Magical Meow Meow Taruto

Yeah...a friend of mine has lent me a rather large load of anime and manga to sample, so I've been powering through them in an effort to get them back to him quicker. If there's one thing my friend has a fondness for it's cute anime girls - specifically cute cat anime girls. The oddly titled Magical Meow Meow Taruto is nothing more than cute anime about cat girls that's only purpose is to be cute...and to my surprise it actually is pretty entertaining. I'll give the show this much credit: at least the cat girls here are as much cat as girl. In fact they're even cat-sized and, for the most part, treated as cats. It's a welcome change from the well-known cliche of girls who just happen to have cat ears for no reason other than to appease people with a cat fetish. The story takes place in a seaside town where nothing much ever happens and all but the most minor unpleasantness are omitted: the show makes its stories out of the most agreeable experiences of everyday life.

The "magical" part of the show comes from the show's prologue which tells us of a race of cat people called the Kinka, who lived in another world, and fought a losing war against a similar tribe called the Byoh. Legend has it that the lost princess of the Kinka escaped to our world. From there we meet Taruto, who may or may not be the lost Kinka princess. She apparently has some sort of magical power, but isn't able to control it properly. The results of her spells are more or less random and she spends most the first half of the series just going about helping people. It's all cute and fun to watch. After a while the show finally gets around to addressing that cat war from the prologue and the show starts to take on a slightly more serious tone. At first I thought there was a strange disconnect between it and the light, innocent material that came before it. But by the series end everything had tied together surprisingly well. Everything from the story came together, all the characters introduced along the way get some sort of pay off, and there's even some good action scenes here and there. Overall, it's just a fun simple children's anime. It's easy to watch, has fun characters, and I have no problem recommending it to people who enjoy this type of thing.