Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [1/23/22]

Hello anime fans! What a week it’s been over here! Commissions, seasonals getting better or worse, schedule shakeups, and more. There’s a lot to talk about, so I won’t waste any more of your time. Let’s dive in.

Seasonal Anime

CUE!

Maybe it’s a good thing that I stopped doing weeklies on this show? This episode, only CUE!‘s third, really meanders. That’s not inherently a problem given that the show is slated for two cours, but it does raise some possible problems going forward.

To put it very briefly; there is now an idol anime happening within CUE! Almost literally, even. We’re formally introduced to another “unit” of four characters this episode. We met one of them–Yuki Tendou–last week, but the other three have basically been background characters before now. These are Airi Eniwa (Mayu Iizuka, in her first major role), Yuzuha Kujo, (Manatsu Murakami, also voicing the lead in the deeply creepy Akebi’s School Uniform this season) and Chisa Akagawa (Satsuki Miyahara, another member of DIALOGUE+).

Yuzuha, Airi, Chisa, and Yuki, from left to right.

The four of them volunteer for a project AiRBLUE is considering picking up; a four-piece idol unit called Project Vogel. Which itself seems to be…honestly it’s not entirely clear? They’re playing characters who have designs and such, we even see said designs, which implies that this is a VTuber thing or is itself an idol anime of some sort? But no one ever actually explicitly says either, it’s just referred to as “a project.” It’s a little confusing.

It may not matter, because on top of everything else, this project is being crowdfunded on what looks like Kickstarter. Someone even explicitly points out that the project has only 52 backers at the moment. Which, to give the show due credit, is pretty funny.

This could all conceivably be pretty interesting, and it might even become so at some point, but there’s a lot of daylight between then and now. Because of the team of four we’re introduced to here, three are just not compelling characters. In contrast with Haruna (still our ostensible lead) and her genuinely endearing everywoman charm, they barely even qualify as caricatures. Only one rises above the level of a complete cardboard cutout.

That’d be Yuki, the only one of the four with some actual spark. She wants to land a role in something as quickly as possible because her dad might be forcing her out of the business to work in the family restaurant, and she’s willing to take a gamble on Vogel Project being something she can do. It’s basic, but that’s a real character motivation, which is more than the other three get. Also, she has an exclamatory catchphrase that gets subtitled as “D’oh!” for some reason, which is fun.

Airi has perhaps a dozen lines this episode and more than half of them have to be variants on “I’m sorry.” There’s also a bizarre dialogue gimmick where she says vaguely rude things and then justifies them as being things her horoscope told her to do? She’s honestly pretty annoying! And Mayu Iizuka’s all-nose vocal performance does not help. Yuzuha “wants to make precious memories.” Chisa is “the serious one.” We don’t get to learn much about those two beyond that. Their introductory scene drags like hell and it’s easily the worst part of the show so far, across all three of its episodes.

These are issues that a series could fix with time and development, but it’s a bad first impression to make for what is presumably going to end up becoming a major part of the cast. Why do an introdump like this if you’re going to make the characters seem so dull? It’s worth remembering here that CUE! exists partly to promote a mobile game. No one is going to roll the gacha for characters this boring. (The show’s character designs tending toward the pedestrian certainly doesn’t help either. Though within the context of CUE! as fiction, it does make the designs of the various shows within the show pop more.)

In more interesting territory, Maika and some of the other girls learn that they’ve landed a role in Bloom Ball. I’m pleasantly surprised that the zany sports anime-within-an-anime seems like it’s going to continue to be relevant. Haruna doesn’t get a major part, although she’s penned in to attend the first recording session anyway. Because you see, she’s got a role as “Student A.” It’s something?

Of all of CUE!‘s characters, I actually probably like Haruna the most. It’s a little disappointing to see her performance from last episode lead to a result that is, basically, a joke at her expense. I do still intend to keep up with CUE, but I can’t pretend that this episode isn’t fairly disappointing. Time will tell if this goes down as merely a rough patch or the point where the series just falls apart.

Tokyo 24th Ward

Normally I don’t cover anime in back-to-back Frontline Reports. (That’s what the dedicated weekly columns are for.) Nonetheless, I felt like I should take some time to appreciate the fact that Tokyo 24th Ward has appreciably improved from its snoozefest of a second episode last week to its third this week. Hopefully signing that the first episode will be more indicative of the show’s overall direction than the second.

Very briefly; the Gourmet Fest alluded to last week happens here, and Kaba, the event’s organizer, foils the scheme by a rival restaurant to win by cheating. All of this is fairly humdrum, though thankfully the production picks back up here (the pop-ins are back! Hooray!)

I would’ve written the episode off as just okay were it not for the fact that we get another one of those bonkers ghost phone calls here. The second half of the episode, which this kicks off, seems more indicative of where Tokyo 24th wants to go from here.

This time the disaster is a sudden tornado (!) striking the festival. Once again, it’s presented as a sideways variant on the trolley problem; choose to save Group X or Group Y, but not both. This time, though, our heroes don’t coordinate before moving out to enact their grand shonen-y rescue plans. As a result, things go badly, and for the second time, “RGB” fail to save everyone. One of those who loses his life is Kaba himself, marking the genuinely shocking removal of a character who had up to this point been a fairly major supporting player.

A willingness to buck expectations now, while we’re still rather early in Tokyo 24th‘s run, is a good sign. I legitimately felt for Kaba’s daughter, Kozue, previously traumatized by the fire catastrophe we learned about back in episode one. Here, on her first day out of the house in who knows how long, she’s caught in a tornado and loses her father. That’s just awful, and all the melodramatic touches in the world–Kozue sheds a tear as her father’s ripped away by the tornado, which mixes with one of his own!–can’t entirely blunt that sense of loss.

