Author: planet Jane

Posted on in anime, Monthly Movies, Reviews

Magic Planet Monthly Movies: The Magic was Inside You All Along in MAJOKKO SHIMAI NO YOYO TO NENE

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Josh, from The Mugcord Discord Server. Thank you for your support.

“Hoi!”

-Yoyo, too many times to count.

Just off the cuff, there are a number of interesting things about 2013’s Majokko Shimai no Yoyo to Nene. It was directed by Takayuki Hirao. If that name sounds familiar, it may be because he also directed the last film I was commissioned to review. This was during his time at ufotable, a powerhouse of a studio both then and now. Also notably, Yoyo to Nene is an isekai, dating from the period when the genre was just in the process of resurging and conquering the anime landscape. But conversely, it’s miles away from the modern isekai zeitgeist, being more reminiscent of the fantasy fairy tales that birthed the genre in the first place. (Or much more distantly, 90s iterations like The Vision of Escaflowne.)

You could also argue that it’s a magical girl story (the term is, in fact, used here.) Though if so, it’s based on a much older version of the “mahou shoujo” idea than what we usually see today, which tends to directly stem from the “magical warrior” archetype that was also seeing a resurgence around this time. All this, contrasted with its distinctly modern look and feel, makes Yoyo to Nene seem like a film unstuck in time. A fact that, along with its general defiance of easy genre labels, may contribute to its relative obscurity in the Anglosphere. But if so, it’s a shame, because while the film falls short of being truly essential, it is quite good, and it’s definitely worth watching.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Before delving into goods and bads it’s helpful to know what the film actually is. The very short version of the plot is thus; after a routine day on the job of battling giant monsters, our titular protagonist Yoyo (Sumire Morohoshi, who has kept busy in the years since. In 2020 she was Michiru in Brand New Animal.) and her sister Nene (Ai Kakuma, also still in the industry. She’s even worked with Hirao again since, playing Mystia in Pompo: The Cinéphile.) are called upon to investigate the sudden emergence of a curious structure in the magical forest where they make their home. (To our eyes, it’s quite obviously a modern high-rise apartment building.) Inside, Yoyo becomes stuck in an elevator, which as it turns out, is secretly a portal to other worlds. As such, she’s promptly spirited away to another universe. Namely, our own. Also tagging along is her adorable….cat? Bihaku (Shouko Nakagawa, an idol and second-generation celebrity who seems to occasionally do roles like this. She’d later play Diana in Sailor Moon Crystal.)

In this apartment building, she meets Takahiro (Miyuki Sawashiro, who we’ve met in this column before. You may know her as the modern Fujiko Mine.), his largely unimportant-to-the-plot brother Takeo (Takahiro Sakurai, who this very season is playing Despa in Ousama Ranking and the protagonist, Burton, in Ninjala. And that’s just shows I’ve personally seen!), and their young cousin, the downright adorable–and much more plot-relevant, she gets a nice turn near the finale–Aki (Rio Sasaki, whose brief seiyuu career started here and never got much farther. As of last year, she’s only ever played two other named roles, with Emery Almond in Fafner Exodus being the more prominent of them.) She learns that Takahiro and Takeo’s parents are under the effects of a curse that’s turned them into grotesque slime monsters. Yoyo, as a proud curse-breaker and general magic problem-solver, is determined to uncover what’s hexed the Tak Twins’ parents, and in the process, free them from perpetual oozedom.

We eventually learn it’s because of a magic gacha game that grants wishes, of all things, but the real meat of Yoyo to Nene comes mostly from Yoyo herself. She’s an enrapturing little ball of pixie dust who brightens up the screen every second she’s on it. Making her the focal point of the film was a very wise choice indeed. (I’m not sure if she’s equally important in the manga that Yoyo to Nene is loosely based on, it’s never been available in English in any capacity.) Yoyo’s magic translates directly to movie magic; she’s the source, directly or indirectly, of many of the film’s visual highlights, and has a cute habit of capping her spells with a small exclamation of “Hoi!”

Much of the film’s emotional thrust comes from her interactions with other characters. She and Takahiro eventually develop a close bond (which the movie is smart enough to never explicitly frame as romantic) but getting there is another story entirely. She’s initially quite dismissive of him, and it’s only through the power of Anime Bonding Moments such as learning how to make instant yakisoba with no magic allowed that they come to understand each other.

She gets along more readily with Aki, who she charms with the film’s sole musical number about a third of the way through its runtime.

But in addition to these bonds, Yoyo has a more flawed and slightly darker side, which intuitively fits with her “witch” characterization and makes her more compelling than if she were wholly innocent.

Later in the film, the curse begins affecting more than just individual people, and assaults whole buildings and even whole parts of cities. When it bears down on a festival the three are attending, Yoyo is shown to be a bit callous toward the idea of Aki possibly being injured. There is an idea here that Yoyo–and perhaps residents of her native Magic Kingdom in general–do not truly understand the value of life and death. When Takahiro gets angry with her for not protecting Aki–noting that she got hurt, and far worse could’ve happened–Yoyo doesn’t really seem to get why he’s mad, suggesting that as long as the body’s intact, even raising her from the dead wouldn’t be a big deal. Indeed, earlier on, we’re shown a scene where exactly that happens to minor character Nils back in the Magic Kingdom, establishing this as being as much a societal flaw as a personal one.

