The Adventures of Mini-Goddess. V.1, The Gan-chan Files. V.2, The Belldandy Files. V.3, The Urd Files. V.4, The Skuld Files.
TV series (48 episodes), 1998-99. Director: Yasuhiro Matsumura. V.1 — V.4, 12 episodes/100 minutes. Price & format: DVD bilingual $29.98. Distributor: Pioneer Entertainment.

© 1998 Kosuke Fujishima/Kodansha/PONY CANYON. All rights reserved.

Although there are numerous exceptions, anime usually comes in two lengths; half-hour (TV episodes) or feature length (over an hour). Productions in the old American animated theatrical short format of six to eight minutes are almost unheard of. Here is one.

This spinoff of Kosuke Fujishima's popular Aa! Megami-sama (Oh My Goddess!) comic book series and its 1993-94 OAV adaptation began as tossed-off four-panel parodies by Fujishima himself, showing how his three young goddesses kill time at home while their college student ward Keiichi is at his classes. They shrink themselves to "super deformed" miniatures and draft the hapless rats in the building as their playmates. One rat, Gan-chan, became their "special friend," as Warner Bros.' Animaniacs would have put it. These single-page slapstick "Adventures of the Mini-Goddesses" eventually became popular enough to be animated themselves (by the OLM studio), as part of the WOWOW satellite channel's weekly (Mondays at 7:00 pm) half-hour Anime Complex show. 48 8-minute episodes were shown from April 6, 1998 through March 29, 1999.

Since the characters were super-small, the program title was exaggeratedly long. It was "Englished" by the Japanese themselves as The Adventures of Mini-Goddess in the Handy 'Petite' Size! American anime fans insisted on retaining "Mini-Goddess" (rather than "Mini-Goddesses") as a correct translation, and Pioneer has followed suit in this commercial release.

Viewers do not have to be familiar with the Oh My Goddess! basic plot to quickly pick up the personalities of brassy, bossy Urd, tomboyish tinkerer Skuld, housewifely Belldandy, and their sarcastic, long-suffering rat companion Gan-chan. The character interplay and their witty dialogue are constants in a wide range of scenarios. Many episodes are variants on the theme of Urd getting bored and deciding to "help" Gan-chan get a girlfriend, go on a diet, or run for leadership of his rat community. Many more are movie and TV parodies, from Japanese classics like Godzilla (naturally it is Gan-chan who becomes the monster) to more recent American thrillers like Die Hard, Cliffhanger and The X-Files. But there are occasional surprise change of pace episodes, such as a dialogue-less quiet mood piece in which Urd simply goes strolling on a rainy day, observing the beauties of nature. The animation staff clearly had fun working in the style of American short humorous cartoons, and also used the 8-minute format for some art film projects.