I nearly started this review with "civilisation is doomed", but that would have been an overreaction. It is, though, pointless and brain-destroying. Idols go to idol school. They sing and dance. That's everything noteworthy in the animated segment, bar the fact that the main character sounds retarded. (I'll be generous and assume that she's being played by a terrible actress.)

All that was practically Mastermind, though, compared with the live-action signing and dancing. The anime's just one segment in a TV show where those voice actresses sing and dance. I was slightly shocked by the number of dancers (both main and background) who looked simpleminded on camera.

It's not even a good song. You'll barely remember afterwards that there was a song.

I've nearly finished the 2018 series. After this, I'll return to the original 1968 series and watch them all in order. (Roughly speaking, another 100-odd GeGeGe episodes get made every decade.)

So, yeah, the chance of me dropping this was zero.

This one's a slightly uncomfortable episode, though. There's a bimbougami (a god of poverty who hangs around invisibly for years) and a zashiki-warashi (the opposite). One of Mana's friends manages to eject one of the former and replace it with the latter, but you'll almost wish she hadn't.

This 2018 version of the show can be great fun, but it can also get political or shocking. This is one of the episodes with a darker view of human nature.

I don't watch The Seven Deadly Sins regularly, but I've always enjoyed what I've seen of it. (There's a blatant fanservice anime of the same name, but I'm talking about the shounen adventure series based on a Nakaba Suzuki manga.) This particular mini-show does fairy tale parodies, this time doing The Little Match Girl.

I was amused and I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who likes the parent show. There's a street seller of pork and Hawk the talking pig is helping her. "Delicious pig meat! Oi, skinflints! If you don't buy it, it's your loss!"

It's a 50th anniversary revival of a show from 1969-70. The original starred troublemaking genies who granted every wish of a boy called Kan.

Here, we have the original genie and Kan's layabout grandson, Kantarou. It's a kiddie show set-up, but that I don't mind. No, what irritated me is that the episode has only one thought in its head, i.e. showing how the original's miracles are a bit rubbish these days. Manga? You can read it on your phone. No, I don't need your help with my homework. Kantarou has no ambitions or dreams and he's basically uninterested in anything. "If I want excitement, I have VR. It's a lot safer than that stupid flying carpet, too."

Obviously, Kantarou's about to spend 20 episodes being proved wrong... but, even so, he can piss off.

Two anime pretty boys do stand-up comedy. I didn't laugh, but there's nothing wrong with the idea for the show.

I'm not a huge fan of Ghost in the Shell. I've seen one of the TV series and four of the movies, but I ditched the boring Stand Alone Complex. This is a sequel to that.

It's a Netflix Exclusive. Run away!

It's a CGI series. I don't mean cel-shaded, either, but full 3D rendering. Unfortunately it's a bit... oh dear, those faces. Bwahahaha, no.

I should summarise the episode's plot. Vehicles going fast, shooting guns, cyberpunk, boring people. I think that sums it up. The political and economic background is interesting, though.

It's the year 2030 and civilisation has collapsed, thanks to a "disease" that turns people into a gigantic slavering monster called a Gibie. You can only catch this disease by being stabbed with a Gibie's poison claws. Is this really a disease?

It's the year 1600 and a samurai and a ninja are going into exile after the Battle of Sekigahara. The ninja has a personality, unlike the samurai. Then, suddenly, they find themselves in 2030. Almost everyone is remarkably accepting of this and no one thinks to investigate how this time travel happened.

A scientist explains the situation to these two primitives. His "explanation" is full of talk about DNA and chromosomes. No one comments on this.

To be honest, though, the episode's not that bad. Silly monsters, okay. Collapse of civilisation, okay. Weird acceptance of time travel, okay. The main thing that puts me off is that monosyllabic plank-of-wood samurai and everyone thinking samurai are cool.

Kagaya's teacher wants to recommend him to a good university, but he refuses and then lies about this to his classmates. He wants to be boring. "Normal is best. I don't need to be myself."

This is because he turns into a monster. I presume this increases his strength, since it also comes with a bunch of drawbacks. He can't see very well as a monster. He's embarrassed by his non-human form, is frightened of being noticed and just wants to be a zero. His monster form, you see, is a giant stuffed toy. I love this. I didn't need any more than that to know I needed to keep watching. Fortunately, though, we also have a somewhat villainous girl who knows about other monsters and kicks Kagaya off a roof.

The episode's fanservicey. Why was Claire lying in a burning building with her shirt open? (This becomes even less plausible when we learn how she got there.) We see quite a lot of underwear and for unclear reasons Kagaya even starts removing an unconscious Claire's knickers at one point. (This freaks him out and he immediately stops, but that was worrying.)

Nonetheless, this show looks like a lot of fun. Violence, sinister people and giant stuffed toy monsters.