Yoyo changes her tune when Bihaku is injured later that same night, and in easily the scene’s darkest film it seems like he might pass away entirely. Thankfully he eventually turns out to be fine, but the shock is enough to impart the lesson to Yoyo.

There is a question that’s natural to raise here, though. What, exactly, is Yoyo to Nene trying to say with scenes like this? There are a few in the film, although that’s the most prominent. The whole magic gacha game plot raises similar questions. Its resolution is fairly convoluted and involves both Aki’s father, the game’s lead developer, and her departed mother, who turns out to also have been an isekai’d transplant from the Magic Kingdom. On this level, Yoyo to Nene does break down; it seems to reach for a universal applicability, but doesn’t properly grasp it, leaving it feeling thematically confused.

There’s a sliver of light commentary in near the film’s very end, about how Aki’s mother wanted to use her magic for the good of the world, but people are selfish, so it’s become corrupt. There’s enough of a coherent thought there that when Yoyo finishes out the movie by absorbing magic from people making selfless wishes, it makes some internal logical sense, but all in all, the film, especially in the latter half, only just stays on the right side of “coherent.” Most of this is fairly broad “power of human connection” stuff, a thing many other anime have done better and more compellingly. But of course, many others have done it far worse as well. (You could also read some environmentalist messaging in here somewhere, perhaps, but you’d really have to squint.)

So, thematically it’s a bit broad and wishy-washy. And the film convolves and convolutes its own rules often enough to only just barely make sense. This is enough to raise the question of if it’s even a “good movie” at all, but I’d argue it still very much is. For whatever else it may misfire on, Yoyo to Nene succeeds on an emotional gut-check level, arguably the most important facet for any anime to nail, especially one that’s not even two hours long. It is, of course, also quite the spectacle, which certainly helps. It’s possible that if the movie looked and sounded worse, I’d be less forgiving, but–and I rarely mention this in positive reviews, though it’s true here as well–you review the art you have in front of you, not one that you can imagine existing.

On its own terms, Yoyo to Nene is an entirely worthy film. Most involved have gone on to do more notable things, but I do think the movie’s comparative obscurity in the West is a shame. By the end, in spite of any issues, I found myself happily grinning. More than any of its actual stabs at a theme, the film’s real strength is the sheer warmth it radiates. And in that sense, I think its closest cousins may less be any other isekai, and more work that centers on that same feeling of simple joy. Little Witch Academia and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! spring to mind as somewhat more recent examples.

At the end of the day, the “sell” on Yoyo to Nene is very simple. If magic makes people smile, well, that’s all that really matters, isn’t it? Yoyo to Nene brings smiles by the dozen, what else can you ask for?

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 Twitter 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, 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, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 8 – “Fiendish Trap”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

There is a tendency in the action shonen genre, which I will charitably call “unfortunate,” where a female character who’s been previously shown to be a competent, strong combatant will be reduced to a damsel in distress role when the story’s stakes need to be raised. “Fiendish Trap”, the eighth episode of Sabikui Bisco, spends most of its opening few minutes showing Pawoo–a woman that other characters in-show have previously compared to an oni in terms of raw strength, and who was shown to be a more or less even match for our redheaded lead back in episode two–being tortured by Governor Kurokawa, the series’ Big Bad Evil Villain with No Morals. He has her chained up to a wall in some dank, gross-looking cell, and prods her in the gut with a hot iron. The show mercifully cuts back to Milo’s own reactions to all of this (this is apparently what we weren’t directly shown in the TV broadcast last week) before showing us much else, but the audio isn’t really any better.

This is all, suffice it to say, pretty stupid and gross. But if it were just stupid and gross, we could chalk it up as a flaw the series has. A pretty major one, to be certain, but a flaw nonetheless. Unfortunately, what the rest of the episode makes clear is that this is not something that Sabikui Bisco is pulling out in an attempt to shock viewers. It’s doing this because it has no better ideas, which may or may not be “worse,” but certainly bodes very badly for the remainder of the show.

The episode’s actual events are garden variety shonen hostage situation nonsense and are frankly not worth recapping in detail. Milo crashes Kurokawa’s HQ to rescue Pawoo and Jabi. There is a tense standoff; bows, arrows, and muscle-controlling mushrooms(!) are involved. None of it is terribly interesting despite the competent direction. When it looks like Milo’s going to bite it, surprise, Bisco bursts in to rescue him. And when Kurokawa eventually puts Bisco on the ropes, Jabi, who gets the episode’s best scene as we’re shown him breaking out of prison, bursts in to rescue him.

