With 12 episodes running three-and-a-half minutes on average, the entirety of Milky☆Subway can be watched in 44-minutes—48 minutes if you also include the prequel short, Milky☆Highway. Yet, this series makes the most of its limited runtime thanks to fantastic dialogue that feels unlike anything you run across in the vast majority of modern anime.

To put it simply, the dialogue feels like real people talking rather than reading off a page. The characters stumble in their line delivery—constantly talking over one another, like in normal group conversations. The dialogue is often hilarious—fast-paced and witty. However, that’s only the surface level. The lines themselves are filled with personality, revealing a bit about each speaker.

With its short runtime, this proves vital for character development. There’s little time for flashbacks and backstories. The most we get for each is their intake interview with police officer Ryoko. Thus, it’s mostly through their interactions in the present that we learn about each character and what makes them tick—and this is done with great efficiency.

The characters in Milky☆Subway come in pairs. When it comes to Chiharu and Makina, Chiharu is impulsive but rather naive. This leads to Makina constantly having to stand up for Chiharu—often utilizing violence. However, it is also clear that Makina sees little issue with this, as Chiharu is the only person who sees beyond her family’s status to the girl inside the robotic frame.

The next pair of characters are Akane and Kanata. Akane is large and intimidating—a physical powerhouse. Kanata is her opposite—a chihuahua-like teen that is all bark and no bite. The trick is that both of them know this, causing Akane to be overprotective and Kanata to try to figure out a way to be more useful to her.

The final set of characters is the cyborg pair of Kurt and Max. Together, they form the perfect team—one a fighter and the other a hacker. However, they feel unrecognized by the world at large, which has made them see the world solely through a transactional lens.

As these three groups move through the train, mixing and matching, we not only learn about them but also see them grow—moving past their first impressions to see the complex people beneath. This, in turn, brings out the moral of the story: don’t judge a book by its cover.

Of course, the dialogue and character interactions are only half of the anime—and it wouldn’t work half as well without the visuals. Milky☆Subway is a fully CG anime that looks on par with something from a Hollywood animation studio. It’s smooth and well-directed, be it an action scene or one of the characters fixing their hair in front of a mirror.

The series’ look is bolstered by fantastic character design. Kurt looks like a traditional cyborg while Max looks like a member of Daft Punk. Makina is clearly fully robotic, with a curved screen projection serving as her face. Meanwhile, Akane, Kanata, and Chiharu have red skin, pointed ears, and antennae. Yet, each of them sports recognizable fashion—and not of the typical cyberpunk or alien variety. Makina wears a letterman jacket while Chiharu is enveloped in a sweater that is almost falling off her. The cyborg boys are clad in street fashion, while Akane and Kanata dress like biker gang members. To put it another way, it is their clothing more than their race or augmentations that tells us more about each character.

It also helps visually that the entire series takes place in a grand total of three locations: the police station, the train platform, and, most commonly, the train itself. This keeps the setting contained and familiar—not to mention economical, as they are reused constantly. This also likely allows for greater attention to detail in the backgrounds, given the limited number of locations.

Musically, the anime sports an ’80s-style theme song which highlights the retro-future aesthetic of the work, as does the fact that the accompanying credits appear as if they are being viewed on an old VHS tape. The other big musical moment comes at the action climax of the series, where we get a new poppy idol song that also serves as a callback to the song in Milky☆Highway that got Makina and Chiharu into this situation in the first place.

All in all, Milky☆Subway is a series well worth an hour of your time. It’s fun, witty, and has a visual style that just oozes charm. The cast is fantastic—be it the original Japanese or the English dub—and their delivery of the dialogue delivers the laughs on a silver platter. And best of all, it’s free over on YouTube, so you have no excuse to give it a watch.