The Winter 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Malevolent Spirits: Mononogatari

When spirits cross over into the human world, they can possess old objects and gain a physical form: a tsukumogami. Tsukumogami can be gentle, violent, or somewhere in between, so the Saenome clan peacefully helps send them back to the spirit world to avoid destruction. Kunato Hyoma is a clan member but is...less than peaceful since he holds a grudge from when a tsukumogami robbed him of something important. Afraid that Hyoma's brash anger in dealing with these spirits will lead to supernatural catastrophes, Hyoma's grandfather sends him to live in Kyoto with Nagatsuki Botan, an unusual young woman who lives with tsukumogami like family.

Malevolent Spirits: Mononogatari is based on Onigunsō's manga and streams on Crunchyroll on Mondays.

Caitlin Moore
Rating:

I didn't expect much from Malevolent Spirits: Mononogatari. The character animation was flat and stiff, the backgrounds were photos with heavy filters slapped on them, and Hyoma's backstory was boilerplate. Yet it surprised me. Not in any one big way, but in a few small ways.

The first thing that struck me was Hyoma's dialogue with his grandfather. It wasn't scintillating per se, or naturalistic, but Grandpa had a lot of personality, and their relationship came through strongly. The team of tsukumogami appeared to have some solid chemistry as well as a family group of not-quite-human, intelligent beings with their own way of existing and the right to do so. And then there was the fight between Hyoma and Nagi—it was a neat touch how Nagi's sleeves took on a form that resembled katana hilts, and Hyoma's little eraser things had a unique design. There was a good sense of weight to the fight, too. I began to wonder… Is the art not so much ugly as it is deliberately stylized?

Whether or not I stick with this series is going to be determined entirely by the tsukumogami and their cast. Hyoma's a fairly irritating type of shonen protagonist—humorless, rigid, and constantly itching for a fight. I'm not here for him. It was way more fun watching Kagami, Itsuki, Yu, Suzuri, Nagi, and Kushige play off each other. Much like Hyoma and his grandfather, the script does a lot with a little, with voice performances to back them up. Plus, Haori is voiced by Miyuki Sawashiro, and you know there's going to be some great character work whenever she shows up.

I can only see Malevolent Spirits: Mononogatari getting overlooked, which is a shame. It may not set the world on fire, but it shows a glimmer of promise in a season full of middling, forgettable productions.

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

I'll be the first to admit that demon/yokai-hunting shonen anime aren't really my cup of tea. Sure, some manage to be an enjoyable watch regardless, but in general, I don't find the mythology and associated magic system all that interesting. So going into Mononogatari, I wasn't what you would call excited. But while neither the setting nor the plot did anything to change my mind, I will give Mononogatari this: it has an interesting main character.

Hyoma, to be frank, is an extreme racist. He believes all tsukumogami should be violently banished back to their own world at the first chance. However, his prejudice comes not from his peers, family, or community, but rather from personal experience. The violent death of his siblings before his eyes has radicalized him. But it's clear that he believes his actions are based on logic rather than emotion. He knows that 90% of the time, tsukumogami can be banished peacefully—that they didn't even mean to enter our world and are eager to return home. However, Hyoma thinks that the risk is too great to play the odds—that all tsukumogami should be treated as violent offenders from the start. After all, under his way of doing things, his siblings never would have died.

Of course, this viewpoint is objectively horrible. His survivor's guilt has warped his rational thought so that he can get violent revenge. What's great is that his grandfather seems to understand all this. While he has tried to de-radicalize Hyoma for years by teaching him personally, it hasn't worked. But as personal experience is the cause, he is hoping that personal experience the other way—i.e., forcing him to live and work with non-malicious tsukumogami—will do the trick. It's a solid setup with lots of potential for personal growth, which should make for an interesting anime.

So, all in all, I'm on the fence with this one. I don't find the world all that interesting but it has a solid personal conflict at its core that might just surpass the set dressing. I'll probably give this series one more episode just to see if the heroine is as nuanced as Hyoma.

Rebecca Silverman
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If the first episode of Malevolent Spirits: Monogatari has a problem, it would be its protagonist. Hyoma is the kind of guy who refuses to listen to anything while stubbornly adhering to beliefs that he formed quite early on in life, and that makes him pretty darn frustrating as a character. Not that he doesn't have a decent reason to be unfriendly towards tsukumogami - one did kill his older siblings right in front of him, after all. But over the years, he has held on to that anger and hatred while refusing to consider other viewpoints. Now that it's starting to get him in trouble with his grandfather and the family business of helping tsukumogami return to the world of the spirits, he's stuck with a shape-up or ship-out situation. That's perhaps not the best phrase to use since, in his case, to shape up he has to ship out, in this case, to a friend of his grandfather's in Kyoto. The young lady of the house has a group of two tsukumogami who live with her and seem to function as her servants, and Hyoma now has to live there, too, to overcome his prejudices.

The problem is that he has precisely zero inclination to do so. He doesn't even talk a good game; I very much doubt that his grandfather truly believes that Hyoma will try, given his attitude when he receives the information that he'll be moving. Hyoma is the kind of stubborn that becomes grating almost immediately, and he does nothing to be remotely sympathetic in this entire episode. He's a punch-first and ask-questions-later kind of kid, and that is the furthest thing from endearing right now. The one potential saving grace here is that most of the characters seem to find him just as irritating as I do, and the tsukumogami in his new house are more than willing to throw down with him while the lady of the house is absent.

Hyoma may change his attitude once he meets Botan, an assumption I am largely making because the ending theme shows her putting on a wedding kimono. I suspect that we are meant to take at least a little bit of Hyoma's intransigence as humorous, and again could be that the sticky business of introducing him and his grudge is over and done with. But without a lot of folkloric background and really unappealing character designs, this isn't doing a very good job of making me want to watch another episode, mostly because Hyoma is so annoying.

Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

I've read a lot of supernatural battle manga and loved quite a lot of them. But once you've seen a few dozen to hundred of them, it can be hard not to feel jaded seeing a new entry hitting all the typical plot beats. This is my way of saying that, while I found this premiere pretty uninteresting, that's just me being desensitized rather than there being anything particularly wrong with the show.

This first episode does everything it needs to do. It establishes our male lead's tragic backstory and distrust of tsukomogami before swiftly slotting him into an ensemble cast that will presumably help him overcome his hang-ups. There are a couple of straightforward explanations of Hyoma's family being exorcists and how tsukumogami operate in this universe to get the audience up to speed. We get a decently animated battle towards the end that shows us what Hyoma's power is, alongside some other characters, before introducing our female lead to wrap it all up. It's functional and looks nice enough while doing it, and I can imagine following this show if I was back in middle or high school.

But while I can recognize Monogatari isn't a bad show, I can't muster up much enthusiasm for it either. Mostly I just came out of this episode wishing we could get another season of Noragami, a show in a similar vein that brought its world to life with far more style and mystique. I appreciate how the show partially focuses on getting Hyoma to recognize the tsukumogami as people rather than potential threats. Still, the boy himself is too stoic and standard to get invested in. Nothing else about this intro leaves much of an impression. So while this might scratch your itch if you're jonesing for another supernatural fight show, there's not much here for anyone else.