The Fall 2016 Anime Preview Guide

Fall 2016 Shorts

Jacob Chapman

Alright, no beating around the bush here, folks. Fall 2016 boasts the absolute highest volume of anime shorts in any given season and I watched almost all of them just so I could deliver these snap judgments straight to your eyeballs. So here we go!

Nyanbo!: This is a pretty cute and inoffensive little kids' show with smoothly-animated CG models (think Show By Rock!, no awkward frame-cutting in the render) of alien box-cats wandering around live-action locales to engage in slapstick shtick and silly kitty jokes. It skews a little young for me to recommend to most, but if childlike cuteness for its own sake is your catnip, this is fine.

KAIJU GIRLS: It's a shame the conceit of this series is based exclusively on kaiju from the Ultraman series, because it's a fun concept, but since these are all super-simple flash-animated designs without much visual spark to draw viewers on their own, the show is mostly an exercise in Ultraman trivia and gags that won't do you much good unless you're a fan of that franchise.

Aooni The Blue Monster: This is an immediately unpleasant little oddity that will probably have mild puzzle or mystery elements later, but just kicks off with a weird baby-headed blob-alien killing off four not-too-bright teens in record time for no reason. This one might need another episode or two before anyone can tell what the point is supposed to be, but I can't imagine sitting through another one because it's just kind of ugly, frantic, and dumb.

My Wife is the Student Council President+!: This ecchi short from a couple seasons back sold surprisingly well, so of course they're pumping out more of it. It's basically just super-tame softcore with a mild harem setup, so if you wanna see some anime boobs get fondled and sucked on for a couple minutes weekly, that's pretty much the whole point of this show. I guess I can respect the honest approach.

Gakuen Handsome: I really wanted to like this short, but it hasn't really come up with more than one joke yet. The whole concept is that someone drew their beautiful BL fantasy in MS Paint and animated it in After Effects, and to make matters worse, they're not even any good with either program. That's it, that's the joke. However, the plot is otherwise played straight (so far), so it's just riding on that one tongue-in-cheek gag for four minutes at a time. Not sure that can last a whole series, but I'd definitely check out one episode just to see if the novelty of its garbage visuals tickles your funny bone.

Ninja Girl & Samurai Master: This is definitely one of the nicest-looking shorts of the season, with bouncy animation and snuggly designs. The show chronicles the wacky adventures of a deadly moe ninja girl who wants to help Oda Nobunaga take down his enemies. It's cute and all, but most of the humor requires some familiarity with the history it's playing with, and I didn't really laugh at anything in the episode. It's tame chuckles with a nice visual aesthetic, but you could definitely do much worse.

Mahou Shoujo Nante Mouiidesukara Second Season: I actually watched the first season of this because I was a sucker for the noxious little mascot characters. It's a cute enough series with some good jokes and bits of nice animation, so I'd say give it a shot if you like magical girls, but be warned that there's definitely some implicit loli fanservice slithering under the surface here if that bothers you. Anyway, it's not a gross show apart from the very mild subtext, so this should scratch your itch for mahou shojo transformations and chirpy mascot friends.

TO BE HERO: This is definitely among the cringiest shorts of the season, which is probably intentional but I still can't recommend this nasty little aborted mess. If you were curious about what Nabeshin (Excel Saga) is up to when he's not attending every American convention ever, it was apparently directing this crass short about a guy who turns into a greasy creeper after attaining superhero powers in a sewer. The jokes here are all lazy toilet humor and "hilarious" sexual assault panic reactions from people terrified by Creeper-san's appearance, but none of it really amounts to much either as shock value or novelty. It's just kinda lame and unpleasant.

Cheating Craft: This short has some surprisingly nice animation, but it literally spends its full twelve minutes just explaining its extremely nonsensical premise through the most lazy narrator exposition imaginable, so the terrible execution just slaughters whatever potential might have been there for something fun or interesting. It should not take twelve minutes to explain that this is a shonen-battle style "parody" of kids cheating on entrance exams in some bizarre dystopian future. I want to give this a shot just because it has one of the loonier concepts this season, but the delivery was just really bad. Skip.

Nazatokine: I think this show is based around solving logic puzzles? The whole first episode was setting up the concept of a salarywoman lost in some kind of mystery-solving wonderland, and it seems like maybe it's aimed at a younger audience, but it's pretty safe to call a hard skip on this one. It's just not engaging at all, and I'm still not sure what it's about after the first episode, since they haven't started solving any puzzles yet.

