Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Die, Die, and Isekai Again in DEAD MOUNT DEATH PLAY

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.

You can probably picture it from the word “isekai” alone, but humor me here; somewhere in a nondescript, grim fantasy universe, a stoic antihero named Sir Shagura closes in on his greatest nemesis, the dread necromancer known only as the Corpse God. The two trade displays of immense power; Shagura, as both a master swordsman and sorcerer, has both literally bone-cracking physical strength on his side and a rune-spamming sort of instant spellcraft that Dead Mount Death Play inherits from an older, pre-isekai boom, strain of narou-kei. (It wouldn’t look too out of place in A Certain Magical Index, if my memory’s serving me right.) The Corpse God, of course, has his necromancy, and conjures whole hordes of skeleton soldiers and a pretty badass undead dragon to stop Shagura’s heroic rampage. As the two fight, it becomes clear that this cool-looking but profoundly D&D-ass setup is just one layer of something deeper and stranger. Shagura, it turns out, has an “evil eye” that lets him see the ghosts of those he’s killed, from monsters and bandits all the way down to birds and bugs. So does the Corpse God. They put this power, it’s fair to say, to pretty different ends.

But just as it seems like “what if an isekai protagonist had necromancy powers” might be all DMDP is working with, it flips over its first card. The Corpse God, near destruction, casts some bizarre spell that Shagura’s never seen. Shagura, apparently, dies, as the actual video starts to glitch and sputter out like a damaged VHS tape. After his death, Shagura awakes in yet another strange and wonderful world. You’ve probably heard of it, because it’s ours.

Shagura opens his eyes in the body of one Polka Shinoyama [Yuki Sakakihara], dazed and confused as memories of both his own past life and that of his new body’s come back to him in a slow trickle over the course of the rest of the episode. This whole “memory bleed” phenomenon has been explored in a lot of isekai, so it’s interesting to see it inverted (if not necessarily disregarded) here. Polka is set in a state of gentle wonder by Japan, where he finds himself, noting that the children he sees seem to be happy, that there’s little violence, and, more to his chagrin, that there isn’t really much magic either. He’s so taken by all this, in fact, that he doesn’t notice the huge gash in his own throat that he’s somehow surviving just fine. He certainly doesn’t notice the mysterious man monitoring him via drone-cam, shocked that this guy is up and walking about. It’s pretty clear from even this fairly early stage that something is going on, but what remains a mystery.

The usual isekai protagonist footnotes do still apply; he pretty quickly regains the ability to speak Japanese after waking up (despite a cool segment where he can’t understand the police officers who try to ask him about that huge cut across his neck, who get subtitled with keysmashes in the English sub track), and he deduces a whole bunch of things unreasonably quickly. This dude is still an isekai protagonist, while he’s notably less obnoxious than many examples of the genre (and DMDP is notably less so in general, no stat screens here so far, thank god), he still is one.

Thankfully though, it’s not all isekai genre clichés. Some of Dead Mount Death Play is other genres’ genre clichés. Which, to be honest? Is kind of welcome at this point. Here’s one I never get tired of; the initially friendly girl who turns out to be a gleefully murderous assassin. In DMDP, that’d be Misaki [Inori Minase], who provides us with one of the season’s most Twitter-ready oneliners as she yanks Polka away from the cops. As she does so, DMDP flips the script twice more.

Surprise #1: she’s actually the girl who killed Polka the first time, and now she’s back to finish the job. (And it must be said, she looks great while doing it; that jacket with “GET HOOKD” written on the back? That’s a killer fashion statement.) There is a fight that takes place in a building that the yakuza have been using as a body-disposal facility, which turns out to be flooded with ghosts.

Surprise #2: “Polka” is not actually Shagura. The guy we’ve been following since the transition to “our” world is actually the Corpse God himself, who we learn cast some sort of spell on himself mere moments before Shagura offed him. (I like to think it has some equally D&D-ass name like Isekai Self or something.) He disposes of Misaki by drawing on the power of the spirits in the building in an admittedly pretty badass little sequence where he impales her on an enormous skeletal appendage. He tosses down a quip/vague mission statement about how this will help him lead a truly peaceful life (I would love to know fucking how, but that’s a question for next week I suppose). Roll credits.

All told, I like Dead Mount Death Play so far, but I wouldn’t quite say I love it. And as far as its relationship to its parent genre, DMDP is not a piece of frustrated hatemail like last year’s The Executioner & Her Way of Life, so I’d advise against going in with the expectation that you’re going to see isekai as a format ripped apart or anything of the sort. A lot of the standard isekai beats are still here, but they’re mostly inverted by the change of scenery, and that alone is worth something in a genre this oversaturated. (This is the second one I’ve covered this season and I don’t even seek these things out.) But the fact that they are here at all makes me wonder how much staying power this thing truly has, even given that it has two cours to fully explore its potential.

On the other hand, the show works in two pretty effective twists in its first episode. If it keeps doing that sort of thing, it might be pretty hard to predict where the hell this is all going. DMDP, as a series from former Baccano! and Durarara!! writer Ryougo Narita, had a fair bit of hype behind it going into this season. I’m not going to claim I understand that hype yet, exactly, but this first episode was, at the very least, extremely entertaining, a few notably sour bits aside. (The show’s humor is very dated, something viewers will either find charming or incredibly offputting. I’m not sure where I fall yet.) It would be pretty easy for this series to lapse back into nothing but cliche without much effort. Misaki’s presence in the marketing as a main character makes it pretty obvious that she’ll be brought back to life at some point, which will put her in his debt in an abstract sort of way, or possibly a magically-enabled literal one, a truly draining tendency of isekai fiction to a far greater extent than it is in any other genre of anime. There are a lot of ways this could go wrong, and I’m sure the reappearance of the real Shagura in the episode’s closing minutes, which indicates that his world will continue to play a role in the story, will put some off as well.

But! I remain optimistic for the time being. Plus, we don’t get a lot of urban fantasy action anime anymore, and if one has to piggyback on the isekai boom to get made, well, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Revolution Wears Red and Pink in MAGICAL DESTROYERS

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.

Somehow, this is a genre. I can only think of a few off the top of my head—2021’s Rumble Garandoll, 2017’s Akiba’s Trip, 2015’s The Rolling Girls, arguably Anime-Gataris, also from 2017 counts too—but it’s a real, if small phenomenon, one without a defined name, at least over here in the Anglosphere. I tend to call them otaku action shows; anime that cast the social divide between the hardcore nerds of the world and “normal people” (no one is actually “normal,” but that’s another subject) as a real source of actual, physical conflict. What would happen, they often ask, if society’s dislike of people who are just generally weird or are into things considered unacceptable, turned truly ugly?

