• Did you ever finish seeing a series and say not just, “Hey, that was a pretty good series,” or, “That was a great series,” but “Wow, that was a great series”? I’ve been around a while and I can say that those instances are fewer than I can count on one hand. “ODDTAXI” is one of those.
• “ODDTAXI” is relatively low key compared to all other anime, which tends to exaggerate and go to extremes. Many anime series are “way out there” in the way their characters behave, while this one is actually quite realistic in depicting a piece of modern Japanese society (even if the characters are anthropomorphic).
• Most anime tend to be targeted at teens or have the point of view of teens or youth in their early twenties, while this series has a decidedly middle-aged outlook with greater depth and thought than your typical anime.
• Great anime tends to excel in something particular—“Attack on Titan,” the action scenes and setups, “Made in Abyss,” the fantastical settings, world-building and creatures, and so on. “ODDTAXI” does everything well, but what this excels in is its storytelling and the story itself.
• An instant classic. It’s very different than anything else the anime industry has produced, in style and content. It starts chill like smooth jazz and then builds on itself. I’m not sure how something as original and unique as this made it to production, perhaps it was the pandemic that loosened the boundaries of anime, who knows. But this will be known in the future as one of the great ones, just 13 half-hour episodes long.
• It is a complete story, ending with the finale. No season 2; the story finishes completely.
• BTW, the correct spelling of the title is “ODDTAXI,” all one word, all capital letters. But I put “Odd Taxi” in parenthesis because how many people looking for information about the program will actually spell the title as one word when they look it up in the search engine?

    Japanese with English sub-titles
Not for Kids