Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Woof. Look at that title. I’m not on the writing team for My Dress-Up Darling–or indeed, the translation team–so I can’t be totally sure, but I’m pretty certain that that’s a somewhat crass joke.
Which is weird, because while the show’s general aura of “idk, horny” returns this week, this is actually a pretty solid episode. The main goal here seems to be fleshing out the character of Shinju, Juju’s younger sister. That does unfortunately mean we get more than a little of the same “isn’t it funny that she’s a middle schooler but has HUGE bazongas?” energy that marred her introduction. But at the very least, she’s humanized here to a degree that raises her well above the status of a one-note joke character. It’s enough to make me at least consider overlooking how weird the series sometimes is about her.
Before that, though, we open with more cosplay nerdery. We don’t get a whole episode about Gojo making the outfits this time. As such, while there’s still a fair bit of Dress-Up Darling‘s usual camera leeriness, it’s at least over fairly quickly. And the rest of this sequence is actually pretty good. There’s the odd Lucky Star-esque sitcom conversation that slips in.
And I’m particularly fond of the details of Marin putting on her Black Lobelia outfit for the first time. The way she gets so happy over having a perfect black soul gem to stick above her chest, or how she delivers this absolute 24-karat one-liner after applying some cosplay tape.
In general, Marin actually gets a lot of great dialogue here. Something I have to equally applaud both the original writers and the translators for. Who hasn’t felt like this at least once?
But as mentioned, the real heart of this episode is Shinju’s story. If you’ll recall, last week, after Juju fainted, we cut abruptly forward in time to spend the last ten minutes of the episode on that dreamy endless summer sequence. If you were wondering what exactly happened in between those events, wonder no more, as this episode establishes that Juju was fine. More importantly, Shinju and Gojo had a long talk about the former’s desire to start cosplaying, but reluctance to do so for pretty understandable reasons.
I have to admit that I was a little surprised to see this brought back up as any kind of actual character flaw. While last week did explain Juju’s extreme passion for cosplaying and general derision borne of jealousy, it doesn’t really excuse it, and seeing that her rather gatekeepy attitude has actually hurt her younger sister’s feelings is an unexpected bit of realism. I appreciate it.
Gojo is able to assure her that she should try anyway, and naturally, Shinju is quite moved. (Will this develop into a third character in the show having a crush on Gojo? It’s hard to say. I rather hope not. Anything beyond the core Gojo / Marin relationship is cruft.)
But there is an issue. The entire reason Shinju is worried about “looking weird” is that the character she wants to cosplay doesn’t match her body type at all. (A real issue that many cosplayers face! To say nothing of broader clothing availability problems.) That character? Why, a cool older brother of course.
One can see how this might be a challenge.
Nonetheless, Gojo is nothing if not a cosplay wizard. He’s able to whip together a pretty convincing outfit in a matter of what seems like mere days, using one of his own old school uniforms as a base. Now, does this sequence also contain unfunny jokes about Shinju’s boobs and weird, leering shots of the same? Unfortunately, yes. Does it completely cancel out the actual good that Gojo is attempting to do? I wouldn’t say so, since he, at least in Watsonian terms, seems to have the decency to not be attracted to a middle schooler.
Clearing that so-low-it’s-underground bar aside, this sequence shows the two building a nice friendship. It’s worth remembering that Gojo doesn’t just do all this outfit-making work on a whim, he does it because he finds it meaningful. Shinju, similarly, doesn’t want to cosplay just for fun. She wants to do it because this character means a lot to her. As Marin said several episodes back, it is a way of expressing love. It requires a fine touch.
And, hey, there’s also some genuinely funny bits in here, like the pair being shocked at the affordability of certain kinds of chest binders.
When all is said and done, the show cuts back to its present–the day of the cosplay photoshoot alluded to last week–and Marin, Juju, and us, the audience, see Shinju’s complete cosplay for the first time. It is a genuinely remarkable transformation.
The two, being cosplay otaku first and foremost, naturally freak out.
And Marin bestows upon Shinju the greatest honor any gyaru can grant to anyone.
Now, arguably, the episode could be said to undercut its own message by showing that Shinju basically does pull off a perfect cosplay of this character. But I think the intended takeaway of “trying your hardest to capture the spirit of your character is the most important thing” shines through well enough. Despite any of my qualms with it, the main shade present in this episode is one of sweetness. I think My Dress-Up Darling shines best when it’s showing its characters the love and humanity they deserve, and that is definitely true here.
Egregious Horny Score: We’re at a firm 3/5 this week. The show’s definitely been more egregious than this, but the pervy camera is back in full force. It’s unfortunate, but I’ve run out of meaningful commentary on the subject (at least for now), and it didn’t kill my positive feelings toward this episode.
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 Directoryto 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Josh, from The Mugcord Discord Server. Thank you for your support.
“Hoi!”
-Yoyo, too many times to count.
Just off the cuff, there are a number of interesting things about 2013’s Majokko Shimai no Yoyo to Nene. It was directed by Takayuki Hirao. If that name sounds familiar, it may be because he also directed the last film I was commissioned to review. This was during his time at ufotable, a powerhouse of a studio both then and now. Also notably, Yoyo to Nene is an isekai, dating from the period when the genre was just in the process of resurging and conquering the anime landscape. But conversely, it’s miles away from the modern isekai zeitgeist, being more reminiscent of the fantasy fairy tales that birthed the genre in the first place. (Or much more distantly, 90s iterations like The Vision of Escaflowne.)
You could also argue that it’s a magical girl story (the term is, in fact, used here.) Though if so, it’s based on a much older version of the “mahou shoujo” idea than what we usually see today, which tends to directly stem from the “magical warrior” archetype that was also seeing a resurgence around this time. All this, contrasted with its distinctly modern look and feel, makes Yoyo to Nene seem like a film unstuck in time. A fact that, along with its general defiance of easy genre labels, may contribute to its relative obscurity in the Anglosphere. But if so, it’s a shame, because while the film falls short of being truly essential, it is quite good, and it’s definitely worth watching.
But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Before delving into goods and bads it’s helpful to know what the film actually is. The very short version of the plot is thus; after a routine day on the job of battling giant monsters, our titular protagonist Yoyo (Sumire Morohoshi, who has kept busy in the years since. In 2020 she was Michiru in Brand New Animal.) and her sister Nene (Ai Kakuma, also still in the industry. She’s even worked with Hirao again since, playing Mystia in Pompo: The Cinéphile.) are called upon to investigate the sudden emergence of a curious structure in the magical forest where they make their home. (To our eyes, it’s quite obviously a modern high-rise apartment building.) Inside, Yoyo becomes stuck in an elevator, which as it turns out, is secretly a portal to other worlds. As such, she’s promptly spirited away to another universe. Namely, our own. Also tagging along is her adorable….cat? Bihaku (Shouko Nakagawa, an idol and second-generation celebrity who seems to occasionally do roles like this. She’d later play Diana in Sailor Moon Crystal.)
