You know fantasy has a different constituency these days when, at a pivotal point in this candy-coloured, realm-hopping anime, the protagonist casts a spell that temporarily boosts local mobile-phone signal. During the climactic battle, it’s salarywoman Miss Kobayashi (voiced by Mutsumi Tamura) who is dialling up extra help from Kanna (Maria Naganawa), the moony, bobby-soxed poppet who’s one of the dragons in human guise that have invaded her life (and demanded a smartphone).
Kanna is very much sought after: with a big smackdown brewing between the forces of chaos and harmony in the dragon dimension, her father Kimun Kamui (Fumihiko Tachiki) turns up at Kobayashi’s flat to demand either his daughter return to fight, or give him the dragon orb into which she has loaded her manna. Offended by his saurian sangfroid, Kobayashi refuses to give Kanna up; when her posse start digging around in the other realm, it appears that human mage Azad (Nobunaga Shimazaki) has been stoking tensions between the two factions.
Presumably the Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid manga, which ran from 2013-2024, made much sport of the domestic tribulations of running a foster home for dragons. This feature-length take only has time for a promising comedy of manners in which Kobayashi, with her duty of care, tries to win over the blockheaded Kimun Kamui to a more human and paternal outlook. But her letter-writing campaign (as Kanna says: “Yeah, argument thread!”) is quickly eclipsed when she is sucked into dragon-land, and the obligatory power-engorged brawling begins. Never mind pleas for gentleness; clearly the trad fandom elements of the fantasy constituency are still too big to ignore.
As per the usual with unforgiving feature-length anime spinoffs, those not up on the Miss Kobayashi bestiary will struggle to fully appreciate the otherworldly gallivanting in its full nuance. The film does look undeniably lush, straddling the range from kawaii cuddliness for the primary-school changelings, to a decorous high-fantasy register in halcyon backlighting; unsurprisingly, it is most exhilarating in flight through celestial cloudbanks. But without further mobile phone calls, or other incongruous 21st-century interruptions that might have shaken things up, the film gets lodged in generic sword and sorcery questing.
• Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid: A Lonely Dragon Wants to Be Loved is in UK cinemas from 4 March.
