Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid review: A Lonely Dragon Who Wants to Be Loved – Sword, Sorcery, and Smartphones | film

YYou know fantasy has a different audience these days when, at a pivotal point in this candy-colored, world-hopping anime, the protagonist casts a spell that temporarily boosts the local cell phone signal. During the climatic battle, salaryman Miss Kobayashi (voiced by Mutsumi Tamura) seeks additional help from Kanna (Maria Naganawa), a humanoid moon dwarf, one of the dragons in human form who has invaded her life (and demanded a smartphone).

Kanna is in great demand: With a great confrontation brewing between the forces of Chaos and Harmony in the Dragon Dimension, her father Kimon Kamui (Fumihiko Tachiki) shows up at Kobayashi’s apartment to demand that either his daughter return to fighting, or give him the Dragon Ball that held the manna in it. After Kobayashi abuses his sangfroid, he refuses to give up on Kanna; When her group begins exploring the other world, it seems that human wizard Azad (Nobunaga Shimazaki) has been stirring up tensions between the two factions.

Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid manga, which ran from 2013 to 2024, supposedly focused a lot on the domestic ordeals of running a foster home for dragons. This long film only allows time for a promising comedy of manners in which Kobayashi, through her duty of care, attempts to lure the foolish Kimon Kamui to a more humane and paternal outlook. But her letter-writing crusade (as Kanna says: “Yes, the argument thread!”) quickly fizzles out when she is sucked into Dragonland, and the obligatory power-packed brawl begins. Never mind pleas for gentleness; Clearly, the traditional fandom elements of fantasy audiences are still too great to ignore.

As is typical of long, unforgiving anime spin-offs, those not drawn to Miss Kobayashi’s menagerie will struggle to fully appreciate the other-worldly races in their nuance. The film feels undeniably lush, spanning the spectrum from a kawaii embrace of elementary school variants, to a very polite, halcyon-backlit fantasy register; Unsurprisingly, it’s even more fun flying through the heavenly cloud banks. But without any more cell phone calls, or other incongruous 21st-century interruptions to perhaps shake things up, the film falls into a generic sword-and-sorcery chase.