Chisato Mizusawa is the kind of hard-working employee that every office manager dreams off. She is cooperative, knowledgeable, takes initiative, and is well-respected by her younger co-workers. Curiously, however, she never tags along when everybody goes out for drinks. Is she just anti-social or trying to keep work and private life separate?
Nope. Turns out that Chisato is just the worst alcoholic imaginable.
Love is Like a Cocktail is a series of 3-minute shorts about Chisato’s life and drinking habits. Her husband is a skilled bartender, who always sees to it that his hard-working wife has something delicious to drink after another day at the office. Whether that’s a fruity cocktail to brighten up a sour mood or an Irish coffee to loosen up a night of watching horror movies.
It’s an adorable idea, made extra fun by just how lovable Chisato and her husband Sora are. They’re a wonderful couple who support each other and remain lovey-dovey even years into their relationship. The side-characters are also fun, even though they get very little focus due to the anime’s brief runtime. I was particularly fond of Chisato’s rival, a co-worker who is super ambitious and competes with her for projects, without ever coming of as envious or mean-spirited over any of it.
The short runtime does end up being the ONA’s greatest weakness, I have to admit. While it’s fun to breeze through a series like this, you never get to see quite enough of Chisato and Sora’s relationship, or the going-ons of her work, to make the story feel satisfying to sit through. The anime keeps having to rush out a mini-plot and then rush back home so we can get to the episode’s featured drink.
Getting to see Sora make the drink would also have been a nice touch. Instead you just get a list of vague ingredients and pointers, which makes it seems like the anime is more directed towards people that already know a lot about bartending? Or maybe it’s just not included because that would strain the minuscule runtime.
Honestly, the drinking gets to be quite repetitive. They try to make a running gag out of Chisato’s reaction to alcohol, but instead it just feels like you get slightly-altered repeats of the same 20-second scene in every episode. It’s not even that great of a joke, so having it repeat constantly in a show already pressed for time is pretty bad.
If you’re into comedy anime about adult characters or just really like alcohol, then you may as well watch Love is Like a Cocktail. Its runtime is basically negligible and it does have a lot of cute moments to it. Its flawed, but in anime this short you probably won’t have time to start feeling bitter over that.
I like that it seems like good fun and isn’t afraid to make fun of itself, but the jokes getting old would end up making it feel super tedious for me. I remember this from the anime BPS (I think that’s what it was called) and by the end, I was so happy to just be done with it.
The running gag they got here is very comparable to the one from Battle Programmer, but with the shorter runtime it’s more of a bother.