Month: April 2024

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [4/29/24]

Hello folks. It’s been another solid week of the ongoing anime season, but the vast majority of this column is going to be taken up by something a little different. Read on, past the seasonals, to see what I mean.

Anime

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 3

I am still kind of astounded by how much less this story works as an anime.

Granted, the particular choice of adapter definitely has something to do with it, but the resolution of the whole Dribblers arc here—I still hate typing that—just feels way less satisfying on screen than it did on the page. Also, why the hell was this episode so yellow? Everything was absolutely drenched in the color. I get that the flashback scenes were, you know, flashbacks, but the sepia look they were going for did not come across at all. The present-day scenes in the hallway look that way because of the time of day, but it kills all the visual dynamism giving us easily the worst-looking episode of the show so far.

The one thing that survives is the series’ very goofy sense of humor. A particularly memorable moment tonight as I watched this with some friends was when one of them (Alice, who I may have mentioned elsewhere on this site before? I don’t remember) remarked on how uncomfortable Sumireko’s tracksuit must’ve been right before it popped open in the most elbow-jabby we’re-playing-this-as-a-joke-but-it’s-mostly-here-so-you-can-ogle-this-girl’s-tits sequence I’ve seen in anything in a hot minute. I guess Studio Passione know their strengths. All told, I’d still rather they be doing this than Ishura. (A well after-the-fact correction from me here. I completely got the studio wrong! This is actually a Zero-G production. I have no idea how I got that wrong. Whoops!)

All of this stuff is in the manga, too, so it may seem unfair to criticize the anime for just adapting what’s already there. But again, the simple facts of the format make it stand out way more in motion than it does in a manga, this adaptation has thusfar largely been rote and workmanlike. It’s technically fine, I guess, if you’ve not experienced this story before, but the format change strips a lot of its moodiness, which is the main thing that makes Mysterious Disappearances work at all, to the extent that it works as a story in the first place.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 4

For the most part, Salad Bowl delivered a solid and straightforward episode this past week, about stopping a middle school girl from being bullied. That said, the final few minutes of episode four are worth mentioning. Here, the show swerves into a solid three minutes of casually-insane worldbuilding, where it’s revealed that Sara’s original world is actually a parallel Japan where Oda Nobunaga became a literal demon king by acquiring magic powers. This sort of ridiculousness is more than enough to remind me why I like this show.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 17

SHE! IS! HERE!

The menace, the power, the unease, and yes, the beauty. These are all traits present in Chimera-Falin, who makes her grand debut this episode. It is probably the most hype I’ve been for a character introduction in a TRIGGER show in a decade.

No anime could reasonably match the absolutely radioactive presence that Chimera-Falin has in ink, on paper. So instead, this episode’s team bring an impressive arsenal of tricks of motion to convey her narrative (and literal!) weight. Chimera-Falin as a character literally bends the story around her, and from her introduction onwards, things change fairly sharply. The show displays this by showing in gruesome detail just how thoroughly she absolutely annhiliates all opposition. To dredge up the tired Dungeons & Dragons metaphor oft used for Dungeon Meshi once again, she’s one of those really high CR, thoroughly unfair monsters. She’s huge, incredibly robust and durable, can claw her foes—characters we’ve gotten to know over the past several episodes, mind you!—to shreds, and on top of all that, enough of her human mind remains that she can still cast spells. Can you imagine how absolutely defeated that mage must feel when Falin simply dispels his summoned undine? I’d be somewhere between furious and suicidal. In general, Falin is drawn and animated in a way that emphasizes her strength and presence. I’d also say she’s drawn with just about the right level of frightening allure. We are supposed to find this as enthralling as we do scary. (This is sort of how Laios seems to see it, in fact, albeit along a different axis than, say, many of the lesbians watching the anime.) Also, she gets a number of really fantastic facial expressions here, some of which are cribbed from the manga but many of which aren’t! I wish more online discussion of the Dungeon Meshi anime focused on what TRIGGER brought to the table in details like this rather than on what can’t be replicated from the original manga, but alas.

The action is excellent, too, almost so much so that saying anything other than that feels like underselling it somehow. Sakugabooru identifies many of the best individual moments as coming from mononymous animators Yooto and Sushio, but really, the entire episode is fantastic from top to bottom.

After Falin clambers offstage, we of course get the long heart-to-fist-to-face-to-heart between Shuro and Laios. I actually think this works slightly better here than in the manga, as it’s a case where stripping some of the ambiguity inherent to that format actually sharpens the show’s emotional impact.

We end with some comedy to take the edge off as our heroes venture ever-deeper into the dungeon, with their objective changed to explicitly defeating the Lunatic Magician. This, at roughly the story’s 1/3rd point, is a real rounding-the-corner moment for Dungeon Meshi, and to my recollection is where we shift from it being a very good story to it being a great one. I cannot wait to see TRIGGER adapt the rest of it.

Some stray additional observations:

  1. Not to be this person, but I am surprised they were allowed to draw the harpies’ nipples.
  2. There is blood everywhere. Several other commenters have pointed this out, but the difference between how striking the visual contrast is in the anime vs. the manga is pretty interesting, it’s amazing what just adding more red than a Playboi Carti album can do. This was an extremely gory episode all around!
  3. Marcille looks absolutely miserable throughout this entire episode. Not without reason! But still, my poor girl.
  4. To completely shoot myself in the foot vis-à-vis what I said in the first bullet point, I think Chimera Falin might be even more beautiful in motion than she was in the manga. Where’s the HRT I can take to get that body, huh, medical science?

Revolutionary Girl Utena – Episode 4

Entering the firmly non-seasonal part of the Anime writeups, hey, did you know I’m currently in the middle of a Revolutionary Girl Utena rewatch? Specifically, as part of a group effort by the Empty Movement folks wherein we watch one episode per week to replicate its original air schedule. I bring all this up because I think I’ve somehow forgotten to mention it on the site before now. I’m going to try to avoid giving anything away regarding episodes of the anime after the point I’m covering on a given week (and will also not be writing a ton in general, most likely, given that I often feel underqualified to discuss Utena), but given that I’ve seen this show before—and how heavily Utena rewards rewatching—it may prove a bit of a challenge, just as an honest heads’ up. I encourage everyone to get in on this, if they’re interested in the idea. We watch an episode every Tuesday.

In any case, Episode 4 is the first of several revolving around Miki [Hisakawa Aya]. Perhaps even more importantly, though, is an on-its-face comedic scene that takes up the middle third of the episode. Here, where local school mean girl Nanami [Shiratori Yuri] attempts to bully Anthy [Fuchizaki Yuriko], we get a sense that Nanami may be able to notice that things are strange even when others do not. The rest of the cast, including Utena [Kawakami Tomoko] herself, write Anthy’s strangeness off as quirky at most. Nanami, our proverbial canary, seems to be the only one distressed by it.

Air – Episodes 1-8

Oh, this is just going to be incomprehensible.

Okay, so, this is a problem I have not run into yet when writing these columns. I generally only watch an episode or two of something at a time, and because most of what I cover here is actively airing, I only have one episode at a time to cover. That’s not the case with older anime, where something like this can happen, where I get very sucked into it and end up making, say, several tumblr posts in a row—the raw material for this column, recall—in a way that defies easily merging them into a single snappy writeup. What I’ve presented below are lightly edited versions of my original posts in roughly chronological order. Bear with me, here, I’m aware that this is kind of a mess to read, but I couldn’t think of an easier way to do this. (I may very well also just review the series outright when I’m done watching it, but I’m loathe to outright promise such a thing.) I am also going to spoil the hell out of it, including some pretty important stuff. So if you just want a straight “is this good or not?” recommendation, I’d tentatively say yeah, it’s pretty great, but probably skip this big long section here and go down to the Manga writeup for this week if you’re spoiler-shy.

Maybe the length of this section is fine. Air has basically eaten my brain over the past week, and as I’ve entered what I believe is the second half of the show, I have only become more fascinated. It is a sticky series, and I think it might be kind of great, although we’ll see if I still think that by the time it ends.

Episode 1

“I had a dream. A strange dream about the sky.”

I started watching this today1, because my buddy Josh2 is watching it, and I am easily influenced by outside forces I suppose.

This is Air, a 2005 Kyoto Animation production from just before their legendary run that began with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It’s adapted from a KEY visual novel, and my first impression is that it is very visibly “VN-y” indeed.

The main feeling I get is one of overwhelming “summer energy.” There are near constant cicada sounds in the backdrop, the skies are a clear crystal blue with huge, billowing white clouds which flip to creamy streaks of the Milky Way across an inky black at night. Everyone, especially our main character, is sweating all the time because it’s so goddamn hot, and the whole thing takes place by the shore. The vibes are absolutely on-point.

In addition to this impeccable sense of place—a deliberate artistic vision—there is also a decidedly non-intentional sense of time. This show absolutely radiates 2005, most obviously from the character designs, which are of a highly sexually dimorphic kind that was common in VNs and adjacent work at the time. The main guy is tall, lanky, and angular. Almost all of the women are comparatively short, round, and have the massive headlamp bug-eyes inextricably associated with the period.

The plot, such that it is, is simple but also rather odd. Essentially, our main character, Kunisaki Yukito [Ono Daisuke], who we are given no backstory for at this point, simply arrives in town one day, nebulously “looking for” something, and attempting to earn money by plying his trade as a puppeteer—it is very much worth noting that he appears to control his puppets with no strings or other tricks—but has little success. When he meets an odd, clumsy girl named Kamio Misuzu [Kawakami Tomoko], who trips a lot and says “gao!” when upset or frustrated. He ends up following her home, and improbably, the girl’s drunkard mother, Kamio Haruko [Hisakawa Aya] drafts him as a live-in babysitter.

Some of this is probably a remnant of the show’s origins as a VN—an eroge, at that, although this particular pipeline of H-game -> clean visual novel -> anime or manga adaptation was not rare back in the day—where a man randomly shoehorning himself into the lives of various women about town is the norm.

About the “gao” thing; Kamio’s mother disapproves, and this dynamic can’t help but remind me of Rosa’s disapproval of her own daughter Maria’s verbal tic from Umineko, itself a visual novel that later got a (particularly poorly-regarded in that case) anime adaptation. So far, the dynamic here seems far less fraught and abuse-laden, but it’s an interesting parallel, and given that Umineko postdates Air, I wonder if it was an intentional reference. (Ryukishi07 surely would’ve been aware of Key at the time?)

The second girl our protagonist meets, Kirishima Kano [Okamoto Asami], seems to style herself an alien, from a planet where everyone is “free.” Freedom. Air. ‘Free as a bird’? There’s something here, especially when she rebuffs the idea later and makes fun of Yukito for believing her in the first place. We later learn that Kano has an odd pseudo-sleepwalking condition, and that her older sister Hijiri [Touma Yumi] is the town doctor.

I cannot shake a strong feeling that this show is keeping its cards close to its chest. Given how crazy the visual novels of this period could get, I really have no idea what to expect. Although, to sell the show more on what it’s doing now than what it might do later, the comedic aspects are very well done. It’s a nice mix of slapstick and conversational comedy. Also, as mentioned, the show’s atmosphere is just absolutely immaculate; you can practically taste the salt of the sea on the wind as you’re watching this.

At the end of the episode, at around sunset, Misuzu gives a little speech as she’s standing, arms stretched out, with her head tilted toward the sky. I don’t normally just include a bunch of screencaps in these little writeups because I like to keep them short3, but what she says here just struck me as so…profoundly odd, strangely beautiful, a little reminiscent of my own experiences with mania and spiritual fervor, that I just kind of need to include it.

In a much more serious sense than usual; what does she mean by this? This is the most taken I’ve been with the first episode of an older anime in quite a while, and I really feel like I need to know more.

Episodes 2 & 3

Something very interesting about how the “shocking”, overtly supernatural moments of the episodes are crammed into the margins, usually only truly laid bare in their final minute or so. That’s so far, of course, there are still ten more episodes of this thing left for me to watch.

The image of the girl in the sky that every character seems to be chasing in one way or another is a haunting one, one that burns with a pure white light that I can’t quite call clarity. It feels like something I have an intuitive understanding of, but can’t quite articulate. It means something different to everyone.

On another level, this series dearly loves its characters. You can tell, by the way it portrays them as whimsical little dolls when they roam around the scenery far from the ‘camera.’ Air is a beautiful show, so far, which makes the moment of outright violence at the end of this episode shocking and a little heartbreaking.

Episodes 4 & 5

“There was never such a thing as magic.”

In episode 4, we get what seems an awful lot like an after-the-fact rationalization of Kano’s condition. A clear-headed, scientific explanation. But the show itself seems almost as desperate as Hijiri is to explain away her younger sister’s “illness.”

Surely, there must be some rational explanation, it pleads, as the theory turns to DID and a feather in a shrine as a psychological trigger. It can’t truly be cursed, of course. No rational person, no doctor, could believe that.

“It was only a dream, it has nothing to do with you.”