In this apartment building, she meets Takahiro (Miyuki Sawashiro, who we’ve met in this column before. You may know her as the modern Fujiko Mine.), his largely unimportant-to-the-plot brother Takeo (Takahiro Sakurai, who this very season is playing Despa in Ousama Ranking and the protagonist, Burton, in Ninjala. And that’s just shows I’ve personally seen!), and their young cousin, the downright adorable–and much more plot-relevant, she gets a nice turn near the finale–Aki (Rio Sasaki, whose brief seiyuu career started here and never got much farther. As of last year, she’s only ever played two other named roles, with Emery Almond in Fafner Exodus being the more prominent of them.) She learns that Takahiro and Takeo’s parents are under the effects of a curse that’s turned them into grotesque slime monsters. Yoyo, as a proud curse-breaker and general magic problem-solver, is determined to uncover what’s hexed the Tak Twins’ parents, and in the process, free them from perpetual oozedom.
We eventually learn it’s because of a magic gacha game that grants wishes, of all things, but the real meat of Yoyo to Nene comes mostly from Yoyo herself. She’s an enrapturing little ball of pixie dust who brightens up the screen every second she’s on it. Making her the focal point of the film was a very wise choice indeed. (I’m not sure if she’s equally important in the manga that Yoyo to Nene is loosely based on, it’s never been available in English in any capacity.) Yoyo’s magic translates directly to movie magic; she’s the source, directly or indirectly, of many of the film’s visual highlights, and has a cute habit of capping her spells with a small exclamation of “Hoi!”
Much of the film’s emotional thrust comes from her interactions with other characters. She and Takahiro eventually develop a close bond (which the movie is smart enough to never explicitly frame as romantic) but getting there is another story entirely. She’s initially quite dismissive of him, and it’s only through the power of Anime Bonding Moments such as learning how to make instant yakisoba with no magic allowed that they come to understand each other.
She gets along more readily with Aki, who she charms with the film’s sole musical number about a third of the way through its runtime.
But in addition to these bonds, Yoyo has a more flawed and slightly darker side, which intuitively fits with her “witch” characterization and makes her more compelling than if she were wholly innocent.
Later in the film, the curse begins affecting more than just individual people, and assaults whole buildings and even whole parts of cities. When it bears down on a festival the three are attending, Yoyo is shown to be a bit callous toward the idea of Aki possibly being injured. There is an idea here that Yoyo–and perhaps residents of her native Magic Kingdom in general–do not truly understand the value of life and death. When Takahiro gets angry with her for not protecting Aki–noting that she got hurt, and far worse could’ve happened–Yoyo doesn’t really seem to get why he’s mad, suggesting that as long as the body’s intact, even raising her from the dead wouldn’t be a big deal. Indeed, earlier on, we’re shown a scene where exactly that happens to minor character Nils back in the Magic Kingdom, establishing this as being as much a societal flaw as a personal one.
Yoyo changes her tune when Bihaku is injured later that same night, and in easily the scene’s darkest film it seems like he might pass away entirely. Thankfully he eventually turns out to be fine, but the shock is enough to impart the lesson to Yoyo.
There is a question that’s natural to raise here, though. What, exactly, is Yoyo to Nene trying to say with scenes like this? There are a few in the film, although that’s the most prominent. The whole magic gacha game plot raises similar questions. Its resolution is fairly convoluted and involves both Aki’s father, the game’s lead developer, and her departed mother, who turns out to also have been an isekai’d transplant from the Magic Kingdom. On this level, Yoyo to Nene does break down; it seems to reach for a universal applicability, but doesn’t properly grasp it, leaving it feeling thematically confused.
There’s a sliver of light commentary in near the film’s very end, about how Aki’s mother wanted to use her magic for the good of the world, but people are selfish, so it’s become corrupt. There’s enough of a coherent thought there that when Yoyo finishes out the movie by absorbing magic from people making selfless wishes, it makes some internal logical sense, but all in all, the film, especially in the latter half, only just stays on the right side of “coherent.” Most of this is fairly broad “power of human connection” stuff, a thing many other anime have done better and more compellingly. But of course, many others have done it far worse as well. (You could also read some environmentalist messaging in here somewhere, perhaps, but you’d really have to squint.)
So, thematically it’s a bit broad and wishy-washy. And the film convolves and convolutes its own rules often enough to only just barely make sense. This is enough to raise the question of if it’s even a “good movie” at all, but I’d argue it still very much is. For whatever else it may misfire on, Yoyo to Nene succeeds on an emotional gut-check level, arguably the most important facet for any anime to nail, especially one that’s not even two hours long. It is, of course, also quite the spectacle, which certainly helps. It’s possible that if the movie looked and sounded worse, I’d be less forgiving, but–and I rarely mention this in positive reviews, though it’s true here as well–you review the art you have in front of you, not one that you can imagine existing.
On its own terms, Yoyo to Nene is an entirely worthy film. Most involved have gone on to do more notable things, but I do think the movie’s comparative obscurity in the West is a shame. By the end, in spite of any issues, I found myself happily grinning. More than any of its actual stabs at a theme, the film’s real strength is the sheer warmth it radiates. And in that sense, I think its closest cousins may less be any other isekai, and more work that centers on that same feeling of simple joy. Little Witch Academia and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! spring to mind as somewhat more recent examples.
At the end of the day, the “sell” on Yoyo to Nene is very simple. If magic makes people smile, well, that’s all that really matters, isn’t it? Yoyo to Nene brings smiles by the dozen, what else can you ask for?
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
There is a tendency in the action shonen genre, which I will charitably call “unfortunate,” where a female character who’s been previously shown to be a competent, strong combatant will be reduced to a damsel in distress role when the story’s stakes need to be raised. “Fiendish Trap”, the eighth episode of Sabikui Bisco, spends most of its opening few minutes showing Pawoo–a woman that other characters in-show have previously compared to an oni in terms of raw strength, and who was shown to be a more or less even match for our redheaded lead back in episode two–being tortured by Governor Kurokawa, the series’ Big Bad Evil Villain with No Morals. He has her chained up to a wall in some dank, gross-looking cell, and prods her in the gut with a hot iron. The show mercifully cuts back to Milo’s own reactions to all of this (this is apparently what we weren’t directly shown in the TV broadcast last week) before showing us much else, but the audio isn’t really any better.
This is all, suffice it to say, pretty stupid and gross. But if it were just stupid and gross, we could chalk it up as a flaw the series has. A pretty major one, to be certain, but a flaw nonetheless. Unfortunately, what the rest of the episode makes clear is that this is not something that Sabikui Bisco is pulling out in an attempt to shock viewers. It’s doing this because it has no better ideas, which may or may not be “worse,” but certainly bodes very badly for the remainder of the show.
The episode’s actual events are garden variety shonen hostage situation nonsense and are frankly not worth recapping in detail. Milo crashes Kurokawa’s HQ to rescue Pawoo and Jabi. There is a tense standoff; bows, arrows, and muscle-controlling mushrooms(!) are involved. None of it is terribly interesting despite the competent direction. When it looks like Milo’s going to bite it, surprise, Bisco bursts in to rescue him. And when Kurokawa eventually puts Bisco on the ropes, Jabi, who gets the episode’s best scene as we’re shown him breaking out of prison, bursts in to rescue him.
The net result of all this is that Kurokawa manages to get the secret to making the Rust-Eater work out of Milo, revealing that he used to be a Mushroom Keeper himself (how shocking), and that his motivation is to monopolize the production of the Rust-Eater drug so he can leverage it to squeeze ever more profit out of the sick, Rust-infested masses.
