^{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.}

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A comet streaks the sky above a dying planet. That is the central image that closes out the first episode of The Missing 8, one of two currently released. It’s a striking image, and a fitting symbol for one of the most mysterious anime premieres in recent memory.

The natural question is very simple. What is this?

The Missing 8 premiered on the Youtube channel FUZI with very little fanfare on December 28th, dropping its first episode several days after Christmas in the pre-New Year winter dead zone. I can find just a single announcement–a teaser trailer from earlier in December–indicating that anyone outside of the animators and voice actors involved in the production had any idea this thing was going to come out.* Allegedly, it’s a collaboration between (or lead by?) animator Naoki Yoshibe and some amount of Wit Studio personnel, at least if Anime News Network is to be believed. Beyond that, there is basically no information on the English internet about this thing. We’re flying blind.

In the absence of the usual “you may know Director So-and-so from The Such-and-such Project” spiel, I am thus left with the task of describing what the show actually consists of. On a basic plot and setting level, that’s confounded somewhat by the fact that the subtitles on this thing are a bit stiff. But the gist is this; somewhere, either our own world in the far future or on another planet, a group of people with the power to transform others of their kind into any object they can conceive of defend their city against antagonists of some sort known as the Dragonewt.

Two of these people; Poppy and Punk (the former of whom loves to refer to herself in the third person) have a brief falling out in the first episode, after a scuffle with the Dragonewt goes wrong. Further spurned on by Poppy claiming to experience dreams. Something she’s read about before in the mysterious tome known as The Lux Code, but which Punk has (apparently) never had. They make up by episode’s end after Punk pays a visit to his mother(?), a blindfolded woman who is apparently the only real human among the group.

If this all seems a bit esoteric in the retelling, it’s doubly so firsthand. What I’ve danced around mentioning until now is that calling The Missing 8 a “seasonal anime” is admittedly rather misleading. I’m filing it into the coming Winter 2022 season, mostly for my own recordkeeping purposes. But this is a short-form project being uploaded to Youtube. Arguably calling it an “anime” at all is misleading, given that only select cuts of it are actually animated in any major way, with the rest being more akin to the (somewhat obscure over here in the good ol’ Anglosphere) medium of the picture drama, a cousin to TV anime proper and a regular fixture on Blu-Ray extras and the like. I am nonetheless going to continue calling it a seasonal anime, for the aforementioned recordkeeping purposes and because when it is animated it looks quite nice, respectively. Despite the general opacity, there’s a lot to love here; cool character designs and a surprisingly hard soundtrack chief among them.

I will not spoil the second episode, as is my general policy with these writeups. But what I will say is that the comet the first episode closes on turns out to have some intriguing implications for the little world that Pop and Punk inhabit, and have grown, it seems, so used to. This is a fascinating little series, and even if it’s not technically in the same format as much of what I cover here, it certainly deserves to be taken on its own terms. My hope is that this little article will help a few more people do that.

I’ll see you all come the new year for the start of the “proper” season. Until then, consider checking this out.

Grade: B+
The Takeaway: The Missing 8’s two episodes are so brief that you have very little reason to at least watch the first of them, unless you just hate the format or cool character designs or something.

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*Despite my mild bafflement, this is a format shows that receive an official translation sometimes air in. Just this past season Heike Monogatari aired online before eventually hitting TV. Longer ago, obscure Studio TRIGGER projects Ninja Slayer From Animation and Turning Girls premiered online as well, and the latter even also dropped on a random Youtube channel like The Missing 8 did. I can safely say that The Missing 8 is better than Turning Girls, though. Also: in this specific case, Missing 8‘s characters appear to originate from a series of music videos that Fuzi has done. Not that being based on music video characters is unique among anime properties.

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