The Daily Life of the Immortal King 3 – A Boy and His Dog

Nothing much has changed really. It’s a cute-looking show with decent designs and good animation. I would say the quality has neither gone down nor up. I am getting more used to Chinese voice acting and have randomly decided that I really enjoy the one in this show. That’s about it.

No wait, there is one point that’s a little tangential. I stand by everything I said in the first paragraph. The production is just as good as it always has been. However, compared to season 2, it’s much safer. That’s a nice way of saying it’s more boring.

Season 2 took some really interesting risks with animation style, production techniques, and visuals. They didn’t always pay off but at least you could see how they were trying things out. Even the OP and contextually adapted EDs were something a bit unusual that added a lot to the show for me.

In contrast, season 3 is consistent and expected with its production. There is one single change to the ED towards the last episodes which I picked up on immediately and really liked but that’s about it. If season 2 hadn’t happened, I would have nothing to complain about. As it is, it feels like a step back to go with such a monotone production. I’m sure most viewers will appreciate the consistency though. A lot of people don’t like experimental productions.

This is actually a little tricky. The Daily Life of the Immortal King has always been a quick-fire slapstick comedy. It’s joke after joke with the usual backbone of friendship and coming of age.  A soft-hearted gag shows that I often compare to Saiki K.

And that is still what it is in season 3. The first half, maybe even 2/3rds, is extremely episodic. It feels like there’s even less of a connective thread between the episodes than in past seasons. This time, it really felt like you could just watch the episodes in any order and it wouldn’t be an issue. And by the very nature of this sort of episodic structure, there were some I liked way more than others. I’m pretty sure most viewers will feel the same.

However, there is some very slow, very subtle build-up in the background. The friction between the displaced and conquered demons, and the victorious but mostly blissfully ignorant humans that I mentioned in my summary. It’s a slow burn that eventually leads to one of the more satisfying season conclusions the show has to offer. There’s even some extremely subtle commentary about immigration and policing that I am surprised was allowed in Chinese animation.

This makes me think that I might actually be reading a bit too much into it. But you know, just the fact that a person can have an anti-establishment reading of the show is already something to be impressed by as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t want to make it sound as if The Daily Life f the Immortal King has gone all serious and political in season 3. It’s still very much a show where one of the punch lines is Wang Ling freeing an all-powerful, all-knowing dragon from a 10 000-year-old confinement spell just so he can turn him into a Yugi-oh card because kids were making fun of him. It’s a silly show. But there were a few touches that seemed a bit less silly.

However, for me, the actual heart of the season was Froggy 2. In many ways, this season was about his coming of age and finally gave him a bit more character development. Froggy 2 has always been one of my favourites and the conflicting moral depth they allowed him to have this time around created an actually compelling character in a show often populated by archetypes.

This more engaged character development is something that has really been missing from the show and if season 4 continues the trend, they could really end up with a fantastic series.

Once again, the episodes were roughly 18 minutes rather than the usual 25 or so. And once again, I really enjoyed this format. It’s not going to be ideal for every show of course, but I think it worked particularly well for this series. It kept the pace brisk and you never ended up having to watch one of the less interesting episodes for too long and once the overarching plot kicked in, the short episodes easily got strung together into a coherent whole.

For everything I’ve said about The Daily Life of the Immortal King season 3, at the end of the day, I was left watching a show about a boy and his dog. Obviously, I’m going to love it. I have no choice.

I think I made it pretty obvious that it’s Froggy 2