Our heroes' best-rated but smutty show gets cancelled. Instead, three bananas get sent to South America in search of a legendary animal with a pigeon's head and a cat's body. (This isn't hand-drawn, but instead a photo collage.)

To be honest, I'm not sure which season this came from, but what the hell. It's likeably daft and you'd probably watch if a random three-minute episode appeared on TV, but it's not the kind of thing you'd go looking for.

Elaina is the official transliteration, but I'll be calling her Ileina.

A little girl swears that she'll become a witch. She works and works until, at the age of 14, she's learned so much that she blasts through the exam and becomes famous as the youngest person to do so. Unfortunately, the other witches in town don't like that and Ileina gets lots of doors slammed in her face when she's trying to get taken on as an apprentice.

Then, she meets someone who calls herself the Stardust Witch. Her name's Fran and she's a free spirit, to put it mildly.

I liked the episode a fair bit. It's harsh on Ileina and you'll think certain persons are bastards, but on closer examination it's in line with Ileina's characterisation. Look at her overconfidence when she's just passed that exam. (Also, you'll see something similar in her mum's final advice before Ileina departs at the end of the episode.)

An interesting lesson is learned and Ileina genuinely takes it on board. I like her. I enjoyed the episode. Happy to keep watching.

Modern stealth fighter/bombers are fighting weird aliens with designs based on living creatures. Chinese dragon skeletons? Horseshoe crabs? Flying fish? The aliens have Pillars that resist a nuke... but they can be defeated by schoolgirls in World War One biplanes!

I was confused in the beginning. It's all very military and serious. They're establishing that the situation is grave and that the enemy is almost unstoppable. The only girl we do meet (Claudia Bruford) is all stoic and dark because everyone she flies with always gets killed. She calls herself a shinigami (death god) and keeps her feelings bottled up.

...and then she gets assigned to Japan, with three teammates who made me laugh. This is what I'd been expecting the show to become. Schoolgirls fighting aliens. Welcome to anime. They're colour-coded, with Red being cheerful, rude and hyper-energetic, White being grumpy and funny and Pink being the "sensible little sister" type but also the craziest in combat. The show makes you wonder if Claudia's curse will kill her new friends, but ultimately it's a warm, friendly episode.

It also has Red jumping out of her plane in mid-battle to attack the nuke-resistant enemy with a sword.

I can understand why this first episode was double-length, since it only got fun in the second half. I've heard that the show's not very good, but never mind that. I laughed. I like the cast. I'll stick with it.

The animation looks more computer-assisted than I remember, but it's not as if this was ever Studio Ghibli. (I'm also watching a random episode on YouTube, so it's possible that this change actually happened in 2021 or something.)

There's a talking coloured pencil who escapes and finds other coloured pencils to talk to. They're at school. Rinko loses too many coloured pencils. Hiyo-chan, on the other hand, loves her coloured pencils and so our heroine returns to her... only to find that Hiyo-chan's abandoned paper altogether and is using a tablet.

I was amused. I've always found Washimo to be a laugh.

I'm astonished. It's quite good, despite being live-action Japanese TV. I laughed. I'll keep watching the series.

It's remarkably faithful to the manga. It almost felt like rewatching the anime, with lots of shared dialogue and scenes. Furthermore, the acting's reasonable. Yui Okada gives Baka lots of stupid energy and successfully carries the episode. (It's almost entirely hers. She's on screen pretty much throughout.) Everyone's at least fine, with Nana Asakawa's Majime being probably the most natural. I preferred anime-Wota's more masculine line delivery, but I don't mind Yuri Tsunematsu. On the other hand, Keita Machida is more interesting to watch than anime-Waseda.

There are a few extra bits, the oddest being a historical drama which recasts the core cast in different roles. Well, no problem. This should be a laugh.

It's the minimalist story of its own creation. Its creator (You Machida) hadn't worked for a year. She'd had clinical depression, due to insomnia caused by physical pain. She kept a diary during that period. "I wanted to disappear from the world by taking a magical pill."

(I don't know the mangaka's gender, incidentally. I'm saying "she" because here she's been given a female voice actor, but her animated representation looked male to me. Well, it doesn't matter.)

One day, she gets a job offer. "A shopping centre in Osaka reached out to me about creating a manga for them." She replies to say that she's sorry but she can only work on subjects she likes, only for the client to say that that's fine and they'll approve whatever subject she wants. She goes there. (It's the Sema Center Building, celebrating its 50th anniversary.) She doesn't see that many customers there, but she admires the staff.. "People who work are beautiful."

That was quite weird. There's no plot at all. It's Machida's first-person narration about her past, her present and her impressions of the Semba Center Building. Clearly she managed to complete the commission, because we're watching it. That definitely counts as a step forward. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like this.

