Mona and Lisa, putting a smile on your face.
Mona Lisa's Silly Talknote is an original YouTube video channel where manga is written out and read out loud. It is an anthology series that has the same characters playing out different stories. The Japanese YouTube channel is here
. There is no English channel.
While the characters all retain the same names, basic appearances, and base personalities, their roles, relationships with one another and even their ages change drastically from one story to the next. This includes who is a protagonist and who is an antagonist, though there are some characters who lean more towards one or the other role.
Mona Lisa's Silly Talk contains examples of:
- Art Shift: The series uses this a lot with the characters, usually to parody other media.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The earliest episodes don't use the cyclical cast, and they start trickling in slowly at first.
- Establishing Shot: The series uses this frequently, with the speech bubbles appearing over the setting. Unusually, many of these shots are in the middle of a scene, not just at the beginning.
- First-Person Peripheral Narrator: One episode is about Gen, a internist at a hospital, having a major disagreement with Kuroha, a specialist, about how to care for a patient. While Gen is clearly the main character, the story is told from head nurse Hisame's point of view, to give a more balanced assessment of the conflict, which has no clear villain. Hisame's own involvement with the main conflict is minimal.
- Gilligan Cut: This episode has Kurumi warning Sora about married people pretending to be single using a matchmaking app that matched Sora with Tetsu, only for Sora to confidently say that an honest man like Tetsu would never do such a thing, which is cut immediately to a scene with Tetsu having dinner with his wife and her parents.
- Motor Mouth: From almost the beginning in 2019 to around late 2021/early 2022, all of the characters spoke very fast.
- Recurring Extra: Three characters with different shades of purple for their hair, Mobumi, Mobuko, and Moburo, the "Mobu Trio," often appear in various extra, minor roles for episodes, with the more important roles reserved for the main cast. The girl with a DQN name and her mother also often take this role.
- Toast of Tardiness: Parodied when Sora is in such a rush to get to school, she can't even take the time to eat the toast herself, having a mochi that's willing to eat the toast for her. It happens to Sora a second time later in the episode, as well.
- Universal-Adaptor Cast: For the most part, every episode uses the same 12 characters for every episode, filling in for whatever roles are needed for the story.
