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If you're ever thought to scroll past the popular shows of each season to look at the lower scored offerings nobody watched; chances are you'll see at least one weird looking CGI or Flash animated show that makes you rapidly ask “Why is this?” A small cottage industry of sorts has sprung up in the last decade or so, producing a small but fairly regular number of these mostly ONAs; mostly about girls doing things. While it would be wrong to claim there was one starting point or one man responsible; if you trace the links back far enough from many of them you'll find ... the 2011 show Gdgd Fairies & its director Souta Sugahara.

Seeing Souta's name attached to Onyakopon explains a lot. In it, a cat god, allegedly from West Africa, sort of but doesn't really help a group of Japanese high school girls with their girl problems. Each episode mostly follows a set routine of something happening in the god world; something similar happens in the girl world; they do a musical number that sort of relates to the issue; then the issue resolves itself. It looks like a low budget, short edutainment show for young children; & the involvement of Toonz Entertainment (part of the animation outsourcing monolith that, among many things, churns out a some of those seemingly computer generated cartoons for babies flooding Youtube) only furthers the impression that this is meant to be a cheap attempt at a Japanese Octonauts, or something similar.

But like many of these shows, one is left more with the impression that this is a parody of children's TV made by & for men who, for various reasons, have to plan their travels to avoid being near schools. The subjects of each episode & the general way the characters converse all leave the impression that the writer's main source of information about high school girls is Lucky Star. Indeed, one of the background tracks sounds rather similar to the one that plays in the back of a lot of that shows conversations. The songs only add to the impression that this some weird experiment to see what men think girls are like, with themes like: “Please, god, don't make my face look fat!” & “I need the toilet; come with?”

Yet there's an appeal to a lot of these types of shows that Onyankopon is lacking. A key feature of Gdgd Fairies & its ilk is that the actresses will eventually go off-script &/or break character; which is where a lot of the humour comes from. The scripted conversations in this one are pretty dull & there's no time for things to get weird or go wrong. Nor does the short runtime & regimented, episodic structure leave any space for anything like a narrative or plot line to be developed; or for characters to form something one might confuse for individual personalities. In a weird way, the show is also too well produced for its own good, lacking the amateurishness that somehow adds to the charm of a lot of these shows.

In short, Onyankopon is just kinda boring. Some moments, like when a black guy's head suddenly appears in one episode to comment on what the girls are doing, liven it up a bit; & I'm sure the singers who voice the girls & do the end song will appreciate the exposure; but I struggle to see what the point of this all was. If it's meant to be one of those parody series, there are plenty of better ones out there (Tesagure! Bukatsumono is probably the best of them). If it really was sincerely meant for children, then the gods' have punished us with something much worse than a fat head.

Christmas just doesn't seem to hold the same place in anime that it used to. We still get our fair share of Christmas episodes, but the significance of hooking up or being alone on Xmas eve just doesn't seem to have the same importance that it used to. Which is why it's nice to see an ONA dedicated entirely to the holiday, even if it isn't anything to write home about.

Akari Kido is the new intern at the NYPD, having transferred from Tokyo just in time for Christmas. No sooner has she started walking the beat when a mischievous magical girl appears, bringing the ... toys to life so she can have a big party &/or wreak havoc. It's up to Akari, her partner Emma & somehow transformed into a hero teddy bear Apple to save Christmas & discover how everything links back to her kind hearted father, killed on the beat fifteen jolly holidays ago.

Which is one of the nice things about the story (that sounds more morbid than it's meant to). For various reasons, anime tends to focus on romance rather than family as the theme of Christmas, with Christmas Eve being one of Japan's many "couples" holidays where companies sell them tat & expensive restaurant menus. This time, however, family is the focus, with Akari "returning" to New York treated as part of her coming to terms with her father's death by following in his footsteps (& nobody eats KFC). This theme does get a little lost in the action, but it's nice that it's there.

It's pretty easy to be critical about Sorcery in the Big City. It's rushed, mawkish & predictable, with little beyond the holiday theme & New York setting to make it stand out. Liberty, the magical girl bringing toys to life, isn't much of an antagonist herself & is soon replaced – because her motivations for unleashing violent toys on the streets were just misunderstood, obviously – by an even more pointless & forgettable monster for them all to team up & fight. The characters are all simple stock types with no real development & there really isn't any point or moral to the story, beyond being an excuse for action scenes.

But really, does that matter? It's a 40 minute ONA & as such it being little more than an excuse for some festively themed fights is fine. It's a shame, then, that the climax – despite being incessantly foreshadowed like it's going to be a huge deal - is just Liberty, Apple & Akari teaming up to fight some throwaway monster that has little to do with anything. They could have at least made it a giant evil Santa, or something. Maybe one of the toys Liberty brought to life that goes out of control after she joins the good guys? Something to make the final fight feel connected to the rest of the story? Call me, Japan; I've got so many ideas!

Being set in New York also means we get a chance to see a bit of the old accidental racism that doesn't happen much any more – given how Japancentric modern anime tends to be. If this was set in Tokyo, I'm reasonably confident in saying that Emma would be a big titted Osakan who's gregarious personality contrasts with the more straight-laced & reserved Tokyan (because that dynamic will never get old...). But this is New York so, turning to American media for inspiration, the creators decided the American equivalent is a sassy, fat, black woman who eats doughnuts. Oh no they di'int!

