The Summer 2023 Anime Preview Guide

My Tiny Senpai

When Shinozaki started his new job, he didn't expect his superior to be so...cute. He struggled to learn the ropes until Katase, his tiny and kind senpai, took him under her wing. But as they grow closer, he hopes her attention might mean something more.

My Tiny Senpai is based on Story of a Small Senior in My Company (Uchi no Kaisha no Chiisai Sempai no Hanashi) manga by Saisou. It streams on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Do you like short but ostensibly adult anime women with big boobs? Do you like them enough to sit through 20 minutes of limp, aimless pablum for the chance to occasionally see mediocre drawings of those boobs in office attire? If so, then I guess you can kill some time here, because nobody else is going to find much of interest.

There really is shockingly little to this show. The entire episode consists of our unremarkable male lead and his short-stack senpai trading niceties and performing generic RomCom actions for twenty minutes, with nary a shadow of personality or chemistry to be found. I watched the episode mere minutes before starting this review, and already so much of what happened – or rather, didn't happen – has sloughed off my brain. I remember there are a couple of moments where Shinozaki has mildly erotic fantasies about his diminutive coworker, and she pats his head at least once. If that sounds like stock actions that would happen in just about any office romcom, you'd be right, and it leaves this whole episode vacuous. There's no rapport or chemistry between our identically pleasant lead characters, and nothing about their work environment, conversations, or potential romance leaves any impression.

I can't even say it only has one joke, because there's not a gimmick here. Despite her small size being the focus of the title, our eponymous Senpai's height isn't mined for humor much at all. I'm not saying I wanted a whole bunch of gags about her standing on tiptoes to reach a shelf or anything, but it feels odd to bring it up and then do nothing with it. Maybe you could do something with the main couple's height difference, or something, I don't know. There are honestly more jokes about her chest size than anything else, and even those feel like bits cribbed directly from the office worker sections of Tawawa on Monday. Though the bit that gets repeated the most is how Senpai is small and fluffy, just like a cat, but like a cat with big tiddies stuffed inside a business-casual cardigan.

It all strikes me as something that might have worked better in its original web-manga form, where presumably each short chapter would be capped off with a dedicated illustration of Senpai, similar to The Maid I Hired Recently Is Mysterious. Unfortunately, the anime designs don't have any real impact, and the direction isn't geared toward soft cheesecake enough to capture that. So in the end we have a show where the script and visuals are equally flat. The best I can say is that at least Senpai isn't infantilized and largely behaves like a believable adult, but that's nowhere near enough to make this worth remembering.

Let's talk about the first shot of an anime in general. It is perhaps the most important single few seconds of the series. It sets the tone for everything to come after. Many anime use it to establish their world. Others use it to introduce us to the main character. Others still show us something at the core of the story—be it a literal object or a visual metaphor for the story we're about to see. And as for My Tiny Senpai? Well, it starts with a zoomed-in shot of Shiori's giant breasts.

…Well, I suppose there's something to be said for not burying the lead and being honest from the start about what your anime is about.

My Tiny Senpai feels like a wish fulfillment for someone who works a soul-sucking office job and hates it. To escape their reality, they've created this fantasy where, instead of a boss constantly yelling at them and coworkers who couldn't be bothered to help if asked, they have a cute, kind, child-like mentor—who also happens to have an hourglass figure on par with Jessica Rabbit. And, of course, in this fantasy world, they're forced to work closely with this woman—basically getting a relationship without having to put in any real effort on their own part. How convenient.

Okay, so maybe I'm being a bit too cynical when it comes to this anime. While there are more than a few sexually suggestive scenes—i.e., those putting Shiori's “assets” center stage or those where she inadvertently says things that could sound sexual when taken out of context—those only make up a quarter of the episode at best. The vast majority of the anime is just “cute” fluff like Shiori and Shinozaki getting a meal or Shinozaki getting nervous before a presentation. Frankly, it's boring—mind-numbingly so. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that the scenes are filled with extraneous details that add nothing to the story or characters. (Like who cares what Shiori and Shinozaki order at a normal restaurant?)

The closest we get to anything interesting is the scene where Shiori gets flustered after being given Shinozaki's coat to wear. She's embarrassed but doesn't quite know why. Yet instead of trying to come to terms with her feelings, she runs from them and returns the coat. This looks to be the status quo for the series as far as its love plot goes and I have no interest in signing up for an endless will-they-won't-they tease.

All in all, this show feels like a big pile of nothing. The characters lack any kind of distinct personality and the story is rather non-existent. It's just a series of largely unrelated scenes that try to be cute, sexy, or funny. But in my eyes, they were simply boring.

Katase is a very short adult woman with large breasts. Her coworker Shinozaki thinks she's cute. Because she's tiny. With big breasts. How cute. Sometimes she meows at bushes trying to get cats to come out. How cute. Sometimes she tries to pat his head. So cute. Gosh. She's so cute.