It’s a bit of a loaded question. And I’ve never seen one of these anime that properly grapples with it, although Rumble Garandoll, with its art-hating fascist antagonists, came pretty close. The general premise of these things always sounds like paranoid nerd persecution fantasy bullshit when you spell it out; yeah man, what if they rounded up people who liked anime or kinky porn or J-pop or whatever and put us all in camps? That sure would suck. Thankfully, it doesn’t really happen. Nonetheless, that doesn’t inherently make the question these things are asking worthless, and while they tend to be very campy, they’re almost never intended to just be jokes; something can be silly but still ask serious questions. And honestly, as someone who is both part of an actively under attack minority in the country I live in (I’m transgender) and who is also a huge nerd, I find the comparison to be less nonsensical and offensive than it might appear at first glance. That’s not to say that Magical Destroyers, the first anime from fashion designer, A$AP Rocky acquaintance, and aspiring auteur Jun Inagawa, is necessarily the first of its genre to actually successfully thread this needle, but it’s going to make an honest go of it. That counts for something, even if not everything here works. (I’ll say upfront I mostly really liked this first episode, but a small handful of the gags cross lines I wish they wouldn’t. Hopefully there will be less of that going forward.)

The premise here is dead simple, and will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the second half of Akiba’s Trip or any part of Rumble Garanndoll. One day, out of the blue, an army of mysterious Bad Guys yanks all of Japan’s otaku media off the shelf and starts rounding people up. Despite their hilariously stupid owo masks, these guys mean business, and things get bad fast.

Naturally, this spurs the country’s otaku to revolution, hoisting a black-and-red flag over the next several years as their chief organizer and leader Otaku Hero [Makoto Furukawa], one of our protagonists and the only guy among them, turns the Resistance from dream to reality, and his people capture Akihabara from the tyrants, who go by the name “the Shobon Army.”

But that’s the past. By the time we’re flung back to the present, three years have passed, and the Resistance is in shambles. Things are looking bleak, and at his wits’ end, Otaku Hero quits his position as the informal rebel leader upon learning that an entire patrol, including one of his elite “magical girl” soldiers, Blue, has been captured. This does not sit well with Anarchy [Ai Fairouz], his de facto second-in-command, obvious love interest (yeah, this one’s straight. Sorry yuri soldiers) and another one of the magical girls in question. Minutes later, we find out that the government is launching an operation to snuff out the remnants of the otaku resistance. Things are bleak, and Anarchy and Hero have a bit of a fight over the future of the resistance.

It’s worth pausing for a moment here to consider the other genre that Magical Destroyers draws heavily from. It’s not a secret that the show is also working with magical girl material. Specifically, the genre’s latter-day format as being primarily about superpowered magical warriors fighting off the forces of evil. Some of the marketing pushed this angle hard enough that I can imagine some people being burned by the presence of a male co-lead at all, but Otaku and Anarchy get about equal billing, and despite a scene where she breaks down over his departure, it’s eventually her own act of courage—raising the otaku flag over the apartment complex that the resistance is camped out in—that convinces him to take up leadership again.

If that were all she did, I might still think Anarchy’s role in this story is a bit reduced from what it should be. But then, in the latter half of the episode, she basically takes over entirely, and Magical Destroyers goes from having a solid premiere to having an absolutely great one.

There’s a pretty amazing meta non-twist here, in fact. For most of the first episode we don’t actually see Anarchy use any of her powers, and given that the marketing was already a little misleading (much of it left out Otaku Hero entirely), it’s easy to assume that the “magical girls” here aren’t actually such at all, that magic doesn’t even exist in this setting, and that they’re all just cosplayers Batman-ing around with explosives or whatever. Then, we cut back to a scene we were shown devoid of context as a cold open, where Anarchy dives out of a plane to assault the otaku prison, and does so without a parachute. Then, this happens.

It is well and truly a moment, one of the year’s best so far, and if Magical Destroyers never reaches that high again, it would maybe still be worth it just for the 30 or so seconds that her henshin sequence lasts. Anarchy in all-business mode is an absolute powerhouse, and while Fairouz’ performance does a lot to sell the character’s more outlandish aspects, they arguably don’t need selling. After a solid 20 minutes where Anarchy seems, honestly, like all talk and no walk, it’s insanely refreshing to see just how much she’s actually bringing to the table. As she fights, her dynamic with Otaku Hero starts making a kind of sense; you can think of them respectively as the brawn and the brains of the Otaku Resistance’s operation. They’re complimentary forces.

They do eventually find and rescue Blue of course. (Who is tied up in bondage gear, one of the episode’s iffier jokes that gets pushed further over the line and back into genuinely funny territory when we find out that the reason she got caught in the first place is that she was catfished and wanted to hook up with someone she met online.) The episode’s triumphant coda leaves a lot of possible angles for the series to explore, and while it’s certainly always possible that something like this will crash and burn, I’m actually pretty confident that Magical Destroyers will remain worth watching. There’s a substance to this style, an order to the chaos, and a method to the madness.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal Anime First Impressions: BIRDIE WING Swings Again

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.

For a little while, it seemed like we might not even get more Birdie Wing. The announcement of a second season came late in the first’s run, and even after it was announced, it ended up delayed, being pushed from the early winter deadzone to, well, now, the feverish pitch of an absolute monster of a season. Birdie Wing is not one to shrink from the competition; much like Eve herself, the presence of those ostensibly bigger and badder just drives Birdie Wing to new heights. Is it still fundamentally the same mid-budget goofy fucking golf battle girl anime we saw back in season one? Yes. Is that a bad thing? Not even a little bit. Birdie Wing swings in like it never left, picking up immediately from the last minor plot line in Season 1, and establishing a whole host of new things in the process.

It’s tempting to go on about, say, Aoi being cranky that she doesn’t win a kiss from Eve, but honestly the real focus of the second season’s first episode is relative newcomer Iijima Kaoruko. Compared to Eve’s more out there opponents, she’s pretty straight-laced, and her motive seems to mainly be to show up her former coach (that’d be Reiya Amuro, the Gundam-themed hardass who serves as one of the show’s big references to that other Bandai franchise with lesbians that’s returning soon). Iijima is one of a few characters with proper “golf powers”, like what Eve has with her “Bullet” shots. She can enter “the Zone”—which she does by gravely intoning “In The Zone” in English—wherein an orange filter douses the golf course and a line of flowers sprouts up along the route she needs to take to her goal. You don’t need me to tell you this is silly. Silly is Birdie Wing’s bread and butter, but god damn is this silly. It’s also kind of great. (Presumably, the flowers represent The Power of Lesbianism. Iijima never actually says anything to strongly indicate she’s gay, but, come on, it’s Birdie Wing.) The Zone, and its more advanced version, In The Zone: Deep, are basically golf kaio-kens, in that they confer incredible power but burn through Iijima’s energy pretty quickly.

