Anime: Mayoi Neko Overrun!

Mayoi Neko Overrun!

I watch my yellow cat
Invade my red cat in the yard
The feline war has raged for years
So I assume it'd be too hard
For me to drive my foot between them
I would never risk the scratch
Just to prove to one or both of them
A cat is just a cat
--Say Anything, Yellow Cat (Slash) Red Cat

Abstract: A stray girl moves in with a cardboard cutout impersonating a boy. Hilarity fails to ensue. Final Grade: D

Genre: Ecchi Comedy
Content: Excessive Ecchi/Nudity

Reasons to Watch: The ping pong game in episode four; The Saki parody in episode eight.
Reasons not to Watch: It's complete, utter garbage

Plot: 2
There are thirteen episodes of Overrun. There are 2.5 of actually plot, one recap episode, and 9.5 of filler. That's a shade over 19% of the run time devoted to actual plot time. I'm just putting that out there. And what little plot exists is pretty basic. Sudden abandoned girl appearance, guy starts living with said girl, girl's past catches up and she decides to stay with the boy because she's in love. We've all seen this story a million times, and while this trope can be done well (see: Chobits), when done poorly it become vapid and boring. Overrun does it poorly. And outside of this plot there is nothing but the most random of filler. And that makes sense, given that every episode has a different director. And interesting idea to try, and a show like UtaKata did wonders with having different episode directors for most episodes. However, UtaKata had quality directors, and had Gotoh Keiji as an overall director, giving a narrative consistency. Overrun did not have an overall director, and so you get 12 different guys doing their own 12 different things, with little carryover between them. There is a hot spring episode and a beach episode, which in a 13 episode series should start massive warning bells to anyone that there isn't much content here. And then there is a little problem with suspension of disbelief. When a story is sent in the modern world, there are two options: a fantasy modern world (like Kurokami or Kamichu) or a realistic modern world rooted in reality, like what Overrun is. The problem is a lot of completely improbable to impossible events occur in these filler episodes, all which are explained away by the fact that Umenomori is loaded. Listen, if you have a magical world, you can handwave away inconsistencies by saying a wizard did it. But in the real world, you can't build a stadium in a day, regardless of your finances. When the story comes up with massive absurdities with the only explanation being the rich girl payed for it, it ruins viewer immersion. Now, there is one good filler episode: the parody of Saki using Jenga blocks. This episode was pretty good, and the Saki parody was done remarkably well. However, after watching it, I realized the only reason why it was good was that it was a poor copy of the excellent drama within Saki. When Overrun did a previous parody of giant mecha robots, it fell on it's face into a pile of its own stupidity. I mean even if you have a parrot that can quote Shakespeare, that doesn't change the fact that it's a dirty bird. Overrun is this parrot, a random collection of sub-par copies of better shows. Grade: D-

Art: 6
First, character design: The girl's school uniforms have their 'waist' directly under their boobs. This must be a Japanese thing, since personally I've always seen the 'waist' of a skirt be around the, you know, waist of person. Or maybe that's because Americans are too fat to wear skirts that high. Anyway, it looks stupid. Secondly, the characters are pretty generically drawn. Take the male lead, Takumi. You could take him and drop him into the background of any shounen romantic comedy and you could never tell he was added. He is the very definition, nay, the very avatar of basic character design. The girls aren't much better. Despite the differences in height and bust, I had the hardest time telling Umenomori and Serizawa apart. The had the same face and hair style, except they had different styles of ribbons in their hair. Thirdly, the backgrounds are pathetic. Absolute crap. And finally, while you could tell there was some money put into the animation (and I gave them some points for that), it was mostly wasted due to the underlying flaws of the character design. No matter how much you spend on animating a turd, in the end all you get is an animated turd. And nobody wants to see that. Now there are two bright points in the animation department. There is the wonderful 3-D animation in the Jenga episode, and there is the exquisitely great animation of the ping pong game in the hot springs episode. In fact, the ping pong game is the best part of this show, and that's in the fourth episode. It's all down hill from there. Grade: B-

