Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
You wanted it, you got it. When I put out the word for my first-ever community survey to help me pick a series to cover this season, My Dress-Up Darling was easily the most popular choice, with 47% of the vote. (The next-highest show was a full 15 points lower.) Admittedly, I was a little surprised by this! Romance anime tend to be divisive just in concept alone. But being only passingly familiar with the Dress-Up Darling series prior to the anime’s premiere, I figured there must be a good reason behind the enthusiasm. And having seen the first episode, I still think that, but I want to take things a bit non-linearly and get into what this column will actually be for My Dress-Up Darling. I’m out of my wheelhouse in more than one sense for this one, so bear with me.
What I mean is; I think it’s very easy to construct an uncharitable narrative around works like this. I myself am pretty romcom-skeptical most of the time. The exceptions are outliers like Kaguya-sama: Love is War! that also dip their toes into other genres and are just generally more ambitious than the norm. I like Dress-Up Darling, at least so far, but “ambitious” is not a word I’d apply. To wit, throughout this first episode, we hear only one internal monologue, that of our nerdy male lead Wakana Gojo. (Played by Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS veteran Shouya Ishige.) He seems to regard not just women but other people in general as enigmas. And he gives off a vaguely self-pitying vibe. To be honest, for a decent chunk of the episode I found him a bit annoying, only changing my mind when he started nerding out toward the end.
Then there’s Marin Kitagawa, (Hina Suguta, in her first major role) our female lead and Gojo’s love interest. Marin, being both a gyaru and a pretty huge nerd, is treated as an exotic anomaly. This character archetype–the “surprisingly nice gyaru who happens to share some of the male lead’s interests”–is a standard trope of its own by this point. That’s without getting into the fact that the camera nakedly leers at her from time to time (in shots that mostly seem like they’re from Gojo’s perspective.) How, in the final part of the episode, Gojo is rewarded for meticulously pointing out how bad Marin is at sewing (a traditionally feminine craft.) Etc. etc. You get the picture.
I want to be careful in how I phrase this, because I do genuinely think that others’ work is just as valuable as mine, and I can imagine people–especially other critics–having sharply divergent opinions on this series. I want to respect those opinions.
To put it bluntly, we are not really going to be grappling at length with that side of Dress-Up Darling. I think these issues (to the extent that they are issues, I think some are more serious than others) permeate the medium, and some of them are endemic to popular art in general. I could hold Dress-Up Darling accountable for not addressing them, but I think that would be an unrealistic burden to place on what is at its core an extremely simple series. Given the choice to be negative and rake a series over the coals for its faults or to praise it for what it does well, I will generally choose the latter. (And frankly, I have written more than enough negative material on this blog recently. It’s unfair, but it’s hard for me to hold much against a series airing in a season that also contains Police in a Pod.)
None of this is to say I am excusing these issues entirely, and if I think Dress-Up Darling has committed some particularly notable offense I will mention it, but it is not what I’m going to be focusing on. Because I think at what it sets out to do, Dress-Up Darling is pretty good so far. To be totally honest, I would just rather talk about that.
So, you may ask, now that I’ve spent six paragraphs running in circles, what does it set out to do? Oh, you know, boy meets girl. Simple stuff.
Fundamental to understanding Dress-Up Darling is understanding that Gojo is a turbonerd, but not just any kind of turbonerd. If we were dealing with a garden variety otaku, Dress-Up Darling would be a lot less interesting. No, Gojo makes outfits for traditional Japanese dolls. His grandfather, who he lives with, makes Japanese dolls. It’s kind of their whole thing.
Having a rather niche hobby that he devotes quite a lot of his spare time to, Gojo does not have any friends. And often when an anime says something like that, it’s an exaggeration. But as far as I can tell, no, Gojo literally has no friends. There’s even a mean/funny moment as he’s walking to high school mid-episode where another guy runs up to him and playfully smacks him on the back. Naturally, it turns out that this is a rando who thought he was someone else. Ouch.
Teenagers, being in general, assholes*, notice Gojo’s lack of friends, and generally both are hesitant to talk to him and take advantage of his timidity to dump classroom chores and such on him. Gojo is sad about all this, because he feels he’s being ostracized for having a niche interest. This being a romance anime, you can probably guess what jolts him into self-improvement.
Here’s a hint; this is one of the most hilariously on-the-nose meet-cute sequences I’ve ever seen. Marin trips and falls while entering the classroom, and somehow rockets over to Gojo’s seat, entering his life like a near-literal bolt from the blue. It is, in every sense of the word, incredible.
If this happens to you, you may be entitled to financial compensation.
This is, even more remarkably, not actually the meeting that gets them talking. Between this and that, we do get some additional insight into Marin’s character, which has the benefit of making her not just a complete slate for geekboy projection. (Among other things, she turns down guys who make fun of her for being a nerd. That’s pretty smart! Although damn, it’s sad that she’s already had to learn to recognize negging despite being, like, what, fifteen? Sixteen?)
The real meeting comes later, when Gojo’s sewing machine at home breaks and he comes up with the brilliant idea to use the school’s apparently abandoned home ec. room’s as a substitute. Surprise! Marin has had this same idea.
The expressions in this show are pretty great.
Not to work on doll costumes in her case, but cosplay outfits. They get to talking, and Marin surprises Gojo by being interested in his dollmaking hobby. She, in turn, shows him the cosplay outfit she’s been working on. (In what is probably the most unapologetically horny scene in the entire episode, given that she changes clothes in front of him with only his word that he won’t peek. Marin, honey, I’m glad that you like the guy but be a little more cautious!) The aforementioned Gojo-criticizing-Marin’s-sewing scene happens, and Marin, of course, counters that hey, if Gojo’s so good at sewing, why doesn’t he make her cosplay outfits? (When you think about it, aren’t cosplay outfits just doll clothes but person-sized? No, they aren’t, but that’s the premise this entire anime is built upon, so just roll with it.)
I’m going over all of this pretty briskly, but Marin’s genuine enthusiasm for Gojo’s dollmaking is, really, quite endearing.
The sub track has Marin refer to the doll as a “little hottie,” which is one of my favorite pieces of translation work of the season so far.
It’s probably the single most important emotional beat for this episode to nail, and it does so admirably. And, yeah, even this early on the two are transparently pretty into each other. I’m not afraid to say it’s cute.
So that’s Dress-Up Darling. Or more accurately, its first episode, “Someone Who Lives in the Exact Opposite World as Me.” (A line from one of those vaguely annoying inner monologues I mentioned.) If I were grading this like a first impressions article, I’d probably give the show a B or so. It has some issues, but I like it overall. (I worry I’ve come across as perhaps rather sarcastic in this article. Some of that is on purpose, but I did genuinely enjoy this episode.)
This, of course, isn’t a first impressions article. Like I said, anime fans, you wanted it, and you got it. Dress-Up Darling will return to this column next week.
See you then.
Extremely important bonus screencap: Marin’s clique of friends goes unnamed here, but I wanted to give a shout out to this girl. I have no idea if she’ll ever be important to the plot of the series, but I love her two-tone black and red hair. That’s a look.
*If you are a teenager, and not an asshole, I apologize for the generalization, but I’m speaking from experience here.
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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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
I went into CUE! extremely skeptical.
The opening three or so minutes of the seriesare–quite literally–another show entirely. This is a cold open. Mid-genre pastiche, as an unnamed green haired heroine and her male companion flee a flying fortress aboard a speedboat. It’s a legitimately really cool throwback to a bygone era of science fantasy shoujo action anime that counted classics like The Vision of Escaflowne among its number. It’s an opening unlike anything the season has offered so far.
This isn’t what CUE! is actually about, though.
CUE!, you see, is an anime about anime. Its cast are voice actors, and that opening scene is a series our protagonist–Haruna Mutsuishi–is working on. In series like these, I am always immediately led to wonder about the actual women voicing these characters. Is it surreal to voice a protagonist whose ambitions are an exaggerated, cartoon take on your own? Maybe it’s oddly reassuring, knowing that people care about, at least, some version of your story? I can only speculate. Regardless, that is our actual starting line with CUE!
In the minutes immediately following that cold open, things don’t look terribly promising. No longer needing to be a convincing pastiche, the animation stiffens. More pertinently, as Haruna arrives to her new job at a voice acting agency (named AiRBLUE, which is vaguely obnoxious in a true to life way), we are introduced to a truly silly number of other girls. Fifteen actresses in all, with the agency’s actual staff bringing the character total up to 18. Each gets only a vanishingly small few seconds to introduce themselves. Most prove themselves to fit into various archetypes; there’s a chuuni who says she’s from Hell, a nervous girl, an overly brash girl who doesn’t quite seem to get what’s going on, etc. etc. You get the picture; we’ve been here before.
All of these are, frankly, pretty bad signs. Sometimes an anime can handle a cast this large even on a fairly tight time budget, but it’s rare. Most things are not The Idolmaster. Last season, the atrociously dull Pride of Orange couldn’t manage to properly characterize a comparatively modest six. What hope, then, does CUE! have, even at twice that show’s length?
Well, here’s the thing. Sometimes the only thing you actually need to make a series tick, at least for its first few episodes, is a single good trick up your sleeve. And CUE! has a great one.