Until this episode’s halfway point, this desperation feels like it might still point toward some kind of grounded explanation for all this, but that notion shatters into light when Yukito touches the shrine feather. In an instant, Air becomes a different story entirely; a history of persecution, of a mother and her child cursed from birth, fleeing wars, storms, and death to find refuge in the village that once stood on the same spot that Yukito and the others stand on now. Even here, there was no real refuge, and the scene morphs into some distant echo of the binding of Isaac; a mother sacrificing herself to save her child. No story, it is worth remembering, is ever just one story.

“You don’t have wings, be happy down there.”

In episode 5, we turn to dreams of the ocean. Yukito’s own, from when he was a child. Here, the show again takes a somewhat more grounded approach, but “grounded” is relative, and perhaps inappropriate, given that even the series’ episodes that are more “grounded”, “down-to-earth”, an other such terms that conflate mundanity with the soil beneath our feet, are themselves preoccupied with the heavens above, as we learn when we’re introduced to Tohno’s “Astronomy Club” here, consisting of more or less just herself and a large portable telescope. Despite briefly meeting her mother, Yukito returns the next day to find the woman claiming she has no daughter, and Tohno herself is missing.

Elsewhere, we learn that Misuzu suffers panic attacks when she gets close to people. This is a distinct yank back to reality from a show that has so far spent most of its time with its head in the clouds, but the loneliness Misuzu’s condition creates—typified by a quick cut to a shot of a lonesome cloud—works with what Air has previously done. A profound loneliness connects most of the show’s characters, although they largely don’t yet seem aware of this connection.

If there’s an emerging theme here, it’s that of lost or broken connections. Tohno is kicked out of her home because her mother has replaced one delusion with another and doesn’t recognize her, Misuzu feels unwelcome in her own house because her “mother” is actually her aunt whose care she was put in as a troubled, younger child, etc.

The cruel reality of the sky is that it can’t truly be reached from the ground, not without wings. The show’s color palette shifts drastically in the episode’s final moments to reflect this line of thought, running red and black like a gaping wound. A strange, stark turn from a strange, stark show.

Episode 6

More than a story in the usual sense, it might make more sense to compare Air to a composition.

It has motifs, themes, imagery, and core ideas, but the anime’s orbiting, circular structure makes it feel like any traditional forward plot motion is an impossibility. The world of Air is suspended in its namesake; a bubble riding a wind current, sealed off from the outside world. And yet, as soon as I had this realization, that sealed-off world was disrupted in this, its sixth episode, making me question it. Air is, if nothing else, great at getting you to think about its characters and its world, and how those aspects interact.

Air‘s two characters named Michiru are, as heavily implied in the last episode, revealed to be one in the same. “Our” Michiru [Tamura Yukari], a character with red twintails previously mostly confined to comedic scenes, confesses her status as a living dream of Minagi, a waking fantasy that must be, in her own mind, discarded for her dreamer to be happy. Still, she is given a good sendoff, and in a beautiful and understated scene, is allowed to try “her” mother’s cooking. It’s a wonderful sendoff for a very memorable character, and the moment in the closing minutes of the episode where Minagi, visiting her father, meets the ‘real’ Michuru are also exceptional.

Michiru’s departure marks a rare change in the otherwise hermetic world of Air. Maybe more are to come? After all, there is still talk of that girl who dreams in the sky, and there are the episode’s final moments, which seem to signal a major shakeup indeed….

Episode 7

I really thought I’d had this show figured out.

Everyone gradually leaves Misuzu’s life as she slowly dies, suffocated to death by her physical inability to be close with other people. Her mother leaves her, and, eventually, so does Yukito, despite how angry he is at her mother for doing the same thing. But then he comes back, only to vanish himself. We have no sense of time here; how long of a timescale is this taking place over? Days? Weeks? Months? It’s hard to say. But at the end, it seems like we’re about to reach some big revelation as to what this all means, only for Yukito himself to vanish, and for a time-and-place card to drop that absolutely slapped me upside the head.

What?!

What do you mean AD 994?!

And yet! It does this! It goes through with it, even, given the next episode preview! We’re just watching a different show now, being shown a completely different story, in a different time period entirely!

And yet again, I have a hunch that this has more to do with the present-day story of the prior six and a half episodes than it would seem.

Episode 8

“We don’t have many days left.”

Clearly, a parallel is being drawn between this new story and the one we were previously following. The situation that our new protagonist, Kanna [Nishimura Chinami], finds herself in and that of our previous protagonist, Misuzu. Indeed, it’s decently strongly implied that they are in fact the same person reincarnated across the centuries. So too, Ryuuya [Kanna Nobutoshi], Kanna’s retainer, is similar to Yukio (although more of a stock anime lech and consequently less likable until he and she grow closer over the course of the episode).

This is basically an entirely different show, albeit one with the same core thematic elements and visual vocabulary as the previous, so it’s a little hard to know just what to make of it as yet. But once he drops his “funny” pervert act, Ryuuya becomes every bit the companion to Kanna that Yukio was to Misuzu. Running away together to flee her sad, isolated fate in the palace is noble, but where is this all going? As of the time of this writing, I still don’t really know. But I’m hoping to finish Air this week, and maybe then I will have more of an understanding of its ambitions.

A side note: the music in this portion of the show, at least the new music, is notably different. Skewing traditional, with lots of flutes and the like.

So! Yeah! Air! It’s a lot! Hopefully I will still like it this much in a week’s time. I intend to keep you posted, anime fans.

Manga

Lily System

Now this is yuri. Gorgeous-as-hell sci-fi yuri, at that.

Once again! I’m gonna spoil the whole thing. So if you just want your basic read/don’t read recommendation I’d say this is quite good, maybe even great.

Lily System‘s premise is really simple. Two girls find an abandoned machine in a shed, and it turns out to be some kind of hyper-futuristic VR device that transports them to a virtual world, an abandoned cityscape overgrown with plants and populated by animals and the occasional strange being. On its own, “two girls wander around an abandoned place together” is inherently yuri, but Lily System doesn’t stick to the subtextual.

Over the course of this story, we learn the precise contours of the relationship between our leads, Nana and Mizuki. Nana is the sensitive intellectual, whereas Mizuki is more forward (with her feelings, romantically, sexually, etc.) and is just a touch tomboyish. Together, they explore the surreal VR world while probing each other with questions about life. With Nana in particular, these tend to revolve around a novel she wrote—a novel whose plot, it gradually becomes clear, is a metaphor both in- and out-of-text for the plot of the manga itself—Mizuki is fond of accusing her book of being ‘a lie,’ and we only really get a sense of what that means at the end of the manga.

The girls eventually become lost, both literally and figuratively, within the VR world, encountering echoes of themselves who kiss in a bell tower, and haunted, animate school uniforms that seem determined to charge at them. When they begin appearing in the ‘real world,’ the girls realize they’ve been in the machine the entire time.

And yet, the conclusion they eventually reach is that maybe that’s not so bad. In the manga’s final act, we learn of Nana’s forgotten middle school love confession to Mizuki, of Mizuki’s regretted rejection of that confession, and how both of them seek to course correct now that they’re a little older. In reality, Nana is headed to a college in Tokyo. Like the fairies in the book she wrote, she and Mizuki will be torn apart. It seems, for a moment, that Lily System will be a bittersweet tale, but that’s not the direction things go in, and I think this decision to avoid the obvious take is what makes Lily System so memorable.

Instead of abandoning each other for the sake of a “realistic” reckoning with the outside world, Nana and Mizuki abandon the world. They retreat, somehow, into their virtual Eden. If they’re ever heard from again, we don’t hear about it.

The manga ends on this note, with Nana and Mizuki in each other’s arms, in a paradise hidden to everyone else. They create their own space. It’s a beautiful ending, and more than anything, it will absolutely fill you with yearning.

The art, it must be said, is gorgeous throughout, with mangaka Yoshitomi Akihito‘s landscapes conveying a real sense of a lost world. The character art is great, too, although fairly subtle. There are many little nods and expressions that give almost as much characterization of our lead girls as the dialogue does.

Notably! The manga also—ahem—climaxes with an actual intimate scene. It’s kept tasteful, and I thought it made a great inflection point for the story, emphasizing that these two really are meant for each other.

All told, beautiful stuff. I have a few stray observations as well.

There’s the curious existence of “Yuuko and Kousuke.” This is an unrelated one-shot that seems to be grouped with Lily System for….reasons I’m not entirely clear on? Maybe someone else will know. It has little in common with Lily System in most terms, and it’s not even a yuri, being about the budding relationship between a young boy and a girl and the former’s first steps toward sexual development. Frankly, I didn’t like it very much, but that might just be because of its odd juxtaposition with Lily System, which is just a much better and more interesting piece of work overall.

Secondly, Yoshitomi Akihito wrote this, as mentioned! If you recognize that name it might be from Eat-Man or Blue Drop, the two series he is, I think, best known for in the west. Certainly though, I had no idea that, from what I can tell from looking at his catalogue, at some point he pivoted to writing….well, stuff like this. Romance, or at least romantically-inflected, works about the relationships between people set in strange, detailed worlds. At least one of these (the “boy meets girl fantasy” of Hanako in the 24th Ward) appears to actually be a spinoff or distant sequel to Eat-Man. Interesting career this guy has had! Although upon looking all this up, I learned that Blue Drop was also a yuri series, at least in part? I somehow didn’t know that, how embarrassing.

That’ll be all for this week. Once again, I really need to find a way to streamline my process a bit.

Here’s today’s bonus thought. So far, these have all been either random musings or screencaps of A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics. Guess which one this week’s is?

1: Or rather, April 24th, when I originally wrote this.
2: This is the same Josh that I sometimes reference when talking about Love Live. Hi, Josh.
3: In their original context as Tumblr posts, that is. They’re….well, they’re obviously not short here.

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Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [4/22/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello, people of Earth! As the season rolls into its third main week, I’ve picked up an additional show, checked out a Netflix series that I think is probably worth diving into, and just all around had a pretty solid time. Hopefully you will, too, as you read on.

Anime

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 2

I have been somewhat down on this show’s visual direction but I like the “cut in half” motif at the very start of this episode. Overall, this is an alright episode that forms the first half of the—yuck—Dribblers arc. I maintain that this series doesn’t entirely work in motion, to the extent that it works at all, but I think this is about as well as they could’ve done it? The ecchi scenes continue to stick out like a sore thumb. Also, it must be said that the whole “drooling sickness” bit is significantly more viscerally unpleasant in motion than it was in the manga, and it was already kind of gross, there.

The Grimm Variations – Episode 1

The Grimm Variations is a hell of a thing, and essentially my big ‘discovery’ for this week. (To the extent that getting into an anime that recently released on Netflix counts as any kind of discovery of anything.) I really liked what I’ve seen so far, and not just because this is the first anime with CLAMP character designs in a good long while. I’m going to spoil much of the first episode, which is a self-contained story as this is an anthology, right here. So if you’d prefer to just get a quick yes/no recommendation, I’d say skip this entry and go watch the first episode for yourself to see what you think. Although do be aware that it, and indeed every episode of this show, is double-length. Personally, I would say the first episode is pretty great, though not without some caveats.

Essentially, this is a twist on the Cinderella story, wherein Cinderella is evil. Kind of. It’s nuanced, but she’s definitely at least an antagonistic force. This version of the story is transplanted to Japan in, if I had to guess, roughly the 1800s, and our Cinderella figure is named Kiyoko [Kugimiya Rie]. There’s also a frame story featuring the brothers Grimm themselves and a young girl named Charlotte [Fukuen Misato], but they’re not a major factor here.

The main force of this tale is the stepsisters’ own greed, at least at first, since they move into Kiyoko’s home as their mother marries her father. But there’s more going on here, and it’s difficult to tell where the dividing line quite is between what happens to the stepsisters being the result of their own actions vs. it being a consequence of Kiyoko being actively malicious. The slide from the former to the latter is gradual, and the episode’s final moments make it unclear if perhaps this entire thing wasn’t her plan from the start. The fact that Kiyoko displays no obvious malice until the episode’s halfway mark actually makes her more unsettling. The living doll in her possession is an interesting development, as well, especially since she looks like Charlotte from the frame story and seems to actively dislike how ruthless Kiyoko is being.

In the episode’s last act, Kiyoko, of course, unexpectedly shows up at the ball outshining both her sisters, propelling us to the end of the Cinderella storyline in which it is inevitably her, and not her stepsisters, who is wed to the prince. (Or, in this interpretation, the heir of a noble family. Same difference. As a sidebar, the show’s translation of various Japanese noble titles into words like “Count” and such is a little strange, although given that this is ultimately based on a European story, perhaps it works.)

It’s interesting how open to interpretation the entire story is. When the stepsisters first arrive, the affection Kiyoko gives them seems genuine, but over time, she begins mocking them, and it seems to grow into a twisted thing where she thinks of them as her playthings. (That she feels this way at least by the end of the story is one of relatively few things we know to be true.) Is this some kind of twisted vengeance? Is this the entitlement of the upper class? Maybe a bit of both? A conversation with a friend of mine (hello, Lexi) led me to think it’s interesting how the stepsisters’ fate can be read in a number of different ways if one is so inclined. For example, as the tendency of moneyed society to shut out anyone who tries to rise above their station. You can see this with how Kiyoko relies on the trust of the house servants, despite throwing one of them under the bus in order to frame her sisters, and how she arranges events such that their “impure” tendencies from their upbringing, their poor etiquette and gaudy dress sense, are exposed and mocked.