Sound: 4
Let me put it this way. You have hired Horie Yui to do voices. Ms. Horie is a once-in-a-decade talent. You have her voice a side character with almost no lines. I drop an atomic f-bomb. If you have Horie Yui, then use her! Jesus, are you stupid or something? Moving on from the nerd rage, the male lead Okamoto Nobuhiko, who has done great work before in Sola and the Sacred Blacksmith, mails in a performance as the infective Takumi. Itou Kanae, who did a fantastic job as Hinamori Amu in Shugo Chara, mails in a performance as the over-the-top tsundere Serizawa. And Iguchi Yuka performs Umenomori at energy level 10, when the plot (and most people's eardrums) need her at a 7. The only bright spot in the cast is the young Taketatsu Ayana, who does a dramatically perfect monotone for the voice of Nozomi. Ms. Taketatsu nailed her performance, and I am looking forward for her roles in better shows to come. But enough about the voice acting, let's talk about the OP song. Now the OP is traditionally 90 seconds long. There is no reason for this other than tradition and this is what the big music companies want. And so you have to take a 3-4 minute song and edit it down to 90 seconds and, this is key, still make it sound good. There's nothing worse that an OP that seems to cut out in the middle of the song. Overrun does not have that problem. Overrun has the problem the song ends too early. There is about 80 seconds of a good song edit, followed by an awkward 10 seconds as the song repeats itself to fill the air time. And this is my point. This is the OP, the sole thing that a lot of potential viewers will base their decision. And this disjointed ending gives the impression that this shows is poorly directed and haphazard. And while this first impression is completely correct, you don't what the viewer to feel that way at the start. You could have cut the OP down to 80 seconds, or you could have done a different song edit. But you didn't, Overrun. And that is why you failed. Grade: C-

Characters: 1
I don't like to rate things as a one. To me, this means the show completely failed in this subject. But when it came to the characters of Overrun, it's definitely a failure. To start, Takumi. The classic failing of the shounen romcom is complete emptiness of the male lead. If you look at ecchi and harem comedies that work well, you will find a male lead that has a personality and strength of will. Takumi is an empty sack. In the most defining scene of his character, the girls are trying to decide who will participate in a three-legged race with him. When Takumi tries to speak up, the girls shush him by telling him that he shut up since he is not involved. This sums up his character perfectly. This is his story, but he himself is only a side character, and a battleground to be fought over or prize to be won, but not a actual human with his own thoughts and emotions. He is nothing but a blank slate, to be filled vicariously by whichever ronery otaku viewer who wants to play pretend. Next, we turn to Serizawa. Is it just me, or is the tsundere fad starting to wear thin? Serizawa is 95% tsun and 5% dere, and her over-the-top dishonesty is really annoying. While a tsundere sounds like an easy characters stereotype, they need to be complicated to work correctly. A tsundere really needs to be 60/40 split, and the best part of the tsundere is when they become dere. Look at some classic tsundere characters, like Sanzenin Nagi, and compare them to Serizawa Fumino. She seems a pale shadow of imitation, as if the author knew what the attributes of a tsundere were, but not what a tsundere actually is. The next cheap stereotype is Umenomori. She's a rich, spoiled loli character who compensates her lack of brains with her infinite pockets. Despite her wealth, she is a remarkably cheap in her character attributes. And the inconsistent storyline really harms her here: some episode drop hints about her past and family troubles, but they are never developed or explored. Umenomori drives the action in most episodes, she comes up with some crazy idea, and the other characters go along with it. But once she serves this purpose, she get regulated to background, where she can ramble absurdities without really doing anything. She basically only exists to give the other characters something to react to. And the final member of this harem is Nozomi, the mysterious non-cat girl. While Nozomi might be the deepest character, she is still very shallow, a creation of the simplest of plot devices. While Umenomori exists only to provide action, Nozomi exists only to react. She does remarkably little on her own, and is basically a empty shell with nothing to fill her. And when it comes to the side characters, the erratic nature of the plot just destroys anything that could have been done with them. In particular, the character of Chikumaen Kaho was so shafted I still can't figure who she was, why she acted like that, or even why she was in the story in the first place. Much like I can't figure out why I watched this show in the first place. Grade: F