Like everything else though, it's harmless. Sorcery in the Big City exists because mobile game company Xflag teamed up with CGI studio SANZIGEN to make a fluffy, forgettable, action focused Christmas ONA using some Xflag characters. On that note, if you liked the CGI in BBK/BBNK, the visuals here are much the same. It's not going to make anyone's required Christmas anime viewing lists, but if like me you're currently besieged by snow & don't want to watch The Disappearance of Haruhi Snoozemiya or that ToodleDoodle episode for the millionth time, it's not a bad watch.

It's no Mad Bull 34, though.

When we left the Furious Fairy Five, the show had overcome some of its more egregious technical issues but still hadn't figured out what it wanted to be. Fortunately, there is a simple solution to not knowing what to do: do classic folk-tales. Forest Fairy Five ~Fairy Tale~ presents us with the fairies spin on three well known legends - Tsuru no Ongaeshi, Momotarō & Urashimako – before the forest fairies themselves have to travel through the settings of these stories to rescue Mai from...her insecurities, I guess.

Surprisingly, given what a janky mess FFF was, it kinda works. Gone is the sense that the ... show is desperately scrambling around for ideas, replaced by what at times feels like a folktale version of Funky Forest or Peeping Life. Each retelling combines elements of other folktales, as well as some of the writers own strange ideas & at times were genuinely amusing – for instance Issun-boshi's girlfriend sulking that he can't do the wall push to her (Issun-boshi is one inch tall). No doubt some – or many – will find it excruciatingly boring (much like Funky Forest & Peeping Life), but it's still a marked improvement on what came before.

As is the shows production. While still janky as heck, FFF's look has reached the point where you can just take its weird & low quality animations & camerawork as part of the shows aesthetic. The character models themselves have improved notably &, perhaps even more importantly, the sound engineer seems to have figured out how to use their mixing desk. While the VA's themselves still have a habit of speaking too close to the microphone, in all it's still leagues ahead of where the show started.

Which is what is part of the charm of FFF – the equivalent perhaps of watching a game go from pre-alpha to final release (well, maybe Early Access). While I'd never call it good, it's been weirdly fascinating to watch this strange show that had no reason to exist outside of some dark corner of Nico Nico (it aired on Tokyo MX1!) but also seems to have been made by people who genuinely were trying to make a real show & kept trying to improve it throughout. If nothing else, it makes a nice change to see a production get better rather than deteriorate over its run time. Not that anyone would think to watch past the first episode.

On that note, if you couldn't stomach the first season of FFF, give this one a shot. The folk-tale stories & “improved” look really do make a surprising difference. & while you still have to put up with (or skip) that needlessly long 2-3minute intro to each episode, this time I'd almost say it's worth it. I don't know what they were thinking then they decided to make this series, but I'm kind of glad they did.

While listed as an OVA, it might be more accurate to describe LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! as an event anime, something we rarely see exported out of Japan. Originally screened at select theatres in August 2017, this just barely feature length final episode feels made for being watched in a room full of fellow LOVErs who know the songs, can quote the catch phrases & are probably just a wee bit drunk.

But chances are you're not in a packed Japanese theatre, but sat at home, alone; hoping for one final adventure with the Battle Lovers. Does LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! provide this? Yes, but YMMV (oh & ... it's definitely not the place to start for newcomers).

Because to reach the feature length needed to get theatrical screenings, it's fair to say they cheated a bit. Opening with the Battle Lovers playing hack sack & then chatting in the Kurotama bathhouse, it looks as though their final episode will be spent mostly soaking in the tub while shooting the breeze.

Which would be fine, if what they talked about weren't the events of the previous two seasons. As the cast slowly gather at the bath, they reminisce about how they first met, then proceed to sing all (& I mean all) of their character songs one after the other. It is, as En glibly remarks, “that kind of episode,” consisting almost entirely of recycled footage & generally feeling like a glorified recap episode. Some of the new banter is fun, but unless you really like looped animations or were hoping for a karaoke session, it's bit of a tough watch.

But just as frustration might be about to boil over, the real episode begins. It's Springtime for Hit...I mean Binan High School, & that means it's graduation day for everyone in the Earth Defence Club but Yumoto. Naturally, things don't go smoothly, as Zundar & Dadacha create one last monster, which the VEPPers, Conquest Club & Earth Defence Club must team up to defeat – though not in the usual way. Then it's on to the goodbyes, as the graduation ceremony finishes & Wombat returns to his home planet – not dying on the way.

It's not the best episode of the series, but as a final goodbye to our favourite magical boys it's about as good as one could have expected, the only disappointments coming from PonyCam (who want you to know it's their 50th anniversary) not stumping up for a lavish production & the aforementioned slow, sing-along start.

But maybe you do know the songs. Or maybe you have a group of LOVErs who can gather with optional but recommended alcohol to see the boys off with a sing song. If that's the case, you will have a very good time with LOVE! LOVE! LOVE! If you're just looking for one final episode, you'll find it; but you might have to skip the first 30 minutes to get there.

