the night.

That is the whole engine of Himouto! Umaru-chan, the anime adaptation of Sankakuhead’s manga. It aired on ABC TV across two seasons and 24 episodes, from July 2015 to December 2017. The premise sounds like a one-joke sketch. It survives 24 episodes because the show understands that the joke is not the transformation. The joke is that everyone around Umaru is doing some version of the same thing.

Trailer, via Crunchyroll Store Australia.

The Hamster Hoodie and the Two Umarus

The split is the show’s central device. At school, Umaru is composed, admired and apparently effortless. At home, she is a kid-sized layabout with a food and video game addiction, and she leaves the housework to Taihei. The series draws her in a chibi style whenever she is indoors, a visual cue that the polished version has been put away with the school uniform.

Taihei is the one who absorbs the cost. He works at a company, lives in a 1DK apartment with his sister, and the two moved in a year before the series begins. He is described as kind and methodical, and he spends most of his screen time reprimanding Umaru for being lazy while quietly doing everything she has abandoned. He is the straight man, but the show never lets him become a martyr. He scolds, she ignores him, and the arrangement holds.

The casting does a lot of quiet work here. Aimi Tanaka voices Umaru, and Kenji Nojima plays Taihei. Tanaka has to swing between the immaculate student voice and the whining indoor voice within a single scene, and the performance is the reason the gimmick does not wear thin.

Nana Ebina, Kirie Motoba and the Friends Umaru Collects

Umaru’s secret life is not as solitary as she claims. She makes friends, and the show’s second season is largely about those friendships settling into a routine.

Nana Ebina is her classmate, voiced by Akari Kageyama. She lives in the ground-floor apartment near the siblings, is very shy, and is originally from Akita Prefecture. She occasionally slips back into dialect when she is eating. Ebina is self-conscious about her figure because people stare at her. Taihei is the first person to look her in the eyes, and she develops a crush on him, getting flustered whenever he compliments her. She has an older brother named Koichiro who ran away to Tokyo and worked at a restaurant that later moved to Hamamatsu. Taihei suspects he may have met him on a business trip.

Kirie Motoba is voiced by Haruka Shiraishi. She is the friend who catches Umaru out of costume, and Umaru talks her way clear by claiming to be her own sister, Komaru.

Then there is Sylphynford Tachibana, voiced by Yurina Furukawa, Umaru’s self-proclaimed rival. Umaru wears a mask to hide her identity from her. At the amusement arcade she wears a cap and is a well-known gamer who goes by the initials UMR.

People are not always who they appear to be, as is the case with Umaru Doma, the perfect high school girl—that is, until she gets home!

Two Seasons, Two Shapes

The first season ran from July to September 2015. The second, Himouto! Umaru-chan R, ran from October to December 2017. The gap between them is not just a scheduling detail. It changes what the show is about.

The manga ran longer than the anime and gives a sense of how much material sits behind these 24 episodes. After two one-shot chapters in Shueisha’s seinen magazine Miracle Jump in 2012, Himouto! Umaru-chan was serialized in Weekly Young Jump from March 2013 to November 2017, collected in 12 tankōbon volumes. A sequel, Himouto! Umaru-chan G, ran in the same magazine from November 2017 to April 2018 and was collected in a single volume.

What the Show Is Actually Good At

Comedy about a secret second self usually runs on exposure — the fear of being caught. Himouto! Umaru-chan mostly refuses that. Umaru gets caught, repeatedly, and the show treats each near-miss as a bit rather than a crisis. Kirie catches her and gets a fabricated sister. Sylphynford gets a mask.

The show’s real subject is the gap between how people are seen and how they live, and it applies that gap to almost everyone. Ebina is watched for her body and wants to be looked at as a person. Taihei is the responsible one and gets no credit for it. Sylphynford positions herself as a rival to someone who barely registers the competition. Umaru is the loudest case, not the only one.

The weakness is that the show rarely pushes past the bit. Taihei’s work life, the siblings’ move, the year they spent before the series — these are handed to the audience as facts and left there. The show is content to be a hangout comedy, and it is a good one, but it is not reaching for anything harder.

The Score on Himouto! Umaru-chan

Himouto! Umaru-chan is a comedy that could have been a single gag and instead built a small, warm ensemble out of it. The chibi transformation is the hook, but Tanaka’s voice work, Taihei’s patient exasperation and the slow accumulation of friends around Umaru are what carry 24 episodes. The second season is the better of the two because it stops asking whether Umaru will be caught and starts asking who she has around her when she is not performing.

What holds it back is ambition. The show sets up a genuinely interesting idea — that everyone performs a version of themselves — and then mostly uses it for jokes about junk food and video games. That is a fair trade for a hangout comedy, but it leaves the sibling relationship, the most interesting thing in the series, underused.

This is a show worth watching for what it does well, not for what it might have done. 8.2 of 10.

anime review · chibi comedy · Doga Kobo · Himouto! Umaru-chan · slice of life anime · Umaru Doma