There is a tiny grain of actual real-world commentary in there, but when your villain takes eight episodes to explain something that Bun B once nailed in a single couplet1, it is maybe time to reconsider what you’re writing and why. (To say nothing of if we’re meant to take this in a “pharmacies are complicit in the opioid crisis” sort of way or a “Covid vaccines have microchips in them” sort of way. It’s vague enough that you can easily read it however you want.) If we had known this from the start of the series, it would’ve been an additional shade of detail that made Kurokawa all the more despicable. It being treated as some huge twist–a politician? Valuing profit over the lives of his constituents? Perish the thought–is just insulting. Even the shonen genre’s target audience of teenage boys are more than smart enough to deserve better than this.
At the very least, it’d be more forgivable if the rest of the writing here were more interesting. Little about “Fiendish Trap” is even remotely compelling, a fundamental problem that dwarfs all the other sins here.
So, what does work in this episode? Well, there are some fun pop culture references. Kurokawa opens the episode by playing a Yu-Gi-Oh! pastiche with one of his henchmen, an amusing nod to voice actor Kenjirou Tsuda‘s most famous role, Seto Kaiba.
When Bisco busts in to rescue Milo from his own recklessness, Kadokawa cracks that he’s basically Tuxedo Mask, which, what, would make Milo Sailor Moon? That’s a fun thought.
There’s also a hilariously awesome sequence where Bisco catches a crossbow bolt in his teeth and flings it back at Kurokawa at full speed somehow.
The chain of rescues that comprise most of the episode’s actual events is also pretty funny when you think about it. With Milo initially setting out to rescue Pawoo, only to be rescued by Bisco, only for the both of them to be eventually rescued by an escaped Jabi, who also himself ends up freeing Pawoo. Pawoo, of course, does not get to save anyone. That would be letting a woman do something, and we obviously can’t have that.
The episode closes with Milo apparently dying in the snow–yes, really–as he and Bisco try to flee from Kurokawa’s facility. His last words to Bisco are a plea to stay alive.
I will give Sabikui Bisco some credit here. Usually, this sort of maudlin attempt at tear-jerking involves a straight couple, and the very fact that the title of the next episode is “I Love You” makes me comfortable calling Bisco and Milo one too. On the other hand, the more interesting of our two leads is dead with four episodes left to go. And if we do consider Bisco and Milo partners in more than just an “adventuring buddies” sense, this whole thing is a pretty rote and lame example of the whole “Bury Your Gays” routine.
Look, it’s not impossible that the show will come back from this somehow, but more than anything else the most damning thing I can say about “Fiendish Trap” is that despite everything that happens in it, it’s mostly pretty boring. I mention minutiae like pop culture references because the show’s actual story is just not holding my interest anymore, and I doubt I’m the only one. It feels like digging for scraps.
1: “They don’t care about the cure, they just wanna sell a treatment // Keep you alive by keepin’ you high, now that’s some street shit.” – Bun B – “U A Bitch”, Return of The Trill. Did I reference this mostly just because I like UGK? Don’t worry about it.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.
Believe it or not, anime fans, I’m not dead! After a rather rough week and a half I managed to recover enough this week to watch a bit more than just the bare absolute minimum of anime. I’m not quite 100% yet, to be totally honest, but hopefully you’ll enjoy my small writeup below. I won’t pretend it’s terribly likely that next week will be much beefier, given that Elden Ring just came out, but I’ll try to not make it totally barebones. 😛
Maybe I’ll end up bringing back Magic Planet Arcade, while I’m making lofty promises. Ah, that’s a joke. I suck at reviewing video games.
Seasonal Anime
Princess Connect Re:Dive Season 2
What is Princess Connect? On the surface, that’s a simple question with a number of simple answers. It’s a fantasy anime series. It’s a tie-in to the mobile game of the same name. It’s a hell of an animation showcase. Priconne is all of these things, that much is true, but one layer beneath all of that, it’s also a story about memories. Making precious ones, yes, but also about things that are forgotten, and that those who’ve forgotten them may be better off not remembering.
Even though its lead has amnesia, it took me a long time to pick up on this particular thematic thread of the series. It’s an embarrassing admission, but I’m not in the business of lying in these writeups. For anyone who’s like me and is similarly having parts of the show go over their head, this past week’s episode about a memory-altering spirit plaguing the cast should help. I won’t give you the play-by-play–the episode is great enough that if you haven’t caught up yet, you absolutely should–but it does certainly push this particular part of Princess Connect to the front and center. The spirit’s brief effects on Yuki, where he appears to remember some part of his past life, are the main plot development here.
But even outside of all that, it’s just another really great episode. Doubly welcome in the wake of the previous week’s still solid but rather puzzling story about a blind swordsman that only just barely involved our core cast at all. The fluid and expressive animation everyone’s come to expect from Princess Connect is all here, and there are some great character moments. My personal favorite being here, with Karyl and Pecorine’s romantically shaded journey to a spring.
Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 8 – “Backlighting is the Best”: On the other end of the scale entirely, we have easily the best My Dress-Up Darling episode so far. As a sidebar; how successful do you think this show would have to be for someone to make a real Flower Princess Blaze anime? I kind of want that. I kind of need that badly. Honestly, now feels like the perfect time. When Magia Record‘s third season and Tokyo Mew Mew New premiere later this year, we’ll have the second time in two years that three magical girl anime are airing at the same time. Obviously FPB couldn’t join that particular class, but in a few years, who knows? I’m just saying, anything can happen.
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 Directoryto 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
There is a plethora of reasons I can imagine someone wanting to drop, or simply never pick up in the first place, My Dress-Up Darling. It’s a romcom, and those are not for everyone to begin with. It’s a straight romcom, so the rabidly queer segment of my readerbase (hi friends) may be inclined to dismiss it out of hand. More specifically, the show’s tonal coherence has been a victim of poorly-worked fanservice–enough so that I’ve made a running gag out of it in these columns–and occasional tasteless humor. Any and all of this, take your pick, I absolutely get why MDUD does not have universal appeal.
But in spite of everything I’ve said about it over the pastfewweeks, I continue to watch it. Partly out of obligation, yes, but also partly because I do genuinely believe it has some good ideas. When the show gets out of its own way enough for everything to truly click into place, it can pull off some spectacular stuff. Episode 8 is that spectacular stuff. It is the best-yet episode of the series by a country mile, and while it doesn’t wave away my previous criticisms of the series (it may make them all the more frustrating, really), it does point toward a path forward for this show. Romcom Hell is escapable, and My Dress-Up Darling might just find an exit yet.
Up to this point, the show’s highlights have revolved around our leads, Gojo and Marin, and they get a good turn here, too. But a good chunk of this week’s episode, “Backlighting is the Best”, is instead about Juju, a character I’d previously basically written off as a one-note joke.
Let it never be said that I am right about everything I assume about a series.
Allow me to go on a tangent for a moment, it’s the proud tradition of the editor-less internet critic.
When I was very young, there were a few shows on Cartoon Network’s nascent Toonami block I really loved. Most of them were standard fare for a young boy growing up in that period of time, and as a small AMAB child, I believed I was a young boy. So naturally, most of the cartoons I gravitated toward were “for boys.” In as much as any cartoon truly is for only one gender.
There was one exception. You’ve probably heard of it, if I had to guess.
