Kaede Shiranui was just an ordinary teenage girl. One night while diligently absorbed in her studies she finds herself distracted by an unexpected guest. Clad in a bright pink gi a hapless kunoichi named Shinobu breaks into her bedroom and begins to rifle through her underwear drawer. Believing herself to be invisible Shinobu is shocked when Kaede confronts her and confesses that shes only trying to complete a task assigned to her by her sensei simply known as Headmaster and is being overseen by the real pervert of the outfit a large yellow ball with a face named Onsokumaru. Faced with all of this extenuating information Kaede befriends her intruder and is consequently drawn into the bizarre world of Onsakumarus hidden martial arts dojo where Shinobu live alongside a horde of identical male ninjas all named Sasuke a sentient alligator and Onsakumaru himself. Will Kaede be able to balance her everyday routine with the complications of her blooming friendship or will her life be changed forever by all of this Ninja Nonsense? And while were at it does 2X2 REALLY equal Shinobu? At first glance you might think Im joking when I say Ninja Nonsense was produced by Ufotable and I cant really blame you. Thanks to its affiliation to certain anime properties like Garden of Sinners Demon Slayer God Eater and several highly acclaimed entries in the Fate franchise Ufotable has a pretty solid reputation when it comes to their sophisticated character design style and slew of critical darling titles. This reputation wasnt something they had from the start however as their style was a bit more random at the start. Even their first production a Weiss Kreuz title that they shared production duties with Magic Bus for had a slightly cartoony edge to it. With Ninja Nonsense in particular the designs were obviously carried over from the manga but the animation and visual direction kind of feel like they were trying to do something similar to Excel Saga... I dont have any evidence to back that up its just a theory I have but we will be revisiting it a few times. The animation is pretty decent with a few caveats. First off this kind of animation is strictly reserved for random gag anime titles. The kind of fast pace constant visual gags and hyper quick cuts that this series employs are usually considered the ideal way to save money while throwing out a joke every other second and when its on point it works commendably well... Unfortunately when it slows down you can tell just how cheap the production really was. It doesnt happen often but when the series finds itself in an extended cut where characters are having a conversation its unnerving how long everyone but the current speaker just sits there on screen not moving not blinking just waiting for their chance to unfreeze and detach from the background and show some sins of life. This doesnt happen the majority of the time but the series doesnt do nearly a good enough job at avoiding them. The character designs are kind of a mixed bag... Onsokumaru is the mascot of the series and yeah having a yellow Geodude flying around being a pervert is at least one memorable iconic design choice. The suke ninjas arent much to write home about on their own but as a group theyre well designed for the kind of comedy they lend themselves to. On the other side of the coin we have the female designs which are kind of confusing? With characters like these you can usually stick to either relative anatomical correctness or straight up cartoony superdeformed chibi but the female characters in this show are stuck in a weird uncanny spot between the two... Anatomical bodies with large breasts with a cartoony roundness that makes them feel half chibi and these big heads that look like exaggerated blushing moe faces were slapped onto head sculpts from Sergeant Frog. The human ones not the frog ones. While the facial designs across the cast are rarely ever offmodel the bodies often are with crooked outlines and abnormal proportions whenever theyre seen from a slightly unconventional angle. Its fairly obvious this is supposed to be an ecchi showwell a PG13 one at any rate and the characters of both genders are often shown in skimpy attire... The ninjas in their loincloths and the girls in the occasional swimsuit/towel situations... But their anatomies feel so offputting with their plasticky shininess that I cant imagine the aesthetic having an effect on anybody other than the desperate Onsokumaru. The most realistic looking character is the dojos resident alligator which is a problem in and of itself. Take a lesson from The Princess and the Frog a friendly and intelligent alligator shouldnt look like a realistic alligator. Ill give them credit for being really creative with Onsakumarus shapeshifting and he does get the funniest facial expressions in the series but other than that it feels like they either didnt have a solid grasp on their own sense of visual direction or they were unable to figure out the right way to bring full colorful motion to the designs from the manga. Or both. It could be both. There arent that many songs in the soundtrack and the ones we do get are fairly repetitive throughout the series but much like the animation style the music also feels like it was inspired by Excel Saga albeit to a much smaller scale. The series is mostly quiet when it lets the comedy do the talking for itself but with the occasional themed track to denote a tonal shift... So again like Excel Saga but without the genre parody themes. The English dub is serviceable enough but the names attached might surprise you. The deep and gravelly voiced sex fiend Onsokumaru is played by Sean Schemmel AKA none other than motherfucking Goku in his least recognizeable role ever. If Shinobus charmingly sincere overacting feels familiar to you thats because her voice actor Emily Bauer has also enjoyed a long and fruitful career as Dawn from Pokemon as well as other various roles. I didnt love Meredith Zeitlin as Kaede I feel like Kari Wahlgren could have performed her a lot better but just to balance things out Veronica Taylor plays Shinobus precocious little sister and Taylor just improves everything shes cast in no cap. At this point Ive reviewed quite a few random nonsense gag comedy anime and Ive made my thoughts on them clear. This particular style of comedy has a very short shelf life and while its not impossible to keep them fresh for the length of a full series its really easy to lose steam and become dull. The longer a gag anime goes on the more familiar the audience becomes with its schtick and the more obvious the method behind the madness becomes making the series predictable. There are some shows that can pull this off knowing exactly how long to exploit a joke before killing it and knowing exactly when its the right time to shake things up and/or break reality but we cant all be Nichijou. When youre expected to throw out jokes at a breakneck pace its hard to balance the humor of the material and while theres always going to be an audience for shows like these only a niche fanbase is going to have the right set of standards and tastes to stick around for the long haul. Theres also a slim possibility of long term financial success and