The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

A Girl & Her Guard Dog

Isaku never asked to be the daughter of a yakuza boss, but when her parents died in a car accident when she was 5, her gangster grandfather took her in and raised her as part of the clan. After years of being avoided by her schoolmates because of her family ties, Isaku is finally ready to make her high-school debut, live a normal life, and maybe even find love...until loyal family servant and Isaku's dedicated guardian, 26-year-old Keiya, enters high school right alongside her and vows to protect her from all of the above. Now she's got a chain-smoking, pistol-wielding knight-in-shining-armor to deal with.

A Girl & Her Guard Dog is based on a manga of the same name by Hatsuharu. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Ah, yes, A Girl and Her Guard Dog is the series based on the manga I keep reading, even though every time I read a new volume, I ask myself, “Why am I reading this?” But it's got a weirdly addictive quality, mostly due to its bizarre combination of being appealingly awkward and very definitely off-putting. To see why, look no further than the early scene where Keiya tells five-year-old Isaku that he'll be her mother, father, and brother all in one; at this point, she internal monologues about how she thinks that's when she first fell in love with him. Whatever works for you, Isaku, but that wouldn't make my top ten list of most romantic lines.

Fortunately, the main story starts ten-odd years later, when Isaku is about to begin her first year of high school. She's chosen a school an hour away from home because her yakuza grandfather's profession has made it very difficult for her to make friends. She'd like to have a typical high school experience (as much as those are ever “normal”) both because she'd like friends and because she's trying to get over her crush on Keiya. She, at least, recognizes that falling for a guy at least ten years older than you who also raised you and is a yakuza may not be her healthiest option. But all plans go awry when Keiya shows up in uniform at school because nothing screams “overprotective,” like a grown-ass man who decides to fake being a high school student to protect the girl he's not in love with. (Bizarrely, this is one of two recent shoujo manga series that use the “adult man goes to high school” plot; the other is Lightning and Romance by Rin Mikimoto). Isaku's horror is entirely justified because he's at risk of derailing both of her goals.

With the age gap romance and wife-raising tropes set aside, there still isn't much to recommend based on episode one. The art has a lot of oddities, from the bent lower portion of the eyeball in profile to the fact that Isaku has one of the most egregious cases of “heroine face” that I can recall seeing; none of the other girls have character designs that even look like they came from the same artist. (The less said about Keiya's dead-eyed look, the better.) The plot also feels simultaneously rushed, and like it's dragging; things happen, but they aren't emphasized enough to feel significant. Since one of Isaku's stated goals is to make friends, wouldn't you think they'd spend more time on her getting to know the girls in her class? Not this show! Nope, it's Keiya being overprotective all the time because that's so clearly romantic. This is just all kinds of awkward; even if you don't find the central premise off-putting, the execution is a good enough reason to stay away.

I don't know if there's a “right” way to write a romance between a 26-year-old and a 15-year-old, but there are a hell of a lot of wrong ways, and they're all here in this episode. Admittedly, I'm throwing a lot of stones in my glass house full of 100 Girl Friends volumes, but at least when that series pairs its high-schooler protagonist with full-grown adults, it has the good sense to be funny about it. While this premiere does mine some humor from Isaku's exasperation with the grown-ass man who's disguised himself as her classmate to “guard” her, it mostly plays her relationship with Keiya for sentiment, and that's a recipe for creeping me out for half an hour.

It certainly doesn't help that the art and animation have all the flare of wet sandpaper. The animation is stiff and minimal in a way that sterilizes the ostensibly sweet moments between our leads and saps all the energy out of any jokes. The real kicker, though, is the character designs are just bad to look at. Every guy has these unsettling dead eyes that make them look like empty husks, especially the supposedly hot Keiya, who looks like somebody stuck a boy band singer into a taffy stretcher. Meanwhile, Isaku constantly looks on the edge of tears, pouting through every scene that doesn't involve her yelling in a way that's more reminiscent of a sad puppy than a human. Also, there's a weird bend to her eyeballs when shown in profile that's genuinely upsetting. It's just a total visual misfire that makes the central romance much more unpleasant.

Even if you're fine with the age-gap fantasy here, there's just no spark between these two. Isaku's major hang-ups are being shy around new people, and Keiya's basically her adopted parent who pouts whenever his not!daughter is making friends outside of him. He's also uncomfortably protective about boys in the way over-the-top sitcom dads have been for decades, which makes the eventual romance between them even creepier. By the time he cuddles her in bed and whispers in her ear, even if you don't care about the age gap, their relationship feels invasive and controlling. This would be possessive, red-flag behavior no matter their ages, yet the show plays it for unsuccessful titillation or cute romance.