Love Making!

TL;DR – A melodramatic sledgehammer with characters that shed enough tears to fill a swimming pool & more angst than a lifetime of Linkin Park albums. But if a teenage soap opera about pop-rock & unrequited love sounds like your kind of thing, either to cry or laugh along to, then it fits the bill.

Love is hell for a shojo heroine. Particularly so for Nino, whose feelings have remained unrequited since her childhood friend Momo suddenly skipped town in elementary school. Despite the years & common sense suggesting she should move on, Nino has continued to hold those feelings inside, determined that one day they ... will finally reach him. Meanwhile, her blinkered vision left her oblivious to the obvious feelings of another childhood friend, Kanade, who pined for her much as she did Momo.

Boy, would it be awkward yet convenient if all three of them started at the same high school...

Whether Anonymous Noise will appeal or not depends entirely on one's tolerance for one thing: teenage melodrama. The series is twelve episodes of unrelenting emotion, with its characters constantly agonising over what they're doing & whether what they feel is getting through to others. While the set up for its main love triangle is hardly original, being very similar to Chihayafuru's, the series compensates by cranking everything up to eleven, tears, fears & deep conversations on school rooftops occurring with startling rapidity.

Nino, Momo & Kanade's relationships form the crux of the series, with Nino's singing voice forming the metaphorical “object” at the heart of it. For Nino, it's through singing that she hope's to finally express the feelings that she can't bring herself to say in person, hoping that her voice will somehow reach through to Momo & make him realise her true feelings. To Momo & Kanade, Nino's singing in different ways gave them something missing in their own lives, inspiring both of them to write songs she might one day sing. This also provides the conflict between Momo & Kanade, who both lay claim to her voice & her by extension, the series sadly not being above the usual shojoism of having suitors fight over the heroine like boys over a toy while she remains obliviously reactive to it all.

Be that as it may, Anonymous Noise does put one somewhat notable spin on its set up. Since Nino knew Momo & Kanade separately, they don't realise they're mutual connection to her until well into the series. Before then, they happen to meet at a train station & gradually develop a friendship over their mutual musical interests. It makes a nice change from the usual animosity between love rivals, though of course that comes eventually & both of them occasionally exhibit the possessiveness that can make even good shojo romances a bore to watch. But considering that possessiveness has been pushed to the point of parody in series like My Little Monster & Wolf Girl & Black Prince, Anonymous Noise seems comparatively restrained in its use.

Music in different ways provides the emotional outlet for each of the trio, Nino in particular. Indulging in some rather eye-rollingly on the nose visual analogies, Nino wears a surgical mask during school – reflecting how she keeps her feelings to herself in regular situations. When the mask comes off, you know the emotions are coming out, probably accompanied by shouting & crying. As a member of Kanade's band, she is prone to going “berserk” unable to restrain herself because of the raw emotions that burst forth when singing from the heart.

To that end, Anonymous Noise is sound-tracked by that most raw & authentic of music – over-produced j-rock with a visual key aesthetic. To begin with the music does not bode well, with the band music sounding forgettably generic while Nino insists on repeatedly singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (get it? Because she's wondering what Momo is up to) & la'ing along to music. But the music does improve, with the final song “Noise,” which Nino writes the lyrics for herself, being pretty decent. One gets the sense that it might be at least partly intentional, with the music improving along with Nino & Kanade's musicianship & enthusiasm for the band.

Frustratingly, Nino's improving musicianship over the series doesn't mirror any real growth in her character or relationships. When it comes to Momo & Kanede, she flip-flops between pining for Momo & being oblivious to Kanade's feelings & occasionally appearing to accept the apparent reality & start to acknowledge Kanede. Her relationship with the band, likewise, yo-yo's between her only seeing it as a means to get her feelings across to Momo & wanting to pursue it for herself. That conflict between being a story about self-improvement & one where everything they do is merely to get someone else's attention runs throughout the series for all three main characters, reducing any real sense of meaningful character development even if the series can hardly be said to end where it started.

The twelve episode length & focus on the main love triangle also means there is very little time given to the support cast. A secondary love triangle between Kanade & band members Miou & Yoshito is quietly discarded after Nino replaces Miou as singer. While she goes on to join a rival band, it seems more for the purpose of keeping her involved in the story than anything more significant; her only real role thereafter being to occasionally talk girl to girl with Nino. Other characters get even less attention, meaning that there isn't anything to really act as a respite from the melodrama of the main story.

It's also notable that the first few episodes, particularly the first, feel a bit rough & rushed. The series clearly wanted to focus on events after Nino has joined the band, which leaves what comes before feeling like set up & back story that has to be got through to get to the meat of the series. Episode one feels like forty minutes of content squeezed into twenty, which leaves a lot of the dramatic turns feeling insufficiently established to make the exaggerated responses given to them.

The production itself is okay. Character designs all have a fairly typical shojo look, though there is something just a bit off about them – the faces seem a bit too wide, while Kanade's head is too small for his eyes. Possibly connected to this, there is a notable downgrade in quality when characters are in the middle distance, with significantly less detail & faces sometimes appearing narrower or completely off model. It looks better up close, which is fortunate because there are an almost endless number of close ups on characters crying, shouting or reacting dramatically.

