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Dec 27, 2021
Mahou Shoujo? Naria☆Girls is a very bizarre little project.
The story follows 3 magical girls fighting baddies of the week to save the magical land of Nariadia from a wicked Ice Queen… Though 85% of the screentime is dedicated to the girls who have no particular interest in being magical girls instead doing prompted improv comedy skits a la Whose Line Is It Anyway?
Far more important than what it claims to be about, is how it was made. Naria Girls is almost entirely non-scripted. The three protagonists are played vocally and physically by their voice actresses – literally, they rigged up their voice actresses with
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motion capture to control CG anime models, and captured their performances live! There is a director who prompts the actresses, and there are some scenes that were definitely scripted as they exist to serve what meagre story is present in the later episodes, but the vast majority of Naria Girls is composed of these three actresses honestly just standing in frame and doing hit and miss improv comedy amongst each other.
Each episode of Naria Girls is composed of a few different parts:
-We get an intro that is a series of drawn stills with narration over it
- Then we go into the CG models doing improv comedy until the halfway point when an evil minion shows up in the form of a drawn still with narration over it and “attacks” them by giving them a prompt for more improv comedy
- Then the animal mascot appears and tells the girls to transform, giving them another prompt to use as their transformation chant
- We get another series of drawn stills of the girls defeating the evil minion, who is usually a guest voice actor who is allowed to say whatever they want, including “Please buy Persona 5!” and other promotions of different projects they are working on.
The story of Naria Girls is paper-thin of course, because it isn’t really a magical girl anime, it’s an improv comedy show in which magical girl tropes are sometimes utilized to spoof them. The girls go through a transformation sequence in which they literally don’t transform at all, the talking mascot animal admits to being there just to sell products, and the show’s title and the final episode itself brazenly rip off Mahou Shoujo Madoka☆Magica.
The drawn stills are quite amateurish and look unfinished, but the CG animation in this is objectively awful. Limbs clip through the girls’ torsos and skirts every episode, hair jitters constantly, and girls often seem to be sliding side to side and sometimes off the frame. It is live capture so it’s not surprising that the final product is very technically unrefined, and I don’t know anything about the program they used to create this anime or CG animation in general, but I just want to ask: Was there really no way to go in and edit the models after everything was captured, if only to fix these obvious mistakes? I realize it’s a comedy and perhaps its entire conception was in itself, a complete joke, but if you’re making something with the intent of having people watch it…
Then again, series like Idolls! exist, and seem to have slightly better production values and is still just as technically inept. So who knows what is going on in Japanese mocap anime studios.
I initially hated the designs for the girls, but they ended up growing on me in a major way by the end. They each represent a season – Urara is Spring, Hanabi is Summer, and Inaho is Autumn – and it would have been easy to overdesign them to get that across, but the visual theming is pleasantly lowkey. As for the enemy designs, they are the standard ugly and forgettable animal-with-wacky-clothes-or-hair designs you would see in any Precure season.
Overall Naria Girls managed to be surprisingly charming, in a strange twist of fate, because of its bizarre production that made it feel more like I was watching a group of girls goof off in a VR chatroom than I was watching an actual attempt at a TV anime. It helps that sometimes the comedy was actually funny and the girls were likeable, if only because you felt bad for them most of the time.
3/10.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Dec 26, 2021
Ninja Collection, despite its title, isn’t a collection of 13 short stories about ninjas so much as it is a collection of short horror stories in which a ninja appears for a few seconds at the end.
It is a spin off of the long-running short series Yami Shibai, and very much in the spirit of it insofar as being a collection of 4-minute long one-off horror shorts with no protagonist throughout. Ninja Collection differs however by having a small cast of recurring bishounen ninja we know nothing about, who take turns showing up and killing the ghost or monster of the episode.
Almost every episode
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of Ninja Collection plays out as follows:
A person living in Tokyo is having a normal day, until something Weird happens. Things keep getting Weirder until they become Scary, and the person realizes they are in danger, being pursued by some kind of malevolent entity, like a ghost or a demon. Right before this threat can hurt or kill them, a ninja shows up and saves them by killing or otherwise containing the entity, and then they disappear in an instant and the person is left wondering if any of that actually just happened. Cue upbeat ending song.
