This Week in Anime

Bite-Size Series

Steve and Chris talk series where the episodes are short and sweet.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Crunchyroll streams Lycoris Recoil: Friends are Thieves of Time, Umayon, Yamishibai, Inferno Cop, Space Patrol Luluco, Wakakozake, Ganbare Douki Chan, Tawawa on Monday, Love Is Like a Cocktail, and I'm Kodama Kawashiri.

Senki Zesshōshinai Symphogear and Takunomi are included in their respective series' Blu-ray release.

YouTube streams BanG Dream! Girls Band Party! Pico.

HiDive streams Yandere Dark Elf.

OceanVeil: Kakushite Makina-San

@RiderStrike

@BWProwl

@LucasDeRuyter

@vestenet

Steve
You know, Chris, we've been covering a lot of big topics at TWIA HQ as of late. It's about time we take a step back and appreciate the little things in life. The small pleasures. The tiny titillations.

The anime episodes I can fit in while my cup ramen is warming up.

Chris
I concur, Steve! I like shorts! They're comfy and easy to watch!

Keeping up with seasonal anime can be a struggle alongside everything else in your life. So as excited as I've been for more Lycoris Recoil, I'm kinda grateful that its entire latest "season" was scarcely the length of a single regular episode. Binge-watching made easy! If only seasonal isekai lineups were this merciful.

If only. While it's tempting to call these a fun diversion for a fun series, I think they're a bit more than that. If anything, these bite-sized doses of LycoReco hone the appeal of the original anime to its sharpest point. And by that, I mean, there's a high concentration of Chisato and Takina being absolute goobers together.

I could genuinely get by just watching them podcast about movies. This is a series that thoroughly works in character-driven sketch form.

Just plop them into the "Half in the Bag" set. I want to hear what Chisato thinks of late-career Spielberg.

There's also quite a bit of variety packed into these 6 mini episodes. It's fun to think about the anime staff experimenting behind the scenes while Takina continues her confectionery experiments on screen.

Can't believe it took them until this spin-off to do a costume swap. They seem to be treating this like a playground, now that you mention it. Even the more "pedestrian" outings that earn the frivolous Friends Are Thieves of Time moniker are messing with framing and perspectives for punchlines, and that's before we get to the whole found-footage horror entry.

Honestly, the most frightening thing is that it introduces the possibility that Five Nights at Freddy's exists in the LycoReco universe.

As long as we're getting Chisato and Takina doing RLM, can we get Kurumi doing playthroughs Northernlion-style?

Therein lies the value of so-called "mini" anime: providing a place for series to screw around in ways that might be a little too robust to be single gags in the main series, but not so major that they need to take up whole full-length episodes.

Also, as LycoReco's mini-episodes seem to be the rare instances of these that are fully canon, they provide some cheeky ways to paper over some of the bigger status quo shifts between seasons.

I'd call these shorts a strategic win, too. One might question why they didn't just make a proper season 2, and while I think that's inevitable, these things take time, and the industry's resources are limited.

A small interlude like this, however, is easier to produce while still injecting some life into the franchise. It's been 2.5 years since LycoReco ended. I didn't think about it too much in the interim, but these shorts pulled me right back in and reminded me of the things I enjoyed about Chisato and Takina's gun adventures.

I sometimes forget it's been that long. What were we just saying about the inexorable march of anime seasons? Even as a fan who has been champing at the bit for more LycoReco, I was surprised at how much this fun-size portion sated me. It's got just enough of the antics and action to work as a refresher. They even still play Hana no Tō over the ends of the episodes. That ED will be hard to replace.

It's why entries like this make sense as productions after or in between seasons. They are, by definition, a bonus.

The aforementioned "bonus" material. Fun, irreverent additions to the franchises, usually in a "cuter" art style (LycoReco also being something of an outlier in that regard).

Do you want to see what the Uma Musume get up to on their days off? Cygames has Umayon for you!

I'm partial to the crayon-esque vibes of the Symphogear shorts.

They're adorable, and Symphogear is always a series that benefits from more opportunities to screw around, whether that's in terms of regular goofiness or getting to go all-in on playing up Hibiki and Miku's domestic partnership.

The "bonus" nature of these does merit mentioning that the Senki Zesshōshinai Symphogear episodes were only available as omake on Symphogear's home video release. Thankfully, Discotek included them on their English-subbed Blu-rays, but this belies how this is the case for a lot of these extra, itty-bitty anime. Not all of them are, or ever were, available on streaming.

This goes even in the case of the more shamelessly corporate cash-ins. Bushiroad's still got the previous BanG Dream mini-anime, PICO, up on their official YouTube channel, but it hasn't gotten a hard physical release, despite there being nearly 80 episodes of it, which could make such a thing viable.

And the mini-anime for Bandori's ex-sister series, D4DJ Petit Mix, has been officially delisted ever since that franchise split from Bushiroad. Ethered. Ephemeral. And a basic lesson on the importance of physical media.

Exactly. This is another downside of everything anime consolidating around a small handful of streaming sites. If they don't pick up or advertise something, it may as well not exist for the vast majority of the audience.

To give you an idea, go to LiveChart, pick a season, sort by popularity, and scroll down to the bottom. You're going to find a whole bunch of shorts you've never heard of, every time.

I've enjoyed many shorts, but I'll always be generally grateful to the cushion of them and the kids' anime down there, gently letting me know when I've reached the end of the seasonal listings.

Some of these are extremely long-runners like ghost story series YamiShibai. Amazing how much you can put out when your episodes are only a few episodes long. And are generous with the definition of "animation."

