Anime: Hakushaku to Yousei

Earl and Fairy is an adventure where a doctor and a prince are going on a journey to find an heirloom of fairy origin. But since it is also a shoujo, the doctor is your typical silly girl with a good heart that can see mythological creatures and the prince is your typical mysterious hairless chest bad boy hunk. YEAAAAH here comes the cheese.

Animation is done by Artland, a studio which has produced nothing but mediocrities with the exception being the highly acclaimed Mushishi. Other than that, they never had high budgets and thus this show looks rather run down. Direction is done by a nobody who has produced nothing but passable titles.

So our shoujo heroine TM Lydia is a doctor, something that can fool you to think she cures diseases and treats wounds. That would make her a heck of a dynamic female instead of a clueless dumb broad. But NAAAAH she is actually a FAIRY doctor, akin to a witch doctor or a shaman, able to see and communicate with the unseen world of mythological creatures. And that is all she is doing, so the whole inborn talent she has is just there to flavour the story with sparkles of magic. So instead of having rose petals and stars as nothing more than visual effects in the background, those are literally stuff that happen in real life… but only to her, because she is the only one who can see all that, so everybody else just thinks she is a nutjob. So much for superpowers if you can use them to do jack in your every day life and be sent to an asylum for no real reason.

The problem with her is that she is penniless, since nobody would give a job to a 19th century girl, much less to a girl who claims she can see monsters in an age such things are considered nothing but fairy tales. Here is where the mysterious hunk TM Edgar enters the story and with his royal lineage and hairless chest asks her to help him find a sword to prove he is indeed an earl. Because finding that sword is apparently all it takes to prove to everyone you are who you claim to be; let’s hope some random peasant doesn’t get to it first because he will magically turn to a noble or something.

Each of them has their own mascot pet to boot. Lydia has a talking fluffy cat that acts like a spoiled noble and Edgar has a butler bodyguard who kicks ass and is of course also a hunk. And thus the four of them go on a journey where she constantly is helpless, he is constantly mysterious, and their pets do all the comic relief and action scenes. That pretty much means that the protagonists have less appeal than their lackeys. YAWN!

So here you are waiting to be excited with an adventure full of action and suspense. You get close to nothing because everything remains quite basic and blunt to the most part. The artwork is so weak and the antagonists so dull, you just don’t give a damn even if they accomplish whatever they want. And by the way, they don’t because the story is left incomplete. You also hope for some spicy romance to take place between them but NAAAAH not even that happens as everything remains on first base at best. There are many moments where they could have done much more than just holding hands but she keeps flipping and he just doesn’t try to force himself on her. How nice of him; too bad we don’t get a single interesting scene for the same reason.

And that is pretty much all you get from this anime. Run down visuals, dull music, stereotypical shoujo characters who don’t do anything, piss poor action and adventure and an open ending showing you its middle finger. You might as well not bother watching this unless you so much want to be disappointed or have a heck of a lot free time to waste.