Seven Mingin’ Monsters

On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love sent to me
Seven Mingin’ Monsters
Six Shower Showdowns,
Five Flag Furores,
Four Gundam Bishies,
Three Empty Paragraphs,
Two Heroes Dueling
And a Bloodstained Euphie.

I established on the first day how Code Geass taught me that ‘I like it’ and ‘it is good’ were not necessarily connected. Kaibutsu Oujo (English titles vary; the official manga translation is Princess Resurrection) gave me the experience of liking something despite myself, of liking something despite knowing that, by all conventional measures, it is actually not very good at all.

Which makes it pretty memorable, all things considered.

So why isn’t it very good? Well, it’s really a case of wasted potential. There’s a potential harem, but it’s hardly used. There’s comedy, but it isn’t very funny. There’s action, but it had to be toned down from the manga’s over-the-top violence, and it’s ruined by poor animation. Pull all the animation tricks you like, but a low budget will out.

Hiro is as unassertive as a clothespeg, and is used as such

Finally there’s no real over-arching plot to tie together the (literally) monster-of-the-week episodic structure; this may be because the manga’s still ongoing, but whatever the cause, it leaves the series without a proper sense of drive and no resolution at the end. Kaibutsu Oujo is fundamentally broken, which is a shame because something could be done with the source material and a proper budget.

However. I have also mentioned before that I have a taste for the ludicrous. And you can’t get much more ludicrous than a girl in a black dress and a tiara riding on the roof of a peddalo and fending of mutant fish-men with a giant hammer, can you?

[Inevitable Hammertime caption]