The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Delusional Monthly Magazine

The story takes place in the town of Most City in a certain country. On the second floor of an old building is a publishing company that puts out a periodical called Delusional Monthly Magazine, a science magazine featuring articles about shocking, bizarre events and inexplicable phenomena that make even scientists throw up their hands in defeat. Its staff consists only of a beautiful editor-in-chief and her one editor, Taro J. Suzuki, who are joined by grade-school-aged assistant Jiro Tanaka and his dog, Saburo. The editorial department is always empty, and Taro, Jiro, and Saburo usually hang out in Rock, a coffee shop on the first floor. One day, the scientist Gorō Satō visits them for a consultation, and therein lies the beginning of an outlandish new story.

Delusional Monthly Magazine is an original anime project by OLM. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

That's the joke.

Are you entertained? Are you laughing? Because that's about all there is to this first episode of Delusional Monthly Magazine.

This show is about three unlikable, unsympathetic characters. Taro is a slacker who wants to be a househusband so that he doesn't have to work (showing that, not only is he not a husband material but that he has no idea how much work housewives do as well). Jiro is a stuck-up boy who works at a café and a magazine—and also has healing powers for some reason. Goro is a scientist (cosplaying as a leprechaun?) who discovered—for all rights and purposes—a piece of Atlantis. And Saburo is a dog. Together they talk, shout, be assholes to one another, and make some poor attempts at slapstick comedy.

Now, all that, while bad, is more overwhelmingly boring than anything else. And then we get to the climax with the three humans running away from suited goons (driving a bulldozer through a building for some reason). Then Taro touches the piece of Atlantis and becomes a weretiger with super strength who wreaks the bulldozer and… you know what, I'm done.

All in all, this first episode was equal parts boring and annoying. It didn't do a single thing to hook my attention and most of what it did do made me want to quit watching immediately. The biggest impact this show had on me was forcing me to internally debate which show was worse, this or Sengoku Youko (my lowest-rated anime of the season to this point)—and the final score should let you know the outcome of that quite clearly. Hats off to you Delusional Monthly Magazine for being the worst show of an already lackluster season.

Here's a great example of a show that I could love…if everything about it were done completely differently. I'm always on the lookout for shows with stories that break the mold a little bit, and a kooky comedy about a bunch of weirdos who investigate supernatural shenanigans on behalf of their chintzy paranormal tabloid is just the breath of fresh air that I'm looking for. To be fair to Delusional Monthly Magazine, too, it isn't like this premiere was entirely agonizing to sit through, and I can imagine having fun with a one-off episode in the future, so long as the show learns to cool its jets a bit and crank the Annoying Screaming Dial down a couple of notches.

More than any of the stiff writing or insubstantial storytelling, my gripes with this show come almost entirely down to its presentation choices. The art is too candy-colored for my liking, and the animation is nothing special. The direction is about as Saturday-Morning-Cartoon basic as it gets. The voice actors are all dialed into varying degrees of obnoxiousness, and the music…dear god, the music. I have long been fighting at the frontlines of the war against the "Tooting Recorders and Screeching Synthesizers" style of music that so many mediocre anime comedies are stuck with, and Delusional Monthly Magazine seems to have decided that being positively unlistenable wasn't low enough a bar to aim for. No, its music has to be downright hostile to the human spirit itself. If I were allowed to watch anime on mute when I review it, I might have been a bit more generous to this show, but alas, we do not live in such a blessed reality, and instead, we must suffer with the atonal, inharmonious screeching that the creators of this show decided to set all of their boring-ass dialogue scenes too.

Then again, the main character of this show has seemingly been cursed by a talisman from an ancient civilization, and is now doomed to transform into a psychedelically colored tiger wrestler ripped straight from the furry OC image boards of the mid-2000s, which is such a deliriously stupid concept that I can't help but respect it just a little. Granted, I'll be doing all of that respecting from a safe distance, with cotton shoved into my ears, so any of you brave souls who dare to endure more of Delusional Monthly Magazine are free to wave some semaphore flags and let me know if the show ends up being worth another look.