Our characters’ time at AiRBLUE kicks off with an unexpected, on-the-spot script read. The script? Hamlet, specifically a conversation between Hamlet himself and Ophelia, rendered in the sub track back into period-accurate Elizabethan English. Having your characters read a Shakespeare play is an absurd idea. When last year’s Kageki Shoujo!! did it in its last few episodes, it was a flex, a demonstration that all these characters had become so known to the audience that they could each deliver convincingly distinct takes on a literary classic. (Romeo & Juliet, there.) CUE! deciding to do it in its first episode is an act of monumental hubris. But this is where the aforementioned trick up CUE!‘s sleeve comes into play; the series cheats a little bit.
When we get our first Hamlet/Ophelia pair–the spacey ex-child actress Mahoro Miyaji as Ophelia, and AiRBLUE’s talent coach as Hamlet–the reality of the recording room falls away. In its place, an expansive medieval castle.
CUE!’s opening fakeout was no fakeout at all. It is a recurring technique the show seems to plan to use going forward, literally transporting its characters into the stories they’re acting out as they do, cutting back and forth between those fantasy-worlds and the tense, actual line reads they’re doing in the real world, with other characters observing and commenting as transparent ghosts within the “play.” It is a blast to watch. It’s probably the quickest a series has ever won me over.
Mahoro and the talent coach’s take on Hamlet is fairly traditional. What really kicks the episode past “solid” and into “arguably brilliant” is what happens after. In an incredible bit of economic character-building, we see very brief excerpts from other Hamlet/Ophelia pairs. (One girl reads Hamlet like a snotty shonen protagonist, which is hilarious. Sadly, we don’t get visual aids for these shorter reads.)
And then there’s the pair that Haruna herself is involved in. alongside the ponytailed tomboy Maika Takatori. (The two seem to hit it off really well, to say the least.)
The easy thing to do here would be for Haruna and Maika to do essentially what Mahoro did, to transport herself mentally to a sprawling medieval castle and give a fairly traditional line read.
Haruna and Maika do not do that. Instead, we get this.
Another shoujo fantasy daydream. I’ll give you this, okay? Maybe I’m just easily impressed, but I love shit like this. In the moment that Haruna and Maika act out their scene, they are not themselves, they are an epaulette-adorned girl-prince and her heartbroken sorceress(?) princess. It’s gay as hell. It’s theatrical in a way that completely transcends its production. It’s amazing.
There isn’t actually much more to the episode after this scene, but does there need to be? This is a point made and taken; this is what CUE! is about. The act of performance itself transports us to whole other worlds, and truly inspiring performers can bring these worlds to life for their audiences. That is a hell of an opening statement for a gacha game adaption that, as far as I can tell, rather few people had any serious expectations for, to make. Almost impossibly, CUE! earns the right to make it, in this scene alone if nowhere else. Obviously, CUE! did not invent this particular trick, but it uses it damn well, and it makes for a knockout finish to its first episode.
Also: Shippers eat your heart out.
The episode ends with the promise that next week our girls are going to be auditioning for something called Bloom Ball, which looks an awful lot like a magical girl anime. I can’t wait.
Also: out of lack of anywhere else that mentioning this little tidbit fits, I will do so here. It’s interesting that the comparative inexperience of the characters is mirrored in at least some of the voice cast. As far as I can tell, this is the first major role Haruna’s VA– Yurina Uchiyama–has ever had.
In any case, keep an eye on this one.
Grade: A The Takeaway: I am hesitant to call anything a truly essential watch this early in the season. What I will say is that CUE!’s first episode is a genuinely impressive piece of showmanship that I think nothing so far has really matched. I would recommend almost anyone reading this at least check said episode out.
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 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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend I quite understand the “die-and-reincarnate” school of the isekai genre. I have liked a few of them in my time, but generally in spite of that central conceit, not because of it. In The Land of Leadale is fairly genre-typical. Somewhere in Japan a power outage at a hospital cuts the life support systems, and a patient passes away. She is reborn into the titular MMO as her elf avatar Cayna. It’s fairly standard stuff, although there are a handful of caveats here to separate us from the most basic spins on the genre.
For one, Cayna doesn’t simply get zooped into the game as she remembers it. 200 years have passed, and she can’t use her foreknowledge of the game to just cheat her way out of any bad situations, Otome Flag-style. (Not a knock, I quite like Otome Flag.) This also gives us a central mystery, which prevents Leadale from feeling like it’s aiming for a pure wish fulfillment vibe that it probably couldn’t pull off.
The visual work on this thing is, to be nice, a bit simple. But the series makes the intriguing decision to strive for a pseudo-retro look, especially in gag faces and chibi cut-asides. It’s a small thing, but it does help the anime stand out a bit, and turns the lo-fi production into a charm point instead of a detriment.
If you can’t practically hear the “ha ha ha ha!” radiating from this image, we are from different generations of anime fan, to say the least.
About that central mystery: because Cayna’s been MIA for so long, Leadale is both not as she left it and seemingly not in great shape in general. When she plonks down a stack of silver coins the innkeeper at the inn she’s staying at hurriedly tells her to not flash so much money. Later that night, she’s nearly robbed in her sleep, with only bit of magic that she presumably set up beforehand preventing such from coming to pass. We do gain some insight into what’s gone on in Leadale in the intervening 200 years, but it’s not much. This is all we get.
Cayna seems to adjust pretty quickly. Again, not rare for this genre, although the few cuts back to her pre-reincarnation life are bizarrely depressing for a show that’s otherwise fairly cozy and upbeat. There’s also a funny bit where she learns (from a magic tower guardian who talks like a delinquent schoolgirl) that because of something she did in the game some time ago, she has kids. Frankly, as someone who tends to play video games pretty fast and loose, the idea of things I do in them having long-term consequences is terrifying, but that’s just me.
If it seems like I’m struggling a bit to come up with things to say here, that’s because I kind of am? In addition to this not being my genre, In The Land of Leadale is a fairly slight series in just about every respect, at least so far. It has some charm, but not much else. On the other hand, I’m loathe to condemn something that is so outside of my usual wheelhouse to begin with, to say nothing of the fact that this is a series that’s clearly not trying to make a bombastic first impression. If any of this sounds appealing to you, maybe give Leadale a shot. Its first episode is, if nothing else, a breezy and pleasant watch. (Those cuts to the hospital aside. Again, this is a weird genre convention that I don’t totally understand.) You could certainly do a lot worse.
Grade: C The Verdict: If you like simple, cozy slice-of-life style isekai maybe give this one a look. Otherwise, you can pretty safely pass on it.
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 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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
There are many reasons that people are generally distrustful of the police. A lot of those reasons are fairly complex and rooted in longstanding authoritative structures, some of which have pretty nasty roots. In the US, there has been a concerted movement to, as consumers, move away from media that depicts police officers in an unambiguously positive light. The neologism “copaganda” was coined for this exact purpose, to make it clear to others that yes, depicting cops as superhuman arbiters of justice (as is the case in numerous cop shows) is kind of a problem. “Copaganda” generally is applied as a label to tonally serious fare, but comedies, such as say Brooklyn 99, aren’t immune either.
While distrust of police is a broader issue, the circumstances that lead to this willful withdrawal from certain kinds of television are fairly specifically American. Japan’s law enforcement has its own issues–ones I’m largely wildly unqualified to speak on–but as an American viewer even the goofiest show that revolves around the police is a hard sell. (This is one of the reasons I’ve never even tried to watch You’re Under Arrest!) I try to judge every anime I cover as fairly as I can, but if I seem unduly harsh on Police in a Pod, MADHOUSE‘s latest, do keep in mind there are reasons for that. Taking art on its own terms is important, as a critic, but it is pretty much impossible to step outside of your own head.
All of which would matter a lot more if Police in a Pod required any nuance to discuss. Here’s a secret about popular art in general; you can get away with a lot if what you make is actually good. Easily impressed eggheads like me will heap praise on things for being difficult or messy because they engage with problematic concepts while still being compelling. We do it all the time. Frankly, we probably do it too much. But you absolutely have to nail the qualitative aspect. Failing all else, you have to at least be interesting.
Police in a Pod is not good. Or interesting. Or for that matter, much of anything.
This series’ first episode is so utterly fucking unfunny, so lacking in charm or really any other merit, that it practically writes an article about itself. Where to start with this wretched little thing? Let’s be nice and start with one of the tiny handful of things it almost gets right. Our main character, Mai Kawai, is a box cop. She joined the force because of the pay and because she failed the exams for every other civil service job she tried, she wants to support herself and her dad and police work was the only way to do it. She honestly seems to have a bit of a self-loathing issue about it, going by some stuff she says in this episode! She also complains a lot about how police work is hard and no one respects her, which, gosh, I can’t imagine why.
‘One of the very, very few things that could redeem this conceptual wreck of a series is if it ended with Mai quitting police work entirely, something she actually considers (but sadly doesn’t follow through on) in the episode’s opening minutes. It’s a real shame, she could perhaps enter a more respectable and fulfilling field. Like gravedigging. Or insurance fraud. That won’t happen for reasons I will shortly make apparent, but hey, it’s fun to dream.
So, our main character is baseline sympathetic, that’s one thing done…we’ll say mostly right. What about her partner, Seiko Fuji, the series’ other main character?