On another note entirely, the show’s visuals are worth praising. Overall, it mostly looks good, but I do wish it looked just a little more so. In its best moments it really captures the sickly elegance and sumptuousness of a rich household, but it falters just often enough that it only works some of the time instead of all of the time. Notably, the characters look significantly better in profile than they do dead-on, which is mostly to the episode’s benefit but occasionally saps a bit of impact out of closeups and such.

But these shortcomings are more than made up for by specific, highly stylish moments. The shot of Kiyoko in a bloodied kimono, juxtaposed over herself as she stands in the ballroom, is lovely. As is her expression, visible for only a frame or two, of a sadistic grin when she’s (correctly) accused of killing her stepmother.

The final reveal; that the stepsisters are also acting, is quite the twist, but makes sense with what we’re presented beforehand, and leaves the tale on a suitably unsettling and disquieting note. All questions, no answers.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 3

This is easily the best episode of Salad Bowl so far. It’s also really weird! The two things are connected. In general, the series continues to have a very modern and satirical sense of humor, which is not really something I was expecting when I started watching it. There’s an unstated irony (and perhaps an implied parallel being drawn) between the actual genre of fiction this show occupies and the roped-off world of the Branch Hill cult, who are the main element introduced in this episode. They’re a cloistered, faux-positive, new-age hack religion, of the kind that is very prominent in Japan, and seeing an anime tackle this at all, much less this brazenly, is pretty impressive.

The absolutely incredible parody of a cult recruitment video would be the highlight of the episode were it not for Livia inadvertently turning herself into the cult’s Jesus by healing a stab wound in its final act. I’m sure we’ll see the Branch Hill folks more as the show goes on, and I’m interested to see how they factor in to the series’ overall goals.

Unnamed Memory – Episodes 1 & 2

I watched the first two episodes of this with friends because I heard from some other folks that it was amusing, and also because one of the main characters is a witch and that’s a whole Thing with me. I’m not sure what I think of the series on the whole so far, but it’s definitely at least decent. The first episode is extremely dry and expository, though, so if someone got a bad first impression of it I wouldn’t be that surprised.

So, what is Unnamed Memory on the whole? Well, something with the very broad structure of a fairytale, basically. The crown prince Oscar [Nakajima Yoshiki] needs an heir but has had his, ahem, manhood cursed by a witch. He sets out to find, and conquers, a mystical tower, petitioning the (unrelated) witch of the tower, Tinasha of the Azure Moon [Tanezaki Atsumi], to free him of his curse. When she can’t, he tries to convince her to become his wife instead, since the curse won’t affect her. (It’s complicated.) When she refuses, he instead asks her to live in the capitol for a year, which she agrees to. Implicitly, this is also to give Oscar time to woo her over.

Fundamentally all of this is basically fine, but it’s a little dry. That said, as someone with very strong opinions as to how such characters should be written, Tinasha, to my own surprise, works a lot more than she doesn’t. She’s powerful, mercurial, a little silly, and full of secrets. Still, her ultimate purpose in this story is to eventually marry Oscar, a fact that the show, in its first two episodes, circles around but (perhaps unsurprisingly given how we’re not very far in), doesn’t directly address. Tinasha says herself that witches are objects of fear, but does the narrative fear her? If it doesn’t, it’s hard for us to do so either, which makes it difficult to buy into the series’ central conceits. The additional fact that she occasionally is played as nothing more than a staid tsundere is pretty bad, too. So it’s a mixed bag on that front.

On the other hand, Unnamed Memory is hardly the anime actually responsible for reducing the sorceress archetype to a gag character, and Tinasha is still given more depth here than many are, and when she’s on she’s on. There’s a particular scene in the second episode where she takes out a cadre of evil wizards and a giant wolf imprisoned in a chunk of ice all on her own, and it’s far and away the best thing in the entire show so far.

Basically, the impression I’m getting here is of a story carried by one of its characters having a lot more appeal and charisma than the rest. (Not a unique phenomenon at all. See The Detective is Already Dead, by this same studio, for an example from a few years ago.) Oscar is broadly Fine as a protagonist but he’s hardly worth talking about compared to Tinasha, and I’ll acknowledge my own biases there, but I really just can’t imagine this show working with a less interesting female lead….and it’s entirely possible they’ll fumble that aspect, anyway. So I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with this or not. If I am, it will mostly be for Tinasha herself.

Also, it’s worth addressing the visuals since this is a series, as mentioned, this series comes to us from the infamous jankmeisters at Studio ENGI. All told, it actually looks pretty much fine, at least not any worse than any of its narou-kei anime contemporaries, and there are actually a few scenes where the animation pops in a nice way, so that’s cool. Will it keep that up? Who knows! But I’m interested in finding out, so that’s definitely one thing in the show’s favor.

Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night – Episode 2

Great second episode from this one.

I do not see enough discussion of how unique this show’s soundtrack is. I haven’t heard this many analog (or at least analog-sounding) synthesizers in an anime OST. Not recently, and possibly not ever? Certainly not in something released this decade.

Let’s talk about the new character, Takanashi Kim Anouk Mei [Shimabukuro Miyuri]. She seems to be a little older than the rest of the cast, but more to the point, is a hardcore idol otaku to the point where it’s actively offputting to the other characters. Especially offputting to Kano, whose old idol persona Mei is a diehard stan of.

This is, on the surface, a very strange move for this show to be making, but I think I see what they’re doing here, casting Mei as someone who is clearly working through her own stuff by burying herself deep in idol fandom. And indeed, we soon learn she was bullied, possibly for being biracial and perhaps neurodivergent. The text isn’t technically explicit, but it’s fairly clear that these things are factors. One of the people bullying her literally just outright says that she’s bad at social cues, and her hair, apparently naturally a reddish-orange, sticks out, as does her name, which she’s openly mocked for. When she first met Kano in a flashback, she was adrift and purposeless, but it’s clear that over time the sincere connection they made at that point has curdled into something sour. It takes realigning herself with Kano the person, and finding an internal acceptance of how she’s changed, that lets her open back up. The show playing this whole very idol anime-y “prior meeting of destiny” bit completely straight is a little surprising, although it can’t resist playing with it as Mei makes a bunch of goofy gay disaster faces the entire time, but I think that by the episode’s end it works out pretty well, with Mei accepting Kano as she is now, and allowing herself to move on.

On another note: there’s a whole thing with hair dye (and more generally, changing one’s appearance) as a motif through this series. Kano goes blonde to avoid any association with her past life as an idol, Mei dyes her hair black both to emulate Kano-as-Nono-tan and to hide her unusual hair color, and this even sort of extends to Kiui, who we haven’t really met yet, who doesn’t physically dye her hair but has a VTuber rig with a different hair color. (Kiui’s hair being pink puts a kink in this whole thing, but not a major one.)

Overall, this was a really strong second episode and I’m glad that this show has kept up the momentum so well.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 16

Another good episode this week. I don’t have a ton of thoughts, this time around, but I do have a few minor observations.

In general, watching Laios say entirely too much while talking to Shuro is a lot more uncomfortable when it’s animated and voice acted. This is one of the least visually-impressive parts of the anime (which isn’t to say it looks bad. It looks quite good and TRIGGER delivers well on what is there, but there just isn’t a ton to draw), but it’s one of the most effective. Especially when Shuro absolutely freaks out on Laios during the pivotal scene where he finds out just what Laios and company have done to resurrect Falin.

We get a little more acquainted with Shuro’s retainerate (is that the term?) here, as well. I always wished we could spend a little more time with these characters, so I’m savoring every moment they’re on-screen, they’re all super fun. Inutade [Furuya Yoshino] will probably emerge as the fan favorite but I like all of them, personally.

As for that final little reveal at the end, what can I—or anybody?—say? She’s here! I’m very excited for the next few weeks.

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 47

With the delinquent, rude rival trainer involved and the battle itself being preceded by some unrelated challenge, this felt oddly like a season 1 episode of the original Pokémon anime.

Largely that’s not a complaint; I think Liko’s ongoing internal struggles are compelling. If I can criticize something though, the “losing the battle doesn’t necessarily mean failing the test” thing seems like it might do weird things to this series’ structure? I guess we’ll see.

Wonderful Pretty Cure – Episode 12

We get a surprisingly moody and starkly-directed episode of Pretty Cure this week, and I am very much here for it.

Cure Nyammy [Matsuda Satsumi], as teased last week, is real! But she’s also a brooding loner and kind of a hardass, and it seems like the disjunct between her more violent method of dealing with the Garugaru and our original duo’s caring, hug-it-out process is going to be a conflict for at least the next few episodes. It is wild how strongly her violent approach contrasts with Wonderful and Friendy’s, and I am a little surprised the show goes there.

Visually, this is the best episode of Wonderful Precure so far. Lots of really stylish animation, especially with the fight scenes, and in general, a surprisingly eerie vibe throughout much of the episode’s back half. If I can make a potentially controversial claim, I actually think this season has (so far!) had a higher batting average of great to merely decent-looking episodes than Hirogaru Sky. But then, we’re only a quarter of the way through Wonderful, so perhaps the comparison is meaningless as of yet.

Anyway, yes, Nyammy. It’s been a while since they’ve done the Cure Honey approach of having a character become a Precure offscreen and then be introduced to the other characters in a piecemeal sort of fashion. I really like the approach here, given Nyammy’s antiheroic personality and general moodiness. Since we already know her backstory, we can make some educated guesses as to how she ended up this way and what she’s prioritizing. (Hint: it’s protecting Mayu.) Although I do wonder if this might be a little intense for your average kid? That aside, Nyammy might be my favorite Precure overall in a hot minute, to be honest.

Himitsu no AiPri – Episode 2

This show is so wonderfully incoherent that I only barely know what actually happened in this episode. Everything else is just a pure sugar rush of digital imagery, only loosely tied together by this whole plot of Himari and Mitsuki trying and failing to keep a mutual secret from each other. I liked this episode, but gosh was it a lot to absorb.

Girls Band Cry – Episode 2

A very good second episode, although one I could not really wrangle my thoughts into a coherent whole about. Have a bulleted list instead. Also I must say, I could relate to this episode a lot, as someone who also often fails at basic household tasks and ends up crying on the floor.

  • I like the sky-patterened bird cutout as a metaphor for bottled-up feelings. I wonder if it’ll recur in later episodes.
  • We learn more about Nina’s weird rich girl country family and her bad school experiences.
  • The meal becomes an immediate metaphor for both Nina’s own past and her emotional baggage in general. It’s clear that she wants to devote herself to music, despite her own protests, but can’t bring herself to focus on anything but studying.
  • NOT THE EMOTIONALLY RESONANT ENGLISH HOMEWORK?
  • Momoka bringing her a light fixture literally vs. symbolically “giving her light” is very funny.
  • The subtle alienation in the scene where Momoka and her new friend/bandmate Subaru invite Nina for a meal and largely talk with each other without involving her is really sad.
  • I really liked the lashing out and making up scenes at the end.

Train to The End of the World – Episode 4

It has been a while since an anime made me think “what the fuck am I watching?” verbatim. Shuumatsu Train really probably should have joined this illustrious club a while ago, but maybe it took four episodes for it to really sink in just how utterly weird this series is. Episode 4 continue the stretch of the show that I’m tentatively referring to as the “Akira just has a generally quite bad time” arc.

I was right last week, she had a mushroom growing on her backside, and she spends most of this week’s episode hiding it from her fellow travelers as they go through an increasingly esoteric series of whacked-out train stops populated by bizarre, sometimes hostile creatures. We don’t get a long look at any of these, which is possibly for the better (sometimes it’s best to let the audience’s imagination fill in the gaps). Angry goat people who compulsively run at and headbutt the train? Screaming plants that cackle insanely as the train rolls past? Floating internal organs? Hails of golf balls? Why the hell not? Reimi openly speculates within the text of the show itself that these might all be former people, which is an even more mortifying thought.

Akira’s dilemma is the real central concern here, though. When the others find out about her mushroom, they yank it out, and in what I believe is a reference to the idea of a shirikodama, seem to take her soul with it, leaving her a babbling, sleepy mess who can barely sit upright on her own. The entire thing is pretty sad, and with this being the show’s first two-parter, we don’t see how or even if Akira will be returned to normal. I’m worried for my girl! Even though her normal personality is basically outright said to be a coping mechanism for the depressing state of the world both before the 7G Incident but also very much after it!

I also have to point out an excellent piece of analysis I saw elsewhere. I generally check /r/anime (as well as a few other places, namely, the relevant tumblr tags, Twitter hashtags, and BlueSky hashtags) for shows I’m keeping up with, because I like to have a general feel for the timbre of conversation about a given series while it airs. Usually, I do not see anyone make any inferences I didn’t make myself, but this post on the former by user 8andahalfby11 postulates an interesting—and sensible!—source for all of the weirdness in the series.

