Kamichu!
“Mitsue-chan,” the rather hapless junior high student named Yurie announces one morning, “last night, I became a god.”
“Oh.” Mitsue is busy trying to get the straw into her juice pack. “What kind of god?”
“I’m not sure…”
So begins the most laid-back show about ordinary people becoming gods ever created. Yurie’s divine transformation doesn’t really help her that much; true, she can now see the spirits around town and talk to her cat, but her grades are on a steady decline and her divine duties aren’t helping. Her “new best friend” Matsuri is making her give paid consultations, the original town god has gone missing, and to top things off her slightly eccentric crush is completely incapable of remembering her name. With the support of her supplicants, can she manage to be both student and god?
This series has a nearly perfect balance of cuteness, childhood nostalgia, humor, weirdness, and flat-out feel-good niceness. Of course I wouldn’t like it if it didn’t also have some excellently explored themes about the passage from childhood into maturity and the innate sense of connection to the divine felt by everyone, but the series is equally enjoyable on levels visceral, emotional, and intellectual. It’s one of possibly only two or three shows that I believe it to be literally impossible to dislike; you cannot die without seing this series! (I mean that literally… since no one wants to live forever, you really ought to see it.)