thoughts on the Monogatari series

15 Apr, 2026

Back in high school, I was a big fan of the anime Bakemonogatari. From today's viewpoint, this is an old anime; the first season aired in 2009. After watching it (because the sequels weren't out yet, it must've been ca. 2011), I went out of my way to get the original light novel it was based on. It ended up becoming the first book in Japanese that i finished reading in its entirery. After finishing it, I told myself that I'd read the whole series.

However, over the years, taste changes. Around the tail end of my university years, I had truly "grown out" of the series. Monogatari is very meta, subverting and playing around with typical anime tropes. This meta slant is why I held onto the series for relatively long, because even though some tropes were really bad, there were used in a self-aware / self-parodising way that made them bearable. But even then, the series is still geared towards a late-teens-to-early-twenties otaku audience.¹ Past a certain point, I just didn't feel like engaging with it anymore.

Still, despite having "parted ways" with the Monogatari series a long time ago, it still has a few elements that I find quite fascinating and have never seen anywhere else.

First, there's the use of banter and wordplay. In the story, the characters often go into long asides that are really only tangentially related to the plot or the problems at hand. They serve as a means for characterisation, but are often nonsensical and "unnatural", in a "no one talks like this" kind of way. Sometimes they're literally just comedy skits, sometimes they're used for exploring the characters in a more earnest way. But they're always enjoyable.²

Another aspect that I like is the anime's editing style, especially in the first season, directed by Tatsuya Oishi.³ It's very ... unconventional, real hipster bait. It features a lot of quick cuts to colored slides with writing or images on them that disappear so quickly that you can only catch a quick glimpse of the content. They almost function like subliminal messages of sorts.

Example of a cut-in scene spelling out "end of flashback."

These slides have different purposes. Some of them, like the one above, contain meta commentary, marking the start and end of a flashback scene. Sometimes they just spell out concepts related to what's happening on screen, like this one from the Kizumonogatari movie with "tragedy" in French. Others contain full sentences or paragraphs of writing (often direct pulls from the light novel) that provide some additional info or glimpse at a character's thoughts, like this one. These longer ones often go by way too quickly and are not intended to be read properly - they merely provide some tiny bits of extra information. Others don't contain any meaningful info at all and apparently just act as "dividers" that break up the flow of the scenes.⁴

This one says "black scene" and is used extensively throughout the series, apparently during moments that coincide with the main character blinking.

I've seen people calling this style "pretentious", probably meaning that it feels like it wants to be different for the sake of being different. And honestly, that might be the case, but that's precisely what I like about it. At the very least, it's highly unique and instantly recognisable as the "Monogatari editing style." This is evidenced by the tons of parodies of it you can find on YouTube. They're usually called "X but it's (edited like) Monogatari" and use music from the anime's OST as a background track. Here are a few examples:

• Kilogram of steel and feathers but it's Monogatari.
• Steamed Hams but it's edited like the Monogatari series
• the American Psycho card scene but it's edited like the Monogatari series

Another element, paired with these slide cuts, are scenery or landscape shots showing the city that the characters live in (or the surrounding countryside). They are rendered in a 2000s vector art kind of style that accentuates the silhouettes of things, often centered around architecture and with exaggerated colouring.⁵ They're also almost always devoid of people (except for the characters of course) and feel a lot like the empty video game maps that I talked about in another post from earlier this month. Combined with the soundtrack, these backgrounds and establishing shots create a minimalistic, contemplative and sometimes even melancholic atmosphere that contrasts with the anime's (often very chaotic) tone. This video showcases the atmosphere perfectly.⁶

One of the Monogatari series background / landscape shots showing an industrial complex at night.

Sometimes I wish there was a TV series with a similar style, or a novel with a similar kind of writing / humour, just without all the anime tropes that I now find to be kind of cringe-worthy (and in some cases downright uncomfortable). I've done a bit research - Terry Pratchett is often recommended for the sort of self-referential, self-parodising tone, and in terms of film editing, the French New Wave is cited as a strong influence. Wes Anderson movies also feel similar in the way that they often feature static shots and incorporate elements like miniatures. At the end of the day, these are not quite the same though.

Now, as an adult, I often feel like I shouldn't like Monogatari anymore, and that praising any of its qualities is already giving it too much credit. But that's irrational; after all, things don't have to be all black and white. I don't see myself as a fan of the series as a whole anymore, but it has left a lasting impression on me, and some of its elements have become part of my "body of influences." Monogatari will always stay in a grey area between fascinating and uncomfortable for me. Instead of rejecting it completely or merely searching for pre-existing things that are similar (just without the "flaws"), I want to treat the elements that appeal to me as valuable material that I can put to practical use in my own creative projects.

#aesthetics #anime #creative