Haiyoru! Nyaruani–First Impressions

Thoughts: (based on watching 5 of 11 episodes) To begin, I'd like to share a little anecdote. My friends and I have been fans of anime and manga for a while, and at times we like to jokingly riff on some of anime's "bad habits," as it were. One thing that seems to be a constant source of humor is the tendency for manga and anime creators to portray just about anything in the moe aesthetic. My friend made a joke about a "Cthulu anime," and thanks to the existence of this show I was able to stop her right there and say "oh, but there is one." Yes, there is one, and this is it; it's also terrible.

The reason I chose to approach this more casually is because there's very little material on which to comment, much less a plot worth summarizing; a good chunk of each episode's 4 minute run time is taken up with the show's theme song and a warning about not sitting too close to the television while watching. That leaves maybe 2 minutes of actual content, and what's there isn't substantial either. There's no explanation as to why these characters, girls based on the various gods from H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, are living together in a house with an otherwise normal guy; that information was something that I found from poking around the internet. The various jokes and gags are based around very thinly-veiled sexual innuendo, some of which can barely be qualified as innuendo: Cthuko is infatuated with Nyaruko, the main character, and Atoko is the type of person who sexualizes every conversation, no matter how innocent. Nyaruko, in turn, just wants to get into Yasaka's pants. It's like a harem anime that's twice as obnoxious than usual, because it doesn't even bother with window dressing like plot or character development.

The main part of the show is animated in flash (unlike the visuals during the theme song, which is animated traditionally). If I were, say, watching this series at someplace like YouTube, or a website devoted to flash animation, this might not be such an issue of quality, but the copy that I watched was 720p and all that I could think to myself while watching was "what's the point of making something like this HD?" (and yes, I understand how vector-based images differ from normal 2D images, but still). The animation isn't even as good as something like South Park, and just gives off a really "cheap" vibe.

There's really very little more to say about this show. I've watched about half of it at this point and gotten nothing out of it. Normally I'd wait until all the episodes were released and just do a full review, but I don't think that even my fairly patient disposition could survive the rest of this utterly stupid, empty gag series. While in some universe I could maybe see the value for some completionist Lovecraft fans, the Lovecraftian fa�ade is so terribly thin that the fact that these characters are supposedly based on that author's creations isn't something that could be guessed without prior knowledge. I'll be over here waiting for a real adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's material, thanks.

Pros:

• Each episode only has maybe 2 minutes of actual crummy material. The rest is a crummy theme song and a crummy warning.

Cons:

• There's no substance here whatsoever. The jokes aren't funny, the characters aren't endearing in any way, and the animation is cheap.

Recommended? No, not even for Lovecraft aficionados (in fact, they may be most likely to get angry at this ill-advised moe-fication).