And that’s all for this week. Putting this column together took several hours, which is a lot more than I thought it would! I need to streamline my process, perhaps.

Here’s this week’s bonus thought: things that seem insignificant to you might mean the world to others, so mind what you say when speaking to people.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Manga, The Manga Shelf

The Manga Shelf: Your Planet is Doomed – The End of Romance and the Alienation of Humanity in UCHUUJIN NO KAKUSHIGOTO

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Knowing yourself is hard, knowing others is harder. Mangaka Hamita, in the second work by him that I’ve read since learning about him last week, seems to suggest that it might, in fact, be completely impossible. This is a core concern of Uchuujin no Kakushigoto (also Secret of the Alien, semi-officially), one of just a few manga of his that aren’t self-published. Other concerns of the work include honesty, difficulty in understanding one’s own feelings and the feelings of others, and of understanding how people think in general. Our main characters are our male lead—called “Class Rep” so often that that might as well be his name1—and Tamachi Haru, his girlfriend, an alien from another planet, who he confesses his love for shortly after she comforts him in the wake of his parents’ unexpected death.

In many other manga, the alien angle would be a gimmick. Something to give a bit of color to an otherwise typical romcom and to highlight how other people can be “alien” to us, while reinforcing that love and kindness can form real, meaningful connections regardless. Uchuujin no Kakushigoto turns that on its head. The inherent unknowability of others is the entire point, and the manga seems extremely skeptical that it’s possible for people to truly know each other at all.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. The manga’s actual narrative concerns Haru, her mysterious “mission” to Earth, and the ways she and the Class Rep impact the lives of those around them. Being from another planet, Haru has no concept of why killing is wrong. This leads to the first central conflict of the manga, wherein she murders the class delinquent Karagaki for hitting on the Class Rep in front of her, because she assumes humans can just rebuild themselves from nothing like her own species can. The Class Rep is, of course, brought to a panic by having his classmate blown to smithereens in front of him, but Haru reassures him that everything will be fine. In two weeks’ time, when she can travel back home, she can regenerate Karagaki just like a member of her own species. So as long as Karagaki’s sudden disappearance stays covered up, it’s no harm no foul.

It does not stay covered up, of course. And in fact, events quickly spiral out of control from this initial flashpoint as twist piles on twist and revelation piles upon revelation. (Not a knock, this style of storytelling gets a bad rep, but it makes for a real page-turner when properly deployed.) A few things quickly become clear. For one, Haru is a truly alien alien. She has no real concept of human morality or common sense, and the Class Rep’s attempts to impart these values to her largely fail. For two, these efforts fail because the Class Rep doesn’t really understand Haru. In fact, as the manga goes on, it becomes clear that, for three, he doesn’t really understand anybody. He tries to help people almost compulsively—the result, we later learn, of a neglectful upbringing—but because he can’t truly relate to people, his “help” tends to cause more problems than it solves. (He is in fact at one point depicted as being unable to distinguish any person who needs his help from any other. This isn’t literal, but it’s telling.) You could, if you were so inclined, read this as loosely ableist, but as someone who is neurodivergent myself, I found it profoundly and painfully relatable. You, or at least I, will really feel for this guy over the course of the story, to say nothing else of the other people caught in this whole mess.

Take the character of Teru for example. Ostensibly, he’s Karagaki’s boyfriend. But after she disappears, it’s slowly revealed that not only was she majorly two-timing him, he’s also the only person actually searching for her, because everyone else assumes she’s just run off somewhere. Teru, we learn, is also deeply alienated from his own feelings, and has spent a lot of time and effort trying to be like Karagaki so she’ll like him back. (She’s the reason he has blonde hair, for example, and it’s implied he generally attempts to act the part of a punk even though he’s really not one.) His persistence in trying to find her, even after the Class Rep manages to talk him out of it once or twice, is in a way admirable, but when the mounting stress of realizing she didn’t truly love him collides with the fallout from another incident wherein his mother suddenly abandons him, he can’t take it, and kills himself.

The ripple effect here, of Haru and the Class Rep’s actions indirectly leading to such a drastic outcome, is characteristic of Uchuujin no Kakushigoto. But more than just a storytelling style (one that foreshadows the manga’s final big twist), it’s representative of its tone. This is, at its core, a deeply bitter story about love that isn’t really love, people who don’t and can’t comprehend each other’s feelings, and how, if extrapolated to the whole of humanity, these intersecting facets say something very bleak about the human race.

Things that are tonally bitter have a bad reputation, and certainly, handled poorly, it can come off as the author simply ranting at an uncaring world. (Though given the state of the world, I’m inclined to forgive a bit of even that much nowadays.) So I do understand why the kneejerk reaction may be, as it was for me, that this manga thinks it has more to say than it actually does. (Honestly, that might even be true, as we’ll get into.) But that overtone of bitterness shouldn’t discount the story on its own. Bitterness is a part of the human condition just like any other emotion, and it can be worthwhile to see it explored. The specific kind of cynicism here feels so total that finding a “constructive” read can feel difficult, but art is not moral instruction. Even read as uncharitably as possible, Uchuujin no Kakushigoto is still emotionally affecting. It’s true that the nature of some of the characters means they resonate less than they might otherwise, but for the most part, and despite its many twists and turns, I actually found it fairly strong in this regard. It feels a bit silly to actually put it this way, but the mere fact that I felt sad when characters died, and that their later “revivals” via Haru’s space techno-magic actually made it hurt more, is a huge point in the manga’s favor. Being able to punch you in the gut is a skill like any other, and it’s worth praising when it’s well-developed.

Now, we do need (or at least, I feel the need) to take somewhere to note the flaws this thing does have. One of Haru’s gee-whiz sci-fi gadgets, which the manga mostly portrays as rightly horrifying uber-technology, is a memory-erasing gun. It seems to give those it affects permanent brain damage, a state Haru herself tellingly terms “honest.” As an example, a major supporting character is a girl named Maseki, the vice class president, and in love with the Class Rep. As introduced, she’s a thoughtful and sweet girl. But eventually, she falls afoul of Haru’s mission, and the damage from the gun turns her into an “honest” being of pure id, devoid of any inhibition. The second this new incarnation of her is introduced, she tries to strangle Haru with her bare hands, since she sees Haru as a romantic rival for the Class Rep’s affections. Later, she throws herself at him, sans clothes, in the manga’s only real instance of fanservice.

This is representative of the series having something of a madonna/whore thing going on with its female characters. The girls are uniformly either purehearted and sweet like pre-memory gun Maseki, or they’re beings of pure desire that use sex appeal to get what they want, like post-memory gun Maseki, minor character Natori whose main trait is stringing Teru along for her own kicks, or, indeed, Karagaki, who probably has a number of issues of her own that would lead to her sleeping around to the extent that we’re eventually told she does (up to and including prostituting herself), but whose inner life goes largely unexplored. It’s not that these women are written with no sympathy, but the discrepancy between them and the Class Rep and Teru, the two characters whose lives are explored in detail, is fairly stark. One could argue that Haru herself rises above this dichotomy, but given that this arises from her disconnection from humanity, I’m not sure that’s a good thing. And even if we ignore that, she’s still only one character against the example of several others.

This flaw doesn’t sink the manga, but it does dull its otherwise sharp emotional impact. The reveal that Karagaki was prostituting herself prompts a relieved “thank god you weren’t a good person” from our hero. He only says this in his own head, and we’re almost certainly not intended to agree with him, but it gives me pause. I think that’s part of why this manga has been such a chewy meal for me. Despite everything I’ve said, I largely like it, but the particular nature of its flaws mean that I can’t quite square why that’s the case. That’s part of what this column is; an attempt to sort my own feelings. (But, well, aren’t they all?)

In its final act, the manga reveals that Haru’s mission to Earth is to find a way to drive humanity to extinction. In parallel, the revived Karagaki—a person who, again, looks identical to her original, but acts completely different, and very submissively in this case—becomes a pariah for her classmates, who blame her for Teru’s suicide. Haru states that this is how she will destroy humanity; by removing any enemy for them to unite against, until they are so used to a lack of conflict that they will inevitably destroy themselves when one arises. Here again, the manga loses me a bit.

There is something worth exploring, despite how dark it is, to the idea of humanity as an inherently cruel thing, always seeking a victim, an Other to blame our problems on. That, in fact, could probably be held as the other major thematic concern of the manga. But the notions that Haru brings up while introducing this idea, ones of stagnation and progress, are artificial, Enlightenment-era ideals that were themselves created by men to serve men. I don’t like that the manga appears to treat them as inherent truths of the world, and I think if it makes a big mistake, it’s probably this. (Although I will reiterate, I am fine with the overall tone and direction of the ending, I just think the specifics get a little muddled in a way that hurts what the story is going for.)

In the manga’s final chapters, its last twist comes when Haru kills the Class Rep. She does love him, in a certain, alien way, but she can’t bear to see him remain something as flawed as a human being. In other words, she doesn’t really love him, flaws and all, in the first place. Haru, with her sensibilities far removed from an Earthling’s, can only see these flaws as imperfections to be fixed, which she does by reincarnating his core genetics into a new person, who she names Noah. This last development strikes me as particularly cruel, snuffing out even a certain fatalistic “it’s just me and my baby against the world!” thrill that other kinds of love stories have explored throughout the ages. For as much as the Class Rep didn’t understand Haru, she didn’t really understand him either.

In Uchuujin no Kakushigoto‘s final, postscript chapter, after many centuries, a series of events plays out with two new characters that implies that all of this might happen again. Indeed, it might have already happened many times, and might happen many times more. If that’s true, it is a fantastically bleak note for a manga to end on, and I honestly really respect the willingness to go out on such a downer.2

I do feel like I’m missing something, though. That’s not something you’re supposed to admit in even amateur media criticism anymore, the idea that you might not entirely get it, but I will cop to feeling that way, at least a little bit, with Uchuujin no Kakushigoto. Perhaps there’s some other theme I’ve failed to pick up on, some other piece of context that would make something else snap into place. Regardless, it’s an interesting work, one I’m willing to break out the dreaded “messy” label for, and it’s one I imagine I’ll return to. I can’t speak to the life experiences that may or may not lead someone to make something like this, but isn’t that just a confirmation of one of the manga’s core ideas? It’s hard to know how other people think, a relationship that is as true from audience to artist as from family member to family member or lover to lover. That, if anything, is the real secret of the alien.

1: I’m not being cute, here. That’s what he’s called for the vast majority of the manga.

2: The fact that the manga was, if certain internet scuttlebutt can be trusted, apparently cancelled, might have something to do with it, but that’s pure speculation. But, the ending works with the manga. If the cancellation noticeably altered the plans for the story, I couldn’t tell, which is the important part.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [4/15/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week, mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

We move into our second week of the new season, and things are mostly going steady with only a couple of comparative curveballs. Plus; an interesting manga and a pretty cool OVA series a friend showed me. Forgive me if I’m a little brief, here. I don’t feel like doing much extra typing today; yours truly is recovering from a doctor’s appointment where I had to get bloodwork done. (Nothing serious! Just regular HRT checkup stuff.)

Anime

Bucchigiri?! – Episode 12 (Series Finale)

A good finale to a good show! That was one hell of a final battle. I loved how by the end, Arajin and Senya’s roles have almost reversed in their respective duos. (Conversely, Matakara and Ichiya’s fundamental insecurities were close enough that they were able to merge permanently.)

I’m glad that Arajin and Matakara both end this series with a sense of what’s really important. I won’t lie and say this show was perfect, it has a couple issues to be sure, mostly boring structural stuff like pacing problems, but overall I quite enjoyed it and I’m really happy with how neatly everything wraps up in this last episode. The story of life goes on. Perhaps we must all bucchi our giri in our own way.

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 1

Ah, this is one hell of a mixed bag.

Here’s the thing, I like Mysterious Disappearances. As in, I like the manga this is based on. At its best, I actually like it quite a bit. But I also like it with many caveats, the biggest of which is that it is a pretty shameless ecchi thing on top of being a horror-mystery series in that “Japanese urban legends all connected by an overarching metaplot” genre. (Think of it as Otherside Picnic‘s heterosexual, fanservicey cousin and you’re in the right ballpark.) I won’t pretend I’m immune to this kind of material, and one of the reasons I started reading the source at all is that the main character, Sumireko, is absolutely gorgeous in her normal form (we’ll circle back to that specificity in a second), but a lot of these scenes, translated to the anime, just don’t do anything for me. Not to mention, I think a lot of people who might be interested in the mystery half of the premise are going to be put off by the ecchi material. Not that the series has any obligation to capitulate to those people, but it is at least worth thinking about. The simple facts of the format shift makes the tonal clash a lot more obvious than it might be on the written page.