Sailor Moon was far and away Toonami’s most successful “girl show.” They only tried their hands at a few others (one was Hamtaro, which I was also fond of), and this aspect of the block has largely been scrubbed from the current incarnation’s image. (Retroactively, its inclusion has been recontextualized as fitting the block’s “action cartoons” mission statement. Which, to be fair, it certainly did.) I haven’t seen much Sailor Moon properly–I was quite young during all this, and my memories of the show are largely a hazy jumble of disconnected images–but something about seeing this pretty soldier stomp monster ass every week while also finding the time to deal with normal teenage girl issues struck a chord with me. I liked a lot of anime characters at the time. But I never wanted to be most of them. I did want to be one of the Sailor Scouts. That’s an important distinction.
So, what do 20-year-old Gender Feelings have to do with a random mid-season episode of a romcom anime about cosplay? Well, I can’t claim the feelings are exactly the same, but Juju certainly seems to be able to relate. About halfway through the episode, Juju–nervous because they’re doing a photo shoot in an abandoned building(!)–confides in Gojo why it is that she got into cosplay in the first place. He wants to know why Juju wanted him to make her outfit, instead of any of the number of other people she could’ve contacted, and this dovetails into Juju explaining why she cares about the craft in general. I’ll just say, I found the sentiment familiar.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Juju doesn’t specifically say she had an at least somewhat unhappy home life, but the very fact that she felt compelled to seek refuge in these stories does sort of imply it. She also distills the appeal of the entire magical warrior-style mahou shoujo down to a couple sentences. It’s clear that she (and by extension, the author) have a sincere and deep love for the genre. But of course, things aren’t as simple in real life as in fiction.
Magical girls (tragically) do not exist, and Juju’s realization of that fact at a young age is what drove her to become a cosplayer in the first place. Not “the next best thing,” but the sort of sublime momentary transcendence of our everyday reality that all great art–of which cosplay, and indeed fashion in general, is certainly a part–is capable of inspiring.
Even Juju’s previous nasty attitude toward Marin is explained here. She was jealous. A jealousy that can only come from caring about something very deeply. She saw an absolutely perfect outfit and had to get in on whoever was making it. It makes total sense.
Gojo is of course deeply touched by this. Why wouldn’t he be? Someone basically just poured her heart out for him to compliment his design skills. He’s so grateful that he unthinkingly seizes her hand while muttering a thank you.
Well, a “fank you.”
My Dress-Up Darling then almost immediately resumes being My Dress-Up Darling. (Read: Juju, who goes to an all-girls school, faints from surprise, because she’s never held a guy’s hand before. Sure.) The moment is over as quickly as it began, though the somewhat doofy gag is not nearly enough to actually undercut it. The rest of the episode is actually also pretty excellent, but completely unrelated to any of this.
Instead, the rest of the photoshoot left implied, we cut to the last day of exams in Gojo and Marin’s classroom. On the spur of the moment, Marin invites Gojo to the beach, and it’s there that we spend “Backlighting is the Best”‘s final ten or so minutes.
The impromptu beach date here is just adorable. It’s naturalistic in a sincere, warm way that the show’s best moments have previously touched on but only delivered intermittently. I’ve never had trouble “buying” Marin and Gojo as a couple; they’re clearly into each other in a way that most stock romcom leads could only dream of, but if anyone has, this sequence should put all of that to rest. Gojo stoically takes in the beauty of the seaside. And the visuals do a lot to sell that nautical beauty; this entire segment has a wonderful in-direct-sunlight look. A sort of deliberate overexposure applied to the drawings themselves.
Marin, emboldened by their comparative isolation at the relatively deserted beach, asks Gojo if he’d like to spend the summer together after learning that he didn’t get out much as a kid. Gojo enthusiastically agrees, and in what is easily her cutest moment in the show so far, Marin has to quickly scuttle back to their beach blanket to hide her blushing. (She’s also developed a pretty fantastic character tic of cupping her face in a W-shape when embarrassed. It’s immensely endearing.)
There’s also a pretty incredible sequence where Marin buys a hamburger and has it stolen by a bird, proving that My Dress-Up Darling can, in fact, be genuinely really funny when it wants to be.
I would honestly not be surprised if this ends up being the show’s overall best episode. Its two halves are great in totally different ways, the directing is on-point throughout (there is a lot of creative storyboarding here, and in a general sense the episode is visually fantastic), and most importantly, it has heart. There’s actually enough good here that I didn’t even find proper space to mention some of it, such as Marin’s truly powerful Girl Dad Fashion, or the episode’s entire first third, which is mostly enjoyably nerdy talk about cameras.
This is the sort of episode that sticks with you, and I sincerely hope it points toward the direction the series intends to take as it enters its final stretch. But even if MDUD never returns to these heights again, watching the whole thing will have been made worth it by these twenty-three minutes alone. That’s worth something, and everyone who worked on this episode should be very proud.
Until next time, anime fans.
Egregious Horny Score: I’m pleased to report that we’re at a tasteful 1/5 this week. There’s a panty shot (which Gojo gets comically flustered by) as Marin frolics in the water, but aside from that single instance there isn’t anything in the episode that’s so much as mildly suggestive.
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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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
“The Stolen Rust Eater”, Sabikui Bisco‘s seventh episode, is predicated on a fakeout.
At the end of last week’s episode, we were teased a confrontation between Pawoo and Bisco. We were also assured that the giant flying snake creature that Bisco and Milo had been pursuing was the thing they were hunting; the source of the Rust-Eater mushroom and the entire impetus for the quest they’ve been on for the first half of the series. In the opening five or so minutes of “The Stolen Rust Eater,” almost all of this is thrown out the window. Pawoo and Bisco fight only very briefly before uneasily teaming up to rescue Milo from the snake creature. When they take it down, they find that the mushrooms it’s infected with are nothing more than a matsutake. Tasty, maybe, but not at all what they’re looking for.
…Or is it?
You see, it turns out that one needs a mushroom keeper’s blood to “activate” a Rust-Eater mushroom. The Pipe Snake was infected with the right mushrooms. All Milo needs to do to make a cure is carefully harvest some of them and extract some of Bisco’s blood to feed them with. Simple, right? Well, our favorite sinister fedora-wearing governor drops in on a blimp to steal the Pipe Snake’s corpse and shoot Bisco in the stomach with a “rust bullet.” So no, not really.
Things twist and they turn. By episode’s end, Pawoo and Jabi are both hostage to Governor Kurokawa, who informs Milo of this fact via TV broadcast (really). Milo and Bisco have a big scuff-up about which of the two should go it alone to rescue them (obviously they can’t both go. That would just be silly.) While this does adequately convey how much they’ve come to care for each other, it is all rather sudden.
If you’re counting; there are three major twists in this episode’s 23 minutes. Add to that its honestly pretty laughable attempt to pivot Bisco and Pawoo’s adversarial relationship into the latter romantically teasing the former and, well, much as I have enjoyed the series so far, the cracks are starting to show. Some of this is a limitation of format; if you want to adapt X number of manga chapters into Y number of anime episodes, you’re going to have to make some things feel more clipped than others. But it does make me wonder if we really needed a whole episode of Milo learning how to ride Bisco’s giant crab companion, even as fun as that episode was. Everything here feels a bit perfunctory. Even Pawoo and Milo’s big reunion.
Speaking of Pawoo, this episode also pretty handily demonstrates the show’s problems with handling her. Much as I love the character, I wouldn’t actually argue she’s terribly well-written. “Stoic badass” is a pretty simple character archetype. “Doting older sister” is another. “Repeat damsel in distress” is yet a third, and by piling all three on top of each other she is consistently the character that Sabikui Bisco writes the worst. She doesn’t really get to do anything here, and her actions within the episode all feel oddly disconnected from one another. It’s unfortunate. We haven’t even really gotten to properly see her kick ass in a while.