None of this really even remotely fazes Eve, who continues to treat golf of all types like a life-or-death situation that she’s nonetheless having a blast playing her way out of. This episode does not reach the heights of when that was literal back in Season 1, but I must imagine it’s going to head there before too long. Birdie Wing is not the short of show that knows much about restraint.

We also learn a little more about Eve’s backstory here, including the pretty incredible notion that Leo, the man who taught her to play golf and Birdie Wing‘s local Char Aznable xerox, seems to have thought she possibly had the potential to be some sort of Golf Chosen One. This isn’t elaborated upon here, but if Birdie Wing plans to aim for ever-greater heights—and it really seems like it is—there are worse ways to do that than to rope the flightly concepts of destiny and fate into your show’s narrative. For now, we mostly get some stuff about her unlocking a new bullet color (which seems to leave her dazed and confused upon use in the episode’s final scene). In the end, she blows Iijima out of the water; another victim to Eve’s golf-murder spree.

Golfing!

There are a few other things that come up here as well (whatever is going on with Aoi suddenly developing a headache certainly seems like it’ll be important going forward), but really, the main thing is just the relief that Birdie Wing is what it’s always been. Good old fashioned normal golf; from a universe much cooler than ours.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Redefining ‘Cult Anime’ in KAMIKATSU: WORKING FOR GOD IN A GODLESS 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.

Nobody needs me to read them the standard line on the contemporary isekai boom at this rate. Nonetheless, here it is, if you’re somehow not aware; the isekai genre, or at least the most common strain of it in the present day, involves people from our world dying and having their souls migrated into another universe, often but not always a fairly standard-templated one based roughly around a JRPG-ish medieval fantasy setting. There are a lot of these. Almost in purely mathematical terms, there are too many of these. It is the most oversaturated genre in modern TV anime, largely thanks to the machinations of J-media conglomerate Kadokawa, and most of them are deeply forgettable. Over at AnimeNewsNetwork, their This Week in Anime column has made a game out of running down the bumper crop of each season for a while now. (Here is the most recent, from back in January. I assume they’re hard at work on this season’s as we speak.) The tide shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.

I’ll be very honest; I don’t really get most isekai. It’s possible I’m just too far removed from the mindset of the teenage boys that this stuff is aimed at these days, but in general, while I think some amount of any genre of fiction is allowed to consist of naked power fantasies, they must at least be interesting power fantasies. (To put it in crasser terms; if you’re going to pen a 20-novel series about a character who is clearly Just You bedding elf chicks and killing fantasy monsters, the elves better at least be attractive and the fantasy monsters better at least be weird.) Contemporary isekai often fails to clear even that bar, and those stories that don’t come across as power fantasies at all are pretty rare. But, hey, credit where it’s due to KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World (what a title), because whatever the hell it’s trying to do, it’s at least memorably strange, and if you can’t clear “good,” then “weird” is a solid second choice.

And things will, indeed, get weird.

Very broadly, KamiKatsu is a comedy. You might call it a parody, but the isekai genre itself is really only part of what it’s taking the piss out of, so that might cast it in too narrow a role. Our lead is the remarkably unremarkable Yukito [Junya Enoki], who is perfectly ordinary. You know, other than the fact that he was raised in a cult and the way he’s killed—remember, isekai series, we gotta kill the protagonist somehow before the story can even start—is that his father, who is inexplicably a really buff tanned bald dude, sticks him in a barrel, ties a magetama around his neck, and has him heave-ho’d into the ocean in the name of their cult’s goddess Mitama. He drowns, because, like, you know, yeah. With his last breath, he wishes to be reborn in a world with no gods and no religion.

After a series of “hilarious” flashbacks where we see things like Yukito fumbling a relationship because his dad’s culties and stepping in dog shit as his life flashes before his eyes, he is—surprise!—reborn in just such a world, where a hot lady, Aruraru [Kana Hanazawa], quite literally immediately jerks him off. (Obviously this is played as a joke but, yes, that happens. I’m just a little stunned by the audacity, somehow.) After some acclimating, he discovers his dilemma and, indeed, the first episode’s central gag. He has been transmigrated to a world not only without any concept of spirituality, faith, religion, etc., but also one without any of the usual isekai fantasy trappings. Yukito’s big quest in this first episode? He helps out the small village he ends up in with their farming, and grumbles the entire time, complaining about how this is Not what he was hoping for when he found out he’d been isekai’d. (To be totally fair to the guy, if I were sent to a generic isekai universe and found out I wasn’t at least an attractive raven-haired elf woman who could, I dunno, use fire magic or something? I’d be pretty let down too.) He has essentially been reincarnated into medieval Germany.

There is a procession of gags, here. They’re more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but they get the job done. When Yukito accidentally gets a bit overzealous and harvests a truly ludicrous amount of grapes, he makes wine and everyone in the village gets absolutely wasted. When a monster—rendered in truly ugly 3D CGI—attacks the village, another character consults what looks like a spellbook, only for it turn out to be a ‘strategy guide’ that suggests such gems as ‘running away’. Later, Yukito and friends track down a different forbidden book, only to find out that it’s about sex. Again, none of this stuff is going to blow anyone’s socks off, but it’s alright as far as killing a few minutes between plot developments. I should note, by the way, if anyone was hoping that this series was just an extended worldbuilding exercise about what a natively, purely atheistic society would be like, you are about to be disappointed. It’s when our not-heroes travel to the Imperial Capitol for some business that things really start to go off the rails.

Very basically, Yukito discovers that in this world—or at least this country, who knows about any others—citizens are randomly put to death. We don’t know why this happens, but most people have accepted it as a part of life. The other two people from Yukito’s village, including Aruraru, have not, and this marks them as ‘deviants’, which, we learn, is why they are sent to live in the village in the first place. It’s essentially an outcast camp. This really doesn’t seem like the kind of series that should be touching the “is euthanasia ethical?” question with a 10-foot pole, but they do basically go there, and it’s very odd. On the other hand, the real point here seems more to be to ask the audience, “what if the state could just end your life on a whim? Wouldn’t that be super scary?” I really do not want to be the one to have to tell this show’s writer that that is, in fact, essentially how the real world works, but someone will have to at some point.

