A green-haired boy called Tarou has to buy ten eggs for his mother and not break them. At the market, he meets a teleporting pink alien and a talking egg that turns him into a superhero.

It looks quite fun. I'd watch it if it came on TV, but I wouldn't go looking for it.

After I finish the 2018 series, I'll be going back to the 1968-69 original and then probably watching all the others in between. So... yeah, I knew I wouldn't be dropping the show here before I started watching.

This week's episode is about Kasha, which Shigeru Mizuki didn't invent. They're from genuine Japanese folklore. They'd steal corpses from funerals and cemeteries, which here is said to be for food. The Kasha eats either the dead or mochi... and he's bored of mochi.

PROBLEM: he's old and feeble these days.

OPPORTUNITY: he's about to meet Kitaro's scumbag non-friend, Nezumi-Otoko (aka. Rat Man). I'll call him what he is. Scumbag spies an unmet need and a win-win business opportunity. His first customer wants to keep getting his mother's pension payments, so wants to keep her death secret. His second got drunk and killed someone with his car. His third killed her husband. His fourth wants to keep a finger. The yakuza are regular clients.

Unfortunately, the Kasha gets bored of these cadavers. They lack spice, aka. "the grief of the family the body's stolen from. That becomes the perfect spice to bring out the flavour of a corpse."

We then learn that the Kasha is two kinds of bodysnatcher.

Yes, it's for children. This isn't one of the strongest Kitaro episodes (i.e. the shocking ones), but it's still gruesome fun. Medama-oyaji, wow. The new end theme song is the worst of the four so far in this latest series, though.

It's about a cat and a girl from Gifu. (I used to teach there!) The art looks as if it was drawn by eight-year-olds. The girl talks in the dialect of Gifu's Tounou region.

It's either an unfunny children's show or a lame attempt to promote Gifu. Not sure which, but it's inoffensive.

It's old-school claymation, not even trying to look smooth or slick. A girl's reading when a green fanged morphing monster appears in her room! She screams! It gives her the wallet she'd dropped. They have tea together.

Later, there's a fight with another monster (similar but yellow). It made me laugh.

There's also a similar animation with a sort of insect-mummy vs. a lemon.

Several shows have a similar premise, but this one's taking it more seriously than most. It starts with the super-alien Zai flying over a convoy of ships and bombing the hell out of them. The survivors take to the lifeboats. The Japanese air force arrives, only to get shot from the sky by superior tech and maneuverability.

Kei and Minghua have been evacuated from Shanghai to Japan. Kei decides to train to be a JASDF pilot, which Minghua opposes since that might well be a death sentence.

The JASDF blindfold and threaten to shoot trespassers. There's a red super-plane that can shoot down a Zai and is piloted by a girl who's not what she looks like. The opening credits promise more pilot girls and hence possibly a harem direction, but so far it's looking reasonable.

It's very good. It's by noitaminA (i.e. mature anime for adults) and it's a yaoi that's had a lot of positive LGBT interest. It's got strong writing and intense character presence. Sleepy Nap Boy finds a dozy boy with a guitar sleeping in Nap Boy's favourite place on the stairs. "Please teach me how to play that thing," says the airhead, who doesn't seem to have noticed Nap Boy's snarling lack of social graces.

My problem with the episode is simply the guitars. There's going to be a band. They'll play in it. I don't care about guitars anywhere near as much as these characters do. They also play basketball, which is another tick on the list of things I don't normally go looking for in my anime. (The show also doesn't have enough girls, unsurprisingly, although Nap Boy has a tall, intimidating sister who's almost as rude as him.)

I'll be skipping this, but it looks like an impressive show and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who's wondering if it might be their kind of thing.

It's charming and moderately funny. I liked the opening, in which the lead character introduces herself and this new anime we might not be familiar with. The end credits are also fun.

One day, our heroine, Su Moting, discovers that her parents are a god and a demon. (She's normal, though. Their supernatural powers cancelled each other out.) They boot her out because they want to go back home, but of course more gods are going to show up and bug her. (Looks as if they'll be pretty boys.)

There's a flat-hunting sequence in which Su Moting is annoying and stupid. Otherwise, though, it's a laugh. My only problem with it is that my episodes' subtitles were written in a small font and often zipped past quite quickly. I'd have been okay if I'd sat nearer to the screen (or if the dialogue had been in Japanese rather than Chinese), but never mind. The show looks good, though.

It's a French-Japanese co-production, starring Osamu Tezuka's robot boy superhero. It's fine, actually. I think it's Flash animated, but also good. It's got Tezuka's character designs (with the noses).

This week, our heroes rescue Amy from an island of giant insects. A praying mantis eats Astro Boy, but he gets better. This is a fairly shallow runaround, but it's also lively and fun. Small children should enjoy it.

To be honest, I'm not expecting much. Apparently the show gets more interesting later, though.