These are all unenviable weaknesses. Sabikui Bisco is consistently at its best the lower the stakes are, but being an adventure anime, we’re now hitting the point of the season where its stakes are getting higher and higher by necessity. I would like to say that I have faith that the show will eventually hit its stride again, but it really just feels too fuzzy to call at the moment. I feel bad saying that, given that I praised the show for its consistency just last week. But things change, and I recap the anime I’m watching in the present, not the anime as it was a week ago. I didn’t dislike the episode, but it feels bizarrely inconsequential for the major role it plays in the story. Looking back, that final line from last week’s column feels like tempting fate.
There is, of course, only one way to really find out for certain if this marks an actual downturn in quality or just a rough patch of road. And to that end, I’ll see you next week, anime fans.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Hello, anime fans. I’ve had a bit of a week, as I’m sure you noticed if you’re one of my readers who happens to also follow me on Twitter. If not, no need to worry, as everything turned out just fine. But in recognition of my own good fortune, I endeavored to go into this week’s episode of My Dress-Up Darling as charitable as I could possibly muster. I do feel like I perhaps complained a little too much last week, even if I do stand by what I said.
So, maybe it’s just that spirit of charity that compels me to say that this is one of Dress-Up Darling‘s better episodes. But I think even if I’d had a more ‘normal’ week I think I’d be giving this one due praise. You see, I think I’ve basically got MDUD here figured out. There are episodes more about the geeky cosplay minutiae that distinguishes the show from any other ecchi comedy, and there are those that focus more on that very ecchi comedy. Bluntly, these are the good episodes and the mediocre to outright bad episodes, respectively. This week’s is mostly a good one, may it not be the last.
If I wanted to be rude, I could argue that I’m not even really reviewing or recapping an episode of Dress-Up Darling here. Even moreso than last week’s, a good chunk of this episode is dominated by footage of show-within-a-show Flower Princess Blaze. This is a double-edged sword of course; the very fact that we’re seeing so much of Flower Princess makes it pretty easy to call that it’d be a vastly more interesting series than Dress-Up Darling itself.
I’m just saying, it’s even got a lead magical girl whose theme color is pink. It’s hard to argue with that.
But of course, the series presents the framing device that lets us see any of that in the first place. The very short version is that Gojo commits to making outfits for both Marin and Juju of characters from the series. He decides that to properly get as many references as possible, he should actually watch the series, which a quick peek at an in-universe Wikipedia article(!) helpfully tells us a bit more about.
This is all narrative pretext to have Gojo head over to Marin’s apartment. The initial plan is for Gojo to borrow her box set of the show (of course she has a box set), but things quickly change once he actually gets there, and Marin ends up convincing him to watch much of the show at her place. Once again, we get some actual access to Marin’s perspective here, and it is a nice change of pace from the focus on Gojo’s point of view the anime has had until recently.
Marin, of course, is Dress-Up Darling‘s best character, and it’s genuinely a lot of fun to see her try to “subtly” win Gojo over by cooking for him and watching Flower Princess by his side.
You could conversely pretty easily frame this badly; it does not exactly require a degree in feminist literary analysis to point out that much of this episode consists of a male lead being handed cartoons and food on a silver platter, and it’s pretty inarguable that Marin and her pristinely kept but very nerdy bedroom are embodying a kind of otaku domesticity here. (I am sure many, many snarky people on Twitter have made “this will not improve the declining birthrate” memes about this episode.)
As Gojo discovers the merits of the entire magical warrior subgenre, of course.
Still, I have no conceptual problems with this kind of escapist fantasy, and if the show operated at about this level all the time, I’d probably like it a lot more. Flower Princess Blaze remains compelling, too. Although again, basically any time it was on-screen I couldn’t help but think that I’d rather be watching it.
This is another episode with a lot of cosplay talk. So, if you’re like me, and you find learning about the ins and outs of other peoples’ hobbies always at least mildly interesting, you’ll be satisfied here. There’s a fairly long digression in the episode’s second half about eye taping, a practice I’d not previously heard of, and which sounds vaguely unhinged to me. But hey, that’s subcultures for you.
The episode ends with Gojo and Marin meeting up with Juju and her younger sister, Shinju, who does her photography. (Hina Youmiya, whose career seems to just be getting started. She was in Selection Project last year.) Here, My Dress-Up Darling pivots from a genuinely funny joke–about the fact that Shinju is noticeably taller than her older sister–into a deeply tasteless one. And that is how what is otherwise one of My Dress-Up Darling‘s better episodes ends on a noxious crack about a middle schooler’s boobs being “hilariously” big, something that causes actual stress to no small number of young girls who are actually in middle school.
I could feign being angrier about this than I am, but at this point I have come to expect as much from Dress-Up Darling. It has its charms, and it definitely has its flaws. A general lack of taste is very much one of the latter. (And to give it more credit than it probably deserves, the original manga was written by a woman. Maybe this is meant to be Relatable rather than just meanspirited and gross, who knows.)
There are a few other things about the episode worth discussing. The translators continue to ride a fine line between clever and just slightly obnoxious. The use of the term “wuv” both in the episode title and in at least one line of dialogue might push it a bit over the edge, but I found Marin’s giggly, wordless “I have a crush” noises being subtitled as keysmashes legitimately hysterical. I suspect opinions will differ.
Yet more evidence for my “Marin is bi” theory.
And finally, after an absence that felt like a century, we can mark the return of the Bonus Nowa Screencap. She appears briefly toward the very end of this episode.
As for the Egregious Horny Score, which I feel an obligation to continue doing for some reason, I’ll slap this one with a solid 3/5. There isn’t actually much horny here, but what we do get feels more out of place than ever. The gag about Shinju’s chest being the most obnoxious example of the lot. Some of the posters in Marin’s room are contributing to that score as well.
And that’s about the size of it, anime fans. I hope you’re continuing to enjoy My Dress-Up Darling. If not, I hope you’re at least enjoying these columns. There won’t be a Frontline Report tomorrow, since I’ve been sick, but I’ll see you all again on Monday for Sabikui Bisco.
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 Directoryto 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
It’s such an understated strength that pointing it out can feel like a backhanded compliment, but I really do think that one of the sneakily great things about Sabikui Bisco is that it’s consistent. You know, roughly, what you’re getting each week. 22 minutes of adventure through spore-infested, Rust-stricken, post-apocalyptic Japan as our leads, Bisco and Milo, seek the legendary Rust-eater mushroom to cure Bisco’s mentor Jabi and Milo’s sister Pawoo. It’s simple stuff, but it’s effective, and if the stars aligned, it’s easy to imagine that Bisco could pull this off satisfyingly week after week for literal years on end.
But we do not live in the world where Bisco is a show with eight seasons at two cours apiece. It gets twelve episodes flat. No more, no less. And God only knows if it’ll ever get even one more season. So, for as much as that consistency is a strength, it means that even minor twists in the formula count a lot. This week, we get a quieter, more character-driven episode. It’s a notable swerve toward the more serious for an anime that, even in its comparatively darkest moments, has so far remained fairly light.