The net result of all this is that Kurokawa manages to get the secret to making the Rust-Eater work out of Milo, revealing that he used to be a Mushroom Keeper himself (how shocking), and that his motivation is to monopolize the production of the Rust-Eater drug so he can leverage it to squeeze ever more profit out of the sick, Rust-infested masses.

There is a tiny grain of actual real-world commentary in there, but when your villain takes eight episodes to explain something that Bun B once nailed in a single couplet1, it is maybe time to reconsider what you’re writing and why. (To say nothing of if we’re meant to take this in a “pharmacies are complicit in the opioid crisis” sort of way or a “Covid vaccines have microchips in them” sort of way. It’s vague enough that you can easily read it however you want.) If we had known this from the start of the series, it would’ve been an additional shade of detail that made Kurokawa all the more despicable. It being treated as some huge twist–a politician? Valuing profit over the lives of his constituents? Perish the thought–is just insulting. Even the shonen genre’s target audience of teenage boys are more than smart enough to deserve better than this.

At the very least, it’d be more forgivable if the rest of the writing here were more interesting. Little about “Fiendish Trap” is even remotely compelling, a fundamental problem that dwarfs all the other sins here.

So, what does work in this episode? Well, there are some fun pop culture references. Kurokawa opens the episode by playing a Yu-Gi-Oh! pastiche with one of his henchmen, an amusing nod to voice actor Kenjirou Tsuda‘s most famous role, Seto Kaiba.

When Bisco busts in to rescue Milo from his own recklessness, Kadokawa cracks that he’s basically Tuxedo Mask, which, what, would make Milo Sailor Moon? That’s a fun thought.

There’s also a hilariously awesome sequence where Bisco catches a crossbow bolt in his teeth and flings it back at Kurokawa at full speed somehow.

The chain of rescues that comprise most of the episode’s actual events is also pretty funny when you think about it. With Milo initially setting out to rescue Pawoo, only to be rescued by Bisco, only for the both of them to be eventually rescued by an escaped Jabi, who also himself ends up freeing Pawoo. Pawoo, of course, does not get to save anyone. That would be letting a woman do something, and we obviously can’t have that.

The episode closes with Milo apparently dying in the snow–yes, really–as he and Bisco try to flee from Kurokawa’s facility. His last words to Bisco are a plea to stay alive.

I will give Sabikui Bisco some credit here. Usually, this sort of maudlin attempt at tear-jerking involves a straight couple, and the very fact that the title of the next episode is “I Love You” makes me comfortable calling Bisco and Milo one too. On the other hand, the more interesting of our two leads is dead with four episodes left to go. And if we do consider Bisco and Milo partners in more than just an “adventuring buddies” sense, this whole thing is a pretty rote and lame example of the whole “Bury Your Gays” routine.

Look, it’s not impossible that the show will come back from this somehow, but more than anything else the most damning thing I can say about “Fiendish Trap” is that despite everything that happens in it, it’s mostly pretty boring. I mention minutiae like pop culture references because the show’s actual story is just not holding my interest anymore, and I doubt I’m the only one. It feels like digging for scraps.

1: “They don’t care about the cure, they just wanna sell a treatment // Keep you alive by keepin’ you high, now that’s some street shit.” – Bun B – “U A Bitch”, Return of The Trill. Did I reference this mostly just because I like UGK? Don’t worry about it.

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 Twitter 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, 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, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 7 – “The Stolen Rust Eater”

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

“The Stolen Rust Eater”, Sabikui Bisco‘s seventh episode, is predicated on a fakeout.

At the end of last week’s episode, we were teased a confrontation between Pawoo and Bisco. We were also assured that the giant flying snake creature that Bisco and Milo had been pursuing was the thing they were hunting; the source of the Rust-Eater mushroom and the entire impetus for the quest they’ve been on for the first half of the series. In the opening five or so minutes of “The Stolen Rust Eater,” almost all of this is thrown out the window. Pawoo and Bisco fight only very briefly before uneasily teaming up to rescue Milo from the snake creature. When they take it down, they find that the mushrooms it’s infected with are nothing more than a matsutake. Tasty, maybe, but not at all what they’re looking for.

…Or is it?

You see, it turns out that one needs a mushroom keeper’s blood to “activate” a Rust-Eater mushroom. The Pipe Snake was infected with the right mushrooms. All Milo needs to do to make a cure is carefully harvest some of them and extract some of Bisco’s blood to feed them with. Simple, right? Well, our favorite sinister fedora-wearing governor drops in on a blimp to steal the Pipe Snake’s corpse and shoot Bisco in the stomach with a “rust bullet.” So no, not really.

Things twist and they turn. By episode’s end, Pawoo and Jabi are both hostage to Governor Kurokawa, who informs Milo of this fact via TV broadcast (really). Milo and Bisco have a big scuff-up about which of the two should go it alone to rescue them (obviously they can’t both go. That would just be silly.) While this does adequately convey how much they’ve come to care for each other, it is all rather sudden.