"When we were children, our mother died. Last year, our father also died."

But, unfortunately, these vtubers are still alive. (And, mind-bogglingly, this is Season 2.)

The episode is motion-captured CGI anime characters who are really vtubers talking to each other. (Their faces are quite well done, but the body language, walking and hands are slightly creepy.) Plot? Story? Hah, no. There's also a studio audience, laughing at stuff that's not funny. They discuss kanji readings, for instance.

It starts with a surfing competition. Hot-blooded narrator, audience on the beach and SURFING!!! The camera makes the pretty boys look cool, if that's your thing.

That's clearly meant as the show's big selling point. We get three minutes of this before the opening credits, after which it turns into a regular anime. A surfer wakes up, goes to the beach and blushes ambiguously while admiring another surfer. Then he goes to school. This show is aimed blatantly and openly at a fangirl target audience... which isn't me.

A woman is telling her listeners that she's alone in the woods at night and a bear is staring at her. (This is true. She is.) She might not survive this broadcast. Instead of trying to move away to safety, though, she starts going through readers' letters and giving inane answers to their questions about their love lives.

She's an idiot. I'd run a mile from her radio show.

I'd already been watching this, but Natsuki (then 7 years old) and Misaki (3 years old) enjoyed it too. It's a bouncy, charming cartoon about a boy (Iruma) who got sold to a demon by his parents. Now he's going to school in hell, where the school song proclaims that "HUMANS ARE OUR FOOD!!!!"

This week, Iruma's made another friend and joined a school club. There's silliness with fireworks, a pyjama party and pillow-throwing. The intimidating-but-adorable Student Council President shows up, to my delight. It's all good-natured fun and everything I've come to expect from this show...

...but then it grows a plot. Bad stuff is happening at the cliffhanger. Goodness me. I'm along for the ride, anyway.

This series has a bad reputation, with even people who enjoyed it still calling it dreadful. There are things I liked about this episode, but I agree with the general opinion.

The episode's first half is a lot more full-blooded and nastier than I'd expected. Our unnamed hero, whom I'll call Edgelord Devil Boy, tries to save three children when monsters attack his village. He fails. Two get eaten and I think the third one dies too, albeit probably just from tragic backstory syndrome. That was quite funny, although that shouldn't have been my reaction. (The episode's a bit too glib and quick with the tragedy.) After that, an old bloke turns up to either save or kill Edgelord. He doesn't particularly care which. He's got the right to kill anyone he wants, after all.

All that I like. Unfortunately, various story beats are undersold or unconvincing. Old Bloke was a challenger to be the King of Darkness and is a massively experienced knight. Edgelord's never held a sword before, but he disarms him in a sword fight. Uh, right. After lunch, let's see if he can defeat a grandmaster at chess. Old Bloke dies (uh, because) and gives his sword to Edgelord, to be his heir. Edgelord trots off to claim this inheritance and meets a knight, Vallus, who accuses him of having murdered Old Bloke and stolen his sword.

Edgelord is unnecessarily curt towards Vallus, which seems like a suicidally dumb move to me. Vallus is angry, hostile and actively attacking Edgelord. "Did you kill him? No, one such as you could never so much as scratch him. Why did you come here?"

"Those who have glimpsed an ideal have a duty to devote their lives to making it a reality!"

"You say that while grovelling in the dirt?"

"What's wrong with grovelling? I am the Prince of Darkness, successor to the King of Darkness!"

"I shall acknowledge you as my lord."

I fell about laughing. Vallus appears to have a unusual idea of sufficient evidence. For the rest of us, I don't think Edgelord's quite managed to disprove the allegations against him.

That's the Kingdom of Darkness. There's also a Kingdom of Light, which the episode would like us to believe isn't fundamentally that different from the Kingdom of Darkness. Personally, I thought the Kingdom of Light looked far more civilised, with a stronger rule of law and infinitely better leadership... but, unfortunately, no one there has a personality.

Nope. Not watching this.

The dog's empty-headed, loves the world and enjoys everything. The cat's evil, sour and violent. It's amusing and the episodes are only two minutes long, so why not?

You'll see this on critics' best-of-the-season lists, but not many people actually watched it. It's a historical that's allegedly based on real figures, although I'll leave that for now.

Takuboku Ishikawa died ten years ago.

Now, though, we're back in the past, when Ishikawa's hanging out with Kyousuke Kindaichi and occasionally solving crimes. He's clever. He also thinks detectives are like poets. (Presumably he doesn't include idiot police detectives in that, of which this episode has a prime example. Aggressive, bad memory, shouts, throws around his status and is wrong about everything.)

Most of the episode is about a murder in a brothel, but there's also a fair bit of character business between Ishikawa and Kindaichi. It feels like an intelligent show. I'll give it a whirl.