That character is Tirol (previously transliterated as Chiroru in this column. I’m not sure if I got that wrong or if the official subs actually changed.) Tirol, you’ll recall, is the traveling merchant / swindler / mercenary / also a mechanic as we learn in this episode that we met for the first time all the way back in episode one, but who we were more formally introduced to in episode four. Milo and Bisco, traveling through an Arctic-cold tundra, discover her once again on the brink of death. This time in a decidedly less gnarly fashion than when they found her infected with a deadly parasite two episodes back.
After being de-thawed, she banters with our heroes for quite a while. Conversation between Tirol and Milo (or Tirol and Bisco) forms the bulk of this episode. The result is, I’d say, more positive than not. Some of her more angsty explication of her own motives comes across as a pretty blatant example of just stating the subtext out loud–always a bad look–but at the same time, there’s marginally more subtle stuff weaved in here, too. For instance, she puts her charm to good use by talking a different merchant into giving Milo and Bisco way more supplies than they can reasonably afford, off of the logic that the merchant will be able to “swindle them again later.” It’s pretty funny.
If that grin doesn’t just scream “integrity,” what does?
On a more serious level, comments she makes toward the end of the episode reveal that she was once a mechanic at a workshop that was tasked with restoring some part of the mysterious Tetsujin. It infected her coworkers with Rust, and she only lived to tell the tale by fleeing upon being promoted to foreman-by-default. This story in of itself is a fairly straightforward critique of worker exploitation. A later conversation in the episode, this time between Milo and Bisco, hammers the exploitation theme, too. Combined with some examples we’ve seen over the first half of the show of Imihama’s colonial-esque influence ruining the lives of those both in and outside the city, it marks the first time that Bisco has shown some real teeth. This is all pretty simple stuff, and no one is going to mistake it for The Communist Manifesto, but it’s good to see a show trying to have a point and mostly succeeding, given that we are still currently trudging through a season that also contains Tokyo 24th Ward and the rotting corpse of Attack on Titan.
The episode’s main act closes with Bisco, Milo, and Tirol locating the underground subway line they’ve been hunting for since episode four. Tirol fixes up one of the automatic train cars and departs the other two, but not before a fairly heartfelt goodbye. She even tells them her real name, something she claims to be embarrassed to do because of how weird it is. (To be fair. “Tirol” does strike me as an odd name for a Japanese woman. But hey, I’m not Japanese, so what do I know? Also, it’s however many centuries in the future. Who knows.) All told, this a nice spotlight for a character I’ve honestly wanted to know more about. Praising this as a sound and logical development may not come across as terribly exciting, but it is those things, and that’s what I like about Sabikui Bisco. It’s comfort food.
Two people who do not end the episode comfortably are Bisco and Milo themselves. After the pair fight off something called an Oilsquid on their train ride, they reach their destination; a vast canyon inhabited by a gargantuan apex predator of the skies. The mighty Pipe Snake; the very thing they need to take down to get the Rust-eater mushroom.
They begin fighting it here, only to be expectedly-unexpectedly interrupted by the one major character who hadn’t shown up in this episode so far. Pawoo.
That particular cliffhanger is where Sabikui Bisco chooses to leave us, this week. A true tease for Pawoo Enjoyers like myself. Still, I think I’ve made it clear that I like this episode a good deal. And let me tell you; one of the nice things about Bisco being so consistent is that, unless something goes truly awry, I’m pretty damn sure I’m gonna like next week’s too.
Until then, anime fans.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rakhshi. Thank you for your support.
The common wisdom is such; if you want to really take the measure of a period of time, don’t look at media from it that everyone remembers. Things that persist over the years tend to be your classics, your cult classics, and your so-bad-its-good’s. If you really want to get in the head of someone living in a period of time, look at the stuff no one remembers. Occasionally something will pick up a reputation as an “overlooked gem” and worm its way into that second category, but that’s rare. Things that are forgotten tend to stay forgotten and are often indicative of things that were popular at the time but not so much nowadays. So, the theory goes, they’re representative of an unfiltered look at a period.
If all this holds true, shows like Dragonaut – The Resonance may represent the true spirit of the late ’00s. A GONZO production from the period where basically all they were making was stuff like this, Dragonaut comes to us from 2007, one of an absurd even by modern standards nineteen projects GONZO produced that year. It aired that Fall to middling interest alongside similarly forgotten-today fare like Ayakashi and Night Wizard. As such, Dragonaut stands out not for any particularly exceptional quality but because, like many weird one-off projects from this era, it has ostentatious character designs and an absurd premise.
It is the near future, and poor Pluto, already stripped of the dignity of being a planet, has been obliterated by a massive asteroid called Thanatos. Some years later, a SpaceX-style civilian space plane launch goes awry when an alien dragon from said asteroid unexpectedly collides with the plane, killing everyone aboard sans a single survivor, the pilot’s son and our protagonist, Jin. (Voiced by the legendary Daisuke Ono.) The government promptly covers the whole business up, and a full two years pass as Jin has to endure the public at large blaming his father for the accident. He only uncovers the truth of things when by sheer chance, he meets a beautiful girl with supernatural abilities named Toa (Minori Chihara, best known as Yuki in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya). Obviously, she is also an alien dragon.
To put it bluntly, this is an absurd start to an equally absurd anime. Dragonaut isn’t totally devoid of merits, but the sheer, overbearing goofiness of its very setting makes it a little hard to take seriously. It quickly comes to involve bonded pairs of artificial dragon-people who can change from human to dragon-alien-mech-things (“Communicators”) and back and their riders / pilots who compose the titular Dragonaut program in the service of an international organization called the ISDA. It’s pretty cool and extremely dumb in equal measure. Moreso because the dragons, in dragon form, are handled by GONZO’s CGI department, which means we get huge, chunky CG rigs that are not quite articulated and lit enough to look fully convincing but do look like they’d make sick toys. (Their color palettes are also not the best, sadly. Which can make some of them hard to distinguish mid-fight.)
The corny tone is not really a bad thing. One of my favorite anime from this period is Witchblade, which has a similar issue. If anything, Dragonaut could stand to have been cornier. If there’s a real flaw here, it’s that Dragonaut starts out fairly self-serious and never really lets up. One might say it’s “very anime,” but it’s not camp. This contrasts in an ugly way with its sillier aspects.
Such as, for example, its character designs. With only a few exceptions each; the men are either emotionally sensitive feminine boys with period-appropriate emo haircuts, unreasonably diesel Chad-Gods who shake the Earth with each footstep, or grizzled, uniformed commanders who scowl as they make Tough Decisions. The women are warmhearted maidens who bring joy wherever they go, goofy brats, or gene lottery winners with chests so big that they have their own gravitational pull. I’m not one to moralize about this kind of thing, so to me the excessive fanservice mostly comes across as unintentional hilarity. If someone were less inclined to that point of view, I could absolutely understand it making the entire series unwatchable just on its own. Especially in the case of recurring antagonist Garnet MacLaine (played here by Haruhi herself, Aya Hirano), whose outfit looks like three other, unrelated, gratuitous sexy outfits crashed into each other at a hundred miles per hour, and also has the misfortune of being one of just two named POC characters in the series.
The plot is a sprawling kudzu vine of romance, political and military intrigue, and science-fantasy hokum. You might note that this is also true of a lot of great anime from around that time, but Dragonaut‘s handling of much of this material is pretty leaden. Enough so that details like, say, Toa’s name being derived from a bracelet Jin gave to his late sister Ai (“From Jin to Ai”, you see.) come across as comedic rather than stirring.