If you’re counting; there are three major twists in this episode’s 23 minutes. Add to that its honestly pretty laughable attempt to pivot Bisco and Pawoo’s adversarial relationship into the latter romantically teasing the former and, well, much as I have enjoyed the series so far, the cracks are starting to show. Some of this is a limitation of format; if you want to adapt X number of manga chapters into Y number of anime episodes, you’re going to have to make some things feel more clipped than others. But it does make me wonder if we really needed a whole episode of Milo learning how to ride Bisco’s giant crab companion, even as fun as that episode was. Everything here feels a bit perfunctory. Even Pawoo and Milo’s big reunion.

Speaking of Pawoo, this episode also pretty handily demonstrates the show’s problems with handling her. Much as I love the character, I wouldn’t actually argue she’s terribly well-written. “Stoic badass” is a pretty simple character archetype. “Doting older sister” is another. “Repeat damsel in distress” is yet a third, and by piling all three on top of each other she is consistently the character that Sabikui Bisco writes the worst. She doesn’t really get to do anything here, and her actions within the episode all feel oddly disconnected from one another. It’s unfortunate. We haven’t even really gotten to properly see her kick ass in a while.

These are all unenviable weaknesses. Sabikui Bisco is consistently at its best the lower the stakes are, but being an adventure anime, we’re now hitting the point of the season where its stakes are getting higher and higher by necessity. I would like to say that I have faith that the show will eventually hit its stride again, but it really just feels too fuzzy to call at the moment. I feel bad saying that, given that I praised the show for its consistency just last week. But things change, and I recap the anime I’m watching in the present, not the anime as it was a week ago. I didn’t dislike the episode, but it feels bizarrely inconsequential for the major role it plays in the story. Looking back, that final line from last week’s column feels like tempting fate.

There is, of course, only one way to really find out for certain if this marks an actual downturn in quality or just a rough patch of road. And to that end, I’ll see you next week, anime fans.

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 Twitter 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, 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, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 6 – Companions and Prey

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

It’s such an understated strength that pointing it out can feel like a backhanded compliment, but I really do think that one of the sneakily great things about Sabikui Bisco is that it’s consistent. You know, roughly, what you’re getting each week. 22 minutes of adventure through spore-infested, Rust-stricken, post-apocalyptic Japan as our leads, Bisco and Milo, seek the legendary Rust-eater mushroom to cure Bisco’s mentor Jabi and Milo’s sister Pawoo. It’s simple stuff, but it’s effective, and if the stars aligned, it’s easy to imagine that Bisco could pull this off satisfyingly week after week for literal years on end.

But we do not live in the world where Bisco is a show with eight seasons at two cours apiece. It gets twelve episodes flat. No more, no less. And God only knows if it’ll ever get even one more season. So, for as much as that consistency is a strength, it means that even minor twists in the formula count a lot. This week, we get a quieter, more character-driven episode. It’s a notable swerve toward the more serious for an anime that, even in its comparatively darkest moments, has so far remained fairly light.

That character is Tirol (previously transliterated as Chiroru in this column. I’m not sure if I got that wrong or if the official subs actually changed.) Tirol, you’ll recall, is the traveling merchant / swindler / mercenary / also a mechanic as we learn in this episode that we met for the first time all the way back in episode one, but who we were more formally introduced to in episode four. Milo and Bisco, traveling through an Arctic-cold tundra, discover her once again on the brink of death. This time in a decidedly less gnarly fashion than when they found her infected with a deadly parasite two episodes back.

After being de-thawed, she banters with our heroes for quite a while. Conversation between Tirol and Milo (or Tirol and Bisco) forms the bulk of this episode. The result is, I’d say, more positive than not. Some of her more angsty explication of her own motives comes across as a pretty blatant example of just stating the subtext out loud–always a bad look–but at the same time, there’s marginally more subtle stuff weaved in here, too. For instance, she puts her charm to good use by talking a different merchant into giving Milo and Bisco way more supplies than they can reasonably afford, off of the logic that the merchant will be able to “swindle them again later.” It’s pretty funny.

If that grin doesn’t just scream “integrity,” what does?

On a more serious level, comments she makes toward the end of the episode reveal that she was once a mechanic at a workshop that was tasked with restoring some part of the mysterious Tetsujin. It infected her coworkers with Rust, and she only lived to tell the tale by fleeing upon being promoted to foreman-by-default. This story in of itself is a fairly straightforward critique of worker exploitation. A later conversation in the episode, this time between Milo and Bisco, hammers the exploitation theme, too. Combined with some examples we’ve seen over the first half of the show of Imihama’s colonial-esque influence ruining the lives of those both in and outside the city, it marks the first time that Bisco has shown some real teeth. This is all pretty simple stuff, and no one is going to mistake it for The Communist Manifesto, but it’s good to see a show trying to have a point and mostly succeeding, given that we are still currently trudging through a season that also contains Tokyo 24th Ward and the rotting corpse of Attack on Titan.