Sigh.
Folks, I’m going to break a rule of criticism and go on a tangent about my upbringing here, please bear with me.
My uncle is a police chief. He was a big figure in my early life, and I hate the guy. He’s a miserable man who fights with his wife, gets drunk on Mike’s Hard Lemonade, complains about both other cops and the “civilians” he’s ostensibly sworn to protect, and says racist bullshit about minorities when he thinks he’s in comfortable company. He is a fucking loathsome human being and every single day I am grateful for the fact that, since I’ve moved out of state, I will likely never see him again.
I feel like Seiko and my uncle would get along great.
Seiko’s main personality trait seems to be that she is helpful to peoples’ faces and then bitches about them when she thinks no one is listening. Because this is a “comedy series,” people–usually Mai–often are listening, and their mechanically predictable “wow, how could you say that?!” reactions to her petulant, entitled nonsense are supposed to be funny. They are not. Seiko–and honestly, Police in a Pod itself–seems to think that interactions between police officers and the public should consist either of cops bullying criminals both petty and serious into pants-pissing terror, or innocent citizens fearfully cowering in submission as they, say, accept a $150 ticket without complaint. Seiko is openly disdainful of the idea that she should be a positive presence in her community, or even just be nice to people. She’s a deeply unpleasant character. If this is supposed to be satirical it doesn’t come across, it just seems like the show happens to be following a total asshole because it thinks she’s funny.
I will admit that I have a hard time with characters like this in general, but when you put them in a position of authority and their abuse of that authority is the entire joke? That goes over a line from “artistically unpleasant” and crosses straight into “genuinely fucked up.” It boggles the mind that something this much of a non-entity artistically could muster up the gumption to actually be offensive, but Police in a Pod somehow manages it over the 20-odd minute runtime of its first episode.
None of this is to say that Police in a Pod actually seems to like Seiko. When jokes are made at her expense, they tend to look like this, and her total lack of reaction is notably weird.
But she’s never actually punished–even in a comedic way that would fit the show’s ostensible tone–for her arrogance or her bullying. That’s breaking a pretty basic comedic rule, a sort of “what goes up must come down” of character arrogance. In of itself, that’s not terribly surprising, because on top of everything else, Police in a Pod is a terribly staid production. Nothing has any real pop, there aren’t any interesting cuts or visual tricks. Even the soundtrack is boring. Were its premise not so gallingly tone-deaf, it would be hard to muster up much an opinion about this series at all.
Lest you think I’m being too hard on Police in a Pod, one of the vignettes here sees Mai–the more sympathetic of the two leads, mind you!–essentially explain and endorse a slight twist on Broken Windows theory to a bunch of school children. (Her explanation as to why it’s bad to ride doubles on a bike is that it will show criminals that they’re free to break rules in the area. This is provably stupid; the reason to not ride doubles on a bike is because it’s fucking dangerous. Just saying that never occurs to her, for some reason.)
I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. If anything worse than this manages to come out this season, we are in for a truly dire time indeed. Don’t watch this show. It’s miserable.
Grade: F The Takeaway: Irredeemably unfunny and lacking in any other merit, this series is to be avoided at all costs.
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 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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
There’s gonna be a recurring narrative throughout some of these impression posts this season, possibly this year on the whole, and it’s not a particularly positive one. CloverWorks are doing a lot of anime in 2022. More than one studio can reasonably handle. I put the blame on CloverWorks’ corporate masters at Aniplex more than the studio themselves, but this fact is going to loom over every single anime they produce this year, including a number of highly anticipated adaptions. If any of those adaptions bottom out, the general public will not be kind.
Tokyo 24th Ward, however, is not one of those adaptions. It’s an original production, and comparisons to a thoroughly divisive anime CloverWorks made almost exactly a year ago–and my own favorite anime of 2021–are inevitable. These comparisons will do Tokyo 24th few favors. Tokyo 24th is not Wonder Egg Priority. It has weaknesses, even this early on, that WEP never did, and its strengths are completely different. They are whole worlds away from each other.
Consider this. The first half of the first episode features parkour and graffiti that digitally inserts itself into a city, signifiers of flash and style. But also, it opens with an arson attack and a solid five-minute run of the episode takes place at a funeral mass. It’s a bit inscrutable.
Here’s a question though: a single episode in, is that really a problem?
Set the question of whether this will be a good anime aside for a moment. It will absolutely be an interesting anime. Even the episode’s first (and worse) half is weird. It’s fairly slow, there’s a winding narrative voiceover about the alternate history the show takes place in (boring), and a lot of fucking annoying waffling on what it means “to be a hero.” Main character (and presumable cousin to Yomogi from SSSS.DYNAZENON) Shuuta Aoi failed to save someone–his friend / maybe love interest / other friend’s sister Asumi Suidou–in that arson attack, you see, during a time where he and his buddies (the other two main characters; reckless Ran Akagi and uptight political heir Kouki Suido) had a habit of playing hero and trying to solve others’ problems. They got in over their head.
Naturally, the incident at the arson fire puts a stop to all that, and by the time of the show’s present the three have drifted apart. Shuuta has become a NEET living above his mother’s bakery, Ran is a Twitch streamer / graffiti artist whose creations “hack” themselves into the city, and Kouki enjoys the privileged but miserable existence as the son of the titular 24th Ward’s mayor during a transitional period from self-rule toward integration into Tokyo proper.
They live very different lives, and the funeral mass is the first time in ages they’ve all been in the same place. A subsequent and by chance meetup at a local restaurant serves to highlight how little they have in common anymore, and there is frankly way too much puffed-up talk about each characters’ worldview, especially Ran and Kouki’s, given their very different stances on authority. This indicates a solid underlying political sensibility, but the series does not handle it in a compelling fashion in this first episode. It feels surprisingly dry.
Then, just when things seem like they’re going to get boring, all three friends get a phone call apparently from the dead Asumi. The ensuing scene is a surreal headtrip wherein the camera literally dives into our characters’ brains, and Asumi’s ghost beats the three of them over the head with a lightly modified version of the Trolley Problem while a bunch of gaudy VFX fire off and make the whole thing look like a fever dream. It’s insane. It’s instantly memorable. It is by far the best moment in the whole episode.
But that’s not to say that what follows it is any slouch either. Suddenly dialed in to some supernatural force (Ran later speculates that it’s some kind of “brain hacking” which, hey, sure), the three realize that this is no mere thought experiment here. There is actually an out-of-control train that is going to run over an innocent person–their friend Mari, plus her dog–and if they stop it in the wrong way, the train will derail, killing everyone aboard. This extremely misses the point of the Trolley Problem, which is intended to be a theoretical ethical dilemma. I would also argue that since it gives the episode a sense of urgency and direction, that that does not matter in the slightest.
The three engage in some real superhero bullshit, and Tokyo 24th improbably backs up all that “what is a hero? 🤔” silliness from the first half of the premiere. Shuuta, in particular, is incredible here. He’s faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive, although the sick-ass roof-running he pulls off here isn’t something Superman would ever do.
I won’t bore you by describing their methodology in detail, but with their powers combined, our heroes save the day. It’s cheesy in the way a lot of the best anime are. It rules.
The episode ends on a down note, though. With Shuuta assuming that the phantom phonecall means Asumi is still alive. Ran is skeptical, Kouki–Asumi’s brother–is downright insulted by the idea, and the two almost come to blows. Personally, I’m on Shuuta’s side here, since he seems to be the only one who actually understands what sort of show he’s in.
So that’s what actually happens in Tokyo 24th‘s first episode. How it happens is another matter. Production-wise, and despite the director’s own concerns, it looks pretty good so far. But it doesn’t really look conventional. There’s a real love of flashy scene transitions here, and there’s also a trick that recurs a number of times where cells are directly layered over each other to give the appearance of events “popping in” on top of each other. It takes some getting used to, and it makes shots look over-crowded in still form, but I’d grown more fond of it than not by episode’s end. It works best when deployed with more lighthearted or more action-oriented scenes. When used against a more serious, dramatic, backdrop, it just looks silly.
My hope is that Tokyo 24th Ward manages to hold things together against all odds. This is a weird anime, and that’s a good thing to be in a season that so far looks to mostly be rather conventional genre fare. (Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, either. But it helps Tokyo 24th stand out.) Who knows what we’ll be saying about this anime in six weeks, but I’d say it’s worth keeping an eye on.
Also: who the hell was this?
Grade: B The Takeaway: Skepticism because of the whole CloverWorks situation is entirely warranted here. But, if you’re looking for something that’s just weird and fun to look at and aren’t too concerned about whether or not it ends up being a masterpiece, this is probably worth checking out.
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 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 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. But you really shouldn’t care in this case. Seriously, don’t watch this.
If you close your eyes, you can almost picture it.
The time is early 2020. The place? An opulent office space somewhere in Tokyo, the residence of a chief CEO. A real big shot. His suit and his coke habit mark him as a survivor of the ’80s entertainment biz. He’s been places. He’s seen things. He’s helped stars rise and he’s made them fall.
Today is a day like any other, when a representative pitching a new series–an anime–strides into his office. The rep talks smooth as Crisco, and the boss doesn’t need much convincing. His pitch is simple; everyone’s got an idol show. Your company needs one too. The boss is hung up on only one point. He’s been around the block, he knows his stuff, and he knows that just blindly copying this hot new trend won’t cut it. They need a twist.
