Isekais! Just when I thought I’ve seen it all, the genre continues to surprise me. Today, I wanted to talk about Isekai Ojisan Uncle from Another World, a new Netflix anime that may very well be a hit series among isekai fans.
A fateful encounter with a truck had rendered Takafumi Takaoka’s ojisan, Yousuke Shibazaki, comatose for the past 17 years. When he finally regains consciousness, Ojisan begins to ramble in a foreign tongue and reveals that he had been transported to a magical world called Gran Bahamal. Takafumi dismisses his uncle’s claims as nonsense until an incantation makes a cup of water hover in the air. In a flash of brilliance, the pair creates a YouTube channel to showcase Ojisan’s magical abilities.
The responsibility now falls on Takafumi’s shoulders to acquaint Ojisan with everything that has transpired during his absence, including getting him up to speed with the internet, new technology, and surprisingly, the outcome of the ’90s console war—the result of which was especially distressing for a hardcore SEGA fan. With Ojisan’s wisdom from his other world experiences, they grow their YouTube channel and tackle online comments and trolls. The journey of this uncle-nephew duo promises to be anything but conventional.
I wasn’t sure when I first heard about the anime whether or not it was worth watching. As an isekaki connoisseur I have seen my fair share of isekai, and they are all starting to look the same to me. Initially, I thought this was just going to be an isekai about a middle-aged man trapped in a fantasy world, but after episode 1, I was hooked on the premise of a person returning to the real world but keeping all the abilities and magic they learned from the fantasy world.
Ojisan as he’s referred to in the anime is a pretty interesting person. His line of thinking is funny as hell, which is the main selling point of the anime, plus watching him adapt to a world that has drastically changed over 17 years makes for a compelling story-telling narrative. On top of that, Ojisan didn’t even have the best of time in the fantasy world that he got isekai’d into as his face was regarded as ugly. This is due to the fact that the fantasy world that he traveled to had nothing but beautiful people in it, so he stood out like a sore thumb. Despite that, he held no ill-will towards the natives and continued to save them in times of peril.
The main aspect of the anime is that we get to see Ojisan regal us with tales of his journey while seeing how the events played out, often times sheer comedic turnouts. The other characters are pretty fun too, his nephew basically exp[olirtiung him to make some cash on the side, all seem pretty realistic. Well, as realistic as an anime trying to show us what happened to a guy that comes back from isekai can be. My only issue is that the anime is currently on Netflix, and the upload pacing has been bad, to say the least.
Despite that, the anime is definitely worth putting on your watchlist once Netflix decides to release the remaining episodes.