The episode’s main act closes with Bisco, Milo, and Tirol locating the underground subway line they’ve been hunting for since episode four. Tirol fixes up one of the automatic train cars and departs the other two, but not before a fairly heartfelt goodbye. She even tells them her real name, something she claims to be embarrassed to do because of how weird it is. (To be fair. “Tirol” does strike me as an odd name for a Japanese woman. But hey, I’m not Japanese, so what do I know? Also, it’s however many centuries in the future. Who knows.) All told, this a nice spotlight for a character I’ve honestly wanted to know more about. Praising this as a sound and logical development may not come across as terribly exciting, but it is those things, and that’s what I like about Sabikui Bisco. It’s comfort food.

Two people who do not end the episode comfortably are Bisco and Milo themselves. After the pair fight off something called an Oilsquid on their train ride, they reach their destination; a vast canyon inhabited by a gargantuan apex predator of the skies. The mighty Pipe Snake; the very thing they need to take down to get the Rust-eater mushroom.

They begin fighting it here, only to be expectedly-unexpectedly interrupted by the one major character who hadn’t shown up in this episode so far. Pawoo.

That particular cliffhanger is where Sabikui Bisco chooses to leave us, this week. A true tease for Pawoo Enjoyers like myself. Still, I think I’ve made it clear that I like this episode a good deal. And let me tell you; one of the nice things about Bisco being so consistent is that, unless something goes truly awry, I’m pretty damn sure I’m gonna like next week’s too.

Until then, anime fans.

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 Twitter 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, 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, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Last Flight of DRAGONAUT – THE RESONANCE

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rakhshi. Thank you for your support.

The common wisdom is such; if you want to really take the measure of a period of time, don’t look at media from it that everyone remembers. Things that persist over the years tend to be your classics, your cult classics, and your so-bad-its-good’s. If you really want to get in the head of someone living in a period of time, look at the stuff no one remembers. Occasionally something will pick up a reputation as an “overlooked gem” and worm its way into that second category, but that’s rare. Things that are forgotten tend to stay forgotten and are often indicative of things that were popular at the time but not so much nowadays. So, the theory goes, they’re representative of an unfiltered look at a period.

If all this holds true, shows like Dragonaut – The Resonance may represent the true spirit of the late ’00s. A GONZO production from the period where basically all they were making was stuff like this, Dragonaut comes to us from 2007, one of an absurd even by modern standards nineteen projects GONZO produced that year. It aired that Fall to middling interest alongside similarly forgotten-today fare like Ayakashi and Night Wizard. As such, Dragonaut stands out not for any particularly exceptional quality but because, like many weird one-off projects from this era, it has ostentatious character designs and an absurd premise.

It is the near future, and poor Pluto, already stripped of the dignity of being a planet, has been obliterated by a massive asteroid called Thanatos. Some years later, a SpaceX-style civilian space plane launch goes awry when an alien dragon from said asteroid unexpectedly collides with the plane, killing everyone aboard sans a single survivor, the pilot’s son and our protagonist, Jin. (Voiced by the legendary Daisuke Ono.) The government promptly covers the whole business up, and a full two years pass as Jin has to endure the public at large blaming his father for the accident. He only uncovers the truth of things when by sheer chance, he meets a beautiful girl with supernatural abilities named Toa (Minori Chihara, best known as Yuki in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya). Obviously, she is also an alien dragon.

To put it bluntly, this is an absurd start to an equally absurd anime. Dragonaut isn’t totally devoid of merits, but the sheer, overbearing goofiness of its very setting makes it a little hard to take seriously. It quickly comes to involve bonded pairs of artificial dragon-people who can change from human to dragon-alien-mech-things (“Communicators”) and back and their riders / pilots who compose the titular Dragonaut program in the service of an international organization called the ISDA. It’s pretty cool and extremely dumb in equal measure. Moreso because the dragons, in dragon form, are handled by GONZO’s CGI department, which means we get huge, chunky CG rigs that are not quite articulated and lit enough to look fully convincing but do look like they’d make sick toys. (Their color palettes are also not the best, sadly. Which can make some of them hard to distinguish mid-fight.)

The corny tone is not really a bad thing. One of my favorite anime from this period is Witchblade, which has a similar issue. If anything, Dragonaut could stand to have been cornier. If there’s a real flaw here, it’s that Dragonaut starts out fairly self-serious and never really lets up. One might say it’s “very anime,” but it’s not camp. This contrasts in an ugly way with its sillier aspects.

Such as, for example, its character designs. With only a few exceptions each; the men are either emotionally sensitive feminine boys with period-appropriate emo haircuts, unreasonably diesel Chad-Gods who shake the Earth with each footstep, or grizzled, uniformed commanders who scowl as they make Tough Decisions. The women are warmhearted maidens who bring joy wherever they go, goofy brats, or gene lottery winners with chests so big that they have their own gravitational pull. I’m not one to moralize about this kind of thing, so to me the excessive fanservice mostly comes across as unintentional hilarity. If someone were less inclined to that point of view, I could absolutely understand it making the entire series unwatchable just on its own. Especially in the case of recurring antagonist Garnet MacLaine (played here by Haruhi herself, Aya Hirano), whose outfit looks like three other, unrelated, gratuitous sexy outfits crashed into each other at a hundred miles per hour, and also has the misfortune of being one of just two named POC characters in the series.

