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This is a Japanese guy/cute elf romance that's half isekai and half "reverse isekai." The part that takes place in the rather generic fantasy dungeon world is super boring and hardly worth describing but the part that takes place in Japan is, while sometimes a bit cliche, decently enjoyable. The elf girl has very cute lines that are well delivered by Hondo Kaede and the boy is at least not a caricature of denseness or lechery. We get to see plenty of cute scenes like cooking together, going on train trips, lying in bed together, introducing the elf girl to other people ... (as a generic foreigner ofc), interactions with MC boy's grandfather, by recent anime romance standards the Japan setting parts are consistently at least decent and recall the classic magical girlfriend anime of the 80s and 90s. Nearly half the run time being wasted on the isekai setting parts weights it down very heavily though

PREMISE

A boy from Tokyo moves to Okinawa and gets into a love triangle.

VISUAL/SOUND

They do a good job of making it feel like you’re in a place that’s distinctly not mainland Japan. There are more cars driving around, we’re always near the beach, the roads are bigger and straighter, even the sun is different. This is the main thing you should be looking for in an anime about Okinawa and it’s done well, better than a lot of Okinawa vacation specials in other anime so kudos to this show for that. Character designs aren’t bad either: lovers of brown girls will ... like what they see and despite everyone having a similar face and simple clothing they do a good job of keeping their distinct appeals in mind. Designated loser Kana in particular is very attractive and the animation director did a great job of keeping her bust size consistent and ideal for a JK to boot.

Voice acting is quite good; Fairouz Ai as Kana in particular is excellent as she always is. Kitou Akari as Kyan shows her range well and manages to really sound like she isn’t from Tokyo which is nice. The BGM heavily reuses a few tracks that aren’t that interesting but they do suit the content well enough. The OP is a very good and has one of the better recent anime dance sequences in it; the ED is just okay.

STORY

There are essentially two stories going on that meet only on occasion: first a high school love triangle that can be cute at times and gives the girls a chance to fawn over the bland male MC but isn’t anything too interesting. It tries hard to bait you into thinking it will have a real ending but this is anime and it of course doesn’t. Second there’s an almost nonfiction story about how Okinawa differs from mainland Japan that is more unique. We get to see local festivals, superstitions, foods, less obvious differences like car-centricity, typhoon perparedness, local chains, strange kanji in names, natural history of local animal species, some things that are hard to believe like people from Okinawa allegedly always swimming with their street clothes on. It’s a change at least.

VERDICT

Pass

PREMISE

Cute girl learns to play golf, meets other cute girls who already play golf.

VISUAL/SOUND

Production quality is average for a TV anime. The character designs are fine with faces distinct enough to tell apart and a variety of body types drawn more or less consistently. The drawings of golf equipment are detailed (with plenty of attention drawn to the brand label naturally) with more quotidian backgrounds just average. The overly bright green color of the grass and a trees on the golf course itself is a major demerit.

Movement isn’t bad. I have no idea how realistically drawn the characters’ poses ... are when they’re taking their swings but they have some impact so good enough. There’s a fair number of super deformed visual gags which are never that funny but are pleasant enough. Facial expressions can be a bit flat.

The voice acting is pretty good. Both of the older girls the MC is yuribaited with are their seiyuu’s first major role and the MC’s seiyuu isn’t that famous either which helps keep it from feeling stale. The show doesn’t have enough going on to call any performance that good though. Use of background music is minimal and there aren’t many sound effects either. OP is okay and ED is above average.

STORY/CHARACTERS

In a word: forgettable. The MC’s character is that she wants to be more of a main character which is good for a chuckle but not enough to sustain a whole twelve episodes. The other characters lean towards the one note (MC’s gyaru friend, streamer who streams) with only the onee-san type being worth thinking about. The relationships are just not good enough to make this a good slice of life anime and as a sports anime there’s nowhere near enough to it.

PREMISE

Yet another band anime this time in the form of an original movie directed by Yamada Naoko. The twist is that the MC has synesthesia and goes to a Catholic school neither of which are portrayed which much weight.

VISUAL

This part is at least okay. The synthesia bits have some nice abstracted water color animation and the production quality of the realist scenes is high – they even manage to have fairly long and detailed dancing and a band performances with no CG but you can’t help but think you are looking at the least imaginative way to portray something so fundamentally based in ... imagination. Character figures can be expressive but rarely have anything interesting going on so it doesn’t matter. They don’t stand out or look attractive and you have the common Yamada problem of all the characters looking the same age. The portrayal of the background environments is technically fine but higly forgettable.

