Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid Review - Skyrim Mods the Anime

I’m…legitimately not sure where to start with this one.

Look, over the fifty-something years anime has been around, it has brought unto us a veritable slew of strange, crazy, outrageous concepts for shows. And while that observation can be easily written off with the sentence, “Welcome to Japan,” it’s interesting how we haven’t come close to hitting the bottom of the barrel in terms of ideas.

Think back to just last year, for example. What did we get? Aquatic boob wrestling, airplane furries, a show on Japanese improv that was waaay better than it should have been, an all-girl motorcycle club, the coolest high school student in the world, a red panda that sings death metal that I know you haven’t seen, and a sequel to a show whose main character is a tuba.

And considering I could review all of those shows in a pretty coherent and lucid manner, one would think I would do okay with a show about a software developer hiring a dragon full-time as a personal maid…

Wait, what?

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is brought to you by Kyoto Animation, who has done a lot of my favorite shows from Hyouka to The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya to K-On!! to Amagi Brilliant Park to name only a few. They were also behind Myriad Colors Phantom World in Winter 2016, meaning that you were probably watching KonoSuba or ERASED instead, but in my opinion that was their most absurd work up to this point. Then out popped Kobayashi a year later, and I immediately had to retract that award because whatever weird stuff Phantom World got up to, you could explain it away with everything being supernatural, hence why the female lead casts spells by groping herself.

Kobayashi, meanwhile, doesn’t have such an explanation, nor is it really intent on giving one. All we know is that the titular Miss Kobayashi (Mutsumi Tamura, Nobunagun, Is It Wrong to Pick Up Girls, and Asobi ni Iku yo!, which is at the top of my to-do list for no reason in particular) got plastered one night, bumped into a dragon named Tohru (Yuuki Kuwahara, Re:Zero and Scorching Ping Pong Girls), mystical things happen, and now Tohru works for Miss Kobayashi as her personal dragon maid.

But, funny enough, neither of them are the most important characters in the series. Not by a long shot. That title goes to Kanna (Maria Naganawa, who had a few passing lines in KonoSuba 2 and a slightly larger role in Occultic;Nine), a very young dragon and friend of Tohru’s, who ends up joining the Kobayashi family as well, and may be the singular best reason to watch this series.

I mean, look at her. Look at her.

She is adorable.

So what is Kobayashi beyond that plot setup? Let me answer that question with another question: who’s seen Eccentric Family?

Yeah, you remember them. The Shimogamo family of tanukis? They had a comedy/drama/slice-of-life show that got a second season this spring? Well, picture that, only now kick out all the tanukis and replace them with dragons. With D-cup sizes at minimum.

This show has enough fanservice to give No Game No Life a run for its money, and let’s recall that NGNL had the female characters without clothes of any description for a good two-thirds of Episode 6. There is plenty of Gainaxing, boobhatting and deep cleavage to go around, and this is before Tohru’s other friend Quetzalcoatl (Minami Takahashi, The Pet Girl of Sakurasou and Eromanga-sensei from this season) comes anywhere close to entering the picture.

Kobayashi is absurd, over-the-top, and all of the other words that I’ve used to describe shows that make no logical sense.

And it’s also one of the funniest shows you’re going to see this year.

I think I was a little to hard on last winter now that I think back on it. I mean, we still got slammed hard with a lot of series that nobody is going to remember or miss by the time the end of the year comes along, but whatever comedy shows were on at the time were absolutely on point. KonoSuba 2 brought us back to the excellent world of Kazuma and his Guild for Misguided and Unusual Adventurers, Gabriel Dropout was a three-month long experiment in getting angels and demons to play improv games, and Kobayashi has five dragons that it needs to assimilate into human society as inconspicuously as possible.

“SnYves, I don’t like the way that last sentence sounded. Are you seriously going to try getting deep with us on a comedy about a literal dragon maid?”

Well, reader, as much as I love to sit back and laugh at a show as much as the next person, if I can relate to the show’s characters somewhat and understand them, then I find that enhances the experience exponentially. For Kobayashi, that link for the audience comes from the show’s emphasis on family ties and relationships. Thinking about the dynamic between our three main characters, they easily fit into roles in what most people would consider a pretty normal family. Miss Kobayashi is the hard-working, down-to-earth but nevertheless understanding and supportive head of the household, Tohru stays at home to help out with cleaning, cooking and other maintenance duties, and since Kanna’s age in dragon years puts her in elementary school range in human years, she’s the cute, lovable kid out exploring the world, going to school, and making friends with other students who may or may not be obsessed with her.

About midway through the show (I’ll put a spoiler flag here just to be safe, nothing major at any rate), we get a few clues that Tohru’s family is not exactly fond for humans and her dad in particular doesn’t have too much of a problem with just wiping them off the face of the earth. So when we see just how fond Tohru has become for Kobayashi and what she’s done for her family of dragons, the show really starts to expand its scope and stops being just a baseline comedy about well-endowed girls “cosplaying” as dragons. While Kobayashi is aware that it is a comedy show first and foremost, it controls its pacing well enough to earn these introspective moments and go beyond what we expect at minimum from shows of this genre.

As for the actual comedy, it hits its stride in the opening scenes of Episode 1 and then stops for absolutely nobody. It sets up its premise as quick as possible so that we can cut right to the good parts as soon as we hit Play. To avoid monotony, there are five different dragons living with various humans of interest, so it would be misleading to suggest that this series focuses solely on the Kobayashi family all the way through. One of Kobayashi’s coworkers takes in a very nihilistic but formal dragon who is quickly converted to an otaku by the next time we see him. Quetzalcoatl (jeesh, that’s a pain to spell) gets summoned by a human mage, gets mistaken for a demon, and now “possesses” his house as the poor kid (yes, kid) has to stave off her advances.

Regardless of which dragon or dragons I was paired with during an episode, I found myself laughing for prolonged periods of time at what I can only presume is an unhealthy rate. This show is ridiculously funny if you can appreciate its sense of humor.

I word the last sentence like that because this is definitely not a show for everybody. It is very outwardly sexual in a lot of its jokes, and if you’re not laughing by the midway point of Episode 1, then that’s a fair enough reason to drop this series altogether. I also feel like a few of the jokes get recycled every now and again, and for a show that’s as crazy and wild as this is, that’s a bit of a downer. I mean, it’s darkly cute how Tohru keeps proposing to solve Kobayashi’s people issues by incinerating them, but the actual comedy values starts to dip right around the third time you hear her propose that. Quetzalcoatl kinda falls victim to the same issue; although the writers use her in a bunch of ways that fully encompass her personality, it still doesn’t change the fact that she’s still a walking boob joke and a scene with her never goes without one.

All that aside, though, considering how badly we’re going to miss KonoSuba in a couple years, I’m glad I found another show that made me laugh about as hard as it did. If you can enjoy the totally bonkers premise, the designs of the dragons (to put it gingerly), and just the sheer cuteness that is Kanna, then Kobayashi is a must-see comedy for you this year. It is a trip, and that is probably the only and best word I can use to describe it.

And finally, since I hinted at it in my Art Club review:

THE VERDICT: A
Next time: Never forget.