It has a live-action title sequence with two ladies dancing while dressed as jesters. They irritate me. They sing "ghosts are there, ooh, scary", but they're not even pretending to take seriously their brief miming of fear. Anyway, soon we're into a kiddie anime. A small boy with a talking cat hat is watching a pretty lady with a pink parasol. She's in a boat. She picks up a bloke. The boy tells the bloke to be careful, but the adults tell him he'll understand when he's older.

The woman is a monster and her pet boat eats her paramour. Big teeth, chomp chomp dead. A shoe floats to the surface.

"I don't want to get older," says the boy.

WHAT THE HELL? This is a kiddie show, right? No one got eaten in the episode I saw of this in 2020.

"Brothers Lucifer, Mammon, Leviathan, Satan, Asmodeus, Beelzebub and Belphegor are among the most powerful demons in the Devildom, serving as officers on the student council at the Royal Academy of Diavolo (RAD). However, being avatars of the seven deadly sins, their behaviors often tend toward the extreme. Their everyday antics belie their high status and fearsome reputations among others of their kind. When viewed behind the scenes, the members of this family are more lovable - and laughable - than they first seem!"

The boys can't study for a test because they're distracted by their phones. I wanted them all dead. I struggled to stop myself from ditching the episode halfway through... and it's only five minutes long.

Watch this show if and only if you find these boys cute.

I have a theory about anime set in civilised, modern worlds that are completely normal, except that everyone's an animal. Beastars was fantastic. Aggretsuko has been widely and rightly praised. (I also liked Seton Academy: Join the Pack!.) This series is looking pretty cool too, although so far it doesn't look as if it means anything for the characters to be animals. So far, it's basically an aesthetic.

Anyway, our taxi-driving hero is a cynical old walrus called Hiroshi Odokawa. He has conversations about social media, Bruce Springsteen, etc. He has someone living in his closet. There's a sinister meerkat cop who says "don't go to the cops". It's not a must-watch yet, but it's interesting. (Also, the Alpaca nurse is pretty.)

FIRST HALF: we're watching an idol concert, but with the "singer" being a snake. Theoretically, I suppose there's a joke in a snake claiming to have forgotten her dance steps. She has a declaration to make. She announces her retirement, only for the crowd to go berserk and the idol to say, tearfully, "If you're gonna be like that, then I won't quit after all."

The joke is that this was the 2752nd Sata Retirement Concert.

SECOND HALF: Khnum the goat-headed Egyptian god of fertility teaches pottery to some of his fellow deities. Everyone's rubbish at it.

I've now seen two episodes of this show. The first was theoretically amusing, but in practice fairly skippable. That's true here too. I like the idea of the show, though.

Two cats, Suna and Manu, live in a desert made of sugar rather than sand. Suna's the smaller cat who reminds me of a fennec fox, although obviously any identification is a guess given the kiddie art style. Manu's the bigger, dumber-looking blue/grey cat.

This week, Suna gets a shovel and dumps a load of sand/sugar on the table in front of Manu.

Our milksop anti-hero is the only boy in his class. The girls gang up on him, give him foot jobs and film it for blackmail purposes. "You have until tomorrow to pay up or I'll spread this photo around."

So, in other words, he's getting raped. One of his tormentors orders him to buy a fleshlight, which he discovers has the magic property of causing someone of his choice to experience whatever he does to it. This lets him rape girls in safety without anyone having any idea what's happening, sometimes even in class in front of everyone. His victims are doubting their own sanity. One gets pregnant. At the end of the episode, he appears to be planning to start doing this to his teacher too. (I'm pretty sure she never did anything worse to him than giving him a bad mark on a test.)

Not recommended. Creepy. Urgh.

If I needed more One Piece, I'd finish reading the manga I bought years ago. Or maybe I'd watch the movies. That said, though, I enjoyed this episode and didn't have that "bloody hell it's slow" problem I've had with One Piece episodes in the past. (It's the 957th episode. Sort of goes without saying.)

The One Piece gang hardly appear, but I'm completely okay with that. There's lots of politics. King Neptune talks to Luffy's grandfather at the bottom of the sea, with a bubble protecting the air-breather. The World Economy Newspaper's headquarters is threatened by a man who wants certain news hushed up. (He's a member of the World Government's black ops agencies, but even so the encounter doesn't go well for him.) The world's shocked when news of a certain death gets out. Bea Hancock rules an empire in the Island of Women. Oh, and Buggy the clown villain shows up again.

