Miss Kuroitsu and the Anime Trope Department
Your favorite Super Sentai show, but from the perspective of the poor employee making the monsters. Will Miss Touka Kuroitsu rise above or crumble under her evil organisation?
This article is a part of AniTAY’s Winter 2022 Early Impressions series, where our authors offer their initial thoughts on the new, prominent, and exciting anime from this season!
The workplace provides fertile ground for anime to poke fun at office culture.. From manga shops in Gaikotsu Shotenin Honda-san to not-McDonald gigs like The Devil is a Part Timer, or even the human body in the Cells At Work franchise, anime often offers insight into and satirizes the workplaces that surround us. I desperately wish Kaijin Kaihatsu-bu no Kuroitsu-san (Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department), a show with a great premise and some very disappointing missteps, was as great as these shows.
Let’s take a step back: our heroine of the day, Touka Kuroitsu, works as a research assistant to the Monster Development Department of the evil organization Agastia. Agastia, led by a literal child and a board of fantastical villains and creatures, has set its sight on no less than world domination. That’s evil cabal 101 for you. But wait! Standing up for justice and protecting the innocent is the hero and Divine Swordsman, Blader. Kuroitsu’s job is to “develop” (i.e. engineer in a tube) monsters capable of vanquishing Blader and opening the way for Agastia to, well, world-dominate. What else should evil do anyway? The brilliant premise of Miss Kuroitsu… is to flip the senta-adjacent “Monster of the week” trope on its head: it’s about the efforts to bring the monsters to life, instead of just discovering them at the end of the episode for the fight.
Miss Kuroitsu sets itself up as a workplace comedy: a cast of diverse characters (careless scientists, tentacled board members, monstrous managers) struggling to do their job under absurd upper management. The evil organisation aspect works well in that regard, with literal monsters at the helm. No character is pretending this is about anything else than creating strong monsters to beat the local hero of justice. And, in theory, that’s fine; Miss Kuroitsu doesn’t look like it’s aiming to subvert any of it. The only twist so far is that for an evil organisation, Agastia is actually pretty ok as an employer. Megitsu, the Chief of Staff and demonic-looking armored man, continuously shows interest in Touka as an employee, berating her for working too hard (a joke that might resonate more with the Japanese audience, given their notoriously demanding work culture) and offering well-meaning, professional feedback.
Through the character of Touka, determined and hard at work, the comedy shines in articulating the absurd (let’s build a robot chicken monster!) and the mundane (Greg from Graphic Design wants a budget for more feathers, management said no). The dialogue feels grounded and realistic, the exchanges between employees relatable, and the sense of hierarchy comfortably dreadful. From board meetings to the actual job (still making monsters in a tube), Touka serves as a good point-of-view character, and her enthusiasm for her job is endearing. Yes, we want to see the team succeed (beating the good guys and taking over the world…) despite the odds. If the pure workplace comedy works well when the team comes together, this is unfortunately not the case for the personal storyline of some of the characters of the show.
Miss Kuroitsu unfortunately also dips its toes into many tired comedic beats with its main cast: besides Chief of Staff Megitsu, few characters shine beyond their archetype (useless supervisor, spoiled brat-in-chief). The case of Wolf-Bête (French for beast), introduced in the first episode, is pretty disappointing. A male wolf-human hybrid engineered to fight, only for him to be turned into a childlike-female body on the whims of Agastia’s child leader. Of course hijinks ensue, the she-wolf complains about being in the wrong body , is made fun of for it, and sent to fight in a skintight “battlesuit,” which of course rips and falls off during the encounter with the hero Blader. OG shonen Naruto also started with a bunch of sexual nosebleed jokes. But seeing the same set up 23 years later fails to impress. That’s not super reassuring. Did we need another underage naked monster lady to throw under the bus for comic relief? No. Poor monster cannon fodder deserved better, and so do we.
One saving grace of the series is its dedication to spoofing Super Sentai shows. Villains be plotting world domination, conspicuous hero teenagers in shining armor be twarting them at every turn. The framework we are introduced to in the first episode sticks, grounding the struggle Touka and co must face when producing the monsters. Adding to the sometimes uncanny realism of the series, all of the heroes portrayed are actually real local sentai, keeping the Japanese countryside free of evil interference it seems. Each episode will even give them a short credit sequence and have them take center stage against Agastia’s monsters. If only the respect the series had for its monsters was on par with the one it shows for its sentai heroes…
My favorite television show when I was a kid was Power Rangers. I liked the Rangers, their cool weapons, the fight choreography, the Megazord battles… I don’t remember the villains much, though (Rita who?). Maybe that‘s why I wanted to like this show, to revisit this aspect of my childhood from another perspective, maybe even bring something new to the Sentai formula. All I got was a joke about a naked she-wolf whose gender got switched for a cheap laugh.
Miss Kuroitsu is an ok anime with a good premise and great potential for revisiting a few anime’s tropes. Too bad it has yet to take that step.
Oh, and the titles of the episode are also absurdly long (à la Star Wars intro title card). Guess that’s funny.
Title: Kaijin Kaihatsu-bu no Kuroitsu-san ( Miss Kuroitsu from the Monster Development Department)
Based on: Manga, Kaijin Kaihatsubu no Kuroitsu-san
Produced by: Crest
Streaming on: Crunchyroll and Funimation
Episodes Watched: 1+2
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