The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

The Demon Prince of Momochi House

The orphan Himari Momochi receives a will detailing her inheritance on her 16th birthday. She goes to the Momochi family estate, which turns out to be on the border between the real and spirit worlds. There, she's attacked by a demon, but is saved by a mysterious, shapeshifting man named Aoi.

The Demon Prince of Momochi House is based on a manga of the same name by Aya Shouoto. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

ANN received a screener for this episode and is able to post these reviews early!

On the surface, it's probably very easy to watch this first episode with no manga knowledge and find similarities to shōjo stories like Fruits Basket. After all, Himari Momochi does show up at Momochi House as a plucky orphan heroine to find it already inhabited by three hot guys, one of whom is naked. But take it from a manga reader that this is something entirely different, and a story that owes more to folkloric titles than to romance ones (although there is a romance plot), something that we only just begin to see here.

That's not for lack of trying, of course; the pace feels much more rushed than the manga, likely in service of getting the big reveal about Momochi House and Aoi's role in it out of the way, as well as establishing the probability of Aoi and Himari as a couple. It isn't so fast that it feels like we're missing something, but it does feel like there's a driving need to get a specific baseline met in a regular-length first episode. Mostly, this results in not getting a good feel for Aoi and Himari as characters. We know that Himari is determined (she's looking for ways to ensure they can't boot her out) and that Aoi is caring (he's very invested in Himari's well-being), but these are all surface-level observations. There's time to get deeper into them, but it doesn't do much to help this episode stand out.

Fortunately, this is still very interesting. Questions of why Momochi House needed a caregiver are certainly there, but why should it be Aoi, who isn't a Momochi rather than Himari? Does it have something to do with the kumonyudo wanting to eat the "Momochi blood" he was promised? Did Momochi House's denizens kill Himari's parents? And what is this omamori-sama form that Aoi takes on when dealing with ayakashi? If Himari is determined to stay, these are all things she will have to figure out, and since she's left the orphanage where she grew up, staying likely is one of the few options she has.

The art looks much better than previews led me to believe, without a lot of the glowy filters that stood to give viewers mild headaches. It isn't a gorgeous adaptation of the original manga art, but some of the details, particularly in terms of traditional Japanese art, look beautiful, and I like the juxtaposition between modern anime pretty and muted traditional lushness. As a fan of the source material, I'm happy enough with this first episode to give it a chance.

The word of the day is "serviceable." While there's nothing particularly wrong with this premiere (though it does lose half a point for the weird shading on the heroine's eyelashes that make it look like she has tiny, pointed teeth poking out of them), there's not much remarkable either. Across its runtime, we hit the expected genre and character beats, are introduced to a series of familiar personalities, and witness some moderately animated supernatural action. If that's damning with faint praise, it's because the episode leaves only a faint impression.

There's not anything "wrong" with this premiere, outside of rather stiff action and the aforementioned weird eyelashes. The character designs are nice enough, but so plain and archetypal that you can tell everything you need about each personality before they do anything. You've got the brash red one, the haughty purple one, the kind and emotional main love interest, and our spunky heroine. You can probably imagine everything any of them will say or do, even without subtitles. The hook of an ayakashi-infested house and Aoi transforming into a handsome fox spirit is similarly familiar and delivered about as plainly as can be, including the somewhat sappy found family angle. All of that is delivered with just enough competency to get the point across, but never with enough emphasis to make you feel it.

That's the Achilles heel of this whole premiere. The presentation is functional, but so plain and frill-less that it never really grabs you or demands your attention. Himari's desire for a family, her burgeoning connection with the ayakashi, and Aoi's mysterious connection to her are all solid hooks. Still, none of them sink in because they're explained rather than demonstrated. Himari can tell us about wanting to connect with her absent parents and find a family, but she never feels particularly broken up about any of it. Without a more intimate or personal connection to these characters, those ideas don't land. So, with only genre staples to lean on, nothing about the characters leaves any impact. There's nothing awful here, but there's also nothing I want to see more of.

It was only a few minutes in when our 16-year-old heroine gawked at a naked young man that I knew I was in no way the target audience for this show. And by the time the ending credits rolled (with a song that gave me flashbacks to a Klingon boy band), the whole show felt like a big bundle of clichés and little more.

Tell me if you've heard this one before. A "normal girl" (read: "girl with hereto unknown special powers") finds herself thrown into a situation where she is not only surrounded by attractive men but quickly becomes the center of their world. Of course, they all treat her coldly at first—though in different ways. One seems polite yet distant, one is passively aggressively standoffish, and one is full of bluster and straight-up rude. However, in the end, they accept her into their newly co-ed living situation.

Aside from the clichés, I will admit there may be something deeper here. The orphan backstory and the dubious nature of the will that convinces Himari to move to the woods in the first place implies a rival group of yokai and humans working behind the scenes. Likewise, how a human-like Aoi came to have yokai powers could make for an interesting enough story. But the fact is that the vast majority of the episode is in no way interesting to my eyes. I won't be coming back for a second episode, but I hope those who enjoy this story will be entertained.

Friends, have you ever had a Fruits Basket-shaped hole where your hearts should be since the remake of that landmark fantasy romance finished its run a couple of years back? Well, do I have good news for you, because The Demon Prince of Momochi House is here to fill that void! I don't know how much of that void is getting filled, because the show is not very good, but any oasis in a desert, am I right?

Okay, maybe I'm not being entirely fair here, since Demon Prince of Momochi House is far from a 1:1 Fruits Basket ripoff. For one, Tohru, the heroine of Fruits Basket, came from a life filled with tragedy and was stuck living in a tent in the middle of the woods before happening upon the Sohma house. Here in Demon Prince, our protagonist Himari lost her parents to…something, and she inherited the Momochi House for…some reason, after doing…whatever she did for the previous sixteen years of her life. Also, in Fruits Basket, the Sohma House was filled with a trio of fascinating and diverse young men who all secretly lived as avatars for the animals of the Chinese Zodiac, hence all of the fantastical shenanigans!

In Demon Prince, Himari discovers that the Momochi House is occupied by a trio of barely characterized cardboard cutouts whose most distinguishing features are their flamboyantly coiffed hairstyles and they're…demons, I guess? Or, like, guardian spirits? Either way, they fight spooky monsters, which is the point. See? Demon Prince of Momochi House is totally doing its own thing, here.

Look, in all honesty, I wouldn't mind so much that this show felt so shamelessly derivative in its opening episode if there was some life to it, you know? Even just a little spark of genuine creative spirit and charm goes a long way toward making me happy to ignore a story that isn't trying very hard to differentiate itself from its famous forbears. However, The Demon Prince of Momochi House feels more bored with its premise than I felt watching the darned thing. It just goes through the motions of getting Himari into the house and interacting with her cute new roommates without even so much as pretending that it cares about making any of them feel like real, likable people who would be worth following for a dozen weeks or so. Outside of some decent action at the very end of the episode, nothing that happens in the story is very interesting, either, which gives the audience very little to latch on to. The exact instant you look away from your screen and start thinking about literally anything else, it vanishes without a trace from memory. It's the very definition of an Anime That Doesn't Exist.