Kiitaro's yokai picture diary: This show also didn't spend much of its runtime explaining what the actual premise is, but that works in its favor in this case. The whole thing is just a colorful and goofy mock battle scene between a heap of different wild yokai designs, biting and punching and tumbling over each other before Kiitaro and his lady-friend call the whole thing off. So I guess this is going to be a cutesy action-comedy where we learn about different types of yokai or just watch them hang out with each other. I dug it! I wanna see more of where it's going.

Miss Bernard said.: I also dug this one. The premise is that Miss Bernard wants to appear well-read to her fellow library friends, but she doesn't actually have the patience to read any of the long-winded classics she wants to brag about, so she just sort of guesses what the books are about, and her friends either roll their eyes or get nerdily indignant about her terrible improvised cliff's notes, and we all maybe learn a little about literature (or don't). If you're a bookworm, this one's for you.

Soul Buster: Clocking in at 13 minutes, this is definitely the easiest hard skip of the pack. The show seems to be advertising a card game with its hacky Fate-lite premise, horribly ugly visuals, agonizing pacing, and eye-rolling exposition, but I'm definitely not buying what they're selling here. It's one of the only shorts that's clearly plot-driven above all else, but that's not a good thing when the plot is this cliché. This wouldn't work at four minutes, but it would just be an even bigger dud at full-length. It's a cheap waste of time for everyone involved.

SENGOKUCHOJYUGIGA: Well, this one's definitely unique if novelty's what you're looking for! So these are quick little anecdotes about legendary sengoku-era generals (starting with Oda Nobunaga, like you do), starring wood-block-style renderings of animals playing all the roles. So you have a monkey and a tanuki (complete with giant scrotum) playing Nobunaga's comrades, while a jaybird plays Nobunaga. Also, the voice-acting is really casual and naturalistic, similar to last year's weird-as-hell skit-style anime Peeping Life. It's so incredibly weird that it made me laugh, so I can't help but recommend it.

So there you have it! Of all those, I most enjoyed Kiitaro's yokai picture diary, Miss Bernard said., and SENGOKUCHOJYUGIGA. So many shorts!

Rebecca Silverman

I didn't have the time to watch quite as many of the shorts as I would have liked since Preview Guide coincided with the Jewish High Holy Days this time around, but there was an impressive variety of them. While nothing still quite compares to Senyu as my all-time favorite short, Nyanbo is pretty terrific and possibly the cat show I've been waiting for. I don't normally love the style of animation – a highly plasticky 3D superimposed on the real world, but not only does this five minute short make it work, it also relies upon it. The Nyanbo are little rubbery cat aliens who have lost the pieces of their spaceship and are trying to rebuild it…but keep getting distracted by acting like Earth cats. Then they meet a real live kitty, who can see them, although the narration tells us that humans can't. Basically this is a show with cute collectible cat things and real cats and enough plot to make me happy. There are better shorts this season on technical and storytelling terms, but this is utterly delightful. Coming a close second is Ninja Girl and Samurai Master, an adorable and entertaining take on history's favorite warlord, Oda Nobunaga. The show gives him a child ninja to protect him (even if she can't swim) and feels like a goofy version of Rinko Ueda's Tail of the Moon manga. Also, did it make a Game of Thrones reference?

Kaiju Girls, on the other hand, is cute, but clearly assumes a lot more familiarity than I have with kaiju, a specific type of monster typically seen in Ultraman-style shows. The idea that girls were born with the souls of kaiju and they can transform into sort-of magical girls is fun, but there's also not a lot done with the idea. It just seems to exist and float along on the whimsy of its premise, with liking cute girl shows seeming to be a perquisite for enjoyment. It'll probably be a harmless bit of cute girl fluff, but it really isn't my thing. Neither is Gakuen Handsome, which is…the cute boy version? Sort of? Honestly, I'm not quite sure what I watched with that one. It's deliberately drawn badly with guys who look like they have root vegetables for chins and all seem to be in love with the faceless hero. I guess it's going to be a BL comedy? It's more than a little weird.

Ao Oni, meanwhile, is utterly bizarre. It gives me some pretty strong South Park vibes, to be honest, although not so much in that it has crude humor and simple animation, but more in its casual slaughter of its characters. So actually it reminds me more of Trey Parker and Matt Stone's Cannibal the Musical. In any event, I'm still not entirely sure what I watched, but the idea of four kids having been unwittingly hanging out with a monstrous blue oni only to have it kill three of them without their noticing is the kind of uncomfortable funny that really works. I'll probably give this one a few more episodes to see if it can maintain its level of entertaining weirdness. Maho Shoujo Nante Mouiidesuka's second season is already managing to do that as it continues the saga of magical girls who have no enemies to fight because all the previous magical girls took care of them. There's not much to this first episode, but it's a welcome break from the heavy magical girl shows that have been coming out, plus that damn mascot makes an awesome cat toy.