The band performances are done with a mixture or 2D & CG animation, rather like Bang Dream. It's not high quality stuff, but it does the job & the mixture of animation & still frames was done to decent effect – though it's hard not to notice the animation loops in the crowds. Nino's berserk moments are made to look all the more over the top with the exaggerated poses & colouring given to them & credit is due to VA Saori Hayami, who is acting the hell out of her role.

Yet while it's easy to criticise Anonymous Noise, it's also hard not to get caught up in its excessively heightened emotionality. Comparisons to Nana are overblown, a shojo White Album 2 perhaps being more apt, but the decision to ramp everything up to maximum drama is what lifts it from forgettable to enjoyable – if you're into that kind of thing. While I'm sure some would jump out a window to get away from it, if you do enjoy over the top teenage romance – or non-romance as the case is here – Anonymous Noise will have you crying or laughing along with it, possibly then leaving you scratching your head as to why.

TL;DR – A cute girls show that is never quite sure what cute things they should be doing, Hinako Note feels unfocused whilst at the same time increasingly focusing on the characters bodies. The potential for a good cute girl show was there, but it really needed a redraft or more editorial oversight to achieve it.

It's not easy starting again in a new city. It's even harder for Hinako, a girl whose social anxiety makes her freeze like a scarecrow when approached by strangers. It wasn't as bad in the countryside, where having a human scarecrow to attract animals away from fields was useful. But ... it won't do her much good in Tokyo.

Yet that's partly what drew her there, because she has come up with a solution to overcoming her shyness: acting. After meeting her new house mates – the book-eating Kuina, maid dressing Mayuki & landlady Chiaki – they resolve to form an acting troupe to bring more customers to Chiaki's cafe & maybe even perform on a famous stage. That is if they can find time between all the other cute girl shenanigans they get up to.

At the start, Hinako Note seems like it will be a spin on the cute girls running a shop set-up that proved popular in Is This Order a Rabbit? There's both a bookshop & a café to split time between, as well as a high school & threatre club – where they meet the final main member of the group; the bratty Yua. However, it flits between settings with abandon, leaving things feeling unfocused & unconnected, particularly as it becomes increasingly episodic. It's almost as though the original author couldn't pick one cute girl location, so tried to have all of them.

It also has the effect of making Hinako's progression towards overcoming her shyness feel disjointed. The idea is that the acting will cause her to gradually gain in self-confidence so that she no longer freezes when talking to people, which is what happens – twice. While the show generally does a fine job showing her friendships develop over time, her own shyness increasingly seems to come & go when it's convenient.

One might expect it to have been structured such that, for example, she starts off barely able to talk & ends giving the leading performance on the big stage, symbolising her finally overcoming her anxiety. Alternatively, it could have gradually dropped the idea altogether, perhaps shifting the theme from overcoming your weaknesses to accepting them & finding people who accept you for who you are. Instead it peaks & troughs throughout the series, with apparent breakthroughs being followed by a return to the scarecrow pose the next time it's funny.

But in some ways that's to be expected, given how the show evolves over its runtime. While it starts out looking like an ensemble anime, all about the importance of friendship & the various relationships between the characters; by about episode six it increasingly seems more about waifu worship & how great Hinako is. Ditsy, vulnerable & air-headed yet also amazing & perfectly proportioned, Hinako quickly becomes the centre of almost everything happening around her. She may not be every viewers favourite character, but she clearly is the director's, it becoming rather eye-rolling by the time a clamshell pillow has been added to her bath scenes like she's some sort of discount Venus.

There is some indication that this is all meant to be presented from Hinako's point of view. A notebook, presumably Hinako's, is often used as the image to break up segments of the show, perhaps suggesting this is all being taken from her diary (clue is in the name, I suppose). But while that may somewhat explain why the show focuses on her, it doesn't explain the things about her it focuses on.

To be fair, all of them get a degree of back story & time to further distinguish themselves as characters, though it all feels a bit predictable. Yua has a girl crush on Chiaki that somehow seems to end up being directed, effectively if not explicitly, at Hinako. Mayuki is insecure about her height & being treated like a child while Chiaki is...attractive & responsible? Kuina, despite looking like Konata from Lucky Star, doesn't fill that or really any role. She eats paper & dresses in animal onesies, quirks compensating for lack of character.

As if wanting to visually parallel this shift, there is progressively more fan-service as the series goes on, particularly once it's revealed what a great body Hinako has. There are two or three of what might be charitably called dress-up episodes, with each one seeing characters striking progressively more risqué poses. The incidental pervy cuts become increasingly so, with body pans escalating to close-ups of T&A while the images used for the next episode previews become increasingly fetishistic - one being of Kuina licking Hinako's foot. A degree of this is to be expected in cute girl shows, but at times Hinako's Note ramps it up to sex comedy levels despite never being one; the lewd parts never feeling in character or particularly connected with what else is going on.