Our heroine, Mangetsu Kohinata, is a pink-haired idiot with slightly worrying standards for packed lunches. (It still smells okay.) To be honest, she's my favourite thing about the episode and holds it together in the face of illusionary worlds, magic, battling giant robots, etc. I decided to keep watching ep.2 mostly because the Next Episode preview promised a return to the real world and an ordinary school setting.

The robot designs are cute, though. Do you know about super-deformed characters? That's when they draw people with childish proportions and heads the size of their bodies. Well, that's these giant war robots.

I'm pretty sure I saw Season 1 and thought it was sort of low-end okay. Nothing obviously wrong there, but nothing that'll stay with you either. Watching this episode, I sort of remembered Hero and Blue-Haired Girl.

Everyone seems nice. The worldbuilding is mildly interesting, having an unusually high tech level for fantasy. Somewhere between Renaissance and Steampunk. They've got telescopes, airships and rifles, but also magic. (Also cow people with big boobs.) The plot, though, is generic and more of the same again.

It's likeable, pretty fantasy wallpaper, basically.

I liked Season 1 ep.1 in 2018, but this was a lot less interesting. Wei Wuxian (dissolute layabout in black who drinks) is still a likeable protagonist, but his travelling companion, Lan Wangji (graceful good boy in white), has no personality and looks almost indistinguishable from Wei Wuxian, except taller. (I think it's that way round.) I'm sure I'd have felt more engaged if I'd seen all the intervening episodes, but I hadn't, so I didn't care.

We start with a dialogue-free pre-credits sequence involving these two indistinguishable men and battle, stabbing, etc. Who? What? After that, they're hunting a demon arm or something. Nothing that made much impression, anyway.

This is still a good-looking show, with proper animation instead of full CGI. The production values are lavish, with movie-quality visuals, extremely detailed backgrounds and unusually fine-lined inking. I also liked the magical details, e.g. little red leaves that walk around.

As for story itself, it seems competent. (No female characters, though.) I don't hate it or anything and my reaction here will be partly my own fault for watching it out of context, without most of the preceding story. I still wasn't tempted to continue, though.

We're watching a meaningless fight inside two minutes.

"She's a beauty," thinks the pretty boy. "Why are you so insistent on killing me?"

The girl wants to kill him because she's distracted by her feelings for him. Eh? I think this is the start of a romance. Eh? The pair then get attacked by ninja-like swordsmen. This has been edited as if the studio wanted to halve the running time and didn't care that they were butchering the storytelling.

The episode's divided into lots of different disconnected worlds. A man on a bird flies past lots of floating islands in the sky. There's a snowbound mountain temple, a night-time forest, a fighting tournament with arenas, etc. This improves the episode a bit, but only up to the level of "oh shit, it's only ep.1 and we've already run into a fighting tournament". We do, though, learn that anger can make your fists explode with magic purple energy.

It's a mess. It's not even competent.

It's set in a world where everyone's a fictional character in a fairy tale. You receive a script at birth, as a big book. This describes everything that will ever happen to you, from birth to death, and of course you'll read it... but you won't be able to use this foreknowledge. If your book predicts that you'll do something stupid, then you'll have to grit your teeth and do it, even though you've always known how dumb it is because you've read about the consequences. What if you're fated to be eaten tomorrow by wolves? Well, tough luck. Everyone knows how they'll die.

This idea does my head in. I love it. I like the heroes and their job of hunting Chaos Tellers. I dislike the reset button and memory-erasing, but what the hell. I'll give this a whirl.

Gudetama is a depressed egg yolk who can't be bothered. This is oddly cute. He's a Sanrio character, like Hello Kitty, and apparently he's a global hit. This isn't the kind of show you can marathon, but I'd watch if it popped up on TV.

Ep.1: someone breaks an egg on to their rice. "Meh, why bother?" says the yolk. Another egg gets cracked. "Leave me alone, please," says the yolk. This is funnier than it sounds.

Ep.2: a yolk on a plate doesn't like being poked with chopsticks. It just lies there, blob-like, then eventually asks the diner to stop. "I'll start making an effort tomorrow."

I'm more likely to watch this than ordinary Gundam, but it's still a "no".

GUNDAM = the mega-franchise that's been running forever. It's about interplanetary politics and lots of battles in piloted giant robots. What it often lacks is character-driven storytelling.

GUNDAM BUILD DIVERS = the real world, more or less. You can buy Gundam model-making kits (which is true) and then plug them into a computer for virtual battles (which might also be possible for all I know).

This episode starts with a virtual battlefield and a Survival Mission Countdown. It feels like a sequel to a previous episode, although two years have passed in-universe since the 2018 season. There's an Exciting Gundam Battle, i.e. it's boring. Beams, kicks, lightsabres, explosions, etc.

We eventually return to the real world, but we'll be watching more battles soon. Our cold hero (who battles) tells a big, over-friendly bloke that he's not here to have battles. If you like Gundam battles, the episode looks fine.