Anime Review: Bananya

Do you love cats? Great, because that’s all that you get in this anime. Do you love bananas? Great, because that’s all that you get to accompany the cats in this anime. This is literally, exactly as the description of the anime suggests, an anime about cats that reside in bananas. Ho boy, I think I’ve lost the plot now. Still, at 3 minutes per episode, you can’t really complain much for the rather cute depictions of cats in bananas, even if it’s one of the stranger concepts I’ve uncovered on Crunchyroll as of late.

Overview

Review

Story

The story in Bananya is really relatively simple: We live through watching Bananya creatures, which are just cats in banana peels. We just watch them through their lives, through their various personalities and their simple stories about themselves. From the main Bananya who wants nothing more than to be covered in chocolate and one of the sweetest bananas around, to the pretty girl Bananya who loves to keep herself looking her best. We just watch them and observe how these creatures survive and stay together.

Artwork and Animation

The animation is relatively smooth, it’s clean and it’s quite stylised. That’s kind of all that can be said about the animation. It’s not meant to be anything more than nice to look at, as generally speaking, this is a kids show. The most animation you’ll really see is one of the Bananya jumping from place to place, or falling over to get some sleep. Other than that, there’s very little in the way of animation. It’s just meant to be cute and fun, which it delivers through a minimalistic approach.

As always, we believe that art is subjective, so if you’re a fan of all that is kawaii, then this might be the anime for you. It’s incredibly simplistic, so much so that I feel that it makes chibi look detailed. One thing to note; It’s seemingly less detailed than Hamtaro at times… But there was a thin veil of a plot in Hamtaro. I guess the time difference in episodes is the main culprit of this.

Sound

There’s not much to say about the sound, as really all we get is the sound of the occasional squeak as one of the Bananya jumps about. We also get someone saying “Nya?” quite a bit and a narrator, who is the only real clarity of the anime. But there’s little else to expect from such a cute show. The jingle is nearly non-existent, sadly… But click on the YouTube video above in order to get an idea of how it sounds.

Overall

Well that was a show now wasn’t it ladies and gentlemen? Okay, it’s not all bad – the sound quality is really good, even if it is literally just one man chatting to you, people saying “nya” a lot and, you know, the sound of a squeaky toy as the banana kitties bounce around the place. I guess there’s very little else you’d expect from a show which is about cats that live inside of banana peels, but hey ho, that’s what you get when you pay to watch anime on Crunchyroll. A rather mixed bag… But in future, I don’t think I’ll let these cats out of the bag. At least we got the comforting images of adorable real life cats at the end. But now it’s over to you. Have you seen Bananya? Is this the sort of anime that you’re interested in? Do the short episodes help with this, or is the lack of any real plot detremental to it? As always, let us know what you think in the comments below, or over on Facebook, Twitter or Reddit.