There are some outliers, but they aren’t different enough to challenge this formula. Even if a ninja doesn’t save the person we’re following, at the end of the episode one does show up and slay that which killed them anyway. Even if the random citizen of Tokyo turns out to be the monster of the week, we still follow them as if they are the victim of some supernatural harassment, until they are found out and a ninja kills them. There are just 2 episodes that are more about the ninjas than a random citizen, but we barely know these ninjas, so they don’t feel any different from the one-off citizens really. In both a ninja is transformed into a demon themselves and dispatched by another.
These titular ninjas are by far the weakest element of the series, for a few reasons. One, their AnimeProtagonistTM designs clash with the otherwise realistic characters and mundane setting that is Real Life. Two, they don’t have names and don’t function as characters, so why include them as part of a recurring cast? And three: the promise of every threat being neutralized by one of these random ninja at the 3 minute mark undercuts any tension throughout.
It would have made more sense for this series to more closely follow something like Kagewani than Yami Shibai. If you’re going to create characters to connect otherwise completely unrelated shorts, then they should… be characters! We should follow them, like we followed the protagonist Banba in Kagewani as he explored scenes of various supernatural horrors, with a loose plot that spans the entire series and leads to a conclusion. Instead of closing each episode with one of a handful of ninja showing up and stabbing a ghost, the episodes should open with us following one of these ninja as they pursue the ghost of the week, or perhaps investigate a grisly scene, or set a trap to catch a horror we wait in suspense to see.
The main gripe I see against this show is that it is badly animated, or not animated at all. And yes, those claims are true, but this style of animation (which means to invoke kamishibai, a traditional story-telling method that uses still images) isn’t unique to Ninja Collection – it’s also used in its main series Yami Shibai, and in other horror shorts like Kagewani and Sekai no Yami Zukan. The visuals may turn off mainstream viewers who have no interest in this type of show, but there is clearly an audience for it. So why is it rated so lowly in comparison?
My belief is that Ninja Collection stands out as particularly bad compared to other entries in the genre of “barely animated horror shorts” because there is no reason to include any ninjas, and no effort made to integrate them into a series of shorts that would function better without them. The main differentiating element of this show isn’t just superfluous, it actively robs the much more prevalent horror element of any tension.
I don’t believe Ninja Collection deserves to be touted as the worst of the worst when it comes to anime – it’s a masterpiece compared to the likes of Skelter+Heaven, etc. But it is dull and conceptually ill-conceived enough for me not to feel compelled to defend it much more than that.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Nov 27, 2021
I've been watching a lot of truly awful anime lately, and coming off of OVAs like Mars of Destruction and Skelter Heaven, I actually came out of Dark Cat with a sense of respect and gratitude for its competence.
It had a narrative, and was – mostly – comprehensible in its storytelling, as rushed as it may have been. There was an undeniable presence of an art director, something I’m not convinced was present in a few of the other similarly rated titles I have seen. Some of the shots were noticeably well composed and even clever, and required an artistic vision and some decent
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effort to create. The animation wasn’t awful, the designs ranged from serviceable to genuinely charming (I like the subtlety of Hyoi and Rui’s cat-like features!), and I liked that the characters actually emoted. It wasn’t as generic as I expected and took some risks, even if they didn’t pay off and left it with a reputation of being “too grotesque to be enjoyable”.
I can understand the common criticisms of the gore and body horror being poorly animated, but I won’t decry it for existing and “being ugly”… of course it’s ugly, it’s body horror reminiscent of The Thing from The Thing. (Now would be a good time to warn people not to look this OVA up, unless they are sure they are okay with body horror and gore of this calibre. Tentacles with teeth and spines rip out of people’s skin from the inside and deform their hosts, it is quite awful) The body horror in Dark Cat being disgusting and making my skin crawl isn’t a fault – I think it’s the intended purpose. Though I will concede that:
1 .The phallic imagery of the horrific flesh mutations, particularly that of the teacher who attacked Rui, was… bizarre, considering that otherwise the OVA isn’t particularly dark in tone or otherwise sexually graphic.
2. Perhaps having grotesque body horror is completely unexpected in a story about two bishounen teens (?) who can turn into cats and fight ghosts.