This whole experience rattles Yukito, and he and Aruraru end up sharing an intimate scene over it a bit later in the episode, which manages to be many things in equal parts; a bit out of place, sad, a little funny, and, when Yukito gives Aruraru his magetama, oddly sweet. (I’m not going to touch on the notion of Aruraru somehow tying him up just before that scene. That’d be the out of place part.)

More importantly, ‘deviants’ like the ones from Yukito’s village don’t even get the dignity of being merely told that their lives are over. They’re just dragged back to the capitol to be executed by the throngs of faceless soldiers that serve the so-far unseen emperor. (Who lives in some kind of magic dome that looks very out of place compared to everything else in the show. That’s presumably on purpose.) If you’d guess that Aruraru is one of those taken from the village to be slaughtered, you’d be right. Yukito pursues in a carriage, only to arrive too late and end up on the business end of a sword himself.

Then, in desperation, he says something like a prayer, saying that the people who deserve divine protection are decent, honest people like Aruraru. It quickly turns into an actual prayer, to Mitama—you remember, the god that Yukito’s father’s cult worshipped?—and the sky promptly cracks with a massive thunderhead, transitioning into an honestly kind of awesome henshin sequence of a sort. For Mitama [Akari Kitou], that is, as she appears in the flesh in the form of a naked young girl (bad) and then promptly annhiliates everyone who hurt Yukito and his friends (good) and brings them back to life (better). The episode ends on that note, with Mitama introducing herself to Yukito and being a little offended that he doesn’t recognize her.

To put it mildly, there’s a lot going on there, not helped by some very weird editing choices (a lot of the footage honestly looks like it’s been sped up. I checked a few sources to make sure this wasn’t a problem on my end but it doesn’t seem to be). But like I said! Memorably bizarre is usually better than boring. If you’re going to watch an isekai this season, you could probably do worse than this one. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t seen any others yet.

Am I going to keep watching this? Honestly probably not. But I might, and that’s a lot more than most of this glut of a genre can claim. Hats off for weirdness!

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Springtime Comes Again in SKIP AND LOAFER

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.

Here are the first nine words of Skip and Loafer‘s official English synopsis; This country girl is ready for the big city!

Obviously, that is not the whole story (would we be talking about this show if it was?), but it’s a good jumping off point. Mitsumi [Tomoyo Kurosawa], our lead, really is a country girl. “Ready for the big city,” though, that’s debatable.

Before we get into why, though, let’s talk about the kind of story this is. This is a very old thing, a fish-out-of-water narrative where a small-town girl finds herself in a proper metropolis for the first time and has to navigate the different social norms etc. etc. that come from the different living situations. Usually there’s some quaint moral chestnut in there about how rural folks are Wise or something. (As somebody from the sticks myself, I am disinclined to agree with that, but that’s a subject for another time.) It’s an enduringly popular genre on both sides of the Pacific and, if I had to hazard a guess, it’s probably common in any part of the world that’s ever had an urban / rural social divide of any kind.

But that’s not really Skip and Loafer’s thing, at least not yet. Mitsumi experiencing culture shock is only part of the whole teenage relatability play here. Above anything else, Mitsumi is an intelligent but socially awkward young woman with huge ambitions. We literally see her spell them out in detail. To hear her tell it, she has her whole life planned out ahead of her.

This, of course, does not go as planned. On her first day in Tokyo, she accidentally boards the wrong train on her way to school and gets lost, making her Very Late for her high school entrance ceremony. This starts a domino chain of mishaps big and small that frustrate her attempts to stick to a rigid plan for the day, and she almost immediately starts raking herself over the coals because of it. (Failing at some ultimately-minor task and feeling like the world is going to end is a pretty universal feeling, but you could certainly read the magnitude of her reaction as some kind of neurodivergent, were you so inclined.) She’s only able to find her way to school at all because of the intervention of our other lead character, Sousuke [Akinori Egoshi], a laid-back (some might say lazy) guy who himself overslept and will also miss the entrance ceremony if the two of them don’t figure something out. There’s a pretty good moment here that establishes Mitsumi and Sousuke’s very different personalities; on their way on the (this time correct) train, Sousuke mentions that the thing they’re missing is just the entrance ceremony, at which Mitsumi actually snaps at him. He doesn’t seem to really mind, but she spends the rest of the train ride beating herself up for it. Unmotivated vs. Neurotic; who will win?

Luckily, they do get there before missing anything important, as the principal’s speech runs incredibly long. There, we see a demonstration of Mitsumi’s smarts as she gives a (memorized!) speech to the class, since she was, I suppose, the top scorer on the entrance exams? (This isn’t elaborated upon here and I don’t know how Japanese high schools pick who gives these speeches, if indeed this is even a thing that’s still done outside of fiction.) Her speech is lovely, honestly, but having to recite it from memory wracks her nerves something awful.

So awful in fact, that she promptly runs to the bathroom to puke. But she doesn’t actually make it there. Instead, she ruins her homeroom teacher’s blouse and suit.

Whoops!

At this point, I should take a moment to clarify something. I worry I’m making Skip and Loafer sound like a cringe comedy, but that’s not really what it is. There’s an element of that, but it’s used in service of a more general depiction of the awkwardness of the teenage experience. Mitsumi isn’t a supernaturally-inept trainwreck like, say, Kobeni from Chainsaw Man or something. She’s just an ordinary girl. I’m nearly 30, and somehow, this is still at least a little relatable to me. In our lowest moments, perhaps we are all little more than a teenager puking on someone’s blouse because we’re just really, really stressed out.

To be fair—and I realize I’m not helping Skip and Loafer beat the cringe comedy allegations here—the situation does give us perhaps the single best line of the season so far, after Mitsumi learns about the epithet she’s picked up because of the morning’s events.

Despite this, the homeroom scene that follows is the one where Skip and Loafer, presented with the opportunity to either double down on the cringe comedy or to pare back a bit, makes the wise decision to mellow out a little. Sousuke, who’s taken something of a shine to Mitsumi because of all these shenanigans, asks for her contact info, and this brightens up the whole class toward her. It doesn’t seem like Mitsumi’s going to overcome her habit of overthinking everything anytime soon, but Sousuke’s given her something to latch on to. (In fact, she has some delightfully shoujo manga-esque flights of fancy where she imagines herself as a little duck and Sousuke as a beautiful swan.) This very quickly develops into a crush, and she ends the day thinking pretty highly of the guy. Sousuke himself is a bit of an enigma to us so far, and we only get one short scene from his “point of view” near the end of the episode, but he seems like a good kid. He leaves a hangout with some middle school friends early so he can get to sleep on time, aiming to actually make it to school on-schedule so he can see Mitsumi again and perhaps actually “enjoy high school,” whatever that may look like for him.

