An exorcist is hunting an evil spirit at an abandoned school. She's a famous Japanese ghost called Hanako of the Toilet, but she's been possessed by evil and even her boobs have been affected by its malevolent power! Surprisingly, this is funny. What they're doing is comedy porn, but they're saying macho supervillain dialogue, with melodramatic line delivery.

"Now you won't be able to get out of here unless you defeat me!"

"You damn human!"

"Begone, evil spirit!"

"You, what are you doing?"

"Isn't it obvious? You're corrupted, so I'm purifying you!"

Unfortunately, it goes a bit alarming later on. "I'm no longer an evil spirit, so please! Stop!" He doesn't, which turns the scene into something very different.

It's okay and I did actually watch the whole thing, but it doesn't warrant a full review of its own. A few sentences here are sufficient. Likeable girls form idol group. An idol-hating capitalist baddie wants to shut down their favourite studio and convert it into something profitable, so they'll put on a live concert to try to save it! Can they get an audience of 5,000? (It's set in the year 2034, in a highly desirable future when idols are considered a thing of the past.)

Nothing wrong with it. It's fine. Good-natured fun.

Takemichi Hanagaki is in his late twenties, but has a menial part-time job and lives in a rubbish apartment with paper-thin walls. He's a virgin who's only ever had one girlfriend and that was when he was in middle school and about 14 years old. He thinks his life peaked then, because he was in a kickass gang! (We see them. They have the world's worst hair, they're tiresome and they're a reason to stop watching the episode.)

The good thing about the episode is the time-travel angle. Takemichi is about to go back twelve years to relive his loser schoolboy experiences and, maybe, try to save two lives. This is more complicated than I'd expected and I quite liked it.

What put me off the episode was the delinquents. Takemichi's in a gang, but they get in trouble with another gang. Apparently he's going to have to join the even more thuggish gang and ascend to the top of it if he wants to stop his friends from dying in the future!

"Delinquent anime" is a genre. It's like the big-mouth retarded teenage cousin of yakuza anime. It's not so popular these days, but it made a minor comeback here. There are anime fans out there who love delinquent anime and were delighted by this series, but I'm not one of them. I didn't care. These people aren't interesting. Takemichi's time-travelling goals make him more likeable than you'd think, but even so I've got better things to do than spend 24 episodes (and that's just Season 1) with these knuckle-draggers.

This show's first episode of 2021 was actually ep.40, but never mind. I watched a random-ish episode.

Sabi is attacking! Go forth, boys! This is another show starring child heroes, who are part of an Earth defence organisation. This week, their job is to defend the Earth from attackers! It's weird to watch mature, professional soldiers entrusting this job to children who are still primary school age. Somewhere between 5 and 8 years old, I'd guess. Yes, this is a children's show, but bollocks is bollocks. Also, the title sequence tells you all you need to know, as lots of car toys turn into robot toys by bolting together. Also, you have to give them a "wheel charge" by buying additional merchandise, ahem, spinning a glowing wheel on your wrist.

Because the season finale is approaching, lots of teams/characters are present. I bet the tiny girl in pink and her two big blue/green henchmen used to be villains, for instance.

The macho children jumped into their cars and zoomed off for an episode of kiddie TV dialogue as they confronted the bad guy... and I fell asleep. It was all so predictable and kiddified that my eyes closed all by themselves and I only realised an hour later what had happened. Whoops. So it's possible that the episode's second half was a work of genre-busting genius, directed by the reincarnation of Orson Welles. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

This one's something of a big deal, sort of, ish. Commissioned by the Olympic Foundation for Culture and Heritage, produced by Studio Ponoc (the nearest we have to a successor to Ghibli)... it was shown all over the world and is hence dialogue-free.

Anyway, it starts by showing us a big scary green moaning thing. Imagine if Swamp Thing possessed an entire hill. Various characters are introduced doing random stuff, e.g. catching fish and being chased by pixie spirit things that I'm going to guess are Olympic mascots. One of our heroes discovers dead fish and a poisoned leaf, so they go off to investigate... which involves running. And pole vaulting. And swimming. It makes intuitive sense, though, because everyone's trying to reach Swamp Thing and stop environmental catastrophe. (Do the Olympic Games really help the environment? Well, never mind.)

