Renaissance Josei

Osamu Tezuka, Eiichi Yamamoto, and the rest of the staff at Mushi Productions had nothing but high hopes for the Animerama film series when it started.  They believed they could produce a film as lavishly animated as anything that had come out of Toei with cutting-edge content to boot.  In some ways, it felt like a return to the early days of the studio.  Just as before, though, those hopes were dashed by the realities and complications of making a feature-length animated feature.   The production of A Thousand and One Nights was marked by uncertainty, experimentation, indulgence, and chaos.   Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film isn’t how it looks or the story it tells, but that the end result turned out so well in spite of its origins.

There are many reasons behind what shows I choose to cover for Disaster Report.  Sometimes it may be due to its distasteful, even controversial content.  Perhaps it's because the show is poorly produced or adapted.  Occasionally it's because a show has a reputation for badness. Sometimes, though, you just randomly come across a show with a premise that demands you watch it, if simply to verify that such a thing actually exists.  That's the situation I found myself in when Anime Herald editor and bad anime connoisseur Samantha Ferreria brought up a long-forgotten harem series from 2001.  From the moment I heard the premise and saw its immensely cheap and shoddy opening, I knew I had to review it. After all, how could I resist a show about a hapless loser who gets a harem of girls who are both guardian angels and reincarnations of his dead pets with a dopey, childish title like Angel Tales ?