As I stated last year in my Tokyo Marble Chocolate review the older I get, the harder it is to get into the jolly spirit of Christmas. Is it schoolwork, a general sense of bitterness, the fact that I spend a notable portion of the holidays trying to write reviews? Whatever it is, I’m not one to accept failure without a fight.

So, after Christmas music I turned to anime. Watching the most horrifically brutal Gundam show (more on that in a later review) didn’t really do my joviality any favors, but what about My Santa a comedic Christmas OVA about a sullen boy named Santa who despises the Christmas season? On his birthday of Christmas Eve, he runs into a woman named Mai who claims she’s a “Santa Claus” in training. Determined to ensure that no one goes unhappy on Christmas Eve, she decides to spend the night with Santa. I saw someone watch the anime on their activity feed, and at two episodes, around twenty-two minutes each, I thought, “what the hell, it could be interesting, it could even be good.”

Well, I got one for two. Scroll to the score to see which I got right.

My Santa is a very, (very, very, very,) very odd OVA that I swear was made under the influence of spiked eggnog. It’s quite surreal, and not in that it purposely does things that are strange to create a unique viewing experience, it’s surreal in that it’s so insanely inept in nearly every feasible category. It’s almost impressive.

To drive the point home that My Santa is mediocre across all boards, I’ll start off with something I don’t usually even focus on in my reviews: the voice acting. It’s like My Santa heard my opinion that dubbing is good and took it as a personal challenge* because the voice acting (or directing, if I’m being generous to the actors) is baaad. Mai’s English voice actor is particularly bad. Everything she says is loud and seems on the verge of a hysterical cry. Everything is eleven with her and she always has this odd...whining quality to her voice, I think it is? It’s hard to describe, but you’d know exactly what I’m talking about if you heard it. I thought her voice sounded familiar, so I gave it a search and lo and behold, Mai is voiced by Brittney Karbowski, who also voices Mio in Ghost Stories, an anime I’m currently watching. I’ll get into it more in my review, but the dub of Ghost Stories is essentially a parody, so Karbowski’s voice for Mio’s voice fits there since it’s supposed to be over the top, while even the “serious” scenes of this anime have her overacting. Hell, there are points where Mio sounds more subdued than Mai. From that, her work as Selim Bradley on Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, and from listening to a clip of her in Fairy Tale, I can tell that Karbowski is by no means a bad voice actor, meaning Funimation just really dropped the ball on voice directing. If that wasn’t proof enough, we later have Sharry, who sounds like she’s trying to impersonate a prepubescent child. Then there’s Santa’s voice actor, who has the opposite problem in that he never sounds particularly intense even when Santa himself is animated as yelling. Then there’s just how rapidly everyone speaks. It’s hilariously bad.

Speaking of rapidly, the anime has an insane, hysterical pace that makes it hard to process anything. In the first forty-five seconds of the OVA proper, Mai asks Santa does he want to spend the night with her, gets flustered when passerbys criticize her (the implication being she’s asking Santa if he wants to sleep with her), slaps Santa, gets dragged off by police, then reappears behind Santa, demanding to know why he’s unhappy. There’s so much going on, I didn’t have a chance to figure out the point or why I should care. The show in general just comes across as obnoxious. It’s hard to resist the urge of just listing everything that happens in the show, because nearly everything is an example of this insane pace. Soon, Mai begins materializing things and gets in a fight with a delinquent leader because of...reasons. Well, lack thereof. There truly is no rhyme or reason in this anime. The pace reminds me of a much less funny FLCL.

The best parts are probably when it slows a bit down and we into why Santa dislikes Christmas: besides being made fun of due to his name and birthday (Mai, for one, makes fun of him, making me question why we should think she’s likable), he hates Christmas because he’s always alone, for his parents are always busy and his friends don’t want to hang out with him. The OVA squanders this with its “solution” to the problem. We discover that Santa’s parents don’t visit him because they’re busy helping orphans. While it’s altruistic, it doesn’t excuse the abandonment they’ve subjected their own child to, but Santa and the audience is supposed to accept this as a good enough reason to neglect their son. On a more humorous note, it turns out Santa’s friends don’t hang out with him because every year, they throw a party to celebrate his birthday. Without him. Because they assume he doesn’t want to go. Really heartwarming, stuff, right there.

