Lucas and Steve bat their big anime eyes at the CGDCT genre.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Crunchyroll streams A Place Further Than the Universe, After School Dice Club, BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad, Food for the Soul, Hinamatsuri, Laid-Back Camp, Lucky Star, mono, Nichijou, Pop Team Epic, Rock is a Lady’s Modesty, Sound! Euphonium, and Zatsu Tabi. HIDIVE streams Gushing Over Magical Girls, Hidamari Sketch, K-On! Sentai: Girls’ Last Tour is available in physical media.
Azumanga Daioh isn’t legally available.
Lucas
Steve, do you think our readership knows about girls? Do you think that they know they can be cute?? And do you think they know that those hypothetically cute girls are capable of doing things that also have the potential to be cute???
Whoa, Lucas, those are some weighty concepts right there, especially when you smash them together. We might want to repackage that into something a little catchier for the general audience. Zhuzh it up a bit. I’m thinking maybe “Adorable Young Women Performing Lovable Activities.”
Damn, Steve, I think we just stumbled onto a whole new microgenre of anime! If there’s anything TWIA column contributors like to do, it’s break down a given niche of media, figure out how fans engage with it and help it permeate, and see how it fits into the broader anime taxonomy! We’ve given isekai and romcoms enough attention for a while, let’s dig into the quietly enduring Cute Girls Doing Cute Things genre!
Also, we are both well aware that we are two, 30ish adults who are going to be talking at length about deliberately cutesy anime girls. We know what this looks like, we promise we’re not scumbags, and we’re fine with the potential for scumbag association if it means educating and entertaining our audience.
So it goes when we have serious discussions about anime. Or not-so-serious ones! Despite the “This Week” part of our column title, there’s no immediately relevant news prompting this topic. I was literally just taking my post-lunch walk the other day and thought, “Huh, isn’t it interesting that we’re still using CGDCT as a genre/descriptor for a whole class of series?” And now we’re here!
To keep things timely, there are a handful of currently airing anime in that milieu that we will get to, don’t you fear.
But we should probably start at the beginning, which, as far as I can tell, is about two decades ago in the halcyon days of the mid-2000s.
I hinted at it in the opening, but as near as I can tell, Lucky Star was one of the first big anime to get the Cute Girls Doing Cute Things ball rolling. Of course, it was supplemented by series like Nichijou and Azumanga Daioh as well.
Obviously, there are even older anime that fit into the “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” framework, but before the mid/late oughts, most of those anime lived under the “moe” moniker. Which brings me to my first derailing question of the column: Steve, did CGDCT kill moe as a genre descriptor?
I don’t think it did—at least not initially. From what I can remember of online spaces at the time, the two terms existed in tandem. Like, people were talking about K-On! and moe for a while, and that would have been several years after CGDCT would have entered the vernacular. Nowadays, though, I’d agree anecdotally that I don’t see moe used as frequently in English-speaking forums.
I also think it’s interesting that the moniker grew out of a bunch of four-panel gag manga adaptations—Lucky Star, Azumanga, Nichijou, Hidamari Sketch, etc. It could be that, in anime format, the need to flesh out the cast’s lives in between the panels may have organically led to the easygoing vibe, which led to the CGDCT term.
That’s a fair read on how the language has evolved, and I think it tracks. Prepping for this column is how I realized that term has ‘moe’ fallen out of fashion, which was a little weird for me! I’m so used to most people I talk to not knowing even basic terms or language related to anime, that I don’t think much about how this in-group speak changes over time.
You make an interesting point on how the constraints and expectations of anime as a medium led to the creation of the CGDCT term, too! Pop Team Epic excluded, it’s tricky to format a 22-minute anime episode that matches the timing and pacing of a gag manga, and it can be seen how the addition of that slice of life content birthed a unique sub-genre.
And now manga/anime are made with this genre in mind, even if creators may not name it directly. And I think that’s another point of interest. CGDCT is, obviously, an English term. People in Japan aren’t using it. The closest equivalents I could find are in Wikipedia. You’ve got kuuki-kei, which I’d translate to “vibes,” and Nichijou-kei, which is more “slice-of-life.” And with the caveat that this is just a Wikipedia page, the intro to the article does mention CGDCT by name as a foreign equivalent (and it goes on to bring up a bunch of the examples we just mentioned).