Value: 3
Watchability: All the filler makes this show, even at only 13 episodes, a slog to get through. I would highly recommend against marathoning it, as I would expect one's IQ to suffer permanent damage. Grade: C-
Re-watchability: No. Just no. Watch the ping pong game again, if you wish, but everything, please no. And instead of watching the Saki parody, just go watch some actually Saki. Your brain will thank me later. Grade: D-
Historical Value: Seriously? Well, there is some actually historical value here. We can use this as any example of what not to do in an anime. We can point out here is when the tsundere jumped the shark. After the anime industry collapses, we can point to shows like this and say 'this is why'. But, really, this is crap. Grade: D

Enjoyment: 3
After I ran the numbers, I was shocked to find Overrun ranked so low. Surely it wasn't that bad, I thought. But on retrospect, it was. This show was crap, pure and simple. There is one good episode and one good scene, and that's it. But it wasn't offensive or insulting like To Love Ru. It was just plain crap. The worst moment was at the end, where the school waged an epic battle over bloomers of all goddamn things. This was the show at its saddest. The show had been stripped of what little of humor, sexiness, and drama it had, and was reduced to pandering the crudest and most chauvinistic stereotypes in a vain attempt to be relevant. It was pathetic, really, this cheap attempt to sway opinions with their paean to the act of wearing bloomers. They seem to forget it is not the costume that is sexy, but rather girl inside it, and no matter how they praise a dead piece of track and field attire, they can not make something relevant to the viewer without a girl we can care about. It's really kind of embarrassing to see this groveling attempt at the cheapest of fanservice. And I was all too happy to close the book this show, and let it rot in peace. Grade: D

Errata:
Watched with this with Doki's sub. I only watched this show because I thought there was an actually catgirl. Dammit, I was disappointed. In order to successfully parody something, you have to be funny. To often, Overrun was not. All reviews are done independent of the original format or other adaptions.

Final Grade: D

Mayoi Neko Overrun!: One for the litter box.

A common metaphor often used for the nature of probability is this: If you were to place an infinite amount of monkeys with an infinite amount of typewriters and give them infinite time, sooner or later one of these monkeys will reproduce the works of William Shakespeare. The logic works on the basis that the odds of one of these monkeys doing this are close, but not entirely, 0. As long as the odds of something happening are above 0, giving you an infinite amount of tries to do so will ensure that it will happen sooner or later. Others hold to the view that this is a flawed metaphor because some events do have odds of 0 and will never happen no matter how many tries you give it. They would hold the idea that monkeys learning to use the typewriters for its intended purpose in the first place, never mind reproduce the complete works of the Bard with them, would be a 0-odds event and make the metaphor flawed. I am not a statistician, a philosopher nor a monkey trainer, so I don’t feel qualified to claim definite certainty for either of the two stances.

One thing I *do* know for certain, however, is that you’d need about ten of each and twenty minutes to churn out something superior to the script of Mayoi Neko Overrun!.

A 2010 anime from some animation company I don’t remember, this show is about some boring guy whose name I never picked up on who lives in a cake shop with his (sexy, NON-BLOOD-RELATED!!!... Sigh) big sister whose name I probably slept through. Alongside some of his friends whom I can’t care to name and his ‘cute’-violent, bi-polar childhood friend who is also a girl, a rich snobby little kid and a brain-damaged catgirl, they do… Stuff. And, as you can probably tell by my stellar devotion to laying out every last detail of this show with my usual flowery prose and leaving no nuance unturned, this is not exactly a show of the highest quality.

Watching Major Cliché Overrun! is uncomfortably much like trying to bore yourself to sleep (something I have, in fact, done at occasion). Unlike other bad shows I’ve seen, like Princess Lover!, this show is not only incredibly predictable, stupid, and overrun with clichés, it’s also incredibly dull, ignorable and… Ugh. Let’s just get on with this, shall we? My brain isn’t getting any deader after sitting through thirteen episodes of this utter ***************.

