Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
There are two immediately noteworthy things about Girls Band Cry, one fairly frustrating, and the other very much a selling point for a series that is going to need it. Point one; you cannot legally watch Girls Band Cry anywhere in the anglosphere as of the time of this writing. There’s just no way to do it. For whatever reason, none of the major streaming services have picked this thing up, and it’s only because of a fansubbing team going by SobsPlease that this article exists at all, since I don’t speak Japanese and would otherwise have written the show off as beyond my reach. If we were talking about a show that was fairly uninteresting, this would still be a little sad, but mostly of no major consequence. However, in the case of Girls Band Cry it is very annoying because of point two. This series has an extremely distinctive visual style. I would go so far as arguing it doesn’t really look like any other TV anime. At the very least, it certainly doesn’t look like any that I’ve ever seen.
All-3D CGI is not new anymore, it’s been an accepted approach to creating TV anime—if a contentious one—for over a decade by now. What separates Girls Band Cry from even its most immediate peers like Bang Dream! It’s MyGO!!! is a stark juxtaposition between its fairly grounded environments and incredibly fluid, almost cartoony character animation. These twin approaches, combined with a flair for directly incorporating visualizations of pure feeling into the series, create a world that feels simultaneously very physical and very stylized. It’s a very interesting contrast, and I imagine some will be turned off of it just because it’s so different from even other 3D CG anime, but it works very well for what the show is trying to do, and I would not be at all surprised if Girls Band Cry ends up influencing other anime to attempt a similar style.
So, you may ask, what is the show trying to do? A fairly simple underdog story about rock bands, so far, but it’s doing it with a real, competitive vigor that’s all the more important because of where and when this is airing.
Our main character is Iseri Nina [Uchiyama Rina], newly arrived in Tokyo*, and apparently fleeing a somewhat difficult home situation, although the details are vague. Following the compass of some online hearsay, she, after a series of minor mishaps, catches a street performance by her favorite musician, Kawaragi Momoka [Yuuri]. Momoka is a former member of and songwriter for a group called Diamond Dust. They’re broken up now, and Momoka and Nina happen to meet after the latter awkwardly introduces herself to and professes her fandom of the former. Hijinks ensue, wherein Momoka is chased from her spot by a pair of punk-looking people, who she promptly flips off as Momoka and Nina, who finds herself caught up in all this, flee together. Momoka also happens to flip the double birdies to their pursuers, beginning both a running gag and an honest-to-god visual motif that I really hope the series keeps coming back to, because it’s funny and earnest in a way that centers the entire narrative.
Nina and Momoka develop a fast friendship, and as they learn about each others’ woes (Nina’s buttoned-up home life, Momoka’s falling out with her bandmates over a song ownership dispute), Momoka lets it slip that she’s moving away the very next day. Obviously, this doesn’t really happen. Nina, who is left Momoka’s guitar, pursues her, and with the unlikely help of the same punks that chased Momoka off earlier, convinces her to stay, and they put on an impromptu street performance that ends the episode. The real lingering message is the one Nina shouts into the crowd while trying to get Momoka’s attention in the show’s closing minutes;
What helps sell this whole unlikely, delightfully cartoony story, is that the motivation for Nina moving to Tokyo in the first place isn’t some grand ambition, it’s just a feeling that she doesn’t belong. As somebody who also moved halfway across the country to get away from family who just Kind of Don’t Get It, I am immediately and immensely sympathetic to her plight. This is admittedly a stretch, but given her reaction to learning that Momoka’s roommate is a gay man, I think she might be queer and closeted, possibly even to herself. I’ll admit that present textual evidence is minimal, but the situation makes the shoe fit. More generally, and even if that turns out to not be the case, there’s a real sense of earnest sincerity to the show’s pop-tough-guy fuck-the-world attitude. “Punk” is a meaningless descriptor in 2024, but the show is genuinely doing something pretty different here, and I think that counts for a lot on its own.
Because while its story is straightforward the way in which it’s delivered sets Girls Band Cry apart from its peers. When Nina is upset, she literally seethes prickly red particles. When she first hears Momoka’s song on the street, the first chord becomes a physical smear of pure blue that wafts over to her ears. When she hears Momoka sing, it’s with such force that an explosion of rock glass erupts behind her. None of these things physically happen, but the show’s willingness to illustrate feelings as though they were literal events is very striking. It also puts it in direct conversation with that other rule-bending underdog story about the power of music airing right now, Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. In a battle of the bands setup, I still think Jellyfish might win, but it’s not really a competition in that way. (And both shows are still very early on in terms of episode count, so who knows where things will eventually end up.)
It might sort of be a competition in another sense, though. Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article about the state of the then-omnipresent idol girl group genre. In the nineteen months since then, that entire format of anime, quite contrary to my prediction in that article, has virtually disappeared. The only idol anime airing right now is THE IDOLM@STER: SHINY COLORS, and of the type that we normally think of when the term “idol anime” comes up, it’s the only one slated to air this year at all, every other example being a movie, a spinoff, or shows which fall outside of the traditional format (like Oshi no Ko‘s second season or, on the other end of things, kids’ anime Himitsu no AiPri). I bring this up not to make the claim that idol anime are dead necessarily, but to underline that there does seem to be some kind of shift occurring, as we move back to the similar but markedly less formulaic girls band genre. Once (BOCCHI THE ROCK!) is a fluke. Twice (the aforementioned MyGO) is coincidence. Three times is a trend. What’s remarkable is that despite these shows all being very different, there’s a running thread of visual experimentation that makes them exciting. If these two facts really are connected, then it’s a damn good time to think girls playing guitars are pretty cool. The rocker girls are back, and if this wave continues, they just might be the future.
1: Technically the place she moves in to is just outside of Tokyo, but even in-text, this is acknowledged as splitting hairs. A bit like the Chicago / Chicagoland distinction where I live.
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