Sentimental sap in the best possible way: A review of The Concierge

It turns out that it doesn’t matter that a whole anime about a trainee concierge does not need to know what a concierge is.

The location for Production I.G.’s feature length isn’t a hotel but an exclusive department store, and the so-called-concierges are shopping assistants.

How exclusive is the department store? It’s there for extinct animals, who wander around as their anthropomorphic furry selves while we humans, or those who feel sorry for murdering a whole species, run around as staff. 

Okay, maybe recent years have evolved the use of concierge to general hospitality or animal heaven. As I said, it turns out not to matter.

Plot

A young girl gets her dream job as a trainee concierge in an extinct animal shopping centre, but can she keep it?

One improbably angry master spy with a comedic knack for popping out from hidden panels in the walls, behind coat racks and other (even more) unlikely places seems to want to fire her. That’s before the nightmare scenario of an HR headcount consultant is brought in — and, hey, I thought this was supposed to be Heaven, not hell.

Apply a half-dozen bizarre shopping assistant challenges – such as finding a perfume no longer being made or helping with a wedding proposal – and that’s that. There’s no more plot and just sentimental sap in the best possible way.

I’ve been calling the Hokkyoku store Heaven as my explanation as to why extinct animals are wandering around in it. For all I know, these are all DNA rebuilds, but a bit like job titles, it turns out not to matter. 

What matters is how you act. The message is that it pays to be kind, even when that’s hard and risky. 

Look and Feel

I’m told the original The Concierge at Hokkyoku Department Store has detailed Where’s Wally/Where’s Waldo style images. The anime hints at those; there are some busy scenes, but I don’t think turning illustrations at that level of complexity and detail would work. However, I do see it working in a graphic novel and I’m a tiny bit tempted to track it down and find out.

Instead, we get a department store that’s hard to imagine because it’s clean and busy. There are staff! Sure, many customers are still jerks, but buying online hasn’t come to Hokkyoku yet.

The Concierge is bright but with pastel shades rather than bold colours. It’s Heaven, or someplace like that, after all, so despite the glamour, there’s a touch of conservative and sobriety to the designs there. It’s also very retro, as you might expect.

In terms of feel, what starts with hijinks and surreality, making it all feel safely fantasy and funny, The Concierge takes a turn towards the sombre, following the colour tone, and gets a touch serious. Not too severe, you understand; you can still expect elephants in hats, but a bit more serious.

Overall

I thought The Concierge would also be an event at Scotland Loves Anime here in Edinburgh this weekend. I was wrong. We’re at the end of day two of the long weekend, and it’s been one of the best I’ve seen.

You might want to know that Japanese celebs do many animal voices. I also got to see the feature-length show on the big screen here in Europe, and I see press coverage that says Crunchyroll will/did so a cinema release in the States.