Anime YouTube is a bended and yet interconnected beast. On the surface you have figures like Gigguk, Mother’s Basement, and the Anime Man, while under the surface you have figures like Watthewut, Satumi the Neet, Ember Reviews, and UrbanTheMyth. Like the anime that they hold so dear, the anime community is highly self-referential and somewhat insolar. As I’ve been increasingly observant of this community ever since summer last year, I’m one of relatively few commenters who has almost every anime YouTuber under the sun. Considering the views my absolute favorite anituber, Satumi the Neet, gets on his channel’s videos, I’m assuming that maybe only a thousand or so people have seen more anitubers than I have. Over the course of the past year, I’ve spiral far down to the depths of this community. I’ve seen several small anime channels with less than a dozen videos and I’ve been keeping up with several of the up and comers who have been working hard to improve their content. I want to shine a spotlight on bottom of the well of anitube, and maybe you can check some of these guys out, maybe find some stuff you like, I don’t know.
The channel I’m covering today has particular intrigue to me, as I discovered them precisely when they released their very first video earlier this year. I later found out that they were, in fact, a spin-off of another YouTube channel, Treesicle (cool naming scheme), some of whom’s videos I had also seen. I kept up with their channel for a few videos before ultimately losing interest, since their content felt kind of vapid and thought their points were uninteresting. Though, I regained interest in their channel after scrolling through anituber Digibro’s “Liked Videos” playlist and finding one of the channel’s newer videos there. Then, I returned to their channel, binged a bunch of their content, and now have revised my opinions of them. Firstly, I still find some of Bonsai Pop’s content fairly vapid, normcore anime content. They have more passion than most with how well edited and educated a lot of their videos are. Their video on A Silent Voice in particular sold me on their channel. It integrates a heartfelt expression of everything Kyoto Animation means to them with a fairly gripping emotional core in the second half of the video. I’ve seen a frankly insane number of videos analyzing this film, many simultaneously expressing their personal resonance with the type of story it tells. I still think Bonsai Pop’s video is one of the best out of all of them. A couple of their videos have this personal narrative fairly seamlessly intertwined with them, as well as sometimes strong comedy and consistently engaging editing. They have a small team of people creating videos on the channel, giving certain videos a different style from others depending on who’s writing them. Most of the videos under the moniker of “The Story You Never Knew” are fairly tonally distinct from that A Silent Voice video. Though, both types of content can be pretty great. “The Story You Never Knew” sometimes posits genuinely fascinating information about the anime they talk about, which most people actually probably wouldn’t know.
I’d grade Bonsai Pop a solid B if this were a tier list, and while they’re not a channel I regularly keep up with, I’d still recommend their channel to basically anyone. It’s not the artsiest or the most unique content on the platform, but they can pull out some legitimately moving, interesting, or just entertaining videos, and I think that alone makes them a worthwhile channel in anime YouTube.
The Madokaist Lens 