Animation and Visuals: 2/10 –- Oh, look at all the wiggling cardboard cutouts.

The visual aspect of Mildewed Carpet Overrun! is not very impressive, to say the least. To say slightly more, it’s fairly damn bad. Let’s just go over the checklist quickly…

Let’s see, all the girls look identical, and most of the men do too. Animation is jerky and frequently cut out altogether, characters go off model (and not just for artistic effect), backgrounds are unimpressive and unimaginative and there’s basically a lot of visible short-cuts to reduce costs in every department … Did I miss anything? Oh yeah, the panty shots, the ecchi fanservice and the meaningless moe appeal, which (like everything in this show) is disappointingly subdued compared to everything else on market. I don’t even know if I should think of that as a good or a bad thing. The best part of the show, graphically speaking, seems to be the previews. Insofar they actually have some animation.

Sound: 3/10 –- Bad music. Voice work that made me wish the music was louder.

So, let’s just quickly move on to the sound aspect. The voice actors in this show are called upon to voice a bunch of fairly boring high school archetypes and deliver fairly boring voices to do so. They may try, but there’s nothing really in there to really give effort on and I think the voice actors recognize this on some primal level. The voices are mainly forgettable, although some give some momentary discomfort by being annoying for the moments they register to my ears. Sound effects are lacking to the degree of being near nonexistent and nothing impressive either.

The music, meanwhile, can be said to exist if I wrack my mind in an attempt to pick it out from the much more noticeable audio aspect coming from outside of the show, like my own heartbeats and breathing. I can’t recall any part of it, except for the OP and ED which are both are both horrible, horrible, horrible. Overall Marinated Nothing Overrun! is just bad audio-speaking, period.

Story: 2/10 –- If these people had only remembered to spay their catgirls, this tragedy may not have happened.

The story of Mutilated Nitpicker Overrun! is not so much a 'story' as a 'series of extremely dull events'. There’s this boring guy who lives with his adoptive older sister without parents in a cake shop. They adopt a catgirl. Thirteen episodes of no real importance happening ensues. The content is standard slice-of-life episodes. There’s a beach episode. There’s hot springs. There’s an attempt at drama where someone runs away. There’s a bad attempt at parodying various other stuff people will already have seen in a dozen better shows. That’s it. The only thing that bears mentioning about this show is its attempt at using different directors for some of the episodes, which mostly leads to the effect that the show feels even more disjointed than is usual for this kind of thing.

Anything that develops on-screen is forgotten by the time the episode has ended, plot twists in-episodes are non-existent and the whole thing advances through a pileup of clichés stuffed inside a formula stuffed inside a railroading which is then seeped and marinated in utter bull****. The pacing is generally functional, depending slightly on the director, but what the heck does that matter? There is nothing in there to pace.

Characters: 2/10 –- I’ve made crêpes with more depth than these ‘people’. They’d probably make for more entertaining protagonists too.

And then there’s the characters: We have the cardboard-cutout male harem lead with nothing going for him (not even a negative trait you’d at least remember him for, even if it would nag you every time he appeared), there’s the tsundere childhood friend, the emotionless catgirl, the cool and flirtatious older sister… In short, these aren’t people, they’re archetypes. And quite horribly played archetypes too: They’ve basically been picked right out of the book and played straight without even an attempt at spicing them up. There’s no character development, no character exploration, and no attempts at making these characters anything more than what they immediately appear to be on the surface. These people are so flat they would make a steamrolled piece of string look good by comparison. Calling them 'one-dimensional' is a gross overstatement of their emotional depth, compared to the glories of your average dot. About the only good thing I can say about these characters is that they aren’t worth the effort to get annoyed over: They don’t have any obviously negative attributes to notice. They don’t have anything.

