Featured TV on DVD Review: Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: The Complete Series
April 30, 2018
Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: The Complete Series - Buy from Amazon: Blu-ray Combo Pack
Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid debuted in Manga form in 2014 and the seventh volume came out just last month. It was adapted into an Anime series for winter 2017 and was a big enough hit to get a Blu-ray release here. Is it worth checking out for fans of Anime? Is it something that has serious crossover appeal?
Before we start with the plot summary, there’s an important point I need to make. The show doesn’t tell us exactly what happened when the two main characters met for the first time, but we get flashbacks to the details throughout the series. I’m going to give a few more details right away, because it makes it easier to explain the plot.
The first of our main characters is the titular Miss Kobayashi, a programmer who works at a company that does outsourced work. Like most office workers, she will occasionally get drinks after work with co-workers, specifically Makoto Takiya, who thinks of her as one of the boys. Other times, like the night before the show starts, she drinks alone. She had a bad day at work, and she gets so drunk that she wanders into the mountain with a bottle of sake only to bump into a massive dragon, a massive dragon with a massive sword stuck in its side. Kobayashi is drunk enough to not realize the seriousness of the situation, even after the dragon threatens to kill her. Instead of being scared, she merely crawls over the dragon to remove the sword, before offering it a drink. During this drunken conversation, Kobayashi invites the dragon to live with her as her maid. The next morning, Kobayashi wakes up with a hangover, and gets ready to leave for work. However, when she opens the door, she sees the dragon from the night before. That’s when the dragon transforms into a woman wearing a maid costume. Kobayashi reacts like a normal person would in this situation; she assumes she’s dreaming. The dragon introduces itself as Tohru and explains she’s come to live with Kobayashi as her maid. At first Kobayashi doesn’t want Tohru to stay and it isn’t until Tohru is able to fly her to work before she’s late that Kobayashi admits having a dragon maid might be a good thing.
There are still issues with having a dragon as a maid, beyond Tohru’s obsessive love for Kobayashi. Tohru lived in a fantasy realm and only came to this world to escape the humans that were trying to kill her. She doesn’t really get how this world works. For example, she refuses to go to the local mall, because it looks like a castle where human knights live. She tries to get help from other dragons she knows, but when she contacts Fafnir, he just tells her to kill them all. Quetzalcoatl, who is technically a goddess, doesn’t give her such violent advice, but it is equally useless in the human world. In one example, Tohru decides to speed up drying Kobayashi’s clothing by using her dragon fire to burn away the clouds. This causes Kanna, another dragon, to find the pair. Kanna is a very young dragon, about 8 years old in dragon years, and was friends with Tohru in their world. At first Kanna hates Kobayashi, because she thinks Kobayashi is the reason Tohru left their world. We find out that Kanna was exiled in this world, due to her playing too many pranks on the other dragons, and without anywhere to go, she lives with Kobayashi and Tohru. Although this means they have to move to a bigger apartment. With this, they have a house warming party. Kobayashi invites her only friend, Makoto Takiya, while Tohru invites Fafnir and Quetzalcoatl and this is the first time the humans interact with the dragons more than just the surrogate family that Kobayashi, Tohru, and Kanna have started. It is not the last.
Soon Kanna starts going to elementary school and meets a new friend, Riko Saikawa. Fafnir returns to the human world and begins living with Makoto Takiya, because they are both closet Otakus. (They are both obsessed with nerd culture, like video games and Manga.) Quetzalcoatl senses someone trying to summon a demon and goes through the portal to prevent that. It’s better that a friendly dragon shows up, rather than an evil demon. However, the person who summoned her is Shouta Magatsuchi, a ten-year old boy, who is the son of a powerful mage. He’s convinced Quetzalcoatl is a succubus and Quetzalcoatl’s attempts to prove she is friendly always backfire, because she comes across as too friendly.
Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid is the second best recent Anime show I have watched, behind only KonoSuba. (Why isn’t that show on Blu-ray here?) It starts out as a slice of life show where the main character is the normal one who is surrounded by more and more chaos. There’s a lot of comedic gold to be mined from this premise. The first time Kobayashi, Tohru, and Takiya go for drinks is a perfect example of that. However, the show goes further than that, as there’s a sweetness and heart to the show. The surrogate family Kobayashi, Tohru, and Kanna form the heart of the show and gives it an emotional depth that’s missing from a lot of other comedies. In fact, as the series continues, the emotional aspects of the show become more important than the jokes and this puts it ahead of most similar shows.
There are some complaints that this show has generated, some fair, others not. The relationship between Kobayashi and Tohru could be seen as creepy, because Tohru is romantically obsessed with Kobayashi, but Kobayashi doesn’t feel the same way, because she’s says she not a lesbian. She says right away that she’s not into girls. I absolutely agree that a lesbian romantically pursuing a straight woman is sexual harassment in the same way a man pursuing a woman who is not interested would be. However, , we see in a flashback late in the series that that in her drunken introduction, Kobayashi hits on Tohru when she first see’s Tohru’s human form. Granted, she doesn’t say she’s a lesbian, but it is clear from the context. Others have complained about the relationship between Kanna and Riko Saikawa calling it pedophilia. Riko has a crush on Kanna and they are both 8 years old. Technically we don’t know how old Kanna is chronologically, but she’s as mature as an 8-year old human. An 8-year old having a crush on another 8-year old isn’t pedophilia, it’s puppy love. It reminds me of the movie Little Manhattan, which was about two 10-year olds that fell in love. Quetzalcoatl is a little more problematic, on the other hand. She’s a goddess, a fertility goddess, so you can guess how she looks. She tries to act protective and motherly to Shouta, but due to her physical attributes, Shouta is convinced she’s a succubus trying to seduce him. Other times she just doesn’t understand how she comes across. It is over the top enough that I didn’t find it creepy, but not everyone agrees.
There are two main extras, the first being a bonus Valentine’s Day and the second being a series of Miss Kobayashi’s Something, which has the characters dressed up as different occupations, sports, words that end with D, etc. The image above is from this second extra, specifically Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Mermaid. It’s goofy fun. There are also clean opening and closing credits.
Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: The Complete Series is great fun and has enough heart to lift it above the average comedy. Extras on the Blu-ray Combo Pack includes a bonus episode and some fun short animated bits. It is easily worth picking up and a contender for Pick of the Week.
Video on Demand (Sub)
Video on Demand (Dub)
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The Show
The Extras
The Verdict
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