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Haiku review:

It has the same name
But all-wrong ingredients
Its flavor now gone

Prose review after five episodes (but it would take a Biblical miracle to pull this one out):

There was once a company called Bell and Howell. It was famous and had a sterling reputation. It made some of the best professional movie cameras ever. Before it was just Canon, in the U.S. it was Bell and Howell Canon. The company went out of business and now we see the name of Bell + Howell stuck on any piece of flimsy crap the just-this-side-of-swindlers want to sell.

There was once an anime called “The Devil Is a Part-Timer.” ... It was a brilliant parody of isekai even before isekai was a thing. Watch it today and it still carries the sparkle and hilarity it did when it was first released in 2013. It is a classic. Problem is, it ended in the wrong place, one episode after the logical season ending. No one knew why. Many of us hoped for a second season.

Now, as with Bell and Howell, the name has been acquired by some outfit that produced what could have been called “Scooby-Do is a Part-Timer,” though that would be an insult to Scooby-Do. This “sequel” has none of the charm, none of the excellent artwork and animation, none of the crisp acting of the original. The visuals are almost as if the Ex-Arm people made this monstrosity in 3D then flattened it to 2D. The faces are unblinking and expressionless or else anime cliché, with lip-flaps on vacantly staring fixed frames. There is no nuance of the sort that marked the original. “The Devil Is a Part-Timer” has been removed from this series in everything but name. Even Chi’s biganimetiddies have shrunk and the franchise manager has become a loquacious social worker instead of a character in a comedy.

The dub voice actors are terrible, possibly out of anguish over what they’ve been given to say. In the real “The Devil Is a Part-Timer,” I laughed continuously. Watching this sorry sequel, I cringed continuously and laughed not at all. The life has been sucked out of all the characters, and some new lifeless characters got introduced for no apparent reason.

This series is a huge disappointment. You can be forgiven for screwing up this badly only if your name is Anno. And he was working through his issues. Not that the people in this purported second season don’t have issues. They do, and they involve learning how to write, learning how to draw, learning how to animate and learning how to act. This is more “Squid Girl” than “The Devil Is a Part-Timer.” (Please, Lord, don’t let these people get their hands on “No Game, No Life”!)

Second seasons, even those that don’t take nine years to get released, have a pretty spotty history already. After a wonderful, legendary first season, KonoSuba got phoned in for the second season and two movies before finally recovering its dignity in the third movie. But this isn’t really a second season. It’s an inept imitation of what people who aren’t as good think would have been a second season had there been one. Even the memorable music has been replaced by some random unremarkable songs sung by random unremarkable anime singers, with immemorable OP and ED, though the latter makes a fan-art attempt to imitate that of the original season. For anime fans, “Yay! A second season!” is accompanied by a feeling in the pit of the stomach that there’s about an even chance that the second season will do nothing but disgrace the first season. That’s what happened here. A fine anime’s good name has been disgraced.

I gave it a 3 for nostalgic reasons. It deserves lower.

So shameful, as they say.

Haiku review:

Shaft depicts it well
Their take on magical girls
Shows it to the bone

Wow. If there were a Monogatari about magical girls, this would be it. In fact, the distinctive Shaft style has never been put to better use – not even in Monogatari – than it is here. There are even head tilts.

I only now got around to watching Mahou Shoujo Madoka★Magica because it seemed to be one of those shows an anime fan ought to watch. It is such a milestone in the development of the art. But holy whiskers, it’s an anime that takes the viewer in so many unexpected places, in so ... many unexpected ways.

Yes, it’s a whole new take on magical girls, bla bla bla. In some ways, it changed more than that subgenre. It reminds us that it’s never safe to sit back and relax – that’s what re-watching is for. No, anything can happen at any time. A happy outcome is not assured. No character is safe. Ever. It makes watching anime in general a more electric, more tense experience.

And it deals with the cosmic issues intelligently. They did the arithmetic. It can be followed and even makes discernible sense. If Nisioisin wrote a magical girl story, this would be it.

It benefits from the standard Shaft “buckle up because it’s gonna be a bumpy ride” approach to the extent that I do not think anyone else could have made it. It is a perfect matching of studio and story. In some respects, maybe all respects, it is a perfect anime.

I should give it a 10, but I don’t much like magical girl shows. Actually, I just now upon reflection went back and gave it a 10. Which it richly deserves. I’m honored to have seen something so good.