STORY

This part on the other hand is just bad. The synthesia premise is basically forgotten after it gives the MC an excuse to care about someone she doesn’t know and has no real reason to be interested in (apart from a potential, and if present completely gutless yuri interpretation) and then gets replaced by a series of school life scenes that gesture towards the idea of a coming of age story about the MC negotiating between her own desires and the school rules and how much she really believes in them and/or Catholicism. We are led to believe this is a lot more than typical for a Japanese girl but then get shown that she (or less forgivably, the movie’s staff) doesn’t know much about Catholicism with the inclusion of distinctly Protestant prayers, a totally cynical interpretation of confession, NICE nuns (suspension of disbelief can’t excuse something that unrealistic!) and then this all also gets dropped in favor of a profoundly boring band narrative. Like much of the animation, everything about the story ends up feeling like mere decoration on top of something that just isn’t worth caring about.

PREMISE/STORY/CHARACTERS

A girl at the post office in Paldea is bored sorting mail and looks for more interesting work. She ends up hitching a ride with Dragonite and flying to Kanto with a little boy to deliver a letter to his father. Everything about the script is very simple but all the characters' motivations have more than enough weight to them to fill fifteen minutes and the story they create gives us great excuses to see cute Pokemon in action!

VISUAL/SOUND

This is the real point of Kairyuu to Yuubinyasan and is it ever great. The quality of the drawings is high and we get ... a lot of expressive movement of people and espeically Pokemon in a variety of settings. We see everything from Litwick melting wax in the post office to Mabosstiff taking a walk to schools of Lanturn illuminating the ocean to Latios and Latias in disguise. This is all presenting with a rapid, almost overwhelming pace that reinforces just how varied the Pokemon setting has become over the past thirty years. The human's voices are fine and the music does its job setting the tone of grand adventure but the highlight here is also the Pokemons' cries.

VERDICT: PASS

PREMISE

Silent Mobius a cute girl police anime set in a cyberpunk Tokyo that also has demons in it for some reason. This movie introduces the setting and is mostly about how our main heroine Katsumi Liqueur ends up joining the youma cops.

VISUAL

Production quality is high. The background art is primarily lovely cityscapes mostly at night from a variety of perspectives in classic cyberpunk fashion. There’s a nice amount of detail that illustrates the near future (now past!) setting well – we see flying cars but not that many and mostly for official use, we see a few tasks performed by disembodied AIs ... but also people selling food on the side of the street by hand. Plenty of animation for things in the background too. The sources and quality of the light changes a lot between night and day, artificial and natural illumination, interior and exterior spaces and this is wonderfully realized – definitely the strongest point of the film.

Character designs are less impressive. The monster designs are just big balls of muscle and sinew with Alien-esque mouths and also some tentacles – adequate for the purpose but nothing special. Character designs have some detail – you can easily distinguish the age and build of the characters for example and we have some original police uniforms complete with epaulets. The scene with Katsumi and her mother embracing in her hospital room was well done but more often the character animation is a bit stiff and inexpressive and given that we are dealing with a premise clearly intended to appeal to the prurient interest the designs mostly do not fit very well. A more orthodox bishoujo art style with cuter faces and smaller proportions would have suited it better.

The action isn’t that great either – they do a good job of showing us Katsumi’s subjectivity in the monster attacks in the shower and in the alley in the first half of the movie but most of it is static incantations or blood getting everywhere.

SOUND

Nothing special. Only Katsumi and her mom have enough lines to be of any interest and of those only her mom (CV: Ikeda Masako) is worth mentioning. Music is adequate but never better than that. It does a good job of avoiding conspicuous overuse of the same sound effects we’re heard a million times so not bad there.

STORY

The main story is pretty simple. Katsumi comes to Tokyo to visit her mom in the hospital and it turns out she has a special anti-demon bloodline (or something) her mom has been hiding from her. As she reaches adulthood the demons (called Lucifer Hawks) start attacking and her. In the first half we have two plot streams: one about Katsumi and her mom’s relationship and backstory which has some pathos to it, the other about the police force trying to figure out what Katsumi’s deal is and later trying to recruit her to the force. In the middle her mom is forced to sacrifice her life to destroy one of the demons and Katsumi is not able to stop her. This ends up uniting the two streams and giving the initially reluctant Katsumi her reason to join the police. The second part, about joining the police, is clearly not intended to do anything more than introduce the TV show and from the movie alone is none too interesting.

VERDICT

The classic cyberpunk art would be enough to make even an otherwise bad movie of this length (not even a full hour) worth watching and even at its worst this movie is decent enough.

PASS