Popotan

If there was ever an argument for mini-reviews existing in this site, Popotan would be a really good reason. There isn't enough for 2200 characters here because there wasn't enough for 12 eps of this show. But much like Popotan forgets about what it was trying to do and stretches itself as loooooong as possible, so will I

TL;DR - this anime is extremely boring and pointless and there isn't really anything to gain by watching it other than mindless ecchi and even that kinda sucks

This is bad, but it isn't bad in a funny or shocking or interesting way, it's boring bad. It doesn't really do anything right but it also doesn't do anything terribly wrong, it has characters that can be described but don't really ever go too deepor are that interesting, it has a cool concept which it seems to always fail at doing something interesting with

Popotan is about 4 girls who live in a christmas themed house, collect magic from dandellions (magic which I don't think was ever used), and at random intervals get teleported alongside the house across spacetime, "time" usually being a few years and "space" meaning like 3 meters to the right where the house always was. The girls don't age and they are always forced to abandon any friend they made when the house teleports

This is a concept that would make for a great short OVA or movie. Meeting someone that changes your life or you change theirs, disappearing and then seeing how they or their family is doing 30 years later; it's insanely bittersweet on paper, it's something that you don't really need much effort to make emotional or interesting. But Popotan fails at even that

I think the biggest thing holding Popotan back is a lack of direction, if the show knew where it wanted to go or what it wanted to do it could be an EXTREMELY good short anime. But one episode you'll have a pretty serious moment with Mai, the next is purely ecchi, then Keith appears and has sex with Ai I guess? And we just forget about that kid Ai met? And the maid was there too I guess?? It's hard to put it into words but it really feels like Popotan is 3 or 4 different animes with the same base concept trying to fight for dominance, and in the end you just never know what to think of the show since the show doesn't know what to think of itself

Basically, the pieces for a great anime are there, but Popotan is constantly building 5 different things with them instead of just 1, so you end up with a bunch of unfinished and unsatisfying versions of the show instead of, well, a good show. It really doesn't help that out of all characters Mai seems to get the most focus out of everyone, since out of the 4 girls she's by far the least interesting and least likeable one, in fact the original summary of this review was going to be "this had exactly one good episode", that episode being episode 3 which focuses almost entirely on Mii and a friend she made at a hospital (Also this was the only instance where the dandellion magic did anything). The show could have benefited a LOT more if it had more episodes like that, if it was more episodic and had characters meet up and revisited 30 years later, which is something the show does twice! The first one is completely wasted and the second one is a revisit of a Mai episode where nothing happened

Maybe that's the real takeaway of it all, that Popotan just wasted any opportunity it gets to be good. Just go read the VN it's probably better than this, or go watch something else because I don't know if the VN can really fix a lot of the fundamental flaws of the show, which I won't go into because I wanted to keep this as vague and spoiler free as possible

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