Haiku review:

Derivative crap
No matter its "edginess"
Is still only crap

Prose review:

Months ago I gave Ex-Arm a rating of 1. But Devilman Crybaby didn't achieve its overarching crapitude through some simple trick such as technical incompetence. No, Devilman Crybaby got awful the hard way.

It seems that Netflix is looking for the "Hey! I think I have a pubic hair!" crowd, because anyone who has watched much anime has seen every single thing in Devilman Crybaby a dozen times, every time done better, or more perceptively, or with an actual point. This is the most entirely derivative work in all of anime, without the features that would have ... at least made it a decent parody.

I mean, they even stole the ED from Angel Cop as the ED for ep. 9, though the Angel Cop music was much better. Samarai Champloo made better use of rap, Akira had a better Akira, Ergo Proxy did better psycho-dystopia, Nana had better girl-girl interaction, Dororo had better dismemberment and a better monster, Belladonna of Sadness had better edgy animation, Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt had a better plot, FLCL made more sense overall, and the original Neon Genesis Evangelion had a more sensible ending.

And countless others had better biganimetiddies.

This is one of the series I wasted time on in my every-other-year month subscription to Netflix. At least, I won't be sad the month is over, given this being the kind of stuff they're producing.

Haiku review:

Komi doesn't talk
Protagonist understands
Narrator preaches

For those who cannot plumb the depths of poetry, a prose version:

Take this into consideration: We frigging GET IT. We don't need the point jammed down out throats. This would have been a perfectly lovely little slice-of-life-with-a-lesson but for the preachy narration. Actually, the show gratuitously hits on popular woke and buzz topics: The second-fiddle supporting tsundere is identified, for no reason that adds to the plot or anything else, as of uncertain sexual preference, and plural pronouns are employed. Later, bullying is also brought up for no reason (and the example given wasn't even bullying -- it was a ... teacher taking advantage of the protagonist's eagerness to help out). This was all shoved in self-consciously, obviously, and stupidly, making me wonder if it got shoehorned in by the localizers/translators/woke cops.

We don't need such crap pounded in to a story that otherwise makes its point sweetly and plenty obviously. Is this the future of anime? Of localization? Of what we'll get from Netflix?

I gave this a 5, sad to say. Without the politics and condescension it would have been an 8. I wonder what the script really said.

Haiku review:

First season is good
Second, superfluous pad
Third, a masterpiece

This review covers the entire “Fruits Basket” remake.

As most of us know, there was an excellent and widely loved “Fruits Basket” series that appeared in 2001. Its lone real shortcoming was that it appeared before the manga was complete, so it couldn’t reveal how everything turns out.

... The story was the kind of shojo that appeals to a much wider audience. The characters were compelling, the plot moved forward at the right speed, and even though it was incomplete it led to a satisfactory ending.

The original series did not, apparently, find favor with Takaya Natsuki, author of the original manga, who was in some measure involved in the three-season remake that’s the subject of this review. The chief production connection to the original is the presence of much of the original voice cast in the English dub, which is nice.

My initial thought upon viewing the remake was how the changes were pretty much limited to style – the characters are more moe, the “leeks” had become “chives” for no apparent reason, and the little androgynous blond character had acquired a German accent and a few German words. The places that could have benefited from the advances in anime making were largely unchanged. Kyo’s transformation, for instance, was little better in this series than in the original.

I have not read the manga, and if this remake represents the manga better than the original did, I’m glad of that. Because in the remake a good and interesting story in which we care about the characters is diluted by padding, a kind of flailing in which there’s an attempt to make this into a high school romantic comedy with zodiac animals and such. It’s as if the story was approached as something that could be hammered into a kind of anime version of a “Twilight”-ish drama. That might be good for the producers’ bank accounts, but it’s crap storytelling. The thing runs a total of 63 episodes, which is at least 11 episodes too long. And it was dissonant, like the first year I watched anime and alternated between “Elfin Lied” and “UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.”