Oh & since important industry types undoubtedly read every MAL review, I have a request: Please stop using moo sounds to indicate big breasts are on screen. Please, just stop.

Of course, if this sounds like your kind of thing, then Hinako Note's production does a fine job presenting it. It looks & sounds pretty much as you'd expect, with suitably bright & colourful images, standard but appealing character designs & an upbeat, whimsical soundtrack. There were no notable dips in quality, though a minor but noticeable thing is the increasingly static background characters. By the same token, though, it never really excels, with no memorable animation sequences or the like. The OP & ED are somewhat notable for being the type of music that goes through multiple key & time signature changes, creating a sort of bubbly, schizophrenic mashup of cute girl sounds, unfortunately accompanied by some rather lacklustre dance routines.

There are some good things in Hinako Note. The characters are likeable, if not utilised to their full potential & some episodes deliver good enough cute girl antics. But it never manages to hold its focus on any one of its ideas for long, even as the camera increasingly focused on the characters vital assets. An okayish show that needed more editorial oversight to become a good one.

& I didn't even mention the busty 9 year old club advisor.

Do you love rice? Do you love boys? If yes, you'd better hand yourself in to the police. But before you do, you'd better watch Love Rice. It might make you reconsider your life choices.

Hinohikari is a boy who knows what he wants & what he wants is to be the HarveStar of the Harvest Show. There's just one problem: nobody likes rice any more, which is unfortunate enough when you're a rice-boy (not the car kind) but doubly so when it means the Kokuritsu Inaho Academy he attends is in danger of shutting down. Undeterred, Hinohikari will achieve his dream & save his school ... the only way he knows how; by joining a cross-dressing idol unit? Okay.

Rice Boys sets out to answer the ultimate question – which is better: bread or rice? After quickly ditching the women's clothes, the newly christened Love Rice (because they love rice) prepare to do musical battle against their wheaty rivals the Yeast Kings; using as many bad puns, bland songs & homoerotic moments as it takes.

In case you weren't able to tell, Love Rice is out to promote Japanese rice (white, sticky, short grains only. None of that exotic Indian stuff here) to women. Each character is named after a specific strain & some effort is made to tie their personalities with their namesake, though it's hard to tell with rice - since it's rice. Their musical performances take place in golden paddy fields & dammit if they aren't trying their hardest to be the best rice-boys they can be so the Gourmet Girls will vote for them. It's a concept silly enough that it could have been a lot of cheesey fun.

But for a concept as silly as pretty rice-boys, Love Rice for the most part plays itself frustratingly straight. Part of this is down to the utterly uninspired production, which makes almost no effort to visually accentuate the humour & often leaves the characters looking like rough drafts rather than finished articles. But even beyond that there isn't much to it. The story is for the most part bog standard, with the bland songs doing little to improve things. It take a turn for the suitably stupid when Love Rice & the Yeast Kings set aside their differences – because at the end of the day rice & wheat are both grains - to thwart a kidnapping, but it's so rushed & disjointed that the humour is lost.

When compared to other male idol or anthropomorphic pretty boy series, Love Rice hardly measures. Unlike Sekko Boys, It doesn't do nearly enough with the ridiculousness of its core concept, relying instead of repetitive agriculture puns & Sasanishiki coughing up more white fluids than Paris Hilton. It barely manages to fill its four minute episodes, even with songs & cooking tutorials padding out the runtime, whereas Miracle Train managed to build an entire regular length series out of sexy male train stations. Or they could have gone in a completely different direction & made Love Rice about actual rice. Worked for The Nameko Families.

Instead, whatever the intentions behind its creation, Love Rice just feels like a half-arsed attempt to ride the male idol & fujoshi waves by combining “attractive” male character designs with a silly gimmick that's supposed to make you think it's just a bit of fun, so who cares? It's certainly no Pillow Boys, but there are plenty of better examples of what Love Rice is trying to do, though you might get some new meal ideas from it. Unless you really love boys...I mean rice, it can be safely ignored.

TL;DR – Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor starts off decently enough that you might think to stick around to see if it gets better. It never gets better.

On the list of things the world is lacking, another fantasy high school light novel must rank pretty high. Fortunately, Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor (AroBMI) – so called because Brilliant Bastard wasn't cumbersome enough – is here to provide.

Sistine & Rumia are two friends on their way to the first day of class at the Alanzo Imperial Magic Academy when they have an only in anime collusion with some guy. Said guy turns out to ... be Glenn, a right bastard who mocks their apology & behaves in such a way that means Sistine must yell “baka!” & shoot magic at him. As if the day couldn't get any worse, Glenn turns out to be their new teacher & not only is he a bastard, but an idle one at that.

Cliche beginnings aside, the first episodes of AroMBI showed promise. Glenn, pronounced Gülenn in this universe, being a teacher rather than a student immediately stands out as somewhat of a novelty, though his appearance makes it hard to tell how much older than its students he's supposed to be. Though his cocky & abrasive, not to mention lazy, attitude rubs everyone up the wrong way at first, he soon reveals himself to be much more capable & reliable than he seemed.