But if anyone had the absurd worry that Tokyo 24th was going to get too serious, the episode ends with the reveal that somehow, this fucking guy was behind the tornado.

And just like that, our little superhero team suddenly has a proper nemesis.

I don’t know where Tokyo 24th goes from here, but that’s an exciting feeling. I am sure it will appear in this column again.

Elsewhere on MPA

It’s been a productive week here on the site.

(Review) Pompo: The Cinéphile – One of two commissions I finished this week. I don’t love Pompo but it’s a pretty solid movie and it probably deserves more love than it’s gotten from western audiences. Check it out sometime, won’t you?

(Review) SCHOOL-LIVE! / Gakkou Gurashi – I think I’ve basically exhausted all I have to say about mid-’10s cult classic Gakkou Gurashi. I really loved this series despite a few problems and it’s probably the most an anime has made me cry since, what, A Place Further Than The Universe, maybe? There’s a reason this one has stuck around.

Let’s Watch Sabikui Bisco Episode 2 – “Soar on King Trumpets” – Sabikui Bisco is, in a word, nuts. If you have any interest in seasonal TV anime as a format and you’re not following it you’re missing out.

Let’s Watch My Dress-Up Darling, Episode 3 – “Then Why Don’t We?” – This episode is a lot less egregiously horny than last week’s. I did want to throttle the male lead at various points during it, though.

And that’s about all for this week. I’ll see you tomorrow for more Sabikui Bisco, 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) A Blood-Red Sun Hangs High Over SCHOOL-LIVE!

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 Rumi. Thank you for your support.

“Yuki’s pretty amazing. With her around, we can always pick ourselves back up.

No matter what.”

The real giveaway is in the soundtrack. The canned, cheery music so common to the school life comedy genre drops out and is replaced by dead silence and howling wind. That’s the first real clue that something isn’t as it seems. Others arrive in carefully orchestrated, almost subliminal drips. A shot of a seemingly normal school hallway with the windows broken, students who seem rooted to their classrooms, and a vague sense of unease that surrounds the actions of every character but one.

By now, the twist at the end of the first episode of SCHOOL-LIVE! (Gakkou Gurashi domestically, and throughout the rest of this piece) is so well known that its reputation precedes the series itself. This is no comedy. A zombie apocalypse is upon the state-of-the-art school building that our four main characters, out of necessity, make their home. Possibly the whole world, too. That first episode is a masterful little clockwork of suspense building, but if the show’s entire legacy were staked on shock value alone, it would not survive in the popular conscience nearly seven years after it premiered. 33 other TV anime served as Gakkou Gurashi‘s co-seasonals in the summer of 2015. Of those, about a dozen persist in the collective cultural imagination. A work’s quality cannot be judged alone on whether or not people remember it, but it’s truly rare for something without some kind of spark to it to persist for that long. Gakkou Gurashi tapped into something. But what?

My pet theory is that as early as its second episode, Gakkou Gurashi draws on a deep, yawning sadness that resonates with those young enough to relate directly to the show’s cast on up. The melancholy, the anxiety, and the outright dread that come with knowing that who you are now is not who you always will be is deeply rooted in modern culture. If not a universal fear, it’s at least up there. Apocalypse fiction is an extremely direct expression of that worry, and after Gakkou Gurashi rips the Band-Aid off at the end of its first episode, it keeps hammering that button, and it’s never less than effective. Just last year, overlooked OVA Alice in Deadly School succeeded in doing much the same with some of the same methods.

Gakkou Gurashi pulling that same trick for a good five hours could conceivably become a slog. But it never does, because there is some sincere levity cut with all this tension; lighthearted moments colored by the characters’ friendships-of-necessity, or when the series indulges in traditional school life anime tropes, even sometimes in the panic-giggles induced by some of its dark comedy. But all of that only serves to ratchet the tension back up when things get more serious again. This is a show that leaves you with a gnawing fear in your stomach between episodes. There’s a rawness to it.

None of this would mean much if the show’s characters weren’t compelling. But each of them is. The titular School Life Club are a fantastic cast. We have Yuki (Inori Minase, who, among many other things, later appeared in Girls’ Last Tour as Chito), Kurumi (Ari Ozawa, who last year played Elisha in BACK ARROW), Yuuri (Mao Ichimichi, notable for voicing Pecorine in Princess Connect! Re:Dive this very season), and Miki (Rie Takahashi, who just a year after this series aired would land the role of Megumin in Konosuba), their teacher and club advisor, Sakura, AKA Megu (Ai Kayano. Perhaps you know her as Kirika from Symphogear?), and finally their cute little corgi, Taroumaru. (Emiri Katou, voice of Kyuubey.)

These characters largely defy easy archetype pigeonholing, but I’ll be as snappy as I can. Yuki, the heart and soul of the group, is burying repressed traumatic memories under her happy-go-lucky outer shell and spends much of the series knee-deep in delusion. Kurumi is the tough one; by necessity, not choice, and wields a gardening shovel she uses to fight off zombies when necessary. She also has what looks to my armchair-seated eye like an untreated case of PTSD. When it flares up, colors wash out in real time and her heartbeat is turned way up in the audio. Yuuri is the “club president,” and the older sister sort. She takes care of the planning and tries her best to keep everyone else in line. Beneath that facade, it’s her who cracks the worst when push comes to shove. (No one can bottle all that responsibility alone, Yuuri.)