It would have been better to have made a second season, picking up from the first, once the manga finished in 2006 – it’s not as if five years awaiting a sequel is unheard of in anime. That failing, the producers might better have remade the original series, changing it only to the extent that improvements in technology allowed it to be better on that basis and that basis alone, and added a second season to complete the story. Then, if they wanted, they could have done “Fruits Basket Fumoffu” or something, where the zodiacs are always getting hugged and there could have been aerial views of the brightly colored explosions and ho ho ho for those who are into it, without messing up the drama of the show. There were cute parts – the scenes with the editor and the school play – that were genuinely funny, but this isn’t a funny show. (And if they’d collected a dollar for every anime trope and cliché used in the otherwise unremarkable OPs and EDs, they would have been able to finance that sidebar series, with enough left over to improve the production values in the main show.)

To say nothing of the endless, repetitive back stories. We got it first time around: It sucked to be a kid in this family; apparently, it sucked to be a kid in Japan, period. No need to devote a half dozen episodes to how it sucked to be this kid, and this one, and this one. It’s less fun than the Endless Eight was. Then there was the soapy soliloquy at the beginning of second season, ep. 22, when Shinji, oops, Yucky, was going on about how Tohru was like a mommy to him (to which his friend said what sounded like, “Even though she’s Irish?” but on third listening I guess it was, “even though she’s our age?”) and how he wanted something more. I half expected him to burst forward in a chorus of “I gotta be me.” This kind of thing happens when they’ve lost control of the story and try to get it back by taking it way too seriously. Truth is, they could lost most of the second season with no loss to the narrative.

“Fruits Basket” is one of the enduring classics in anime. As such, it shouldn’t be messed with lightly, any more than “Neon Genesis Evangelion” should be redone as a rom-com. If it were to be remade, it should have been done with that near-sacred status in mind, with the goal of the heights to which it could further soar, instead of how many high school could be crammed into it, how much it could be homogenized with all the 5/10 shows that come and go without leaving a ripple.

THEN CAME SEASON THREE, “FRUITS BASKET: THE FINAL”

And oh, my God. Perhaps as a reward for enduring the aimless second season, the third season is one of the finest series of anime I have ever seen or can imagine. It is gripping, moving, tense, heart-wrenching, uplifting, terrifying – pick your superlative and there’s something in this short season that fits it. Talk about a roller coaster!

(It also demonstrates that, with a very small exception, all that high school stuff had no bearing or effect on the outcome. It was as out of place as it seemed.)

That third season also does something very well that anime usually does poorly if at all: Usually, if there’s an ending it takes place about 10 frames before the end of the show, leaving the viewer thinking, “and then what?” They hold hands and there’s fireworks, the end. (“Toradora,” I’m looking at you.) Not here. “Fruits Basket: The Final” devotes several episodes – more than necessary, really – to letting us know what happened then. It might be an apology for all the pointless high school stuff, but those producing the show seem to have realized that the audience has come to care about the characters and would like to know that they’re safe, if in fact they’re safe. We get to find out how it turned out writ large, not just at one point in time. It acknowledges that the “Fruits Basket” story is special, that it has a revered place in anime’s enormous body of work.

That’s good, though even the ending may be just a little bit stretched out, as if everyone involved didn’t want to go home yet, didn’t want to leave these remarkable characters behind. And who can blame them? We don’t want to be done with them, either. We want them to come over for a cup of coffee. We want to do what we can to help them along to happiness. Not many anime (or stories in other media) bring us to that place.

After watching a series that’s become important to us we often express a wish: for a different outcome, for a plot hole (or many plot holes) to get filled, most often, for a second season. I’ll do that now. I fervently wish (with no reason to think it will ever happen) that they go back and recut the whole show. That they take the vast majority of the high school stuff, the parts that have nothing to do with the story, and make them into a sidebar series. At least that they remove them from the main story, which loses its pace and just wallows around because of them. The pacing of parts of the series is just right, but in the second season it and much else goes terribly wrong.

If they were to do that, the remake of “Fruits Basket” would be just right, a perfect successor to and completion of the 2001 masterpiece.

Haiku review:

First season is good
Second, superfluous pad
Third, a masterpiece

This review covers the entire “Fruits Basket” remake.

As most of us know, there was an excellent and widely loved “Fruits Basket” series that appeared in 2001. Its lone real shortcoming was that it appeared before the manga was complete, so it couldn’t reveal how everything turns out.

... The story was the kind of shojo that appeals to a much wider audience. The characters were compelling, the plot moved forward at the right speed, and even though it was incomplete it led to a satisfactory ending.
The original series did not, apparently, find favor with Takaya Natsuki, author of the original manga, who was in some measure involved in the three-season remake that’s the subject of this review. The chief production connection to the original is the presence of much of the original voice cast in the English dub, which is nice.

