For half a decade, Aggretsuko has quietly become one of Netflix’s greatest shows. Any anime fan knows this—the show is based on a hugely popular character by the hugely popular brand Sanrio; it’s got big anime muscle behind it. But it's time for mainstream audiences to pay attention to its unique excellence too.
With its fifth and final season out in full as of last Thursday, there’s no better opportunity to fall for this marvelous combination of anthropomorphic animal cuteness, urban mundanity, romantic trials, and oversized circumstances.
Aggretsuko follows red panda twentysomething Retsuko, an anxious, shy accountant who struggles to break out of her shell. With the help of her coworkers-turned-friends, she’s able to find her inner confidence and become someone more than just a bored office worker.
This personal growth comes courtesy of antics both relatable and outrageous: Retsuko dates a man she thinks is out of her league, as a challenge to her relationship anxiety and stands up against a misogynistic coworker. But she also joins a girl group that performs hard rock against a background of Japanese pop idol aesthetics and is even almost murdered by a toxic fan after one of the group’s concerts.
The ping-ponging between storytelling modes is always fun to watch, as the show effortlessly moves between the emotional and the hilarious. Watching Retsuko and co. going through hashtag-adulting in and outside of the office feels cathartic as their fellow twentysomething, who herself feels almost as stuck as Retsuko. It’s a special twist on what would otherwise be a great comedy.
In Season 5, there are two parallel scenes that best exemplify this mixture, to comic and moving effect.
The best way to pacify family trauma
A big part of Retsuko’s journey concerns her love life. After seasons of pining for our red-panda heroine, her colleague Haida can now call her his girlfriend. It’s a satisfying, long-awaited win for the hyena, whom we met in Season 1 as an accountant so overcome by his feelings for his soft-spoken coworker that he could barely utter a word to her.
But Retsuko is the perfect foil for Haida: Although similarly tongue-tied most of the time, she’s actually a ticking time bomb of rage. When sufficiently annoyed, Retsuko dashes to the nearest karaoke booth to let out her feelings … in the form of death metal songs. (Hence “Aggretsuko”—or ”Aggressive Retsuko.”) That she can’t speak her true feelings about almost anything without transforming into an entirely different person and screeching them at the top of her lungs says it all: Retsuko is self-consciousness taken to its apex.
Season 5 takes those personal insecurities to new but traditionally wacky heights, wonderfully so. Episode 7 finds Haida in a stupor following a harrowing visit to his family, whom Retsuko was meeting for the first time. It turns out that the Haida clan is one of the most powerful political dynasties in all of Japan, with father Juzo a long-time member of the government. Haida’s younger brother Jiro is readying to take over his dad’s county seat in the next election—something that Jiro and Juzo mock Haida as incapable of ever doing.
This comes after several episodes of Haida trying and failing to get back on his feet after resigning from his job at the accounting firm, in response to that fraud scheme. Instead of applying for jobs, he becomes obsessed with an online role-playing game—to the point where he’s spending thousands on in-game items, bankrupting himself. His father, who was paying for his apartment, kicks him out, and Haida moves into a local internet cafe so that he can keep playing games without having to find a real apartment or job.
It’s embarrassing, something even sweet-natured Retsuko takes issue with. Only a threat to keep him at a distance until he’s employed again motivates Haida to get some work, even if it’s part-time. That’s enough for Retsuko, who also lets Haida move in with her after finding out he’s effectively homeless, but not for Haida’s family. He’s a loser and always has been, they tell him; he’s pathetic and aimless and hopeless. When Jiro baits Haida into taking money from the family to get himself back on his feet—an ultimate sign of weakness, one that Haida painfully caves to—Jiro breaks down into pure evil laughter.
Which is where we find Haida in Episode 7: spirit broken, haunted by the memory of his younger brother cackling in his face. “I’m a loser! I’m a hopeless loser!” he screams. It’s the kind of heartbreakingly human moment that Aggretsuko so acutely realizes, even when the aggrieved party is a hyena. And watching Haida’s rise and fall into this pathetic depression stings extra for a viewer who's committed to this show for so long.
But then Retsuko shoves an entire banana in his mouth. “I know that,” she tells him, in response to his “loser” meltdown, before instructing him to stop freaking out about what happened and move on. She heads out to work … only to find him sitting in the same spot with the same banana in his mouth when she comes home.
The best way to pacify political intrigue
It’s darkly funny, and made even more so when the joke is repeated under completely different circumstances one episode later. Episode 8 kicks off with Retsuko in the same spot, also feeling doomed—because she unwittingly agreed to run against Jiro for that same open county seat. With Retsuko thrown even more directly into Haida’s family affairs, it’s one thing for her to feel overwhelmed to the point of drooling dissociation; it’s another when it means this shy accountant has to start publicly campaigning all the time.
To get her to shake out of the darkness, Haida shoves a banana into her mouth. He gives her a reality check and permission to go vent her feelings in her heavy metal karaoke way.
I laughed out loud to find Aggretsuko mirroring this quick-paced joke, both visual and story-driven, in just the span of one 15-minute episode. (Each episode is blessedly short compared to everything else on Netflix.) And it’s especially funny considering how polarized Retsuko and Haida’s situations are: Haida is reckoning with his loved ones thinking that he’s useless trash. Retsuko is reckoning with accidentally signing up to use her death metal stylings to promote political policy she knows nothing about to an entire population.
If Aggretsuko seriously fixated on Haida’s family trauma so closely for any longer than it already did, it wouldn’t be Aggretsuko. The off-kilter comedy comes from how quickly it vacillates from these intimate moments to completely ridiculous ones, without sacrificing the impact of either.
Retsuko telling Haida that she knows he’s a loser but he needs to buck up isn’t mean-spirited or minimizing; it’s in keeping with the show’s wildly funny, weird tone. We know that Haida’s wretched family will continue to factor into the remainder of the season as villains—and the person he loves most of all is going to be the one to stand up for him. How lovely and real is that?
The way Retsuko ultimately proves both her and Haida’s confidence and willpower to Hiro and Juzo is by Haida encouraging Retsuko to scream her pettiest annoyances to a rapt crowd of thousands; in this way, she emboldens a disempowered audience. (Sadly, she loses, but it’s the effort that counts.) As silly as that all is, it’s also a powerful message about never giving up—and how if you wallow in self-pity for too long, you’ll get a banana stuffed in your pie hole.
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