It’s Working!! episode 1, and the diner Wagnaria is looking for more help, and a small girl named Poplar is given the job to find it. She eventually finds a boy who is willing to take on the job.

A small diner in Hokkaido named Wagnaria is looking for additional part-time help due to being short staffed. However, despite posting ads, they can’t find anyone who wants to work there. In a last desperate bid to find a new worker, they send out a small high school girl named Poplar Taneshima to recruit someone.

Poplar tries her best to ask everyone she knows, but no one is willing to work at the diner. She soon has to stoop to asking random people on the street, but naturally, she gets no takers. Eventually she runs into a boy who, at first thinks Poplar is a lost small child due to her small size. However, he finally agrees to work at the diner after being shown that not only is Poplar a high school student (at his very high school!) but also a year old than them…and because he finds her smallness cute.

On his first day, the boy introduces himself as Souta Takanashi, which is apparently a difficult to remember name given the kanji used to spell it. Poplar is put in charge of training Souta, though Souta soon finds that Poplar is unable to do half the tasks in the resturant due to her small size.

Souta also soon meets the other employees: Jun Satou, a serious looking but nice cook who often helps Poplar at the tasks she can’t do; Hiroomi Souma, the other cook, who seems to like to gossip and slack off; Yachiyo, a waitress who nonchalantly appears to carry around a sword; Kyouko Shirafuji, the manager of the restaurant who is sensitive about her age, but is also very protective of her employees; and Mahiru Inami, who has an extreme fear of guys, and attacks them whenever she sees one.

However, Souta has his own quircks, such as saying that Poplar is “just like a water flea” because he loves things that are small and helpless. He also calls his 28 year old age-sensitive boss “quite old,” and ends up getting put on the schedule every day as a result until Poplar finds out what he did and gets him to apologize. Unfortunately, he also gets slugged by the man-fearing Mahiru as well.

I wasn’t planning on blogging this, but after watching the first episode, I thought it was worthy to give it a try. Yeah, there is a lot of moe in this show, but I don’t think it’s overboard. I also have to laugh at the fact that Souta thinks everyone at the diner is weird when he isn’t exactly normal himself.

I’m sure we’ll meet more employees later as well, given that there were a lot more names on the schedule than people we’ve met at the diner, and I’m pretty sure I spotted 3 people who weren’t introduced yet. I’ll be interested to see who else works there and what their quirks are.

I guess needless to say, I found the first episode funny. Also, while the animation wasn’t necessarily “sharp” (for lack of a better term), it seemed like it was pretty good. Maybe the only distracting point is that the episode seemed to move at quite a brisk pace at times, but I don’t think it was anything that was too bad.

Also, I think Poplar comes off as a very good character so far, which has a good portion of cuteness without being annoying either.