English Dub Season Review: Konohana Kitan Season One

Spirit foxes bring it home in the most charming anime of the season.

It’s curious to me that anime seems to function with a different metric for quality than other, more mainstream storytelling mediums. Never would I believe that a story about cute fox girls working at a spirit hotel giving warm life lessons every episode would be a compelling and quality TV show. Yet, throw that into an anime and see it come to life as a wondrous experience full of heart and soul; world, welcome Konohana Kitan.

Some shows try to shoot for the moon, but up there is dangerous territory, and for every great original experience like My Hero Academia, there’s another ambitious, but flawed anime like Kill la Kill that tries so hard, but doesn’t hit the mark. Konohana Kitan follows the reverse dynamic; keep the stories small, tight and closed. Every episode follows an open and shut form of meeting a new character, exploring a little bit more of this show’s world, and then finishing up with a warm mug of good feelings as it divulges a didactic, but charming moral. While this will also put it lower on my scale of quality than something like Lucky Star or Nichijou, which push themselves to lofty heights, I can respect Konohana Kitan for sticking the dismount on quality cute little show.

The core dynamic of this anime falls upon interactions between its cast and discoveries of its world through the eyes of Yuzu, the eternally endearing understudy of the fox spirits running the inn. She’s adorable, sincere, and doesn’t overstay her welcome. How easy it is for a character like her to overstay her welcome or become annoying, but Yuzu strikes a healthy middle ground of well-meaning clumsiness and growth that keeps her story chugging along until the final episode.

Unfortunately, I can’t say that the rest of the cast is particularly interesting, mostly because they don’t get a lot of screen time to develop their own stories. They’re not insulting or bothersome, just a bit meh. Characters like the uptight Satsuki or the motherly Kiri just feel like tropey cutouts we’ve seen in plenty of other anime. The cast takes a backseat to the parables and one-off characters each episode has to offer.

To that end, those parables make up the bread and butter of each show, and for the most part, these little stories are memorable and heartwarming. Each one can be evaluated on its own merit, of course, but I felt by the end of the season that each had contributed a little piece of the larger spiritual world that Konohana Kitan takes place in, and there was never any episode that left me feeling disappointed.

If you want a good show to watch this season, Konohana Kitan isn’t a bad place to start. While I don’t think anyone will say it’s their favorite anime or that it stands out from the crowd, it does what it tries to do pretty well. Its chicken soup on a rainy day, and to this reviewer, it’s just what the doctor ordered.

Score
8/10