longevity which once again brings us back to Excel Saga. If youre not familiar with Shinichi Watanabe not to be confused with Shinichiro Watanabe hes an anime director whose MO is to take a manga that features a bizarre premise start out loyal to it and then veer off into various forms of nonfuckery with a set of preestablished characters who can be flanderized for maximum comedic effect. This is kind of genius as it takes wellwritten characters who still have leagues of development to go and exploits them to sell a far more casual and brainless product to the consumer as long as the manga itself isnt popular enough to spawn a massive backlash coughHayatecough. I dont really like Excel Saga but even I get the appeal of taking established and distinctive characters out of one creators work and forcing them to deal with the absurdities of another creator the possibilities are absolutely salivating. Nabeshin wasnt involved with Ninja Nonsense but it does feel like he inspired its production on some level as Ninja Nonsense does seemingly try to do the same thing. Right from episode one we have a normal girl being dragged out of her normal life by a chance encounter with a ninja and that ninja also comes from a sympathetic background as its made pretty clear shes being scammed and manipulated by a bogus martial arts dojo. Ill be honest its a damn good first episode. It sets up a lot of interesting conflicts and asks several intriguing questions. Will Kaede save Shinobu from her manipulators? Are Shinobus feelings for her genuine or a product of her sexualization? Are there secrets behind the dojo that are waiting to be uncovered? The answer is who cares because none of this is ever going to be brought up again. And sure Nabeshins work is similar in that regard but at least he occasionally sprinkles in material from the manga here and there to keep the plot relevant. Ninja Nonsense cant do that because and I cant believe Im actually listing this as a negative its way too faithful to the manga. Unlike all of Nabeshins financially successful but critically questionable output theres no unused or forsaken potential in Ninja Nonsense. These arent fleshed out characters being placed in a nonsensical gag comedy theyre nonsensical gag characters with nothing special to add to the comedy they were primarily written for. The comedy in Ninja Nonsense rarely ever feels like it had any thought put into it and instead of being detached enough from the bullshit to react to it in unique ways Shinobu and Kaede are pulled helplessly this way and that by the random whims of the writer. They add so little to the material that their actions often make no sense. Like twelve episodes in I still cant wrap my mind around the reason Shinobu and Kaede are friends. Dont get me wrong I know why Shinobu hangs out with Kaede... Shes clearly gay and has a crush on her... But why is Kaede so close to Shinobu? She has other friends at school we know that. Why does she start spending all of her time over at the dojo when theres nothing there she likes? When its hot out wouldnt she stay home in the air conditioning or invite Shinobu to an actual pool instead of accepting an invite to swim in a fucking kiddie pool outside the dojo? Do they have anywhere else to play badminton than on the dojos baseball field? What is she missing that draws her to a world she doesnt belong in where shes just going to be the resident tsundere? You could argue that shes tying to protect Shinobu from her pervy fellow ninjas but shed be a lot more active if that were the case. There is no characterization behind the comedy. The gags are largely random nonsequiturs which is an approach that really only works in small doses at the best of times and outside of overacting and random acts of violence character interactions have almost no diversity behind them at all. Remember in Strike Witches how the characters were so distinct that you could put any two of them together and theyd have an interaction that made perfect sense but only specifically between the two of them? Theres nothing like that here. Youll occasionally get a well timed joke but for the most part the jokes in this show are either too brief to register a response or they drag on for so long that they go from beating a dead horse to opening a glue factory. If youve ever had a pun war with your friends where something just happened involving an egg and you each take turns making some kind of egg related statement? Lets get cracking Thanks for helping me come out of my shell That was eggzillerating Why are you so eggstra? And the bit goes on so long that it just becomes eggzausting? There are so many extended bits in Ninja Nonsense that are like that and they do not fit the pace of the animation one bit. The comedy can be more overwhelming than funny whenever Onsakumaru and the Sasuke ninjas are involved with pervy jokes and random references flying past you too fast to register them but it does get slightly better when its just Kaede and Shinobu and maybe with Onsakumaru with them. They have a pretty familiar dynamic... An earnest and sincere teenage girl and her spunky protective best friend and a hormonal male sidekick. If iCarly were about becoming ninjas instead of internet stars and it didnt have so much gross foot fetish crap it would be pretty similar to Ninja Nonsense. The only real difference is that despite their differences its easy to tell why Carly and Sam are friends. They are dynamic defined characters who learn and grow together and yes I realized that I just praised fucking iCarly in an anime review. If that doesnt tell you just how little this classic anime comedy has to offer I dont know what will so let me jut leave you with the only good thing that came out of this show... A thirty second clip from AMV Hell 0. https://www..com/watch?v=bX9R2wxtkiY Ninja Nonsense was originally available from Nozomi entertainment and after it spent a few years out of print it would eventually be rescued by Rightstuf who still have a bluray edition available for a pretty decent price. The original manga is available stateside from Mediaworks and a sequel manga is available from Kadokawa. Before I drop my final score to this series Id like to very explicitly point out that this is all just my opinion. Humor is extremely subjective. I found this show pretty funny when it first came out in the mid 2000s and while I find it mostly unfunny now I still laughed a few times which is more than I can say for Shimoneta. Hell if I watched it again in a year I might find it hilarious I mean thats what happened with Ebiten. I have no trouble imagining someone binging Ninja Nonsense in a single setting and finding the whole series hilarious but that person isnt me and Im pretty sure I get the humor. I guess its possible that the comedy makes a lot more sense in Japanese... They have a lot of jokes in that language that dont translate very well to English hell the original title of the series is all the proof you need of that but my instincts are telling me this show is full of randomness and nonsequiturs down to its core with characters that just arent strongly written enough to stand out against an aimless story. I give Ninja Nonsense a 3/10.