Idly, he taps a remote on his desk, and the jumbo flatscreen on the other wall lights up. It’s a sports channel, but they’re not broadcasting any of Japan’s typical national pastimes. Instead, he sees an ice rink, and a black puck zipping across it.
He smiles at the serendipity as the rep stands there confused. “Son.” The boss says, his tone cool and confident. “There’s our twist.”
This is probably not how Pride of Orange, a near-instantly forgotten entry in the “idol anime but also something else” subgenre from late last year, actually got greenlit. But it makes more sense to me than the alternative. Some washed-up suit OK’ing this is the only way it seems plausible that it was made at all. What’s the other explanation? That this was focus-tested? That multiple people sat down and assured themselves that yes, idols playing hockey is exactly what the youth of Japan want in their cartoons?
If the show had actually been good, it’s possible I’d be sitting here praising the ingenuity of conjoining these two things that absolutely do not go together at all. But we don’t live in a world where Pride of Orange is a good show, so that’s irrelevant. In the US, this is the kind of thing that gets mocked on VH1 by washed-up celebrities 20 years after it airs off the surreal premise alone. Some real Baywatch Nights shit. I don’t know if they have a similar pop culture backwash hall of shame practice in Japan, and if so, whether it includes anime, but Pride of Orange had better hope so on both counts, because there’s no way anyone’s remembering it otherwise.
You might take all this to mean Pride of Orange is bad. You’d be right to. It is bad! But every single bad anime I’ve ever covered on Magic Planet Anime before has had a saving grace that Puraore does not; they were bad in interesting ways. Pride of Orange is bad in the same way that Imagine Dragons, ugly logos, and direct-to-Netflix specials are bad. It is an obvious product of a pop cultural media machine completely failing to deliver the one thing that said machine should always be able to. In this case, a baseline watchable cartoon. Beyond its ridiculous premise, there just isn’t much to it. It’s audiovisual wallpaper. An active test of your patience that dares you, with its sheer brain-numbing mundanity, to blink first. This is anime-by-algorithm, a so-inoffensive-it’s-offensive patchwork of tropes, plotlines, and even character designs cribbed from other, better anime, kludged together by grey-suited executives without a single creative bone in their bodies. That’s before we get to its more serious flaws, mind you.
So, what is this horrible abomination unto mankind? Well, as mentioned, it’s theoretically an idol series where the idols are also a hockey team. In practice it’s more the other way around. The “idol” bit feels tacked-on enough (a grand total of two dance sequences, with almost no buildup, over its whole run) that I wonder if it wasn’t initially conceived as a straight sports series and then later altered. It does have the cast structure of an idol series, at least, and all characters present fall into broad archetypes that the genre popularized, but quite unlike some personal favorites in it (say, 2011’s The Idolmaster, 2018’s Zombie Land Saga, or 2020’s Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club),* none of them have much personality. Probably the best of the lot are Naomi and Riko, whose distinction mostly comes from the fact that they’re quite obviously dating each other. (Their brief arc, which culminates in episode 9, is unquestionably the highlight of the series.)
The remainder of the cast is fairly anonymous, including theoretical protagonist Manaka.
“My literal only personality trait is obnoxious cheerfulness.”
We should also talk about Youko, the team’s coach. Youko is an outlier here, because she’s not devoid of personality like most other characters. Instead, her combination of doofy catchphrases, manipulative, obnoxious personality, and general overbearing nature combine to make her come across as weirdly creepy.
In one of the show’s “arcs” (the term seems generous), she attempts to recruit the star player of a rival team, Yu, who’s recently left the life of a hockey prodigy behind to experience a normal teenagerhood. (God knows we can’t have that in our sports anime.) In her efforts, Youko resorts to tactics such as repeatedly, incessantly calling her phone, standing outside of her house and yelling(!), and engineering a situation where she deliberately leaves a pen behind when invited into Yu’s house by her grandmother. This, of course, means that Yu has to return said pen (I’d argue she doesn’t, really, but neither Yu herself nor her grandmother object to the idea). When Yu does so, Youko ropes her into a bizarre bet, which she loses, and essentially forces her to join the team. This is glossed over with the non-explanation that Yu actually enjoys being on the new team, so it doesn’t matter. Youko is similarly unpleasant to her other players, and even engages in gaslight-y emotional manipulation a few times, giving her an almost predatory vibe.
None of this is ever addressed, because Pride of Orange has neither the writing chops necessary to address it nor the forethought to simply not make the coach a skeevy weirdo in the first place. I would also argue that Youko having to quite literally trick the cast into becoming an “idol group” on top of being a hockey team feels like it betrays a broad disdain both for the show’s audience and its own genre.
“The fact that I’m allowed to be an influence in children’s lives is, on a moral level, horrific.”
But really, while Youko’s situation is the worst of the series’ many writing flaws, it’s far from the only one. Frequent issues like conflicts springing up and then being almost immediately resolved, or flashbacks grinding action scenes to a dead stop to repeat to us information we either already know or could easily infer, recur repeatedly throughout. Pride of Orange often feels like the first draft of an anime that, even were all these issues fixed, would still be merely just below average. All these little problems add up, and they make Pride of Orange an altogether miserable watching experience.
One could try to chalk all this up to Puraore’s length, but two of the anime I previously mentioned were also single cour. It is very possible, with economical character building, stylish animation, sharp writing that builds a solid triumph narrative, etc., to make your audience care about even a quite large cast in that amount of time. Pride of Orange never swings that, because it has none of those things. It doesn’t even manage to instill much of a base level thrill off the novelty of its premise, the one thing that objectively distinguishes this series from any other. In October, right around when Pride of Orange started airing, a pilot short called “SHAREDOL” managed to do that much in less than three minutes. Length is no excuse.
In the broadest sense, the problem is this. The best anime can, in the moment, feel monumental. I’ll again draw a comparison to The Idolmaster (you’ll have to forgive my lack of experience with sports anime, which would honestly be more appropriate here, but the general structures still apply). One got the sense, during the series’ climactic concert, that those girls had done everything to earn their moment. They would’ve bled and died on that stage if that’s what it took. It feels, as it’s happening, huge. All-important.
Pride of Orange manages the almost impressive feat of going in the other direction. Of making not just its parent genres, but its entire medium feel small, trivial, and trifling. While watching it, I felt transmogrified into a disapproving stepmother, finger-wagging at myself for watching these silly cartoons. And you can accuse me of projection, and say that no anime, no matter how bad, should make me feel this way. But the fact of the matter is that taken together, as a whole, Pride of Orange‘s cheez-whiz take on the sports and idol anime genres improbably transforms simple boredom into existential dread. It is such a yawning void of mediocrity that it’s somehow one of the worst anime I’ve ever seen. At the risk of repeating myself, it is distinguished from past Magic Planet Anime worst-of candidates like Speed Grapher, Big Order, The Day I Became a God, and fellow idol trainwreck 22/7 by the fact that those anime were bad in a way that still made it clear that the people behind them cared about them. They may have had any number of very serious qualitative flaws. They may have been downright offensive at times. But a certain kind of terribleness can only come from misplaced passion, which at least implies that there is passion.
Let me be very clear; this is not true of Pride of Orange. I do not get the sense that anyone who worked on this series cared about it at all. Whether because they did not want to or because circumstances made it so they could not I do not know, but the few tiny pinpricks of light that poke through–Naomi and Riko’s relationship, the vanishingly brief pair of dance numbers that comprise the entirety of the show’s “idol” element, the surprisingly solid soundtrack–make it clear that for the vast majority of this show, nobody involved gave a shit. It has all the artistry of a McDonald’s order and ends with a limp, nondescript hand gesture too lazy to be a middle finger. Make no mistake, all of this is tragic.
And perhaps the worst part is that I don’t think Puraore is unique in this way. Things like Pride of Orange are what you get when a zeitgeist is about to die. Most of my time as an active anime enthusiast has been spent in the midst of the idol anime boom. I have liked a decent amount of those shows, but I wouldn’t quite call myself an “idol anime fan.” Those who would should be wary; things like Puraore are not a good sign. The same is broadly true of the “all-female cast does stuff” supergenre in general, and for that matter, anime on the whole.
What else is there to say? Pride of Orange is symptomatic of an industry that is simply producing way, way too much content by sheer volume. Few people watched it. Fewer of those who did will remember it–fondly or otherwise–in a few years’ time. It is hypergeneric but endlessly replaceable, a combination ice skate / high heel stomping on all our faces forever. In this light, the name of the protagonists’ team sounds less like a quirky sports team name and more like a sneered command. Dream, monkeys. Dream hard. Because there has to be something better than this.
* I should make a note here to apologize to all involved with Selection Project, a different idol anime from the Fall 2021 season that I derided as unimpressive in my impressions post for the first episode. I foolishly assumed that because Pride of Orange has a stupid premise it might be more interesting than SelePro. I have heard through the grapevine that Selection Project apparently eventually got quite good, something Puraore cannot say. (And really it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly be worse.) If one of these two anime ever picks up a cult following, it will not be the one I reviewed for you today.
