天下制覇

Extremely inappropriate.

Impressions:

I think I can’t help but be a bit disappointed here, like many a Muromi episode, even if this one was twice as long and reminded me in its usual manic and possibly more inconsistent than before what expressive animation looks like. After a brief sort of pseudo-Snow White parody, it goes into what’s ostensibly a Little Mermaid parody. On paper, it sounds great. Take some shots at Disney. Awkwardly toss the established characters into comically inappropriate roles. I was amused by Otoboku’s Tsunderella, more than the show itself, and we’ve got much better characters here, so… it’s good to go, right?

What they chose to do instead was have all the established characters sit on the sidelines, and introduce new ones for some really wafer thin and boring gags. Mana being the most egregious and general intentionally cloying one in a show already primarily filled with squeaky, hyper high pitched characters, cucumber deep-throating aside. And about the only things that it actually had in common with The Little Mermaid are a ‘prince’ and the mermaid becoming ‘human.’ Cut a strategic 15 seconds out of the sequence, and it’d have nothing to do with The Little Mermaid at all, which just makes why they’d even choose to associate themselves with the story at all something of a mystery.

It still had its moments (although I think I enjoyed the Snow White part about as much as the entire 20 minutes that followed) and besides the double length, would have probably seamlessly fit right in with the rest of the series, but there was so much more potential that they could have used here that just went unrealized because it really felt like they just completely forgot what it was they were doing and got going through a checklist of character ideas that never panned out.