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 entirety. 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, they came with self-aware / self-parodising writing that made them bearable. But even then, the series was still geared towards a late-teens-to-early-twenties otaku audience.¹ Past a certain point, I just didn't feel like it was for me anymore.

Still, despite having "parted ways" with the Monogatari series a long time ago, it 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 At least compared to your standard, run-of-the-mill anime, it's very unconventional - real hipster bait. For instance, it features a lot of quick cuts to colored slides with writing or images on them that disappear so quickly that only quick glimpses of their content can be caught. They almost function like subliminal messages.

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. Some 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 tend to flash really fast and require doing back and then stopping the video for each individual slide. In that way, they add "rewatch value", but even in the first watch, they provide some texture by letting the viewer catch a few keywords, tiny bits of extra information. And then there's slides that don't contain any meaningful info at all and 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 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 main cast, 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 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.

Today, I wouldn't call myself a fan of the series 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 straddle a grey area for me - fascinating in some aspects, and supremely awkward in others. 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