Mayoi Neko Overrun – First Episode Review

Episode Summary: Like so many other male high school students in anime, Takumi is awakened by his pretty childhood friend Serizawa Fumino, her standoffish nature amplified by his accidental view of her striped panties.  Serizawa has the quirk of saying and doing the opposite of what she truly means, and Takumi has adjusted.  Takumi's other friends include Ieyasu, a shameless otaku with an eye for eroge, and Chise, heiress of the Umenomori and granddaughter of the founder of the school that Takumi and his friends attend. Takumi lives with his older sister Otome, an eccentric woman who would go to the ends of the earth to help anyone in need, and who owns a cake shop despite not being particularly good at baking.

One evening, Takumi finds out that a cake which was reserved as a surprise for a customer's anniversary has been eaten, and a little boy at the scene has the only clue - it was eaten by a cat that he describes as being as big as Serizawa.  While Takumi and the others try to bake a replacement cake, Serizawa and the little boy race around town trying to locate this mysterious cat.  They almost manage to locate her, but like a ninja she's able to evade their grasp.  It isn't until dawn breaks that the replacement cake is ready, and just as Takumi is headed to bed, his sister Otome returns to the shop, and she's brought a souvenir back with her.

Thoughts: I found out through research that, as its gimmick, this series has a different director lined up for each episode.  That might be a good thing, because the first episode was a disjointed mess of pseudo-fanservice, weak humor, and characters who come and go without making much of an impression. The watery flavor of the series might also have to do with the fact that it comes across as a pastiche of borrowed clichés.  When I watch shows like this, I can't help but be reminded of the scene early on in Welcome to the NHK! when Satou and Yamazaki are trying to create a main character for their eroge and she ends up being a mish-mash of every moe trait they can come up with. In this show, there's the childhood friend who's a tsunderekko (and whole standoffish nature the narrative actually attempts to justify although the reasoning boils down to "don't let other people get under your skin"), the loli rich DFC cosplay-loving princess character whose lack of assets are explained away by her two loyal maids, the wacky male friend who's an unapologetic otaku, and the catgirl fetish object who we haven't really met yet.  It sounds as if someone assembled this from a kit.

I'm finding it exceedingly difficult to find anything substantial to say about this show because it's neither a roaring success, nor a spectacular failure.  Though it contains some fanservice, it doesn't skirt the line of good taste that series such as Seikon no Qwaser do.  Its characters are essentially one-dimensional, but they aren't quite at the level of being one-note sexual stereotypes and none of them (except for perhaps the otaku character) represent a one-off joke that gets repeatedly hammered into the ground.  There's just enough sentimentalism to breathe a bit of life into the proceedings and just enough underwear jokes to suck it right back out again.  It's like it wants to cross the street, but most of the time it gets halfway before being scared by an approaching car, and its indecisive nature makes it difficult to want to pay much attention.

The show really tries to do things right; it spends the first half of the episode introducing the characters (despite them being pretty uninteresting people).  The problem is that the character introductions and the related hijinks seem wholly disconnected from anything that happens in the second half.  There's a whole segment where Chise arrives at the classroom dressed in nothing but a school swimsuit.  While her maids attempt to change her clothing on the fly (and they put up a sort of screen to do so, Chise spends time attempting to get her classmates to join a cosplay group with her.  An argument ensues regarding her flat chest and whether she can pull off the character because of it.  None of this has anything to do with the rest of the episode, and when Chise reappears later on and helps Takumi replace the stolen cake, it's almost as if she's disconnected from the Chise in the first half.  She acts the same but it's as if the cosplay obsession has been mostly forgotten.  The only character who seems to sustain a consistent feel is Ieyasu, whose constant yammering about 2D versus 3D women is consistently annoying. It's a difficult feeling to describe and perhaps I'm just perceiving something differently.

My apprehensions about the characters aside, the production values don't offer much in the way of standout flavor either.  This is one of the few recent anime where I've noticed a blatant re-use of shots; early in the episode as the characters are walking to school, a back view of Serizawa walking is used two or three different times.  This may be in order to highlight the "absolute zone" between her stockings and skirt, and the way her thighs are drawn seems to point to this conclusion, but it was for some reason terribly distracting.  In some scenes where characters are speaking particularly emphatically, only two frames are used - a close-up with their mouth open, and another with their mouth closed.  While limited animation is the bread and butter of the anime industry, a long-standing tradition that in some cases has been used to good effect, when it's so obvious and the end product is so choppy, it just seems willfully cheap. There are some creatively executed moments, however; the scene where Serizawa is in pursuit of the catgirl is creatively abstract and helps to emphasize the hectic nature of the chase, but it's one standout scene in an otherwise unremarkable half-hour.

This is just one of those shows where I don't feel compelled to watch any more; it doesn't pique my curiosity like other more daring or risqué shows, and it doesn't seem to suggest any sort of hidden potential either.  The characters aren't interesting people, and to be blunt they're almost the complete opposite since they seem like slaves to a particularly overused set of character tropes.  Most of all, I have little affection for cat girls, and the thought of sitting through a series where there's clearly nothing creatively done with that type of character (unlike say Bakemonogatari which has had some fun with it) seems like a waste of time to me.

Pros:

• There are occasional moments of visual inspiration, mostly during the chase scene.

Cons:

• Most of the animation seems cheap and there are some reused scenes.
• The characters are boring and adhere too closely to common moe traits.
• The first half of the episode seems strangely disconnected from the second half.

Recommended? No, this episode is just plain boring.  While having various directors come in to manage each episode might help to rock the boat a bit, the first episode just doesn't excite me.