The episode's first half shows us some slightly off-putting weirdos. The story being told with them is a little uncomfortable and quite interesting, but definitely not fun.

1. There's nothing actually wrong with Yomogi Asanaka, but he's drab, unenthusiastic and doesn't want to get involved. He is, though, serious-minded and willing to help people.

2. Yume Minami looks permanently miserable (as does Yomogi, frankly) and the way she treats people is fairly nasty. She says there's something wrong with her and I don't disagree.

3. Gauma is a nutcase who's introduced begging for food under a bridge.

4. Koyomi Yamanaka is a NEET with no motivation who rarely gets out of bed.

The episode's second half goes completely mental. I'm looking forward to this.

It's like The Animatrix, but for Star Wars. (Both were even nine episodes long until Star Wars: Visions continued in 2023. Its second season isn't Japanese, though, instead going all around the world. South Africa, South Korea, UK, Ireland, India, etc.)

Anyway, being an anthology means this episode tells us nothing about the others. Except that it's very good.

The style is CGI rendered in a black-and-white rotoscope-a-like that looks like nothing I've seen before. (The only things not in monochrome are the blaster bolts and red Sith lightsabres.) It does, though, scream "classic Japanese cinema". Had Star Wars been a time-travelling franchise, you'd think they'd visited Edo-era Japan. The villagers. The scenery. The droid's straw hat. In the Japanese dialogue, someone even calls the ronin "samurai". I've read that this episode is a homage to Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which brings us full circle back to one of Lucas's inspirations.

The music breaks the Kurosawa spell, though. It couldn't feel more like John Williams, except for the biwa bit at the end, although as it happens the composer's name is Keiji Inai.

I'd recommend this. It's a brief piece, obviously, but it inhabits its running time well and has quite exciting battles. (It's not always clear who's fighting who, mind you.) This is the first Star Wars I've watched since 2015 and I wasn't expecting to return to the franchise under its Disney ownership, but I quite enjoyed this episode and I'm happy to watch the others.

Japan has an anti-piracy video series starring a camera-headed character called "Eiga Dorobou" (Movie Thief). This one's a crossover with the anime Sgt. Frog and it's actually quite fun. Keroro doesn't care about the material's illegality and he's about to watch it all on his phone, regardless of what his friends say... until he gets nabbed.

A red frog suggests that being able to download movies from the internet might be an alien trap.

It's an unusually serious episode of Strike the Blood, with no nudity, no nipples and no fanservice beyond panty shots. (These can be shameless, though. A girl's skirt falls off.) Instead, it has fights and a plot. If I'd been watching the show regularly, I'm sure I'd have thought this was a solid instalment. As it is, I'd put it at the low end of okay.

Someone tells his friends to kill him if he loses control of his familiars. A girl gets freed from ice. There's a dagger, a gate-opening and a dragon. "You gave up the strongest power in the world for a girl who was created."

It's not entirely one-dimensional, but it's close. A boy finds an app on his phone that can make any woman do anything he wants. Does he use it for world peace? Does he resist foul temptation and only perform good deeds? Yeah, right. This is hentai. He turns members of his class into the Sexual Outlet Club.

The mildly interesting bit is where this app came from. On getting home, he finds a succubus using his shower. "I came here today as your designated support staff for our company's Hypnos app. Yes, I'm a sex demon." In other words, she installed the app on his phone without his permission and is now using it to get him to making online purchases. Using the app costs a "succubus gem" per use, which cost 5000 yen each.

She's deeply worrying and I approved of our hero's initial response to her. "Let me first report you for trespassing and fraud."

That said, though, the show's mostly about its unattractively drawn porn. It's also a bit kinky. Armpits, anal, peeing in someone's mouth (at their request), etc. The show's main two girls are lively and a laugh, but after a while our anti-hero is hypnotising girls whose names he doesn't even know.

The show's not a complete write-off... but it's not far off. It has enough characterisation, jokes and alarming succubi to come alive as a series (to some extent), but it's mostly a string of dodgy sex scenes.

The original four-issue comic is part of Millar's Jupiter's Legacy universe. Netflix also did a live-action adaptation of Jupiter's Legacy (which lasted for one season) and gave the spin-off this anime. Apparently there's a live-action version of Supercrooks in development too.