It also explains why nobody in Japan would want to use it, because the literal translation “かわいい女の子たちがかわいいことをする” is way too many characters for a genre name.
In all fairness, it’s a pretty clunky name in English, too! As well as being less than descriptive. Anime like A Place Further Than the Universe, Hinamatsuri, and After School Dice Club are all clearly playing around with similar ideas and inspirations, but I’d be quicker to use “A Coming of Age Story,” “Supernatural Comedy,” and “A Special Interest Series” to describe each of those respectfully before the more blanket CGDCT label.
All genre descriptors are, by their nature, reductive. They map stuff onto a big picture, and when you do that, you lose the details that define an individual work. It’s a trade-off our pattern-seeking brains make all the time. Cute Girls Doing Cute Things, however, is a more contentious example than most, and I think there are good reasons for that. One is that it has all the hallmarks of a fandom invention: the unwieldy name, the weird specificity of it, and a tendency for it to be overzealously applied.
We have to talk about how explicitly gendered it is.
While I’m confident that one of my previous examples, Hinamatsuri, fits the CGDCT mold, it also features a male co-lead, which would theoretically disqualify it from this genre. But it’s also legitimately one of the first anime that spring to mind when I think of this genre and its markers, so here I am talking about it again, lol.
And yeah, the gendered element of CGDCT is kind of tricky, especially since there’s a subset of these anime that are somewhat skuzzily catering to a mostly male audience. Don’t get me wrong, most of CGDCT is made for people of all genders and sensibilities, but I feel like the Touhou media empire also fits into the CGDCT genre, and we all know which folks are keeping the lights on over there.
Things always get tricky when we try to talk about an “intended” audience. I mean, many modern shows people would describe as CGDCT are based on manga published in seinen magazines, i.e., targeted to young adult men. But it’s also not like a woman will spontaneously combust if she picks up one of those off the rack. There’s always more nuance.
What I think is interesting is that it’s Western fans who are putting “cute girls” in the genre, while the Japanese equivalents I linked to earlier don’t mention gender at all. We’re talking about the same shows, so the gender balance is also the same—these are overwhelmingly all-female main casts—but we’re the only ones calling attention to that.
That may be where the CGDCT moniker rubs me the wrong way. It feels tongue-in-cheek. It feels defensive.
I’m picking up what you’re putting down. The gendered nature of the labeling implies that the default anime is something like “cool dudes doing cool things.” While I’ll be the first to admit that there is a systemic issue with how women are depicted in all forms of media and especially anime, the CGDCT term perpetuates the idea that most anime is for boys by framing these titles as an exception.
Exactly! It sounds dismissive. As if you could only ironically enjoy watching a cute girl doing a cute thing. That’s a narrative that has plagued anime fandom since well before CGDCT was coined, but in a small way, I think this jokey phrase helps perpetuate that. I mean, not even ANN is exempt. Now, I’m not criticizing this article’s author—and in fact they talk up a lot of anime I love—but the framing of this article is what I’m talking about. The general attitude that CGDCT is a disposable genre…unless you do something ~a little different~ with it.
Circling back, it’s very similar to the conversations about K-On! and moe-poisoning in the early 2010s, before the critical consensus came around to realizing that Naoko Yamada is a genius, and before girl band anime came to rule the world.
I despise the idea of “Elevated Cute Girls Doing Cute Things” for the same reason as I despise terms like “Elevated Horror.” A part of a genre’s designation cannot be based on whether the titles under that banner are good or not! That’s reductive and ignores the iterative nature of artistic mediums.
Getting too in-the-weeds about any genre debate is a losing battle. It’s all arbitrary nonsense. But that doesn’t stop it from being annoying. Like when you end up with the third season of Sound! Euphonium being nominated for “Best Slice-of-Life” at the Anime Awards. The show is a drama. It’s one of the most dramatic dramas. And its third season is more drama than ever.
My suspicion is, ironically, that the character designs are too CGDCT-adjacent, so it doesn’t register as a drama to the wider audience. Which is another whole can of worms.
People rely too much on aesthetics in these genre breakdowns. I’m not a huge Sound! Euphonium guy, but I know just enough to say that, if BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad gets to be celebrated as a music-focused interpersonal drama, there’s no reason Sound! Euphonium shouldn’t be viewed similarly.
