Arakawa Under the Bridge

Arakawa Under the Bridge:  C++

I had a tough time rating Arakawa, partially because I've had a tough time describing Arakawa.  Ultimately I couldn't quite give it a B, it's just too damned weird.

The basic idea is that a very by-the-book, ordinary young man who has been raised to never be in debt to anyone has his life saved by a girl who lives under a bridge over the Arakawa (a river).  Naturally, as he cannot be in debt to her, he asks what he can do to repay her, and she says that she would like him to be her lover, because she's never had one before.  Unfortunately, the girl also is from Venus, and will forget about him if he leaves for more than a few hours, so he has to live under the bridge as well, and get along with the impossibly strange group of people who also live along the banks of the Arakawa, under the bridge.

That's the basic description, but that doesn't tell you much about the show itself at all.  Instead, imagine taking the characters from two or three especially bizarre Monty Python sketches and, instead of disposing of them at the end of the sketch, making them all live in a town together.  This begins to give you an idea of what you're getting yourself into.

Arakawa is deeply absurd, but the humor has a very thorough poker face, and it may be very difficult for a Western audience to appreciate a lot of the humor.  The art and sound are all delightful, and the voice cast is positively stellar, but its incomprehensibility makes it a little inaccessible, though if you can get into it, you'll have yourself some laughs.