The plot is a sprawling kudzu vine of romance, political and military intrigue, and science-fantasy hokum. You might note that this is also true of a lot of great anime from around that time, but Dragonaut‘s handling of much of this material is pretty leaden. Enough so that details like, say, Toa’s name being derived from a bracelet Jin gave to his late sister Ai (“From Jin to Ai”, you see.) come across as comedic rather than stirring.

On one level, all this means that you could freely regard Dragonaut as the shlock that it is. By 2007, the hunt for the next Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the wave of “world story” anime it spawned had largely petered out. Eva had spawned numerous imitators and responses, and even shows outside its genre entirely were affected. By the late 2000’s, that influence had turned into background noise. The gulf between Dragonaut and something like, say, Eureka Seven, one of the very best anime in this vein and from just two years prior, is vast. If we wanted to draw an admittedly imperfect analogy, we could turn toward the history of pop music. If Evangelion was Nevermind–another 90s touchstone–Dragonaut is Daughtry. Everything challenging and artistically interesting about the movement has been squeezed out, and what you are left with is the sad backwash of an artistic point in time that was already firmly in the rearview. It’s not at all unfair to say that Dragonaut is a series of very limited ambition, at least.

On the other hand, that very inconsequentiality makes any judgement of Dragonaut that leans this harsh feel, frankly, a bit silly. (In much the same way that it’s hard to get too mad about the strained bluster of “It’s Not Over.”) No, it’s not some grand, generation-defining artistic statement. I doubt anyone–including anyone who worked on it–thought it was. That doesn’t make it criticism-proof and I certainly have quite a few qualms with it, but we should remind ourselves that we’re talking about a goofy-ass anime about goofy-ass space dragons, here. Condemning it in that manner is perhaps a bridge too far.

Because all this said and meant, the show does have its strong suits. Some of the character relationships are pulled off surprisingly well. Mostly these are various Dragon / Rider pairs. Jin and Toa will not win any originality-in-writing awards, but they’re cute together, and when they’re apart you do genuinely feel their longing for each other. Turning their couple into a trio is Gio (Junichi Suwabe, probably best known as Archer from Fate/), who seems to get on quite well with both of them. My favorite pair, though, is that of rider Akira (Miyuki Sawashiro, voice of Fujiko Mine since 2015) and her dragon Machina (Yuuko Gotou, VA of Mikuru Asahina, making Dragonaut something of a Haruhi Suzumiya cast reunion), whose affection for each other is warm and uncomplicated throughout the first half of the series series, as Akira grows to question the role that the ISDA has forced her into. The two are also very gay for each other; Akira here had a dragon wife long before Miss Kobayashi. (Sadly, the two are the victim of a pretty nasty instance of the “bury your gays” cliche, and they’re killed off around halfway through the show. I will leave the question of their sort-of resurrection as ghosts attuned to Thanatos making that better or worse as an exercise to the reader.)

Rounding out the most interesting characters are the rich girl / butler pair of Sieglinde (Nana Mizuki, who probably needs no introduction, but who you might variously know as Cure Blossom, Fate Testarossa, or Symphogear‘s Tsubasa Kazanari) and Amaedeus (Eiji Maruyama, active as both an anime VA and toku actor from the early ’70s until his death in 2015. Most of his anime roles were kindly and/or badass old guy parts like this, and if Amadeus is any indication, he was damn good at them) who have a cute surrogate daughter / father relationship, and lastly Kazuki (Tetsuya Kakihara and Sawahiro again, depending on where you get your credits from. I’m unsure of what the story was there. Perhaps it was a split role), who fosters an incredibly toxic yandere-leaning jealous streak over both Jin and Gio, and his dragon Widow, (Saeko Chiba, who has a string of supporting roles under her belt, although most of them were behind her at this point. You may know her as Nina Einstein from Code Geass) with whom he bonds over their mutual feeling of being spurned, until his jealousy inevitably mutates into an abusive streak.

Seen here in mid-distance, because getting an image of all of these characters together was quite difficult for some reason.

Production-wise, Dragonaut avoids the pitfalls of some of its uglier GONZO brethren. While the airborne fights are janky because of the CGI’s general inflexibility, the on-foot fight choreography is pretty excellent throughout, accounting for almost all of the show’s visual highlights. On a less technical level it’s also competently directed (by Manabu Ono, who directed a bunch of things for GONZO and has since gone on to helm some later Sword Art Online material) and the color choices are solid. (Outside of the dragons themselves, that is.) There’s generally at least a few cool shots per episode, etc. These are modest strengths, but Dragonaut makes the most of them.