Miki, rescued from a nearby mall, is the most reclusive of the four and takes some time to adjust to the others’ personalities. Megu tries very hard to be the best teacher to her remaining students she can be. Taroumaru is a good boy, as all dogs are.

The show’s structure is fairly simple for most of its runtime. The School Life Club must attend to some task, either something fairly serious like a supply run or some whim of Yuki’s. They do it, and along the way fun is had while, simultaneously, the knowledge that this can’t last forever looms large. It’s a difficult dichotomy to make work, but Gakkou Gurashi manages it, and it’s the show’s main strength.

One of the traits that separates art that is merely very good from that which is great is, in my mind, applicability. A story’s ability to resonate beyond the context in which it was originally written. In the seven years since Gakkou Gurashi first aired, the global climate crisis has escalated to the point of emergency. To the extent that even talking about it in contexts like this can feel like a cliché. Gakkou Gurashi so expertly plays that single chord of apocalyptic despair that when it strikes a nerve, the resonance is as deep and dark as an abandoned well. The “zombies” (or whatever they are) are a formality; they’re everyone who’s not looking out for us, either by malice or by being beaten down by the weight of it all. Our collective abusers and our fellow victims united into a single shambling mass of consumptive darkness.

This is to say nothing of any number of other global crises to which one could easily apply the zombie apocalypse metaphor. Some of the writing in the series would seem rather on-the-nose if it were penned today.

It’s pure projection, of course. But in hindsight, it certainly can feel like the “zombie fiction” boom that Gakkou Gurashi came about at the end of was prescient; the skeletal hand of the Grim Reaper knocking on our collective door. Going about our daily lives in spite of it all, we can all feel like Yukis in our own way. If she’s delusional, maybe she’s no more so than we are.

Perhaps that’s a bit heady, and one would prefer to look at Gakkou Gurashi as an outgrowth of or reaction to the school life genre. The endless everyday that defines that sort of work turned vile and strangling. Consequently, I sometimes see Gakkou Gurashi spoken about as though it is a singular, weird blip in modern TV anime history. I have seen it referred to as an attack on (or worse, a “deconstruction of”) that genre, and I’ve seen it criticized as being all shock value. (And to avoid seeming like I’m talking strictly about other people, I naively believed some of this myself when the series was new. It is a part of why it’s taken me so long to watch it.)

For my money, none of these things could be further from the truth. Gakkou Gurashi is a comparatively early example of a strain of anime that would come to define some of the very best of the 2010s. “Post”-school life work like A Place Further Than the Universe, O Maidens in Your Savage Season!, and even Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! It is distinguished from these far more grounded stylistic cousins by its apocalyptic setting. But if one views the slice of life genre as an organic, living thing, one can imagine Gakkou Gurashi as a sort of evolutionary defense mechanism. A warning: “Our daily lives are under threat, here are the stakes.” (If you wanted to, you could also probably draw a line backwards connecting it to other fare that combined a high school setting with supernatural elements and a broadly similar tone space. Say, Angel Beats!)

With all this in mind, Gakkou Gurashi is not without light. The School Life Club’s rare excursions outside their school, while dangerous, contain moments of joy and human connection they would never have if they stayed locked up. This is how they meet Miki in a flashback that spans most of episodes four and five. The original School Life Club trio is able to liberate Miki from her comparative isolation. Miki’s own history with her friend / maybe-more Kei–who struck out on her own out of frustration sometime before the events of those episodes–serves to frame all this. Both Miki and Kei eventually choose freedom over isolation, but because they don’t do so together, they lose each other. It’s a complicated tangle of cutting loss and the balm of simple contact, and it’s remarkable how well Gakkou Gurashi can walk that tightrope, and how well it continues to walk it as the series goes on. Nothing is without sacrifice, but at the same time, it tells us, no situation is truly hopeless, either. This is, I would in fact argue, Gakkou Gurashi‘s core thesis.

This is best expressed with Yuki. Yuki is, by any conventional definition, extremely mentally unwell. But while Gakkou Gurashi sometimes seems like it might play this for shock, it never really does aside from arguably that first episode swerve. Everyone who actually gets to know Yuki–including Miki, who is initially extremely offput by her mannerisms–finds her a necessary ball of joy in a world that sorely needs it. Her friends in the club indulge her tendencies where they’re harmless and curb them on the occasion they cause real trouble.

She is never treated as lesser than any of the other characters simply because she has specific needs, and when at the series’ end she becomes more lucid it feels less like some part of her is being erased and more that she has simply grown as a person. She confronts a truth she’s been hiding from; the fact that Megu sacrificed her life to save the School Life Club some time ago, and reconciles with the state of the world in general. A lesser “zombie apocalypse survivors” sort of story would frame her as a burden. But Gakkou Gurashi never even suggests it. The one and only time she ever voices the concern that she might be weighing the others down, she’s immediately corrected by all present. Yuki is a symbol of a hope placed not on some distant Other coming to the rescue, but in each other, a slice of life lead girl slipping that genre’s bounds to become, in her own way, a genuine hero.

In general, the girls’ relationships with each other feel as authentic as any friendship from a “normal” slice of life series. And that’s the thing, despite what it may be easy to assume, Gakkou Gurashi still is a slice of life series. Decent chunks of even very serious episodes are spent on fairly mundane activities. Some whole episodes are devoted to them, such as when the club gets the idea to send out letter balloons in episode seven. Or episode nine, where Gakkou Gurashi manages the impressively absurd feat of squeezing an egregious pool episode into its remaining runtime, complete, at least in the fansub I watched, with a random reference to the then-recent Kill la Kill. (It’s easily the least essential episode of the whole show, but even something that nakedly cliche is a welcome breather between what comes before and after.)