Yes, Dark Cat, the OVA put on Worst Anime Ever lists for being a grotesque spectacle, is just as commonly placed on those lists for being a dumb anime about guys that can transform into house cats and who fight supernatural entities with not so amazing powers. This is a gripe I’ve seen a few times when I looked up the few impressions I could find of this OVA, but there was no point during my watching experience that I thought, “Man, these teens are pansies, they don’t even turn into big scary lions or anything! What’s the point, it’s practically a power-down! cinemasins ding” because I don’t go into anime expecting every single male character I see to be Big & Strong & Cool, I guess? Especially not ones with their hair styled into cat ears.
Otherwise, it seems the biggest reason Dark Cat is lauded as One of the Worst – perhaps even ahead of the silly concept and nauseating gore – is actually because of the abysmal english dub. It’s my honour to say that I didn’t watch the dub, so it doesn’t factor in at all into my impressions!
So in the end, perhaps my only true gripes with Dark Cat are:
1. Despite having no particular issue with body horror and gore existing, the extent of destruction and graphic death gave the OVA a bit of a snuff film vibe.
2. The conclusion to the story was quite bad.
Dark Cat isn’t a very complicated story. Demons and ghosts exist and wreak havoc on emotionally vulnerable humans, and supernatural soldiers try to mediate between the realms by purifying tortured ghosts and saving those dragged into darkness by evil entities. These beats are common in the supernatural genre of anime, but Dark Cat’s handling of its tragic morality tale left me more confused than anything. I can't really elaborate on my issues with it without spoiling everything, so on the offhand chance someone who is going to watch this OVA for some reason cares about what happens in it, I won't get into it.
Other than the bad writing, the string of deaths in the backhalf of the OVA when the monster lets loose in the school are quite uncomfortable to behold. The violence of a fight against a monster like this, I can handle, but the graphic images of helpless death were difficult to stomach. And in this OVA, there is no miraculous reversal of the demon’s damage once it is purified – there is no implication whatsoever that everyone who died isn’t still dead.
The main thing I was actually worried about when I watched Dark Cat was that there would be onscreen assault, thanks to reviewers griping it for “generic hentai tentacles”. I am relieved to say that there is none, at least not insofar as deserving a comparison to actual porn. There is sexual content scattered throughout the horror scenes: The occasionally phallic appearance of the tentacles, shots of the tentacles coming down from under skirts, and there is one shot of nudity when Aimi’s shirt is ripped open as she transforms, though I would say it’s too horrific and ugly to be sexualized or otherwise considered “fanservice”.
What is the point of the hits of sex imagery in Dark Cat? I have no idea. This isn’t Alien, it isn’t about the horror of sexual assault or the violence of creation, and there doesn’t seem to be any moral posturing about it as is often seen in slashers. I couldn’t parse any sort of consistent STI allegory regarding the plague of tentacles upon the student body, despite how many summaries I have read that describe the tentacles as that, a “plague”.
… I realize I am probably the only person on earth to give any aspect of Dark Cat’s production this much thought. To sum up: It seems to just exist for the shock value. Considering the extent of disgusting imagery already present a la The Gore and Deformation of Human Bodies, I don’t think this OVA benefitted from featuring some explicit looking tendrils, beyond cementing its abhorrent reputation.
Is this all to say that I think Dark Cat is a good OVA? No, of course not. It’s tone deaf, and tasteless, and has awkward pacing and bad writing. But compared to the utterly soulless and artistically devoid works the likes of Skelter Heaven and Mars of Destruction, I would say the fact I was able to write this much about Dark Cat is testament to that fact that it at the very least, contains content – and some of that content was like, decent!
By virtue of being executed with an average amount of competency for an OVA from the early 90s, and for having a balance of good and bad elements that gave me something to hold onto and mull over after viewing, I'm going to go ahead and say this is one of the better entries in the Worst Anime Ever countdown lists.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Nov 27, 2021
GIBIATE isn't good, but it still deserves better. Why does it deserve better? Because nearly every season I see asinine pedo-pandering isekai get scores over 7 for just existing, but GIBIATE is maligned for the cardinal anime sin of using bad CGI monsters.
So everything considered, I don’t think GIBIATE was that bad. It wasn’t even remotely the worst anime I’ve seen -- it wasn't even the worst anime of 2020, in my opinion. Now, does GIBIATE have terrible art and animation? Yes. Does it have confusing direction that makes fight scenes incomprehensible, and 0 sense of space, so you never know where the characters are
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standing between shots? Yes. Is the CGI terrible, and more than that, are the designs for the monsters God Awful? Yes. Was the narrative completely nutso bonkers, littered with tons of unnecessary flashbacks, and were the characters super poorly developed and non-compelling? Yes.