The episodes that focus on him as a teacher are the strongest. Taking a Great Teacher Onizuka approach to schooling – even using a similar title at least once – his unorthodox teaching methods gradually win over his students, even if he is openly disdainful of magic as a tool fit only for harming others. Eschewing the conventional methods of rote learning & memorisation, Glenn instead emphasises practical application & experimentation as well as encouraging each student to excel at what they're best at, rather than relying on the top students to carry the rest of the class. The potential was there for the series to at least offer a somewhat novel spin on the genre, even if Glenn still had the usual cliché past & an evil organisation to fight.

Unfortunately, what potential it had is soon squandered by its inability to adapt genre conventions to the new status of its protagonist. It soon becomes apparent that, although a teacher, Glenn is still very much a light novel protagonist. Events all revolve around him, he is the solution to every problem & people just can't help but like him, think about him, or at least blame him for all their problems. Worse is that, while Sistine is your typical tsundere heroine, she is also your typical light novel love interest. There is some effort to explain Glenn's apparent closeness to her as being because she reminds him of someone he used to know. But by the time she's daydreaming about him defeating her plot convenient fiancé & proposing to her, it feels very awkward.

As does Glenn's constant need to rescue his harem...sorry, students with non-brown hair. Normally you expect a teacher character to encourage their students personal growth & ability to stand up for themselves & that does happen with the class as a whole. But when the evil mages show up to cause trouble for the main female characters, it's all on Glenn to save them, once just in time to stop Sistine from being raped.

Rumia is supposed to be some sort of unique magic user, her power to amplify others magic apparently a cause both for her being hidden away by her royal mother & also why the evil mages keep attacking. But it's never established why her power, in a world full of magic, causes that, or why amplifying power is a bad thing while nobody bats an eye at Glenn's power to nullify magic or Sistine's power to drain it. It's just a thing the plot needed to have, really. When another character from his past, Rel (spelled Re=L) joins his class as a transfer student who openly professes her devotion to him, it only furthers the sense that ARoBMI is unable to think outside the box.

Speaking of that near-rape scene, its narrow avoidance leads into another issue with the series: it's terrible sense of comedic timing. Sistine's assault is built up for well over a minute, with her calls for help becoming increasingly desperate as more clothes are torn through. But almost as soon as Glenn strolls through the door the tone does a 180 & witty banter ensues. Even in regular exchanges, jokes often fail to hit the mark, either due to excessive repetition or punchlines taking too long to deliver. It's alright when it's not trying to be funny, but it's almost always trying to be funny & is only made worse by the OST, which uses a cuckoo clock sound effect in the “funny scene” music.

There is also a frustrating lack of continuity & consistency between the three main arcs of the series (one for each girl). The first two build up an evil maid character to be the series' main antagonist, being involved in both Rumia's & Re=L's stories. But the final arc almost completely ignores her so Glenn can do battle with another guy from his past that we haven't been introduced to. It seems pretty basic to think that they would have to fight against the maid henchman before revealing a new, higher ranking enemy, or at least have him say “you sit this one out, I got this.” But that wouldn't fit Sistine's marriage fantasy that's the core of the final arc, with all the unhealthy student – teacher relationship implications that has. By the final episode it's almost like they're flinging whatever they've got at the wall in the hope that twenty minutes of material sticks.

There are issues in the small details as well. For the first half of the series, the setting seems a fairly typical fantasy one, with magic & swords & carriages. But then in Re=L's arc there's suddenly a high-tech laboratory & Glenn's former special mage forces partner Albert hands him his old revolver. It's the only firearm in the series, which begs the question: why are there firearms in a world with knights & magic? The answer is because the director thought having Albert hand Glenn his old gun to symbolise their reuniting for one more case would make a cool scene, implications be damned. It's not the only time where something that worked in a different film is used to poor effect.

As to what the Akashic Record is, well you'll just have to read the novels to find out.

The production of AKoBMI follows the tiresomely familiar pattern of starting with its best foot forward & only getting worse as the series goes on. Putting the usual light novel inevitabilities aside – like silly uniforms & character designs taken from the beginners guide to archetypes – everything seems to look & move fine, with some eye-catching animation sequences in the first few episodes. But things become gradually more static & stuttery as the series progresses, with a notable decrease in the amount of detail put into character art.

There are also a couple of annoyingly obvious continuity errors. A minor but unmissable one is when Glenn has very clearly been stabbed through the lung, complete with bloody wound to mark the spot. But his bandages mostly cover his abdomen instead of his chest, presumably because it looked cooler. A more glaring & irritating one comes later, when Glenn punches an opponent into a wall. When the dust clears, he's in a Jesus Christ pose that the camera is really keen you get a good look at, only for him to be sprawled on the floor in the next cut, no falling animation or even a sound effect. It's eye rolling at best & likely to cause viewers to yell at expletives at the screen for how pretentious it is.

AKoBMI is hardly the first light novel to start with an interesting premise, only to become increasingly unfocused & reliant on overdone tropes & clichés as it progresses. But there have been so many of them, which becomes increasingly unforgivable as each year also produces more shows that buck the trend. The first 5-6 episodes that focus on Glenn becoming a teacher & Rumia are okay enough that they might be worth watching on their own if you're a big enough fan of the genre. But if you really want to watch a light novel adaptation about a magic bastard instructor, just watch Alderamin on the Sky.