In its final stretch, the girls of the School Life Club are thrust into crisis. Zombies break through the school’s barriers. Kurumi gets bit. It’s bad. If Gakkou Gurashi were the shock schlock people (including my younger self) have mistaken it for at times, it would be very easy for the series to end on a down note to be “shocking.” Instead, we get a miracle. Yuki gets the idea to dismiss the zombie horde via the school PA. Improbably, it works.

The scene falls apart in the retelling, but in the moment, it’s magical. There are losses (poor Taroumaru really looks like he’s going to pull through, but he doesn’t), but the School Life Club carry on. Maybe all of this is helped somewhat by the fact that I binged the entire series in only two sittings. Maybe it is also helped by my new HRT regimen making me even more vulnerable to sappy bullshit than I already was. But I like to think I’d have bawled like a baby regardless. The show is as good at tugging your heartstrings as it is inspiring dread. Not many anime can claim that.

Gakkou Gurashi can get away with that heartstring-pulling because by the time it happens, we’ve already spent some five hours with these characters. We have seen them not just survive but thrive in a world that has well and truly gone to shit.

And that difference, the distinction between simply surviving and truly living, is what that line in the maddeningly catchy OP theme means. “We have dreams like we’re supposed to.” Different dreams, maybe, than the ones we had when we were younger, but dreams, nonetheless. Gakkou Gurashi‘s final shot is the School Life Club, having held for themselves a “graduation ceremony” now that hiding out in the school is no longer tenable, flying down the empty highway in Megu’s old car, seeking to link up with other possible survivors. The city they drive through is in ruins, but there’s barely a hint of melancholy. The future is theirs to seize.

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 2 – “Soar on King Trumpets”

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

We’re in new territory for this site.

I am a lot of things as a critic. But I would not say I’m exactly a savvy predictor of an anime’s success or positive acclaim. Sometimes I stick to my guns in spite of public consensus, sometimes I do not. I went over the long and short of this in another post earlier today, but the very short version is this; the previous series I’d picked up as a weekly is just not working out. Instead, you get Sabikui Bisco every week going forward.

I’m going to go ahead and assume that if you’re reading this, you’re fine with that.

This column arrives rather late (and a bit short compared to my usual) as a result of this schedule shakeup, but I do intend to pick up episode 3 on Monday, so we’ll have to really haul ass through episode 2 here. But I’m fine with that. Do you know why? Because Sabikui Bisco is an utterly unhinged box of delights, and writing about it is fun.

If you don’t like my “rapturous praise” mode of writing you can go ahead and skip this column. I have nothing but good things to say about Bisco.

This week’s episode focuses more on the redheaded title character than the feminine Milo, who we got to know last week. We learn how he ended up in the city and that the reason he sought Milo out is because his traveling companion and mentor, an old man named Jabi (Shirou Saitou, who seems to play roles almost exclusively in this vein and has done so since he made his VA debut in 1996. He was also Jake in the Japanese dub of Adventure Time, isn’t that fun?), was injured by an attacking bounty hunter looking to take Bisco in. Now, that’s a fairly normal shonen plot beat. Less normal is the fact that the bounty hunter’s method of attack was “giant snail fighter jet.” Similar weaponization of animal life occurs throughout this episode and, I imagine, will continue to be a motif seen throughout the show.

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One could speculate on the possible thematic implications of a world so war-torn that even ordinary fauna have been turned into weapons. But this early on, the sheer cool factor has yet to wear off. We’ll get there, and so will Bisco itself, presumably. Right now, the feel of the ride is what matters most. The episode ends with the promise of an impending duel between Bisco and Paw, who currently thinks (correctly) that Bisco blew up her brother’s hospital and possibly (incorrectly) that he’s killed him. This promises to be one of the most stylish fights of the season, and you’ll have to forgive me if I take this opportunity to again remind everyone that Paw is just an absolutely untouchable character.

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I wish she’d look at me like that. 🥺

So that’s the Cliff’s Notes for our second episode. I’m glossing over more than I’d like to here because I’m pressed for time. I almost didn’t even get to mention the fun little character aside where the aforementioned plane-owning bounty hunter grovels for her life at the feet of the villainous prefectural governor we met last episode. How he tosses her a pistol and tells her she’s still under contract, and how he offhandedly mentions that Bisco’s attack on the city has ruined his plan to host a totally sweet sci-fi movie marathon.

You know he’s a villain because he watches the Star Wars movies in chronological order.

Nonetheless, I hope I’ve impressed upon you how wonderfully bonkers the world of Bisco is. If you’re reading this, I assume you’re already onboard the mushroom hype train. If not, there’s plenty of time to climb on.

Until episode 3, 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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime, Other Posts

ANNOUNCEMENT: Seasonal Coverage Schedule Change

Hi folks. As is often the case with these short little update articles, this is more of a PSA than an article per se.

I’ll cut straight to the point: no one but me is watching CUE! I have spent some time going over the metrics and it simply isn’t pulling crowds. Not just here, it doesn’t really seem to be doing well anywhere. It’s a non-entity on reddit, Twitter, etc. The Internet simply does not care about this show.