That was quite fun. As always, there are women with ridiculous breasts, but that's because everyone is an outrageous caricature in Eiichiro Oda's art style. Definitely one of the better random One Piece episodes I've seen in recent years.

When she was young, an oni saved Mashiro's life. She's now 17 and the perfect age to be eaten! Unfortunately, he finds her adorable and has no intention of turning her into breakfast.

Most of the show has cute chibi art, although the very end shifts into a pointy-chinned shoujo romance style. (I preferred the chibi characters.) You'll be wondering for ages if Mashiro's obsession with being eaten actually means she wants to be sexually devoured, but no. She really does want her flesh to be chomped on. No, hang on. It's surprisingly hard to avoid innuendo with this subject matter, isn't it?

Anyway, they're likeable and mildly silly together. Lots of misunderstandings and thoughts at cross-purposes. The episode's nothing you need to hunt down, but it's okay.

It's also on YouTube, if you want to go looking for it.

I like the idea. There are innumerable harem anime where the childhood friend is your favourite girl by miles, but unfortunately her plot purpose is to be a plausible rival for the hero's Predestined One. I was quite looking forward to this episode. Its hero is Suehara Maru (bland hero) and he's in love with Shirokusa Kachi (prize-winning novelist, TV celebrity, bikini model and schoolgirl), but of course he also has a childhood friend in Kuroha Shida (older than him, tiny, has already asked once if she could be his girlfriend).

The characterisation's supporting the premise nicely. Kachi is cold and arrogant in her personal interactions, but there are indications that she's nicer and more vulnerable than she seems. (Her choice of friends, her crying.) She's still far less likeable than the super-friendly Kuroha, though.

Then, though, Kuroha suggests taking revenge on Kachi. (For the crime of having a boyfriend who's not Suehara, even though he's never even asked her out. This is basically creepy stalker behaviour. It also seems quite likely that there's been a misunderstanding about this alleged boyfriend.) Suehara likes the idea and agrees.

I immediately lost interest in watching this show.

"Haru, let's get revenge. Frankly, I've always hated Kachi."

"She might call me scum, but I'm gonna get her back a million times worse!"

Tenkorin Okakura loves art so much that she's willing to blow her mother's credit card on a Roman-style stone bust that costs hundreds of thousands of yen! (Behind her mother's back, obviously. If she'd asked mum, the reply would have been "no".) Tenkorin will draw this and become a professional artist... as soon as she's finished loafing around in her bedroom. Her goal is for her dreams to come true without hard work or effort!

This is funny. What happens, though, is that a god summons a famous painter to give Tenkorin a talking-to. He'll help her fulfil her dreams, but only if she shapes up and does the basics, i.e. practice every day.

It's a highly entertaining episode, but I have a feeling that it'll end up being atypical of the show's format, which will mostly be lots of conversations with famous artists. But I'll try ep.2 and find out.

It's okay, but less funny than ep.1. Yes, the second half is still a famous artist giving (good) advice to our ambitious but useless schoolgirl. (She seems to think that she has no talent and that there's no point in practicing, but that she'll become a famous artist anyway. Somehow. I don't think she's thought that through. This week, she's practicing her signature.)

Our heroine investigates the school art club. Also, this week's dead artist is a Japanese oil painter (Takahashi Yuichi) who helped develop the Western-style art movement in 19th century Japan... i.e. he's obscure by international standards and I'd never heard of him. But he says good things about why Tenkorin's practice isn't making her art any better. (She's got to learn how to learn, so to speak. Not all practice is the same.)

The show's still amusing and I approve of the lessons it's teaching Tenkorin. But I'll give it a miss.

This week, there's lots of genre parody. Cops, criminals, yakuza, tough guys with guns rolling on a car roof, etc. Later, they do Predator and 1980s video games.

I'm not a fan of this show, but if you are, this looks like business as usual.

It starts with a bespectacled girl lying in a muddy stream in what looks like the middle of nowhere. A desolate bit of the Norfolk broads on a grey day in the middle of winter, maybe. She thinks she's about to be killed by wibbly frogspawn ghosts. "It'll all be over soon. If I disappear, no one will be inconvenienced."

She's saved by a confident blonde girl. A bit too confident, in fact. Later in the episode, she decides that she wants to go ghost-hunting. Oh, and they're both from the ordinary world. Japan, school, cafes, etc. But they can enter other worlds too. Also, the title sequence is overflowing with weird stuff.

This seems potentially interesting. It's certainly odd, anyway.