Laid Back Camp is the show from this past season that continues the trend of “cute girls doing cute things with a twist”. The twist this time around is that instead of having a music club, a bunch of game designers, or drivers of drifting tanks, we get to enjoy the nice calming atmosphere of camping out in the wilderness. Not like in the brush or anything. This is not Survivor: Anime Edition, and it’s not something that is overly strenuous to watch. Though, you probably knew that already. With a title like Laid Back Camp, the tone of the series is fairly self-explanatory. Like other shows of this type, Laid Back Camp is a series that focuses much more on its atmosphere, wrapping that up in a layer of cute girls to help sell the whole ensemble. And this is a feat that it accomplishes fairly well, all things considered, without too much ripping off of other similar shows. Sure, there are some throwbacks to shows that came before it, the most obvious being in one of its secondary characters Aoi, who from a design perspective holds many K-On character tropes as far as her design (like the body of Mio, the eyebrows of Mugi, and the voice of Yui). But the main cast is far more unique. However, we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Ladies, gentlemen, and others, my name is Arkada and welcome to Glass Reflection. Today, the 2018 anime from C-Station, based on the manga of the same name: Yuru Camp, or Laid Back Camp. Let’s Jam.
At the start of the series, we get introduced to a girl named Rin, whose personality quirk is that she enjoys going out to camping sites in the off-season when it’s a bit colder and more barren as a way to relax. What I like about Rin’s personality is that she’s not a socially outcast person like you might expect. She’s perfectly able to be in social situations and conversations with her peers, but she’s an example of someone who is able to enjoy and appreciate the solitude that she can get. It’s a refreshing change. Too often I’ve seen the common trope of the outcast that is so far into a shell that they need an extrovert to coax them out and show them how great the world is. But Rin is just like, “Hey, I see the beautiful world every day from my tent, get on my level.”
Her new pink-haired friend Nadeshiko is a bit more atypical, being the overly hyperactive girl who is just excited about everything until she’s not, at which point her energy dies and she just curls up into a comf ball on the ground for a while. Thankfully, Nadeshiko’s seiyuu makes her feel far more genuine of a person than she might otherwise have been.
So Rin inadvertently shows Nadeshiko the joys of camping that lead her to join her school’s outdoor club to meet two other equally quirky girls to do camping activities with and the show proceeds by showcasing the various joys of camping and learning how to camp with our group of mostly novices.
I’m not actually sure how accurate the show is to the true camping experience, mostly because the climate of the Fuji area is probably quite different from my memory of camping on the grounds of Algonquin Park. Plus, I have to be honest, camping has never really been my thing. But if camping was like this, I would totally camp all the freaking time!
I DO know that the show is accurate as all hell in how expensive camping is, though it does gloss over a number of things. While actual numbers are displayed for things like rentals and some pieces of equipment that the girls research, it doesn’t tell us the numbers to the tune of close to the $800 that would be needed to cover Rin’s existing camping gear. And that’s just a rough estimate too, considering what all of her gear looks like and trying to find equivalents online. So to get all of that set up, it’s quite a large investment and not many people can pay an Elric’s price for all that stuff. Good thing Rin’s equipment was mostly hand-me-downs from her grandfather.
The series is not too shy about flaunting narrative coincidences to suit its needs. The fact that our main characters meet, only to find out the next day that they go to the same school, is questionable enough. But then on their first camping trip together, they meet their future teaching advisor before she even joins their school’s faculty. ♫ IT’S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL ♫ These are minor quips, but they’re things that just over time have come to bug me when I see them used in anime.
Counteracting that though, the narrative deftly avoids any semblance of melodrama between the cast. This is mostly because – in true “cute girls do cute things” fashion – all the cast are the most perfectly understanding and amazing human beings and nothing in the world would force them to act otherwise. So any possible arguments are quickly snuffed out before they ever become a thing, and even stressful moments are all played off as not a big deal.
I’d like to say that the characters were always laid back about the whole thing, but that’s a bit too on the nose. Despite its title though, details in the art are anything but laid back in many situations. There’s a very heavy focus in this series on the minutia of things. While some static shots can be a little more lackadaisical in style, there are also a lot of the small movements that are done in great detail. The landscapes of the series remind me a lot of the anime series Aria, and the tone of both series is similar, so that’s not that surprising. And despite seeing a variety of different shots of Mt. Fuji over the course of the show, its appearance never ceases to calm me.
Until, of course, the opening theme for the show kicks in and I have to scramble for the remote to skip ahead. I’ve seen that a lot of people really enjoy the upbeat energy that this show’s opening has, and it is quite energetic, I’m just not a fan of the song. I grew up listening to Michel Jackson and the Jackson 5 on repeat ad nausea ‘til I couldn’t stand some of their music anymore. Even the soothing appearance of some of my favourite characters from this past season couldn’t help me get over this when the skip button would do just as well.
Laid Back Camp is the kind of show where, if I were a doctor and thought that I could use anime to calm a patient and soothe anxieties, I’d prescribe this series. It’s an immensely charming and fluffy show that exists in a rose-coloured world about the joys of camping, but it’s not so rose-coloured that you couldn’t see the possibility of these situations actually occurring if you had that kind of luck and patience.
Some of the show’s rough patches – like the forced slapstick of the sister character or the nagging prattle of a narrator that was used when a character’s inner voice would have done – get smoothed out after the first few episodes, leaving the vast majority of the series as a calming remedy for our stressful lives.
As such, I would like to present Laid Back Camp with the Glass Reflection rating to buy it. It would be far cheaper to do that than to actually get the equipment to go camping. Plus, then you can watch this within the warmth and comfort of your own home, instead of the potentially chillier outdoors. I don’t want to knock the camping experience. I’m sure it’s quite lovely, especially when you limit your camping time to the offseason like Rin does. It’s just that I tend to be a solitary indoor creature. I like shelter. I like warmth. I would be lying though if I said that the show didn’t almost make me want to try camping again. Almost.
If you are interested in the series, it’s available for streaming over on Crunchyroll (if you happen to have access to that website), and the original manga that the series is based off of is available for pre-order by our good friends over at Bookwalker.
For alternate anime recommendations, allow me to point you towards some of my favourite anime of this type, starting with the aforementioned Aria the Animation. It’s another calming series about a young girl who is in training to become a tour guide to a water city very much like modern day Venice. There are quite a few seasons to it, but each of them is cleanly separated. I still would start with the first one, even though you don’t necessarily need to. Second recommendation goes to Kiniro Mosaic, which follows a group of Japanese high school girls and their two friends from England and contains all of the culture shock value that one might expect from such a grouping. Between those two, you should hopefully find something to your liking.
And until next time – ladies, gentlemen, and others – stay frosty.
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