I think the smart thing to do might honestly have been to minimize this stuff, but they were never going to do that. That in mind, going in the other direction and getting a team who could really amp up the raunchiness would’ve been an approach that at least engages with the source material, too. (If nothing else, original mangaka Nujima clearly really loves drawing Sumireko.) Unfortunately, and to be probably too blunt, the team from Zero-G working on this just aren’t capable of making normal Sumireko as hot as Nujima draws her in the manga. Sorry, but it’s true! A lot of the more egregious cheesecake shots in here, especially the ones we get while Sumireko is thinking about the state of her life, don’t really do anything except remind me of the “everyone is so mean to me :(” meme. Funnily enough, I’ve also seen the exact opposite complaint; people who are more all-in on what the manga’s doing than I am complaining because the show isn’t as explicit and crying censorship. I think this is an unfortunate case where the necessary compromises of an anime adaptation have left no one particularly happy.

And as for Sumireko’s other form, her childhood self which she reverts to by reading a magic poem, well, I’m not into that kind of thing. Is the show into that kind of thing? Honestly, in the manga it was an unequivocal “yeah I’d say so,” given how it was presented, but here, I’m not entirely sure. There’s definitely some camera angles in here that I did Not Enjoy, and I can’t imagine putting that in a series where that’s not at least part of the intent. On the other hand, Sumireko’s actual transformation is evidently painful, and by the episode’s end she’s bleeding out of her eyes, which seems to indicate to me like we are perhaps meant to find this gross and offputting. This was an equally strange thing, in terms of tone and presentation, in the manga, so I can’t really blame the anime itself here, but it’s pretty unpleasant all around and I’m not a fan, and the anime definitely makes all these shortcomings more obvious. Also, there’s a ton of crude humor directed at Sumireko by our other protagonist, Ren. To my recollection, this eventually becomes more tolerable as Sumireko starts to give as good as she gets, but I forgot how much of a snot he was in the first couple chapters, and he just comes off really badly here for all sorts of reasons. Cool eyes, though. I’m glad those survived the transition to the anime.

As for the actual horror / mystery / urban legend / whatever elements, those survive more or less intact and I think are what works best here. The nighttime city shots are suitably liminal and creepy, and as weird as the execution is, in terms of characterization, we get a good sense of the kind of person Sumireko is from her abuse of the poem book’s age regression spell in order to feel like a child prodigy again. Also, Fairouz Ai absolutely kills it as Sumireko, and I think the decision to cast her here was a smart one. So despite everything I just said, I do intend to keep up with this. I think every season needs its C-tier Decent anime, and that is the role this looks to fill for me.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 15

A good episode, and a return to what probably qualifies as the series’ “formula”, even if I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing.

This is one of the visually wilder episode’s of the series, which surprised me a little. I haven’t looked up the staff credits but just from watching this it’s obvious that a lot of animators with strong individual styles were brought in here. (Sakugabooru identifies at least part of the very stylish fight scene against the dryads as being the work of Kanno Ichigo, and I’m inclined to trust them on this.)

Some other points; Marcille is just great up and down this entire episode in all sorts of ways, and I love how absolutely done she is with everyone else. A lot of the animation for the dryad flowers was incredibly horny (not a complaint, just an observation). The cockatrice being introduced with boss subtitles is the funniest thing ever. Even when it’s preparing a familiar course, Dungeon Meshi continues to be just really great.

Go! Go! Loser Ranger! – Episode 2

Good episode this week, definitely a bit speedy, but I think the key points were done very well, mainly Soldier F’s untimely demise. I will also confess that a huge chunk of the reason I was fond of this episode was the extremely obvious; Suzukiri first makes her role in this story known here and the entire scene where this happens is just really, really good. Arguably, it’s even better in the anime than it was in the manga. Speaking of which; Suzukiri is, as far as I can tell, the first role of any real note played by Yano Yumika. Whoever found her and decided to cast her here needs a raise, because she is an absolute delight as this character. If you’re not watching this show, and women with ambiguous morals and crazy eyes are a thing you’re interested in, I would recommend at least checking it out.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 2

This show is weird! I did not like basically the entire first half of this episode, but it brought me back in the second. (They’re basically different stories entirely, and I assume they were separate in the original light novel.) All told, I’d say I don’t really understand its sense of humor super well, but sometimes it gets a chuckle out of me, and I guess for something I’m watching with friends that’s all you can really ask for.

Train to The End of the World – Episode 3

This was an interesting, and very fun-gal episode. I think it illuminates some of the show’s main concerns. But I have to admit my first reaction was “poor Akira!”

This show has a very unique way of structuring its dialogue that I struggle to put into words. The characters talk over each other a lot? This, combined with the fact that the rest of the main four just dismiss Akira’s concerns out of hand even before the mushrooms start influencing their thoughts when they eat dinner gives me the feeling that learning to listen to each other is going to be a running theme going forward. (It makes sense; the 7G incident was caused by a communication network gone haywire, after all.) I’d kind of had this thought as early as the first episode, so it’s nice to see it reinforced here. The girls are each others’ only real peers, and they’re friends in a loose sense, but they don’t seem to really respect each other very much.

We also get our first straightforward spook of the whole series with Akira’s “dream” of being pursued by the mushrooms. But the episode doesn’t let up there, and I’d call the entire thing fairly unsettling, especially toward the end where Shizuru, mushroom-bearing, is questioning if she was ever even really friends with Yoka at all and all three of the non-Akira girls seem pretty ready to give up. Although I think it’s interesting that the mushroom cult’s way of life is ultimately not immediately dismissed by the series, a lesser show would just write these people off entirely. Train to the End of the World doesn’t do that, it’s at least open to the idea that their sort of pseudo-carefree doomerism might be a valid, if flawed, approach to life, even if it’s not the one the show wants to take.

Also, that cliffhanger. My thought in the original version of this writeup was that Akira had a mushroom growing on her in an inconvenient place, but a person replying to me on tumblr (specifically a user named dream-about-dancing) pointed out that she might actually be turning into an animal instead, and also postulated that the next town seems to have a kitsune theme going by the doodles on the map from episode two. So who knows what’s going on there! I remain extremely invested in this show, and I’m glad it’s kept up the intrigue.

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 46

Pokémon Horizons opting to establish its characters over its first major arc, and then going into a loose adaptation of the recent games for its second, is, in my opinion, kind of brilliant. It allows them to eventually move the same characters to the next games’ setting when the time comes, and it makes sure we already care about the core cast before introducing a number of game characters here, also making it a good way to ensure Liko and friends aren’t overshadowed.

That fun little narrative trick aside, this was just a really great episode overall. The Floragato / Dewott battle was really exciting, and the episode as a whole was a fun way to get any new viewers up to speed but also get all of us into the swing of things going forward. I’m really excited to see where all this is gonna go, since the Explorers are clearly going to still factor in somehow.

Also, I will wholly admit that a good chunk of me watching this episode was just pointing at various characters from the game I like and then kicking my feet like a schoolgirl because they’re on the silver screen. Many such cases.

Himitsu no AiPri – Episode 1

Himitsu no AiPri is my second total Pretty Series show, and a lot like the previous, Waccha Primagi, it’s very zany and goofy, with the idol stuff as an outlet for the main character being a ball of anxiety trying to express herself. (As a sidebar, I ended up watching the premiere a week late and will probably be a week behind the JP airings for most of this series’ run, but it’s hard to say for sure, this being another fansubs-only release.)

There are just tons of strange little elements crammed in here that give the premiere a ton of charm; a “good luck charm” between two characters that consists of tapping one’s heads together, the inevitable titular idol competition taking place in some weird cyberverse, a principal who disrespects the show’s entire premise and is also so old-school that she’s an ojou character named Victoria, a background character whose hair looks chimera-fused right down the middle. The fact that we’re introduced to over a dozen characters here (albeit most of them only briefly) is pretty crazy, too, and signals that this is a show that’s going to be on the lighthearted and goofy end for the most part. Our main character literally falls into the technomagic bracelet that turns her into an idol. We’re in for a good time.

There’s also the show’s bizarre cyberworld, which provides a distinct feeling from the already-zany main setting. It must be noted that, of course, our main girl passes the cyber-idol entrance exam she’s subjected to without any prior warning here with flying colors. (Personally, I wasn’t that won over by the song itself, maybe it will grow on me?)

Also there is a truly overwhelming amount of pink in this episode. And it’s pretty gay, to boot.

Giant Robo the Animation: The Day The Earth Stood Still

A non-seasonal bringing up the rear, here. I watched this with a friend (who tends to go by zhagu on the internet), and I have to say, it was quite interesting overall, and I enjoyed it a lot.

In terms of scale, it plays out something like a cross between an old-school sci fi anime and a Greek Tragedy. Everything is huge, stylish, and feels inevitable. It doesn’t really fall into a single genre, something representative is that the enormous final battle, otherwise a contest between two enormous mechanical beings, is interrupted with a fight straight out of a samurai series and it doesn’t feel strange or out of place at all. I’ve been told that some of this is an attempt to make the series feel like an incomplete adaptation of a nonexistent original work; this is the alleged “second to last arc,” of which the rest of the show, obviously, does not exist. This structure gives the series a surreal and sometimes even hallucinatory feeling, even as it remains distinctly grounded in its 70s sci fi anime / raygun gothic visual style.

Also found within: interesting ruminations on what a sacrifice truly means and is, familial legacy, and cycles of vengeance. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while, and I would not be surprised if I rewatched it at some point and think even more highly of it. Good show, and I broadly recommend it.

Manga

A Story About A Hallucinatory Girl

Let nobody ever tell you that there’s no interesting stuff on Mangadex.

This is a very short Pixiv comic (split into nine chapters but they’re each very brief. I think this totals to 30 pages or so?) about a guy who gets in a car crash and starts hallucinating that a girl is following him everywhere. It’s….odd. I kind of like it a lot.

I’m not necessarily sure I’d call it the most sensitive handling of this material, but it turns out a lot better than what I think many would be inclined to assume from its oddball premise, especially around the halfway point when the girl starts interfering with his love life. It goes some places in a way I think is actually pretty arresting, I wouldn’t mind reading a full series of this and I think the author is talented enough that my first reaction upon finishing it was that I hope they continue pursuing art. (More on that in a second.)

I’m going to spoil the ending now, which I think is best experienced for oneself, so if you’d prefer to get the authentic experience, go read it quick, and then read the next paragraph.

OK, so!

The case turns out to be this: there actually was no guy at all, the girl is the real protagonist, and what she’s been experiencing is some kind of syndrome, brought on by brain damage, where she doesn’t recognize herself as herself, and thinks she’s a man. By the end of the comic, she’s been hit by a car again (!!) and improbably, this seems to return her to her normal condition, and she can recognize herself again.

This is quite an interesting place to take a story like this and I have to be honest in that, perhaps naively, I did not see it coming at all. Like I said previously, this isn’t a terribly sensitive handling of this material (I don’t think the solution to receiving brain trauma is to get more of it, if I had to guess), but it being….sort of a metaphor for self-acceptance in the end? Is pretty cool. Even moreso because you can choose to read some trans subtext in there if you’d like, which is always a bonus. It’s far from a perfect comic, but as a rough draft from someone who clearly has a lot of ideas (and a knack for character design, shout out to the absolutely gorgeous polyamorous queen in chapter 6), I think it’s a solid hit from a wild swing.

As for the mangaka making more comics, well, it turns out that Hamita, the mangaka in question, actually has quite a deep back catalog of mostly-independent manga of this nature, which I’m excited to dive into this coming week. (They also have a few manga that have been published, it seems, in actual magazines, but the majority of their work seems to be doujin in the broad sense.) Finding a new rabbit hole to explore like this is always fun, and I have to give a shout out to my friend zersk for alerting me to the fact that this manga existed in the first place. Evidently, I need to snoop around scanlation sites a bit more often.

And that’s all for the week from this past week. I think after this article goes live, your favorite anime blogger is going to take a nice, long nap. But before I do, please contemplate this week’s bonus thought.

Note: Magic Planet Anime is not responsible for any legal actions that may occur as the result of hiring a child wearing a tiny hat as your lawyer.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime

Seasonal First Impressions: Flipping The Haters Off in GIRLS BAND CRY

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.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [4/7/24]

One season ends, another begins, and it’s time to revive one of the longest-dormant Magic Planet Anime columns. Yes! You may or may not remember Anime Orbit Weekly, an “everything else” column where I’d write my opinions on the various anime and manga—and occasionally even other things!—I’d experienced throughout the week, sometimes at considerable length but usually only a few paragraphs. Generally, these will assume that you have also watched the episode(s) in question, and will have spoilers up to and including said episode(s).

This, essentially, is the same as that column, but with one key difference. Most of what you’re about to read is not technically original writing. Instead, these small writeups are largely cribbed from my tumblr blog, with minor edits to bring them in line with this site’s writing standards. Why am I doing this? Well, because there is a subset of people who are interested in my anime writing but don’t follow me on tumblr, and because even for some of those that do, sometimes it’s just more convenient to have things in one place. Oh, and I’ll actually be archiving these, quite unlike the original Anime Orbit Weekly column. So that’s a good thing for those of you who like to be able to find things.

Without further ado, let’s get into this past week in anime.

Anime

The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic – Episode 13 (Season Finale)

A solid end to a solid series. I don’t have a ton to say, here. I liked the little teasers for upcoming story arcs at the end, although given the state of the industry who knows if they’ll ever actually make more of this as an anime. I tend to call these “go read the books stupid” endings because I do feel a little like that’s what they’re going for, but the emotional beats worked well here so I think this was a good end to the series overall. Also, Rose [Tanaka Atsuko] is still ridiculously good-looking and I would watch an entire show about her without a second thought. Sorry!