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 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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Hello, anime fans! Happy New Year and welcome to the first Frontline Report of 2022! As I mentioned in my plans for 2022 post, this column is going to remain mostly unchanged entering the new year. Once the seasonal schedule settles, I may move it to publishing on a different day (and we may skip a week at some point in the process), but beyond that, the Report is going to remain familiar, at least for now.
But before we can truly venture into 2022 and the season ahead, I have two anime I’d previously left unfinished from last season. Let’s talk about those, shall we?
Weekly Anime
Mieruko-chan
The first of our cleanups from the tail end of last year; Mieruko-chan was, as far as straightforward manga adaptions go, pretty typical. That is to say, it inherits most of its source material’s weaknesses and only some of its strengths. The good news is that while the more ambitious work that separates a good manga adaption from a merely OK one is largely absent from the series’ first half, it does begin to pick some of that up as it nears its conclusion. This is a series that, far from falling off after its first episode, more or less linearly gets better. Its last few episodes are its strongest, and that brings us to the “Zen arc” that closes it out.
Zen, as brought up when we last visited him, is the substitute teacher for Miko and Hana’s class. He is, in a general sense, weird. Much of the tension of the arc is predicated toward building on the assumption we already have (from his prior appearances in the series) that he’s a serial animal killer. The pieces seem to add up; a rash of missing cats in the neighborhood, his own cold and detached demeanor from other people (including his students), generally suspicious behavior, etc. But one of Mieruko-chan‘s central themes is that looks can be deceiving.
The arc’s climax, in which Zen is almost hit by a car while trying to rescue a cat, and we learn of his past with his abusive mother, is the series’ best handling of anything with real gravitas. Aided by the fact that she literally still haunts him, a situation Miko fixes for him in what is certainly her most proactive move in the whole series. This entire sequence of scenes (which takes up the bulk of the penultimate episode), is the show’s overall highlight.
So, what to make of Mieruko-chan overall? I’ve been rather critical of it in this column in the past (including at the top of this very section), but I maintain my initial impression that what it does right outweighs what it does wrong. I still might point anyone interested in the series to the manga first and foremost, but the visual snap (and consequently, additional narrative weight) added to these last few episodes definitely makes the anime worth watching as well.
Then there’s the characters. Any series that has both serious and comparatively lighthearted components will end up judged on the former over the latter, but Mieruko-chan‘s comedic chops really solidify in this last arc as Miko, Hana, and Julia’s dynamic clicks into its final shape. My main hope for a second season is not as much because I am interested in the resolution of the story arc (although I am), but more because I just want to see these three delightful dummies palling around town more.
(Also, if the subtext between these two isn’t intentional, I’ll eat my hat.)
A shout out has to also be given to the translators here, whose quirky script really helps Mieruko-chan‘s comedy come across in English. Far too many comedy manga and anime end up falling flat when translated “literally,” and it’s for the best they didn’t go with that approach here.
So that’s the long and short of it. Will Mieruko-chan change anyone’s life? No, but it’s solid genre fare in an under-represented genre, and that is more than enough. I think the best thing I can say about Mieruko-chan on a personal level is that despite any criticisms I may have, if they made a second season, I would absolutely watch it. And really, isn’t that the only metric of quality you really need?
Rumble Garanndoll
I think if you wanted to, it wouldn’t be that hard to make a case against Rumble Garanndoll. The series does the stock irresponsible anime-about-anime thing of conflating all human passion (a very broad thing) with passion specifically for this medium (a very narrow thing). You could point to other missteps it’s made along the way (most of which I’ve covered in previous editions of this very column), you could single out how, in the end, its big fascistic villain is revealed as little more than the cosplaying puppet of an even bigger, offscreen fascistic villain who we don’t really get to meaningfully meet at any point.
But the thing is this; I am an anime critic. Emphasis on the first word, not the second. If an anime is mostly about how fucking awesome anime is, I’m going to at least kinda like it unless it’s truly terrible. And Rumble Garanndoll has the appropriate amount of audacity to, say, cap its final arc with the villains attempting to drop the Comiket Center onto Akihabara like a bomb. Even if I didn’t like the series, I’d respect its punch.
But I do like it! Flaws and all, it’s hard to find major fault with something this damn fun. Our main arc here concludes with Hosomichi finding that even if he can’t feel as strongly for the art itself as other people do, he can feel for those people. That’s a surprisingly mature conclusion for something like this to reach! And that’s not all; we get a lot of good small moments over these last three episodes. Stuff like Hosomichi’s ringtone turning out to be a crucial plot element, and a small arc between Commander Balzac and Mimi (the scientist lady). There’s even a few oddly poignant moments. Like here where she assures Balzac that their own sacrifices–and the mistakes they made during them–weren’t for nothing.
Or here, at the very end of the series, where Akatsuki is astonished to learn that many of the resistance members weren’t even Japanese. Implicitly, a gesture of Garanndoll reaching out to its overseas audience as Akatsuki visibly begins to question the ideas he’s been fighting for this entire time. (In the process, supporting character Ukai is revealed to be American.)
It’s all just very good-natured and fun. There are criticisms one could make of this last arc, especially on the production side (there are a few downright sloppy action sequences here mixed in with the better ones), but why? Rumble Garanndoll set out not to imitate the great anime of the past, but to become one itself. I’m not sure if it quite hit “great,” but it’s certainly a worthy show, and I hope it picks up a following. It deserves one.
And yeah, for the record, I’d watch a second season of this, too. (Especially since the last episode raises as many questions as it answers!) I’m glad this was the last anime from 2021 I finished; I think Rumble Garanndoll‘s attitude is a good one to bring into the new year.
This is outside my usual window for mentioning an article on the subsequent Frontline Report, but I worked really hard on this, and I want as many people to read it as possible. So please give it a look if you haven’t!
If you want to get very picky, you could argue that the season’s already begun. The Missing 8‘s first two episodes dropped just after Christmas, and I honestly am still just in awe that the show exists. It’s not a TV series, it’s a semi-independent web short thing that is only actually animated some of the time, but it’s worth checking out just for how odd it is.
And that’s about all for our first week of 2022. If you’re finding the year’s start a little thin, I wouldn’t worry. We’ve got quite the week ahead of us with a good number of premieres piled up already. (I’ll probably be covering about one per day, once they start dropping.) I should also quickly mention Ousama Ranking; yes, it will be returning to this column, probably before too long. It’s a great series and I intend to follow it ’til its end. I’m only not counting it as a leftover from 2021 because, well, I tend to categorize anime by the year they end in rather than the year they begin in. A personal preference, I suppose.
What was your last anime of 2021? Do you have any plans for your first of 2022? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter, I always look forward to hearing from you, anime fans!
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 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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
A comet streaks the sky above a dying planet. That is the central image that closes out the first episode of The Missing 8, one of two currently released. It’s a striking image, and a fitting symbol for one of the most mysterious anime premieres in recent memory.
The natural question is very simple. What is this?
The Missing 8 premiered on the Youtube channel FUZIwith very little fanfare on December 28th, dropping its first episode several days after Christmas in the pre-New Year winter dead zone. I can find just a single announcement–a teaser trailer from earlier in December–indicating that anyone outside of the animators and voice actors involved in the production had any idea this thing was going to come out.* Allegedly, it’s a collaboration between (or lead by?) animator Naoki Yoshibe and some amount of Wit Studio personnel, at least if Anime News Network is to be believed. Beyond that, there is basically no information on the English internet about this thing. We’re flying blind.
In the absence of the usual “you may know Director So-and-so from TheSuch-and-such Project” spiel, I am thus left with the task of describing what the show actually consists of. On a basic plot and setting level, that’s confounded somewhat by the fact that the subtitles on this thing are a bit stiff. But the gist is this; somewhere, either our own world in the far future or on another planet, a group of people with the power to transform others of their kind into any object they can conceive of defend their city against antagonists of some sort known as the Dragonewt.
Two of these people; Poppy and Punk (the former of whom loves to refer to herself in the third person) have a brief falling out in the first episode, after a scuffle with the Dragonewt goes wrong. Further spurned on by Poppy claiming to experience dreams. Something she’s read about before in the mysterious tome known as The Lux Code, but which Punk has (apparently) never had. They make up by episode’s end after Punk pays a visit to his mother(?), a blindfolded woman who is apparently the only real human among the group.
If this all seems a bit esoteric in the retelling, it’s doubly so firsthand. What I’ve danced around mentioning until now is that calling The Missing 8 a “seasonal anime” is admittedly rather misleading. I’m filing it into the coming Winter 2022 season, mostly for my own recordkeeping purposes. But this is a short-form project being uploaded to Youtube. Arguably calling it an “anime” at all is misleading, given that only select cuts of it are actually animated in any major way, with the rest being more akin to the (somewhat obscure over here in the good ol’ Anglosphere) medium of the picture drama, a cousin to TV anime proper and a regular fixture on Blu-Ray extras and the like. I am nonetheless going to continue calling it a seasonal anime, for the aforementioned recordkeeping purposes and because when it is animated it looks quite nice, respectively. Despite the general opacity, there’s a lot to love here; cool character designs and a surprisingly hard soundtrack chief among them.
