According to reviewers I've read, the show later turns all weird and stupid. This first episode, though, merely looked boring. Our heroes are two straight-laced men from the public prosecutor's office who work very hard and don't have much personality. They investigate false advertising from a drug company that was allegedly paying off four universities that were testing its new drug. Wheeeee. They then find some bloodstains and a dead body that may or may not be a suicide.

There's an impending mayoral election, bribery, men in suits and no sense of humour. A character's first line is "I'm so happy to be able to hang out with the person who's been my best friend since college." The episode has almost no female presence, unless you count a prostitute with no dialogue.

It's pretty dull. However, there were production issues and the season's second half aired in 2021, so I'll be watching ep.9 tomorrow as a First Episode of 2021. I'll see how different it is to this. (UPDATE: it was equally dull.)

Bakugan Battle Brawlers was a Canadian-Japanese anime series that ran from 2007-2012, often airing on the Cartoon Network before it reached Japanese TV. This is a reboot of it. What's more, I could watch in lots and lots of languages... but I couldn't find Japanese in the list. Instead, I had loud American voice actors being cartoonish and swaggering.

Here's what the dialogue was like. I'm sure this would have seemed normal if I watched the Cartoon Network, but I don't and I was in pain.

"Now? Uh, eating here."

"Yeah, now. Got a news flash for you. This could change the fate of the world."

"Huh? What's with this dude? Talk about being a little overdramatic."

"Dan, we've been challenged to a battle."

"But he's babbling on about heavy stuff like fate and the world. What do you think his deal is, Drago?"

"Only one way to find out: BATTLE."

These two small boys then have a battle with their toys. Well, their balls that turn into bakugons, which I'm going to guess are battle dragons. In mid-battle, though, we get a flashback to a previous adventure.

Ouch, no.

It's set in a multiverse of pretty boys, ostensibly based on real historical figures. Samurai, etc. However it also has history-changing, unhappenings and timelines. Quite a lot of the episode is taken up with mildly indigestible info-dumping about why things haven't been destroyed or burned down. Our heroes must return the flow of time that was disrupted by the chronometer to its current course!

It's also fangirl bait. (There's nothing wrong with this, but it is.) There's a post-credits relationship diagram to help us get our heads around fourteen cast members. Twelve of these are male and indistinguishably hot, while two are female and way too young to be a danger to all that yaoi fanfic.

Even if this had been good, I'm not sure if I'd have been interested. I'm not a fan of parallel universes, especially stories that start changing its own history. This one, though, has an evil samurai mastermind ordering our heroes' decapitation, which in real life would have happened on the spot... but not here. Instead, they're put in a cell (why?) and rescued by their friends.

This is a "no" for me, three times over.

I quite liked it. Well, until the dragon dinosaur thing showed up. I lost interest then, but hey. It's a kiddie anime. Tiny boy protagonist, big hair, does embarrassing dance with penguins. You could do worse.

He's their "hero", so they dress him as a girl, then in a fundoshi loincloth. His sidekick penguin dresses as a dustbin. There's a silly penguin family, including a "sexy" one for comedy. There's jumping through a ring of fire. For what it is, it's fine.

A cat mountain yawns, then later erupts like a volcano. (Harmlessly, to no effect.) At its base grow bananyas, which are a cat-banana life form. (I'm not sure why the show bothered stating that. They're just cats that live inside bananas, aren't they? Admittedly that's unrealistic, but it's not as if realism comes across from anything else in the show.) One bananya puts on a comedy disguise and two others laugh at him.

It's for children, of course. Limited but moderately charming visuals. You might watch it out of curiosity if it appeared while your offspring was watching Japanese children's TV, but it probably wouldn't occur to you to put it on for yourself.

I liked Season 1, so I'll be watching Season 2. (And probably also Season 3, from 2020.) That said, though, this episode's nothing special and I might not have kept watching had this been a standalone series.

It's the start of a new school year. There's school stuff. This is unmemorable, although I was amused by Rinko, the school council president who's afraid of public speaking. (She has to give a speech. Big fail. I'm impressed that she performs in a band.)