Which is a shame, because I genuinely like the show. But it now being three weeks into the season I have to ask myself if I like it enough to cover it weekly for two entire cours when almost no one is reading what I write about it. The answer there is a firm “no.” I do what I do out of love, but I must make some sacrifices for practicality. It is just not sensible from any point of view to continue to devote this much of my time to covering CUE!

So here’s what’s going to change, in the briefest terms I can put it.

  • Weekly Let’s Watches of CUE! will stop.
  • Consequently, CUE! will become a show I cover occasionally on The Frontline Report.
  • Sabikui Bisco will be taking its spot as a weekly. I really like it, and it’s getting enough positive buzz that I’m confident my columns on it will be more widely-read than those on CUE!
  • There will be a short Let’s Watch post–my first for the series–on episode 2 later today. Regular coverage will pick up when the series’ next episode releases on Monday.
  • Because this will shuffle around my work schedule, The Frontline Report will release on Tuesdays for the remainder of this season, in order to keep all my publishing days in a row. Starting with the upcoming edition of the column, which will now be released on the 25th. (The day that the Frontline Report is released depends on a lot of factors, but one of them is what’s most convenient for me. If I’m publishing something on Sunday and Monday already, then Tuesday is the natural fit.) Update: None of this is true! I misremembered what day My Dress-Up Darling comes out on. They will remain a Sunday feature for the remainder of the season.
  • Recaps of My Dress-Up Darling will be unaffected.

The schedule will thus be:

  • Saturday: My Dress-Up Darling
  • Sunday: Frontline Report
  • Monday: Sabikui Bisco

I suspect most of you will be neutral on or happy with this change. For anyone who did enjoy my coverage of CUE!, I’m sorry that this has happened. I try to avoid switching things up like this in the middle of a season if I can help it, but, well, see my prior point about practicality. I hope you’ll look forward to its appearances in The Frontline Report, at least.

For the rest of you, I hope you enjoy the Sabikui Bisco coverage as much as I enjoy the series itself. I’ll see you later today with the Let’s Watch column.

Posted on in anime, Monthly Movies, Reviews

Magic Planet Monthly Movies: From Reel to Real in POMPO: THE CINÉPHILE

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 The Mugcord Discord Server. Thank you for your support.

Who are movies made for?

The pop media machine is, by all accounts, an absolutely insane thing to spend your life involved with. Across all media, all over the world, the roiling mass that is the entertainment industry stamps out new books, albums, television shows, and, of course, movies. This complex, if working in its most cynical mode, can produce truly horrible works of profound soullessness. At its best, though, it can allow work that is beautiful, brilliant, and life-affirming to reach a mass audience. Pompo: The Cinéphile, the first theatrical release from Studio CLAP, is neither of these things, but it’s closer to the latter than the former. Being a movie about movies, that’s a good thing.

Pompo is a complicated and sometimes frustrating film, not a rare thing for art about art. It clearly has its heart in the right place, but there are a few key issues that prevent it from really rising to the level it clearly aspires to.

But before we examine Pompo in detail to hash out why that’s so, it would perhaps be best to take the measure of our cast. Starting with Pompo herself.

The eponymous Joelle D. “Pompo” Pomponette (Konomi Kohara, probably best known to readers of this blog as either Cure Milky from Star Twinkle Precure or Chika Fujiwara from Kaguya-sama: Love is War!) is not actually the main character of Pompo: The Cinéphile, but she is important. A filmmaking prodigy superproducer, Pompo has, at the time our story begins, funded a string of extremely cheesy but highly profitable B-Movies after being bequeathed a fortune from her grandfather, who is also a (retired) film producer. Pompo is a mercurial little ball of fairy dust, and she’s quite endearing.

Her movies seem pretty great.

She also has an intern / sort-of apprentice, Gene Fini (Hiroya Shimizu, in his first major anime role), who serves as our real main character. Gene, who looks like the concept of sleep deprivation given human form, serves as an embodiment of all of Pompo‘s big ideas about the purpose and nature of human artistic achievement.

Rounding this out is our secondary lead, Natalie Woodward (Rinka Ootani, also in her first major VA role), an aspiring actress who Pompo sees some potential in, and who eventually becomes the subject of a script she writes. She gets probably the least screentime of all the major characters, which is a bit of a shame, because her can-do attitude is charming. Importantly, she’s also taken under the wing of Mystia, a veteran actress (Ai Kakuma, who, among a number of other roles, was Aki-sensei in last year’s Sonny Boy).

The script written for her is quite important. Pompo pens it with Natalie and a retired, world-famous actor, one Martin Braddock (industry legend Akio Ōtsuka) in mind. She doesn’t want to direct this film, though. That falls to Gene.

All of these characters are fun, including Gene, who avoids most of the pitfalls associated with being a slightly dull male lead. He falls backwards into directing a huge movie and initially he is left wondering why, exactly, he’s agreeing to all this. But subtle-unsubtle tricks like his pondering who–if he had to pick one person–he would shoot the move for, and the scene going out of focus except for Pompo in the background, better explain his feelings than he himself can.

But yes, this script of Pompo’s forms the film-within-a-film Meister, about a disaffected, jaded former musician regaining his love for music after he meets a young girl in Switzerland. The shooting of Meister, consequently, is the backbone of Pompo‘s plot. There isn’t much in the way of traditional conflict in this part of the film, as Gene’s struggle to form his own directorial vision takes up the bulk of the screentime. This treats us to engaging details that draw attention to the serendipitous side of the filmmaking process. Say, one of Meister‘s scenes changing mid-shoot because a fog bank rolls in, or the cast collectively coming up with an entire extra scene in order to take advantage of a chance rainstorm.

