The story is rather simple. A girl named Maisa Higa works with her father in her family hotel business after experiencing an injury in handball, although this is never actually told in the show, as far as i believe. She meets one of the hotel residents, whose name is Ichirou Suzuki, and they go through weird, unexplained natural phenomenon's together. After that, the rest is history.
It's practically a 24 minute special divided into 12 episodes, and i think this is where it fails the most. Abruptly stopping the story every minute broke the immersion i had with everything else the show had to provide, and i think if it was just one short special directed in a way where all the individual episodes are put together in a seamless manner, it would've been received more positively by the community, and by me as well. It's unfortunate to say this, because Deji Meets Girl has such weird yet engaging world building which falls victim to subpar storyboarding.
Moving on from it's ill-fated directing, the show actually does provide some sweet visuals. The character designs are cute, the backgrounds are even cuter, and the wacky imagery is there to back it up the whole time. To the hotel being filled up with loads of colorful fish and a ginormous tree, the show at least tries and most of the time succeeds to entertain you with its audiovisual aspects, which LIDENFILMS does pretty well here, despite me having negative opinions here and there about them as a studio. The animation is smooth, the CGI fish were fair and not a pain to look at, and the show is objectively well made, but it doesn't do much beyond that.
I leave this show feeling empty, but full. It's a weird mix of wanting more, but being somewhat content with having less. I will say though, if the decision was made to make this show into an hour-long movie instead, i truly believe it would've been way more successful. Because, if this was a film, it could've been up there with Your Name and Weathering with You, as it's cuteness is pretty formidable.
End of review.
