Seems like a growing trend the past couple of seasons for studios to crank out quick, cheap, 5 minute or less anime shorts in an effort to… uhhhh well…. honestly I’m not sure what these things are for, but there’s quite a few of them this season and they often get the same big announcement (and streaming license) as any other full length title. So in the name of JOURNALISM, let us venture forth and see if any of the Winter season’s shorts are worth even the minuscule amounts of time they demand.
Inferno Cop
The Premise: Ghost Rider dons a cop uniform and aviator shades while shooting people so they explode.
Verdict: As potentially awesomely bad as that description sounds, this is just really, REALLY, cardboard cutout Adult Swim animation bad. It’s mostly intentional, but it doesn’t work. You may be tempted to check it out because Studio Trigger (ex-Gainax dudes) is involved, but don’t bother.
Puchim@s
The Premise: Weird baby versions of the girls show up at Studio 765.
Verdict: I could try to bail this out and say this would be amusing if I knew more about Idolm@ster, but I get the feeling that’s not true. The producer having a head that is literally just a block letter “P” is kinda funny I guess, but that’s all I got.
Boku no Imouto wa “Osaka Okan” (My Litter Sister Is An “Osaka Momma”)
The Premise: Some dude’s sister moves back in with him after 10 years of living in Osaka and she is now some kind of cultural stereotype I don’t understand.
Verdict: Forgive me for not speaking enough Weeaboo to know exactly what an “Osaka Momma” is, but I’m assuming it’s some kind of borderline offensive name for a girl deeply rooted in Southern Japanese culture. So if you like making fun of Kansai dialects and pointing out marginally different terminology they don’t use in the Big City, this is the show for you!
Encouragement of Climb
The Premise: Two friends from Junior High reunite in high school and the obnoxious, energetic one tries to get the obnoxious, introverted one to climb mountains like they used to.
Verdict:Â Really? We couldn’t get a better name than that? This almost looks like a real anime and probably could have been stretched out to one. At least it feels more like an attempt to actually make something than most of the other shows on this list, but there’s only so much you can do in three minutes.
MANGIRL!
The Premise: A bunch of cute girls decide to publish a manga for no discernible reason and sadly none of them are both Man and Girl… as far as we know.
Verdict: Marlin watched this before I did and tried to warn me: it’s really quite literal in it’s description of how to publish a manga. That means it’s BORING, and self indulgent to boot. Definitely the best looking of the group though, as once again it actually looks like a real anime.
Ai Mai Mi
The Premise: A bunch of cute girls decide to start a manga for no disc… wait, didn’t I just go over this?
Verdict: Easily the best of the bunch (and it’s still terrible), Ai Mai Mi at least catches your attention with it’s humor “recommended for those mentally 18 and up.” Apparently that means REALLY WEIRD. At the very least I wasn’t expecting a girl vomitting with blood coming out of her ears during the character introductions. The 8-bit animation ED was pretty cool too. This is the kind of bizarre thing I might like, but once again the short format cuts it down before it can pick up any steam.
I would like to point out that I personally, really enjoyed Inferno Cop. But as Jel said, it’s really stupid and you need to be the kind of person who enjoyed Panty and Stocking to like it.
It’s one of those shows where you need to jump into it with a certain expectation, like that it’s a parody of silly action cop shows that’s trying to be bad.
And you didn’t even get to Ishida and Asakura, Line Offline, Senyuu, the new gdgd Fairies, Good Job Club, and Monchicchiisu!
The most disappointing one of these for me was Yama no Susume (if you want a better English title, try Mountains of Encouragement), since I was expecting a full-length, character driven healing show. Three minutes an episode is unlikely to be enough to make that happen, even if the runtime will add up to the equivalent of a 40-minute OVA.
Definitely not a comprehensive list here, for one I don’t think I could stand too many more and then some of them I don’t think have aired yet.
“Mountains of Encouragement” sounds like a much better translation, I just went with what Crunchyroll used since that’s the closest thing to an officially licensed title. I do agree it had some elements you could actually work with in a full series, but I have a feeling the source material isn’t that serious either.
I actually like “Encouragement of Climb” as a title, since sometimes its fun to just keep it as literal and engrish sounding as possible. Although a literal translation would actually be “Mountains of Encouragement,” which makes Crunchyroll’s translation seem even odder.
I think Encouragement of Climb is how the Japanese themselves translate the title, as the phrase shows up in the title card even with subtitles off. So it’s the Japanese being weird, instead of Crunchyroll being weird.