Chibi versions of the girls from Shaft’s Assault Lily: Bouqet being lesbian at each other:

The original series was a sort of mahou shoujo series in which girls called “lilies” fight the Huge, alien monsters, with their CHARM (Counter Huge ARMs) weapons. The chibi version took the undercurrent of yuri and made it really, really blatant. Not actually released officially in English, the fansub makes that yuri even more blatant. One of those things where you have to be fan of the original to get anything out of it. Cute though. A pity however that the ads at the end of each episode promoting the game and character songs were not translated.

If you want to know who the people are that design the monsters tokusatsu heroes like Kamen Rider have to beat up on a weekly basis, Kaijin Kaihatsu-Bu No Kuroitsu-San is the series for you.

If you watch anime, you probably know a little bit about tokusatsu; if not, think Power Rangers and you get the gist. It’s a catch-all term for live action series that make heavy use of special effects and stunt work. Sometimes you got a giant hero squaring off against equally giant alien menaces, as in Ultraman, sometimes the monsters are more human sized and can be defeated by a good jump kick, like in Kamen Rider, but almost always it’s men in spandex superhero type suits facing off against stunt men in rubber monster suits. These series are incredibly popular in Japan, with Ultraman running from 1966 and Kamen Rider debuting in 1971. They’re as much part of Japan’s pop culturesubconsciousness as superheroes are in the US, so you see references to them crop up all the time in anime and manga. It seems like a ripe subject for a parody or comedy anime and Kaijin Kaihatsu-Bu No Kuroitsu-San by asking the question: so who actually does design all those monsters of the week the heroes inevitably defeat?

And the answer is the understaffed and overworked members of the Monster Development Department of Secret Society Agastya. It’s not the worst job in the world: this is an evil society, not a black company. The bosses actually care about work life balance and not overworking their employees. Apart from that however, it does suffer from most of the problems any company has. there’s office politics, unrealistic deadlines, budget issues, having to get clearance from other departments and of course, meddling overlords deciding the macho wolf dude monster should be a cute wolf girl monster, which is how you end up with Wolfie-kun on the left there. Very much still a dude at heart, trapped in a girl’s body. Wolfie is only the first of a series of monsters that join the department: there’s Cannon, a chicken monster with a railgun, Hydra, a cute monster girl with her four snake sister permanently attached to her, Mummy-chan the mummy and Melty, a Valentine’s day monster girl made out of chocolate. There’s also a subplot in which we learn how the foot soldiers of an evil society are recruited: they’re part timers who work through an agency for whichever society needs them this week.

This was a fun series, a nice balance of workplace comedy with tokusatsu parody in which the dozens of heroes featured over the course of the series actually exist. Yes, the fabric of reality is a little extra thin in Japan and quite a far few people have become action heroes, usually to promote a region or town or local business. Luckily these heroes mostly take their inspiration from the same sources, or it would’ve been a crime to make their designs work together. As is fitting, the heroes do come off a little bit more serious than the various monster designs, which apart from the railgun chicken consists of various cute girls. I binged this series in a couple of sessions and it’s perfect if you want something light and amusing on a rainy Sunday.