I love it when small anime are very obviously using cut-outs, tweening, and other shortcuts. My high school years were spent watching all the avant-garde low-budget animation on Adult Swim. Everything similar, spiritually, is Aqua Teen Hunger Force to me.

And of course that includes anime that are literally Aqua Teen Hunger Force, like Inferno Cop.

I may have razzed YamiShibai, but you know I have nothing but respect for Inferno Cop. As Imaishi and the funky bunch had already shown with Panty & Stocking, they get this kind of rapid-fire comedy informed by a shorter form. Inferno Cop's even got the ATHF-ass explosions.

It's honestly something I miss about early Trigger. They were doing more of this weird, short-form stuff while they were still a young studio. Like, alongside Inferno Cop, you also had Turning Girls. They rounded up their female staff members and told them to make an anime. I love that, and the result feels so unique, even 12 years later.

Arguably, Trigger reached an appropriate apotheosis for the short format with Space Patrol Luluco, but I'd still love to see more in that vein.

The cool thing about picking up new recommendations on a subject like this is it's only going to take me a few minutes to catch up on Turning Girls after we're done here.

I can at least confirm that Space Patrol Luluco is indeed great, and closes a thematic loop with the previous Inferno Cop in ways that I honestly don't want to spoil for those that have never seen it. Go check it out, it's short!

It arguably hits better than Trigger's other Inferno Cop thematic follow-up Ninja Slayer, which pushed the short format to fifteen full minutes, and didn't land quite the same.

There's plenty of short anime beyond Trigger's oeuvre, of course. I don't have the data to back this up, but I also want to say that ye olde Crunchyroll was a lot better about picking up and advertising random shorts each season. Like, would modern Crunchyroll bother to license Wakakozake? I shudder to consider a world bereft of pshuuu~

It's the platonic ideal of "unwinding" anime, getting to spend just a couple of minutes vicariously enjoying good food and drink. It's the anime that helped teach me the joy of taking myself out on dates. At least we can still count on Crunchyroll for streaming other shorts about thirsty office ladies.

You just made me realize that the Douki-chan anime is going 4 years old, and now my body is withering. Still, respect to Crunchyroll for simulcasting both that and Tawawa on Monday in the same season.

More recently, I'd wager that HiDive has picked up the slack when it comes to licensing short-format dreck for horndogs. They're the ones sticking their necks out for Yandere Dark Elf, and you know what? Somebody has to.

I mean, that's not even speaking to all the short-length shows that upstart entry OceanVeil is now streaming that are actual porn. But that's straying into something of a different topic.

To say nothing of how all this demonstrates the lopsided priorities when it comes to which of these bite-sized anime get picked up and stay up for streaming, like we talked about. It is great that Wakakozake is still taking up a minimal amount of space on Crunchyroll. But my other beloved short about booze-loving ladies, Takunomi, is long gone from HiDive.

Good thing this one merited a Blu-ray release.

It is very funny and very good that "office ladies enjoying a pint" is basically its own subgenre of anime shorts. I'll also shout out Love is Like a Cocktail for combining that with malewife appeal. Shorts don't have to adhere to conventions, though. Under their lower costs and commitments to produce, they can look and act more radical than those with normal lengths. I'm Kodama Kawashiri, for example, aired a few years ago and bursts with color and creativity. That's not surprising considering it was directed by Shingo Kaneko with art direction from Chieko Nakamura, two frequent Kunihiko Ikuhara collaborators.

Mad props to any series where over half of an episode's runtime is its lavishly aspirational OP followed by a few seconds of Aoi Yuuki narration and noises.

It is, as shorts could and should be, the Platonic ideal of anime. What more do you need?

That's why it can be a real shame how easily these fall between the cracks. It's not like shorts are exclusively made by no-name artists. Talented folks work on these! Like my goat, Rie Matsumoto. The first non-Precure show she worked on wasn't Kyousougiga. It was a short series called Marie & Gali. Good luck finding it!

I like knowing about some of the weirder stuff out there—not even in an appeal for obscurity sort of way, but just knowing that it did exist. Few people are going to be aware of something like Hulaing Babies, the Iwaki tourism hula anime produced by studio Gaina, with its regular surreal artistic descent. But even if it doesn't take long to take it in, just tracking down a way to watch it can be the tricky part!

I love animation because of the strangeness it enables, and short formats facilitate certain aspects of that better. It creates more variety, and that's a precious commodity in the age of algorithms. Only a restricted episode length could have given us the anime adaptation of Pupa. Whether it was good or not is immaterial. It was art. Art about incestuous cannibalism. I don't know about you, but that's what I'm on this planet for.

I was worried we might not find space for the requisite incest mention in this week's column. Thankfully, anime shorts truly do seem to contain multitudes.

It makes sense, given another structural similarity to comedy, but horror does seem to be a semi-recurring angle for short anime. From Pupa, to the aforementioned YamiShibai, to the multi-story episodes of the Junji Ito Collection, they fit the bill alongside...not being particularly stellar. But I think that, too, speaks to the value in making sure these have a home. "Bad" art and "small" art are, as with all things, still worth preserving.

Indeed. And lest I spend the rest of this column proselytizing about Pupa, I'll open the floor to the comment section to discuss their favorite short-form series. As we've already touched on, there's a hell of a lot out there, and most of it is invisible to the American audience, so I'd love to see other folk's recommendations! Talk up your weirdest faves. Be the change you want to see.

Be sure to tag us if you've got any more about working women getting wasted. I'll always be able to spare a couple of minutes for that.