Story wise, things are dicier. The plot aims for profundity and complexity but only occasionally gets farther than simply being complicated. Some of the arcs the show sets up have decent payoffs and others very much do not. In its best moments, like the mid-series episodes 13 and 14, where the ISDA save the world from being blown up by a magic nuke (!), Jin, Gio, Akira, and Machina depart to rescue Toa, who is trapped on Mars (!!), only to be intercepted by a characteristically jealous Kazuki, who they must then fight and seemingly kill (!!!), it is at least quite entertaining. Plot threads roll into each other like tumbleweeds across the desert. Or, indeed, run-on sentences. Occasionally, it’ll make an emotional moment hit just so, and Dragonaut achieves its greatest feat; the ability to perform a half-decent imitation of shows like Eureka Seven, or Eva, or even RahXephon (which I haven’t seen, but a friend who I was watching the series with has). It’s hard to tell if Dragonaut wants to be counted among that number or if it’s content just cribbing notes from those shows. Either way, it’s very much an imitation, not the genuine article.

Things go back and forth like this up and down the whole length of the series. Sometimes these various subplots and diversions end in a way that’s satisfying or at least entertainingly silly, other times they’re straight-up bad. Coming down to an almost even split across the show’s 25-episode runtime, I’d say. The fairly strong character writing contrasted with the relatively weak plotting does make it sometimes feel like a gaggle of good characters searching for a good show to be in and never quite finding one. There is a solid theme wound through here about how different sorts of love mean more to different people, but it’s subsumed by world story tropes riffing on Eva‘s Instrumentality plot in the finale–tropes that had become cliches by this point–and the series ends with a whimper rather than a bang.

Watching it, I was acutely aware of how tired of the pseudogenre everyone must have been at this point. Dragonaut‘s final few episodes seem to default to the Eva mode less out of any real commitment to the themes it explores and more because it lacks any better or more original ideas. It is a decidedly fine ending. Not offensively bad. Not particularly great either.

But being fine was enough, at least, for Dragonaut to be decently popular while it was airing. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it seems to have done well enough financially, though not enough to warrant sequels or spinoffs aside from a manga adaption that apparently takes a somewhat different spin on things. It did get a bonus OVA included on its DVD box set, a supremely ridiculous thing where the cast have their characters switched around via a wacky science machine. It is mostly an excuse to parade screwball situations out and have the camera zoom in on the girls’ busts some more; every sense of the word “fanservice” rolled into one. Perhaps unavoidably, given the general thrust of the female character designs, it was a popular fanart magnet for a little while. The few English-language reviews it got predictably nailed the show somewhere in the C-grade range, a trend I am all too aware I’m contributing to here.

All of this constitutes a minor legacy for a decidedly minor show. It still is a legacy, and that is worth something, but there is a reason that people still talk about even other Eva-indebted mecha anime from this time–say, Gurren Lagann, which I’m not a personally huge fan of but which is inarguably a better and more striking an interpretation of some of these same influences–but not Dragonaut. It has largely been left in the dustbin of history. Pierce the heavens, this does not.

Rather than any of its contemporaries, Dragonaut‘s status as an Extremely 2007 Anime reminds me of another, much more recent show, with which it has almost nothing else in common, The Detective is Already Dead. Like that anime (and a few others I’ve covered here over the years), it was a fossil from the day it began airing. Ultimately, Dragonaut represents a small side branch of a larger artistic tradition. That branch has largely come and gone, but the larger Evangelion and Eureka Seven-indebted school it represents survives to this day. Even in terms of fairly specific setups, one of the very few times Dragonaut is brought up in modern anime discussions at all is to compare it with Darling in the FranXX, another extremely-of-its-moment child of Eureka with which it shares a broadly similar premise and some thematic points. There are worse fates for an anime to have, even if DarliFra itself is extremely polarizing.

Most people who worked on Dragonaut went on to bigger things. (“Better” is subjective.) So, while it is always tempting to view the story of any largely forgotten series as a sad one, that really isn’t the case here. While GONZO themselves are gone, as far as I can tell, most of the staff from this project have continued to work in the field. Those who don’t seem to have either later found success elsewhere or had already established a legacy by the time they worked on Dragonaut. I feel comfortable in saying that for almost every single person who worked on it, Dragonaut was a minor step along their paths. I could easily spin this into a condemnation, but I’d be condemning plenty of other shows too. It is the fate of the vast majority of anime that air every year, even now. Hard to hate, equally hard to love, Dragonaut simply is what it is.

Anime is an art form, but it’s also a craft and a field of the entertainment business. In entertainment, works arise to fulfill a desire from their audience. In 2007, people wanted hopelessly romantic stories where high-flying science-fantasy heroes saved the world with the power of love. Dragonaut, for whatever faults it has, is one of those, and it is if nothing else, a competently made one. It was not the most notable, most successful, and certainly not the best of that sort of story, but it gave the people what they wanted. Perhaps sometimes that is enough.

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 Twitter 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 owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 5 – Children’s Fortress

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Another day, another episode of Sabikui Bisco that is certainly not the best thing airing right now but is pretty damn entertaining. That’s about what I signed up for with Bisco, so I’m pretty satisfied with it.