TL;DR – An oddity even among the growing number of anime reboots, The Laughing Salesman offers a darkly comic, pessimistic &, unfortunately, a little bit dated journey through the underside of Japanese society & human nature.

The last few years have seen a growing trend for older series getting new adaptations. From action classics like JoJo's Bizarre Adventures to children's shorts like Bono Bono, an ever growing number of titles are being given new prequels, sequels, remakes, reboots or simply getting an adaptation years after the source material finished publication. This goes double for The Laughing Salesman, adapting a manga by Fujiko Fuko A that ... ran from 1969-1971 & was previously adapted into anime from 1989-1992, another period when adapting older titles was in vogue.

At its simplest, The Laughing Salesman can be summed up as a series of morality tales that follow an almost identical structure. We're introduced to a character who, perhaps despite outward appearances, is missing something in their life & is open to ways of finding it. This leads them to encounter Fukuzou Moguro, a sinister looking figure who offers them a solution on condition that they promise not to ignore his instructions. Of course they inevitably do, so each story ends with an ironic punishment.

This structure has led to criticism that The Laughing Salesman is mean spirited. No matter how good or deserving the client seems, or understandable their reasons for breaking their end of the bargain; all of them do it & all are punished for doing so. This criticism I think is based at least partly on the false assumption that you're supposed to agree with what happens to them. The Laughing Salesman is no saint. Indeed, he's not unlike the Devil in Western folklore, seeking out those who might be susceptible to his charms & offering them a deal that seems fair but is designed to encourage his client to break it.

A simple reading would be that the moral of each story is be careful of what your wish for or be weary of offers that seem too good to be true, but it goes beyond that. Many characters start out sympathetic & clearly wronged, but reveal themselves to be hypocrites, liars or just as bad as those who wrong them. As Moguro says to one client toiling at a black company, “who knew you were rather black yourself?” Arguably not all characters really deserve their fate, but then you have to ask where the story is really laying the blame. For example, who's at fault: The old man who breaks his promise not to try to find the fake, online grandson Moguro provides him; or the society that allows the elderly to become so isolated that they would need such a service to begin with?

Ultimately, The Laughing Salesman simply presents his clients with a deal & punishes them for breaking it. The right & wrong of the situation is for the viewer to decide. Having said that, there is undoubtedly meant to be humour in the irony of how things turn out. So while it's debatable what the stance the series takes on events, it is a series that expects the audience to see the funny side in what happens, if perhaps in a "if you can't laugh, what can you do?" way.

That's not to say the execution is flawless. For one thing, there is an annoying reliance on fat &/or old hags being either the punishment or cause of a character taking Moguro's deal. While often used in the context of showing the shallowness of a client's professed love of something or someone, it does get tiresome seeing yet another man be tempted by a beautiful woman & punished with an ugly one. The stories with female clients are also arguably the weakest, with the final one ending with the the very unpleasant implication that her punishment is to be raped by a foreigner.

The Laughing Salesman also has a similar issue that a somewhat similar series (at least at first), Hell Girl, had. Because it follows the same formula for each episode, the result is that very different situations are treated with the same gravity despite clearly not being on the same level. It feels incongruent to see someone punished for wanting to cheat on their wife, only for the next story to be about a guy who just really wants to ride on a favourite train a second time.

The age & occupation of many characters also stands out. Most of Moguro's clients are middle aged salarymen or office workers, with the youngest being a 22 year old university student. While there has been an effort to modernise the setting, a number of characters feel the product of past decades, as well as raising the same questions about how, for instance, nobody would have heard of this very unique looking Salesman that dogged Parasyte's modernisation. There are some, such as the aforementioned old man & a chat room nerd, who feel like appropriately modern takes on the shows formula. But many of the stories use quite familiar stock characters & settings, which can leave The Laughing Salesman feeling its age.

But it doesn't look old. While retaining the artstyle of manga & anime from the 1960s-1970s, this production by Shin-Ei Animation (who also did the previous adaptation) still feels quite modern. While fairly limited overall, the animation for Moguro's “Boom!” sequences, the point where he punishes the client, are all well done & there is good use of switching from the simple art style to more detailed & full of action line stills to emphasise a character's reaction. It all contributes to maintaining a suitably ominous & darkly comic tone, with one notable exception being when a possessed girl is dancing in front of oncoming traffic - the sequence being funny for the wrong reasons.

Most notable is of course the Salesman himself, appearing like a besuited Laughing Buddha with a Cheshire Cat smile that often emerges menacingly from the shadows. His design alone gives him a commanding presence, though commendation goes to the director for often picking just the right angle to amplify the sense of menace he exudes. Credit also to the performance by Tessyo Genda (Violence Jack!) who gives Moguro an unnerving laugh & a voice that can make your skin crawl. But with all that said, it seems likely that some will be put off just by the apparent juxtaposition of an art style now mostly associated with old kids shows with the darker tone of the stories.