I will not spoil the second episode, as is my general policy with these writeups. But what I will say is that the comet the first episode closes on turns out to have some intriguing implications for the little world that Pop and Punk inhabit, and have grown, it seems, so used to. This is a fascinating little series, and even if it’s not technically in the same format as much of what I cover here, it certainly deserves to be taken on its own terms. My hope is that this little article will help a few more people do that.
I’ll see you all come the new year for the start of the “proper” season. Until then, consider checking this out.
Grade: B+ The Takeaway: The Missing 8’s two episodes are so brief that you have very little reason to at least watch the first of them, unless you just hate the format or cool character designs or something.
*Despite my mild bafflement, this is a format shows that receive an official translation sometimes air in. Just this past season Heike Monogatari aired online before eventually hitting TV. Longer ago, obscure Studio TRIGGER projects Ninja Slayer From Animation and Turning Girls premiered online as well, and the latter even also dropped on a random Youtube channel like The Missing 8 did. I can safely say that The Missing 8 is better than Turning Girls, though.Also: in this specific case, Missing 8‘s characters appear to originate from a series of music videos that Fuzi has done. Not that being based on music video characters is unique among anime properties.
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 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.
Hi folks! As with a couple other things I’ve written lately this is less an article and more of a PSA, though it’s a bit more involved than some of the others I’ve put up recently.
Basically, now that all of my material for the year’s end is written and published (capping with my end-of-year list from yesterday. Read that if you haven’t!) I wanted to talk about my plans for 2022. Mostly in terms of what you can expect from this blog on a week-by-week basis, but I’ll also briefly touch on some other stuff. Before I start, I do want to get out that I know my reader base (that’s y’all) are pretty understanding and few people, if anybody, expect me to be mechanically consistent 24/7-365.
Nonetheless, I do want to try to hold myself to a higher standard in the coming year. I don’t like to talk about this side of running the site because I feel it’s a bit tasteless, but it’s pertinent here; 2021 was the year I started genuinely making some decent money off Magic Planet Anime. I’m still not where I’d like to be in terms of income, and if I’m being perhaps way too frank, I can still only just barely take care of myself even with the assistance of my loved ones, but it’s a great start, and I’m deeply grateful to everyone who’s donated any amount even once.
I bring all this up because part of the reason I want to hold myself to that higher standard is because I want to make you all feel like you’re actually paying for something worthwhile. I can’t realistically promise to always be the smartest or most insightful anime critic on the internet, but I can aim for honesty, thoughtfulness, and consistency. Your donations over the past year have allowed me to do that, and I’m hoping I can deliver on that front even moreso in 2022.
So, with that out of the way, let’s talk plans.
The Future of Let’s Watch
Let’s Watch was one of the things I started on in 2021 that I was least confident in. Which, in hindsight, is pretty funny. It served as a replacement for my former work for GGA. Recap-breakdown-writeup-whatevers about an anime episode once a week, more or less. While it didn’t go perfectly, my takt op. recaps were some of the most engagement my site’s ever gotten. Obviously, I intend to continue doing these in 2022, since people evidently want to read them. But there is a change to take note of.
Most seasons, I will be covering two shows a week, not just one. One anime will be a seasonal Community Choice. You can find out more about the latter here(and get in a last-minute vote if you haven’t already. I plan to close the poll sometime shortly after the new year). The other will be whatever I happen to pick from the seasonal crop of anime I do First Impressions posts on. In the rare event that I can’t find anything I want to cover; I might run another poll or just stick to one show for that season. (I don’t expect this will happen terribly often, if ever, but it’s nice to have a contingency plan in place.)
Reviews in the Rearview?
Traditional Reviews have historically been a thing I focus on here. While I’m certainly never going to stop writing them here, they will be less of a focus going forward, especially in terms of writing them for seasonal anime. Aside from the fact that when I do write a traditional review, it will hopefully make it “mean” a bit more, there’re a couple of other reasons for this:
Everyone does reviews. When I write a review I’m competing with every user-written review on MyAnimeList and Anilist, dozens upon dozens of other blogs, and so on. They simply aren’t a good way to get new eyes on my site most of the time.
My ability to advertise reviews is very limited. I can do some amount of SEO magic, but there’s ultimately a limit on that. And since Anilist no longer allows me to advertise my site when I mirror reviews over there (a way I was able to get some users to follow me from that site to this one), I have even less incentive to review every seasonal anime I finish.
Seasonal coverage always competes with Youtube videos. This is the big one. I simply cannot compete with the pace and engagement that your average Youtube video on seasonal anime gets. In some cases (like my Let’s Watch column) it’s still enough that I’m willing to try anyway. But review posts on this blog are never going to get even a meaningful fraction of the views that, say, a Youtube video with a flashy thumbnail and a title like “The PROBLEM With takt op.Destiny!” is going to get. That’s just the nature of the landscape right now and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.
What all of this boils down to is; I’ll be largely saving full, traditional reviews for either A) older anime, where there tends to be far less of a glut of competition, B) seasonals I have very strong feelings on, whether positive or negative, and C) movies, which brings us to our next subheading.
Monthly Movies & Manga
This is the big change. For most of this blog’s lifespan I’ve been very lax about getting “extra articles” out there. Stuff like my Monthly Movies column or my Manga Shelf column. I want to change that, because these are some of the projects here that I’m most passionate about, and they are the sort of thing that there is less of, so the field isn’t quite as crowded.
I want to do at least one Manga Shelf column or one Monthly Movies column a month. If I’m going at a good clip by mid-year and am feeling ambitious, I might up it to two. Consequently! If you’re a big anime film buff or read a ton of manga, feel free to toss recommendations my way, I’ll even credit you in the lead-in for any articles I write on them. (And for our purposes here, single-episode OVAs count as “movies.” I won’t tell anyone if you don’t, alright?)
The Front Lines March On
The Frontline Report, my honestly pretty stupidly-titled weekly writeup of whatever I happen to be thinking about at the time, is the column that will change the least going into 2022. I will still aim to write it once a week, although it’ll remain the column I’m most likely to suspend if I’m ill or something of that nature. The only real change here is that the specific day I publish the column on might change from season to season as different things will work better with my schedule.
That’s most of the specifics. I do have some more general goals, such as wanting to do some more collaborative stuff, and some longer-term ideas (I’d like to break the readership record I set here this past October, for instance.) Beyond that, though, that’s pretty much what 2022 is going to look like, barring some kind of unforeseen circumstance.
With all that laid out, I hope to see you all back here in the new year. I don’t have my plans for next season entirely set in stone yet, but it shouldn’t be too long into January before you start seeing me post here again.
Until then, anime fans, thank you for your support over the past wonderful two years of running this blog, and happy holidays. 🙂
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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.
Special Notice: This should really go without saying, but since I’m going to be talking about all of these shows in general, overall terms, you can expect spoilers for all of them, up to and including their endings.
So here we are again, anime fans. Another year firmly in the past tense, not just within our specific sphere of interest but in general. Time is a funny thing, it’s already late November as I write this opening paragraph, which isn’t much less time than I gave myself last year, but despite the fact that I am demonstrably writing about fewer shows, I wanted to at least try and give each of them a bit more attention.
Yes, this marks a change in format. Last year I undertook the–in hindsight rather absurd–task of ranking every anime I’d finished that came out that year. The format required me to spend a fair amount of writing real estate on anime that I either didn’t like or simply had no strong thoughts on at all. This year, I wanted to simplify a bit. Only a bit, mind you. This is still me we’re talking about, after all.
So, this year the job is less complex, but simultaneously more difficult. 5 Anime I liked more than the rest; five that stuck with me and that I think will continue to stick with me. Plus, a handful of honorable mentions to get a positive word in for some anime that I enjoyed but couldn’t wholly self-justify putting in the main top five.
Just to fully disclose; as usual, these are indeed only my opinions, thoughts, and observations. My opinions that I consider reasonably informed and well thought out, but opinions, nonetheless. There is also the fact, of course, that anime I didn’t watch cannot make it onto this list by default, with apologies to the several anime I heard very good things about this year but did not find the time to watch myself. (Chiefly here I am thinking of ODD TAXI and Eighty-Six, but there are other examples too.) This list also consists exclusively of serial fiction, in the interest of keeping things fair, so the final Rebuild of Evangelion film isn’t here either. (Which is a shame, because it would’ve easily earned a spot on this list. My hope is that next year I’ll have seen enough anime films that actually came out in 2022 to make them their own list, but we’ll see.) And it’s only shows that are actually finished, so if Ousama Ranking ever shows up on one of these lists, just as an example, it’ll be the list for next year, when it concludes.
Ultimately then, what you have is a snapshot of what I consider particularly worthwhile in the medium of serial anime. A couple things went into picking shows for this list. The simple question of how much I enjoyed watching it week to week is obviously the biggest factor, and all else being equal is what I prioritized. But I did try to give at least some consideration to more nebulous things, such as general public reception, whether I think they will stand the test of time, etc. etc. (Factors that I am of course completely capable of being wrong about. But hey, I try my best.) Above all else was the simple fact of what they meant to me. It is, after all, my list, no one else’s.
Anyway, enough beating around the bush, let’s get to it.