I'll admit that I've never quite understood the “short adults are adorable” genre of anime and manga, possibly because I come from a relatively short family, but this one is a bit dull by almost any measure. The entire plot, so to speak, revolves around average-height office worker Shinozaki finding his older coworker Katase charming and cute because she's well below average height, and that's pretty much it. There are a couple of efforts made to show that she has a personality beyond that – she likes cats, for example – but since we're largely looking through his eyes, the focus is pretty much on where his gaze lands. And although it's not a hard and fast rule, I have learned that when a show opens with a shot of the female lead's breasts, it's rarely a good sign.

Another issue here is that this feels like the office setting could have been swapped out with almost any other and the story would have remained unchanged. It would have worked in a middle school, a high school, onboard a ship, or space…the characters are so poorly filled in that it simply doesn't matter where you put them – or, for that matter, how old they are. While it's always nice to get the odd show with adult characters, it also helps if they have a reason to be drawn that way. The saving grace is that it looks perfectly fine – clean lines, comfortable colors, and a sense of consistency to the art and animation, even if it does rely on a few too many images of Katase with cat ears and a tail, just to drive home the fact that Shinozaki thinks she's cute. (And to possibly objectify her? Or am I reading too much into this in a desperate bid to find something interesting?)

In any event, you'll likely know very early on if this is a show for you. I could see it being very calming if the issues that bother me don't bug you. But if you're looking for more than a visual treatise on how adorable Katase is, you may find yourself disappointed.

Man, this is really shaping up to be a “Two-and-a-Half Stars out of Five” kind of summer, huh? It's quickly become a cliché to describe something to be like “as if it had been written by an AI”, but that's honestly the best way for me to describe “My Tiny Senapai”, which offers little more than a rote and shameless remixing of tropes and gags that we've seen done a thousand times before. It plays things too safe and simple to be outright unwatchable, but I defy anyone watching it to try and remember a single detail of what they saw within ten minutes of finishing the episode. I'd bet money that it can't be done.

Have you watched even one of the “Tiny Yet Buxom Schoolmate/Co-Worker That Acts Like a [Insert Cute Animal or Comically Exaggerated Stereotype Here]” shows? Congratulations, you've seen My Tiny Senpai. If I'm being honest, my tolerance and appreciation of these kinds of rom-com skit collages continues to shrink with every passing year, mostly because being married for nearly a decade gives you a much different perspective on what makes things “romantic” (and, to a lesser extent, “funny”). If I've learned anything over the years, it's that all of the most interesting, heartwarming, and, er, stimulating aspects of romance come from the ups, downs, and in-betweens of being in an actual relationship, which is not something that toons like My Tiny Senpai seem interested in depicting.

Sure, there's obviously a lot of fun to be had with the usual will-they-won't-they workplace pining and crushing that we've seen in basically every workplace rom-com ever, but the success of that dynamic usually depends on the characters in question having some degree of chemistry with one another. In order for Takuma and Shiori to have chemistry, they would need to possess discernable human personalities; Shiori's entire existence is literally summed up at the top of the show as being “tiny and cute”, and Takuma is…a guy…who does a job…and…yeah, that's pretty much all I've got for him.

So, the romance aspect of the show seems to be going nowhere, the side characters aren't interesting, and the workplace element of the show is so extraneous to the story that they all might as well work at a place called “Business, Inc”. What more does a show like My Tiny Senpai have to offer, then? Background noise, I guess, or maybe some pretty colors to occasionally glance at while you fold your laundry. It's honestly hard for me to say who this show is for. It doesn't seem like much passion has gone into its creation, and I can't see it stirring up much of a fervor in its audience. Hell, I'm sure if I fed this script into Chat GPT right now, it would probably respond with, “Damn, even I could have done better than this!”

Hey you! Yes, you! Are you the most boring dude in the world? Do you wish you had an equally boring female coworker with huge boobs to praise you and flirt with you and bore the pants off everyone around you? If that's the case, My Tiny Senpai is the anime for you!

Now, I am neither a dude, boring, nor an office worker, so I am not in the target audience here. Without any fantasies to be indulged, no protagonist to project upon, there was nothing left but watching two people flirt in the most uninteresting ways until I wanted to pull my hair out. Oh, he put his jacket over her shoulders when she was cold! And when she gives it back, it smells like her! Now, where have I seen that situation before? Oh right, every single rom-com ever. The writing has all the depth of a puddle and all the originality of that cliche I just typed.

I was shocked to learn that the manga this is based on has run for six volumes because after only ten minutes I was climbing the curtains out of sheer boredom like some kind of crazed cat. Maybe the secondary characters are fun? I wouldn't know, because they get very little screen time in this episode in favor of slow pans over Katase's enormous knockers and close-up POV shots of her face from Shinozaki's perspective that allows the audience to imagine that she's making those faces at them. It's not uncommon for stories with bland main characters to have a more entertaining ensemble cast… but this is all speculation, trying to find some kind of explanation for My Tiny Senpai's popularity because I refuse to accept that people think these two blocks of unflavored tofu are interesting.

I don't think it's fair to even call this a “romcom,” because that implies there's comedy, and my friends, there are hardly any jokes to be found. Those that are, are mostly about the size of Katase's melon-sized melons. It is merely 20 jejune minutes of nothingness, a blank void of time that would be better spent napping.