First Impression: Chimimo

The everyday life of three sisters—Mutsumi, Mei, and Hazuki—is thrown for a loop by the appearance of a bouncy, cute, spherical creature with an oni-like horn. Soon, Mochi, as he’s nicknamed, is joined by eleven others who make the sisters’ lives fun and cuddly, but also threaten to eat them out of house and home! To make matters worse, the creatures’ owner comes to retrieve them, but he’s a monster himself, an “envoy of hell” who is planning to make the human realm a hell on earth! The little white balls of kawaii are his loyal servants, known as chimimoryo, and he plans to unleash hell with them, beginning with the Onigami household. But doing so is no small task for this fearsome intruder, who’ll have his hands full simply handling the incorrigible sisters.

Well, this was a surprise! The character designs in the show, both for the adorable, Pusheen-like chimimoryo (chimimo for short) and the sisters themselves, are so kawaii and adorbs that you’d expect the series to just be one long stretch of fluff. And for sure, there’s a cute energy to it, but episode one achieves a nice balance as well. The humor isn’t childish; it’s grounded in a more adult world with topics like household income, social media, and hangovers, appropriate for the characters’ ages. Plus, the word “hell” is uttered some two dozen times, as that word is what appears to have summoned the chimimo and their master, Jabberwock the 8th (“Mr. Hell”), who it seems just needed a haircut, bath, and a hotpot to relieve his angry spirit. Future episodes seem as if they’ll continue to focus on the daily lives of the sisters as they interact with Mr. Hell who, with his adorable companions, may come around and abandon his plan for creating a realm of horror on earth.

Chimimo can be streamed through HiDIVE.