I know that I can be hypersensitive to sound, but even with that, the music in this episode just set my teeth on edge. It's not particularly shrill or loud, my two usual buttons, but something about it is simply annoying in the same way a low-grade headache is – you know something is bothering you and putting you in a bad mood, but at the same time, can't quite pinpoint what it is. That's not a terrible analogy for my feelings about this episode in general, because while on the surface it's no more bizarre than any other strange comedy, something about it is just plain old irritating.

It probably doesn't help that there's a wordplay that I'm missing. It's hard not to notice the preponderance of words beginning with the sound "mo," some in English, some in Japanese, and some just made up. Why that sound should be so much in favor isn't clear, but I suspect it has to do with "moso" meaning "delusion" in Japanese. This could indicate that the show is poking fun at itself for being "delusional" with a dollop of bizarre, although it made me want to use the sound "mou" as an expression of exasperation. There's nothing wrong with absurd humor – I even really like it in many cases – but this mostly gives the impression of being weird for weirdness' sake. While that may change going forward, it didn't endear this episode to me.

The basic premise seems to be that overeager young scientist Goro is deeply invested in the equivalent of studying Atlantis, searching for the sunken Mo Continent and its relics. When academia refuses to publish his paper on the "MOpart" he excavated, he turns to the pulp magazine Monthly Mōsō Science, which he believes prints more truth than they realize. Then some men in black show up, people turn out to have mysterious powers, and the MOpart turns aspiring househusband Taro into a Thundercat. This episode also made me realize that I've seen more Afghan Hounds in anime than in real life, perhaps indicating how little this held my interest.

I will say that the bright, simple art and character designs work very well for the Saturday morning feel of the show. Its approach may be too deliberately weird to feel organic, but it does tap into the sensibility of how adults remember children's shows, and I kind of love Catherine's design, with her flower-shaped hair, for that reason. But this falls firmly under the "trying too hard" category for me, and I don't see myself returning for another episode.

I am spiritually and morally obligated to say I hate how this premiere uses its music. Irrespective of the quality of any individual musical track, the way this show mixes and deploys it is gratingly obnoxious in a way that's rare in professional productions. Seemingly, every scene, every cut of animation, and every line of dialogue has to be accompanied by a plodding, overly loud soundtrack of obnoxious instrumentation, usually in ways that are totally at odds with the tone of the story. A character is explaining esoteric lore about Not!Atlantis? Better have an accordion warming up sporadically in the background, interspersed with synth beats and possibly a chanting choir. Does that make a lick of sense for what's on-screen? Who cares! It's loud and incessant, which must mean it will keep the viewer's attention, like a toddler with keys jangled in front of their face.

Unfortunately, that musical sense is emblematic of the rest of the premiere, which mistakes being loud and annoying for being funny and presses both of those buttons as hard as it can at all times. The character designs are garish, their personalities loud and devoid of charm, and the concept feels like the least interesting angle you could take on the setting of an early 20th-century pseudo-science magazine's editorial office. Of all the weird, esoteric, quirky things you could do with that setup, we go with off-brand Atlantis, but also, all the characters turn into furries with bad makeup. There's no cohesion between those two ideas, and with such a loosely defined story, the only thing left is character interaction, which is uniformly boring and hollow.

Looking back, it's shocking how little happens from a character angle in the premiere. Despite most of this episode being dialogues between a small cast, none leave an impression. The purple guy is lazy and cowardly, and every single thing he does is meant to hammer that in. The green guy spouts exposition and is absent-minded, and outside of a running joke about having corns on his feet, that's his only personality trait. The blue kid doesn't like being called a kid. There is a dog. There are some vaguely defined bad guys, too, but they accomplish nothing and then just leave after Mr. Purple turns into a borderline Sparkledog. I've legitimately seen five-minute shorts establish more about their world and characters in their opening episode, and they managed to do it without being half as irritating as this one. If that's not an indictment on this thing as entertainment, I don't know what is.