Itazura Majo to Nemuranai Machi

I had a good time with this Monster Strike Christmas special. It was a departure from a lot of the original anime content their channel had produced in the past, a completely new story with new characters set in New York City of all places. I always love seeing anime depictions of American culture. I love that their idea of a stereotypical New York cop is a large, sassy, donut-loving black woman. Very progressive.

Likely unbeknownst to the citizens of New York, there's been a bit of a world changing phenomenon over in Japan where one of their mobile games has come to life and started ... opening portals to another world unleashing real ass monsters everywhere. You know, Japan stuff. One of these monsters decides to play an epic prank, bro on the people of New York by making all the Christmas toys and decorations come to life. Our protagonist, new to the NYPD, has to deal with rounding up giant frosty the snowman and nutcracker displays that are rampaging through town spreading Christmas cheer. Then her childhood teddy bear with huge sentimental value comes to life and turns into a magical girl.

It's a really wacky plot already, but the best part is that all of this magic stuff is happening over what would have been a typical buddy cop story, where the new by-the-book recruit has to learn to work with the older jaded mentor and they eventually overcome their differences and learn to work together to save the day. All of those elements sound like they should be really stupid together but it's actually pretty fun. Almost as good a Christmas movie as Die Hard. Overall I'd say 8/10

Well, I really liked that.

Story:
Christmas needs to be saved and apple's just the one to do it! Standard anime stuff. Giant monster about to destroy Christmas It has everything you expect: Contrived convience, sad backstory.

Art:
I really like the way apple and liberty's designs they looked really good. Everyone else looked OK, kind of fleshy which is how cgi typically looks.

Characters:
We've got akari, our every day police woman. Emma our *black* every day comic relief. I laughed out loud at 2 of her jokes. Liberty our magical girl and apple our superhero, it's the basic cast for ... a basic show. I Can't really say much without giving everything away for a 40 minute mini movie.

Sound:
Everything sounds fine

Enjoyment:
I really liked watching it and I'm not mad that I did, it was simple and perfectly put together.

This anime is available on YouTube and it is just 1 episode.
Every aspect of the story's progression is slow and generic. You will see pure 40 minutes of nothingness and boring backstory that no one cares about. No one is relevant to the plot unless the Girl Teddy Bear (?). They tried to mix anime's elements that are not compatible at all, and it looks and feels very strange as the story goes on. I can imagine why this is free to watch: to steal your time and to gain money with advertisements while you could be watching better anime, studying, working, etc. If you ... don't like 3D animations, then it gets even worse, because almost every character is 3D and animated very slowly and pathetically. Every minute you watch this is a minute you will beg for it to finish. Nonetheless, it could maybe be worth of your time if you love, and absolutely love NY, magic toys and witches and meaningless dialogues.