Reviews

Kinema Citrus put a lot of effort into leaving the viewer confused as possible pertaining to the plot of the story, there are many themes to the story that are thrown around but never developed, I can understand why they would do this considering that the studio is looking to create a 2nd episode and leaves us on so many cliffhangers out of the hope that it will motivate people to fund the 2nd installment and potentially an OVA movie. That being said Kinema definitely went over the top in trying to grab the viewer's interest.

*Warning: spoilers (although under the dog is so contrived that it's hard to really spoil anthing)*

story 1/10
First let's address the elephant in the room: the story gives us no firm grasp on the plot, they only vaguely explain who the flowers are and give us no explanation into how pandoras are created, if you peek at anthea'ss monitor it would imply that the flowers have some type of psychic ability that the pandoras emulate through a twisted mutation. There also seems to be an implication that they are searching for someone who has a particular mutation of this psychic strain and may or may not be the key to freeing humanity from a scientific breakthrough gone horribly wrong however most of what I've stated just now is based purely off conjecture considering that there's never any concrete explanation into anything going on in this episode. The pacing of under the dog left me feeling disconnected from the characters and anything they do although at least the action scenes can be seen as a prelude to what we may expect from the 2nd installment (should it get enough funding)

Art 8/10
One thing under the dog did well was the art and animation. The artwork felt new and didn't lose it's appeal throughout the episode and was consistent enough to at least keep my attention by being aesthetically pleasing.

Characters 3/10
A surefire way to lose peoples interest in an anime is to rush character introductions and give no time to actually care about them before killing them off. It felt like an insult to my intelligence when they wasted the majority of the episode on characters that we could have watched only the last 5 minutes and felt more emotion for than if we were to watch the entire episode. They waste time on characters that will end up being meaningless simply to force the theme of dread and lack of hope for humanity, instead of giving us reasons to care about these people we're forced to not care because of how they are handled

Overall i think that under the dog has potential and I really hope they make an episode 2 in order to elaborate more on the story's plot because otherwise this one-shot was a waste of time and crowdfunding.