My initial thought upon viewing the remake was how the changes were pretty much limited to style – the characters are more moe, the “leeks” had become “chives” for no apparent reason, and the little androgynous blond character had acquired a German accent and a few German words. The places that could have benefited from the advances in anime making were largely unchanged. Kyo’s transformation, for instance, was little better in this series than in the original.

I have not read the manga, and if this remake represents the manga better than the original did, I’m glad of that. Because in the remake a good and interesting story in which we care about the characters is diluted by padding, a kind of flailing in which there’s an attempt to make this into a high school romantic comedy with zodiac animals and such. It’s as if the story was approached as something that could be hammered into a kind of anime version of a “Twilight”-ish drama. That might be good for the producers’ bank accounts, but it’s crap storytelling. The thing runs a total of 63 episodes, which is at least 11 episodes too long. And it was dissonant, like the first year I watched anime and alternated between “Elfin Lied” and “UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.”

It would have been better to have made a second season, picking up from the first, once the manga finished in 2006 – it’s not as if five years awaiting a sequel is unheard of in anime. That failing, the producers might better have remade the original series, changing it only to the extent that improvements in technology allowed it to be better on that basis and that basis alone, and added a second season to complete the story. Then, if they wanted, they could have done “Fruits Basket Fumoffu” or something, where the zodiacs are always getting hugged and there could have been aerial views of the brightly colored explosions and ho ho ho for those who are into it, without messing up the drama of the show. There were cute parts – the scenes with the editor and the school play – that were genuinely funny, but this isn’t a funny show. (And if they’d collected a dollar for every anime trope and cliché used in the otherwise unremarkable OPs and EDs, they would have been able to finance that sidebar series, with enough left over to improve the production values in the main show.)

To say nothing of the endless, repetitive back stories. We got it first time around: It sucked to be a kid in this family; apparently, it sucked to be a kid in Japan, period. No need to devote a half dozen episodes to how it sucked to be this kid, and this one, and this one. It’s less fun than the Endless Eight was. Then there was the soapy soliloquy at the beginning of second season, ep. 22, when Shinji, oops, Yucky, was going on about how Tohru was like a mommy to him (to which his friend said what sounded like, “Even though she’s Irish?” but on third listening I guess it was, “even though she’s our age?”) and how he wanted something more. I half expected him to burst forward in a chorus of “I gotta be me.” This kind of thing happens when they’ve lost control of the story and try to get it back by taking it way too seriously. Truth is, they could lost most of the second season with no loss to the narrative.

“Fruits Basket” is one of the enduring classics in anime. As such, it shouldn’t be messed with lightly, any more than “Neon Genesis Evangelion” should be redone as a rom-com. If it were to be remade, it should have been done with that near-sacred status in mind, with the goal of the heights to which it could further soar, instead of how many high school could be crammed into it, how much it could be homogenized with all the 5/10 shows that come and go without leaving a ripple.

THEN CAME SEASON THREE, “FRUITS BASKET: THE FINAL”

And oh, my God. Perhaps as a reward for enduring the aimless second season, the third season is one of the finest series of anime I have ever seen or can imagine. It is gripping, moving, tense, heart-wrenching, uplifting, terrifying – pick your superlative and there’s something in this short season that fits it. Talk about a roller coaster!

(It also demonstrates that, with a very small exception, all that high school stuff had no bearing or effect on the outcome. It was as out of place as it seemed.)

That third season also does something very well that anime usually does poorly if at all: Usually, if there’s an ending it takes place about 10 frames before the end of the show, leaving the viewer thinking, “and then what?” They hold hands and there’s fireworks, the end. (“Toradora,” I’m looking at you.) Not here. “Fruits Basket: The Final” devotes several episodes – more than necessary, really – to letting us know what happened then. It might be an apology for all the pointless high school stuff, but those producing the show seem to have realized that the audience has come to care about the characters and would like to know that they’re safe, if in fact they’re safe. We get to find out how it turned out writ large, not just at one point in time. It acknowledges that the “Fruits Basket” story is special, that it has a revered place in anime’s enormous body of work.

