This is what happens when you love a show enough to watch its DVD extras. Five shorts, thirty seconds each, twenty once you strip the credits, and every one of them takes the fat maneki-neko lump that is Nyanko-sensei and drags him into 2009-era CG that looks like it was rendered on a dare. The Natsume Yuujinchou proper is watercolor melancholy and quiet grief over a book of names. This is that cat, plasticized, squeaking, bundled onto the back of your Zoku discs like a joke nobody signed. The audio is genuinely rough, the modeling is worse, and if you are the kind of fan who owns those volumes you already know you watched all five anyway. Madara deserved better. You clicked play regardless.

Nyanko-sensei gets his own set of short 3D animated comedy pieces in this five-episode special collection from 2009. The shorts were released as bonus material on the DVD and Blu-ray volumes of Zoku Natsume Yuujinchou, so they serve as a light extra alongside that series and put Nyanko-sensei front and center for a few quick laughs.