I think that the specific word “enjoy” might end up being what Skip and Loafer fixes on. Mitsumi is clearly someone with a lot of ambition, but it is important to know how to have fun, and how to live with yourself when you’re not either Doing Important Things or Making Plans To Do Important Things. Not figuring that stuff out can turn you into a workaholic (I’m speaking from experience), and that’s no good for anyone.

The episode ends with a cute little scene where Mitsumi calls her hometown friend Fumi, and despite lying to her and telling her that everything went just fine, it’s clear that Fumi knows Mitsumi well enough to discern the truth, even if she doesn’t actually say so. I feel like these phone call scenes will probably be fairly important going forward.

All over, there are lots of additional little touches, too. I’ve barely touched on the visuals, which is a sin, because the anime looks gorgeous, with believable but still cute-as-a-button character designs and a ton of great character animation. It’s enough to remind one that the “PA” in PA Works is supposed to stand for “Progressive Animation” at the end of the day. There is also, in a fact that may surprise some, a supporting transgender character, Nao [Mitsuki Saiga], Mitsumi’s dad’s ‘sibling’ (we’re not told anything more specific about their gender identity in this first episode, but I looked it up and the fact that she’s a trans woman is both canon and doesn’t seem to be any kind of twist. If it actually is supposed to be a twist, I apologize. Google was not helpful on this front). I will confess that I’m always a little worried when I see a character who’s visibly not-cis in just about any kind of fiction, but Nao’s minor role in the story is handled very well so far, and Mitsumi certainly seems to think well of her.

Less a facet of the show itself and more its localization is the subtitles, which are lightly dialectical to further convey Mitsumi’s whole ‘country girl’ vibe. At one point she also says something that the subs translate as calling the sides in her dinner “stylin'”, to which Nao wonders if anyone says that anymore. There are a lot of ways to use slang in subtitles, and this is a particularly fun flip-around.

All told, Skip and Loafer is a lot of fun, a classic take on a very old central premise that still feels grounded in the present. I’m sure it’s rearranging some teenage anime fans’ brains as we speak, but you don’t have to still be in high school to find this stuff super charming.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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. If you have any questions about this or any article, feel free to leave a comment, or pop on over to my RetroSpring and ask me there. It’s up to you!

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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Gay Girl Gaffes in ALICE GEAR AEGIS EXPANSION

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.

Pervy lesbian girlfailure seeks to join the power armor-clad alien defense force / idol agency for the space colony she lives in, despite her vast, galloping incompetence in every relevant field. Need I say more?

I mean, I literally do, but if you wanted a concise pitch for alice gear aegis Expansion you could do way worse. I jokingly called this show “Bocchi the Mech” to some of my friends as I was watching the first episode, and that’s not entirely accurate—Nodoka (Miyari Nemoto), our lead, is way more together than Bocchi ever was. Also, this show isn’t quite as good as BTR yet—but it does a good enough job of summing the whole thing up. Nodoka is a fangirl of Actresses, idols / mecha musume-style battle girls who defend her planet from alien invaders. She desperately wants to be an Actress, so she can fight alongside her favorite of them all, Yotsuyu (Manami Numakura), who she is ludicrously, obviously gay for. Unfortunately, she’s been ruled unfit to pilot a Gear—the Actresses’ equipment—via a computerized test. Initially it seems like there’s not much to be done about that, but we’ll circle back around to that point.

First, let’s hone in on the name of these battle armor units. Yeah, they just straight up are called Gears. I’m not going to sit here and say that Alice Gear is a front-to-back rip of Symphogear, because it isn’t, but the influence is obvious. Symphogear is one of my favorite anime of all time, despite some flaws, so one might expect that I’d be very harsh on Alice Gear because of this. To be honest, though, there are much worse things to try to be than Symphogear. Assault Lily Bouquet managed to make it work, so there’s no reason this couldn’t, too, but the actual fighting part of the genre seems fairly incidental to Alice Gear, (despite a very strong opening action sequence, only killed a little bit by some harsh screen-dimming) which instead traffics mainly in zany character comedy, at least so far. One might be more inclined to think of it as something of a parody of this kind of show. Again, a solid idea.

Much of this first episode is basically a single long training montage. Yotsuyu (and some of the other girls) get the notion that if they can build Nodoka’s stamina, she might be able to pass the test. Thus, a parade of ridiculous things like having her balance books on her head while walking on a narrow bridge over a river filled with alligators, practice asking people to please buy idol tickets while wearing heavy cartoony balls-and-chains, etc.

Not all of these jokes work; there is a particularly unfunny bit where one of the characters dons A Certain Kind of Military Uniform to show that she’s going hardass mode. (Maybe rethink that one, guys.) But a lot of them do, and Nodoka’s sheer shameless infatuation with Yotsuyu is fairly endearing. Not even the presence of old-school romcom cliches like high-pressure nosebleeds can kill it.

There’s an interesting little twist at the end, indicating that there might be a little more to this show than just jokes. Time will tell, but I do hope we get to see Nodoka fight at least a few times.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: KIZUNA NO ALLELE Asks, Can 3 Million Kizuna AI Fans Be Wrong?

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.

If you’re out of the Virtual Youtuber loop, it is probably difficult to comprehend what went on with Kizuna AI. I am, myself, only marginally invested in the medium these days, so I will disclose right off the top that I’m no expert. But I am something of a fiend for entertainment industry stories, and AI has a pretty great one. By most counts, she was the person who actually coined the term “Virtual Youtuber,” and later its abbreviation VTuber.

So you can thank / blame her, in at least some sense, for all those 3D-rigged anime girls taking over your Twitter timeline over the past half-decade. She is, in a way, her medium’s Elvis Presley. She didn’t invent the whole thing by any means, but she was among the first to take it mainstream, and that popularity has endured globally even as she’s gained real competition in the form of later arrivals, like the vast rosters of the Hololive or Nijisanji agencies. (She was, to provide some sense of numerical scale, the second VTuber to reach the 3,000,000 subscribers milestone. The only VTuber who beat her to that mark was Hololive EN’s sharkgirl star Gawr Gura. Gura has quite the story in her own right, but that’s a shark tale for another time.)