… Were the character designs kind of sick, actually? Yeah, they were. Thank you Amano for my life. Was it fun to watch, despite being a technical failure of an anime? Yes!
GIBIATE isn’t good, clearly, it’s a disaster – but I would put it above other, similar disasters of production, like Hand Shakers and Marchen Madchen, because it isn’t just a horrendous incest-riddled story delivered in an equally horrendous visual style, or a moe gone wrong. GIBIATE maintains a sense of intrigue to me because I can’t imagine what the production of it was like.
Characters designed by a legend like Amano, used in a story about… time-travelling samurai killing the goofiest looking monsters I’ve ever seen (designed by a mangaka who has drawn Resident Evil manga, by the way), as caused by a virus brought to earth by an alien spaceship’s debris. Did they know? Did anyone who worked on this project know that that was the direction it was going in? Why would anyone trust Ryo Aoki to produce this, and Masahiko Komino to direct it, when they’ve evidently never directed anything before this?
GIBIATE is one of the better trainwrecks that I have watched, and considering how many anime I’ve seen that aren’t plagued with the same problems GIBIATE is that still manage to be far worse, I enjoyed it. Watching it with my friends was a blast, and I clicked through every page on the official website completely unironically.
It's a 4/10 regardless of how much I enjoyed it -- I'm not completely deluded -- but it's a loving 4/10 accompanied with a recommendation to give it a shot.
Reviewer’s Rating: 4
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Nov 27, 2021
You might think an anime that takes place in an orderly and contained environment that demands very simple and clear story goals with literally 6 characters and 16 full-length episodes to develop at least the main 2 protagonists would be pretty good or at least damn focused, but unfortunately you would be mistaken!
I like the concept of an anime based on a RPG maker horror game with distinct levels that represent character struggles, because I like the limitations of a story like that. But despite a good set up that I thought was rife with opportunity to explore characters via personalized settings and challenges, Angels
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of Death failed to be a compelling narrative, because the characters we explored were… well. Really only Zack and Rachel received narrative attention and they were bafflingly uninteresting and unrelatable, and the small cast of secondary characters who were opposing them were walking cliches that left no impact whatsoever and just weren’t explored, period.
Far too much of the dialogue was repetition and reaffirmation of the narrative linchpin that doesn’t make sense (so we gotta reiterate it constantly so please just suspend your disbelief) – “You promised you would kill me when I get us out of this dungeon right? You’re definitely going to kill me? I can’t let you die because I need you to kill me.” “Yeah, heard you the first time, I’m definitely going to kill you, so be useful or I won’t kill you!”
And so all of the characters talked a lot, but no one really said anything, and nothing tangibly changed in our protagonists. Rachel herself says when her character arc ended and she got over her hangup about God and being forgiven by Him: “It’s not as if I myself have really changed. I’ve just accepted who I am. And I don’t wish to be forgiven anymore - no one would forgive me. That is why I still want to die.” But she still has a hangup about her and Zack’s promise in general, it just has no relationship to God anymore, and she is still walking towards the exact same goal… her reasons why have shifted slightly to the left, but nothing drastically changed.
As for Zack’s “development”… I don’t think he did develop so much as we just learned more things about his past overtime, all of which did nothing to make him remotely sympathetic or even particularly complex. Without spoiling much, near the finale Zack says: “What is the point of leaving here without Rachel?!” and that surprised me for about 2 seconds, because I thought Oh, he realized he cares about her? Had his dynamic with her had become more important to him than his ultimate goal of leaving this place? But then I realized the more likely answer is that he caught her Promise Hangup Disease and was panicking about not fulfilling his promise to kill her after 15 episodes of talking about said promise constantly all of the time literally every episode it was honestly 80% of what they talked about SERIOUSLY WE GET IT. So I don’t think we ever really moved from square one with him, either.
So even if the characters may have SLIGHTLY changed how they think about the dumb linchpin of the story, they act on it in the same as they would have without having been challenged at all. So it comes off as pretty dissatisfying, because I was expecting that a story as character driven as this would have very dynamic protagonists, but alas…
(It also goes without saying that a big reason I was never particularly committed to these characters in the first place was because the idea of a suicidal 13 year old girl having a deeply messed up relationship with an adult serial killer that hinges on their mutual promise of him definitely killing her later isn’t terribly appealing to me.)