Then we have a concert at the new live venue, Galaxy. There are performances from Poppin'Party, Roselia, Afterglow and Hello, Happy World! (but not Pastel Palettes). On one level, this is just music. When Aikatsu does this, I fast-forward. However it's also the most direct and effective way of reintroducing everyone, including their music and on-stage personas. All it takes is a couple of minutes and we know that Roselia are very serious (and a bit chuunibyou), Hello, Happy World! are eccentrics with odd costumes, etc.

It's a CGI anime, although it's trying to hide the fact. The faces give it away, though. Everyone's the same and has a plastic default expression. I suppose they did it because CGI capture is the most practical way of animating stage performances and at least that avoids style changes.

The episode's okay. Great, no. However it didn't put me off from watching the rest of the series and I'm expecting to have at least a modest amount of fun with it.

"A human world where everyone's an animal" has almost become its own anime genre. They're often sharp comedies, like Aggretsuko or Seton Academy: Join the Pack! This one, though, has herbivores and carnivores who are capable of living down to their biological urges. It's treated as murder, but it can happen.

At the start of this episode, one student eats another. We don't know the murderer's identity.

I really liked the episode. It's great, despite being on Netflix. (Every so often, an Netflix anime turns out to be superb, e.g. Devilman Crybaby.) It's blurring lines, with "herbivore" (or "grass-eater") being a term in Japan to describe meek, unassertive men who don't chase women. There's a carnivore character here who's this kind of grass-eater and gets pushed around by actual herbivores. Also, a rabbit is a complete bitch to another rabbit.

That might sound like a potentially silly, Disney-like show, but it's well written and often cutting in its characterisation. I'm expecting this to be excellent.

The first version of Youkai Ningen Bem aired in 1968. It's about three youkai who are trying to do good in a world that hates them. Lots of bittersweet endings. This is the latest version of it.

I've got a bad feeling about this. I'm going to keep watching, because I'm on a Youkai Ningen Bem marathon and because other people have said it's a good series... but this smells bad. This is not Bem, Bela and Belo. They all look about 17 and conventionally pretty, because that's mandatory in anime these days. (Closer examination reveals that Belo is actually the shortest of the three, but he still doesn't come across as young.) Bela is a schoolgirl. Belo is a moody, negative teen with attitude. Bem's the one who gets the spotlight. Bloody hell.

I'm reminded of Cutie Honey Universe, which looked good at first but hadn't had the integrity to keep the traditional theme music. (A lot of hard negotiation goes into anime theme songs.) Final result: ugh.

Apart from that, though, the episode's fine. A young cop called Sonia Summers moves into a corrupt American precinct and seems to be hoping to be Jim Gordon in Batman: Year One. Unfortunately, there are also monsters, youkai and people drowning on dry land. I'll continue and hope that the show manages to justify its choices with the characters, but so far I'm hostile.

The only surprising thing about this show is that it's a spin-off of Cardfight Vanguard, which has built up lots of weird cool tribes and settings in the world of Clay. You'd never guess this from the episode, though, because:

(a) it's hiding all connections to Vanguard, trading card battle games, etc. so thoroughly that you'd almost think they were embarrassed about it.

(b) it's Cute Girls Doing Nothing fluff with almost nothing weird or cool about it. The girls are mermaids... and that's it. I liked the bit where a girl hatches from a purple egg, but otherwise it's so generic that it's actively avoiding personality.

Almost the first thing we see after the opening credits is someone pouring hot water into a teapot. It's been animated to look like you or me doing the same in a cafe on dry land, even creating a little steam. But they're underwater. My physics analysis brain exploded. I'd have hated this show even if it was otherwise good, but it really isn't.

Good thing: it's short. (It's a net-only streaming anime, also available on Disney XD.)

Children fight battles with their spinning tops. Our hero has mixed feelings about his friend getting stronger, but his dragon tells him that he can get stronger too!

The children discuss breaking dragons, then they have a BEYBLADE BATTLE!