The history of her actual presence on Youtube (and the internet more generally) is odd and full of twists; from her channel relaunching with multiple Kizuna AIs all voiced by different people, her rig-actress Kasuga Nozomi becoming one of the few people of her stature to ever publicly admit to voicing their associated VTuber and gaining some creative control over the character, and so on, she’s had quite the ride, culminating in a semi-retirement—an “indefinite hiatus”—early last year.

All of that context is important because without knowing who Kizuna AI is and what she did, you can’t really know what Kizuna no Allele is trying to do. She’s the first character we see on-screen, not traditionally animated but in a reality show-esque confession cam segment where she enthuses about the fictional Lapin d’Or award, which she’s just won, and the series opens with a full-on music video by her. She is not the main character of this story, but she is an important, looming background presence. She is also, we find out from another confession cam segment from a different character, missing. Virtual Youtubing’s first great star has vanished.

At first, all of this seems like it might be only marginally relevant. The real star of our story here is Miracle (Ayumi Hinohara), herself an aspiring Virtual Youtuber, attending an academy(!) for the same, and with big dreams of one day measuring up to her idol—I’m sure you can guess who that is—despite being, at present, a total unknown. It is, basically, a pretty standard idol anime plot with the word “idol” swapped out for “VTuber.” Some of the specifics are a little unusual, but for a minute, this seems to be walking a tried-and-true route. Hell, the protagonists even do a variant on the Liella “throwing a star shape with their hands” thing in the OP.

It quickly becomes clear though that if this is trying to be a “normal” idol anime with just some different seasoning than the norm, it’s only doing a so-so job of it. Throughout the first episode, the entire series demonstrates a spacey, loopy energy that doesn’t really mesh well with those sorts of narrative goals. Miracle is a decent protagonist in theory, but she seems to spend more time talking about Kizuna AI than she does about herself, and it makes her feel more like a fan of VTubers than an aspiring one. Speaking from personal experience; there is a huge difference, and because so much of an idol anime’s success hinges on we, the audience, being able to “buy in” to these characters and their ambitions, the fact that I found myself bouncing pretty hard off of Miracle this early on is a bad sign. There is also a particularly odd aside where she gets lost in a greenhouse on her way to class and has tea with a character we haven’t really been properly introduced to yet. What that is about is anyone’s guess.

And then there’s the class itself; a dry, all-talking affair where we’re yet again doled out exposition about Kizuna AI as she lived her life in this fictional setting. (She won the Lapin d’Or award five years in a row, which is certainly impressive in-context, but feels so much less interesting than the actual story of the real person. The series also goes with the conceit that Kizuna actually is an artificial intelligence, which has always been her character gimmick as a VTuber, but for some reason not even making a token acknowledgement that there was a real person involved irks me. But, to be fair, this might become a plot point later on.) We’re also told about (but not introduced to) her counterpart Ada, who has won several years since AI disappeared, and who several of the students in this VTubing class vocally express a preference for. Clearly, this is our heel, although the fact that it’s directly pointed out that she only appeared in the years following AI’s disappearance makes me wonder if she isn’t just Kizuna AI herself under a new name and rig. (Consequently, I wouldn’t be too shocked if the entire anime was a promotional vehicle for exactly that.)

The real disappointment here though is Miracle’s performance for the class. The notion of shooting these performances in a similar rigged 3D CGI fashion as the one in the opening is solid, but they do need to actually be good. Unfortunately, despite the show attempting to sell it as a big moment, Miracle’s performance in this episode is incredibly lackluster, with passable but dispassionate singing and weak choreography. The song itself is fine, but she has no real charisma with which to sell it, and compared to Kizuna AI’s performance at the top of the episode, it’s just a colossal letdown. Bizarrely, when Miracle reappears in a post-credits sequence to wave us off for the week, she seems much more chipper, and consequently, much more interesting to watch, if only for those 30 or so seconds. It’s strange that she has a kind of upbeat charm there that’s missing from the actual show. Perhaps it can be pinned on the fact that this is Ayumi Hinohara’s first anime role, but the writing doesn’t give her much to work with either. If she could somehow bridge the gap between who she is in the actual anime and who she is in that closing segment, the series might become properly worth watching.

Even then, there are a few more interesting moments before the first episode closes. After her performance, which most of the class hails as Super Impressive, Miracle gets overconfident and shoots a collab request to one of her classmates that she admires, only to get turned down near-instantly with a literal big fat “NO.” There isn’t a ton of humor in Kizuna no Allele, but what little there is is effectively deployed.

Then there’s the utterly confounding final scene, where Miracle comforts herself by watching the Kizuna AI video from the start of the episode, only to have a voice in her head—who might actually be AI? It’s not clear—speak to her and deploy a shining portal, which she then steps through to find….a mostly empty grassy field with a little virtual avatar of a green baby taking a nap. It’s very odd, the kind of oddness that it’s hard to do on purpose. That sense of lackadaisical WTF-ery might be what saves Kizuna no Allele, since the chops to be engaging as an idol series just aren’t there yet. Who can say? This is a strange one.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Climbing The Stairway to a HEAVENLY DELUSION

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.

Let me say it again, if you didn’t happen to check out the Spring Let’s Watch poll article. Heavenly Delusion (officially just Tengoku Daimakyo on Disney+, as the streaming service has chosen to forego the existing English title of the series for some reason)—both that it exists at all and that we’re able to sit here and talk about it—is pretty remarkable. The original manga is the still-ongoing project of Masakazu Ishiguro, of And Yet The Town Moves fame. These are very very different properties—And Yet The Town Moves was an often-surreal comedy series, something that does not describe Heavenly Delusion at all—but if you squint, you can spot a few similarities. Some are obvious, like Ishiguro’s general character design sensibilities—natural hair tones, round faces, a certain specific sort of facial proportioning—or the timbre of some of the moments of genuine comedy in this opening episode, of which there are a surprising amount. Less obvious is the sheer sense of tactility that Ishiguro, and the staff of the anime, bring to Heavenly Delusion‘s setting. For lack of a better term, this show’s world—a post-apocalyptic landscape overrun with vegetation and unease—feels real. There is a grounded feeling to even the more fantastical elements.

The plot itself is actually rather simple, so far. Maru (Gen Satou) and Kiriko (Sayaka Senbongi) wander what was once Japan in the wake of some society-destroying disaster known only by the maddeningly vague name of “The Collapse.” Kiriko has been hired as a “bodyguard” of sorts, by somebody, in order to escort Maru to his destination, a place that both characters are short on details about, but they know is called “Heaven.” Along the way, Kiriko hopes to find two men who she keeps photos of sealed in a plastic baggy. Their relationship to each other—and to Kiriko—unknowable at this early point in time.