I didn't know any of that when I watched this episode, though. I just saw Mark Millar's name in the anime's opening credits and reacted with extreme caution.

Johnny is a teenager whose mother sends him to bed to get him out of the way for an evening with her boyfriend. Johnny discovers that he has electric superpowers and does some experiments. He blacks out the entire neighbourhood and reacts with a happy "that was me", without wondering if, say, the blackouts might have affected something like a hospital. He goes to school and blows up someone's stereo. (Its owner was a dick, but so is Johnny.) He messes with traffic lights and makes cars come to screeching stops. Then, eventually, he electrocutes everyone in a swimming pool, causes vehicle accidents, kills people in a church and cooks a bunch of pigs. All that was an accident, obviously, but it happened because he was being a thoughtless idiot. It shouldn't take a genius to guess that someone called Electro Boy should avoid swimming pools.

Yup, I didn't like it. Its cast is neither likeable nor memorable. It ends with some bloke in prison and the title is Super Crooks, so I can see where this is going. I've zero interest in this.

Koguma lives alone, in a world of muted colours and no incidental music. She doesn't have any parents, money, hobbies, friends or goals. She sees herself as a girl who has nothing.

What she does have, though, is a hill she has to cycle up every day when going to school. She's thinking of buying a motorbike. She looks at a Honda Super Cub and we remember the show's title. We follow her slow, staid, understated journey from "boring girl with bicycle" to "boring girl who sits on a motorbike and suddenly the episode's colours are more vivid and the soundtrack is livelier". This is quite a clever way of portraying what this means for Koguma and how her world is about to open up...

...but it's a motorbike. She's excited about a motorbike. Naaah.

(Although, in fairness, this show has fans who reckon it's the strongest anime of Spring 2021. Also, the episode does rather well at holding one's interest through close character focus, even though both the plot and the characterisation couldn't be more ordinary.)

Super Dragon Ball Heroes is a internet anime to promote the franchise's latest card and video games. It started in 2018 with Universe Mission, then they did Big Bang Mission in 2020-21 and followed this with an Ultra God Mission in 2022. They don't think small, I see. This episode had Goku finding a bird that he says has a stupid face, which I'm sure the bird didn't want to hear from him. This is a Toki-Toki Bird that will appear in Universe 7 and destroy all the universes, according to Beerus and the Gods of Destruction (who show up looking for a fight). It's like Marvel and DC.

Also, Trunks is Trunks from another universe. He's in the Time Patrol.

The episode ends with everyone getting ready to FIGHT!!!! (They'd be out of their depth if you told them to think.) After that comes an advert for a video game.

It's not an isekai. Instead, it's a straightforward fantasy adventure that you'd expect to have been one, but isn't. Everyone here belongs in this world and no one came from ours.

It also has a lot of charm.

Lloyd is the weakest boy in his village, but he wants to be a soldier anyway! He comes to visit Marie (a witch) and says so, to her annoyance. She tells him to bog off. Marie's lack of interest in helping Lloyd is quite funny, but she's actually quite nice underneath and I can see that they're going to get on well.

The joke is that Lloyd is too much of a hick to realise that not everyone can run hundreds of miles and punch house-sized monsters sky-high. He's a lovely lad. "I'm sorry to disappoint you. I know it's not impressive at all."

What's more, though, the whole cast is amusing. There's a Belt Princess who at first looked like a stereotypical Girl Who Falls In Love At First Sight With The Protagonist... until we realise that she's actually kind of scary and unhinged. And funny. There's a mercenary girl who's been promised to have her criminal record wiped clean if she attends Soldier School.

I think I'll enjoy this show a good deal.

The humour gets more cartoonish. I hesitated, but I suppose I'll keep going.

Kusohamu-chan is a stamp character for the LINE messaging service. A Google image search found lots of pictures of him eating things, sometimes in a way that looks cannibalistic. He's supposedly a cute hamster that came from space... which is why he says "dechu" instead of "desu". Unfunny speech patterns are a thing in Japanese and I hate them.

The best thing about Kusohamu-chan is his name, which roughly means "sodding hamster", "bloody hamster", etc.

Anyway, this episode has Kusohamu-chan's human owner giving him karaage, except that it's inedible as an April Fool's joke. Ho ho ho. Kusohamu-chan doesn't like this.