The Fall 2014 Anime Preview Guide

Gonna be the Twin-Tail!!

Nick Creamer

Rating: 1.5

Soji loves twintails and so does this show. This episode opens with him obsessing over all the girls with twintails (pairs of matching ponytails) at his high school's opening assembly. Then he goes home, where he and his tsundere twintail childhood friend (really stacking those tropes deep) run into a lady who keeps a pager in her boobs. She informs Soji that unless he takes action, all twintails will vanish from the world. Spurred to fight, Yuji accepts her transforming bracer, which turns him into the twintailed hero of justice Tailred, who fights the twintail-absorbing Elemelians.

Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! has close to the least reason for existing out of any show I've seen. It's essentially one joke - “what if twintails were, like, super important or something?” - stretched out over twenty minutes. Its existence is basically predicated on being a vehicle for lines like “She is unquestionably the strongest twintail bearer in the world” and “I have finally learned the true strength and beauty of twintails!” This joke actually does contain about two to three minutes’ worth of humor potential, but this is an entire anime series - because of that, this episode dives from mild amusement to tedium within its first quarter, surfacing only occasionally with silly gags like the lizardman who loves giving stuffed animals to girls. The show is very self-aware, but that self-awareness doesn't really lead to any actual jokes - and at this point, self-awareness is kind of the default for shows like this. Most of the show's other jokes are either “people get hit by things” or “boobs.”

In spite of its questionable reason for existing, Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! does exhibit a surprisingly real amount of animation in this first episode. The fight between Tailred and lizardman isn't particularly well-choreographed (it's basically a standard sentai fight - a lot of this show seems to be riffing on sentai cliches), but it does look nice enough. The character designs are crisp, the direction is fair enough. But in the end, I'm really just left baffled as to how a show like this will manage to fill an entire season's worth of episodes.

Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! is available streaming at Funimation.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 3 (out of 5)

Sometimes a show doesn't have to be particularly smart or clever to be a whole lot of fun. Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! is just such a show. Its premise is remarkably silly – Soji, a high school first year, is totally obsessed with girls who wear two pigtails. Actually, it's not entirely certain whether it's the hair he loves or the girls, but in any event, he is fanatical about them – unless his best buddy Aika is wearing them. Her, he can pass by, possibly because she is small-breasted. In any event, Soji is not the only one who loves a head of hair parted down the middle – alien invaders are coming to Earth to remove the twin-tails from girls everywhere, along with the very desire to wear them in the first place! Luckily for pigtails everywhere, Soji has been recruited by a (very busty) mysterious lady named Twoearle. Twoearle, through much double-entendre, tells Soji that the power to fight the giant lizardman aliens if only he'll put on her suspicious bracelet. When Soji does, he becomes a twin-tailed girl himself – Tailred, Warrior of Justice!

To say that this is dumb fun is to state the obvious. As the somewhat underclad Tailred, Soji has no idea how much power he has, and watching him stumble his way to a decisive victory is much more entertaining than it might otherwise have been. He takes his transformation in stride, with no fussing or self-groping, and really, one gets the feeling that he kind of enjoys being a cute pigtailed girl. The character design is frankly adorable, and while the flaming hair – it features lots of shifting, kaleidoscopic colors – is gimmicky, it works well for the show. Twoearle is probably the weakest part of the episode for me. The double-entendres aren't particularly funny and her apparent belief that her boobs are what makes her special (and that Aika's lack of large ones makes her less of a girl) is annoying, but that could just be me. At least the only breast grabs in this episode are her thrusting her own bosom at Soji, something that perhaps shouldn't be a nice change, but nonetheless is.

The art, as I mentioned, is quite cute, with all of the characters showing different figures and variations on the twin tail theme. Soji as a boy is the least remarkable character design, but one gets the feeling he'll be a girl more oft than not. The colors are manically bright, which works very well, and there's a sort of frenetic feeling to the animation for the battle scenes that keeps you watching. Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! is pure, silly entertainment. It doesn't strive to be more than that in its first episode, and because of that, it succeeds in being a good break when you just need something fun.

Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! is available streaming on Funimation.

Theron Martin

Rating: 1 (of 5)

Review: Soji adores the twin-tails look on girls, to the point that he entirely defines his interest in girls based on whether or not they sport them. When a sexy woman approaches him and insists that he needs to put on a special bracelet, he is reluctant until she explains that the fate of all twin-tails is dependent on it. It seems that aliens have come to Earth to steal away the twin-tails of girls (or, more precisely, the energy “element” that is apparently inherent in having twin-tails), including those of the student council president, whose tails Soji admires greatly. He won't stand for that, so he uses the bracelet to transform into a twin-tailed warrior and use the power of his (now her) twin-tails to. . .