At the same time, somewhere else, a sealed-off facility hosts an entire generation of children who know nothing of the outside world but seem to be cared for in relative comfort. One of the children there, Mimihime (Misato Fukuen), wonders of the world outside the dome, telling her friend Tokio (Hibiku Yamamura) that she dreams of it, and that in her dreams, a person outside the dome looks just like Tokio. The latter mentions this notion to the facility’s mysterious administrator, who all-too-happily tells them that life outside the facility’s walls is a hellish, unforgiving struggle. Given some of the other things we see in this episode, and regardless of whatever else she’s up to, she might not be wrong.

Most of the opening episode focuses on Maru and Kiriko, who have a sibling-esque relationship complete with plenty of affectionate bickering despite not actually being related at all, as Kiriko points out. You’ll forgive me for talking around the episode’s events in general instead of addressing all of them individually—this is a busy first episode, albeit not in a bad way—but the two do go through some pretty intense stuff here, and how they handle it raises tons of questions. Kiriko has some kind of laser gun* and Maru seems to be capable of some truly bone-cracking martial arts that makes one wonder why he needs protection in the first place.

Even more bizarre are the man-eating monsters that seem to stalk the world’s nights. Something very bad clearly happened here, and this episode does a dizzyingly excellent job of hooking you in by making you wonder what that could’ve been.

On top of that, the production is just absolutely top-shelf stuff. If that seems like a rather unromantic statement given everything else I’ve said, know that this is only because I don’t really think I can compete with just posting screencaps for this particular part of the show. Look at this!

I’m very cynical about tierlist-bro descriptors like “movie quality visuals” but if people resort to terms like that to describe this show I don’t really blame them, Production I.G. have done an absolutely stunning job, and it’s good to see something carrying the torch for truly wonderful TV anime visuals after the finale of Trigun Stampede last week.

So what to make of this thing, all told? Well, it’s firing on basically every available cylinder. Sometimes there are no nits to pick or further points to raise. If anything, I’m even impressed with how Disney+ are handling the show, which is not something I expected to be saying even a week ago. (Last year they sidelined the intermittently-brilliant Summertime Render by simply not releasing it until months after it concluded. I’m still salty about that.) As far as opening episodes go, this is basically perfect, a gorgeous adaptation of already well-loved source material. You can’t go wrong here; 10/10, no notes.

*In part, I think this is actually a reference to And Yet The Town Moves, which to my recollection featured a similar weapon in a gag plot, but I assume there is some in-universe explanation for it as well.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: On a Highway to HELL’S PARADISE

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.

If you’re the sort that craves a truly classic premise, try this one on for size; disgraced ninja threatened with execution is offered amnesty if he can find the Elixir of Life, hidden somewhere on a mysterious island that may or may not be one of the Buddhist Pure Lands. The specifics here are, of course, very culturally Japanese, but the core of that idea is universal. Death is the ultimate equalizer after all, and despite many attempts over the centuries, no one has truly figured out how to escape the Reaper’s long reach. Certainly, the topic preoccupied the minds of those in the late Edo period in which the show takes place as much as it does today. It’s a fairly universal point of fixation.

Some, of course, claim to not fear death at all. Such is the case with Gabimaru (Chiaki Kobayashi), protagonist of Hell’s Paradise and star of this season’s opening anime.* All told, it’s an extremely promising one. It’s also remarkably slow for such a thing, but that’s not a complaint. Despite being a MAPPA-produced shonen adaptation, Hell’s Paradise knows better than to overplay its hand at this early juncture, and there’s a deliberateness to this opening act. This is the sort of story that wants us to know the why before the what. Episode one is, thus, mostly an examination of Gabimaru’s motives and how he comes to reckon himself with them.

How does Hell’s Paradise get there? Well, we open on an executioner repeatedly trying and failing to behead our protagonist. His sword simply breaks against the young man’s neck. This is Gabimaru, disgraced shinobi, captured and hauled before a magistrate and condemned to death. As the magistrate’s executioners repeatedly try and fail to kill him—first by beheading, then by burning at the stake, then by tearing apart with bulls, and then finally by dousing him in burning oil—is someone who claims, again and again throughout this first episode, to not be attached to this thing we call life. Honestly, combined with the nearly documentarian narrator, it becomes pretty clear from the word ‘go’ that, in addition to anything else, there’s a surprising amount of grim humor in Hell’s Paradise.

That claim to have accepted his impending death is what’s most important here, though. Gabimaru is lying.

Serving as a counterweight to Gabimaru is Yamada Asaemon Sagiri (Yumiri Hanamori), an executioner and “sword-tester” who seems to directly serve the shogunate itself. Sagiri spends most of this first episode in a detached and observational mode. She grills Gabimaru about various things, scribbling notes down in a small book she keeps on hand. Two points stand out here. One; the village of Iwagakure, a shinobi enclave that Gabimaru was raised in from a very young age, and two, the daughter of said village’s chieftain, who is also Gabimaru’s wife. It is for the sake of his wife—who, despite their arranged marriage, he loves very much, as shown in some genuinely super endearing flashbacks—that Gabimaru clings to his own life. It is also for her sake that, when Sagiri offers a way out of being executed, Gabimaru accepts.

Gabimaru cuts an interesting figure across this first episode in general; he seems very fatalistic, but that’s clearly also at least in part a cover for how badly he misses his wife and, perhaps, some deeper traumas. When recounting how he was apprehended by the Iwagakure shinobi, Gabimaru leaves out the part where he resisted so stubbornly that he took out twenty men before eventually being captured. There is definitely some level of self-serving memory going on here; no one accidentally kills twenty people, but whether it’s to keep Sagiri in the dark, as part of an internal attempt to reconcile himself with his wife’s wishes for a peaceful and ordinary life, or some other option, isn’t yet entirely clear.

Nonetheless, Sagiri offers him a pardon from the shogunate itself, offered on just one condition; he must go to a recently-discovered mysterious island, which may itself be a Pure Land, far past Ryukyu, and recover the Elixir of Life. In doing so, he’s competing with a number of other condemned criminals, each of whom also seek the Elixir on behalf of the shogunate. Essentially, Hell’s Paradise seems to be setting up a death game scenario here, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more to it than that. (Sagiri also assures Gabimaru that his wife is allegedly still alive and patiently waiting for him back at Iwagakure village. This screams “bait” to me. I would not be shocked if there was a plot twist of some kind that hinges on that particular detail.)