Any pros attributed to the first episode come from just the subject itself: Christmas, even if its not handled particularly well, I guess it’s still sweet to see someone find the spirit of Christmas.

Thanks to My Santa I can now safely say that I don’t intrinsically love romance because by God was it handled ineptly here, just like everything is. Mai and Santa have known each other for four hours tops before they’re falling over one another. This would be a bit more believable if Mai hadn’t spent a significant portion (at least that we, as the viewers see) of that time antagonizing Santa.

Oh, and don’t get me started on the second episode. It features Sharry, who’s shown as being nothing but nasty towards Mai, but at the end they’re revealed as friends, just “clashing due to having different ideals.” This is despite the two characters’ conflicting “ideals” never being brought up besides this moment. The after credits scene takes away any sort of sweetness this episode has (of course, that’s not saying much so you might as well watch it). It creates a pretty annoying plothole in which Mai’s teacher claims Sharry read a letter wrong, mistakenly believing Mai had to return instead of MaiMai. But earlier in the episode, the teacher herself stated that Mai had to return.

The characters look quite bland, not really popping out at all, and I can say the same about the animation. Neither is terrible, but they really don’t add anything. It should be mentioned that this is an ecchi show. It’s not a focus at all, and it tends to just be distracting, and not at all tantiliating due to the aforementioned blandness and the fact that it isn’t focused on. We see plenty of Mai’s panties due to the anime realistically depicting a short skirt and there’s a Sailor Moon-esque transformation sequence that shows Mai getting a large bust and derriere. Plus there’s a bit of Gainaxing the second episode. If that’s your thing, I still wouldn’t really recommend My Santa because there are doubtless shows that do it better.

The show’s supposed to be a comedy but it mainly tries to achieve this by being as random as possible which doesn’t really do it for me. The only intentional funny bits were Mai and Santa eating Mai’s terrible cooking (rendered as them inexplicable firing energy blasts from their mouth) as well as MaiMai’s constant eating while Mai, Sharry, and Santa were having a conversation. I probably laughed the hardest during portion of the first episode where a young Santa looks absolutely broken while over dramatic sad music plays and his mother chews the scenery apologizing over the phone. It’s so overwrought that it kills the mood they were going for and I can’t help but lose it.

I suppose that’s the best way to summarize this anime: unintentionally funny. Whatever it tries to do, it fails miserably, as indicated by its assurance that there would be a third episode only to have just two produced. It’s suppose to be a Widget Series in its randomness but its more weird in how inept it is. There’s honestly something fascinating in how terrible it is. I dare say it’s almost so bad it’s good. Almost.

Thanks to this show I can finally tackle the question of what to rate something that’s mechanically bad but still can be enjoyed due to its terribleness. Enjoyment is an important component of how “good” something in, but it becomes tricky if the enjoyment isn’t intentional. I suppose I can acknowledge how bad the show is in my score, yet state how it can have merit in a “so-bad-its-good” manner.

Making my job easier is the fact that the “so-bad-its-good-factor” doesn’t help it that much. At the end of the day, My Santa is part comedy that’s not funny. Meaning that there are few moments where the viewer will actually laugh. My Santa certainly has its moments of unintentional comedy but those are few-and-far-between. The unintentional comedy and the sheer impressiveness of how bad it is save it from a lower score.

But let’s not make bones about it, My Santa is still god awful.

(And I just realized that “My Santa” is a pun on “Mai Santa” and I hate it.)

*In all fairness, however, the Japanese voice acting apparently wasn’t very good, either. As per the top review of My Santa on Myanimelist, courtesy of DeSwitch, “Mai bounces immediately into the high-obnoxious register and stays there so long as she's not in Santa Claus mode. Whiny, shrill, and always shouting, her voice actor, the talented Aya Hirano, should be ashamed of this performance, deeply ashamed.” So, points to the dub for equivalency, I guess?