The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

mono

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The Photography Club and the Cinema Club are in danger of shutting down until club Satsuki, An, and Sakurako decide to form the Cinephoto Club. They are asked to be the main characters for manga artist Haruno's latest work centered around action cameras. The girls head out to capture the lovely sights of Japan, experimenting with gadgets beyond photography and film equipment and, of course, chomping on the local delicacies along the way.

mono is based on a manga by Afro. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

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James Beckett
Rating:

Mono is the type of “Cute Girls Doing a Hobby” that resonates with me more than the usual fare, though it took me a while to get on to the show's wavelength. A cartoon like this is only as good as its cast, after all, and Mono's premiere is slow going to establish its core crew of gals. Satsuki is a perfectly fine protagonist to start with, but she's not an especially charismatic protagonist on her own, so the episode doesn't begin to pick up until we're introduced to her infatuated counterpart, An. Even then, the premiere didn't really click with me entirely until Haruno ed the trio and balanced out Satsuki and An's juvenile personalities with something just a touch more mature (and chaotic).

By the end of this first episode, though, I finally started to get what kind of anime Mono is trying to be, and I think I dig it. It's more abstract and roughshod visuals are actually pretty charming, for one, even if they're not the most traditionally “pretty” cuts of animation you're bound to see. If you want a more bucolic anime that contains a more typical veneer of shiny anime polish, then you're likely better off with the other famous adaptation of author Afro's work, Laid-Back Camp. Mono is much less about the beautiful vistas and the emotional refuge of camping with your pals, and much more about enjoying the unpredictable mischief that a bunch of teenaged girls can get up to when they've got all this modern photographic technology to mess around with and no shortage of ambition.

I think the scene that sold me on Mono was when the girls strapped a helmet-cam to Taishou the cat and made one of those fun video-montages of cats getting into scraps with their local feline competition. It's the kind of unique and genuinely interesting little adventure that makes the audience connect with Satsuki and An's hobbies. When you've seen as much anime as I have, the novelty of the “Cute Girls” part of the equation has long since lost its luster, so shows like Mono have to have some legitimately meaningful stories to tell and a cast that has more going for it than decent character designs. Mono has those qualities so far and should make for an easy seasonal pick for any viewers that crave something more easygoing to the time.