This is all visually lovely too, and Pompo deserves serious credit for its utterly gorgeous backgrounds, which really capture the serene majesty of the Swiss alps. Or, both earlier and later in the film, the hustle and bustle of Hollywood. (Sorry, “Nyallywood.”)

Indeed, speaking purely from the visual angle, Pompo is downright fantastic. It’s edited like a whirlwind and is just about allergic to regular scene transitions, subbing in unusual ones whenever it can. (It’s particularly fond of a three-part punch-in effect, which frames both the departing and arriving scene in interesting fashion.) Very little of Pompo is content to frame a shot simply. Not when there’s some unusual, stylish angle it can use instead.

There are also some cool scene tricks, my personal favorite being the way it sometimes frames a character reflecting on a conversation as said conversation playing out on a film screen while the character “watches” the memory. A motif of film reels, both literal and symbolic, also runs through movie, giving it an extra bit of visual continuity. Similarly, characters’ eyes literally glow when they’re displaying passion or raw talent.

Despite the film’s own focus on live action material, there is also the feel of a great anime film here, too. The animation is highly expressive, with Pompo herself getting a lot of the best cuts. She will literally bounce into a room, inflate like a balloon when complaining about how movies over 90 minutes are “bloated,” and her Play-Doh ball of a face gives us the movie’s best expressions.

Once we move away from production strengths though, things get more complicated. The characters and visual style are great, and it’s because of the film’s brisk pace none of that wears out its welcome. But we at some point need to discuss what Pompo: The Cinéphile is actually about, and it’s here that things get a little dicey.

You see, Gene’s movie eventually runs into production issues because of Gene himself. He spends weeks editing it but just can’t seem to make it his own. (This, as Pompo itself points out, is why directors rarely edit their own movies.) Eventually, he decides that he needs to shoot an additional scene. Pompo is not happy about this! An additional scene this far after shooting has wrapped is a huge undertaking. She rightly raises the objection that it requires a lot of expense, it requires getting the cast and crew back together, and so on. Gene is undeterred, and Pompo eventually caves, causing the movie to miss an initial premiere. In turn, this causes a number of important financial backers to withdraw their support.

This problem is eventually rectified by the intervention of minor character Alan Gardner (Ryuuichi Kijima, active in the industry since 2007, and for whom playing roles like this seems to be a recurring thing) who convinces the massive bank he works for to finance the movie. It’s a truly ridiculous sequence of events that involves, among other things, giving a financial presentation while secretly livestreaming said presentation, his own efforts to interview Meister‘s entire cast and crew, and also-secretly setting up a Kickstarter for all of this.

It’s ridiculous, and if it involved anything but a bunch of bankers, I’d probably like it a bit more for that very reason. I do still respect the sheer audacity of dropping this into your movie about why movies are important, but it does not fit at all.

When all this financing (complete with a documentary on the making of the film!) is still not enough, Gene ends up in the hospital from overwork, and it’s here where Pompo truly hits a wall. Overwork is an utterly massive problem in the entertainment industry, especially the anime industry. While I have no reason to believe that Studio CLAP is guilty of the same practices as some of its contemporaries simply because it’s an anime studio, the result of this whole development being Gene ripping out his IV and dragging himself back to the editing room with everyone’s only-slightly-reluctant support just scans as a little weird. And maybe more than a little tone-deaf. It’s even weirder when Gene starts ranting about the things he’s sacrificed to make his great film. In a scene that is supposed to be uplifting, it instead feels like the ravings of someone who desperately needs to be pulled away from his work for a while.

This is all even odder when considering Meister. In that film-within-a-film, that very same stepping away is what allows the main character, Dalbert, to regain his own love of music. Indeed, he rediscovers a love of life itself in the mountains of Switzerland when he meets Lily (Natalie’s character). Gene has no comparable experience, because he’s new to the industry, and by his own admission, his life has been rather uneventful.

Gene and Dalbert are not similar characters, despite the film’s heavy-handed attempts to conflate them. It’s a truly strange note for an otherwise good movie to stake its emotional climax on, and it doesn’t do much to convey the film’s intended thesis of art as a universal conduit for human empathy and resonance. Consequently, when the final scene hits and Meister sweeps the “Nyacademy Awards,” it comes across as masturbatory and unearned.

All of this leaves Pompo as, frankly, a mess, in thematic terms. Beginning with some weirdly cynical moralizing earlier in the film about how happy people are less creative and peaking with that fictional Oscar-sweep at its end. It almost makes Pompo seem like the victim of the very same conceptually fuzzy editing-room chop-jobbery that its final act depicts. Maybe it was! It’s hard to know.

Comparing the film with its source material, the still ongoing Pompo: The Cinéphile manga, raises another possibility. One gets the sense that director Takayuki Hirao may have wanted to tell a more grandiose story than the one that the comparatively modest and more comedic manga presents. If so, this may be a simple case of a director being a poor match for the source material. It is possible to build a gripping story out of the rough struggle to make art that truly expresses oneself. But Pompo is not that story. Trying to force it to be such drags the film’s final act down quite a bit.

Does all this ruin the film? No, because it remains an engaging watch throughout on its production merits and because the characters are fun to keep up with. (Even at its very end, it pulls off the cute trick of itself sticking to Pompo’s 90 minute rule. Not counting credits, the film is exactly 90 minutes long.)