That’s good, though even the ending may be just a little bit stretched out, as if everyone involved didn’t want to go home yet, didn’t want to leave these remarkable characters behind. And who can blame them? We don’t want to be done with them, either. We want them to come over for a cup of coffee. We want to do what we can to help them along to happiness. Not many anime (or stories in other media) bring us to that place.

After watching a series that’s become important to us we often express a wish: for a different outcome, for a plot hole (or many plot holes) to get filled, most often, for a second season. I’ll do that now. I fervently wish (with no reason to think it will ever happen) that they go back and recut the whole show. That they take the vast majority of the high school stuff, the parts that have nothing to do with the story, and make them into a sidebar series. At least that they remove them from the main story, which loses its pace and just wallows around because of them. The pacing of parts of the series is just right, but in the second season it and much else goes terribly wrong.

If they were to do that, the remake of “Fruits Basket” would be just right, a perfect successor to and completion of the 2001 masterpiece.

Haiku review:

First season is good
Second, superfluous pad
Third, a masterpiece

For those who cannot count syllables:

This review covers the entire “Fruits Basket” remake.

... As most of us know, there was an excellent and widely loved “Fruits Basket” series that appeared in 2001. Its lone real shortcoming was that it appeared before the manga was complete, so it couldn’t reveal how everything turns out.

The story was the kind of shojo that appeals to a much wider audience. The characters were compelling, the plot moved forward at the right speed, and even though it was incomplete it led to a satisfactory ending.

The original series did not, apparently, find favor with Takaya Natsuki, author of the original manga, who was in some measure involved in the three-season remake that’s the subject of this review. The chief production connection to the original is the presence of much of the original voice cast in the English dub, which is nice.

My initial thought upon viewing the remake was how the changes were pretty much limited to style – the characters are more moe, the “leeks” had become “chives” for no apparent reason, and the little androgynous blond character had acquired a German accent and a few German words. The places that could have benefited from the advances in anime making were largely unchanged. Kyo’s transformation, for instance, was little better in this series than in the original.

I have not read the manga, and if this remake represents the manga better than the original did, I’m glad of that. Because in the remake a good and interesting story in which we care about the characters is diluted by padding, a kind of flailing in which there’s an attempt to make this into a high school romantic comedy with zodiac animals and such. It’s as if the story was approached as something that could be hammered into a kind of anime version of a “Twilight”-ish drama. That might be good for the producers’ bank accounts, but it’s crap storytelling. The thing runs a total of 63 episodes, which is at least 11 episodes too long. And it was dissonant, like the first year I watched anime and alternated between “Elfin Lied” and “UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.”

It would have been better to have made a second season, picking up from the first, once the manga finished in 2006 – it’s not as if five years awaiting a sequel is unheard of in anime. That failing, the producers might better have remade the original series, changing it only to the extent that improvements in technology allowed it to be better on that basis and that basis alone, and added a second season to complete the story. Then, if they wanted, they could have done “Fruits Basket Fumoffu” or something, where the zodiacs are always getting hugged and there could have been aerial views of the brightly colored explosions and ho ho ho for those who are into it, without messing up the drama of the show. There were cute parts – the scenes with the editor and the school play – that were genuinely funny, but this isn’t a funny show. (And if they’d collected a dollar for every anime trope and cliché used in the otherwise unremarkable OPs and EDs, they would have been able to finance that sidebar series, with enough left over to improve the production values in the main show.)

To say nothing of the endless, repetitive back stories. We got it first time around: It sucked to be a kid in this family; apparently, it sucked to be a kid in Japan, period. No need to devote a half dozen episodes to how it sucked to be this kid, and this one, and this one. It’s less fun than the Endless Eight was. Then there was the soapy soliloquy at the beginning of second season, ep. 22, when Shinji, oops, Yucky, was going on about how Tohru was like a mommy to him (to which his friend said what sounded like, “Even though she’s Irish?” but on third listening I guess it was, “even though she’s our age?”) and how he wanted something more. I half expected him to burst forward in a chorus of “I gotta be me.” This kind of thing happens when they’ve lost control of the story and try to get it back by taking it way too seriously. Truth is, they could lost most of the second season with no loss to the narrative.

“Fruits Basket” is one of the enduring classics in anime. As such, it shouldn’t be messed with lightly, any more than “Neon Genesis Evangelion” should be redone as a rom-com. If it were to be remade, it should have been done with that near-sacred status in mind, with the goal of the heights to which it could further soar, instead of how many high school tropes could be crammed into it, how much it could be homogenized with all the 5/10 shows that come and go without leaving a ripple.