I've been told that the Black Clover anime is bad for the first thirteen episodes or so, but then gets good. That sounds plausible, except that we're talking about a generic formula Shonen Jump definition of "good". I hated ep.1, whereas this was sort of okay.

It won't have helped that I walked in on the anti-climax ending of a story arc, though. There's a blood-manipulating female demon. Asta's friends are all being crucified. "Your first task is to kill everyone here." Sounds good... but then the demon says "you have defeated me" to her daughter and it's all over. It was something about perfection vs. imperfection.

Next thing we know, everyone's friends and the demon's giving them one of her earrings. After that, it's general silliness with jokes about topless men, Asta being stupid (which he is) and people being annoyed that Asta's got back the use of his arms. "Go and get cursed again!"

This lasts the rest of the episode. None of it did much for me, but that's my fault for not knowing the cast and for coming cold to all the jokes. It looks as if the daughter is an ongoing character, so this will have been an important story arc for her. I'm sure the series is better than it looked to me here.

I was impressed by the script. It's an inventive, clear-eyed adaptation, ditching and rearranging scenes in order to focus on what's important. 24 episodes means a lot of screen time to fill, yet here they've sidelined the big introductory set-pieces. Murder of Manji's sister and subsequent retaliatory carnage? It's a throwaway and slightly hallucinogenic pre-credits sequence. Murder of Rin's father and rape of her mother? Barely even glimpsed, although we return to it later in a flashback.

Instead, it's about Rin. They've stripped away all that extraneous action to give her a strong focus. She's willing to sell her body and stab herself in the throat if that's what it takes to punish her parents' killers. (Neither of those things happens, incidentally.)

The art and animation are cheaper than in 2008, but in a way that's harsh and stylish. Also, Kenjiro Tsuda is voicing Manji. Goodness me. I hadn't been expecting something this good.

It's quite good. If I were in Japan and this came on while Natuski was watching children's TV, I'd probably watch it with him. It's still the same Bonobono that I remember, but this time with Tom and Jerry style abuse that made me laugh.

Bonobono (a blue sea otter): "This shellfish might have gone bad."

Shimarisu-kun (a pink chipmunk): "You can't eat it, then! You need to make sure!"

Shiramisu-kun does this by throwing it into the mouth of a sleeping raccoon (Araiguma-kun). It's bad. Glad we sorted that out. Later in the episode, Araiguma-kun wakes up Bonobono from a wandering dream state by kicking Shiramisu-kun at him like a football.

Apart from that, everything's as normal. This week's philosophical question is "does everything get old?" Our friends' discussion covers dream superheroes, the sky and doing two poos. "The sky never changes, so it doesn't get old." "We're becoming new every day." We also meet Bonobono's father, who talks in a sing-song voice that in any other anime would suggest an android that's going to kill everyone.

There's no need to watch this regularly if you're more than, say, ten years old. I still enjoyed it, though.

In Japanese, it's all called Boogiepop wa Warawanai (i.e. "Boogiepop Doesn't Laugh/Smile"). The original light novels, the live-action movie, the 2000 anime and this 2019 anime, etc. In English, though, the 2000 anime was called "Boogiepop Phantom" and this 2019 one's "Boogiepop and Others".

I've seen all the 2000 stuff (anime and live-action movie), so I'd expected to watch this series too... but it's a bit boring. People talk about high school romance, then later about the possible destruction of the world by a monster that's lurking inside someone. One of those people is Boogiepop, in a cloak and an awesome hat... but it's still an off-puttingly dry, talky episode.

I'll try another episode, but I'm not optimistic.

Naaah. Too many conversations with bored-looking people. The man-eating manticore is a plus, but no.

It's completely okay. A decent example of its genre. It wasn't good enough to make me continue, but it's perfectly good, albeit cheap-looking. (The Akuta monsters can be imagined as the Faceless from Spirited Away, if that hadn't been a Ghibli movie, but instead episode billion-and-something of a churn-em-out weekly TV show.)