So, Pompo: The Cinéphile remains a perfectly enjoyable flick in spite of its issues. And I’m excited to see what Hirao will do in the future, if this is indicative of a visual style he intends to keep pursuing, especially if he’s given a more fitting story to work with. In general, this is a very promising start for CLAP, marking as it does their big international coming out party.

But all of this faffing about with the film’s message does kneecap Pompo as a coherent statement, firmly marking it as “just” a pretty good movie instead of a truly great one, which is a bit of a shame.

Still, there is a place for pretty good movies. As one, Pompo is certainly worthwhile. Don’t expect to add it to your classics shelf, but it’ll sit with the rest of your Blu-Ray collection just fine.

Wanna 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, Uncategorized

Let’s Watch CUE! Episode 2 – “Their Respective Colors”

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

The people behind CUE! likely don’t know–or care–about this, but the show’s very premise is a particular form of critic bait. That’s part of why I liked it so much last week, and that’s why I’m taking a very real risk by committing to covering its entire run week-by-week here. (24 episodes is a lot for this sort of column! Who knows what could happen!) But I have faith in the series, and that “critic bait” nature is some amount of why.

TV Anime is a pulp medium, and pulp media are inherently built on standard character archetypes and story beats. This is not a good or bad thing, it’s just a fact. CUE!, with its story centered around voice actors, highlights those tropes by its very nature. In our second episode, “Their Respective Colors”, the girls of the AiRBLUE Voice Talent Agency tackle their first real audition, putting their full weight into embodying those character archetypes. But what makes CUE! fascinating from a critical point of view is that the AiRBLUE girls, being anime characters themselves, also embody different character archetypes. The entire series, if sufficiently abstracted, can thus be thought of as these archetypes interpreting each other. Just on its own, that’s very interesting.

But of course, it’s also quite a lot of heady material to get into over CUE!, an anime series primarily about cute girls doing their best to voice other cute girls. The audition–which takes up the entirety of this episode–works on a lot of levels. On the one hand it is very much all that I said above, but it’s also just a lot of fun, which is arguably more important. Before I get into anything more specific, I should point out how absurd it is that CUE! is able to inject so much personality into a given episode despite its fairly workaday production. We don’t get nearly as many of the cut-asides where our characters imagine themselves as literally embodying the roles they play here, so the actual voice acting itself is left to pick up a lot of the slack. It manages it. And from my point of view, the second episode, even moreso than the first, proves that this anime has real legs.

So! The audition. Last week I mentioned that Bloom Ball–the show-within-a-show that’s the focus here–looked like a magical girl anime. It is…not that. (Although you maybe could argue it’s a battle girl series.) It’s some sort of hot-blooded sports anime shonen thing that frankly looks way better than most actual shonen anime. (Am I saying that because of its all-female cast? Maybe.)

As mentioned, the actual episode consists almost entirely of auditions. Enough care is taken to make sure that things do feel genuinely tense. AiRBLUE are the last agency auditioning, and in contrast to everyone else, they’re woefully inexperienced. The voice director (an everyman type in a pink polo) is very clearly a bit done with all of this. The author of the original Bloom Ball manga, a woman named Kei, has actually fallen asleep in her chair from consulting on so many auditions.

I have seen so many manga and anime depict mangaka exactly like this–dark-haired women who are visibly not getting enough sleep–that I have come to believe the entire manga industry is sustained by people of that specific description.

Nobody really expects AiRBLUE to make much of themselves here, and several members of the agency, including our protagonist Haruna, (Yurina Uchiyama, part of the idol group DIALOGUE+ in her first major VA role) aren’t actually familiar with the manga. (They’re given some time to read a bit of it and go over some reference sheets to pick a character to audition, but it doesn’t seem like the individual tryouts take very long. My impression is that Haruna, who eventually auditions last, got maybe an hour or two at most?)

The pressure is palpable, and CUE! really makes you feel that tension, here, with nothing more than some closeups and other clever “camera angle” tricks. This is an actual audition, none of these girls were prepared for it, and some of them don’t even know what Bloom Ball really is. It’s an unenviable position.

And yet, in the face of all this, our girls make a good show of it anyway. Most try out for the role of Bloom Ball‘s main character. We see most of these only in passing, with the most attention being given to Yuki Tendou’s (Ayaka Takamura, also a member of DIALOGUE+) take.

Yuki’s read is hyperactive and energetic, but it’s notable that she doesn’t get one of those fancy cut-asides. We also see Haruna’s fast friend Maika (Nene Hieda, whose most recent role I’m familiar with was Miyako in Warlords of Sigrdrifa) give her take on Ball Bloom’s secondary protagonist. A fun nod to her own status as Haruna’s best bud in this series, but not one that necessarily indicates she’s great for the role. Maika’s read is boisterous and hot-blooded, an ill fit for a blue-color-schemed deuteragonist whose role in her home series is clearly “the logical one.” This is yet another example of how CUE! toys around with character tropes, and the interesting mismatch here highlights the differences between Maika and the role she’s chosen to play. Although it’s worth noting that the mangaka seems to find her take on the character interesting, at the very least.

And then we get to Haruna’s tryout. Haruna initially auditions for, again, the lead role. She’s pretty good at it too, only fumbling once when she knocks her script into the microphone (illustrated by a very funny cut-aside where she is Bloom Ball‘s lead…and then falls over with a loud conk sound. It’s very shonen slapstick.)

If her audition ended here this would be something of an anti-climax. So, CUE! employs another clever trick here. Haruna’s performance as her initial choice is solid, but the mangaka hears something else in her read, and asks if she can record lines for a different character. One who–in the very brief time we get to know her–seems even more boisterous and hot-blooded than Bloom Ball‘s lead. (Bloom Ball seems like a very good series. Were it real, I would probably love Kuwai here.)

