The Spring 2016 Anime Preview Guide

Spring 2016 Shorts

Editor's note: though we don't usually cover short-form anime in the preview guide, we did ask our critics to write up a brief synopsis of the shorts they did see, and offer some recommendations. We'll post them as they come in throughout the week, in the leadup to the preview guide's finale on Friday with Big Order. If you've toured this spring's short form anime, we'd love to hear your recommendations too!

What I saw of this season's anime shorts was certainly a strange batch. The first, Space Patrol Luluco, comes courtesy of Studio Trigger - a fact that becomes obvious roughly two to three seconds into the episode. Trigger's original productions are all marked by a variety of clear hallmarks, from their heavy focus on slapstick and western-style cartoon humor to their distinctive visual tics and general focus on expressive single frames over consistent animation. Following closely in that vein, Luluco falls somewhere between Kill la Kill and Inferno Cop, featuring a girl who wants to be normal in a world that's unfortunately designed by Studio Trigger.

The first episode was all exposition and rapid-fire visual gags, as you might expect, with maybe a fifty-fifty hit-miss ratio. The show is colorful and hyperactive and occasionally sharp, hewing pretty closely to something you might already see on Adult Swim. It's a reasonable production, but this episode was honestly a little too heavy on exposition to demonstrate whether the show will turn out to be something worth following.

I also checked out Pan de Peace!, which was notable only for its invention of the phrase “Bread Buddies,” the most charmingly ridiculous term for lesbians I've ever heard. Pan de Peace! is one of those “girls in a club are suggestively romantic with each other” shows, but since it only has three minutes of runtime, it really has to double down on that premise - and so by the end of this episode, the three current leads have basically all professed their desire to marry each other. It's kind of funny to see this style of show reduced to its absolute component parts, but I can't say I'm all that compelled to continue.

Finally, I also burned through Tonkatsu DJ Agetarō, which is about Agetaro, who discovers that frying tonkatsu and being a DJ are actually the same thing. That's, uh, that's the joke. You'd expect a short with that premise to be the briefest of the bunch, but this one was actually nine minutes, and it's now apparently going to cover Agetaro's rise to Tonkatsu/DJ stardom. I wish it well on that journey, and applaud its defiantly fingerpainting-style artwork, but I can't say that one unjoke is enough to keep me on board for the ride.

Overall, I'll likely give Luluco another episode to see if it's more consistently funny without the weight of exposition, but that's about it for this journey into anime shorts. It doesn't look like we'll be having anything approaching She and Her Cat this season.

Theron Martin

I checked out all of the available episodes to date of all of the shorts which have debuted this season and have official streams. None of them really reached out and grabbed me or featured impressive animation, though some were entertaining. Here are a few brief observations about each of them:

• Pan de Peace! – So it's about middle school girls who become “bread buddies.” I am pretty sure that there has to be some kinky way to interpret that, and the content does have some breast references and possible yuri leanings. It isn't relentlessly dirty-minded, however, and does both look and feel cute in its bread-emphasizing silliness.
• Wagamama High Spec – Now this one is dirty-minded, as it features the four busty female members of the Student Council all stripping down to their skivvies because the AC in their office is broken on a hot June day. Not much to it except for the fan service.
• Usakame – This is a frenetically-paced little comedy about four female members of a tennis team. The pacing on it comes out too choppy for it to be enjoyable, however. It also has a touch of breast-related humor and does have a live-action video of an idol group for the closer.
• Tonkatsu DJ Agetarō – Definitely one of the two weirdest options, with a rough animation style more reminiscent of a Cartoon Network original production than a typical anime. It's about a (high school-aged?) boy who belabors working at his family's tonkatsu (breaded deep-fried pork cutlet) shop until he notices that the skills for preparing tonkatsu are awfully similar to the DJing done by an American legend he sees at a club. So he gets enthusiastic about doing both! The conversation the kid imagines he's having with the DJ is pretty funny, especially if you just ignore the subtitles and listen to what's being said in English. The animation is just too crude for my tastes, though.
• Hakuōki: Otogisōshi – This one isn't available in English, although its raw version is streaming here on ANN. If you've seen the animation it's derived from, though, you don't need to understand the words to appreciate the content and should be able to get a good gist of what's going on anyway. (Basically, Chizuru is looking for her father and failing at it to comic degree.) This silly little chibified version would probably be my favorite if it was at least subbed.
• Shōnen Ashibe GO! GO! Goma-chan - At 9 minutes this is one of the longest ones, but it's also the most kid-oriented. This tale about a boy who acquires a pet seal wouldn't be worth mentioning if it wasn't for borrowing lyrics from LL Cool J for the closer. (This happens around the 8:30 mark.)
• Space Patrol Luluco - Easily the most talked-about short so far this season, and not hard to understand why. This crazy little bit about a middle school girl living in a town that's become a haven for aliens of all types is a work of bizarre absurdity, including how Luluco ends up as an agent for the Space Patrol within her school and how her special suit can (quite literally) turn her into a gun. It is easily the most visually ambitious and inventive entry even if its animation isn't all that great, and the first of the two episodes available gave me as many laughs as any full-length debut this season. It's the option that I most recommend for any audience.
• Onigiri -This is, I believe, connected to a MMORPG, and boy, does it milk that connection! Sexy fantasy girls in cosplay costumes battle monsters called Kamikui, but the main joke is that they interpret everything in terms of game mechanics (falling damage, earning x.p., etc.) even though they're supposed to be acting like they're not in a game. It has a scene involving two of the girls suddenly being pulled out of action for an account being suspended, but its best joke is that the one male character doesn't talk out loud because the game doesn't have male voices. Pretty funny, even if you're not familiar with the source game, and definitely has the most action. You'll have to go to The Anime Network to find it.