Neon The Animation

Neon the Animation is a fascinating little set of quasi-commercials for Nipponbashi, Osaka's equivalent to Tokyo's Akihabara, a destination for electronics and hobby goods, which aired over the course of four years. there's not much to say of the story other than the episodes represent an interesting, engaging, and educational look into the city of Osaka, its culture, notable sites, and even how its culture is felt abroad.

As for the art, it employs an interesting blend of animation and actual footage, resulting in a nostalgic and enjoyable project produced by the Osaka Animation College. Interesting divergences cover the city of Ximendeng in Taiwan, the ... Tennoji Zoo in Osaka, and the history of Nipponbashi itself as explored through historical archive photographs.

The sound is unremarkable, meeting the basic standards of quality for the time.

The characters are limited, but Neon is a likable and well-designed mascot. In any case, the city itself, and Nipponbashi in particular, take on this air of being a character all their own. Overall, this is a neat little love letter to one of Japan's big otaku havens, and that alone makes it worth checking out in my book.

Still no reviews for this so here I am !

So it's just basically a promotional anime for the nipponbashi district in Osaka, we follow Neon an anime girl mascot of this place who introduce the location to us while dealing with her sister's shenanigans.

The story is just about promoting the district and doing commercials for a pc. And even with just that they fail to do it good, it would have been so much better if instead of 6 short episodes that present Nipponbashi in a very shallow way with things anyone could find by looking the wikipedia page, they made a long episode of ... like 30min with maybe more real footage where we would have the girls doing interviews of people working and living there.

Now the animation... It's absolutely awful, it's very static and some shots seems to have been done in Microsoft paint. The art does improve a little throughout the episodes but the budget was probably too low to produce something decent.

To conclude just don't waste your time like I did and don't watch this anime, especially if you don't plan to go in Nipponbashi.