The baddies are reasonably interesting. There's a old bloke who's being carried around by Akuta monsters and having theological differences with the Fabrications that he made. "We have secured humans whose hearts will become ours." That's not metaphorical. There's going to be some amateur heart transplant surgery from unwilling donors. Old Bloke disapproves of this, which is a problem for his creations. They see themselves as his arms and legs. They revere him. However they're also crumbling away like old, dried-up cement and they'll be no use to anyone if they're all dead.

There's a nice, earnest Fabrication who's full of uplifting anime cliches about wanting to experience the human heart. He'd be lovely if the heart transplant process were victimless. There's evidence that the Fabrications aren't as heartless as they believe. There's even a cute little Fabrication who's helping the heroes and gives the episode surprising emotional weight.

However the goodies are bog-standard shounen heroes. They seem fine, but they're in the story to have fights. They also have dialogue like the following, which is so common in shounen anime that I swear it's going to start leaking out of my ears:

"You should be weak. How are you so strong?"

"The strength of our hearts. Friends we trust with all of our hearts."

I quite enjoyed it. I didn't start fast-forwarding through the fights or anything. The baddies are interesting. It looked pretty good, actually, if you like this genre.

I'm not a fan of idol boy band anime, but I enjoyed this. It's fluffy and utterly unimportant, but it's also quite entertaining and it's trying to find some emotional weight for its characters. It doesn't feel empty.

It's about the idol super-group B Project, which is short for "Bambi Project". No, I'm not kidding. We've got a female manager (Tsubasa) and about a dozen hot boys in her reverse-harem. They go on stage! They take their tops off! They do photoshoots and late-night radio programmes! This is most of the episode... and it's actually quite amusing. The boys are silly and are capable of bickering, teasing each other and delivering weird cooking lectures about curry cubes.

However there's also that emotional level. Tsubasa's dealing with the fallout of the end of Season 1, which sounds as if it was a bit traumatic and has left her not quite coping with her workload. She's struggling. She's usually late for things. Eventually she talks to the boys about it and they give her support and reassurance. That might not sound like much, but it's a big deal for her.

It's still an idol boy band anime, of course, but it's fun. It's nowhere near as camp as many of them and I'd recommend it to anyone who's a fan of that genre.

Yohei (pronounced "YO! HEY!") is a small boy who likes farting rap. In Japanese, this is wordplay. Yohei has a dog. A man with a cucumber nose also raps.

After lots of rapping, farting and rapping to the beat of farts, the end credits show Yohei rapping with his two friends: a girl (eh?) and a bigger boy whose shirt doesn't cover his belly.

I liked seasons 1-2 in 2016, but disliked the 2018 movie enough that I deleted my copies of the episodes and swore off the series. This is a first episode, though, so here I am again.

It's a Port Mafia story, from when the show's best character (Dazai) was working for them. Yes, as usual, he's trying to commit suicide. Someone called the King of Sheep walks along a plane's wing while it's in flight, tears his way inside and then kicks a bullet fired at him back to its sender.

I'd been expecting a tough decision about whether or not to return to this franchise, but this episode didn't give me one. It's sort of okay and the King of Sheep makes things lively, but his confrontations are just superhero fights and the episode's ultimately a mafia story about scumbags doing nothing I cared about. I'm sure it's still a good show and I'm being weird in dropping it, but what the hell.

Business Fish doesn't have a fish head. He's odder than that. His head is an entire fish, from tip to tail. His universe is a mix of ordinary humans and other seafood people, e.g. Ebika Ise (prawn) and a squid girl.

Unfortunately, the episode itself is ugly-looking motion-capture CGI. You can see the actors' body language, which is nice, but even so watching this is not enjoyable. As for the script, it's unremarkable workplace placefiller. Business Fish is shocked to learn that his friend sees him as a supporting character and vows to develop the strength of will that a main character has.

The character designs look quite cool. The show doesn't. If you fancy something like this, try a Minoru Kawasaki film instead. The Calamari Wrestler, Crab Goalkeeper, Executive Koala, etc. They're even live-action.