The dialogue is equally stilted and clichéd. Attempts at comedy and snappy dialogue fall dead the instant they are vocalized, helped in part by the complete lack of impact by the archetypes that utter them and partially because the writers of this crap wouldn’t know good dialogue if they ended up getting savaged by all the cleverest and most creative insults in the world – which, by the way, they wouldn't deserve for making this thing. Having the word '****' screamed at them nine thousand times would probably be more of a response worthy of this work.

Value: 1/10 -- …You’re kidding, right?

You all know the old adage “everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it”, right? Well, by that definition, the ‘value’ I would place on Microscopic Nucleotides Overrun! is something to the degree of minus fifty quid. I wouldn’t get this show if you flung it at my head (which at that point would be fleeing in the general direction of ‘away’). There are methods of torture I would rather enjoy than having to sit through this again. If aliens came down to earth tomorrow and mind-wiped humanity of any memory of this thing’s existence, the end result would be a net gain to our cultural advancement. This anime is utterly without historical merit, originality or any sort of distinguishing feature outside of it being indistinctly crap, and should be shunned like the nasty, virulent canker on animedom it is.

In fact, would this not cause backlash by store breakage policies forcing people to buy this crap, I would recommend that if you ever see this show on a DVD shelf anywhere you should tear it from its shelf, throw it on the floor, and start jumping up and down on it while laughing manically.

Enjoyment: 2/10 –- That is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler to suffer upon the audience the slings and arrows of outrageously bad plot and characters, or just bore them to death.

Mayonaisse Nebula Overrun! is not only amateurishly made and directed, painfully insultingly written and has archetypes so flat they barely qualify as more than scenery, but more than anything it’s also downright dull, unimaginative and just plain bloody boring on top of it. My enjoyment of this show, if I can even use such language to describe it (that is, ‘enjoyment’ and ‘show’ – the words ‘involuntarily fell asleep in front of’ and ‘abomination’ may be better picks) did not come in any form that I would recognize as pleasurable. After a while I just left the show running in the background while reading books, doing my accounts, and listening to music videos on youtube just so I could get it over with at all. Actually making myself paying attention to it led to each episode taking a little over four hours to finish, of which most of it was spent, you guessed it, doing everything *except* watching said episode.

I don’t even get a ‘so bad it’s eerily fascinating’ sense from it, just a ‘when will the dullness end?’ feeling. I can’t even get fired up enough to be mad at it or stop watching it, only lose interest after five minutes of exposure and start looking at paint drying as a more entertaining way to spend my time.

So at least it won’t contribute to any health complications from risen blood pressure or aneurisms. Which I suppose is something, right?

Total: 2/10 –- How do I loathe thee? Let me count the ways...

In the end, it’s almost difficult for me to finish this review. Minge Nagger Overrun! is one of the objectively worst anime I have ever beheld in my life, and yet I find I harbour less dislike for it than I do for objectively better shows such as Code Geass R2 and Baka Baka. This show is so badly done, and most of all so incredibly drab and boring, it reduces me to little but bitter and resigned emotional silence. I can’t get mad at it, it’s too dull to elicit such responses. I’ll just sum it up quickly:

As someone who has associated with cats for most of my adolescent and adult life so far, I find the connotation between this show and cats to be insulting to cats. In fact I find it insulting to even try to find an analogy between all the good times you can have with your cats and this show. This show is less enjoyable than being scratched by an irate kitten. It’s less enjoyable than being savaged by an adult tom. It’s less enjoyable than having to clean out after your cat. It’s less enjoyable than finding out, at the same time, that your cat has been doing its business in your shoes since the sand was too dirty. This show is about as fun as finding out your cat gave your pregnant wife (or, if you’re female, you) toxoplasmosis and made her spontaneously abort. Yeah, that sounds about right.

In summary, don’t ever watch this show. Ever. You’re wasting electricity, oxygen, time, and most of all your precious memory and brain cells on it.

'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.

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.

Story: 4/10
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.

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).

Character Development: 6/10
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.

Value/Enjoyment: 6.5/10
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 highly experimental in production stage of this series with different directors and studio assistance. 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.