Moetan

Information of Anime

Ink Nijihara has a crush on an old childhood friend, Nao Tezuka.  Nao is an otaku who does poorly in English.  Because of his ways, Ink has problems approaching him when she manages to build up some courage to go up to him.  Learning that Nao may not be able to go to university, Ink prays that he will manage to get into university.  From there, she meets Ahiru no Arcs, a mage from the Magical Kingdom who is sent to the human world in the form of a duck as his punishment.  Ah gives Ink the powers to become a magical girl.  As magical teacher Pastel Ink, Ink uses this power to help Nao study English & help people in trouble.

Storyline (CONTAINS SPOILERS)

Below is a summary of the storyline I've seen.  If you haven't seen the series yet & don't want to be spoiled, skip this section.  If you want to know the story & want to see how I viewed it, read on.

Given the powers of becoming magical teacher Pastel Ink, Ink uses it to get close to Nao by helping him with his English grades every night.  Although she uses it to help him, the main purpose of the powers is to help people in trouble.  By helping those in need, she gains points from the magical world committee.  These points help Ah return to the magical kingdom once he reaches to a certain amount.  However, Ark believes this so-called trial is sent up by someone behind the scenes & has another purpose.  He notices this when he finds Karts in the human world in cat form.  Karts would later have Ink's rival, Sumi Kuroi, magical girl powers that transforms her into Tempera Sumi.

The story manages to pick up even though the show introduced Alice Shiratori midway.  The Magical Kingdom is in trouble as time is out of order.  This also affects the human world as it is linked to the Magical Kingdom.  Pastel Ink & Tempera Sumi then enter the Magical Kingdom to prevent this from happening.

Entering the Magical Kingdom, the Black Darkness is almost completing her goal to destroy both worlds.  The truth is known from Arcs that the Black Darkness was sealed inside of Alice many years ago as it was the only solution at the time.  Because of Arcs' obsession for small flat breasts, the Black Darkness was set free due to Alice's depression of having large breasts.

More shocking answers appear as the man call Dandy in the human world is actually the king of Magical Kingdom in disguise.  The punishment for Arcs & Karts are removed & Pastel Ink & Tempera Sumi combine their last of their powers to defend the Black Darkness by making Arcs a giant duck.  The arc ends well with time being back in order.

The final two episodes focuses on Ink, Nao, & Sumi getting ready for the university entrance exams.  Despite losing their magical powers, Ink continues to teach Nao English in disguise with Sumi joining in to strengthen her weak English skills.  In the meantime, Alice continues her idol work in the human world & Dandy appoints Mio into a magical girl with new enemy named Shizuku appearing.

The show ends with Ink, Nao, & Sumi passing their exams & entering the same university together.

Another episode was created on DVD only.  It's almost a spin off where Magical Mio & her rival Magical Shizuku got to another world where Pastel Ink (a different one) is captures by the enemy Nao.  Designed by the "production" staff who felt the show was a failure, the story has Nao trying to take over the world with his lolicon fetish.  In the end, the world is saved with some robot combining action.

My Personal Review

Moetan is a pretty interesting show.  Not only does it uses the anime & otaku culture to teach English, it uses the principles of loli & ecchi as well.  If you are somewhat disturbed with partial nudity or ecchi scenes on loli sized girls, you may want to stay away from this.

Animation

The character designs are a bit strange.  They look cute, but for some reason a bit plain & boring.  This mainly applies to the loli-sized girls' faces.  It's pretty strange.  The school uniforms are pretty unique & cute in their own way.  It's strange that some of the girls' uniforms are different in some way.  Ink's uniform has her sleeves exposing her shoulders to the elbow & huge buttons on the side of her dress.  Sumi's uniform has completed long sleeves & big zippers on the side of her dress.  These uniforms give the characters' their own cuteness factor.  As for the magical girl uniforms, it does have the appearance of a magical girl, but it's a bit plain & strange.  Although they do have the appearance of what seems like a school uniform, they like like school swimsuits to me instead in terms of the tight appearance. 

The backgrounds are on a bit of the dull side.  However, it still gives the show a bold colourful appearance.  The colours blend well between the background & the characters with no clashing.

In terms of the animation movement, it's quite flowing & smooth.  There are the occasional quick & silly movements involved for those cute & comedy parts.  A nice touch to the show's feel.

Sound       

Many funny & cute sound effects in this anime as one would expect.  They are pretty soft & gentle, which lights up the mood of the show.  It gives the show it's moe factor.

The seiyuus here are pretty good.  Because the show 's theme is teaching English, I was wondering how the seiyuu for Ink, Yukari Tamura, would do with the English speeches.  The sentences & words aren't simple everyday English.  However, I was impressed.  I haven't heard Yukari speak a lot of English in other roles she played in, but I felt she did a good job.  Not the best English, but it's certainly pretty good.  Although there are times where she would change her voice out of character a bit during the translation parts.

The music is ok as it's mainly cute stuff.  However, the ending theme song was a bit nerve-racking.  The singer's voice was too high pitched & the song itself wasn't too pleasant to listen to.

Story

The storyline has an interesting plot that I didn't expect to have.  It's a bit deeper than I thought in terms of the magical kingdom trial that Ah is facing.  However, that bit only happens later on after some fanservice bit for the loli fans out there.  It kind of drags the show a lot.  But what do you do with a show that focuses on teaching English only?

As for the English part, it's still weird to me on how it teaches English based on the anime & otaku culture.  It was funny to see the characters doing their class & homework from the English class using wrestlers & magical girls.  Although it teaches good English, it's not something that you would be using in real life much.  I may be picky on this area really since I don't see it teaching English in the correct way.

As for the entire story, I felt it wasn't too great; especially the last two episodes.  They are mainly fillers even though it focused on Ink & the crew preparing for their entrance exams.  Although it sums up the whole show nicely, it was like the show didn't have a story to begin with.  It was like short stories were filled in to make the show interesting.  I don't know about the Moetan series from the books, but I would imagine there isn't a great storyline in it since the purpose of the series is to teach English.

Overall Conclusion

Moetan is a great show to watch if you like cute loli magical girls.  However, don't use this show as a learning tool for backward learning (English to Japanese).  It may serve a good purpose talking to your otaku friends, but not in actual conversations.

Moetan receives a six out of ten on its report card.  I thought the story is a bit deeper than I thought & the moe factor is pretty high.  But it ended up being a series of shorts with quick answers in the end.  The Japanese to English translations look good & the English sentences are well structured.  However, the show tends to go over a bit on the loli size with ecchi transformations.  Plus, you have a perverted duck that has broken into the loli world.

Last updated on September 1, 2008