THEN CAME SEASON THREE, “FRUITS BASKET: THE FINAL”

And oh, my God. Perhaps as a reward for enduring the aimless second season, the third season is one of the finest series of anime I have ever seen or can imagine. It is gripping, moving, tense, heart-wrenching, uplifting, terrifying – pick your superlative and there’s something in this short season that fits it. Talk about a roller coaster!

(It also demonstrates that, with a very small exception, all that high school stuff had no bearing or effect on the outcome. It was as out of place as it seemed.)

That third season also does something very well that anime usually does poorly if at all: Usually, if there’s an ending it takes place about 10 frames before the end of the show, leaving the viewer thinking, “and then what?” They hold hands and there’s fireworks, the end. (“Toradora,” I’m looking at you.) Not here. “Fruits Basket: The Final” devotes several episodes – more than necessary, really – to letting us know what happened then. It might be an apology for all the pointless high school stuff, but those producing the show seem to have realized that the audience has come to care about the characters and would like to know that they’re safe, if in fact they’re safe. We get to find out how it turned out writ large, not just at one point in time. It acknowledges that the “Fruits Basket” story is special, that it has a revered place in anime’s enormous body of work.

That’s good, though even the ending may be just a little bit stretched out, as if everyone involved didn’t want to go home yet, didn’t want to leave these remarkable characters behind. And who can blame them? We don’t want to be done with them, either. We want them to come over for a cup of coffee. We want to do what we can to help them along to happiness. Not many anime (or stories in other media) bring us to that place.

After watching a series that’s become important to us we often express a wish: for a different outcome, for a plot hole (or many plot holes) to get filled, most often, for a second season. I’ll do that now. I fervently wish (with no reason to think it will ever happen) that they go back and recut the whole show. That they take the vast majority of the high school stuff, the parts that have nothing to do with the story, and make them into a sidebar series. At least that they remove them from the main story, which loses its pace and just wallows around because of them. The pacing of parts of the series is just right, but in the second season it and much else goes terribly wrong.

If they were to do that, the remake of “Fruits Basket” would be just right, a perfect successor to and completion of the 2001 masterpiece.

Haiku review:

Experimental
Anime from long ago
Why even bother?

Prose review for more pedestrian tastes:

“Damn! Episode 16 and still no plot!” says Nabeshin (played by Watanabe Shinichi, who also directed the series and wrote the OP and ED) near the beginning of Episode 16 of “Excel Saga,” one of those experimental maybe-aimless anime typified by “FLCL” and, a decade later, “Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt,” both of which were much better than this too-cool-for-school alleged comedy. The show reminds me of nothing as much as the 1970s stoner comics that everyone liked to quote and no one admitted weren’t really all that good. Its actual full English title ... is “Quack Experimental Anime Excel Saga.” And talk about a slow burn . . .

Excel is the woebegone protagonist. She is not a spreadsheet either in the sense of a computer program or that of a morally loose person. Right off the bat she tracks down a dog, Menchi, which she intends to eat. Throughout the series he’s kept around, just in case he’s needed to fill that role. The unhappy fact is that this detail is as close to sense as the first dozen episodes of the series makes. (Actually, that may not be fair – but we’ll never know, because the dialog is largely in inaudible whispers from Monica Rial when she’s not coughing, vomiting, or bleeding, or else in Excel's loud anime screeches.)

It is plenty meta and self-referential, which is how a show that otherwise displays no symptoms of it announces that it’s a comedy. If it were billed as a program designed to be force-binged to enemy spies to get them to talk, that would be believable, too. It is apparently supposed to parody the styles of popular anime of the day. I’d never heard that anime in 1999 was so bad.

I did occasionally, briefly, like it, but that was most likely flashbacks to a time of which I remember little.

Though beginning with episode 17 the series does acquire a bit of coherence. That episode, about making fake anime cels (from “FLCL” and “Samurai Champloo” – “Sailor Moon” is rejected because no one would want them) was meta enough to draw the occasional unexpected grin. And in episode 18 we have this exchange: “So this is YOUR sick plan.” “No, our sick plan is three days per year.” It may be that watching it drains the viewer’s IQ at a rate – I’d guess about five points per episode – that by episode 17 one has become stupid enough to like it. Today’s experiment . . . Failed.

