Madoka AsahinaMikoi SasakiMiyu KubotaSaya Aizawa
Plus-Sized Elf
Also known as: Elf-san wa Yaserarenai.
Medium: TV, series
Year: 2024
Director: Toshikatsu Tokoro
Writer: Yuki Takabayashi
Original creator: Synecdoche
Actor: Aino Shimada, Ayasa Ito, Aya Uchida, Ayaka Fukuhara, Kaori Maeda, Kotori Koiwai, Madoka Asahina, Mikoi Sasaki, Miyu Kubota, Rena Hasegawa, Saya Aizawa, Shizuka Ishigami, Sora Tokui, Takahide Ishii, Yuka Iguchi
Keywords: anime, fantasy, werewolf, boobs
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese
Format: 14 twelve-minute episodes including two OVAs
Url: https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=31557
Website category: Anime 2024
Review date: 8 April 2025
plus sized elf
It's amiable trash for chubby chasers. Fat elf, monster, etc. girls get naked. That's the show's objective. Our token male protagonist, Naoe, works in a health salon and tries to help the girls lose weight, which won't work because of: (a) their personality issues, (b) Earth food tastes better, (c) genre inevitability.
The girls are... 1. an elf (Elfuda), 2. a dark elf (Kuroeda), 3. a mermaid who can transform her fish tail into legs (Mero), 4. a plant-girl (Kusahanada), 5. an ogre (Oga), 6. a werewolf (Raika), 7. an orc who isn't green because Japan often equates "orc" with "pig-person" (Oku), 8. an adult-in-years-but-child-sized kobold for any timid lolicons in the audience (Kobo), 9. a satanic, villainous and easily embarrassed satyr (Satero), 10. a skeleton who thinks she's fat (Honeda), 11. an angel in a coffee shop (did we even learn her name?), 12. a dragon in small human form like Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid (Gonda), 13. a very big cyclops who becomes Oga's rival (Hitome) and 14. another elf (Oeda) who's the domineering aunt of Elfuda. What's more, there are apparently more in the manga. It's only a short-form anime, so it couldn't fit in the medusa, the dream eater and the manticore.
It wouldn't be wrong to call this show "empty", but you'd be surprised if a cast this big didn't contain one or two amusing characters. I liked the mother-victim relationship between Oga and Kobo, plus the one-sided rivalry between Oga and Hitome. They're both basically giant-type monsters, but Oga is determined to protect her status as Kobo's "mother" even though Hitome has no interest in that. I also laughed at the joke of a skeleton complaining about her obesity.
It's a happy, friendly series. Everyone's nice, including the designated villain (Satero) who's mortified by nudity and usually ends up foiling her own wicked schemes. The rivalry is harmless and always ends up as a pair of frenemies (Elfuda-Kuroeda and Oga-Hitome). No damage is ever done and even monsters that should theoretically be dangerous have been made fluffy and harmless. The girls don't even compete romantically for Naoe, because this isn't a romantic harem series. (Except in the second OVA episode, which genre-hops for laughs in a magical dream sequence. After being a high school harem comedy, it then briefly becomes a zombie apocalypse series called "Calories of the Dead" with a diet supplement that makes people crave human flesh.)
The show makes occasional attempts at diet and exercise advice. We visit exercise locations, e.g. boxing gyms, swimming pools. Naoe dispenses professional advice and the girls' weight problems are in specific body areas instead of being generically all-round. The show's advice isn't bad. It might seem odd that a massage practitioner is being presented as an expert on health and weight loss, but in Japan there's an alternative medicine practice called seitai that includes massage. Similarly, that "water walking" in ep.4 is something I discovered for the first time on visiting a Japanese swimming pool.
Nonetheless, the show's fetish is clearly on BIG GIRLS!!!! and you know what the target audience want to see, with the counter-textual message of "big is beautiful".
Overall, the show's pointless but amiable. Your brain would melt with boredom if you tried to marathon it, but you could play it in the background and ignore the dull bits while finding yourself chuckling occasionally. The nudity is copious, but not sexy. It's not the body shapes so much as the fact that almost everyone's so matter-of-fact about it and treats it as a sort of uniform. The whole thing's a lot like Isekai Onsen Paradise in the same year (both short-form anime built around casual isekai nudity), although that's even shorter and hence suffers less from being so bitty, shallow and nudity-obsessed. I've watched both. They're okay, but obviously nothing you'd bother keeping.