It's quite good, actually. The cast are likeable and it made me laugh twice. I still won't be watching it, though, because I'm familiar with this franchise and I've got better things to do than watch schoolgirl idols be nice-but-vapid. Perform in the Prism Stone Concert Hall! Turn into a 3D CGi version of yourself! Unlock new outfits!

The franchise's earlier instalments, incidentally, are Pretty Rhythm, PriPara, Idol Time PriPara and Kiratto Pri Chan.

A cat girl called Myamu steals a magical book, but then gets outwitted by her grandfather waving a piece of grass in front of her face. She's not very intelligent, but she has impossible hair. Her friend is a talking blue wolf. Meanwhile, in the real world, a muggle schoolgirl called Matsuri Hibino loves idols. She particularly hero-worships last year's champion, Jennifer, whose hair is even more outrageously styled but doesn't have exotic colours.

It's quite fun. It has a 3D CGI idol performance through which you'll fast-forward, obviously, but I laughed at Myamu's face on eating a cat lollipop and Matsuri's "let's go to the police".

My main problem with the show is that I don't care. Tatsu is a glowering, snarling badass ex-yakuza who's covered in tattoos and... no, wait. Stop. Tatsu, please talk like a human being. The show's joke is that he's given up crime and is now effectively his wife's housewife, so he goes shopping and does domestic chores like the terrifying crime lord he used to be.

Personally, though, I'm just not particularly interested in spending time with him. He's voiced by Kenjiro Tsuda (which is a huge plus), but nope.

The show's other problem is that it's the equivalent of those cheapazoid "motion comic" adaptations where someone's just pointing a camera at the original comic's pages, then adding a voice-over. That's not even exaggeration. This was a deliberate choice. The anime's director, Chiaki Kon, said about this: "The producer said, 'Make an animation that looks like a manga! Never move the characters! It was a lot of work. [...] There were scenes where I thought, "It would be easier to just draw the scene! It was not an easy work at all (laughs)."

It's undeniably something different from Netflix, mind you. The property's also had a live-action TV drama and a live-action film. But I'll be skipping it.

This show is great. I've heard that there's going to be a plotline this year about Iruma turning evil, but it won't be through choice and I'm sure his friends will help him fix that. This episode would have had to crash and burn to put me off this show.

Iruma is a nice chap who also happens to be the only human in the demons' school of evil in Hell. They don't know he's a walking dinner. Everyone's got used to the situation (including Iruma) and life in the abyss looks pretty good, all told. Iruma's friends are lovely. Clara remains mad and adorable (and I'll be upset if anyone else becomes Iruma's girlfriend), while Alice "Azz" Asmodeus is the most devotedly faithful swooning maiden you ever saw. (Not all boys could pull that off, but it suits him.)

This week, Iruma's magic ring grows a personality and a voice. It made me laugh. Yes, the show's still cartoonish fun.

I started watching this in 2020 and we're halfway through the series now. It's funny, charming and well observed. What's not to like?

This week, we learn about the time when Matsumoto used to do volunteer work at a dog shelter. There's also comedy pseudo-horror when she's cooing over her (evil, disdainful, domineering) cat. "I thought I took a cute video of my cat, but why is there a creepy old woman's voice in it when I watch it?"

This show is great. I genuinely think it's one of the better anime of the year.

This animation was made to publicise the new campus of Kanazawa College of Art. An artist is drawing in a monochrome world, to the sound of gentle violins and guitars. Her studio is big, but contains a mountain of miscellaneous bric-a-brac.

Colour turns into a goblin, which the artist throws away. A demon comes alive, but instead of eating her, a heart shines in its mouth. This is a semi-abstract piece about magical fantasy creatures, use of colour and the artist's creativity. I rather liked it. It's on YouTube, if you fancy taking a look.

WIXOSS (pronounced "wicross") is a real trading card game by Takara Tomy, but as far as I'm concerned it's an anime. I'm a fan of the "selector" series in 2014-16, written by Mari Okada. I'm less enthusiastic about the "lostorage" series in 2016-18, written by Michihiro Tsuchiya. Now we have a third iteration, written by Tsuyoshi Tamai (who doesn't seem like a star name, but what the hell).

This new one has idol groups and a tournament battle system that depends on Selector Points, aka. "the treasured feelings of everyone in the audience!!!" There's a battle between three heroines, three cynical smug sadists and quite a lot of large bosoms. Frankly, I wouldn't have made it through the episode if I hadn't already been attached to WIXOSS. A trading card game battle, presented front-and-centre and unironically. I'm a bit worried about what I'm letting myself in for here.

That said, though, we have an optimistic idealistic heroine who makes speeches and says things like, "To make our dreams come true!" In WIXOSS. Has the franchise genre-hopped, or is it getting ready to crush her? (The rules of the WIXOSS universe are not nice.)

I'll keep going. If nothing else, our heroines' victory as a team called "NO NAME" put me in mind of No Game No Life. (Which also got a 2014 anime adaptation that I enjoyed and would like to see more of.)

That was pretty wild. Apparently it's a bit like Black Rock Shooter, so clearly I need to pull that off my shelf and get watching it fast. (I bought the DVDs years ago, but didn't get around to watching them.)

There's a girl called Ai. She buries a dead cicada, but it starts talking to her. Now, she has an egg. At school, girls are writing "die" on someone's locker. "What should you do if someone in your class is being bullied? Answer: pretend you didn't see anything! Ahahahaha!"

A talking toilet roll tells Ai to break the egg. Inside is... okay, that's enough spoilers.

Like I said, it's weird. There will also be axe-throwing, red-faced jumping critters and some backstory that appears to involve suicide.