On one level, all this means that you could freely regard Dragonaut as the shlock that it is. By 2007, the hunt for the next Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the wave of “world story” anime it spawned had largely petered out. Eva had spawned numerous imitators and responses, and even shows outside its genre entirely were affected. By the late 2000’s, that influence had turned into background noise. The gulf between Dragonaut and something like, say, Eureka Seven, one of the very best anime in this vein and from just two years prior, is vast. If we wanted to draw an admittedly imperfect analogy, we could turn toward the history of pop music. If Evangelion was Nevermind–another 90s touchstone–Dragonaut is Daughtry. Everything challenging and artistically interesting about the movement has been squeezed out, and what you are left with is the sad backwash of an artistic point in time that was already firmly in the rearview. It’s not at all unfair to say that Dragonaut is a series of very limited ambition, at least.
On the other hand, that very inconsequentiality makes any judgement of Dragonaut that leans this harsh feel, frankly, a bit silly. (In much the same way that it’s hard to get too mad about the strained bluster of “It’s Not Over.”) No, it’s not some grand, generation-defining artistic statement. I doubt anyone–including anyone who worked on it–thought it was. That doesn’t make it criticism-proof and I certainly have quite a few qualms with it, but we should remind ourselves that we’re talking about a goofy-ass anime about goofy-ass space dragons, here. Condemning it in that manner is perhaps a bridge too far.
Because all this said and meant, the show does have its strong suits. Some of the character relationships are pulled off surprisingly well. Mostly these are various Dragon / Rider pairs. Jin and Toa will not win any originality-in-writing awards, but they’re cute together, and when they’re apart you do genuinely feel their longing for each other. Turning their couple into a trio is Gio (Junichi Suwabe, probably best known as Archer from Fate/), who seems to get on quite well with both of them. My favorite pair, though, is that of rider Akira (Miyuki Sawashiro, voice of Fujiko Mine since 2015) and her dragon Machina (Yuuko Gotou, VA of Mikuru Asahina, making Dragonaut something of a Haruhi Suzumiya cast reunion), whose affection for each other is warm and uncomplicated throughout the first half of the series series, as Akira grows to question the role that the ISDA has forced her into. The two are also very gay for each other; Akira here had a dragon wife long before Miss Kobayashi. (Sadly, the two are the victim of a pretty nasty instance of the “bury your gays” cliche, and they’re killed off around halfway through the show. I will leave the question of their sort-of resurrection as ghosts attuned to Thanatos making that better or worse as an exercise to the reader.)
Rounding out the most interesting characters are the rich girl / butler pair of Sieglinde (Nana Mizuki, who probably needs no introduction, but who you might variously know as Cure Blossom, Fate Testarossa, or Symphogear‘s Tsubasa Kazanari) and Amaedeus (Eiji Maruyama, active as both an anime VA and toku actor from the early ’70s until his death in 2015. Most of his anime roles were kindly and/or badass old guy parts like this, and if Amadeus is any indication, he was damn good at them) who have a cute surrogate daughter / father relationship, and lastly Kazuki (Tetsuya Kakihara and Sawahiro again, depending on where you get your credits from. I’m unsure of what the story was there. Perhaps it was a split role), who fosters an incredibly toxic yandere-leaning jealous streak over both Jin and Gio, and his dragon Widow, (Saeko Chiba, who has a string of supporting roles under her belt, although most of them were behind her at this point. You may know her as Nina Einstein from Code Geass) with whom he bonds over their mutual feeling of being spurned, until his jealousy inevitably mutates into an abusive streak.
Seen here in mid-distance, because getting an image of all of these characters together was quite difficult for some reason.
Production-wise, Dragonaut avoids the pitfalls of some of its uglier GONZO brethren. While the airborne fights are janky because of the CGI’s general inflexibility, the on-foot fight choreography is pretty excellent throughout, accounting for almost all of the show’s visual highlights. On a less technical level it’s also competently directed (by Manabu Ono, who directed a bunch of things for GONZO and has since gone on to helm some later Sword Art Online material) and the color choices are solid. (Outside of the dragons themselves, that is.) There’s generally at least a few cool shots per episode, etc. These are modest strengths, but Dragonaut makes the most of them.
Story wise, things are dicier. The plot aims for profundity and complexity but only occasionally gets farther than simply being complicated. Some of the arcs the show sets up have decent payoffs and others very much do not. In its best moments, like the mid-series episodes 13 and 14, where the ISDA save the world from being blown up by a magic nuke (!), Jin, Gio, Akira, and Machina depart to rescue Toa, who is trapped on Mars (!!), only to be intercepted by a characteristically jealous Kazuki, who they must then fight and seemingly kill (!!!), it is at least quite entertaining. Plot threads roll into each other like tumbleweeds across the desert. Or, indeed, run-on sentences. Occasionally, it’ll make an emotional moment hit just so, and Dragonaut achieves its greatest feat; the ability to perform a half-decent imitation of shows like Eureka Seven, or Eva, or even RahXephon (which I haven’t seen, but a friend who I was watching the series with has). It’s hard to tell if Dragonaut wants to be counted among that number or if it’s content just cribbing notes from those shows. Either way, it’s very much an imitation, not the genuine article.
Things go back and forth like this up and down the whole length of the series. Sometimes these various subplots and diversions end in a way that’s satisfying or at least entertainingly silly, other times they’re straight-up bad. Coming down to an almost even split across the show’s 25-episode runtime, I’d say. The fairly strong character writing contrasted with the relatively weak plotting does make it sometimes feel like a gaggle of good characters searching for a good show to be in and never quite finding one. There is a solid theme wound through here about how different sorts of love mean more to different people, but it’s subsumed by world story tropes riffing on Eva‘s Instrumentality plot in the finale–tropes that had become cliches by this point–and the series ends with a whimper rather than a bang.
Watching it, I was acutely aware of how tired of the pseudogenre everyone must have been at this point. Dragonaut‘s final few episodes seem to default to the Eva mode less out of any real commitment to the themes it explores and more because it lacks any better or more original ideas. It is a decidedly fine ending. Not offensively bad. Not particularly great either.
But being fine was enough, at least, for Dragonaut to be decently popular while it was airing. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it seems to have done well enough financially, though not enough to warrant sequels or spinoffs aside from a manga adaption that apparently takes a somewhat different spin on things. It did get a bonus OVA included on its DVD box set, a supremely ridiculous thing where the cast have their characters switched around via a wacky science machine. It is mostly an excuse to parade screwball situations out and have the camera zoom in on the girls’ busts some more; every sense of the word “fanservice” rolled into one. Perhaps unavoidably, given the general thrust of the female character designs, it was a popular fanart magnet for a little while. The few English-language reviews it got predictably nailed the show somewhere in the C-grade range, a trend I am all too aware I’m contributing to here.
All of this constitutes a minor legacy for a decidedly minor show. It still is a legacy, and that is worth something, but there is a reason that people still talk about even other Eva-indebted mecha anime from this time–say, Gurren Lagann, which I’m not a personally huge fan of but which is inarguably a better and more striking an interpretation of some of these same influences–but not Dragonaut. It has largely been left in the dustbin of history. Pierce the heavens, this does not.