All is not lost, but the years have not been kind to “Excel Saga.” A lot has happened since 1999. Thank goodness.

Closing haiku:

It might be a good
Historical document
But bad anime

Haiku review:

Not magical girl
Harem fun but serious
Degeneracy

Prose review for those to whom art doesn’t matter:

They’re back and lewder than ever. “To LOVE-Ru Darkness 2” might, by the third episode, be called “Lick x Sis,” as in sister-sister action we learn that the only difference between the folds in the tails of our pink-haired space princesses and their other nether regions is the color. Swap the blacks and grays for skintones and we’re in full-on hentai territory here.

... I wondered if “To LOVE-Ru Darkness” would take this tendency as far as it could go. It turns out, there was more unprobed territory, so to speak.

The first couple of episodes re-establish the strange world and that this is not our world in that there the girls are, for lack of a better term, psychotic nymphomaniacs who may turn on the other person or not. This may serve as a strong warning for viewers who employ the three-episode rule. It’s a commonplace for people to say this show isn’t for everyone, but they’ll know whether it’s for them in the first minute of the first episode. This series pulls no punches, though in keeping with the solemn code governing anime, the protagonist is an idiot.

We are reunited with our old friends from the earlier series. They’re unchanged, though Lala is more thicc than I remember (though, in my defense, it’s been almost a whole day since I saw the original Darkness series). Stylistically, there were a few more (disappointing; they’re always disappointing) misplaced rays of foggy light as censor strips, though only a few; they’re better, I suppose, than the stupid stickers licensees use, but if they don’t want full nakedness then they ought to reframe their cuts to begin with, no? And this series there’s a new way of travel, in the form of spring-shaped tornado things that precede one of the various magical girls’ arrivals. It seems a little late in the game to introduce this stuff, but that’s not something unheard of in second-season, lower-budget anime. And they did seem to spend their money where it’s most effective, if you catch my drift.

The writing seems much the same (in the dub; who knows what Sentai changed from the original Japanese – it’s not as if the issue has never arisen before), though there was one notable difference, at the end of episode 3. One of our girls is sneaking into the bed of the protagonist in the middle of the night, only to find another of our girls is already there. Did she go berserk and call him a pervert? She did not. She went berserk and called him “you filthy weeb.” I don’t know if this is progress, but it is certainly different – as is the idea that a weeb would ever be in bed with a willing girl.

Strangely, MAL lists the series as having 12 episodes, but the one I watched has 14. This leads me to think that there’s a version out there minus two whole episodes worth of material aimed at, um, sophisticates. (The version I saw, a dub, included the occasional explanatory comment, as when a pun that would only be understood by Japanese viewers was part of the dialogue, so perhaps the longer version is unofficial, more’s the pity. The final two episodes, though, were heavily censored subs – meaning an almost completely white screen much of the time.)

The series finally got around to a festival episode. It was not explained where they got yukatas that accommodate tails, but they weren’t wearing those or any other garments for a lot of it.

Celine – who is supposed to be a plant! -- latches onto any available nipple in search of milk. There’s never a shortage of candidates. And there is a cabbage-chopping scene – don’t worry, established anime cabbage rules were followed – in which the protagonist and his little sister are inadvertently put nearly into imouto/onii-chan territory. That’s not the only time. Anime, wonderful as it is, can get weird. Oh, and there’s more hot tentacle action, too.

The long-sought Master Nemesis appears – they didn’t even have to use master bait! – and our protagonist has her tiddies out and has face planted into her coochie before a minute has passed. Good job, though I’m beginning to think he slips and falls on purpose, like some grocery store liability lawsuit grifter. Best line of the series is not from Nemesis: “It’s become clear to me that the laws of physics mean nothing to you,” said to a coochie-gagged protagonist following a tumble down the stairs. (And I never dreamt I would ever write the phrase “coochie-gagged protagonist. I’d be a great title for a novel, don’t you think?) Close second, same character to protagonist: “I love all things perverted. And I love how depraved you can be, too.”

Nemesis, who it turns out likes to get herself some tail, can make her boobies get big and small at will, but I think it may have just been the animators demonstrating that unlike other animators they can draw more than just the one size. While we’re at it, the panty wrinkles have by episode 5 become downright explicit – remove the lace edges and change the color and they aren’t there at all. And who the hell makes that sort of electric cat’s paw toy? And who would call it “adorable”? (Well, before its use, anyway.)

