LogFAQs > #970640259

BONUS. My Master Has No Tail
https://myanimelist.net/anime/49533/Uchi_no_Shishou_wa_Shippo_ga_Nai
Fall 2022 (13 episodes)
My Score: TBA, MAL Score: 6.71/10
Best Character: Mameda

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZr4vWg8YIQ

Premise: A young tanuki named Mameda wants to follow the tradition of tricking humans with her shapeshifting, but its difficult and dangerous in the modern era. She decides to learn rakugo instead, a storytelling art that can spellbind an audience.

The Good: My Master Has No Tail is a comedy about a cute tanuki girl named Mameda learning rakugo from a reluctant master, Bunko. I'll say up front that I know nothing about rakugo other than what this anime showed me. As I'll talk about in the bad section, I don't think this was a good introduction to the art form. I still appreciated the emotion that a few of the performances carried. Mameda was cute, and I liked moments like when she realized that sucking people into a rakugo story was essentially tricking them, which is her lifelong dream. The animation in this also at least wasn't terrible. Those are the only nice things I can say.

The Bad: Rakugo was obviously a big part of this, and it was terrible. I don't know how a normal rakugo performance should go. Maybe they actually are as great as the audience seems to think. My Master Has No Tail just couldnt capture any of that magic. One story was said to take exactly ten minutes, but the anime cut it down to one or two, which ruined the flow. There was always something else going on during the stories too, like a character's thoughts or some other situation that made the rakugo a secondary concern. To make up for this, there's a segment at the end of each episode where Mameda explains the rakugo story. The only thing worse than a poorly delivered humorous story is having someone painstakingly overexplain what the joke was supposed to be. Large parts of this anime are merely mediocre, no worse than the usual bargain bin show. The awful rakugo was what really dragged it down for me.

Overall: I only watched My Master Has No Tail because I felt like I should watch something else from this season and a cute tanuki girl seemed like it might be fun. Mameda was indeed the best part of the anime, but almost everything else was mediocre. All the other characters were annoying in different ways, especially two they introduced halfway through who had grating speech quirks (one girl spoke incredibly slowly, and another guy coughed after every word). I didn't expect this to be a new favorite, but I at least hoped it'd be a bland list-filler. Instead, thanks in large part to the awful rakugo, this will almost certainly be a new 2/10.