Nick Creamer

As has become the norm, this season of full-length anime was accompanied by a dizzying number of new shorts. I wasn't able to check them all out, but I did catch some of the highlights. Here are my thoughts!

Miss Bernard Said is centered on a very relatable premise - a girl who basically just bluffs her way through appearing well-read, while actually not reading anything. It's a situation I normally see applied to stuff like music or film, but it's definitely something I understand both the anxiety of maintaining and the frustration of running into. This first episode leans pretty heavily on that one idea, though it offers at least one more solid observation: the experience of creating a relationship with one title of a translated work, only to have your feelings be frustrated by an updated version with a new title. The comedy here is light and inoffensive, and it seems likely the show will rely on the growing chemistry of the three leads. It's not a standout show in any regard, but it's a pleasant enough diversion with a reasonably balanced cast.

To Be Hero stars a man whose powers are limited to immediately ascertaining a woman's hip size… or so he says. In reality, he's just very good at that because he's a toilet salesman (as his daughter yells at him early in this episode, “don't bring our toilet seat to hit on women!”) As To Be Hero proceeds, our daring lead ends up actually becoming a superhero… sort of. He transforms from an attractive middle-aged man to an overweight and balding middle-aged man, and ends up squashing a cockroach-sized alien invader. To Be Hero is a mix of reasonably sharp toilet humor (“I don't want to be a hero. I just want to take a dump”) and some fairly unique art design, and plays out sort of like an Adult Swim cartoon with a more creative visual style. The visual style was actually one of the surprise highlights of this show - the animation is far from fluid, but there were some compelling bits of very loose, interpretive animation sprinkled throughout. It's not a great show, but it's certainly better than the average anime comedy.

Ninja Girl & Samurai Master is largely just charming, but it is certainly that. There are a couple nice gags here (“I will cut you down, even if you're taking a poop, Master!”), but most of the appeal comes down to the titular ninja girl Chidori being a cute ninja in Nobunaga's retenue. If you need a three minute dose of charm and fuzzy times, Ninja Girl fits the bill.

Nyanbo is a very simple show starring a collection of CG characters that essentially look like cats made out of cardboard boxes - the titular nyanbo, talking cat people from space. I didn't really care about the nyanbo characters, and this show overall seemed like a pretty simplistic children's production, but Nyanbo does have one strong mark in its favor: actual cats. If future episodes also star actual cats, I could see this being a dark horse candidate for short of the season. Cats are good.

Incidentally, the ending credits of Nyanbo star a CG Yotsuba, seemingly as a warning against anyone thinking about making a monkey's claw wish for a Yotsuba adaptation. Please be happy with the manga Yotsuba, everyone. Do not wish for things we cannot take back.

Finally, Gakuen Handsome rides on exactly one joke, but it is a good one. Gakuen Handsome is essentially framed as the most low-rent BL game ever conceived, where all the art assets intentionally ape the look of Microsoft Paint, animation is non-existent, and the chins are all as pointy as can be. There were enough small referential jokes to keep me entertained throughout this episode (I like how the protagonist literally lacks a face), but I doubt the one joke here will be enough to keep me watching. Still, if you want a silly riff on very bad romance games, Gakuen Handsome is happy to provide.

Overall, while I'd say To Be Hero was probably the most comedically and artistically impressive of the shorts I watched, I also wasn't thrilled enough by its style to keep watching. In the end, if I were to stick with any of these, it'd be Ninja Girl - the show is simply a small dash of goofy camaraderie, and that's more of what I look for in a short.

Paul Jensen

We've got quite a few short-format series premiering this season, and several of them are comedies where the audience really needs to be in on the joke for the show to work. One such title, Kaiju Girls, reimagines monsters from the Ultraman live-action series as cute anime girls engaging in everyday comedic hijinks. If literary jokes are more your thing, Miss Bernard Said features a group of high school students arguing about novels in their school library, with the gimmick being that the main character just looks at covers and memorizes titles instead of actually reading anything. The oddest of the bunch may be Gakuen Handsome, an adaptation of a PC game where most of the humor comes from the uniquely exaggerated character designs. None of these titles have been supremely funny in the early going, but they could be amusing if you happen to be familiar with the genres or tropes they're poking fun at. If you're looking for something for a more general audience, the cat-box-alien creatures of Nyanbo look like a good bet.