Brave Bang Bravern – Episode 12 (Series Finale)

Oh, this was a really fun finale. I think shows like this are a very good argument for the idea that some kinds of storytelling just never go out of style.

Obviously, Smith/Bravern’s love for Isami, and his respect for him, burns from beyond the grave. Hot enough to resurrect him first as Bravern and then in the final scene of the episode, as himself. I was also so so so fucking happy that Lulu [Aizawa Saya] got to contribute to the final final final battle, I was worried she’d get left out.

Speaking of! Verum Vita [Kugimiya Rie] makes a lot of her brief screentime and I love how she goes from this cool, calm, collected ultimate final threat to psychotically planning to massacre the entire planet to incredibly annoyed at Bravern continually just being able to overpower her attacks. I liked how literally everyone came back for the finale, even if just to contribute to Bravern’s spirit bomb, I think that’s a good way of showing where the show’s priorities lie. I get that Smith has that whole little bit at the end about how “oh everyone who was there that day was a hero”, but if I can disagree with the show for a second, that’s really not true. Bravern and Lulu are the heroes because they’re the super robots. Everyone else is support

I do feel the need to concede that this was not a perfect series, at least not for me personally; some of the humor goes a little over the line for me (although not much of it to be honest), and while I’m mostly over the hoo-rah undertones present in spots, I do still have that little bit of an icky feeling that I get from anything involving the military. Also, hey, damn, Superbia [Sugita Tomokazu] sure got the short end of the stick, huh? Everyone else gets to come back to life but he stays dead, what’s up with that? Maybe the idea is that he lives on within Lulu, but if so, the anime doesn’t really make that clear.

Anyway, that’s all pretty minor stuff, honestly? Other than maybe the Superbia thing. And that’s the thing, this wasn’t a perfect series, but it was quite a good one, and I liked it a lot. If someone said it was an all-timer for them, I would understand completely.

Also, I am NEVER going to get the theme song out of my head.

Pokemon Horizons: The Series – Episode 45

So, there are two main themes of this anime, one is that experiences and adventures inherently change you and having a goal to strive for is more important than the actual act of reaching that goal. The other is that Pokémon are fucking awesome, which they really, really, really are in this episode. The team-up against Rayquaza? Sprigatito evolving? The Amethio assist? Are you kidding me, man? I’m just really glad this show exists.

Sengoku Youko – Episode 13 (Season Finale)

What a fucking way to end Part 1.

As is often the case in Mizukami Satoshi‘s stories, what we thought our initial goal was is no longer reachable, because the entire status quo has been turned on its head. As of the end of this episode, most of our characters are in some sense destroyed; physically, spiritually, mentally, or in terms of position. This is the barren wasteland that the mountain goddess refers to, in a sense.

I have no idea how this story will end when Part 2 picks up in the Summer. And you know what? That’s a good thing.

Metallic Rouge – Episode 13 (Series Finale)

If anime were appraised solely on their last episodes, Metallic Rouge might squeak by as pretty decent, but they aren’t, so it isn’t.

I’m not going to recap all the various little revelations and plot twists here because honestly, who could possibly care? The gist is that the events of the preceding twelve episodes don’t truly matter because everything was really just building up to this, a showdown between Rouge and her father figure Dr. Junghardt [Shimoyama Yoshimitsu], a character who is barely in the show before this point (even in his hooded guise as The Puppetmaster), and who feels ancillary to much of what the series was trying to do. In as much as “what Metallic Rouge was trying to do” is even a coherent set of ideas.

The actual events of this episode feel very random. I’d almost say fanfic-y? In isolation it’s not a terrible finale but finales of course do not occur in isolation. When taken against the backdrop of everything Metallic Rouge could’ve been, and indeed actively tried to be, the episode simply makes no sense. The Neans’ plight doesn’t matter because the entire thing was orchestrated by Doc Jung, which he demonstrates in a long monologue that comes off as trying way too hard to make this boring cutout of a Super Intelligent Chessmaster type character seem interesting. If the show had just focused on this from the start instead of interpolating four or five unrelated plots along the way, it might’ve worked a lot better, but it’s impossible to know.

It would certainly feel less distasteful, at least. I cannot get over the fact that this series treated “serious examination of discrimination and a moral question over the ethics of armed struggle,” regardless of its (deeply shitty and unbelievably milquetoast) conclusions, as just another hat it could put on and take off at will. None of it ends up mattering! At the last minute Rouge just decides to free the Neans, because now she thinks it’s the right thing to do. If we were going to build Rouge up as some kind of liberator and savior it would’ve had to start many episodes ago, and despite occasional toothless gestures in that direction, it really didn’t. (As an editorial note, bear with me here, in the original version of this post I screenshotted someone else’s points to agree with them, but they’ve since deleted their tumblr blog for reasons unknown, so I don’t want to reproduce them again here.)

As for everything else the show tries to do, the genre-hopping was occasionally fun when it remembered to not be stupid about it, but that was really only a handful of episodes in hindsight and if someone doesn’t feel that that’s enough to make up for the show’s many writing mistakes, I find it very hard to disagree with them.

And then there’s the last couple minutes of this episode which….reveal at the end that clown robot girl Opera [Ise Mariya] was secretly a Usurper all along and installed a virus turning all Neans into murder-bots, which completely threatens to saw the legs off what happened mere seconds before, except that then it turns out to completely not matter because Gene installed an antivirus beforehand because he knew this would happen, somehow? (Gene is a nothing of a character and is another reason this show’s writing sucks.) And thus Neans have freedom now, because of a completely un-foreshadowed, last-minute minor plot twist that occurred offscreen.

The final impression is of a show that is unintentionally funny and deeply unserious. My friend and sometimes-podcast cohost Julian M. also pointed out that apparently a bunch of this a wholesale bite of the end of RahXephon? I haven’t seen that show so I can’t comment, but it’s indicative of the fumes the show is running on at this point. (I later learned that RahXephon was created by the same person! So if anything, it’s self-plagiarism.)

Just so this entire heading doesn’t come off like an angry rant, there are a few things that work. Mainly the buildup of real, mutual trust between Rouge and Naomi. (Or maybe I just want it to work because otherwise this show truly does have nothing going for it on the writing side.) At the very least, it’s delightfully gay, I like the visual of the two of them together inside Rouge’s mindspace. Although even this comes with an icky side effect in that Naomi is now functionally dead as her own physical person. Any time I try to give this show credit for something, I find another way in which it could have so easily done better.

Hey, at least they brought the dedicated combat theme back, that’s good. And Cyan [Shiraishi Haruka], Rouge’s surrogate little sister, is right, Rouge’s new form does look really cool. (Why did they feel the need to kill Cyan, by the way? You can’t both have a shitty central narrative and kill all your best characters.)

I don’t want to come off as though I just completely hated the thing top to bottom. It was entertaining on a week to week basis, but in trying to do so many different things it just does nothing, and I find it really frustrating for that reason. The visual aspect of the show remains decently compelling (the Gladiator designs in particular), but I could never in good conscience recommend this to someone even if I don’t “regret watching it” per se.

What a mess! I’m glad it’s over.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 13

I think I’ve called the last five episodes of this show “the best episode so far” so, so I’ll stop doing that now but really, what a good episode. I was a bit behind when I watched and first wrote about this, so I’ve covered episodes 13 and 14 separately here.

This may be a hot take, but I actually think the show does an even better job of conveying Thistle’s [Kobayashi Yuu] menace in this part of the story than the manga does. That’s perhaps at the cost of sacrificing some nuance, but as I’ve said before, an anime adaptation definitionally cannot have everything.

There are so many good faces in this episode, especially from Falin, who spends a lot of the episode understandably looking absolutely haunted, and Marcille, who goes cackling mad while fighting off Thistle’s blood dragons.

I’ll admit, I sort of forgot about this whole second bit with the orcs. The orcs in general are not my favorite part of this story, but I like Chilchuck’s Character Moment here of having to confront the fact that he, you know, is worried about his friends, and I think Zon’s sister [Murase Michiyo] is very well-cast.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 14

Overall, not my favorite episode of this series, but still a very strong piece of character work, mostly for Kabru’s [Katou Wataru] party.

As for the big obvious change brought on by us moving into part 2; the visuals in OP 2 are great but I don’t like the song nearly as much. Many such cases! Hopefully it’ll grow on me.

The animation in this episode is not quite as good as in the previous episode, but it still looks very nice. Also, this part of the story does a very good job of establishing Kabru’s very extreme but principled in its own way personality. I also like the way they slowly reveal how good at memorizing details about people Kabru is, it’s a nice touch.

Everything about the introduction of Shuro’s [Kawada Shinji] party, meanwhile, is incredibly good and makes up for any deficiencies the episode could be said to have. Plus, Tage [Furuya Yoshino, in what appears to be her debut role?] is here! And I loved the samurai moves Shuro pulled on the sea serpent.

There’s a fun cliffhanger at the end here. Also! In contrast to the OP, I might like this second ED song even better than the first; it’s got a soft-focus indie rock sound of a sort I’m very fond of.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 1

This was alright?

First, an actual case of literal “portal fantasy” in contemporary isekai. You don’t see that super often, although I feel like it’s slightly becoming more in vogue again. At the very least, I’ve seen it a few times over the past couple of years.

There are some elements of the visual presentation in the early moments of the show, with what seemed to be real photos with a filter slapped on them, that were pretty weird.

The main thing Salad Bowl of Eccentrics does well is small-scale gags; I liked the bit where Sousuke [Furukawa Makoto], our lead, literally picked the bratty princess Sara [Yano Hinaki] up and ran away with her. Sara’s Detective Conan fixation, the “job” popup introducing supporting character Livia [Ichimichi “M.A.O” Mao] flipping from “Lady-Knight” to “Homeless”, etc., are similar examples of little moments that work pretty well. The actual premise I’m not entirely sold on yet, and I feel like the show may be inclined to abandon it if it gets in the way of the humor, but it’s hard to say for sure.

Also said Lady-Knight being the hapless fanservice character is….a little annoying. I’d rather it be her than the 13 year old, I suppose, but it’s a bit of a tired cliché at this point isn’t it?

As I said, I like the general character interactions, and it’s got a pretty good command of quick little gags, but I’m not sure if I’ll keep up with this or not. Time will tell.

Go! Go! Loser Ranger! – Episode 1

I really wanted to do a full writeup on this, but my hands are not happy with me after all the writing I’ve done over the past week, so my thoughts are here, instead.

Overall; fucking fantastic first episode. There are not a ton of situations where I’ve gotten into a somewhat lesser-known (in the Anglosphere at least) manga and had it then get a big splashy anime adaptation, so I’ll admit a part of me was a little worried, but the Yostar Pictures team working on this honestly just knocked it completely out of the park. Go! Go! Loser Ranger! deserved a full-force adaptation and they seem equipped to give it one.

The action is really well-done. There’s an interesting bit in the first fight where CGI and flat animation are blended, but in an inverse way of how you’d expect; the rangers get the CG, since they’re not the actual protagonists of this story, and the Duster footsoldiers get the traditional animation. Clearly a deliberate stylistic decision for this first fight and I think it pays off really well when the episode does its pivot at its halfway point. The comedy is really on-point, too. Our lead, Footsoldier D [Kobayashi Yuusuke] is fantastically cast and I love how he’s the focus from the second he’s introduced onward, and I love the fun riffs like him shoving his own introductory text out of the way. Our scrimblo has made it, Loser Ranger fans.

Lastly, even though her role in this episode is firmly secondary, I have to note Suzukiri. [Yano Yumika] My beloved. I have no idea whose idea it was to cast Yano Yumika, since this marks only her second role of any real note, but it was a great decision. I will also admit that If this show doesn’t absolutely take off in popularity I will be a little sad. Because it’s very good, yes. But also, admittedly, because I want way more Suzukiri fanart than there currently is in the world. She’s just very pretty, OK?

Train to the End of the World – Episode 2

In a sense, the real litmus test of any anime is usually not its first episode, but its second. Thankfully, Train to the End of the World‘s is quite good.

With this episode Shuumatsu Train establishes what I imagine will be a template it works off of for much of the rest of the season. The episode’s first half is largely dialogue-driven, focusing on the characters playing off of each other in both dramatic and serious ways.

We get a lot of goofy stuff here, for sure, since Shuumatsu Train clearly wants to be a funny anime in addition to all the other stuff it’s doing, but we also get a surprising amount of genuine tension; it’s implied that these girls have been each other’s only friends for years, and because of that they can easily poke at each other’s insecurities if they get angry with each other, which Reimi and Akira in particular absolutely seem perfectly willing to do. Which, honestly, who can blame them given the situation they now find themselves in? Far from home with minimal food, money, etc. It’s a tough spot!