Oh, gods, stop. Please.

What this new light-novel-based series was undoubtedly aiming for was to be a spoof on one of the most prevalent visual tropes in anime: the long twin-tailed hair look, perhaps even a semi- or outright parody along the lines of a Date A Live. In execution, however, the concept is so unbelievably, mind-numbingly stupid that getting any enjoyment out of it requires active suppression of the gag reflex. This is a plot element which would seem more at home in an episode of My Little Pony or a purely-kiddie-fare magical girl tale, not late night anime. Even then the content might have still been passable if it had actually been funny or sported good artistry or technical merits, but the first episode has none of those. It offers a bit of mild fan service in the Twoearle character (the sexy lady), but again, nowhere near enough. In fact, the episode's only redeeming trait is that Soji has to gender-swap, Kämpfer-style, to go into his Tailred combat form. (Since the bracelet attunes to the wearer's wishes, presumably it's turning him into his ideal image?) Oh, and I suppose that the Tailred combat suit is somewhat sharp, too.

But that's not enough to prevent this one from getting the lowest rating of the season from me. Even dumb fun should show more intelligence and creativity than this soulless drivel.

Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! is currently streaming on Funimation.com.

Hope Chapman

Rating: 1.5

Soji loves twin-tails! He loves twin-tails so much that he completely ignores the girls and even the boobs on the girls that are attached to them! (Just kidding: he freaks out about the boobs, but only after they're forced into his face in a way that only happens in bad anime comedies and nowhere else.) His childhood friend has twin-tails and the student council president has twin-tails and freshman Soji is looking forward to spending his high school days surrounded by a flurry of twin-tails. Just to be clear, we're talking about double ponytails, or "pigtails," as I grew up calling them. We're talking about a hairstyle. Literally, it's just a hairstyle that they've built this entire show around. But moving on...

A beautiful (alien?) girl named Twoearle appears before Soji and tells him the earth's twin-tails are in danger! A race of completely generic reptile-aliens and their army of putties have come to earth to take the earth's twin-tail powers by passing a magical ring over twin-tailed girls that removes their hairstyle and makes them forget they ever loved it in the first place! (This plot device attributes a lot more affection for one hairstyle to its wearers than I've ever seen from actual girls. The ones who love to do their hair play with lots of different styles, and the ones who don't just plain don't care. Twin-tails are the easiest "style" in the world to do, but they make you look like you're five, so--I'm getting off-topic.)

Soji wants to avert this tragedy so he pushes through Twoearle's show-padding tendency to turn everything into a limp double entendre and accepts the power to fight for twin-tails everywhere. Naturally, this power turns him into a genki lolita (complete with chirpy female VA, which ruins the potential comedy in letting him keep his man-voice.) He defeats the aliens, who wanted nothing more than to make him pose with cute stuffed animals while wearing his twin-tails. (Sometimes they just steal the power of girls' hairstyles, and sometimes they want them to pose for a photoshoot. It's not really clear why, but it sure isn't funny!) With the help of his twin-tailed comrades, Soji is out to defend the power of twin-tails everywhere!

Oh, I forgot. At some point in all of that, Soji's mother tells his childhood friend that she should give him a blowjob and that also counts as a joke, I guess.

So this is a parody that isn't funny at all, in either a gentle or a biting way. It's "parody" only by a very loose definition, and the fact that it's shabbily animated doesn't help much either. It substitutes cliche devices for nonsensical ones in a sort of Mad Magazine meets Mad Libs way, but otherwise it's just literally following the tired formula it's supposedly mocking. Date A Live, probably its closest spiritual relative, was more unusual and satirical than this, and it didn't seem like it was even meant to be a parody to me (but this is up for debate). Whatever Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! is trying to do, it's not succeeding. You just feel secondhand embarrassment from watching it and that's basically the beginning and end of the conversation. It's pointless and lame and you should check out something funnier like Kokkuri-san, Supernatural Battles, or even Parasyte. Frankly, Cross Ange is more likely to make you laugh than anything in Gonna be the Twin-Tail!!

Gonna be the Twin-Tail!! is available streaming at Funimation.