Review of A Girl & Her Guard Dog

This anime is an ephebophile grooming nightmare. If you're into that kind of thing: This anime is for you! If you aren't, but you're morbidly curious enough to watch it anyway, here's what you can enjoy about it: 1.) Umehara, Yuuichirou's voice (i.e. Keiya's VA). That's admittedly a very subjective reason, but as a huge Umehara fan, this is what mainly drove me to keep watching until the end. 2.) Isaku's friends and the hostess. Those three female side characters were surprisingly likeable! Because of Keiya and Isaku's huge lack of communication skills, the happy ending (provided you see it as such, considering the controversial nature of the relationship)literally couldn't have come to pass without those three! It was only through their support that Keiya and Isaku could sort out their feelings and solve their issues. Other shows might have made the hostess a love rival to Isaku, but this anime utilised her much better, namely as an older, more experienced source of advice.

3.) Animation/continuity/editing fails.
There are numerous of those, and whenever they show up, you can be sure to laugh your ass off. They range from characters moving awkwardly/unnaturally, over characters talking when their mouths aren't moving and vice versa, to characters changing positions or even clothes (!) in between shots. There are also a couple of still shots during which dialogue is played, which first makes you think your screen has frozen. It's absolutely hilarious!

4.) OP+ ED song.
Musical tastes vary, but chances are you'll find the OP song very catchy and the ED visually pleasing (the song is also quite nice, but less so than the OP imo).

To round off this review, I'd like to mention the two things that would have fixed this anime, the only two things that would need to be different for this to be a decent romance anime (at least in my humble opinion):

Make Keiya 18, and let him have a character arc.

Or make him 17, if you wanna go for a fully non-controversial anime, but that's all. That's all that would need to be changed, and you'd have an anime with basically the same outline, but without all the controversial stuff. If you're interested, please let me elaborate:

5-year-old Isaku moves to her grandfather's place after her parents died. To keep her company, her grandfather organises her a friend, Keiya (here he'd be some yakuza's relative, not a yakuza himself). Isaku and Keiya spend all their time together, even go to the same elementary and middle school. They are each other's only friend, which makes them highly emotionally dependent on each other. Keiya is extremely possessive and protective of Isaku, while Isaku is extremely reliant on him. When Isaku turns 15, she decides not to go to the same high school as Keiya because she wants to get over what she thinks is an unrequited love for him. With the help of Isaku's grandpa and some bribery, Keiya gets into the same class as Isaku and things pan out as in the original anime (also the fight scenes because this young Keiya took combat training to be able to protect Isaku whom he is so protective over). Unlike the original version, however, Keiya actually takes Isaku's protest against his behaviour to heart, sees the error of his ways, and develops into proper boyfriend material by the end.

And that's it. Not a perfect or revolutionary story, but decently enjoyable, at least imo. Thanks if you have read this far.