This review will be extremely short, not because the show lacks anything worth dedicating a detailed analysis on, but because no matter how much I elaborate on why it works, at the core of it all, the reasoning is so simple that it's almost unfathomable to think that so many creators are missing this key ingredient in their works. Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid is FUN, plain and simple.
That's it, that's the magical formula. It turns out that after all the overzealous attempts at trying to make "mature/2deep4u" anime to be accepted by a general audience, all it really takes to win people over, in the end, is less cynicism and more unadulterated fun.
Using the fish-out-of-water foundation for its story, the show introduces us to a bevy of mythical dragons that take on human forms. After stumbling around in a forest in a drunken stupor from one too many shots, 9-to-5 salary woman Kobayashi finds herself coming face-to-face with one of these dragons. Fast forward later and this dragon, named Tooru, is now her maid, and the rest is history.
What I love about this show is just how whimsical and lighthearted it treats everything. And when I say everything, I mean that quite literally. Cannibalism, excessive stalking, casual homosexuality, threatening to murder someone, devouring small critters like little morsels, causing mass destruction; every bizarre situation you could think of, the show manages to flip it into a hilariously "out there" situation. There isn't a moment that passes by where I wasn't laughing at the nonsense that occurred on screen. This is a show that effortlessly flies through slapstick scenarios like it's second nature, made all the funnier when accounting for the dragons themselves.
Each dragon has their own quirks and mannerisms. From the adorable goth loli Kanna to the grimdark stick-in-the-mud, Fafnir. What the show does so well is essentially taking all these simplistic personalities, dumping them into a container, shaking it up and just sitting back and view the kind of interaction that would occur when their personalities collide. It's the same method shows like K-On adopted, but here, I think it's even more successful, as it doesn't remain relatively grounded, instead choosing to give birth to the weirdest outcomes possible. As is the case with Fafnir, who, despite his stoic persona, turns out to be a hardcore otaku in the making, or with Kanna who exudes an extreme amount of enthusiasm, but with a facial expression that's complimented with a thousand-yard stare.
This anime is essentially a slice of life with kooky characters all being placed within a proverbial pinball machine, where every episode results in left-field eccentricities and small moments of endearment.
And really, there's nothing else for me to say here. If you've grown tired of all the bleak, overly-serious melodrama and just want FUN in your anime again, this title is a must-watch. A show that carves something out for itself without all the overt cynicism usually associated with the "cute girls" trend.
