Shiba Inuko-san

Each episode of Shiba Inuko-san contains one to two mildly amusing jokes and/or sight gags, and that's about it. If that's all you're looking for, you'll get a pretty good return on your investment (1 minute and 30 seconds per episode). What you won't get is anything very memorable or interesting. The characters have essentially one trait each, the voices are your standard high-pitched moe performances, and even the art is fairly dull; the character designs, aside from Shiba Inuko-san herself, are utterly forgettable.

To be fair, you can't expect much more from a show that asks so little of your time. The question does remain, ... though: if an entire episode is going to be devoted to building up one single joke, shouldn't the joke be a LITTLE better than just "mildly amusing"? If the producers had felt like constructing some kind of narrative to weave the jokes into, it could have made for a decent 30 minute OVA; as it is, each episode just left me with a feeling of "why did I even bother?"

It should also be noted that the theme song is 30 seconds in length, and thus makes up 1/3 of each episode's running time. This turns out to be a pretty poor production choice, given the show's format all but guarantees that the audience will be watching multiple episodes in one sitting. It's not a terrific song, and it becomes more than a little irritating when you hear it start to play for the fourth time in six minutes.

Shiba Inuko-san delivers exactly what it promises: cute, innocuous shorts showing two high-school girls and a cute dog.

There's no story to speak of in such shorts; your enjoyment of it will boil down to whether the premise appeals to you. It's a slice-of-life style absurd comedy that delivers sweet, simple moments in each episode. It even squeezes in a tiny beach episode!

The three main characters are pretty average, likeable high school girls/canines, and they are never annoying.

I think it's impressive that they managed to squeeze in two different openings in a series that is literally only 26 minutes long content-wise! Both are average; the second ... one is the better one.

The art is pretty simple and standard fair; appropriate for the tone of a high-school setting. The dog is (obviously) cute.

Overall, I think if you like cute animals or high school settings, then it's worth half an hour of your time. It's not super memorable, but it is what it is. I think it would actually work well as a longer series - even as 5 minute shorts - as I think there's plenty of comedic potential in the set-up. Alas.