![]() There are jokes, but they're either jokes the characters themselves make, or they're jokes arising from everyday situations. We see the characters go to school, go shopping, go on trips, spend time together at home or in a club after school. These are slow-paced shows about everyday life. The classical examples for slice of life in anime are shows like K-On, Yotsuba&!, and Ichigo Marshmallow. (Pure slice of life is vanishingly rare almost all slice of life shows have drama or comedy elements, but they're the kind of little dramas and jokes that arise in mundane life, not huge scripted events.) One could argue that The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is slice of life, though I consider it more of a drama. It is naturalist, and in some sense it's about everyday experiences in a war zone, but the war zone setting is not mundane to the characters at all. For this reason, The Hurt Locker is not slice of life. That's still slice of life the important thing is that the experience is mundane to the characters, within the setting. They might be naturalist works about everyday experiences somewhere where every day is very different from what audiences know. So what does this have to do with slice of life? Wikipedia defines slice of life as "the use of mundane realism depicting everyday experiences in art and entertainment." Essentially, slice of life works are naturalist works which are about mundane, everyday experiences. Some works which never reach outside the bounds of real life are nevertheless theatrical, as we see with Hana Yori Dango and Rurouni Kenshin (to an extent). Some fantasy and science fiction works are naturalistic. Note that this has nothing to do with genre. In film, the style of The Hurt Locker is called cinema verité it's also used to interesting effect in the far less realistic District 9. The events of the film mean what the viewer thinks they mean there's no sense of a writer behind it, more of an editor or reporter, who presents certain "factual" events for our consideration. ![]() There is no sense of dramatic import or fate behind the events of The Hurt Locker-at least, the film does not attempt to impose one on the audience. The American films The Hurt Locker and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel are naturalistic, despite the former taking place in a war zone.Most other shoujo romances are also theatrical. The conflicts here are interpersonal and revolve around romance rather than the physical conflicts of Rurouni Kenshin, but the characters are nonetheless larger than life and the plotlines carefully architected. The shoujo manga Hana Yori Dango is also theatrical.Most other shounen action shows (Naruto, One Piece, Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho) are also theatrical. ![]() Although it (for the most part) sticks to the realm of possibility, the characters, their internal struggles, and their interpersonal conflicts, are highly dramatized and expressed through epic clashes that affect the fate of an entire nation. So I've used American films as examples of naturalism, because I want to be clear that slice of life is a subset of naturalist, not an equivalent term.) (It's hard to find examples of naturalistic anime which aren't also slice of life, because, well, it's anime it's inherently unnatural. They can still have conflicts, plots, and interesting characters, but those things will all tend to be truer to life and less artificed. By contrast, naturalistic works try to tell stories which develop the way things tend to develop in real life. Theatrical works use dramatic conflicts, larger-than-life characters, architected plotlines, and other artificial manipulations of events and causality to tell a story which the audience will find interesting. You can think of all media as falling on a spectrum between theatrical and naturalistic. Like everything in literary and film criticism, this is all pretty subjective, so people will differ on whether they think an individual series qualifies as slice of life under this definition or not, but the concepts should be pretty universal. Toshinou-san's answer covers the general sense of the term very well, so in this answer, I'm going to try and fit it more into a critical framework, which can be helpful for understanding whether a given individual work is slice of life. ![]() This term actually originates outside of anime, but it's rather common for anime to have slice of life elements, so it's a common term in the anime fandom. ![]()
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