Magical Meow Meow Taruto 3/10

The madness ends. What the hell was this show trying to accomplish?

I can appreciate that there are some anime produced specifically for kids. I can appreciate that some of these shows are good enough to warrant normal anime fan attention. I can appreciate that Bandai Entertainment releases shows on DVD in North America that should appeal to anime buyers in this market. So WTF is up with this show?

Technically this show looks ok, it's not great but not bad. The music is OK and the voice acting is alright considering most of the characters are cats and have "meow" in damn near every sentence. Not much else to say here. Oh, I HATE the singers on the theme songs. I liked them in Azumanga Daioh but it got tired long ago. These 12 episodes aired in 2001.

As far as the plot goes I really found this show annoyingly paced. We meet the main character, a purple haired cat-girl named Taruto who lives with her spaced out owner Iori and his family as their pet. Or something. See, Taruto is cat-sized but looks human. She wears clothes, runs around and talks but the show deliberately dodges the question as to whether or not the humans can understand the cats. Taruto has some other cat-girl friends and most of the shows involve them having uninspired adventures. There IS a running plot here about Taruto maybe being a princess from some cat world and we see that she DOES have some odd powers but this plot isn't really advanced until the last 5 episodes or so.

I didn't care for 2 major things in this series.

1. The episodes seem slapped together, not much character development and the episodes feel....disjointed.

2. Taruto is retarded. She's like the kid in the helmet. A little ditzy can be cute. Mentally underdeveloped is just creepy.

I give this show a few points for how colourful it is and hope that the poor quality of this show doesn't spoil any plans for Bandai to release other shows of this nature in the future.

NOTE: I liked the purple DVD cases these DVD's came in but the small episode per DVD count and heroically creepy extras pissed me off.