Those not up to speed on the Miss Kobayashi manga may struggle with the full nuance of this dimension hopping anime, but the visuals are stunningly to look at
Y
ou know fantasy has a different constituency these days when, at a pivotal point in this candy-coloured, realm-hopping anime, the protagonist casts a spell that temporarily boosts local mobile-phone signal. During the climactic battle, it’s salarywoman Miss Kobayashi (voiced by Mutsumi Tamura) who is dialling up extra help from Kanna (Maria Naganawa), the moony, bobby-soxed poppet who’s one of the dragons in human guise that have invaded her life (and demanded a smartphone).
Kanna is very much sought after: with a big smackdown brewing between the forces of chaos and harmony in the dragon dimension, her father Kimun Kamui (Fumihiko Tachiki) turns up at Kobayashi’s flat to demand either his daughter return to fight, or give him the dragon orb into which she has loaded her manna. Offended by his saurian sangfroid, Kobayashi refuses to give Kanna up; when her posse start digging around in the other realm, it appears that human mage Azad (Nobunaga Shimazaki) has been stoking tensions between the two factions.
Presumably the Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid manga, which ran from 2013-2024, made much sport of the domestic tribulations of running a foster home for dragons. This feature-length take only has time for a promising comedy of manners in which Kobayashi, with her duty of care, tries to win over the blockheaded Kimun Kamui to a more human and paternal outlook. But her letter-writing campaign (as Kanna says: “Yeah, argument thread!”) is quickly eclipsed when she is sucked into dragon-land, and the obligatory power-engorged brawling begins. Never mind pleas for gentleness; clearly the trad fandom elements of the fantasy constituency are still too big to ignore.