Basically: I can forgive the creepypasta-esque ridiculousness of this story, I can realize the characters look like they were conceived in a design contest on deviantart in 2009 and accept that, I can listen to Zack’s grating maniacal laughter layered over a rock music montage and Danny pronounce the name Rachel with 54894 extra syllables approximately 83478 times – but I can’t forgive having watched 16 full length episodes of an anime that is focused on just 2 characters, wherein they are never challenged quite enough to actually budge from the (completely irrational) beliefs they held from the start.
5/10 for having clean, consistent artwork, decent animation and direction, some great tracks on the ost, and not being a particular chore of an anime to get through and Thank God Having No Romance Elements That I Could Parse – but ultimately feeling like a waste of time and potential.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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Nov 27, 2021
When I first started Bokuhaka, I found it unexpectedly charming because Hanadori the hopeless chuuni wasn’t the one being ridiculed, it was his “normal” classmate Seri who tried his best to not go along with his ridiculous roleplaying. By virtue of not being a cruel comedy when it easily could have been, I figured I could add it to the pathetic single piece of paper that comprises my Anime Comedy Good Book.
12 episodes later, I’m not so confident. While the series does hand Seri the L in every situation, I find that by relentlessly doing so it actually loses the touch of kindness a
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series like this could benefit from. Seri’s assumptions, even the wholesome ones – like his worries about Hanadori’s wellbeing, social or otherwise – are uno-reversed the same way his negative assumptions are. You could argue his self-sacrificing assumptions are driven by a sense of self-importance he shouldn’t have and him getting unwittingly checked by Hanadori or Tsukimiya is satisfying, but after the first time it just started to feel a little malicious. Even if Hanadori never means to insult Seri by rejecting his rare offerings of kindness or concern, it left me waiting for a pay off when he would accept and there would be some normal bonding moment uninterrupted by cynical comedy, but that moment never came.
I get that it’s funny that the times when Seri gives in and tries to be nice to his wildly annoying friends who are obsessed with him, that it backfires because haha, he thinks they’re obsessed with him! Except, they actually are...?
And so the usual episode format goes one of two ways:
1. Seri gets wrecked by his annoying friends who can’t leave him alone and he eventually snaps and yells at them for embarrassing him.
2. Seri gets wrecked by his annoying friends but something happens that makes him feel guilty about how he reacts, or causes him to worry about their well-being, and when he expresses these things it is revealed that he shouldn’t have, and he snaps and yells at them again for embarrassing him.
It does get tiresome to see the same formula again and again and again, and by the end of it, I was there in despair with Seri and wondering if he would ever escape his friends' tormenting. When Seri becomes more soft, it just backfires on him and the universe proves that he should stay cynical. When Hanadori reveals any other aspect of his character other than just being a chuuni, it’s backpedalled into him just being a chuuni actually. When Tsukimiya actually says something with an ounce of truth to it, he then twists it to be another part of his game of 4D chess he’s playing to make Seri suffer. And so it turns out there are consequences to making literally every scene a joke: nothing happens and no one changes.
It made for a rather insincere final impression, even if Hanadori and Seri are endearing… their endearing traits go nowhere because it wouldn’t be funny if they did. But it would be better.
Oh, and the side characters are either useless (Hibiki) or annoying (Tsukimiya and Mogami). Hibiki’s entire thing was just being unlucky and getting ignored by Hanadori and I found him easy to ignore as well. He really has no presence whatsoever after his introductory episode. I don’t care about Tsukimiya and him “being a God “ with literally supernatural abilities like being able to read Seri’s mind and always knowing where he is -- it just felt like Godmodding. I don’t get what’s “cool” about the kid that ruins a D&D session by rambling about how unexpectedly invincible his character is against the boss that should wreck him. And Mogami is just… a masochistic teen boy… really don’t care about a teen larper begging to be stepped on.
So considering we have an ensemble cast where only 2 characters have anything resembling development, and that development is caught in a perpetual state of Take-Backsies, I would say Bokuhaka deserves its middling score and rather poor reception, even if I enjoyed it more than the average critic. I didn’t find it cringeworthy, and I did find it funny enough, but there really is no substance. And I am not of the belief that comedy is magically exempt from expectation.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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