Well here’s an episode that feels totally unlike the Oshii era of the show. In later interviews, Oshii’s makes no bones about being somewhat disinterested in certain characters, mainly Lum’s alien pals. And this episode is almost entirely based around Ran, side lining Lum and especially Ataru from their own show.
The entire episode revolves around Ran feeding Rei, in an attempt to get him to kiss her via some magic ingredient she’s added to the food. It fails, but he ends up “kissing” her anyway when he eats some bean paste that she gets on her lips.
That’s it. That is all there is to the plot. It’s bulked out with some dream sequences and occultism scenes, but the plot is paper thin with very few gags. I’ve also noticed that they are often resorting to random bonks on the head with mallets in lieu of jokes in these Studio Deen episodes so far. Not that I’m anti-mallet inflicted head bonks or anything, but I’m missing the back and forth banter I’d gotten used to. And again we get the sort of continuity referencing that was largely absent in the Pierrot episodes. Here the occult shop Ran visits is in the supernatural shadow Tomobiki where Ataru got the bathhouse job.
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A couple of staff with now lengthy resumes show up here. Yoshiyuki Suga has written a hell of a lot of stuff, often doing series composition for adaptations. Indeed that is his role here, taking over from Ito.
Setsuko Shibuichi has been in pretty much every role for an animator, though the material she’s worked on tend to be kid’s shows and as such utterly overlooked in the anglophone anime fandom.
Screenplay: Yoshiyuki Suga
Storyboard: Naoyuki Yoshinaga
Director: Naoyuki Yoshinaga
Animation Director: Setsuko Shibuichi