Torako Koshi thought she had successfully buried a wild past to become a normal highschool honours student, with none of her classmates aware of her delinquent roots. But that all changes when she discovers Noko Shikanoko (Nokotan for short), a new transfer student with antlers, tangled up in power lines. Whatever she is, Torako (who's given the nickname "Koshitan" by Nokotan) may regret saving her, since Nokotan can smell the former delinquent on her. Now a punky past and a reality-defying deer girl have crashed into Torako's life in the hilarious and chaotic highschool comedy that she's become painfully aware she's in.

The best way I can describe My Deer Friend Nokotan (or, as the viral opening theme lets us know it's called in Japanese, Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan) is that it's like Nichijou and Yuru Yuri had a baby and let it be raised by Asobi Asobase and Pop Team Epic. In fact, it's a show that's clearly learned the most important lesson taught by such series as Nichijou: When it comes to animated comedy, there's a direct correlation between the stupidity of a joke and the unreasonable amount of time and effort you spend committing to it. In the case of My Deer Friend Nokotan, it's already pretty funny that poor Torako has woken up to find herself in a world gone mad, where she's seemingly the only one who thinks it's even a little strange that there's a new girl at school with antlers growing out the sides of her head. What makes this show often downright hilarious is that the deer girl, Nokotan, behaves like a borderline malevolent demigod who uses her power to violently disrupt the laws of physics and basic anatomy and become Torako's new best friend (read: ruin Torako's life by shattering the carefully crafted illusion of perfection that she's so meticulously established since abandoning her life as a delinquent).

Basically, My Deer Friend Nokotan has three types of humor. The first is puns and references. There's a ton of deer-centric wordplay--I mean, our titular protagonist, Noko Shikanoko, has a name that could literally be translated as "child of the child of the deer". Then there's the recurring bit with the word "shika" being ominously chanted in the background music. Added onto that is some Fourth Wall-breaking humor where the characters and narrator reference that this is an anime, and they make references to a bunch of other media, including Drifting Classroom, Fist of the North Star, Detective Conan and even Dangan Ronpa.

The next type of humor used, conversation humor, is the show's weakest point, in my opinion. Torako, desperate to keep her secret safe, is constantly trying to steer the conversation away from her dark past, but Nokotan keeps bringing it up. There are also humorous manzai routine-style conversations that either end up with Torako exposing her true personality or being conned into doing something due to her own ego. Honestly, these didn't entirely work for me, but only because they seemed very predictable and that lessened the effect of the humor.

Lastly, we have the best part of the episode, the surrealist humor. I legitimately laughed my ass off at the scene of Nokotan entering the classroom for the first time. The joke was obvious from the moment you could see she wouldn't fit through the door and wasn't smart enough to turn sideways. But what made it so funny was that it was taken to the most insane extreme--glass shattering, walls breaking, debris flying, people smiling as they receive bloody injuries, all of it in dramatic slow motion, and to top things off, we had the ominous chanting. It was perfect. The other surreal jokes are funny as well, from Nokotan hanging from the power lines to the uncanny photorealistic CG deer that appear randomly throughout the episode.

Unfortunately, it's time for me to bring up the things I didn't enjoy, as the show doesn't stick the landing of every joke. The giant trail of snot that extends from Nokotan's nostril like a tentacle and sticks to Torako's head when they first meet, for example, is more gross than anything, and there are a few bits that revolve a little too much around Torako loudly explaining the gag. I also wasn't a fan of the joke about Torako's virginity and everyone's ridiculous investment in it. I get it, the entire first half of the episode is about how ludicrous notions of feminine purity are, with the implication that Torako's shift from shonen manga-influenced delinquent to the epitome of girlish perfection is her going from one ridiculous stereotype to another, but the whole thing is both nobody's business and decidedly not funny.

Still, those small misfires are usually offset by a beat of gloriously overanimated visual spectacle that sells a joke so much better than simply explaining why Nokotan is weird over and over. The bit mentioned above where Nokotan makes her grand entrance that ends up injuring several obliviously grinning classmates and the equally oblivious teacher is easily the grand highlight of the episode, but I don't want to overlook the smaller but equally funny parts. My favourite joke of the episode, aside from that scene and the unexpected Dangan Ronpa reference (you'll know it when you see it, trust me) might've been the way Nokotan's head warps and rubber-bands when Torako reluctantly brushes her hair with an animal brush, complete with utterly charming boi-oi-oing sound effects from Megumi Han. And speaing of the voice actors, the moments where Torako reacts incredulously to Nokotan's weird shit and yells at her are made particularly funny simply by knowing who voices her--those rough-voiced delinquent outbursts are provided by Saki Fujita, the voice of Miku Hatsune and Elena from Street Fighter. I also know for a fact that Yurika Kubo (the voice of Hanayo from Love Live, Koume from Urara Meirocho, Toa from TsukiMichi, Marguerit from The Legendary Hero is Dead!, Cavalla from Azur Lane and Cocoa Cookie from Cookie Run Kingdom), an actress born in Japan's deer capital Nara, is also in this show as a character who has yet to show up outside of some foreshadowing within Torako's moments of bragging about her facade of perfection.

By the way, I don't know if it was the work of the world's fastest fansubbers or just an alternate subbing team for English-speaking Asian markets like a number of other anime have had, but thank all that is holy that I watched a version of this with good subs, because the show's official subs on Amazon Prime and Crunchyroll are truly awful. Studio Wit has been extremely eager to force it into worldwide meme status, and so they had a company called REMOW handle the subs for multiple languages all at once so it could be rushed out onto various international streaming services. There's some discussion about whether the subs are AI-translated (and the French ones are reported to be the worst of all, having turned out 100% incoherent), but to be fair, there's nothing in the English script that 100% signals it was translated by a program. There's multiple changes that only a human would make, like converting the temperature from Celcius to Fahrenheit or understanding the loanword "yankee" as meaning "delinquent" rather than "American". At the very least, it feels like there was human involvement. The many issues people are pointing out have to do with quality control (typos, formatting errors, consistently referring to antlers as horns, not capitalizing the start of a new sentence, never translating onscreen text, etc.) that could just as easily be human error from a company that doesn't know or care enough about the standards for simulcast subs. Either way, they're bad, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were a number of linguistic jokes that got lost by being translated literally. Even better, Crunchyroll issued an apology for the subs, accepting part of the blame for using them but mostly directing people's attention to REMOW. So this means they were handed REMOW's subs...and didn't even proofread them, they just went ahead and used them. I'm having flashbacks to Funimation airing three episodes of Interspecies Reviewers before finally realizing what it is, pulling it from their streaming service and essentially holding the entire IP hostage. Between stuff like this and the steadily declining quality of both Crunchyroll and Sentai Filmworks' subs, especially whenever Katrina Leonoudakis is involved, is it really any wonder why so many people are still seeking out fansubs? Meanwhile, the only thing wrong with the version I watched was a two-second spot close to the end where they apparently forgot to put subs at all.

I will admit that I might've let myself fall for the hype a bit too much, as I was expecting to laugh more than I ultimately did with this premiere. I was certainly always have a great time though, and I'm definitely going to be checking in on this show throughout the rest of the summer. Now that we've gotten the setup out of the way, I imagine the show will only get funnier once it's able to compound on its zaniness and really cut loose.

Oh yeah, and as a bonus, the end credits are placed over real footage of deer in Nara Deer Park and a video showing the process of making shika senbei, the special rice crackers sold at the park to be fed to the deer. I'm eager to find out whether this is the set ending sequence for the whole series or different things will be shown in each episode.