The first Weird Thing the girls come across is relatively harmless. This guy paddling his duck boat up and down the river seems, briefly, like an indication that the girls’ journey will perhaps not actually be that dangerous. Despite this, he gives a genuine and serious warning to the girls about what’s left of the world outside of the train line along which they live. (Akira promptly shoots him down, claiming his warning is a poor imitation of a monologue from “absurdist theater.” This appears to be Shuumatsu Train smacking itself in the face to make you laugh again, said theatrical tradition is a big influence, directly or indirectly via other anime, on a lot of the anime this series is taking cues from.)

The real capital-M Moment is toward the end of the episode though, when a tsunami threatens to overtake the train and drowns the railway behind them. Their tentative plan of going back to Agano to more properly prepare is thus fully rendered impossible, and it’s made clear that there is no way but forward. I think this is Shuumatsu Train again signaling its themes of pushing forward an growing up in a world that is indifferent or actively hostile toward you. Also! I like the symbolism of the plant that Nadeshiko brought along growing into their emergency food supply. She definitely seems to be the “mom friend” of the group despite perhaps lacking the strong convictions of the other three, it’s cool to see that play out directly in the show’s worl.

Also also! Someone on reddit pointed out that the map the girls get from the hermit appears to foreshadow the nature of each of the train stops, given that we immediately meet people with mushrooms growing out of their heads for the closing scene here. I’m really interested to see where that goes. Great episode, great show.

Manga

Magical Girl Tsubame: I Will (Not) Save The World! – Chapters 20-23

This was the only substantial bit of manga I read this week! Tsubame remains one of the most fascinating and odd contemporary magical girl stories to me. I love the dual expression of Tsubame’s naivete in particular, how it both prevents her from fully understanding the gravity of the situation she’s in but also lets her reject the boxes that Kokoro has been placed in by the Center. If that’s gibberish to you because you haven’t read the manga, I highly recommend it. It’s quite good.

And that’s all for this week, I hope you enjoyed the somewhat more off-the-cuff writing style of these posts. If you want to see them before they go up each Monday, you can of course follow me on Tumblr, but do be aware I post about a lot of things there in addition to what I cover on this site.

Here’s a weekly bonus thought for you all. “Wherever you happen to be, if you look around you, that’s where you are.”

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: JELLYFISH CAN’T SWIM IN THE NIGHT, But With The Moon on Them, They Can Shine

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.

I think most people know that jellyfish aren’t fish. They’re cnidarians, part of an ancient order of primitive animals that date back to the earliest days of multicellular life on earth. Perhaps because of their ancient origins, or simply because they’ve never been pressured otherwise, jellyfish do not actually swim per se. They have no muscles with which to do so. Instead, jellyfish are carried along by the ocean’s currents. Clearly, this has worked out just fine for them, but what any one person might make of that situation is going to vary. When you see the jellyfish, do you see something hapless, or something that just needs a little help to get going?

This question, of course as a metaphor, is central to Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night, which, over the course of one of the year’s strongest premieres, establishes itself as a fairly unique take on an old, old story in the TV anime format. Jellyfish is not technically an idol show—indeed, the industry seems to be moving away from those over the past year or so, and Jellyfish here premiered on the same day as another non-idol music anime, Girls Band Cry—but it shares much of the DNA of one. Specifically, a kind of starry-eyed, emotionally-driven resonance, which it spins into an underdog story about the difficulty of pursuing your passions against the backdrop of a world that may be apathetic or actively hostile to your attempts to do so, not to mention the specter of self-doubt, a force that should not be underestimated.

Jellyfish‘s visual techniques are varied and are all applied very well. Chiefly, the show seems focused on cementing a solid sense of place early on, nighttime Shibuya rendered as a concrete but also almost supernatural nexus of nocturnal vibe, where anything seems possible if you reach out to touch it, and you can truly be yourself. The directing on this thing, courtesy of Takeshita Ryouhei (recently also known for the Paldean Winds ONAs), is nothing short of incredible. Our protagonist, Kouzuki Mahiru [Itou Miku], is an uncomplicated but fully-realized character, she is near-literally haunted by flashbacks throughout the opening episode, as they manifest in front of her as glowing apparitions of her former self and her friends. She has involved daydreams that interrupt the flow of the episode, only to be waved off or rewound back like a video tape; daydreams where she worries about a future as a “nobody”, or emotional outbursts she’s too self-conscious to actually have. (As a fellow serial imaginer, and hell, a fellow nobody, I sympathize.)

Mahiru used to be an artist. She isn’t anymore, but as we learn throughout the course of the first episode, after arguments with her sister about makeup, funny socks and TikTok influencers, and in-between hashing out tentative Halloween plans with her friends, she used to be an artist. Once, when she was a child, a drawing of hers was even selected to be made into a mural, a mural that still stands in the show’s version of Shibuya up to the present day; a sprawling tangle of bold lines and colors that, of course, form a jellyfish. Her friends, as kids often do, saw the mural and made fun of it, not knowing it was hers. This single act was enough to completely uproot her self-esteem, and eventually she takes a marker and scribbles over her own “Original Concept by:” credit on the mural. Thus rendered anonymous, it clings to a city wall, disowned but not disappearing.

As part of the landscape, it becomes a backdrop for—we must assume—many things, but the most relevant is a street performance by a random indie idol named Miiko [Uesaka Sumire]. Mahiru doesn’t much appreciate said performance using her mural as a backdrop, but can’t muster up the nerve to say anything. After all, it would, in her own words, take a real “hot-blooded weirdo” to speak up in the middle of a concert.

So of course, one does.

Yamanouchi Kano [Takahashi Rie] is, in terms of attitude, everything Mahiru is not. But she used to be something, too; an idol herself, part of a group called the Sunflower Dolls, in her case. We later learn that her departure from her chosen field was, unlike Mahiru’s, involuntary. (These things tend to happen when you deck another girl in your group, a murky incident we’re not given many details on here and which I’m willing to bet will form a strong running B-plot throughout the whole show.)

It’s a little funny to see a show frame street heckling as a powerful, heroic act, but in-context and in the moment, it really is. Mahiru comes off as a little mystified by Kano, but she’s clearly taken by her, and it’s very easy to read the relationship that almost immediately takes hold here as something more intense than simple admiration if you’re so inclined, but what’s truly important is that this provides a seed for Mahiru to realize that she wants to pursue art again.

She’s not the only one; Kano has a thing going on as an utaite1 despite being blackballed by the idol industry proper. She does this under the name JELEE, providing another, marginally more literal meaning to the show’s title. Naturally the end of the episode sees the two combining their powers, but this takes some doing.

It’s clear that Mahiru’s insecurity, while it might stem from a single obvious cause, has since grown beyond it, and when Kano initially tries to get Mahiru to join her, she literally runs away, spouting a fountain of excuses and retreating to the relative anonymity of the evening train. Encountering Kano again, during Halloween night, while once again in Shibuya, gives Mahiru the final push. Once again, the pair encounter Miiko. Once again, she’s performing in front of the mural, this time covering “Colorful Moonlight”, a song Kano wrote during her days in the Sunflower Dolls. Once again, Kano tells her off. This time, though, things go a step further. Borrowing an acoustic guitar and stepping into the performer’s spotlight herself, Kano begins singing her version of the song, here stripped down to just guitar and vocals.

This marks the first time we hear the song unobscured, and this is where Mahiru finally frees herself of her own anxieties, even if only temporarily. She draws behind Kano, making huge, swooping lines with a stick of lipstick, she marks up her own mural with googly eyes; making it look like the jellyfish from the logo of Kano’s youtube channel. This whole thing is being livestreamed, and thus, JELEE ceases to be one person, and becomes a collective; what Mahiru cannot accomplish on her own, she finds is possible in the company of Kano, someone who stokes her creative fires and inspires her. On that beautifully-executed note, the episode ends.

Not long after this incredibly important shot.

I’ve glossed over and simplified much in the recapping of this episode’s actual plot, because in some ways the literal events take a distant backseat to the emotional beats. I haven’t had space to mention the brilliant little scene near the beginning where Mahiru hesitantly chooses between an angel or devil costume, only for Kano—who we haven’t met yet—to snatch up the devil without a second thought. I haven’t talked about the series’ use of symbols; jellyfish obviously, but also lipstick as a signifier for all things simultaneously “adult” and ruthlessly constraining, a sort of deliberate inversion of how a lot of anime for young girls use that same symbol, the use of video effects to emphasize the artificiality (and thus lack of consequence) of Mahiru’s daydreams. Ultimately, the thing is that these are details, and while there is a lot going on in Jellyfish and such details greatly enhance it, it is very clearly a big-picture show. That’s why it feels like there really is something special about the idea of not an idol anime or a girls’ band anime but an artist collective anime. Something too to the idea that the lead is not even the singer, but the visual artist. (Our eventual other two members of this troupe are a VTuber and a pianist, who knows how that’s going to work? I’m excited to find out!)

This is not a perfect premiere—what is?—some of the dialogue is a little strained, and I would really like to see the camera be a bit less leery going forward, but these feel like such minor complaints compared to the pure pulse of breathtaking energy that is the rest of the premiere.

Jellyfish, in a word, is hyperactive. Eager to make you look at its murals and songs, its nighttime Shibuya, the strong, instantly-formed shock-of-destiny relationship between its two leads, its flashy camera tricks and video effects, its characters, its idea that everyone has a song inside of them. This is a show that wants to impress you. “Isn’t all this beautiful?” It asks, and the wonderful thing is that it’s completely right; it is.

1: A kind of internet-based singer, originally associated with NicoNicoDouga, now common on Youtube as well. Perhaps the most famous utaite-turned-professional in contemporary J-pop is Ado, apparently a deliberate influence, in the case of this anime.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: ASTRO NOTE Isn’t Quite Out of This World

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.

Just because of the sheer number of people on the planet, there must be someone, somewhere, who tuned into Astro Note‘s premiere while knowing literally nothing about it. This person, I must imagine, was faintly confused. Not as much as they’d’ve been by Train to The End of The World‘s premiere earlier this week, but still pretty puzzled. Fakeout openings are nothing new in shows like this, but the disconnect between Astro Note‘s first minute or so—a retro sci-fi pastiche complete with space suits and ray guns—and the rest of its premiere episode, is pretty funny. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that this is the funniest thing about it, which when the actual main aim of your show is to be a romcom, is kind of a problem. On the other hand, as is always the case, I tend to not want to judge shows that are clearly Doing Something too harshly.

Let’s set the question of quality aside for right now. Astro Note‘s actual premise is thus; Goutokuji Mira [Uchida Maaya], an alien from the planet Wido, escapes a firefight and takes refuge on Earth, of course in Japan, sometime in the 21st century. There, she bumbles her way into ownership of a share house, the Astro Lodge, which has, as a living perk, free daily breakfasts. (Is this a real thing? I have no idea, probably!) The building’s tenants, a cast of colorful archetypes rendered with varying levels of success and clarity, demand she find them a new cook, since Mira’s own cooking is more or less inedible. Yes, a good chunk of this episode’s setup is based around one of the oldest jokes in the format. At the very least, said inedible food is not literally just rendered as purple gloop this time around.

She puts out a for-hire ad, which as it turns out is completely full of lies and other made-up things. (She’s an alien, which her housemates of course do not know, so she doesn’t know how job listings work. Obviously.) Nonetheless, they attract an applicant, our male lead Miyasaki Takumi [Saitou Souma], who first encounters Mira when she nearly falls off the Astro Lounge’s roof. He catches her, giving us our obligatory Meet Cute moment, and only then does he find out that she’s more or less in charge of this place.

Since the job posting was full of lies, Takumi cannot actually get the position, but he stays at Astro Lounge anyway, serving as the house’s daily breakfast chef regardless. Why? Because Mira is pretty, and he’s talked into it by two of the other tenants.

Fair enough, I suppose, but it seems like a lot of convulsion to get us to Step 1 of our romcom setup. The remainder of the episode is spent on Takumi settling in, interacting with the various other tenants, and getting a good idea of just how strange Mira is.

If the non-sci-fi portions of this premise seem familiar, and you’re someone with a decent command of 80s anime, that’s because this series appears to be heavily riffing on Takahashi Rumiko‘s Maison Ikkoku, which had a TV anime that ran for nearly a hundred episodes back in the Cold War era. I will admit that I’m not really familiar with that series beyond its basic premise, but I am assured that there are a number of references in this series to that one, despite the fact that they’re not officially “related” in any way. (You can draw a loose analogue here to how last season’s Brave Bang Bravern was heavily drawing from the Brave series of mecha anime despite not actually being part of it.) The most obvious of these is the name of Mira’s species itself; “Wido”, as in, a homophone for “widow,” which the female lead of Maison Ikkoku actually was, a mistake that Takumi makes when he overhears Mira talking to her dog—actually her superior from Wido—late at night.

Building on previous texts is all well and good, but this show still has to stand on its own two legs, and this is where I start to doubt Astro Note. A romcom needs to succeed at either the rom or the com to be tolerable, and ideally it should be good at both. So far, most of the humor in Astro Note is fairly rote and will be familiar to anyone who’s seen any character-driven comedy anime of the past several decades. This is hardly the worst I’ve ever seen some of these jokes done, but I have nonetheless seen them before; the hapless woman who can’t cook, the fish out of water who doesn’t know what these ‘Smart Phones’ and ‘Films’ you speak of are, the precocious kid who’s too smart for his own good, the scumbag cheapskate salaryman (who in this case is actually just unemployed full stop), the vicious little dog whose anger seems too big for its small body, the idol who’s a real piece of work in person. And so on, and so forth.

