English Dub Season Review: Kemono Michi – Rise Up Season One

Since the debut of Sword Art Online in 2012, the Isekai genre has run rampant on mainstream anime. Log Horizon, Overlord, That Time I was Reincarnated as a Slime, Shield Hero, just to name a few. By now, it feels like we’ve had close to about a hundred shows that have played the tropes and clichés of it straight, stretchy, zig zaggy, and all the way around to the point that it was hard to see anything new left to do with it anymore. Enter Kemono Michi, which comes to us with all of that in mind, stood proudly, and SAID…that this was right. But we can at least still have a lot of fun with it. What this series brings to the many now plain jane shows is a pretty novel premise and mash up of genres that may not always do the best it can, but still manages to pull off a surprisingly amusing time out of it.

Said premise follows Genzo Shibata, also known as Animal Mask, champion pro-wrestler and not-so-secret animal lover about to face his final match with his longtime rival. However, as the fight commences, Genzo finds himself forcibly summoned to a fantasy world in order to be its hero!…which he promptly outright refuses, suplexes the adorable queen, and runs off into town in order to start a new life. But that life is not to be the typical fantasy adventurer, but the owner of a pet shop for demon beasts! With the aid of the money conscious wolf-girl Shigure, the half dragon girl with bottomless stomach Hanako, and her vampire woman-servant Carmilla, Genzo sets out to make his dream come true, as well as to pet all the fluffy, feathery, and scaly critters he can get his hands on.

Right off the bat, Kemono Michi does its best to set itself from its peers with its less than conventional protagonist, Genzo. Unlike other Isekai leads who end up warped out of their mundane lives into worlds of pure escapism full of cool adventures and hot girls, Genzo is more focused on his dream of caring for animals than anything else, even to the bewilderment of the other characters around him who expect a regular hero character. But, conversely, he’s also a tried and true pro-wrestler, fit to bursting with muscle and physical ability and a true showman in the ring. It’s around this odd twist on a typical isekai protagonist that much of the story and comedy revolves.

However, while the uniqueness of this is certainly fun for the first handful of episodes, it does start to feel like the series falls back on it over better utilizing its characters, world, and story. About a third of the way through the season, a group of antagonists are introduced that offer a cracked mirror on the protagonists, and so there starts to be an ever growing sense of dread forming as they raise their forces and creep closer to our heroes. Only the stuff going on WITH those heroes ends up feeling unfittingly mundane. This could be part of the joke, but it feels like there should have been some escalation or world-building or even just progression on getting the pet shop together, which ultimately goes unresolved after what is actually a fitting finale. Not to mention that most of the characters don’t really budge that much as characters.

In the end, I believe there’s plenty of room for this series to grow from simply a quirky take on a genre, but this season (hopefully the first of at least a few) left me wanting for what this sort of story could have been. It’s got plenty going on with its subversion of the usual takes of things, but then doesn’t work outside of the slightly bigger box it gives itself. It’s by introducing these sorts of tweaks and twists to stale formulas that genres can continue to grow and thrive, which I think Kemono Michi has the potential to do for Isekai shows. Maybe that’s asking for too much from what might prove to be a disposable series but I think it can be the start of something great.