There’s a little bit of Capital-A Action sprinkled in here too; a pretty great bit where Sagiri proves that she could kill Gabimaru, even if he resisted with his various ninja techniques, and makes the ludicrously badass claim that her sword’s reflection shows the true inner nature of the people she executes. She and Gabimaru have a nicely-choreographed fight before she eventually offers him the pardon, and when they both have to escape the angry troops of the magistrate, Gabimaru deploys a proper jutsu for the first time in the series, lighting himself on fire in the process. (Ninja Bullshit will always be cool to me. I had a brief Naruto phase in middle school and that was more than enough to rearrange my brain in that regard.)

And in the episode’s closing minutes we get some truly gnarly shots of what happened to the first expedition to this “Pure Land”; they came back to Japan’s shores in wooden boats, dead, bodies overgrown with flowers, and their faces contorted into a ghoulish smile. That’s one hell of a hook to get you to tune in next week

I can imagine, in theory, someone being perhaps disappointed that the first episode of Hell’s Paradise doesn’t lay all its bells and whistles on the table right away. But personally, I’m finding this slower approach pretty captivating. The show is not, at least not yet, a full-fire storm of blood and adrenaline. It’s a creeping, almost nocturnal dread, not unlike the fear of death itself.

*Heavenly Delusion, which I will also be covering for a first impressions article, technically premiered about an hour earlier.

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, Mastodon, or Anilist, 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, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit: At The End of a Long, Long, Long Road in The Final Episode of The POKÉMON Anime

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

One thousand two hundred and thirty-two. That’s how many episodes, in sum total, the original Japanese run of the entire Pokémon anime has. The episode that aired just two days ago, “The Rainbow & The Pokémon Master”, is the 1,232nd. I’m not trying to wow you with sheer numbers here—although if I were, just for reference, that’s about 400 more episodes than The Simpsons, perhaps the only American cartoon with an episode count in even the same ballpark—but I am trying to make a point. 1,232 episodes over the course of 26 years is a truly stunning achievement. Even if the show were utterly unremarkable in content, that would be worth commenting on.

But we’re not here to evaluate quality today. That’d be pretty much impossible for Pokémon, something that has sunk its fangs into my psyche as much as it has any other Millennial of a certain age and disposition. When I started watching the Pokémon anime—and really, that is how pretty much everyone still refers to it, as either just “the cartoon” or, if they’re slightly more of a weeb, “the anime”—I was a literal child. It was one of the first cartoons period I was ever invested in, long before I had any idea that cartoons from different parts of the world could be meaningfully different, Pokémon, when I first got into it as a child, offered me something very different from any cartoon I’d seen before.

My experience with TV had been very limited up to that point. I grew up in a fairly religious household where things like television were considered distractions and possible corrupting influences. We only got a TV in our house at all in the year 2000, and my grandmother had to do some convincing to convince my mom to pick up cable. It was a tiny hand-me-down thing with a fuzzy picture. Nonetheless, the Pokémon cartoon became important to me. How could it not? I was six years old, and here was this thing chucking all these crazy monster designs at me, and telling me that a young kid Just Like Me (more or less), could have adventures, make friends, and that there was a world outside of the town you grow up in.

I won’t pretend I’ve religiously followed the series in the 23 years since then. (Has anybody? I think even those who’ve seen all the episodes are more likely to have marathoned it in chunks, but maybe I’m underestimating the true Pokemaniacs out there.) But Pokémon has remained part of my life. I’m neurodivergent, and it was, to my recollection, my second total special interest after dinosaurs (I had a big, illustrated encyclopedia of dinosaurs. Wish I still had that thing!), and it’s remained enough of a hobby that I preordered Pokémon Violet. (I also play a fair few Pokémon ROMHacks, but we’re getting into hobbies-within-hobbies at that point) It’s stayed both a part of the cultural conversation and a part of my life, so seeing it finally end as of this 11-episode “postscript” season, after Ash has finally won a championship, feels not so much bad or good, but rather just surreal. I remember the news taking a while to really process for me. As in: “what do you mean the Pokémon anime is ending?” If it feels like the end of an era, it very much is. There will continue to be a Pokémon anime; two new protagonists are slated to start their own journey in just a few weeks, but the Pokémon anime that stars Ash—Satoshi in the original JP—is now officially over. That’s nuts. And I have thought about whether I wanted to even write anything about it, because on some level “that’s nuts” is all you can really say, but not writing anything would be even crazier. This series has been a part of my life since I could read. I have to say something, right?

Then let me say this; if the miniseries’ purpose was to kick shots of pure nostalgia right into my brain, it worked splendidly, and the last episode might be the purest example of that in the whole show. There are a lot of one more‘s in this episode. One more time where Brock gets all lovesick and then gets reprimanded by his Croagunk, one more Team Rocket scheme to snatch Pikachu, one more example of Ash bonding with a Pokémon he just met (it’s a Charmander here; Professor Oak has a new round of trainers to give starter Pokémon to, don’t you know?), etc. If you wanted to be cynical you could describe it as box-ticking. But honestly, there’s so much obvious affection in every frame of this anime that I really find it hard to summon up such a criticism. Toward the end of the episode, Ash’s Pidgeot, the second Pokémon he ever caught, returns to his team, and it’s such a hugely obvious nostalgia play that I started tearing up. I am not immune to affection from giant birds.

In general, they cram quite a few Pokémon into this episode, actually, although I’m sure some will nitpick some omissions. (The big surprise to me is that Ash’s Charizard doesn’t show up for even a split second. When a scene briefly calls for a big draconic flier, his much more recently-acquired Dragonite does the job instead. I’m not complaining, but it is slightly surprising!)

What took me from having watery eyes to full-on bawling was the final scene, where Ash and Pikachu—plus a bunch of Kanto wildlife—take refuge under a tree as a storm passes overhead. This too is a callback; you’ll remember that the very first arc of the series involved Ash biking through a thunderstorm as he tried to protect Pikachu from a flock of Spearows. More than just a reference, though, it’s a meaningful inversion. Back then, the Pokémon were hostile. Here, everything is peaceful and serene; Ash may not consider himself a Pokemon master yet, but in spite of the endless “eternal 11 year old” jokes, he’s clearly grown, and the show itself reflects that.

Not long after, Ash and Pikachu set off again, but this time, we don’t follow along. Our journey together ends here.

But, like I said near the top of this article, this isn’t really the end. The show itself acknowledges that; the retro “To Be Continued…!” text that’s closed out each episode of the miniseries says something a little different here, and really, can you argue with it?

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