She then does it again, having Haruna read lines for a third role as well. The other AiRBLUE girls in the casting room are a bit shocked to see this all happen, and it’s even directly called out as rare. (In fact, I was a bit worried it’d be milked for cheap melodrama, but there’s no sign of that so far. AiRBLUE’s girls are professionals!)

This all has the effect of making Haruna seem like a voice acting wunderkind. To be fair, her own VA is pretty damn good (and again, I just love the fact that Haruna is voiced by someone in her own first major VA role. That’s just perfect.) But this would not work nearly as well without the mangaka seizing upon Haruna’s first performance. It’s a trick to convince us that Haruna’s an amazing talent just waiting to be discovered, and it works. That kind of thing is why CUE! is so entertaining, and it’s a general presentational technique I hope the show keeps up as it rolls on.

Haruna and Makai end the episode by hitting a cafe to relax and reflect. Two of the other girls from AiRBLUE, Honoka Tsukii (Yuuna Ogata, who previously played Gloria in the Pokemon: Twilight Wings ONA) and Shiho “just Shiho, please” Kano (Kyouka Moriya, whose sole other role was as Hemo Midori in 2020’s Dropout Idol Fruit Tart), chat them up as the four unwind and discuss a first day’s work well done. It’s a low-key ending to a fairly exciting episode. I look forward to many more like it in the weeks ahead as we get to better know not just Haruna and Makai, but Honoka, Shiho, and the other girls of AiRBLUE as well.

Wanna 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 Magic of ARTISWITCH

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

Over the past decade, an artistic movement has emerged in anime that values perseverance and centers the stories of young women. If this movement has a name–or is even a cogent scene as opposed to a simple undercurrent–I am unaware of it. But one would have to be fairly oblivious to not at least feel it in the air. Artiswitch was not the most prominent example of this lineage to come out last year, but with the benefit of hindsight, it might be one of the best. And it’s certainly among the most inventive. My only regret with this series is that I didn’t cover it when it was new. (I actually didn’t plan to cover it at all, assuming I’d have nothing of note to say about it. Arguably I still don’t, but, hey, these things have a way of sneaking up on you.)

In terms of “literal plot,” there isn’t much to Artiswitch. Our protagonist, Nina (Utano Aoi, in what appears to be her first-ever anime role), is a witch who maintains a mysterious shop somewhere in Harajuku, Tokyo. Customers find their way to the shop, and when they leave, they take with them an item that changes their lives.

This premise is not a unique one, and in particular fans of forever-underrated CLAMP classic xxxHOLIC will find the general idea familiar, but Artiswitch’s format (a series of shorts, only totaling to about 45 minutes in all) prevents it from preoccupying itself with the sort of sprawling story that that series eventually develops. Instead, we get a lot of symbolism, compelling imagery, and sharp direction. Artiswitch is all mood and atmosphere. Which isn’t to say there are no points being made here, but anyone who requires their anime to have an easily decipherable linear Point A–>Point B plot should check out now.

The first two episodes establish the format. A customer (a tomboyish athlete in the first episode, and a shy, follow-the-leader sort of girl in episode 1 and 2 respectively) makes their way to Nina’s shop. They pick up an item, prompting the witch to deliver her catchphrase (“would you like to peer deeper?”), and from there things dissolve into full-on music video territory.

Quite literally, since these segments, which take up the middle third of each episode, are set to songs and feature little to no dialogue. Going into detail about each of these would be tantamount to spoiling the series, but the first episode’s already gorgeous conceit of the tomboy Haruka rediscovering her repressed feminine side by donning fire-red lipstick and dress is where things start. They ramp up exponentially from there, with the remaining episodes serving to twist the formula in various ways.

The most notable deviations here are the final two. But simply explaining what happens would feel like trying to strangle the life out of the series. It’s less a “what” and more a “how.” When Nina meets a maybe-nemesis in the form of a gothic lolita with ambiguous motives and a habit of, ahem, raining on other folks’ parades, things become less straightforward, and it’s around here where I feel like simply recapping the literal events of the series would be doing it a disservice.

Artiswitch clearly has a lot on its mind, and were I forced to come up with a single flaw I thought were present in the series, it might be a lack of clarity. But at the same time, that feels fundamentally misguided.

And it would require ignoring the final episode, where Nina’s wish-granting capabilities are turned back on themselves, and it is she who must dive into her own mind. We see why she entered this magical line of work to begin with, and the sight of her past self comforting her present with the affirmation that she is moving forward and is doing her best, despite her own doubts, is why I decided to write this short review in the first place.

Fundamentally, art resonates with its audience based on shared thoughts, experiences, and feelings. Those things change from person to person, but taking special note of when a series has successfully struck a chord with me is the entire reason I write at all. Leaving Artiswitch un-commented-upon just didn’t feel right. I have to confess, I am in fact worried about doing this series justice while simultaneously trying to avoid pinning it to a corkboard like a dead butterfly.

But I probably shouldn’t be so concerned. It flits and flies free. On a practical level, I am excited to see what director Kazuma Ikeda (who seems to have an extensive background in design, something that really shines through here) does next. But beyond that, this is the sort of thing people will keep discovering as the years roll by, and even now the comments sections below each episode are crowded with testimonials, in a plethora of languages, from those to whom the series already clearly means quite a lot. The shop stands waiting, all one needs to do is step inside.

Wanna 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.