The anime industry in Japan is vast, with the country being one of the largest producers of animation in the world. By the mid 2010's, legal online streaming allowed the world access to several dozens of new shows every year. With such a abundance of content to choose from, it is easy to forget about shows merely months after their release, and few franchises have the staying power to be referenced years later.One exception to this is the ecchi genre, broadcast anime with raunchy fanservice, often better known for the sexy situations their female characters get into rather than any story. While not appreciated by critics, fans still tend to exist as their love for these fictional characters grow, and said fans will have a soft spot for a series many years after the show had ended. Fan art and merchandise can still make a profit, especially since a simple stimulating picture of a character provides almost as much value as a tv episode. This is how I came to learn about "Kanokon - The Girl Who Cried Fox," a 12-episode animated adaption based on a manga of the same name. Despite releasing in 2008, I can still easily find the manga on bookstore shelves, and occasional art appears from the original creators or fans online. The anime series was licensed by American distributor Media Blasters and released shortly beffore the company went under. Technically, the company still exists and still releases a couple new titles each year, but is barely a shell of its former self, and many of its older releases are long out of print. The "Kanokon" DVD set similarly tends to be listed as out of stock by most retailers, but mysteriously comes back in print every year or so to allow the curious to purchase a copy. Perhaps it is one of those shows that allowed the company to survive today.So how is it? In part because of Media Blaster's situation and the (lack of) respect for the show's content by the creators, it is downright awful. I don't think I have ever seen a sadder production or release.First, let's talk about the DVD release in North America. Released in a complete DVD set (series and OVA) circa 2012, you will quickly find the discs don't play in a DVD player. I've tried multiple DVD/Bluray players and consoles with no success, and this sseems to be a common problem to other buyers as well. DVD software on a computer also fails. To finally view the content, I had to view the disc on my computer as a "Data DVD" rather than a media disc, and click on one of the files in the folder hierarchy. This finally allowed my VLC Media Player to see the DVD menu, and play the episodes with only minor bugs to follow. Clearly, Media Blasters had encoded the discs incorrectly, a mistake that even children would be quick to catch. What bothers me is, based on the availability status, the company must be printing discs on demand even today in 2017. I purchased my copy in 2017, years after its original release and years after customers mentioning the encoding error, and the bug still remains. That a company would be unwilling to update their process, let alone not replacing released discs entirely, is unacceptable. This type of issue plagues a handful of their releases, but not most, so it is by chance that "Kanokon" would be caught in the issue. That the company happened to lay off people around this time likely had much to do with it.And I will quickly mention the English dub, as produced and released by Media Blasters. The character acting in both English and Japanese is pretty horrid, but the English version reaches new lows. It has the delivery and emotion of a badly-acted porn film. Which is perhaps appropriate given the subject matter, but similar shows have received better treatment than this. Here, voices are awkward and wooden. Which can't be the actors' fault, as a few in the cast list are quite experienced: the lead male character is voiced by Mona Marshall, known as "Izzy" in the Digimon series among many other trademark roles! I have to assume this was a rush job from the voice director. One such scene proves this, where a character's mouth moves for about six seconds before we finally hear his voice say "let's go," an example of bad dubbing not seen since the early Godzilla movies. It's laughably bad. The only enjoyment I had from the English dub was from Chizuru, who sounds horrible in most of her scenes, but when her character yells out in jealousy, a shred of personality appears.
The visuals from studio Xebec don't help either. The studio around this time was known for lackluster fan-service shows, but I don't remember any of them being quite this poor. The character designs are just slightly chubby with big eyes and small mouths, giving the impression that we are watching horny Pillsbury-dough--yokai-teenagers. Characters are barely animated, be it in the few action scenes or in the sexual situations. There is a lack of creativity even in said sexy scenes, the show's selling point: most other shows would find clever ways to show skin while hiding the naghty bits, or finding different situations for awkward sexual tension to build. In "Kanokon?" Most scenes happen to take place at a public bath or hot spring, and the characters outright get naked with no inabition, the camera layout giving a plain straight shot on them. On one hand, this is arguably the closest I've gotten to seeing a fully-nude character in a broadcast anime: some shots would just need to draw an extra line to be rated XXX for showing female genetals. They don't, but having such camera shots and not drawing parts as if pretending they don't exist isn't really a solution. And they can't seem to decide if they want to show nipples or not, revealing the chests of some characters early, but not revealing lead poster girl Chizuru until later in the second half, despite her being nude more often.I had to remind myself that this show was fairly recent, being broadcast in 2008. If I had to guess blind, I would have thought the show was at least five years older based on the animation. There is no excuse here.Did I mention the story? It's something about a shy and timid high school boy who discovers the busty co-student in his class who has a crush on him is also a supernatural fox diety. A couple other students are also part of this secret culture, but do little to act on trying to hide Chizuru, only scolding her before getting side-tracked elsewhere or making some poor joke. Other clans try to destroy her to no avail, and the fight scenes are so limited that I wouldn't dare call this an action scene. And despite my qualms, I do admit I started to warm up to "Kanokon" by the end. The production values seemed to improve just slightly by the end of the series, and further still in the OVA's, even if still below acceptable quality. The barely one-dimensional characters grew on me, and I looked forward to seeing them on screen and finding out what happens to them. While hardly an example of sexy anime done right, the fanservice has enough nudity to satisfy anyone with a fetish for girls with large breasts, fox ears and a fox tail (and admittedly, the fanservice does go a bit farther than I expected, the only sign of the show not being from an older era). And if you want to laugh at something bad, this is a good example, an attempt to be sexy, funny, serious and romantic, and failing in some fashion in every step. This is the magic of anime: no matter how good or bad, it can be mindless fun if you aren't picky.But that doesn't help me in recommending it. "Kanokon" is a mess from its release in America to its cheap production. If you are looking for something to get excited about, there are many other examples that should take higher priority. Let this one die and move on.