The Spring 2023 Anime Preview Guide

Too Cute Crisis

The sci-fi comedy follows Liza Luna, who has been dispatched to Earth by the space empire Azatos. At first, she thought that it would be fine to destroy the Earth, since it has a low level of civilization. However, after stopping at a cafe, she encounters a cat and is shocked by her cuteness.

Too Cute Crisis is based on Mitsuru Kido's Kawaisugi Crisis (Too Cute Crisis) manga and streams on HIDIVE on Fridays.

Serviceable is the key word here. From the premise to the art to the execution, everything here is just solid enough to be enjoyable without ever breaking the barrier into exceptional or remarkable. You come for some cute anime cats, some jokes about how gosh-darned adorable the concept of cats is, and then you go about your regular day of scrolling social media and smiling at real-life cat pics. That's perhaps damning with faint praise, but I don't think Too Cute Crisis harbors many ambitions beyond going “squee” about kitties and doggies and all of the various animals we humans have turned into pets. Sometimes, that's all you need.

It's such a thin premise that this would have served better as a short. At five or even ten minutes, this would work as a cute little distraction or palette cleanser every week – not unlike all those Twitter accounts that are just pictures of randomly submitted pets. The art style is the exact kind of limited and simple you see in many shorts too. Yet at a full 22 minutes, it just drags. Unless you like seeing anime characters talk about how adorable and wonderful domestic animals are, there's nothing to liven up or diversify the comedy. You would get more variety of humor – and animals – by just searching “cats” on TikTok.

That said, as somebody who loves cats and currently lives somewhere that doesn't allow pets, I got some vicarious enjoyment from seeing these adorable little critters in their barely animated glory. It's far from the best cat-service of the season, but even mediocre cat drawings are pretty darn cute. In that respect, I enjoyed myself, and it was fun hearing the voice cast d'awwwww out over the cats and dogs (and panda) in this episode. So I don't regret watching this premiere, but I also probably won't remember it.

Liza Luna is my new hero. Sure, her show's just okay and probably would have made a better short, but when she fires an alien artillery blast down on the people who starved, abused, and abandoned a cat, she made the half-hour I spent watching Too Cute Crisis worth it. Liza, you can do the same to whoever tortured my dog for his first six years of life anytime.

The amazing catharsis of watching the heroine do what I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing upon animal abusers; this is a very okay show. The premise that aliens from the Azatoth Empire are surveying planets and have just shown up to decide whether or not Earth gets to stick around, a fate ultimately decided by Liza's newfound love of cute animals, is fun enough. Liza mistakenly wandering into a cat café – and the show not going for the low-hanging fruit by having her assume it's a café where one eats cats – is a decent hook, and her total meltdown when she encounters toe beans for the first time is one of several fun moments. The problems are largely two-fold: the art isn't up to the task of showing the intense cuteness Liza sees, and there's not enough plot to fill out a full half-hour. This really would have worked better as half-length episodes because the good moments get lost in the drawn-out nature of the whole.

Things don't pick up until the three-quarter mark when Liza and her new friends from the cat café, Seiji and Kasumi, find the abandoned and dying Scottish Fold cat in the rain. Up to that point, it's mostly Liza freaking out over new animals or new experiences with animals and trying to keep the cuteness all to herself because her captain, the awesomely named Mikitty Fulpurring, is likely to try to keep it all to himself. While watching her have a meltdown over a dog who shakes paws is fun, it isn't exactly enthralling. That said, it may be worth the old three-episode test because now that Liza has a kitty of her own, her adventures in cuteness may be much more targeted and take on the tone of cat manga like All About Kuru or Nights with a Cat. (Both of which are recommended reading for cat fans.) But even if the episode doesn't do it for you, stick around for the ending theme with pictures of what I'm hoping are the pets of people who worked on it. Even with four cats and a dog of my own, I never get tired of looking at pet pictures.

I know this is a comedy, and we're not supposed to take anything we see too seriously. But can I just say that this show has a decent sci-fi premise? Humans, being humans, are egotistical enough to believe that if aliens came to Earth, it would be because of us, like we are somehow special. This show's setup is basically that humans aren't special—not even a little. However, the diverse amount of life here is—in that the animals of Earth are generally far cuter than the life forms on an infinite number of other planets. If there is something unique to humans, it's that we are desensitized to the cuteness all around us; we don't turn into a pile of goo every time we see a cat's paw pads or play fetch with a dog.

The first episode centers around our alien invader, Liza, who is looking to see if there is any reason not to destroy our planet. At first, nothing seems worth protecting until she stumbles upon a cat café and learns that cats exist. Realizing that cats are the cutest life forms in the universe, she hesitates to report to her handlers. After all, who knows how they would react in the face of a cat's devastatingly adorable prowess?

This anime has one joke. Liza encounters an animal and freaks out about its cuteness overload. She does the same thing for each new thing she learns about the animal until she eventually passes out from over-stimulation. For one episode, it's funny enough. However, I can imagine that 12 episodes of this pattern will get old quickly. Hopefully, the addition of new characters and stories, like next week's episode about Liza being unable to leave her apartment now that she has a cat - will inject some new jokes into the plot. If not, animal lovers will probably be the only ones entertained by this show, even if no one else is.