“Children’s Fortress” splits its time between two stories. Which is an expedient way to keep track of multiple groups of characters at once and also keep the pacing up, but it does make it a tad annoying to summarize. Let’s start with the “B-plot” first, since it’s shorter and simpler.

Pawoo–Sabikui Bisco‘s coolest character and also my future wife–has been pursuing Bisco and Milo since they left Imihama. We don’t get a particularly precise idea of how far off their trail she is so far, but it’s evidently far enough that they don’t interact at all during the course of this episode. Instead, the B-Plot kicks off when Pawoo’s bike pops its tires in the midst of an abandoned town. Evidently from a trap left by some bandits who have themselves long since vacated the area. While trying to sort out what to do about all this, she sees a kindly old couple being menaced by an overgrown mutant spider. This being a shonen anime, she of course casually kills it with her giant iron pole thing and finishes it with a kick. (What is that thing, anyway? No one ever calls it anything but a “pole.”)

You really have no idea how hard it is for me to not just caption every single picture of Pawoo with “SHE’S SO COOL!!!!” written exactly like that.

Grateful, the couple allow her to stay with them while she fixes her bike. They also take the time to explain that an eeeeeeeeevil mushroom keeper is the cause of a Rust outbreak that whittled the town’s population down to just the two of them. Whether or not this is true, we don’t learn here and may never directly learn, but there is reason to doubt the couple’s story.

There are many great things about Pawoo, but I would not say that her calm demeanor and even temper are among them.

Pawoo isn’t with these people for terribly long before she discovers that something is off. By “discovers something is off,” I mean she comes across a bunch of rotting corpses propped up like they’re watching TV in one of the couple’s rooms.

They drop the act pretty much immediately and go all blatantly evil knife-sharpening on her, also threatening to “turn her into a statue of a female oni.”

It’s all rather silly, and of course Pawoo escapes the entire mess unscathed (although I wouldn’t be surprised if the fucking zombie she encounters in the couple’s hideout breathing some kind of toxic fumes on her comes back in some way or another). She doesn’t even actually kill the couple herself. They plea for mercy, but before she can make any meaningful response, retreat back into their hideout, which promptly explodes. Which they seem to have done intentionally? This whole half of the episode is, frankly, kind of absurd. But I do like the idea that whenever Pawoo isn’t directly on-screen she’s off having some kind of bizarre Samurai Jack-ian adventure.

Then there’s the A-plot, which is a tad more involved. In last week’s post-credits teaser, we saw Bisco and Milo come upon a building / small city inhabited solely by children, two of whom were sniping at them from the rooftops. Bisco and Milo end up willingly letting themselves be captured by these kids. Why? Well, mostly because they think they might have food. There’s also perhaps the unspoken implication that even the antiheroic Bisco would prefer to avoid hurting kids if he can.

Mostly this serves as a vehicle for us to learn this town’s woes. All the kids have Rust and all the adults have left town to try to raise money to buy treatments for it. We’re not directly told how long they’ve been gone, but it seems to be a few years minimum, based on the other major threat the town faces; annual giant flying blowfish attacks.

Yes, you read that correctly. Sabikui Bisco really loves its funky bio-engineered deadly wildlife. Here, they even have the audacity to appear out of season due to “unusual weather.” (We are helpfully told that this is normally a winter problem, and it’s currently summer in-show.) Unlike some of the other dangers our heroes have faced, which have been either cool or genuinely grotesque, the blowfish land more on the doofily cute side of the spectrum. But they are dangerous; one of them almost eats support character Kousuke, who spends most of the episode as Bisco’s “jailor.”

It also turns out that, surprise; the infection the kids have is not Rust, but some far more benign and easily treatable disease called shellskin. Milo treats them (and in the process, teaches one of the kids, Plum, enough about medicine that she can become a doctor herself.)

Plum also has a precocious crush, which adds her to the long list of women in this show that mistakenly think Milo is available.

But the facts are simple; their parents have been misled. And by who else but Imihama’s governor? I hadn’t considered this while actually watching the episode, but comparing the two, it makes me wonder if he–or someone working for him–wasn’t the mysterious “mushroom keeper” the couple from the B-Plot were referring to. The man seems to have a vested interest in making sure Imihama is the only habitable place around.

On the other hand; maybe not. Sabikui Bisco is good for what it is, but this is very much an episodic episode. The biggest change here being that Bisco exits town with a new weapon (a harpoon), and some directions pointing him toward an abandoned subway line. It does all feel a touch filler-y, which is a little strange given how short this series is planned to be. Perhaps they’re already banking on a second season, or maybe what’s gone on here will have more significance than I’ve given it credit for.

Still, it’s a minor complaint. Sabikui Bisco‘s goals seem to be fairly modest ones of entertainment and telling a story that’s base-level compelling. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and it’s succeeded at it admirably so far. Will next week bring us more of the same or are things going to start getting a little more ambitious? There’s only one way to find out.

Until then, anime fans.

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 Twitter 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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.