Moetan

Okay, because I'll pretty much randomly grab any anime with a 1 next to its name, I downloaded this, not really paying attention to it. Thus, it sat on my harddrive for maybe two weeks, unused, and nearly forgotten.

Well, the wife went to a mom's night out last night once the boys were in bed, and so after doing a bit of work, I realized that I had nothing to do. I'd already watched all the animes I'm watching for this week. So I hunted through, and found one that I hadn't watched.

Moetan (wiki! but AnimeSource has a better synopsis of the anime).

Frankly, I should have stopped as soon as I saw the word "moe" in the title. For those of you who aren't familiar with the anime scene, moe (pronounced "mo-eh") is Japanese slang, and well, I could either give it a short, incomplete definition for it here, or send you over to wikipedia where you can learn something. So here you go.

Anyways, this particular anime, started out life as a series of books, designed to teach English. Not an illustrious beginning for an anime, but hey, good things have come out of worse concepts. I just can't think of any right now.

But, back to Moetan. The man character is Ink, and about half-way through she becomes a Magical Girl (魔法 少女 mahō shōjo),. Ink is a typical shy moe character. In fact, the creators appear to be shoving every moe characteristic they could think of onto her. She's clumsy, smart, forgetful, shy, and wears a sailor's fuku. She's a high school student, but looks like she's an elementary school student (that's for the loli freaks out there). The only two moe characteristics they missed were glasses and the characteristics of a cat.

Now, I can admit, I've watched some magical girls in anime. Things such as Nanaho, and who hasn't seen at least one episode of Sailor Moon. Yet, this seemed to be mocking the constructs of magical girl episodes more than anything else. Or at least, I felt that way, because I was snickering and laughing the entire time Ink was being introduced to the world of being a magical girl. Most speficically, everything seemed to be spoofing Nanaho.

Ultimately though, it was only humourous at that point, and the story itself didn't engage me at all. Too bad too, because if they could have kept the humor without it delving into overt stupidity (such as when she spoke her 'flight' spell, and her tool transformed into wings, which attached to her butt, and flew her around town that way) then it may have been a fun series to watch.