Our heroes play volleyball with a magic cabbage that makes the earth sprout green and shiny whenever it bounces. I want one of those. It's quite a nice film. It's also on YouTube, if you're interested.

There's a boy called Ayumu, a girl called Ryou and some vile boys who are doing this on the orders of a karate scumbag who's annoyed because someone told the teachers that he was bullying someone and that a girl was stronger than him.

Ayumu gets tied to a chair and they make him watch as they film Ayumu losing her virginity. (There's a two-way mirror in the bedroom.) She thinks she's found a boy she likes. She thinks it's romantic. She doesn't know a gang is about to give her drugs and a blindfold, then film themselves taking turns with her. Throughout, Ayumu is forced to watch everything.

"Look forward to what happens when we spread this footage around."

It's pretty disgusting. What's more, ep.2 doesn't give the villains their comeuppance, but merely tells a new story.

OFFICIAL SUMMARY: "At dusk regular customers flock in the little Nagoya shop 'Tora and Mike' to wash away with sake, a delicious array of food and resounding laughter the hardships of the day. A culinary journey into traditional Japanese home cooking."

FINN'S REACTION: it's cats on YouTube, but not real cats. Sketched in crude, relaxing lines, in what looked like pencils and watercolours. Most of them seem to be old age pensioners, or at least that's the impression I got from the general mood. Two of them own an izakaya where the others come to drink. It's publicising a manga. It's nice, but I got a bit bored after only two of its three minutes.

It's two stories in one.

The first story's quite good and I liked its couple. Dai-chan has always loved his Aunt Itoe, but he gave up on her when she got married. On a family visit, though, it turns out that Itoe's husband keeps cheating on her. "He thinks of me as a mere country girl."

Dai-chan plucks up the courage for a love confession... and Itoe laughs. "What sort of joke is that? I'm your aunt, you know!" He explains that he's serious, though, and she eventually decides that she should probably reciprocate. "I could manage a kiss," she says, with the intention of stopping there. (Hint: they don't.)

It's romantic and heartwarming. This isn't true of the second story, in which Yukito-kun is in love with his schoolteacher. There are all kinds of questionable issues here, from the age thing to the "drawing the curtains to fellate your student in the classroom" thing to the fact that sensei is probably lying about her marital situation.

Apparently, this is an anime franchise dating back to 2008. I'd never heard of it. The worldbuilding is fairly unremarkable, but perfectly okay. (Another world exists alongside ours and has a magical border. There are youkai, etc.)

On actually watching the series, though, what I got from it was girls. The show's populated by generic female characters who do generic anime things and almost never show anything you'd call intelligence. The journalist comes the nearest to being watchable, but basically this is the kind of nonsense you'd get if you put a dozen unrelated anime in a blender. I don't know how these characters fit into their world and I don't care. One of them has red eyes, fangs and bat wings, so I presume she's a vampire... but she drinks tea and iced chocolate.

The voice cast includes Kikuko Inoue, though.

That was odd. Absolutely no fun whatsoever, but distinctive. It starts with an immortal (either God or someone with similar habits) sending a round thing to the world to watch it grow. For a while, it's a stone. Later, it decides to become moss. Snow comes and a white wolf staggers up and dies next to the moss-stone-thing, so it decides to become a copy of that wolf.

A white-haired boy was the late wolf's best friend. (Will the Thing eat the boy? It's a mildly sinister shapeshifter in an arctic environment, so I might as well call it the Thing.) This boy might be the nicest, most optimistic boy in the world... and indeed, for all we know, he might be the last human being. There used to be more people, but they went away. He talks about them. He hopes they're okay. He talks of going off to be with them. Ouch.

This boy realises that something's up with the wolf, but he never guesses the full truth. Not even when the wolf sort of talks.

This looks like a Very Serious story. Not light watching. It's also more than a little strange. I'll continue, tentatively, but I'll probably drop it if it doesn't find at least a little fun or humour.

