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Odd Taxi is really good. I debated for a while whether to give this a 9 or a 10 since I really can't find anything wrong with it, but I don't think I got quite the experience from this one as I did from the other shows in my "10" list, so I'll stick it with the 9s.

What worked for me:

- The characters were great. Even though a few of them were definitely campy and over-the-top, they were all really unique and easily distinguishable from one another. I think some of my favorites had to be Odokawa himself along with Imai and the duo ... from the Homo Sapiens comedy group.

- The comedy was really good and worked even for a western viewer who doesn't get a lot of Japanese comedy.

- The art was unique and the simplicity of the style worked really well. I loved the sort of crayon-textured backgrounds and lineless CGI vehicles.

- Scenes that were meant to evoke tension did so effectively even though the show can get goofy at times, so props to that!

- There's probably a decent amount of rewatchability given that there are so many plot points that run simultaneously. It's totally possible that a viewer's going to miss a detail or be confused about the timeline of events on the first watch through.

- The length of the series and the pacing was more or less perfect.

- I appreciate that a Yakuza story is able to be told without excessive violence or sex. I don't have an issue with either, but it's nice to have something different.


What didn't really work for me:

- There was nothing really wrong with the story, but a lot of the big reveals can be guessed fairly early on - like what Gouriki is going to find out about Odokawa's mental state, and which three or so characters are most likely to be the culprits of the show's main crime. There was plenty I didn't guess, but the reveals I did figure out were pretty major plot points so it was a lil' disappointing.

- Yano, the character that raps constantly was a bit annoying, although other characters' reactions to him (his underlings summarizing him or other characters being confused about what he said) could be kind of funny.


In all, there's nothing really bad I can say about Odd Taxi, and my only complaints are minor gripes. I'd recommend it to pretty much anyone - crime-thriller fans, comedy fans, furries, and everything in between.

More like a 7.5 if MAL allowed for half-stars, this was a pretty good show that had a slightly better premise than its execution managed to live up to.

Story - 8/10
It's not the most original story ever looking at media like Minority Report, Paprika, and Inception, but it is something pretty uncommon within the anime realm. I like the sci-fi/fantasy flavor in this crime investigation thriller; it makes it stand out from other "whodunnits". The use of the id wells was fairly effective, though some stories did less for me than others. Unfortunately, as for the main mystery of who John Walker is, I ... figured it out by the fifth or sixth episode, so the thrill was lost. I also thought the story fell into a very overdone plot for the last four episodes or so with the "reveal" of who and where Kiki has been the whole time. Without spoiling too much, it felt like an extremely predictable Japanese-style collectivism moral gets pushed onto the audience, and then things abruptly end on a pretty unsatisfying note. There's no real discussion of whether what the police are doing with the id well project is truly worth it despite everything that's happened with John Walker even though it seems like that's what the anime is supposed to be about?? I dunno, maybe it's just me. From first to last episode, the series had a serious loss of steam.

Art - 5/10
What stops this series from being higher than a 7 for me was the art. Some of the character designs REEEAAAALLY drove me insane. Sometimes, certain characters' eye sockets would essentially been drawn inverted (convex instead of concave), but just often enough to catch me off guard every time and really take me out of the story with how appalling it looked. Seriously, it looked like they were recovering from some sort of severe allergic swelling from a bug bite. Some characters - Matsuoka - were drawn consistently well. Some - including, unfortunately, main character Narihisago - always looked pretty bad. Scenery and backgrounds were alright but nothing special or out of the ordinary, and this unfortunately extends to the id well scenes which could have been way more alien and experimental than most of them ended up being. Fukuda's id well was the most interesting backdrop we see.

Sound - 7/10
The OP and ED (the ED in particular) were great. There were a couple insert songs. The first one (the bit where Narihisago is in a well within a well) was so cheesy that I cringed, but the second one (going into the final battle) was pretty good. The SFX and dubbed voices were fine.

Character - 7/10
I think the characterizations in ID:Invaded were good enough but could have been great if not for the short length of the anime run. We get a good understanding of Narihisago and his motivations and feelings, and we get to know Hondomachi and Fukuda fairly well by the end. Fukuda was probably my favorite character. That leaves a dozen or so characters who are just kind of there. A lot of them felt hollow, and there were moments where the audience is meant to feel something based on the music that would play during a scene or the way other characters are reacting, but it doesn't feel earned. I think John Walker's motivations (tempting people into doing thought crimes often enough that it turns into real, punishable crimes) were told to us but not really explored in any meaningful way. Other media - like Minority Report - have explored this concept more thoroughly.

Enjoyment - 8/10
Despite my gripes, I liked this because it felt unique and was refreshing as an anime concept. I love to see unordinary plots!

Overall - 7(.5)/10
This would be the top of my 7/10s or the bottom of my 8/10s. I may round this up to an 8 in the future as I complete more series, but for now, I'll place it at a 7.

While I finished this several months ago, I had to think about why I found this so disappointing and mediocre for a while to make sure I got it out alright.