Some of this ostensibly appears to be happening in a dream, but I'm wouldn't expect dream people to talk about the fact that they're inside one. So we're back to the weirdness. The episode's a wild and often beautiful explosion of mad stuff, but it's also digging into heavy emotional content in a way that reminds me of Kunihiko Ikuhara (Mawaru Penguindrum, Yurikuma Arashi, Sarazanmai, Revolutionary Girl Utena).

Apparently the last episode goes off a cliff and people hate it. Well, never mind. I'm forewarned.

The first half is memorable and sometimes shocking. The world's not actually going to end, or even all of Japan. Mount Fuji's going to have a really bad eruption... but unfortunately so many people live there that it's impossible to evacuate them all. Schools are organising places for everyone to gather at the end.

A boy and a girl meet online. They've never met in real life. This is haunting, strong stuff...

...until, halfway through, the episode introduces parallel universes. Oh dear. It's worth watching until then, though.

Not sure about this one. It's another death game. I've sat through my fair share of those, enough to discover that I tend to lose patience with the more pointless, arbitrary ones.

Also, I don't like the main character (Neku), although admittedly he makes a small amount of progress in this episode in the direction of not being a knob. He's unnecessarily rude, e.g. "oshiero", and uncooperative to the point of self-endangerment. He needs to be told not to try to fight all the baddies at once single-handedly. "I don't want strangers I've just met telling me what to do."

Also, the art looks a bit odd. I got used to it though. It's striking, in its way.

That said, though, it's based on a famous and still highly respected game from 2007. Crumbs. Some of Neku's twattish behaviour was due to the influence of something or other and he's awkward about it afterwards, so there's hope for him. Besides, his friends are nice. The death game has straightforward rules (so far), includes monsters like Vomiting Disintegration Frogs and is being run by shinigami who can improve their promotion prospects by killing as many players as possible.

Also, the worldbuilding and rules are of interest. Our heroes are in a version of Shibuya, Tokyo, where no one can see you or touch you unless they're also involved in the game. It's possible to read the minds of these intangible passers-by, but at the moment it's unclear what benefit that would give you.

I'll keep going. There's enough good stuff here that I'm interested in seeing what happens next.

It's done with a straight face and lots of medicobabble, but we know what it boils down to. A Noble But Bland Anime Protagonist is one of only five men on Earth who hasn't been cryogenically frozen to protect them from a virus that's lethal to almost all men. He's immune. His duty is to have anonymous sex with a different woman every night, but he's on strike because he loves his missing girlfriend!

What about artificial insemination, though? Answer: that wouldn't work, because cough choke anime scriptwriter looks shifty. (Translation: that would spoil the porn premise.)

The TV version's visual censorship sounds horrendous, but I watched the uncensored version. The huge boobs (with nipples) clearly indicate the target audience, but the inking and colouring is flat and ugly.

Is this episode good? Actually, yes, sort of. It's watchable. The protagonist is a cliche and an idiot (e.g. running out of the car into a virus-infested environment before learning that he has immunity), but at least that's better than a horndog. There's a missing person and some pseudo-scientific and pseudo-medical mysteries. Yes, I like trash sometimes.

It's an episode of two halves, plus an epilogue.

PART ONE (isekai): EEEEEVIL evil evil people are auctioning 13-year-old girls... but, more importantly (thinks this anime), look at their boobs! And arses! And panty shots! That's what the camera's focusing on. Yes, even kidnapped thirteen-year-olds will have boobs like watermelons. The purpose of this sequence is to persuade us that even though this show's protagonists are assassins, that's okay because the people they're killing are even worse. Ahem.

I had to double-check that this was episode 1, because we're thrown in with so little context. The main cast appears to be a boy who's surrounded by hot girls. Because this is anime.

PART TWO (flashback to the real world): our anti-hero is an old, cold bloke of about seventy who's about to retire after a lifetime of murder for money. Instead, he's going to become an teacher of assassins, i.e. encouraging other people to murder for money.

His employers arrange his death. Gee, what a shame.

PART THREE (epilogue): an annoying goddess who uses too much gratuitous English wants to send our hero to a fantasy world to assassinate its Hero.

I've seen reviews calling this show surprisingly good... but the same reviewer said of ep.1 that "this series has a fun hook". Personally, I'd say this show has an anti-hook. I don't care about these people. Also, it's adapted from a light novel series by Rui Tsukiyo, who also wrote a rape revenge series called Redo of Healer that should be avoided even more vigorously than this.

Season 1 ran for 73 episodes from 2014-16, but then the manga went on indefinite hiatus due to the author's health problems. It returned in late 2018, so now the anime's returned too. Apparently, these days it's best known for its large cast and battles full of tactics.

This episode starts with military people planning an assault. They discuss whether or not they should target their enemy's Triggers. Also, they're agents of a small country that can't afford to make unnecessary enemies. After a while, a black energy ball destroys a city area and the fighting begins! The episode's second half is all action.

It looks okay, if you like that kind of thing, but I wasn't grabbed. The only moment that suggested that the show had a personality was the tiny boy with a pet capybara.

The previous Take Off! series only used the Strike Witches cast, but this one also uses the Brave Witches... allegedly. In fact, it's just Miyafuji (doing chores for everyone), Hartmann (still a slob) and Barkhorn (still inflicting comedy ultra-violence on Hartmann). The post-credits sequence explains that the Brave Witches will appear next week, though.

Barkhorn decides to make a promotional video. It's okay, but nothing you need to rush out and watch today. Unusually, this time we don't even meet Shirley or Lucchini.