That there are more women in Sound! Euphonium cast doesn’t make it automatically “cozier” and therefore more suitable for the slice-of-life category than the drama category.
I also try not to use CGDCT in either my professional or personal writing. “Slice of life” is a perfectly cromulent genre, and if the show is specifically about high school girls in a club doing an activity, I might call it a hobby anime. But since it’s the subject of this column, I would like to go on record as a fan of many CGDCT shows. My favorite go-to example is probably Laid-Back Camp. I think it just nails everything you could want in this genre space. It’s cute, funny, gorgeous to look at, and poignant when it wants to be.
This is where the vague descriptors of the CGDCT genre let me have fun again. The terminology is nebulous enough that I can say that a series we’ve discussed at length before, Gushing Over Magical Girls is probably my favorite CGDCT anime, and NO ONE reading this can get mad at me in the comments for saying Gushing Over Magical Girls is a CGDCT anime!
If I had to give a more conventional answer, I’d say that Nichijou is one of my favorite CGDCT anime. It helped me realize the breadth of the anime medium when I was getting more into the space, and a screening of it at a convention also got me a date back in college! I also have all the faith in the world that the upcoming City: The Animation will push this kind of genre forward the same way the anime adaptation of Keiichi Arawi’s previous work did.
I cannot tell you how excited I am for City. But in the meantime, we’ve got some CGDCT anime airing! See, I told you we’d eventually make this discussion contemporary. Might as well start with mono, which is based on another manga from Laid-Back Camp author afro. You can tell by the eyebrows.
An entire anime about the hobbies of cinematography and photography as hobbies with various locales across Japan as backdrops? On top of their distinctive eyebrow preferences, they’re unmatched in anime that defines the CGDCT genre!
I appreciate all the ways the Laid-Back Camp sensibilities seep into it (because, like I said, I love Laid-Back Camp). But the photography angle is great—another thing I like about afro’s works is the way they use and highlight technology’s beneficial possibilities—and the adaptation is also very lively. I respect afro’s decision to write in a self-insert mangaka fail girl as well.
Especially now that we’re in the dying gasps of the GenAI era (btw, in researching this for this column I came across Google Search AI results claiming that Demon Slayer is a CGDCT anime because Nezuko is a prominent character), it’s cooler than ever to see anime dedicated to specific hobbies or crafts! Now more than ever, we need art that showcases how rewarding these kinds of pursuits can be, and CGDCT anime has this kind of subject matter in spades!
That’s the slice-of-life genre’s bread and butter: taking time to find and depict the artistry in the mundane. That’s why there’s so much overlap with iyashikei. On that subject, we have the appropriately titled Food for the Soul. You could use that as the name of this genre.
Food for the Soul slipped through the cracks for me, but this looks super interesting! I’m interested to see all of the different permutations on “cooking anime” blossom now that Food Wars! won’t be eating everyone’s lunch!
I didn’t like its premiere quite as much as mono’s, but it’s solid. Good food porn, relatably neurotic main character, and the “twist” ending made me laugh.
[Dracula voice] Perhaps the same could be said of all CGDCT anime.
The last one from this season is Zatsu Tabi, which is Rural Tourism: The Anime. And fair enough, because it definitely made me want to revisit Japan, hop on the Shinkansen, and see more places off the beaten path.
I have a few qualms with anime that essentially function as advertisements for specific regions, but all of these sound cozy as heck and like textbook CGDCT series!
One interesting thing about both Food for the Soul and Zatsu Tabi is that their casts are college-age, so these aren’t high school shows. It’s too early to say if that’s the sign of a trend or not, but I support it. Full-grown adults deserve to be cute and cozy, too.
I’ll also say that, for as impractical as the genre can be, it’s endearing to see the EN anime fan community continue to grow and develop new language and shared iconography along the way.
Did you know there’s a synth-pop musician who goes by Cute Girls Doing Cute Things? I didn’t until I started researching for this column and that’s rad as hell!
That’s news to me, too. As clunky as the phrase may be, it stuck. It might not stick around forever, but it’s here now. I just hope we can strive to use it productively and not derisively.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got another anime about wholesome high school girls bonding over their mutual passions to watch.
