The Genre: fan-service and... melancholy (see review)

The Format: DVD 12 episodes across 3 disks in a box set from Geneon

The plot: Three sisters, Ai, Mai, and Mii, along with their housekeeper android Mea live in a large, time-travelling house. The story follows the sisters' journey through time and space as they, with the assistance of communicating dandelions (referred to here as "po-po-tan"), seek out a certain mysterious someone believed to hold the answers to their questions. Emotions begin to run high as the girls are challenged by an inherent fact of their situation: they will abandon anyone they meet... or worse, befriend.

Video games.

As a westerner, I must admit I'm far more used to seeing video games that are adaptation of popular movies or, on occasion, things like books or TV shows. The idea of this being done the other way around is something of an oddity to me, then, but in Japan it seems to be quite commonplace.

Certainly there's been a wealth (or dearth, depending on your perspective) of anime adapted from Japanese video games in recent times. Perhaps this is a reflection of some aspect of Japanese culture, or maybe some sort of over-developed nose for a buck by Japanese corporations, but I guess what really matters is the quality of the end product, rather than where it came from.

What I'm building up to in this lengthy pre-amble is that what the anime makers seem to have tried to do with the Po-Po-Tan is give it a strong storyline, but also maintain the ecchi element too. Or, to put it another way, they tried to have their cake and eat it.

Unfortunately for them, it seems that this particular cake, instead of being of the delicious double chocolate variety instead turned out to be part chocolate and part fried egg. Or, to unscramble the similes, they've taken two things that are quite nice on their own, and put them together to form an unpalatable mess.

Po-Po-Tan just plain doesn't work.

Now, don't worry, I'm not going to go all prudish. I'm still an honest to goodness fan of tits-and-arse; it's just that in my opinion, if you're going to do a t&a show, then you need to do a t&a show. Making a show that tries both to be ecchi to cover the fan-service, but also a kind of melancholic romantic story at the same time just become confusing.

I do literally mean at the same time. There are numerous scenes where the girls are basically naked in the bath, and these scenes can run right through the gamete of comedy all the way up to an almost maudlin, suicidal flavour.

And it really does become confusing. I mean, are we meant to be ogling the girls, or feeling sad for them? It really is difficult to do both, cos they just plain get in the way of each other.

To be fair, the more serious, melancholic theme is developed; it isn't just dumped on us, and a nice hint structure is used to slowly bring it to fruit, I just wish that as they'd been building that up, they would have been toning down the fan-service at the same time. But instead, it just seems to get more prevalent, until, as I say, we end up with naked girls being miserable... and a very confused viewer.

It's saying something when nakedness in a show doesn't work for even me :/.

As you can tell, I found this really quite disappointing and confusing--it's a big old mixing bag of all sorts of different elements and types of show that don't work too well.

Character design is quite nice, though, and the sound design is quite good (well, the opening and ending themes are awful, but them aside), but that's' about where the good stuff ends. Animation is very workman-like, with even the jiggling of boobs kept to a minimum and the disk extras are very on the ground.

Something I did find odd was that I actually preferred the English dub to the Japanese. This was primarily due to the Mii character. In the Japanese she's horribly high pitched and annoying, but rather than have the English VA matched this artificial hyperness, instead she gives a relatively measured performance. I mean, it may not have quite matched the on-screen action as well, but at least it didn't make my ears bleed.

The Summary: It gets more interesting at the end, but generally I found Po-Po-Tan a thoroughly confusing mix of genres.

The Score: 2/5

The Pictures:

(click for larger versions)

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