Anime Review: Kemono Friends

August 15, 2018

Sometime in the future, an animal park called Japari Park is hit by a meteor or something that releases a substance called “Sand Star”. This turns all the animals in the park into anthropomorphized girls that still act and behave like their original animal type. Well, within reason of being in humanoid form now. The story revolves around a lost human girl. Not knowing who are what she is, she is given the name Kaban by the friendly Serval (a Serval cat) who finds her.

The pair go on a journey through the park trying to find out what kind of animal Kaban is and to reunite her with her herd. But things are not so simple for them. The park seems to be somewhat rundown and no other animals like Kaban are found anywhere. We follow the pair as they go through the various habitats of the park looking for those that used to run the park. But nobody seems to be in charge and everything is running on automatic. In addition, there are animals fighting with each other. Can Kaban and Serval find peaceful solutions along their way to finding where Kaban came from.

This was a really fun show. I thought they did a great job of keeping the traits of the animal-girls intact. They also gave bits of information about each animal which I found quite fun – I enjoy learning little tidbits I didn’t know before. It isn’t a “high quality” type of animation, but it didn’t feel like it was supposed to be. After a few minutes you get used to the stye of animation and don’t really give it much further thought. There is one questionable scene where the pair and some other animal-girls go to a hot spring. The water is completely opaque and their shoulders are only just visible above the water line. So I would call it still completely clean.

Number of seasons: 1
Episodes per season: 12
Content: Clean visually and in language.