Do not be fooled by Narutaru. Yes, the series features a spunky elementary school student and her cute but dumb looking starfish-like alien pal. However, this is not a story about a girl and her powerful pet righting wrongs and having fun adventures. This is a story about why giving great power to children tends to be a horribly bad idea.

The star of the series is Shiina, a cheerful, purple-haired kendo student. In the first episode she celebrates summer vacation by flying out to spend a week with her grandparents by the sea. She feels driven to swim out to a marker in the water that she has never been able to reach before. When she finally makes it to the marker she discovers that she is too worn out to make the long swim back in and decides to explore the area a bit. Underwater she sees what looks like a giant rounded starfish with big googly eyes and in surprise she breathes in seawater. When she awakens, she is on the sidewalk just outside the town clinic with no one around her. She soon finds the starfish alien again and decides to keep him with her, naming him Hoshimaru, or rounded star. She rides him like a skateboard as he flies through the sky and at the end of the episode they witness a woman with strange red markings on her body rise up from the ocean riding some sort of giant monster.

It all sounds terribly cliché, but this is a series with a body count. Other children have these starfish-like creatures, called dragons, as well, and not all of them are using them as hoverboards. Shiina attempts to befriend an older girl, Akira, who spots Hoshimaru, who Shiina carries around as a backpack, and is immediately terrified of her. The girl has a dragon of her own and she finds the mental link between her and her dragon an abomination too terrible to live with. There are also groups of children training their dragons to different ends. One boy wants to kill all the scientists and then weed out most of the population of Earth so he can rule over a Stone Age society. Others have their own goals, most of which seem to revolve around correcting what they see as wrongs perpetrated by adults against the world, and they are not afraid to use force to do it. This is the world Shiina is thrust into when she takes Hoshimaru into her life, and we follow her as she tries to reach out to Akira and balance her strong desire to do the right thing with the need to protect herself and her family.

Visually Narutaru isn't too stunning. The animation is smooth, but rarely truly impressive. The character design is interesting, with bodies that are elongated and thin even by anime standards. This lends an interesting air of surrealism to some scenes, but just comes across as weird in others. The dragons are inventively designed as well; while the first ones you run into are the basic large starfish shape, other children have developed theirs into different shapes, such as a doll-like armless angel or a giant, malevolent flower. The audio for the series is decent as well. The opening theme is a bit too perky for the tone of the series, but it matches the paper cut-out animation of the opening sequence well and is extremely catchy. The background music serves its purpose, reinforcing the mood of the scenes without becoming a distraction, but falls a bit on the generic side and becomes easily forgettable.

A legend surrounds the manga that Narutaru is based on. It says that no one wanted to publish the original version because it was too dark and depressing, so the studio pitched a very light and happy version to several publishers until it got bought. Then they printed just enough issues to secure their contract and began immediately began wiping out the cheerful characters graphically and without remorse. Whether or not this legend is true, the anime series plays by the same rules, sucking you in with a cliché "girl and magical pal" beginning then delivering you something much darker, and in the end, more interesting. Narutaru is one of the must-watch series of the season for those who like their anime to ask questions. - Angie 'Foodbunny' Dietrich .