Beyond the content of the show itself, though, there is one nagging question: why was this made? What about 2017 made the producers think now is the time to bring The Laughing Salesman back? As mentioned before, the series feels old, not really fitting in even among all the reboots etc being released. It made sense for the manga to be written when it was, when gekiga comics were booming & many mangaka were looking to cater to an audiencve eager for darker, edgier stories. The previous anime adaptation fits in with the transition in anime from space opera optimism to cyberpunk & post apocalyptic pessimism that occurred during the very peak of the bubble economy & the crash that in some ways Japan still hasn't fully recovered from.

But there is no economic crash in 2017. No Japanese New Wave driving artists to challenge the post-war consensus on what is an appropriate subject for media. There is certainly a growing unease about inequality & the failing social contract in Japan, & as mentioned some of the characters do seem to address that. But too many feel like stock characters that could have existed at any time in post or even pre-WW2 media. Office women having to put up with their co-workers talking behind their backs & salarymen cheating on their wives, while still no doubt a feature of Japanese society, just don't feel particularly modern.

There really needed to be more done to make this adaptation stand out as more than just a well done rehash of old ideas; though when viewed purely in the context of today's anime, it still manages to seem different. Even so, fans of series like Paranoia Agent that explore the darker side of people's characters which they'd rather keep hidden should enjoy The Laughing Salesman. Those who expect good things to happen to good people, however, should stay away.

In their insatiable hunger for new content, CrunchyRoll will occasionally license series that seem to have no business being seen outside of whatever dark corner of Japan they came from. Forest Fairy Five (FFF) is the latest of those shows, an attempt at a CGI children's show that, on first appearances, is a confused mess of ugly visuals, bad sound quality & no clear sense of what it's meant to be about or who it's for.

First, some back story. In 2011 Sōta Sugahara's & studio Bouncy's GDGD Fairies first aired, a CGI show about fairy idols that looked like a kids show, but ... was actually a surreal mixture of character breaking improv comedy & weird animation. It was apparently popular enough to get a second season & a film in 2014. Said film was produced with help from another studio, Rokujigen (6D), who have now gone on to make their own CGI show about fairy idols that looks like a surreal mixture of character breaking improv comedy & weird animation, but is actually a kids show.

To further confuse matters, the first three minutes of FFF are effectively two separate introductions that contradict each other. The first introduces a “beautiful & prosperous since ancient times” Japan where anime has become real & we're off to the place where you can meet “anime-chan's.” But straight after that is another introduction that presents the show as occurring in the mushroom fairy kingdom where the main characters are trying to protect the real world from the evil poison mushroom army. Neither really has much to do with the show itself, but it means that the first three minutes of every episode contribute nothing.

Not that you'll probably bother. The first episodes of FFF are a mess, a show that looks & sounds terrible & doesn't seem to know what it is. Ostensibly based on a children's illustration book, FFF stars a quintet of mushroom fairies who spend their days hanging about & sometimes checking in on the real world through a fairy circle. They're supposed to be eight years old, but given that the voice actresses don't put on voices, they certainly don't sound like it. It makes the exchanges with narrator JoJo feel odd & condescending, as an adult man talks to the fairies like they're children, only for them to talk back like teenagers.

Nor is it clear quite what FFF wants to be. Its mix of scripted interactions & improv don't seem connected & it almost feels like the VAs aren't quite sure what to do. The first couple episodes introduce the fairies to sites in Harajuku in such a way that it's almost like they're addressing foreign tourists. After a couple of episodes a new segment about some bird looking characters is introduced who seem to have nothing to do with the fairies. In all the opening episodes give the impression that the producers aren't sure exactly what they're trying to do with their show.

These problems are only exacerbated by the presentation problems. The CGI looks like captured footage from a Chinese fantasy MMO, with glitchy animation loops & a virtual camera that doesn't know where it's going. There is also an excessive amount of Bloom, to the point that the fairies often resemble the sheep from TES IV: Oblivion. It makes for an ugly introduction to the series, not helped by the problems with the voice actresses microphones. Despite the improv skits, it never feels like they were recorded in the same room & the sound quality varies from fine to not fit for Youtube. The only thing that doesn't seem to have problems is the music, which sounds like it might have been licensed from a jRPG music library rather than commissioned for the show. It's hard to imagine how the series could have made a worst first impression.

But having said all that, as the series progresses it starts to pull itself together. The technical issues don't go away, but the sound & visual problems start being cleaned up & the camera is brought back under control. Episodes start sticking to a single theme, for instance one character forgetting how to say “ka” & all the problems that causes. The fairy portal is also re-purposed so that it now contains a recurring woman who introduces the fairies to various professions. Oh & there's a guest lady in one episode who's high on schrooms. Drug references in children's TV shows are always welcome.

This change over it's runtime means that the overall impression of FFF is of a series where the production team were having to learn on the fly. There are lots of things, major & minor, that suggest it's a show that had very little pre-production time to set up & learn the production tools & develop a concrete concept for the series. By the end, it has ironed out a lot of the creases, to the point that it now is a decent enough short show for young children. But the issues at the start leave this first season of FFF feeling like one of those well-intended but misguided no-budget animations for kids you find on Amazon Prime. I recommend Bubble Bubble Meows. It'll change your life.