It's completely different from ep.1 and fixes most of my problems with the show. Different setting, different cast, different tone. Our idiot immortal shape-changing hero dies and resurrects himself repeatedly while trying to get the hang of his new human shape. We meet a community of jungle people.

We also meet a small girl (March) who's rumbustuous, fun and likeable. I like the foreshadowing of her wanting to be an adult and mother, long before fate ends up forcing her into a very similar role with our hero. I loved her childlike "shinitakunai". The scenes with her and our nearly mindless hero are lovely.

The episode's well written and very good. But.

They're going to sacrifice her. They're going to take her up a mountain and feed her to a bear-god. If she runs away, they'll sacrifice another child. If that one runs away, they'll sacrifice a baby.

I'm getting a bad feeling about this series. I'm expecting anyone we like to die, or get abandoned, or commit suicide out of despair, or something like that. After an extremely downbeat first episode, now the show's created a situation where people's faith means that a child must die. The hero's an immortal to whom death is a stepping stone. The show certainly isn't as dreary as I'd been fearing, which is a big plus, but I'm expecting it to get depressing or tragic at reasonably regular intervals.

I love PreCure, but its first decade was stronger than its second decade. These days, it seems to have settled into a three-year cycle. Go! Princess and Hugtto! are good, but both were followed by weaker series (Mahoutsukai, Kirakira Pretty Cure a la Mode, Star Twinkle and Healin' Good). The good news, though, is: (a) that three-year cycle would suggest that we're in for a stronger season, and (b) this year's crossover with a classic PreCure team will feature the Heartcatch cast. The latter makes it a must-watch.

I enjoyed this particular episode, but that might be a misjudgement since I tend to enjoy PreCure first episodes. Something's got to be an absolute stinker (i.e. Kirakira Pretty Cure a la Mode) for its flaws to be visible even at that introductory stage.

That said, though, this one has a funny protagonist (Manatsu Natsuumi), who's moving to the big city from a little island and has yokel expectations and comedic energy levels. (She's also an acrobat.) There's a mermaid (Laura Apollodoros Hyginus La Mer) who's clearly going to become the PreCures' magical ally, but is also extremely pleased with herself and planning to make herself the next queen, for the sake of which she regards human children as sacrificial pawns. The Yaraneeda monsters are old-school PreCure, with their heavy-handed pun names that they shout out regularly. (But they say nothing else.)

The show's also sea-themed. We visit an aquarium and see a whale shark and a dugong, which is lovely (of course) and reminded me of The Aquatope on White Sand.

I'm not confident, but I'm hopeful. Maybe, if I'm lucky, this will be one of the few modern PreCure series that's drama rather than fluffy slice-of-life. We know they can do it. It's just whether or not they want to...

It's another light novel adaptation about a token male protagonist who's sent to a fantasy world where he finds he's game-breakingly strong and has magical powers. (How strong? He starts punching a dragon without considering the possibility that he might lose. What's more, the dragon's enormous.) He'll also end up with a harem of female party members, or at least that's what I assumed from the title sequence.

That said, though, it's quite fun. I was amused by a god promising to dispose of Makoto's adult goods so he won't be embarrassed in absentia while in another world. Makoto's reason for saying "yes" to the whole isekai thing is surprisingly good. Makoto himself isn't academically gifted and not even particularly good-looking. (Or so he says. In practice, it's just another anime face, so we'll have to take his word for it. And of course the goddess who says he's too ugly for divine powers and boots him to the edge of the world, to a wasteland populated only by monsters.)

Similarly, the first girl he meets is kind, sweet... and a pig in a dress. (The show says she's an orc, but yeah. She's a pig.)

I liked the gentle parody. I'd have been happier had Makoto not been so piss-takingly strong, but what the hell.

Four pretty boys appear in canned coffee adverts, talk bullshit in TV interviews and then transform into CGI versions of themselves for an idol song-and-dance performance. (In fairness, that CGI dance sequence is excellently done, although the body motion is so fluid and naturalistic that the anime faces pasted on top look sort of creepy.)

Younger siblings show up of two of our boys. There's career advice. None of it matters in the slightest. Anyone who's not a fan of male idol anime should run fast and hard away from this one.