Rather than any of its contemporaries, Dragonaut‘s status as an Extremely 2007 Anime reminds me of another, much more recent show, with which it has almost nothing else in common, The Detective is Already Dead. Like that anime (and a few others I’ve covered here over the years), it was a fossil from the day it began airing. Ultimately, Dragonaut represents a small side branch of a larger artistic tradition. That branch has largely come and gone, but the larger Evangelion and Eureka Seven-indebted school it represents survives to this day. Even in terms of fairly specific setups, one of the very few times Dragonaut is brought up in modern anime discussions at all is to compare it with Darling in the FranXX, another extremely-of-its-moment child of Eureka with which it shares a broadly similar premise and some thematic points. There are worse fates for an anime to have, even if DarliFra itself is extremely polarizing.
Most people who worked on Dragonaut went on to bigger things. (“Better” is subjective.) So, while it is always tempting to view the story of any largely forgotten series as a sad one, that really isn’t the case here. While GONZO themselves are gone, as far as I can tell, most of the staff from this project have continued to work in the field. Those who don’t seem to have either later found success elsewhere or had already established a legacy by the time they worked on Dragonaut. I feel comfortable in saying that for almost every single person who worked on it, Dragonaut was a minor step along their paths. I could easily spin this into a condemnation, but I’d be condemning plenty of other shows too. It is the fate of the vast majority of anime that air every year, even now. Hard to hate, equally hard to love, Dragonaut simply is what it is.
Anime is an art form, but it’s also a craft and a field of the entertainment business. In entertainment, works arise to fulfill a desire from their audience. In 2007, people wanted hopelessly romantic stories where high-flying science-fantasy heroes saved the world with the power of love. Dragonaut, for whatever faults it has, is one of those, and it is if nothing else, a competently made one. It was not the most notable, most successful, and certainly not the best of that sort of story, but it gave the people what they wanted. Perhaps sometimes that is enough.
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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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
I honestly just never know what to make of My Dress-Up Darling. Last week’s episode was, to put it mildly, not a personal favorite. This week’s episode, “For Real?!”, isn’t either, but it starts off with one of the simplest and best story segments in the show so far.
For one thing, the first part of this episode is actually from Marin’s perspective, something we’ve largely been denied explicit access to up until now. We hear her internal monologue and see shots from her point of view. In one of those monologues, Marin reveals herself to have more emotional intelligence than the vast majority of anime romcom protagonists.
Indeed, this whole section is a pretty cute and emotionally striking piece of work. Marin rides the night train home alone, wondering if maybe she should’ve more seriously put the moves on Gojo while the two had some alone time. But it comes across as the sincere thoughts of a teenage girl, rather than something gratuitous or showy.
We get more of a sense than ever as to why Marin might like Gojo in the first place, and in the process, the season’s premiere malewife / cosplay gf couple become that much more believable.
Were that the whole episode, this would be a glowing review. Unfortunately, all of what I just described happens before the opening title and is not really what the episode focuses on.
The first thing of note that happens after the opening title is that Gojo accidentally walks in on a little girl taking a bath.
I’m not posting any of that actual scene, because ew, and because I don’t want to get my WordPress account suspended. So here she is having been caught in the rain. I like the composition of this shot.
Look, I will level with you. I feel like a fucking dweeb complaining about nudity in an anime. If I could show this article to my teenaged self, I’m sure she’d cringe out of her skin, but come the fuck on. We do not need a convoluted string of Anime Happenings to put a little girl in Gojo’s house off a case of mistaken identity on the part of his grandfather. We do not need the ancient-ass “accidentally walking in on someone bathing” trope. We certainly don’t need lovingly boarded, queasily fetishistic shots of her legs, the only barely-censored space between her legs, and prepubescent chest. God knows we don’t need the show’s shitty attempt at a joke by inserting a wildly inappropriate flashback to when Gojo and his grandfather talked about how “smooth” Hina dolls are. What does this add? Who is this for? Rejoinder: who is the fact that she turns out to actually be older than Gojo for? What am I watching here? Other than something that makes me feel like I’m going to be put on a list?
Dress-Up Darling continues to feel like two shows with wildly different tones and, frankly, levels of decency, that constantly interrupt each other. I’d say it brings down both sides of the series, but the anime’s ecchi half is so noxious to me at this point that I can’t properly gauge that. More to the point; I wish the ecchi anime would stop interrupting my romcom.
This character, for the record, is Sajuna “Juju” Inui. (Atsumi Tanezaki, who you may remember as the title role from last year’s Vivy – Flourite Eye’s Song.) Juju sorta sucks. She manipulates Gojo into making an outfit for her and is a judgmental little shit toward Marin when the latter shows up.
And what exactly is wrong with that, you snide little weirdo?
The real tragedy here is that the last third of the episode is pretty good! Juju wants to cosplay one of the leads, Shion, from in-universe magical girl anime Flower Princess Blaze, a broad homage to the last 30 years of the magical warrior subgenre. We see enough of the show-within-the-show that by the end of the scene I rather wished I was watching that instead. The scene is a full-on loving pastiche, it’s even letterboxed. It looks melodramatic, fun, and very, very extra as it briefly chronicles Shion’s totally-not-a-Madoka-soul gem becoming corrupted and her falling to the dark side. We get a full-on henshin sequence near the start of the scene! This stuff is great, and I really wish more of the episode were like this!
As always, Dress-Up Darling is the best version of itself when it’s about Geek Shit, so this part of the episode is pretty fun in general. Juju also mistakenly assumes that Marin and Gojo are dating, which floors Gojo and puts Marin in a tizzy.
The episode ends with Gojo promising to make Juju her outfit and with Marin chiming in that she’d like to cosplay one of the show’s villains, Neon. (Neon is also Shion’s older sister and apparently people in-universe ship them. Because Dress-Up Darling seriously cannot stop itself from being weird for more than five minutes at a time.)
I wish I could praise the episode with fewer caveats. I feel like a whiner whenever I complain about the fanservice in this series, but I feel entitled to mention it because it frankly really does ding my enjoyment of the show pretty hard. I certainly can’t recommend it to most of my friends who aren’t waist-deep in the anime rabbit hole, which is doubly a shame because romcoms are otherwise a pretty accessible genre. (I’ve had some success along these lines with Kaguya-sama: Love is War! That series isn’t perfect, but it has way fewer problems than this does.)
And not everything needs to be recommendable to necessarily be good. There are plenty of anime I like–from Kill la Kill to Bakemonogatari–that I would not casually recommend to someone without knowing beforehand their feelings on such things. The difference between those anime and Dress-Up Darling is that they are honest about what they are. Dress-Up Darling really feels like it’s trying to have it both ways, and it mostly just keeps tripping over its own feet. This wasn’t even always the case! The second episode was loaded with over-the-top cheesecake, but it fit within the context of what was going on, so it was easy for me to chalk it up to stupid but harmless fun that I was simply no longer in the target demographic for. Four episodes later, I am not sure I can do that anymore.
I will continue watching the anime, both because I am obligated to by it winning the community choice pick for this season and because I do believe there is no small amount of good in it, but I am not enthusiastic about it anymore because of how many things it gets wrong, and that sucks, because I really want to be. Maybe the show will improve in its second half as we move into an arc that’s again more focused on the actual cosplay side of things. But that increasingly feels like wishful thinking. I am not optimistic.
Until next week, I suppose.
Egregious Horny Score: This segment isn’t fun anymore/5.
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 Directoryto 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.