Japanese history and mythology seem to be popular themes this season, with at least two short comedies featuring humorous takes on good old Oda Nobunaga. Ninja Girl & Samurai Master is probably the more accessible of the two, and features a young ninja joining Nobunaga on his quest to rule over Japan. Ninja girl Chidori makes for an amusing protagonist, and this series shows some early promise as a by-the-book short anime comedy. If you're looking for something a little more unusual, Sengokuchojyugiga blends historical humor with a very distinctive art style. Kiitaro's Yokai Picture Diary goes for a supernatural approach instead of a historical one, and will presumably feature a lot of myth-based humor after starting off with a lighthearted action scene.

A couple of titles are working with slightly longer running times, landing close to half the duration of a normal anime episode. Out of this group, To Be Hero stood out the most to me in its first episode. It's a very rude and crude comedy about a man who becomes a superhero after getting sucked into a toilet. His newfound powers allow him to beat the stuffing out of the comically incompetent aliens who've come to invade the planet, but the catch is that he's transformed from a handsome guy to a chubby, middle-aged man. The jokes tend to be in questionable taste at best, but it looks like it may be amusingly dumb if you can put up with it. It's also being helmed by Shinichi Watanabe of Excel Saga fame, so there's a good chance it'll descend into entertaining insanity by the end of the season.

Theron Martin

There are so many shorts this season that even writing a brief paragraph about each one would make this untenably long. Hence I am providing highlights only.

One of the two longest shorts of the season, at around 12 minutes, is Cheating Craft. Given the heavy emphasize put on school entrance exams in Japan and how they can almost literally determine the course of a young person's life, I am convinced that this is intended, at least in part, to be a satire on that inflexible system. After all, we have a setting here where a single test literally does determine whether a person will become an elite or be relegated to menial jobs, so some people (as the series' name implies) specialize in coming up with ways to cheat, even to the point of a studious type pairing up with a cheater under the understanding that the studious type will let the cheater copy in exchange from their fellow students, who are keen to eliminate competition. All of this is taken to a quite ridiculous extreme (yes, that's some kind of tranquilizer gun in his pen in the screen shot) and goes way, way over-the-top, but that seems to be both the point and the message. The first episode is apparently just set-up and backdrop, as the duo who will be the main protagonists only show up at the end of the episode. Still, the respectable production values and potential for savage wit make this the premier short of the season based on first episode alone.

At 13 minutes, Soul Buster is the longest of the season. It is also the second of the two Chinese-Japanese cross-productions this season, and that is evident in the emphasis on ancient Chinese history and the more Chinese styling of some of the characters who appear in the closer. That and some weird, annoying pattern effect used on most of the scenes are the most remarkable features of this series so far. Otherwise it is just a darkly-shaded, pretty blatant rip-off of Fate/stay night.

The next-longest is To Be Hero, which clocks in at 11 minutes. It tells the story of a 38-year-old ladies' man who gets sucked down a toilet, told he's developing super-powers but some falsetto-voiced muscle guy, and reemerges as a fat slob. But he does seem to have super-powers, as even his karate-black-belt daughter's beatings don't hurt anymore, and there are alien foes which he easily trashes. This is a decidedly crass and rude series, but also kinda fun, and the unconventional type of super-hero angle has some promise.

Amongst the shorter shorts, My Wife is the Student Council President 2 stands out as the season's top fan service option despite being a short. I've heard the term “soft porn” used in reference to this series, and after seeing the uncensored version of the first episode I must agree that it's close to accurate. Most of its viewing value comes from the fan service, though, so take or leave it on that basis. Contrarily, Nyanbo! is the most innocent of the options but also the best-animated, with its blocky renditions of cat-themed aliens seamlessly integrating with real-life backgrounds and the actions of a real-life cat. Juvenile, but fun. Gakuen Handsome, on the other hand, is the worst-animated title of the season, and what the hell is up with those chins? Ninja Girl and Samurai Master, which features an Iga ninja girl with a screw or two loose who goes to work for Oda Nobunaga, is short and basic but also surprisingly funny. The weirdest offering is the other one involving Nobunaga: Sengokuchojyugiga. This uses an entirely different and distinctive animation styled to depict important Sengoku-era figures as anthropomorphic animals. Very, very strange indeed!