#5. Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Season 2
Madoka Magica was not the only franchise to make a welcome return this year, but of those that did, it’s probably the one closest to my heart. I will fully admit, there’s some circumstantial bias here. I missed out on the original Madoka Magica when it was airing now a good ten years ago. On some subconscious level it’s possible that my opinion of Magia Record is elevated by the simple fact that I get to see it unfold in real time. I’d be hard pressed to say that MagiReco’s second season was the most accessible anime of 2021–that’s part of why it rounds out the bottom of the list–but it was certainly among those I felt the most connection to. (Covering it week by week, on what would become my last bit of work for The Geek Girl Authority, probably helped.)
To a point, a show that looks like this speaks for itself. Public consensus has held for some time that Studio SHAFT‘s golden age is firmly in the past tense, but if there’s a case to be made for that whole “SHAFT Renaissance” idea that bounces around Anime Twitter from time to time, it’s somewhere in the frames of Magia Record. The season’s stronger episodes (which make up a good chunk of its brief eight) absolutely drip with style, and its premiere in particular is the sort of love letter to both the fans and the series itself that you just don’t get super often. Combine that with its wildly ambitious (some might say overly ambitious!) storyline that attempts to mythmake by tying together disparate parts of the wider Madoka ‘verse, it giving relatively minor characters like Kuroe a chance to shine, and just the frankly kinda insane fact that the Madoka Train is still chugging along at all a full decade later? Yeah, Magia Record earns its spot on the list, even if it is “only” at #5.
It’s totally possible that MagiReco’s third season–whenever it arrives–won’t be as good as this, or indeed that it’ll be much better, but this list is a ranking of what’s aired this year, and this year, the oddball middle segment of a three-part story happened to be the fifth-best anime of the whole damn thing. Go figure.
#4. SSSS.DYNAZENON
As a sequel to one of the best anime of the 2010s–2018’s SSSS.GRIDMAN—SSSS.DYNAZENON is odd. It takes place away from that anime’s setting and involves only two of its characters (and only in a supporting capacity.) But considered thematically, these deviations from its predecessor make perfect sense.
If, as is often held to be the case, we can map GRIDMAN‘s characters to the inner workings of a single mind, and thus make the case that that series is about self-acceptance, DYNAZENON is the logical progression. The exterior to GRIDMAN‘s interior. Like a lot of anime this year, DYNAZENON dealt in themes of alienation and misplacedness. Common emotions that we all struggle with in a world where things feel like they’re falling apart faster and faster all the time. Yet, at the same time, it re-lit the fire of that old truism; no man is an island.
How? Easy. Director Akira Amemiya proved yet again that, yeah, you can still make a show that’s at least 50% giant robots fighting giant monsters by volume actually say something and have it not come across as corny or just over-wrought. DYNAZENON manages the impressive task of welding those fight scenes together with interrogative character work all over again, in a way that feels distinct from, but very much related to, GRIDMAN‘s approach to that problem.
All five members of our core cast are disconnected from society in some way. Be it Yomogi’s parents’ separation, the death of Yume’s older sister, Koyomi and Chise’s mutually-enabling shut-in habits, or even how Gauma is lost from his own world entirely. Over the course of the series they heal, but the journey is not a smooth or easy one, and the kaiju represent allegorical threats to their wellbeing as much as physical ones.
This is to say nothing of the Kaiju Eugenicists, those alarmingly-named villains who serve as the main four’s opposites on the other end of the good guy / bad guy spectrum. They’re alienated too, but their alienation consumes them, and is the driving force behind their desire to subjugate and destroy. In the case of Sizumu, it quite literally turns him into a monster.
DYNAZENON‘s driving question is thus how to move on from that alienation, from those things that drive a wedge between us and others. To its credit, it offers no easy solution, although in showing what really happened to Yume’s sister when no one was there to support her, it offers a dire warning of the consequences of not at least trying. The Dyna Soldiers find solace in the pieces of the Dynazenon itself, which, perhaps tellingly, is formed from what appear to be mere toys in their dormant state. But more importantly, they find solace in each other. To quote my own writeup of the tenth episode from back in June:
The only reason she couldn’t be saved like Yume herself was just a single episode ago is that, in a very literal sense, no one was there to support her. I suspect that SSSS.DYNAZENON may lose some people off that fact alone, but the point here is that Yume is still affected by her death. There are no easy outs, not even here.
But there are words of advice. Before the two leave each other for the last time, Kano tells Yume that she needs to rely on others more. And that, right there, is the entire thesis of SSSS.DYNAZENON as a series. Where SSSS.GRIDMAN dealt with the internal, all of its characters mapping to different parts of a single psyche, SSSS.DYNAZENON is external.
It’s known that a third part of the trilogy; a crossover, likely in film form, called GRIDMAN x DYNAZENON, will round out this particular series of stories from Amemiya and co., beyond that, details remain scarce. But SSSS or no, if they can keep making stuff like this, stuff that hits you right in the heart? His place as one of the new decade’s best directors is assured. Keep broadcasting, kaiju king.
#3. Sonny Boy
Another theme we’re going to be seeing a lot of here is transience. It’s rather been my “word of the year,” so I hope you’ll forgive my use of it again, here, but it’s true. All things pass, and for many people our whole lives involve, at least to some degree, reckoning with that fact.Sonny Boywas not the only show this year to grapple with that fact, but it was notably thorough about it.
It begins in the void, but soon crash-lands into an island on the far side of summer. There, surreal parables about life, death, and everything in-between unfold like the show’s own Matryoshka Doll worlds. Universes within universes, wheels within wheels. The purpose? An ode to our lost digital generation; the Millennial/Gen-Z continuum. Adults are imposters putting on a show or so distant that they’re divinity. No one is truly there to guide the cast, much like there’s no one truly there for us except ourselves. They, as we, need to make peace on their own.
Of the anime on this list, I will cop to “understanding” Sonny Boy the least. There is a lot of symbolism here; it’s a dense show. (Which, hey, means it’s good for a rewatch.) But the series’ core of melancholy-hopeful nihilism is easy enough to map out, and that’s what earns it a spot on this list. Well, that and its absolutely stunning visual style. Sonny Boy looks like very little else that aired in 2021, and its surrealist, painterly looks would earn it a spot in the honorable mentions even if the show genuinely was all talk and no walk. But thankfully, while it may occasionally lean inscrutable, its heart beats strong.
Of the various treatises on the passing of everything that 2021 produced (gee, I wonder why that was on everyone’s minds), Sonny Boy stands as one of the more accepting. But in a way, my typing this is pointless. One of the show’s own characters put it best.
Perhaps I should be giving Rajdhani a co-writing credit for how often I’ve used these screenshots when talking about Sonny Boy.
(As a side note; creator Shingo Natsume‘s next project is a sequel to The Tatami Galaxy. So, it seems like this is hardly the last time he’s going to direct something delightfully confounding. Perhaps it’ll show up on the list next year!)
#2. Heike Monogatari
If Sonny Boy explored transience via surreality and imagined worlds far from our own, Heike Monogatari grounded its own investigation of the concept firmly in the real-world concerns of history and myth. Based on a historical Japanese epic, The Heike Story has the benefit of hindsight. From the beginning of the first episode, each character’s steps fall with inevitability. From Lord Shigemori, who takes protagonist Biwa in after her father is callously murdered by members of his own clan, to Taira no Kiyomori’s heartless power-grabbing ploys, every man, woman, and child here has their fate sealed before the first episode of the series even begins.
There is one exception: Biwa herself. (She’s voiced by Aoi Yuuki, in what would be the strongest role in the career of almost any other voice actress but is just another casual triumph for her. She brings alternating innocence for the Biwa we see most of the time, and stately, religious gravitas for the white-haired “seer” Biwa.)
Her role? To be conscripted as fate’s chronicler and become representative both of the nature of the original epic itself and more generally as a symbol of all of us. Witnesses to history, as we are, who so often are powerless to change it despite our own strengths. It can feel grim and fatalistic; seasons change and an empire falls like a leaf from a tree in autumn. But Heike Monogatari never makes it feel that way. Things simply are, and then they aren’t. Dust becomes dust, time ticks on.
Heike Monogatari is observance and acceptance, and the stormy lining to its silver cloud is that it’s so obviously timeless that even writing about it feels sort of pointless. It’s like trying to review The Iliad. It could have been #1, easily, and in almost any other year it would’ve been. Yet, at least to me, it was still somehow “only” the second-best anime of 2021.
But, before we get to the top of the list, let’s go through some honorable mentions. Because you’re worth it, dear readers.
Honorable Mention: takt op.Destiny
Ribbons of highway and a great blue sky way. Ruins, cities, deserts, forests, monsters, and song. A world that’s lost its music. That was takt op.Destiny. Hardly the year’s most “together” production, takt op has the dubious distinction of sharing a bizarre ending twist with notable “would’ve probably made this list if quality wasn’t a factor at all” shortlister The Detective is Already Dead. But obviously, its spotty ending is not why it’s here. Of what I saw in 2021, takt op had some of the most purely joyous animation. Most of it took the form of fight scenes, and it’s easy to dismiss that sort of thing as lowbrow. But by tying it together with a thematic core about rescuing a world that thinks it no longer needs art with that art, it manages to make it all feel meaningful. For the bounty of good to great anime 2021 did have, it was rather short on anime that I felt compellingly made the case for art itself–something last year had in spades–boiling down to mostly just this, Love Live! Superstar!!, and Kageki Shoujo!! (Which itself only missed the list by dint of a dry run of episodes in its middle third.) So, for filling that niche, I am quite grateful to takt op, perhaps the year’s messiest pile of camp.
