REVIEW: ‘A Girl And Her Guard Dog’ Episode 6 — “A Midsummer and Night’s Dream”

The time has come, good reader, that it seems even the animation team has given up on A Girl And Her Guard Dog with Episode 6, “A Midsummer and Night’s Dream.” While this episode is actually more wholesome (until the last three minutes), and Keiya somehow manages not to mention Isaku’s age the entire episode, the animation quality makes it nearly unwatchable.

From a story perspective, A Girl and Her Guard Dog Episode 6 lets you forget a lot of the age gap elements because Keiya isn’t creepily talking about how Isaku has grown or how she was as a child (even though she still is one) and the like that have marred any endearing qualities the series has had. Instead, this episode is focused primarily on looking at Isaku and how she relates to girls her age. While Isaku and Keiya are on a “date” at a festival, she sees her old elementary school classmates who mock her for being a Senagaki. As a member of the audience, you see the stigma attached to her identity as a Yakuza granddaughter.

While her relationship with those girls is nonexistent, to say the least, with Keiya pretending to be her boyfriend, she gets a nice laugh from them. Later in A Girl And Her Guard Dog Episode 6, we get to see Isaku not coupled with Keiya. Instead, we see her making new friends with the people in her school now. It’s a bit that allows the audience to see Isaku as a normal girl and gives some payoff to the series so far.

All of that said, A Girl And Her Guard Dog Episode 6 is a monstrosity when it comes to animation. While the last two episodes have had terrible proportions, this episode has a pajama in one scene where it should be consistent, mouths moving with no dialogue coming out, hands detached from bodies, and shockingly noticeable changes in face quality is so shockingly bad that it’s a wonder that they got through the editing process.

Sure, the only thing creepier than the relationship where one person keeps bringing up that the other is a child is the completely dead eyes that every single male character in the series has. But it’s more than just that in this episode.

It seems that on episodes where I’m not thinking about the implication of the romance, the animation will disturb absolutely any peace from trying to detach from the realities of the story. Even the score of the series has deteriorated. I noted in my review of the last episode that the quality in animation is so remarkedly different between the closing theme and the entire episode, but that continues to Episode 6, where A Girl And Her Guard Dog struggles greatly to even animate the face of its female lead.

Before, it was just mapping shoujo manga proportions into animation, now it’s animated more like a buggy video game than anything—with body parts detaching and faces morphing without notice. It’s a shocking element of the series that makes it hard to focus on anything good that could come from the episode. A Girl And Her Guard Dog Episode 6 is astonishingly bad and may mark this series as the worst of the Fall Anime season for 2023.

A Girl And Her Guard Dog is streaming now on Crunchyroll.