'Mayoi Neko (Stray Cats) Overrun!' is a harem comedy mainly about one guy and three girls in a cake shop called "Stray Cats". The owner of the shop is a tennen ("natural boke", someone who has zero common sense) woman who likes to find stray cats and sometimes kids, and provide them shelter in the shop. Our protagonist Tsuzuki Takumi is one of those human stray cats, and the story begins with the arrival of the second human stray cat, Kiriya Nozomi.
STORY: 6/10
Pretty common setting with plenty of parodies.
As far as I can tell, only first and last three episodes were the main story with ... Kiriya Nozomi as central focus, despite all the episode titles were about her.
Just as with the animation, there was a different director for each episode. It seems like they were given the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted to do with filler episodes from ep 4 to 9, and that's exactly what they seemed to have done.
Episode 4: Possible 'FMP Fumoffu' onsen parody with a sudden parody of Ping Pong (2002) movie?
Episode 5: Went for character development with fan service.
Episode 6: Entire episode on a PV shoot, reminds me of 'Haruhi' movie shooting episode.
Episode 7: Entire episode on mecha parodies.
Episode 8: Entire episode on a custom Jenga game.
Episode 9: Went for straight romance drama.
Whether it worked or not is up for debate, but they all had great slapstick pacing, and I personally found the noticeable difference in direction to be quite entertaining.
Final episode was a recap of the series, which is pretty rare nowadays. The commentary was pretty funny, and I think it represents the freedom in production of this series very well (since it shows that they were given total freedom even the series composition stage).
ANIMATION: 8/10
Notice the animation director and the production studio for animation work assistance is different for every single episode.
Animation quality varied by episode, like episode 1 (Studio Comet) and episode 8 (Sunrise) were significantly better than the rest, but generally above average for harem comedy series.
Character design was decent, with big-eyed attractive girls and signature features (cat ear hair, red cross-patterned ribbons etc) and comments. Despite great influence by animation director and work assistance, character animation consistency was better than average, with exception to episode 11 (Studio Blanc.), which had distinctly different drawing style that I think worked pretty well.
You can tell none of the animation directors and studios wanted to be seen as a slacker (less deadline rush probably helped too), and we are treated to quality animation with subtle difference in style for every single episode, which I found to be very fun to watch.
SOUND: 7/10
Voice acting was very strong, especially for Serizawa Fumino and Kikuchi Ieyasu. Filled with emotion and highly motivated seiyuu staff.
BGM was unremarkable, but that is expected for harem comedy series.
OP/ED were extremely weak seiyuu songs. I can kind of imagine a bunch of NEETs dancing otagei to it. Three "special EDs" for episodes 6, 7, 11 were somewhat interesting though.
CHARACTER: 7/10
Picking a girl for the indecisive protagonist sure is difficult for this series. We have Nozomi, who's a tennen cat girl who's good at everything and goes along with everything. Then Fumino, a tsundere childhood friend (i.e. the "invincible character" if this was 'eroge'). Finally Umenomori Chise, a super -pushy billionaire lolita. I have to say I liked the balance with tsundere and pushy loli fighting for the guy with tennen as a mediator.
Yes, we have a lot of stereotypical character personalities here, but they're all so off-the-chart in each characteristics (like tsundere so much that Fumino always means the opposite) actually made very interesting story developments possible, though they do get a bit annoying after a while.
Character development is not really expected in a slapstick series like this, but Fumino did start expressing her feelings, and Nozomi's gradual realization of friendship and family was depicted very well.
ENJOYMENT: 9/10
I personally liked the characters, and thought there were couple of really funny episodes. Just like Haruhi 2009's "∞8", most of the watch value was in subtle difference in animation styles and in this case, different director for each episode too.
The original setting and story may be unoriginal, but there was abundance of creativity in production stage of this series made possible by one-episode-only staff and teams. Changing animation style, good pacing, hilarious gags, constant fan service, repetitive violent retribution, great directions.
It's in a crappy genre where you can't expect any story, character development or value to begin with, but there was some of each in this series.
As far as watch-and-forget comedy goes, this is as good as it gets. 'Mayoi Neko Overrun!' was hands-down the best comedy of the season for me since all other comedies this season were plagued with horrible pacing and letdowns.
 Alternative Titles Japanese: 迷い猫オーバーラン! Information Type: TV Episodes: 13 Status: Finished Airing Aired: Apr 6, 2010 to Jun 29, 2010 Premiered: Spring 2010 Broadcast: Unknown Licensors: None found, add some Studios: AIC Source: Light novel Theme: Harem Duration: 24 min. per ep. Rating: PG-13 - Teens 13 or older Statistics Score: 6.651 (scored by 60,082 users) 1 indicates a . Ranked: #60842 2 based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded. Popularity: #1625 Members: 139,606 Favorites: 209 Available AtResources |
|