Now, is an anime (or any piece of art or entertainment) necessarily obligated to reinvent the wheel? Well, no, of course not, it just has to succeed at what it’s trying to do. Some of Astro Note‘s gags work better than others; it’s almost certainly just because I’m a sucker for the archetype, but I do find Matsubara Teruko, the aforementioned jackass idol, pretty amusing. (She’s voiced by Furihata Ai, AKA Ruby from Love Live!, which may help sell the joke for some.)

To my own surprise, I also liked Wakabayashi Tomihiro, the salaryman character [Sugita Tomokazu], whose blatant dickbaggery is so audacious that it can wrap back around to funny, given the right circumstance. These things are all matters of taste, though, and I imagine how willing you are to watch characters that you’ve almost certainly seen versions of before interact is going to drive how much slack you’re willing to give Astro Note.

And really, the question of how much slack to give the show is hounding me a bit, here. I feel like I’m being too mean and too lenient at the same time. On the one hand, no one wants to ever be accused of Not Getting It, so I am going out of my way to establish that I am aware that the show is deliberately working within a restrained, older format, and I think it does sometimes succeed within that format. On the other hand, this is a pretty busy season already, and it’s only going to get busier. Should anyone really be setting aside an extra 20 minutes of their own time each week to watch a show whose first episode could be charitably described as “decent”? I’m honestly not sure!

The show’s visuals are worth checking in on here, since that’s about the only thing I’ve not addressed. I suspect that these, too, will be divisive. Astro Note is definitely colorful and solidly-composed, which puts it a cut above anything actually bad (and feels like an oasis in the desert after a full season of watching Ishura and the like), but where we get into odder territory are the character designs. Some are pretty good; Mira is cute, and her curling hair is a nice visual touch that nods to the show’s inspirations. Our male lead is inoffensive but also visually a bit bland in a way that’s unfortunately inescapable with almost any male romcom lead. I actually quite like Teruko’s design both in and out of her idol getup, and the other designs range from decent to a bit offputting. I would’ve liked to see the retro influence come through a bit stronger in this area, and maybe they still will in characters we’ve not met yet, as the ED seems to allude to, but still. Also, at two distinct points, Mira is bowing and the camera is angled such that we’re staring at her ass. This is the kind of thing that would be excusable if the mood the show was going for was “horny,” but it seems to be aiming much more for cute and funny, so it’s just kind of offputting.

All told, and for me personally, I turn to the old post-2000s anime fan standby of the three-episode rule, which despite its name is more of a tentative suggestion. It’s good for anime of a couple different kinds, one of which is something like this, where it’s not clear whether its disparate elements are going to cohere in any substantial way, and how good at paying off its setups it’s going to be. Even then; this is a comedy anime, not Madoka Magica, so if someone were inclined to just write it off right here, I’d get that too. Certainly, I know people who I’m quite sure are going to like this a lot less than I did, and that’s even accounting for the fact that I’m only lukewarm on it. I’ve seen some other reviewers call it “dated” and I don’t think that’s entirely fair, it’s clearly attempting to be a deliberate throwback. But being retro can only get you so far.

Will Astro Note appear in the pages of Magic Planet Anime again? Certainly, that would be nice, but unless it does more with its central romance, or really picks up the pace with regard to its comedy, I don’t see myself finishing the series. On the other hand, who knows? The closing shots of this episode promise to lean more into the sci-fi elements, which could help build Astro Note a distinct identity apart from the show it’s riffing on, and would be one way to paper over some of the elements of the series so far that don’t work.

Birds aren’t real. They’re tools of the bourgeoise.

So who can say? Maybe next week it will really blast off. Stranger things have happened, on this planet and on many others.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: 30 Stops to Ikebukuro – What Even is TRAIN TO THE END OF THE WORLD?

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.

Consider the train. Trains connect places, and therefore people. They shorten distances, enabling the average person to travel far and wide with relatively little of the immense pain that travel was in pre-industrial times. Nonetheless, trains aren’t cars. You can’t pick where you’re going to go; if it’s not somewhere on the line, you’re never going to get there. In this way, trains are both freeing and restrictive. They will get you where you want to go, but only if where you want to go is along a predetermined path. You know, like college.

I can’t prove it, but I have an inkling that this dichotomy was the genesis of Train to The End of The World (more snappily known as just Shuumatsu Train in some corners), or at least a small part of that genesis. Shuumatsu Train kicks the spring season off1, notably, as an original production. So we’re all on the same page, equally travelling blind to wherever this railcar happens to take us, which is an inarguable positive for something that’s as out-there as this series is already shaping up to be. It comes to us from EMT Squared, who have been around for a while, and in fact, they also made Fluffy Paradise, the first anime I covered here on Magic Planet Anime last season, but are certainly not a household name. More immediately interesting to your average anime viewer may be the resume of director Mizushima Tsutomu, an industry lifer with a truly odd body of work. What sweeping statements can you make about the guy who directed Squid Girl, ANOTHER, Witchcraft Works, most of Girls und Panzer, Shirobako, and Joshiraku, among other things? If nothing else, you can’t pigeonhole the man. For reasons like its eclectic staff, and also its rather bizarre first key visual, it was hard to know what to expect from Shuumatsu Train. In a way, that’s exciting; some of last season’s best anime were originals (I am here thinking mainly of super robot pastiche / self-effacing yaoibait comedy Brave Bang Bravern! and superpowered delinquent punch-up Bucchigiri?!), so it would be great to see things continue in that direction.

However, the main question Shuumatsu Train wants to answer, as it begins, is “what would happen if a spam pop-up ad could abduct you in real life?” This is just one part of what I can wholeheartedly call one of the absolute goddamn weirdest pre-OP introductory scenes I’ve ever seen. A girl enters a train station, en route to it’s-not-really-important, and is promptly met with cheers, because she’s the 77,777th person to enter the train station that day. This, of course, means that she is immediately snatched up by a mobile owl statue and deposited at the top of a building. There, a black-and-silver-haired huckster named Pontaro Poison implores her to push a huge shiny button labeled “7G.” 7G, as you can surely intuit, is the successor to 6G, the successor to 5G, the communication standard. 7G, the huckster explains, allows us to “instantly broadcast” our thoughts and “make visions real.” After some chiding, the girl presses the button, an the world promptly dissolves into a surreal hell of abstract buildings, psychedelic colors, and warped faces. Cut to opening credits!

When we return from the admittedly very nice title sequence, two years have passed and the world has fallen into an incredible state of disrepair, and in the city of Agano, almost everyone has turned into animals. If Shuumatsu Train makes a mistake in its opening episode, it might be that the entire rest of it takes place here, in a setting that is certainly weird but doesn’t measure up to the sheer WTF factor of those first couple of minutes. It’s actually a bit tempting to say that the series overexplains itself a bit, because, courtesy of our narrator and main character Shizuru [Anzai Chika], we get a clean rundown of what actually happened. As one might guess, the present state of the world was indeed caused by the launch of this mysterious 7G Network. Here, it happens that folks from the area turn into animals at the age of 21 and 3 months. The town’s populace thus consists of a few relatively ordinary high school girls and a whole bunch of talking animals, at least a few of whom are struggling to hang on to the mental faculties they still have, and one of them, a sun bear, briefly leaps at one of the girls in a short but fairly uncomfortable scene.

It should be noted that this is said to be a state of affairs unique to Agano. Other regions have different, and, it’s implied, more overtly dangerous problems to deal with. Also, one guy has inexplicably remained physically human but can only run around making choo-choo noises, keep him in mind.

Now, it might be tempting to claim that Shuumatsu Train has scuttled its own mysteries right out of the gate here. But given how this information is presented to us, it doesn’t seem like the series is terribly bent on building up that sort of mystery. As becomes clear over its first episode, Shuumatsu Train is an adventure series first and foremost. Despite its bizarre premise, the series makes legible gestures toward themes of growing up in an indifferent world that is spiraling into chaos, a core that resonates not in spite of being buried under layers of surreality, but because of those layers.

For example; Shizuru and her friends, Reimi [Erisa Kuon], Akira [Kino Hina], and Nadeshiko [Waki Azumi], each take a different approach to coping with the strange state of the world they live in, exemplified by the goods they ask for from a caravan of armored trucks that visits the town once a month (apparently the last remaining of what was once several such caravans). This is most obvious with Reimi, who Akira not-entirely-incorrectly accuses of being an escapist, who dresses herself in gyaru fashion and wants cute manga and anime magazines to peruse. Akira, meanwhile, is cynical and often makes rude remarks, coming off as more than a little self-important. Accordingly, the book she asks for is an occult treatise by Japanese writer Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (I can’t quite figure out if it’s a real occult treatise or not. I’ll confess to not having been familiar with the man before now). Nadeshiko, meanwhile, seems adrift and aimless, and can’t even recall why she wanted the item she receives from the delivery company, a potted sweet myrtle plant, in the first place.2

Shizuru, meanwhile, has spent the past two years searching for her missing friend Youka [Touyama Nao]. If you’d hazard a guess that Youka is probably the girl from the pre-credits scene, you’d be completely correct, and nothing so innocuous as a random scrap of newspaper used as package stuffing for Nadeshiko’s plant gives Shizuru her first lead as to where Youka might be in years. The newspaper contains a photo on its front page, and Youka is in that photo. The problem? The photo was taken in Ikebukuro, far enough away that one would need to take a fairly lengthy train ride to get there. Running to show Youka’s grandmother, now an elderly guinea pig, this photo of her only granddaughter, Shizuru narrates; the distance between train stops has gotten much, much larger since the world went haywire.

Nonetheless, Shizuru is determined, because the last time she and Youka spoke, they had the kind of friendship-obliterating argument that can haunt you for the rest of your life. Her determination only grows when she discovers an unused train resting on the tracks while having her dog sniff out a cap lost by Zenjirou [Okitsu Kazuyuki], the aforementioned train noises guy. (He manages to just barely strain the word “cap” out, the only time in the whole episode he actually talks in this form.) By putting the conductor’s cap on his head, Zenjirou temporarily reverts to a youthful, vigorous appearance, during which time he mostly rages at “Pontaro,” from which we can conclude he’s a colleague of the huckster from the opening. Or a former colleague, given how angry he seems to be at the guy. And how Pontaro gave him a lobotomy. Such things have a way of destroying friendships.

With a lead on her friend’s location and her mind made up, and now possessing the means and approximate knowledge of how to operate this metal chariot, she promptly drops out of “school” (a tiny class consisting of herself and her friends, taught by an iguana), and attempts to make for Ikebukuro solo. Of course, her friends, for all their differences, won’t stand for that, and they all end up following her as the train’s sign flips over with its destination. Suddenly, the show’s English title makes a perfect sense; Ikebukuro is not the physical edge of the planet, but it is certainly the end of the world in another sense.

I’ve said a lot about Shuumatsu Train here, but honestly there’s also a ton I didn’t mention. The visuals are largely good, although the directing is a bit strange in a way that’s difficult to precisely place my finger on. More pertinently, they’re packed with subtle details that aren’t directly pointed out. When the caravan arrives, the handler who distributes the packages to the girls has an eyepatch, and the heavily-armored trucks are covered in bloody handprints, some of which are quite clearly not human.

There are also many bits and bobs crammed into the worldbuilding; the fact that the 7G Network delivers something that may or may not be electricity, but not enough of it to reconstruct life as it was before the disaster, exemplified by the fact that the Internet and traditional phone networks can no longer be powered, but the low-power, short-distance PHS System, a delightfully obscure piece of real-world communication tech, still works. Sharpening the already-present theme of coming of age in defiance of a world going to hell, there’s a detail early on where Shizuru gets a lecture from her iguana teacher about how she can’t just fill out all of her “plans for the future” worksheets with “I Want To Look For Her,” a heartbreaking bit of miniature characterization that only hurts more as the episode goes on.

Also, the show’s character comedy is mostly pretty funny; Reimi and Akira are introduced having a conversation that feels ripped from a manzai routine. As the series goes on, and likely gets heavier, bright spots like that will become more and more essential.

All of this to say; this is clearly a show with a ton of ideas, and while it’s always a gamble as to whether or not any given work will actually stick the landing, just having so much to chew on from the first episode alone is a great sign. Wherever this train is going, I’m confident the ride will be worthwhile.

1: Technically, the season started yesterday with the premiere of Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included. But I didn’t cover that! So we’re not counting it. 🙂

2: There is almost certainly some layer of additional symbolism here with the choice of this plant specifically, as Akira directly calls attention to it before being cut off. A quick sojourn to Wikipedia tells me that there are two plants known by this common name, one of which is psychoactive and the other of which is used in chemotherapy, among other things. I think this particular shrub is the latter. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from that, but the fact that the show made me want to go look this up is a good thing in of itself.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.