#1 The shallow concept
Mitsuboshi Colors is a slice-of-life anime about the mundane activities of three, little girls. And that’s all it really is.
The show is the stereotypical example of a SOL anime and does nothing to break away from that. The girls have their own club and fancy themselves the defenders of their city, but this is just a plot device to get them running around their prefecture to be mischievous. There is no real gimmick or selling point, which really began to weigh on me as I tried to work through its 12 TV-length episodes.
Sure, not every slice-of-life anime needs some major gimmick, but those that don’t generally sell themselves on the characters, which is also not the case here. You have a hyperactive tomboy, an easily flustered crybaby that often gets left behind, and a blue-haired girl that is always playing on her 3DS and talking about video games. They are decent characters, but severely lacking in depth and this leads to them being outshined by side-characters all the time.
#2 Too much cringe
I’ll be the first to admit that I did have a few laughs throughout the show. It has a few good scenes and some of its best jokes hit fast and unexpectedly. It’s just a shame that these were scarce throughout the anime as a whole, and attempted jokes that just felt awkward were much more in common.
Sat’s repeated poop-related gags were an obvious contender, but there were many others segments with jokes that just felt random or forced. Comedy is always going to be subjective, but I watched this at a marathon with several people and the silence after some scenes was just weird. The absolute nadir of the show happens when the girls are at a fish market and the entire joke is that Sat goes around asking all the vendors if they sell fish poop.
#3 Everything is rotoscoped
I am not usually somebody who talks much about the noble art of anime background designs, unless it’s either really good (see Non Non Biyori) or so awful it makes the eyes bleed. Considering the type of article, you can probably guess in which category Mitsuboshi Colors goes.
I love rotoscoping as a technique and find it a fascinating practice, but not when I need to look at it for the duration of a seasonal anime series. The rotoscoped backgrounds stand out way too much and because it looks so ugly and weirdly realistic, it’s yet another factor that distracts from the actual characters and events of the show. Some scenes do use traditionally drawn backgrounds, which just made the sudden switches to rotoscoped settings all the more jarring.