As a general disclaimer, I'm fully aware that everything with the production of WEP went horribly awry due to the pandemic making the rush of getting a non-light novel/manga-adaptation out the door and onto TV screens on schedule, and I'm really, REALLY trying to be forgiving of that in my scoring. I would LOVE to see more artful original works and fewer trashy light novels and shounen-tournament-manga-of-the-weeks getting adapted into anime. But this ain't ... it, and I don't think we can fully blame crunch or the pandemic or the funding.

Story - 4/10

This story was botched all to hell and beyond. In this eleven episode series (subtracting the one episode that was 100% recap with completely reused scenes), the main plot is that four girls get eggs from some mannequin guys who are actually loli-obsessed scientist guys. The eggs allow the girls to travel into an alternate dimension and fight the literal technicolor villain-of-the-week embodiments of the things that drove other young girls to suicide. The purpose of doing this is to bring their own friends who committed suicide back from their graves.

That's already a dense plot for such a short series, but it doesn't end there! This series also features:

- A teacher who may be a pedophile/groomer/abuser... something?
- And the mom of one of the main characters is dating said teacher, because of course.
- Pokemon.
- A clandestine genius society (think Mensa International) run by a middle school girl, because of course it is.
- A whole branch of plot dedicated to what happens when you grow your very own girl in a test tube and she turns out to be Bad TM.
- Spooky bug girls.
- Gender theory.
- Unplugging your friend's life support machine as a fun sleepover activity #JustGirlThings.
- Lots of navel-gazing about the overly simplistic reasons that middle school girls are so irrational** as to commit suicide. The general aura of the middle aged men who probably produced this thinking they've really done something with this one.

**This isn't my assertation; I believe suicide, at any age, happens as the result of many complex issues including brain chemistry and traumas. This is literally something the writers propose via their characters, and everyone just agrees with it.

As you can imagine, with such a short time frame to discuss these topics - MANY of them heavy and deserving of the utmost respect - the result is an unholy fustercluck. Most episodes have our girls fighting a villain of the week in Eggland and then coming back into the real world to work out some issue. This wouldn't be a bad setup if there wasn't so goddamn much going on in the "real world" portion of the series. Every episode, we have a brand new concept being introduced and one from the previous episode being forgotten. The last three or four episodes were particularly bad; we get introduced to about eight new characters all at once who only tangentially fit into the overall plot, except at the same time, one of those characters is the reason that all girls everywhere commit suicide, I guess?? Except she's only about 15 years old, so before that... I don't know?

Furthermore, this series seems to establish rules about how Eggland works and then turns right around and forgets those rules. For instance, Eggland is one of those "if you die in the dream you die in real life" places, and for the first few episodes, that seems to be the case. We see a few of the girls coming back with cuts and bruises. But then it just... stops? It's also established in the series that only girls can enter Eggland, but there is a scene where the two trans characters - one a trans girl and one a trans boy - have a conversation inside Eggland. Does that mean the trans boy is wrong about their identity, or is this just the writers forgetting what they were doing again?



Art - 7/10

Yeah, it was good. I thought the designs of the suicidal tendencies personified was a little over-the-top, but otherwise, I have no qualms.


Sound - 6/10

It was fine.


Character - 5/10

After the plot, my biggest complaints are about the characters.

The human characters were mostly fine, but there were way too many of them, and a lot of their intentions seemed kind of unclear to me. I truly believe having a cast of only two or three main egg-wielders would have been preferable and would have allowed them to be better fleshed out than the thing we did receive.

Acca and Ura-Acca were initially interesting, but as time went on, I understood their purpose less and less. Eventually, they just felt like the writers'/producers' self inserts, or something - tossing out thought vomit about why they felt like young girls should be more erotic to combat depression and the young girls in the series agreeing.

I don't even want to get into Frill and her bug girls. She was completely unnecessary. I saw so many people saying that she's meant to be a symbol of how adult men pressure young girls into acting in a society, but I don't see it. I saw a spoiled girl who became murderous when she suddenly wasn't the center of everyone's attention anymore.

The monsters that represented the reasons girls commit suicide were a horrible concept. To say that it's one single thing that causes anyone to commit suicide demonstrates a basic lack of understanding of suicide and depression. Some were worse than others - in particular, I'm thinking about the one that represented a doomsday cult. That was seriously nestled right in amongst "emotional neglect" and "sexual assault" and "not getting to meet your senpai idol", or whatever.


Enjoyment - 3/10

I loved the first two or three episodes, but this show really went off course quickly. As I waited for each new episode to be released, I kept thinking, "surely they'll resolve this. Surely this isn't going to end like this. Surely they'll tie up at least ONE of these dozens of loose threads." I regret to inform y'all that I was wrong.

I don't recommend this series.


Overall - 5/10

This is a mediocre series that takes a clumsy, cursory attempt at saying why tween girls are depressed. This series handles suicide and depression with all the grace of Thirteen Reasons Why.

