^{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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I went into CUE! extremely skeptical.

The opening three or so minutes of the series are–quite literally–another show entirely. This is a cold open. Mid-genre pastiche, as an unnamed green haired heroine and her male companion flee a flying fortress aboard a speedboat. It’s a legitimately really cool throwback to a bygone era of science fantasy shoujo action anime that counted classics like The Vision of Escaflowne among its number. It’s an opening unlike anything the season has offered so far.

This isn’t what CUE! is actually about, though.

CUE!, you see, is an anime about anime. Its cast are voice actors, and that opening scene is a series our protagonist–Haruna Mutsuishi–is working on. In series like these, I am always immediately led to wonder about the actual women voicing these characters. Is it surreal to voice a protagonist whose ambitions are an exaggerated, cartoon take on your own? Maybe it’s oddly reassuring, knowing that people care about, at least, some version of your story? I can only speculate. Regardless, that is our actual starting line with CUE!

In the minutes immediately following that cold open, things don’t look terribly promising. No longer needing to be a convincing pastiche, the animation stiffens. More pertinently, as Haruna arrives to her new job at a voice acting agency (named AiRBLUE, which is vaguely obnoxious in a true to life way), we are introduced to a truly silly number of other girls. Fifteen actresses in all, with the agency’s actual staff bringing the character total up to 18. Each gets only a vanishingly small few seconds to introduce themselves. Most prove themselves to fit into various archetypes; there’s a chuuni who says she’s from Hell, a nervous girl, an overly brash girl who doesn’t quite seem to get what’s going on, etc. etc. You get the picture; we’ve been here before.

All of these are, frankly, pretty bad signs. Sometimes an anime can handle a cast this large even on a fairly tight time budget, but it’s rare. Most things are not The Idolmaster. Last season, the atrociously dull Pride of Orange couldn’t manage to properly characterize a comparatively modest six. What hope, then, does CUE! have, even at twice that show’s length?

Well, here’s the thing. Sometimes the only thing you actually need to make a series tick, at least for its first few episodes, is a single good trick up your sleeve. And CUE! has a great one.

Our characters’ time at AiRBLUE kicks off with an unexpected, on-the-spot script read. The script? Hamlet, specifically a conversation between Hamlet himself and Ophelia, rendered in the sub track back into period-accurate Elizabethan English. Having your characters read a Shakespeare play is an absurd idea. When last year’s Kageki Shoujo!! did it in its last few episodes, it was a flex, a demonstration that all these characters had become so known to the audience that they could each deliver convincingly distinct takes on a literary classic. (Romeo & Juliet, there.) CUE! deciding to do it in its first episode is an act of monumental hubris. But this is where the aforementioned trick up CUE!‘s sleeve comes into play; the series cheats a little bit.

When we get our first Hamlet/Ophelia pair–the spacey ex-child actress Mahoro Miyaji as Ophelia, and AiRBLUE’s talent coach as Hamlet–the reality of the recording room falls away. In its place, an expansive medieval castle.

CUE!’s opening fakeout was no fakeout at all. It is a recurring technique the show seems to plan to use going forward, literally transporting its characters into the stories they’re acting out as they do, cutting back and forth between those fantasy-worlds and the tense, actual line reads they’re doing in the real world, with other characters observing and commenting as transparent ghosts within the “play.” It is a blast to watch. It’s probably the quickest a series has ever won me over.

Mahoro and the talent coach’s take on Hamlet is fairly traditional. What really kicks the episode past “solid” and into “arguably brilliant” is what happens after. In an incredible bit of economic character-building, we see very brief excerpts from other Hamlet/Ophelia pairs. (One girl reads Hamlet like a snotty shonen protagonist, which is hilarious. Sadly, we don’t get visual aids for these shorter reads.)

And then there’s the pair that Haruna herself is involved in. alongside the ponytailed tomboy Maika Takatori. (The two seem to hit it off really well, to say the least.)

The easy thing to do here would be for Haruna and Maika to do essentially what Mahoro did, to transport herself mentally to a sprawling medieval castle and give a fairly traditional line read.

Haruna and Maika do not do that. Instead, we get this.

Another shoujo fantasy daydream. I’ll give you this, okay? Maybe I’m just easily impressed, but I love shit like this. In the moment that Haruna and Maika act out their scene, they are not themselves, they are an epaulette-adorned girl-prince and her heartbroken sorceress(?) princess. It’s gay as hell. It’s theatrical in a way that completely transcends its production. It’s amazing.

There isn’t actually much more to the episode after this scene, but does there need to be? This is a point made and taken; this is what CUE! is about. The act of performance itself transports us to whole other worlds, and truly inspiring performers can bring these worlds to life for their audiences. That is a hell of an opening statement for a gacha game adaption that, as far as I can tell, rather few people had any serious expectations for, to make. Almost impossibly, CUE! earns the right to make it, in this scene alone if nowhere else. Obviously, CUE! did not invent this particular trick, but it uses it damn well, and it makes for a knockout finish to its first episode.

^{Also: Shippers eat your heart out.}

The episode ends with the promise that next week our girls are going to be auditioning for something called Bloom Ball, which looks an awful lot like a magical girl anime. I can’t wait.

Also: out of lack of anywhere else that mentioning this little tidbit fits, I will do so here. It’s interesting that the comparative inexperience of the characters is mirrored in at least some of the voice cast. As far as I can tell, this is the first major role Haruna’s VA– Yurina Uchiyama–has ever had.

In any case, keep an eye on this one.

Grade: A
The Takeaway: I am hesitant to call anything a truly essential watch this early in the season. What I will say is that CUE!’s first episode is a genuinely impressive piece of showmanship that I think nothing so far has really matched. I would recommend almost anyone reading this at least check said episode out.

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