This is a cheap, ugly production delivering a premise that's dead on arrival. Perhaps this works better in the manga, where I assume the characters have life in their eyes and don't come across as total ciphers. But here, as an anime? Total non-starter on all fronts.

Ah, yes. Another “yakuza princess” story. On one hand, I get it. This sub-genre basically takes a romance fantasy story between a noble lady and her knight and transposes it into the modern day by setting it within a yakuza family. On the other hand, a crime boss isn't a king and a group of murderous street thugs aren't exactly an order of honorable knights. The yakuza aren't some virtuous group of people. They're criminals—regardless of how popular Japanese media often romanticizes them.

On one hand, A Girl & Her Guard Dog is at least willing to acknowledge this—to reflect that, in the real world, few normal people would want their children to associate with a child whose family could have theirs killed or worse. But on the other, that doesn't change the fact that Isaku is the typical yakuza princess trope in full—the whole “woe is me because my family is affluent crime lords and I just want to be normal” bit while being surrounded by violent guys who “really aren't that bad.”

That said, the good thing about A Girl & Her Guard Dog is that being a yakuza princess isn't her real problem. While the circumstances of her birth are a hurdle to overcome, the real problem lies within her personality. From a young age, Isaku has used Keiya for all her social needs. He's been a father, friend, and brother to her. She knows this is unhealthy for her but is still ridiculously attached to him. Yet, even knowing this, she blames him and her familial circumstances for her social isolation instead of herself. Even in her new school, she doesn't put herself out there—she doesn't introduce herself or join in conversations. She just puts her head down on her desk and sulks.

It's only when Keiya effortlessly interacts with the rest of the class that she realizes nothing will magically change on its own. If she wants friends, she's going to have to work for it—truly fight to break out of her shell rather than simply blame Keiya or her family. And unsurprisingly, her efforts almost immediately bore fruit.

When the sporty kids of her class see how hard she has been practicing volleyball for their sake, they immediately warm up to her. It doesn't matter that she is terrible compared to them because they truly understand both the power of hard work and what it is like to be a beginner. Moreover, her efforts cause them to want to do their best as well. It all makes for a story with a good moral for anyone out there who struggles socially: that you have to take risks and put yourself out there to have any chance of changing things.

And as for A Girl & Her Guard Dog's other central aspect—the age gap romance between a 16-year-old girl and the 26-year-old man who raised her… well, let's just say there's a reason that this show only gets 2 stars from me.

I'm not going to lie: I wasn't even that mad at A Girl and Her Guard Dog's ridiculously inappropriate and illegal romantic setup. It's not good, obviously, and I don't like it, personally. At this point, though, when it comes to these intentionally shocking romance setups, I'm not about to froth up a whole bunch of anger or disgust when the show is aimed at an audience that knows what they want, and that wants the crass, taboo-breaking edge that comes with a story about a girl who ends up falling for the fully-grown man who has been raising her since she was in kindergarten. Whatever, right? More power to you, I guess. It ain't my kink, but these kinds of saucy romantic fantasies have been lining the shelves for decades. The audience is there, and far be it from me to deny these good folks their hard-earned trash. Lord knows that I've rummaged through my fair share of proverbial dumpsters in my time as an anime fan.

No, what ended up making me mad was when A Girl and Her Dog started trying to be a wacky cartoon comedy, complete with all of the goofy reaction faces and cutesy gags that the show could cram into all of the scenes that don't lovingly linger on the shots of tiny little Isaku being cradled by her adoptive brother/father/crush/classmate/bodyguard that is fully twice her age. There are a heck of a lot of words that you could use to describe this kind of trashy, borderline-incestuous age-gap/groomer romance, but “cute” and “hilarious” are not the ones that I ever would have picked, and for good reason.

Do you know what puts a damper on my breezy high-school sitcoms? A romantic dynamic that has me reaching for the Child Protective Services Hotline whenever the main characters are within fifty feet of each other. And, even if I was a part of the series' target demographic, what would kill the vibe of the steamy, forbidden love that is so clearly going to develop between Isaku and Keiya? All of the dumb and not-very-funny sitcom shenanigans. You know, there's absolutely a version of A Girl and Her Guard Dog that could maybe work as a straight comedy; like, if Keiya was only ever framed as her platonically overprotective and terrifying bodyguard who is attempting to pass as a teenager at Isaku's school? I don't know, that could make for a decent set of gags in the right hands. Combining a mediocre comedy with a deeply uncomfortable romance, though, makes both halves of the premise even weaker than they would be on their own. This one is a hard pass, for me.