It's a French co-production with a very non-anime art style. They're not trying to hide the Flash animation. The famous Osamu Tezuka robot hero Astro Boy has adventures with his friends, which this week involves banana-squeezing monkeys in a hot spring.

I watched a random episode. It's for pre-schoolers, but there's nothing wrong with it.

The first half has some fun character set-up. Corrupt politicians hatch schemes and gloat about who really runs the country until their island gets god-slapped. A boy has a motorbike chase to retrieve an old lady's bag. There's a cute girl who's less harmless than she looks and will turn homicidal if you break her glasses.

There's a lot to like here... but unfortunately it's about a martial arts tournament. The title sequence promises BATTLE FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT WEAPON.

My brother watched this series, though.

Crudely drawn cartoon monsters since and dance. The mini-sodes always end with food being eaten. Eh?

On closer examination, the show's star is meant to be rice and the guest star kaijuu are all some kind of food that accompanies it. "Gohan" means "rice", so the Gohan Kaijuu is a sort of white fluffy Godzilla. He dances with a pink blob that's actually an umeboshi (pickled plum) and with some Japanese curry.

I quite enjoyed this show's first two seasons, so I was assuming I'd watch this third season as well. I will, but it was a closer decision than I'd expected.

Asirpa's disappeared and Sugimoto's looking for her with his fellow soldiers, thugs, ex-prisoners or whatever. They're big. They're well-muscled. They fought in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese war. They're the kind of idiots who hit each other for lack of a more eloquent form of communication and the episode's climax is lots of macho wankers punching each other.

Asirpa isn't like that. Asirpa is a little girl, albeit also a tough Ainu hunter who's saved Sugimoto from bears and my favourite character in the show. There are other child characters here too, but they're not Asirpa and they can't win against the stench of man-idiocy.

There's good stuff in the episode too, though. I like the setting. I liked the historical material about the Ainu, the Russian boxing (up to a point) and the back-and-forth of territory. Our heroes meet a wolverine and think it's cute until they learn that wolverines' bad tempers are said to make them scarier than bears. I even quite like Sugimoto and his quest for Asirpa, even if he is being an idiot here.

I'll keep watching, but only because I'd previously seen Seasons 1-2.

It's a cool, slick, well-produced show with fun music. It looks great. The character acting and facial expressions are endlessly watchable. It's definitely one of Netflix's stronger anime.

Unfortunately, it's about con men. The first thing they do is swindle an old lady out of some savings. Some people love con men stories. Personally, I saw these characters getting themselves into outrageous trouble and I was thinking, "Good, now get arrested."

I like Gudetama. He's an egg that can't be bothered and just lies around. He might prefer not to be eaten, but he's not really interested enough even for that.

Gundam Build gets weird.

I don't understand all this properly, but I'll try to explain. Gundam is a boring but insanely huge (in Japan) franchise of very serious interplanetary wars and giant war robots. Gundam Build is a show about fans who make Gundam models (aka. Gunpla) and use them to fight virtual battles with each other.

In other words, they're triple nerds. Gundam nerds, modelmaking nerds and online gamer nerds.

This episode is set within a virtual game world. The Gundam riders are clearly playing a computer game. However they're also barely in it. Instead, we're following a community of beast people in what looks like some Middle Eastern ruins. It's a planet called Eldora and its people seem real. They have families, villages, etc. Their big sisters shout at them if they don't do their chores, like weeding in the fields.

They also live in fear of attack by cyclopean war robots.

They call the Gundam players "Creators". They revere them. One of them even manages to summon them... and then what looks like an entire season of action goes past in a narrated montage, after which the Creators lost and the world's worse than ever. The Build Divers went away.

Compared with what I'd been expecting, it's extraordinary. It's practically a different genre. I won't watch this show, because it's Gundam, but I respect it.

It's surprisingly well drawn and animated for a 4-panel manga adaptation. I watched Granblue Fantasy season 1 and it was okay, but I can't remember much about it now. I'll certainly never rewatch it.

This, similarly, was okay. Nothing wrong with it, but...

A gymnast called Joutarou (nicknamed "The Samurai") has reached old age (29). For a professional gymnast, that's prehistoric. His coach has been telling him to retire for years, but until now Joutarou never listened.

Joutarou is also a widower and single father, with a very cute daughter (Rei) who loves ninja and her father's gymnastics. He can't bring himself to break the news to her, so they go to a historical theme park (Edo Wonderland) so that she can enjoy ninja. To everyone's surprise, one follows them home and they can't persuade him to go away.

It's quite a fun episode, although I could have lived without the silly talking Big Bird in their living room. I also didn't have much patience for Joutarou's inability to spit it out when it comes to breaking the bad news to Rei, but it turns out that there's a reason for that. I'm sure the show's good. I've read good reviews of it. I'm dropping the show because it's a sports anime about gymnastics, but that's just me and by all means give it a whirl.