Michiro Ueyama is incredible. His real younger brother is Tetsuro Ueyama, who did the character design for the masterpiece RD Sennou Chosashitsu (Real Drive), is highly regarded by his peers, and is called an undervalued genius. Michiro Ueyama himself has an astonishing résumé — he's been fighting on as a manga artist for 35 years since his 1990 debut — and the fact that Villainess Reincarnation Uncle is his very first original work to be animated is just too cool. Continuing to do something takes energy. After all, first there's the "getting started" that most people find too much of a hassle, then countless walls, then unbelievable effort to clear them, until you finally find your own path properly and can run down it — and after that it's like running on endlessly through a goalless world. Even if there are small rewards along the way, many times more hardships come crashing in. And if you don't keep running, working hard without rest, you get overtaken more and more... To keep at it in a world like that for 35 years and finally reach an anime adaptation — honestly, you could make an anime of the artist's own documentary; that's how dramatic it is.
The original work itself is incredibly fun. At first the premise was serialized irregularly on pixiv, but it won overwhelming support and began serialization in a commercial magazine.
It is a work in the trendy "poke fun at the villainess" genre, but its substance is quite unusual: a 52-year-old otaku civil-servant uncle reincarnates into another world as the soul inside a villainess. The hook of this setup goes without saying, but Ueyama himself, being an elite of the first otaku generation (the same generation as the protagonist Kenzaburo Tondabayashi), brings a depth of knowledge that adds fuel to the fun. On top of that, it's overwhelmingly easy to watch as an anime. There are no unpleasant developments, yet it isn't boring in the way of plodding along at the same tempo, and it makes you want to know what happens next in the story — as you'd expect.
The soundtrack is superbly done, too
Of course, the soundtrack is fantastic as well. Pieces that feel like refined Baroque-style music, pieces with a faintly calm and elegant atmosphere wafting through, somewhat solemn pieces... and so on. Maybe it's like a sensation of the bright castle-music vibe you'd hear in an RPG mixing with cheerful, dazzling sounds. I can't go into detail because it would be a spoiler, but in other works, a person who gets hit by a truck and reincarnated into another world usually shows a lot of confusion and panic at the start — yet Kenzaburo Tondabayashi, maybe out of the wisdom of age, or maybe because he's an otaku, doesn't take it too heavily, with a kind of easygoing "guess I'll just settle into this world" attitude that matches the soundtrack beautifully — refined yet not too stiff, never too heavy, with a fun atmosphere.
The only exception is the music playing in the background when, occasionally, he tries to act like the villainess Grace and is being harsh to Anna Doll in his imagination — there a stiff, by-the-book orchestral-suite-like timbre plays, minor-chord-driven and unsettling. But in the end it betrays you in a good way with a soundtrack as fresh and dazzling as the arrival of spring.
You can feel that the original work, the anime, and the soundtrack were all made with enjoyment
Precisely because the anime industry these days is evolving so tremendously, there are many works sharpening their blades as if in competition — but this anime is pleasantly free of strain, and that's exactly why it's easy to watch and the story slips smoothly into you. It feels as if it's teaching us that this lack of strain, lack of pushiness, lack of greed is the right "uncle move" for the modern "uncle" generation — a generation that can be branded as out-of-touch geezers and tends to get the cold shoulder from society.
By all means, when you're worn out from anime brimming with intensity, why not let Villainess Reincarnation Uncle soothe you?
Cited from the official site https://tensei-ojisan.com/
