By Riley Glover

Is it playing with fire to say that the “My Melody & Kuromi” TV series (2025) on Netflix is quietly one of the best animated releases of the year? An easy recommendation for a work of stop motion children’s animation that is a beautifully designed piece, that’s also quietly one of the most fascinating and strangest directorial breakthroughs in quite a long time. One that might be worth some caveats and conversation for family viewers.

“My Melody and Kuromi’s” plot is deceptively simple in the beginning. The main selling point of the series here is about the rivalry between the fluffy and adorable My Melody (yes, that is her full name, and that’s how you say it) who runs a popular desserts shop with her friends Flat and My Sweet Piano (the later of whom is shortened to Piano) that is in direct accidental competition with the neighboring Kuromi’s “dessert” shop. “Dessert” as in her desserts use more savory ingredients like garlic and onions at the center of what should be sweet and delightful treats. My Melody is a fluffy rabbit with a pink “Red Riding Hood” style hood, and Kuromi is a fluffy rabbit with a black joker hat with a pink skull reflecting her emotions. One is very sweet, and the other is very sour.

The whole concept of “My Melody & Kuromi” is the endlessly reusable formula between a sweet, adorable character clashing with a rough and tumble, edgy character, always in a strange yin-yang relationship with each other. Kuromi views My Melody as a competitor always at her throat because of My Melody’s endless cuteness, even towards Kuromi, someone who is trying so hard to even look presentable. That dynamic is the fuel of much of the first half, where plots are often about Kuromi trying to understand her failures in relation to another person’s success, while ironically, My Melody is dealing with serious anxiety about her skills and reasons for making food. As a children’s show, it could have easily been that sort of formulaic 80’s Saturday morning cartoon vibe and still be quite charming due to the gorgeous felt-based stop motion, but the tonal turn halfway through is where my fascination with the director comes into play.

“My Melody and Kuromi” is a major project for director Tomoki Misato, noted both for his personal horror short films and his charming TV short film series “Pui Pui Molcar” (2021-2022) that has gained international reach. What’s so bizarre about these other films is the extreme contrast of tone of adult horror and family-friendly comedy, from each other, while each project, by itself, keeps a consistent, energetic personality. His horror-focused short films contain harrowing imagery with dramatic tone shifts. “My Little Goat” (2018) in particular contains one of the darkest explorations of child sexual abuse I’ve ever seen, though it blurs the literal trauma in action and the fairy tale sense of distance, yet still has the time for a deformed baby goat Voltron fight sequence. While “Pui Pui Molcar” is much more child-friendly and fun in comparison, the simple setup that hamsters evolved into cars humans can enter and drive around in turns quickly into a playground for zombie apocalypses, magical girls, and “Back to the Future” parodies. Despite his ADHD afflicted tonal sensibility, Tomoki always respects animation as a medium of creativity and detail, regularly using highly complex cinematography and dense multimedia animation techniques designed to just enthrall the viewer with detail and imagination as a weapon against the shallow smartphone era of entertainment. Getting into the works of Tomoki Misato showcased a clear talent that helps explain not simply the more sophisticated social themes explored within a work made for younger kids in  “My Melody and Kuromi,” like an episode exploring anxiety in relation to mean comments on social media, but also a major tone shift that occurs in the second half.

A plot point established early on involves a magical creature that enters the life of My Melody and becomes a background anxiety slowly creeping in. A sort of dread of withheld information and darker forces beyond the context of My Melody and Kuromi’s world. That is before the second half of the series begins, completely going into all the genre tricks Tomoki has built up over his career, jumping from apocalyptic horror to action scenes straight out of John Wick to a strange mixture of childlike fairy tales and complex psychology. Themes of addiction, anxiety, and greed become folded into the center of a more complex question of what it means to be a good person and how one’s personal passions can help make the world a better place. Cannibalism even becomes a recurring plot point! It’s remarkably both sophisticated and wild in a way more in the vein of “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” or “Coraline” than the hyper-adorable fluff I regally semi-ironically watch to avoid admitting I like things like Hello Kitty a lot. It bleeds creativity in a way that some viewers may dismiss and stereotype due to the cutesy surface.

This tonal conflict, though, one I saw other reviewers and parents note online, is why I would recommend parents who want to sell it to their kids to watch and communicate with what the child might be going through. There is stuff in here that is quite visually scary for a young child to see without someone to talk to, with many of the bigger ideas worthy of a discussion after viewing. This isn’t a work to easily pass by as it bleeds an artistic soul that is in direct argument against passivity in art, a dialogue that is becoming increasingly essential across generations. What “My Melody and Kuromi” accomplishes at its best is not just simply an impressive directorial calling card or an adorably kawaii TV show, but also a wonderful reminder of art being the consideration of detail and expression to reflect the messy aspects of the human condition.