The 5/10 score is largely me being generous and thankful that at least it's not another fighting shounen. They did TRY something new here, they just also failed spectacularly. The art was good, at least.

Pros:

A decent handling of an actual friends-who-are-rivals situation; it is actually established that the main characters (Ikuto and Chiyuki) are kind to one another before their temporary rivalry begins, which is something many shounen anime fail to do (and yes, this is a shounen anime). I'm very appreciative of the fact that the show doesn't try to convince the audience that two characters who are shown to be nothing but complete assholes to one another are somehow friends. Ikuto and Chiyuki have a good rapport and are pretty supportive of one another - their rivalry is temporary and to advance their education/careers, and then they're ... friends again. Cool.

Also, without spoiling too much, I appreciated the realistic depiction of what would happen if a high school sophomore entered a competition designed for university students who've actually taken some classes on the subject of the competition.

It's funny, although mostly unintentionally. I'm laughing at it, not with it.


Cons:

The art is lazy and led to a weirdly vacant-feeling world. A distinct lack of background characters in pretty much every scene made for an unpopulated vibe. There were only a handful of backgrounds/sceneries/locations and none of them were great (copy-pasted racks of clothes, copy-pasted shelves of fabric, copy-pasted student desks...). Lots of panning still shots in lieu of actual animation. A lot of the clothing designs were really lackluster, which is bad when you have a series about fashion.

It's insanely melodramatic. Ikuto got his world rocked at least three times per episode by people making casual observations (Some Guy: "Yeah, this isn't fantastic, but you're 17 and you've never taken a design course, so that makes sense." Ikuto: [eyes widen, skin goes clammy, he grips his chest dramatically and the music goes DONNNNNNN]) and Chiyuki was panting like she just ran a half marathon every time she did her thirty second catwalk. And why couldn't Tsumura just quit being a model if she hated modeling so much? Because then there would be no drama, I guess. See above about this show being unintentionally funny - this is due to the melodrama.

There were a lot of unnecessary side plots. The mom being sick, the failed-model-turned-agent scorned, the girl who worked at the fashion mag, etc. So much of the plot could have been resolved if any of the characters at any point just said "no thanks" to all the unnecessary criticism/unwarranted life advice they received.

Story - 3/10
Too many loose ends never get tied up. We're introduced to a "whodunnit" plot with a character that simply disappears without another mention after the third episode. We also hear that the person to solve Tem's murder will become the next Beastar in the first or second episode. That never gets mentioned again. The big reveal comes way too soon, and then... nothing really happens. We get a new character who seems like he'll be integral, but he does nothing of importance. Characters make extremely confusing choices throughout based on what we know about them from S1 and from what we get told. ... And that ending. Holy cow that ENDING. UGH. Bad. The plot progression of this series essentially went "exposition - climax - climax - climax - climax - falling action." No rising action or resolution to be found, and so ultimately disappointing.

Art - 6/10
No change from S1 of the series. It's fine. I don't love the CGI, but I did enjoy the occasional 2D shot drawn using the style of the manga. Absolutely loved the watercolor scenes from the ED.

Sound - 7/10
The VAs felt well-cast. The music was okay, although I miss the jazz. I'm no sound engineer, so no comment on the SFX and mixing.

Characters - 4/10
The characters who were interesting and complex in S1 felt ultimately dumbed down here. Legoshi's inner turmoil of wanting to get stronger to protect herbivores but not being able to eat enough protein to physically do so should be interesting, but he gets high off eating a bug one time, has a good cry, and goes super saiyan now understanding that truly even the smallest microbe has value. Except he does a complete about-face in the penultimate and ultimate episode and everything leading up to that is trashed. Uh, okay. Sure. Louis went full OTT in this season and I didn't like him as much, although he had some of the best lines. I don't know what purpose Pina was supposed to serve but he sure was there in the show. As much as I love Juno and the idea that she's an herbivore-carnivore apartheidist, the way they have her denounce those views after looking at Haru for one hour was annoying. Haru's still Haru - nothing about her is particularly interesting aside from being an unapologetic slut, which I actually appreciate! Tem's murderer was probably the most sympathetic person in this season, aside from perhaps the one random jaguar girl and her sheep friend we spend an episode with. I did like the Shishigumi guy as well, but not well enough to remember his name... "Louis' New Dad" is what I kept calling him, and now that's all I can remember. Too bad his final scene was such a letdown.

Enjoyment - 4/10
I liked the first half and hated the second half, and the ending was absolutely abysmal. This season became more and more of a chore to get through, and the only thing I looked forward to by the eighth episode or so was that bangin' OP.

Overall - 4/10
I really enjoyed the first season of Beastars and gave it an 8 out of 10, so saying I got only half the enjoyment overall this time feels right. It felt rushed and slapped together, and maybe it was; I haven't read the manga, so I couldn't say for sure. 4 out of 10 is as good as I can go here. Underwhelming. I expect my furry content to be better than this.