Yaoguai Mingdan, when I first came across this anime? Chinese cartoon? I was wondering how you would write it in Japanese, but then I realized that this is a Chinese anime? Cartoon? Well, since it is supposed to be anime I will refer to it as an anime in this review. So, animation and character design… I was not expecting a super high fidelity CGI and amazing animation quality for this anime, and I think that’s a really good expectation to have with this anime if you are looking into it. The character designs are a quite imperfect compared to modern Japanese anime and canseem off and drawn by amateurs. But maybe that's just “Chinese” style animation, but the animation itself is not an eyesore, what is was the fact that episode 12, 13, 14, I could only find them in 360p. Ouch, otherwise it's in 1280x720, which is already pretty bad if you are watching anime on a 2560x1440 display (like me) but resolution is different for everybody. If you are running a lower resolution display it's not going to be that bad. I don't know if it is just me getting used of the animation style/quality or this is genuine, but the second half of the series appears to be better animated, I mean it's a bit minor, or it may be that the animators sucked at animating all the vines from the fist villain but I really feel especially with those flashbacks at the end that the animation has improved a tiny bit, although no major improvements.

Sound and audio. Background music? Ehh, not awful, but good enough, I mean I really didn't have high standards for this anime, but voice acting I will say is mediocre, the intro and the outro was enjoyable (intro was more enjoyable though), Chinese is different than Japanese so for me it was interesting to hear a different oral language, but at first I disliked them a bit, a lot of things with this anime will just have to grow on you.

Story. Minimal spoilers? The first part is meh, second part gets better. This anime can be moving particularly with the ending and can be more moving than some Japanese anime's that I have watched and if we want to over analyze things the first part (semi-spoiler) seemed to highlight deforestation. Additionally, the flashback of the final arc was the most moving for me, and was actually quite interesting, and I think enforces my point that this anime gets better as the story progresses. As for the ending ending, I'll leave that up to you to discover, but I have no negative opinions about it.

Overall, I have seen better, but this is not as bad as you may think, sure it's a bit rocky at first, but the 10 min episode length and good enough story should allow you to watch all 18 episodes. And I mean for self-enjoyment I give it an 8/10, because, at the end of the day, I can say that I enjoyed it and I think it was worth watching, albeit not the most glamorous anime in the world.