When you think of children's anime shows, Pokemon, Dragon Ball Z and Yu-Gi-Oh! come to mind. While those titles are marketing giants, Tokyo Pig is a lesser known series that started airing in America back in 2002 on ABC. Unfortunately the show was cancelled in April of 2003 so the adventures of Spencer and his magical pig have come to an end.

Mirimax has released a best of DVD featuring eight of the most popular episodes and it gives a very good look at the series as a whole. There really is no continuity in the show so only seeing eight out of the twenty nine episodes isn't going to get you lost in the grand scheme of things. I personally had never seen Tokyo Pig prior to my viewing of this DVD, but after watching it I'm not surprised the show was cancelled.

The premise is a great spring board for a children's show with a cute art style, eclectic characters and whacky stories, but it's such an unorganized mess most of the time it's difficult to follow. Instead of creating an interesting script, Tokyo Pig feels like an amalgamation of strange ideas picked from a hat. The way these scenarios are tossed together I felt though, I was watching a program for kids with ADD.

Spencer isn't your normal 9 year old and he absolutely loves school and doing homework. One day his teacher assigns the entire class the task of keeping a diary and soon he realizes that whatever he writes in his journal comes true. It's through this magical diary that Sunny Pig comes to life and befriends Spencer. Sunny has the magical ability to make whatever Spencer is imagining become reality so things get quickly out of hand in each episode.

From Pigzilla to fruit with aspirations of world domination the random situations these characters find themselves in are off the wall and littered with jokes that just aren't funny most of the time or over the head of the target audience. There are even random instances when Sunny Pig will break into a dance in every episode with psychedelic lights flashing and cheesy music. I understand that the pig is really cute, but this entire show comes off as an attempt to distract children instead of actually entertaining them.

That being said the artwork and animation isn't particularly good either and there are several shortcuts taken in the animation process. From stationary characters to repeat animations and it appears that the actual production time on this show must have been extremely short. The dubbing is also pretty poor here and the quality of it appears to be amateur at best. It's hard to tell how large of a budget this show had, but it doesn't appear like it was all that big.

I understand that this is a children's show and not aimed for an older audience, but I always have an open mind when it comes to what I'm viewing. There are some truly memorable moments with the Tokyo Pig show but overall the low production quality and absolute randomness of it all hurts. With better kid's series on the market there is little reason to pick up this DVD unless you want something completely unique.

The DVD also does not feature scene selections and you are only allowed to skip through episodes instead of to certain points within them. If you are familiar with the show and were wondering what episodes were included here, they are:

"When Pigs Fly", "Dad is the Worst Cook in the World", "Luck of the Draw", "Trouble in Lightning Land", "A Bitter Fruit", "The Incredible Shrinking School", "Samurai Lunch Lady" and "Pigs on Ice".

Tokyo Pig is presented in the full screen 1.33:1 aspect ratio that it was originally aired in. There is quite a bit of graininess and blur in the image and for some reason the image is shaky, almost as if it's jumping up and down ever so slightly. The shortcuts taken in the animation process are quite evident and this DVD transfer shows questionable quality and a low budget.

As I stated I didn't particularly care for the art direction and the designs are extremely unorthodox and simplistic. The color palate pops from the screen in an almost epileptic seizure manner, especially when Sunny Pig randomly breaks into a dance. Children may enjoy the show and characters more though, but when other cartoons have overall better production

With only an English 5.1 audio track there really are not a lot of options to speak of. English subtitles are available, but if you were hoping for another language you're out of luck. You aren't missing much anyways since the audio quality is spotty at best with horrible dialogue and obnoxious music. Many times the characters talk so fast or with such an outlandish accent that it can be difficult to even understand what they are saying. If I had to keenly listen to someone's grumblings to get what they said, I can't imagine a five year old catching on.

Aside from a slew of children's programming previews there are absolutely no extras included on this disc. Seeing sneak peaks for Chicken Little, Spider-Man the Venom Saga and Tarzan II are all well and good, but seeing as this is a children's DVD there should be some form of interactive menu or game to play.

I truly wanted to like Tokyo Pig, but the fact is it's just not that good of a show for an adult, let alone a kid. It's filled with fun characters, cute animals and some truly funny situations, but it's so totally off the wall and random that it's hard to enjoy. The production values all around scream low budget from the animation to the audio and it's really a shame. The premise for this show sets up for a perfect kids cartoon; unfortunately Tokyo Pig totally misses the mark. I am giving this release the score of Skip It, but if you know a young child who likes cartoons they may enjoy it as a rental.

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