The music is typical; the OP and ED are both apparently products of the computer program that randomly generates anime theme song lines (and a busy machine it is!), and they’re still longer than they need to be.

But yes, Nemesis’s appearance means that there is a plot. What could it possibly be? How can it turn out? Will our beloved characters be destroyed? Will the protagonist have what it takes or succumb to performance anxiety when he must enter the breach?

Haiku review:

Space princesses bring
Tiddies and panty wrinkles
And a dab of plot

Prose for the culturally challenged:

Somewhere out there there’s a disappointed adult who as a teenager watched this series and thought it represents how life is when you get a little older. He lives alone, as he always has and always will.

It wasn’t until episode five, when the dogs, um, pleasured one of the characters in “To LOVE-Tu Darkness,” that it dawned on me that this is not just any old fan service slice-of-life Spacesex (sorry, Elon Musk) cute space alien series. Within a minute or two after the doggies went all lickie-lickie, the scene got ... as close to tentacle hentai as a show can and still be considered straight anime (and even then, you can’t do with a straight face). Tiddies appear with hentai-like frequency, and the panty wrinkles are more detailed than one normally encounters in anime (and for that matter, IRL). Oh, those kids!

There is a plot, but it takes a supporting role to the spacegirl-boy, boy-girl, animal-girl, animal-boy, girl-girl, and girl-boy-turned-into-girl as well as boy-alternating-into-girl (a different one) hi jinks. And it’s even got a plot involving interplanetary politics or something. I would be surprised if anyone has watched this series for the plot. (I didn’t: I watched it for, uh, research. Yeah, research, that’s the ticket.) Though a deep philosophical line does get opened: Can the typically dimwitted protagonist in a harem anime get to keep all the girls and call them an actual harem? This is a question that once raised demands an answer (and perhaps a pathway to its use IRL).

“Even in girl form, if it’s with you I’m down if you know what I mean,” says a space princess after the protagonist has gotten more or less accidentally transformed into a girl. Soon, the princess is moistening two of her fingers by putting them in her mouth. I wonder what for. Seconds earlier, as the boy-now-girl stood before a mirror, the princess was happy he had taken new interest in female anatomy. “You didn’t have to look at your own – I would have shown you mine whenever you wanted if you had only asked me. And I mean *any* part of my body.”

The thing is, the characters are developed sufficiently (no, I don’t mean tiddy development; in fact, this series recognizes that breasts come in different sizes) that we’re glad to see them get happily lewd because we’re invested in them. That isn’t often the case in this kind of show.

I know it will surprise and shock anime fans to learn that in this series the protagonist cannot so much as sneeze without grabbing the nearest girl by her tiddies, nor can any of the girls trip without landing coochie-first on the protagonist’s face (and of course immediately calling him a pervert and administering some sort of punishment). Another character can’t sneeze without changing sexes. But there are surprises here and there. Says one character to the protagonist after for no apparent reason lifting her skirt: “I wouldn’t normally show myself to anyone, but I feel comfortable with you.” (Here’s to widespread, so to speak, adoption of that method of demonstrating comfort.) “You can touch me. If you want to, that is.” Alas, a sneeze intervenes, though we’re given to believe that indeed he does want to. This kind of thing probably happens to NEET weeb shut-ins all the time, so viewers can relate.

A warning to them, though: There is no known method of spacial transfer that leaves behind all a girl’s clothes except for her thigh highs, as we see in a later episode. In a better world, scientists would be at work on this right now, but I don’t think they are. Nor do girls IRL, um, get off in the sexually ambiguous tail-centric fashion depicted in this anime.

All that having been said, there really is a plot that fills the spaces between the nudity. It is worth following and is even touching (in the emotional, not physical sense). And some of the nudity even figures into that plot. Not all the fan service is just for fan service. (Though the ice cream scene, not unique in anime, parodies hentai maybe just a little too closely. And then there are the strange wrinkles in the tail arrowhead toward the end of the last episode . . .)

Design and animation are mostly fine. Music is fine, though the OP and ED are each a little too long.

Most anime bomb when someone tries to make a live-action version, but “To LOVE-Ru Darkness” is worth the attempt and might succeed if it follows the original shot-for-shot.