Honorable Mention: Zombie Land Saga Revenge
If someone asks me what I thought about the general quality of anime in 2021, I will tell them that I had to relegate the second season of Zombie Land Saga to the Honorable Mentions list.
Honestly it barely feels fair. Zombie Land Saga Revenge is everything you could want out of a sequel; it builds on the original in logical and interesting ways. Franchouchou start the season having blown their biggest concert, washed up and down and out. But the mountain waits for no one, so what can you do but try to climb it again? And we saw them climb again. Those ridiculous zombies fought claw and jaw to bigger and bigger concert placements, and along the way we saw them grow as people, with particular star turns for Junko and Yuugiri. Let’s not forget that in the latter case, Revenge decided to just become a historical drama for several episodes, an outfit it wore better than many actual historical dramas do. Zombie Land Saga truly can do it all. The best idol anime of 2021, and almost certainly its best comedy. And I had to put it on the HM list. What a year it’s been, eh?
Honorable Mention: BLUE REFLECTION RAY
More than any other anime on this list, and maybe more than any anime I’ve ever covered period, I really strongly think Blue Reflection Ray is underrated. It’s a victim of circumstance, really. Animated by a studio long past its prime in a year that had two other anime that did many of the same things as it but in a more flashy and accessible way, there is a real case to be made that BRR never had a chance. But this list is, ultimately, about anime that I love. And I truly do think BRR was something special.
And not just because it’s really gay, although that certainly helps.
As a love letter to the magical girl genre, as a scrappy example of what even the most “low budget” of anime can accomplish with enough sincerity and grit, and as a rumination on how society treats young girls–another theme that came up quite often in art this year–Blue Reflection Ray stands tall with the best of them. When, in its penultimate episode, the Reflectors transform back-to-back-to-back just like a “real” magical girl team for the first and only time, BRR felt just as important as any other magical girl series. Girls in a world of lies living their truth for the first time.
Speaking of other magical girl anime.
Honorable Mention: Tropical Rouge Precure
This was the hardest cut from the proper list. TroPre is relegated to the HMs by a technicality; it’s not actually over yet, a quirk of the show’s odd schedule. (Precure series generally run for a full four cours over the course of an entire year, which makes accounting for them in otherwise neat and orderly lists like this one difficult. And yes I’m aware I said that only finished shows would be on the list. Sue me.) But that’s okay, because while Tropical Rouge Precure is great, it’s on this list less for what it actually is and more for the experiences I had while watching it. Its placement here is not due to its excellent sense of humor, its wonderful characters, or its at-times gorgeous animation, even though those are all very much merits the series has.
Unlike most other anime on this list, I did not–and do not–watch TroPre by myself. I watch it with a group of friends, every weekend, at around the same time. In this way, I get to have an experience that I very much would’ve liked to have had as a little girl; getting to talk about one of my favorite magical girl anime with some other girls my own age. A sense of lost youth is a common side effect of being transgender, and while never having gotten to chat about Sailor Moon with schoolmates is pretty low on the list of things I’m sad I missed out on, it is still on that list. So, as a balm for that particular little hole in my soul, I value the series a lot. We plan to continue this practice next year, so unless something goes horribly wrong, you can expect to see Delicious Party Precure somewhere on the list next year, too.
There have already been three magical girl anime somewhere in this article, and that’s the end of the honorable mentions. So you may well wonder; what’s at #1?
Well, a different sort of magical girl anime.
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Oh come on, you can’t actually besurprised.
#1: Wonder Egg Priority
I knew from the minute I started writing this list that Wonder Egg Priority would be my #1.
I tried to talk myself out of it more than once; to convince myself to put Heike Monogatari at the top of the list instead. I like that show and Wonder Eggalmost as much as each other. It would’ve been a compromise, but it was one I could’ve lived with.
But that’s the thing, right? It still would’ve been a compromise. And it’s my list, so there is no room for compromise. Wonder Egg Priority is my favorite anime of the year. Is it the best anime of the year? That’s a level of definitiveness that I don’t normally strive for when writing, even if this sort of format implicitly demands it. But if I’m the one being asked the question? Then yes, it absolutely fucking is.
Quite unlike my #1 pick for last year, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Wonder Egg Priority ends the year not as a widely beloved (or at least liked) exemplar of its staff’s prowess. Its place in the popular discourse is, and probably always will be, that of a great folly. A production train-crash that physically hurt the people working on it and squandered its potential and left its audience profoundly disappointed.
Which, of course, is a massive oversimplification. I try to at least pay some attention to what The Public At Large think about the anime I cover, if anything. But the fact remains that while the consensus will probably always be against WEP, and not totally without reason, there are people who still like it. I am one of them. There are dozens of us. I just happen to like it more than anything else that aired this year.
But of course you want to know why, which is a fair question, given what this website is and what I write about on it.
It would be fairly easy to fall back on its many technical merits. Wonder Egg Priority is an incredible-looking show, constantly toeing a line between appearing pristine as jeweled glass and wild as paint-buckets tossed at canvasses. If CloverWorks never make anything that has quite this level of visual pop ever again, it would not be a mark against them in any way. We could talk also about its soundtrack, an underappreciated aspect of the series that colors every moment of it in a way rare both this year specifically and in general. (Sonny Boy is its only real competition from 2021 in this aspect.)
If we wanted to really stretch our critic-brains, we could turn toward its thematic merits. To try to break down the series’ elaborate use of symbolism. Or perhaps its understanding of how gender roles define and oppress us, and how the modern world will beat any young girl it can’t control into submission, co-opt her for its own ends and twist her into hurting others like her. (See: Frill.) We could cite its deeply compelling four main characters and their own specific twists on this notion; a recovering hikikomori (Ai), a former idol with past sins on her mind (Rika), a mysterious wunderkind with a vanished sister (Neiru), and the series’ own high-strung, gender-nonconformant take on the obligatory “boyish one” (Momoe).
We could talk about how they smash personifications of pedophilia, misogyny, and transphobia to paint-colored smithereens and are pursued by anonymous maniacs called Haters through their imaginary worlds. We could talk about how their mysterious “benefactors” who promise they can restore the dead to life turn out to be little more than hucksters past their prime. We could talk, at length, about all of this.
We could even talk about this!
But frankly, I think “all of this” is, incredibly, at least to me, somewhat secondary. It is true that Wonder Egg Priorityhas all these merits, and I think they alone could be used as an argument for why the show is very good. And if they were all that Wonder Egg Priority did right, it would have earned a comfortable spot somewhere a few ranks back. Maybe between Sonny Boy and Heike Monogatari, as “merely” a show from 2021 that I’m confident I’ll still be thinking about in 2031. In truth, what is often cited as its greatest “objective flaw” (and oh, how I hate that phrase), is what locked me into holding it close to my heart forever, and why, if asked, I will say it’s among my all-time favorites.
Wonder Egg Priority doesn’t really have an ending.
Its story comes to an abrupt halt. Little is resolved, one of the main characters is missing. It’s a question mark. There is no “to be continued.”
This is, I realize, a stance held by very few. But endings are rarely what truly move me about stories. (Heike Monogatari is one of a quite small number of exceptions.) So on its own, WEP’s lack of an ending is no serious fault to me. Indeed, Wonder Egg Priority could have ended in any number of ways, from the sappy to the depressing, that would’ve given it some measure of critical and fan acclaim. If it had really nailed it, it could’ve sat alongside modern born-classics like Revue Starlight, hailed as a truly great example of what TV anime as a medium could achieve.
Instead, it dissolved into a cloud of smoke, seeping into our collective memories forever. It became an unanswerable question and an unsolvable puzzle; quiet as God and twice as unknowable. In doing so, it embodied the boiling haze of steaming existential confusion that is the modern zeitgeist better than almost any work of fiction I have ever experienced. Wonder Egg Priority left an axe-wound in the popular imagination. For that, I love and respect it immensely. In a way, it is this aspect that most closely ties Wonder Egg‘s form to its message. The girls’ struggle, ultimately, is against suicide personified. The Temptation of Death. The fact that they don’t explicitly “win” is contentious. But that’s the whole point; we don’t see how this story ends. Some small glimpses of incremental progress aside, we know nothing. Only that Ai marches forward, in spite of it all, to try again.
I have seen it argued that this is a relentlessly bleak ending, but both the reality of the subjects Wonder Egg speaks on, and its own stylistic flourishes make it fairly obvious that this is, in fact, hopeful. To live in the modern age is to live in a world filled with poison. To live on in spite of that, to get up every day, to snap your gaze toward the horizon and walk–as Ai does–is optimism. This world wants us dead. We live anyway.
Quite unlike last year’s #1, I do not expect that Wonder Egg Priority will ever be hailed as timeless or classic. I think if it is remembered at all, it will be as a mistake. The avalanche of public consensus is hard to fight against, particularly in the age of social media. But, as I have learned many times this year, I can be wrong. If I have ever been wrong about anything relating to this medium I’ve devoted so much of my time to writing about, I would like it to be this.
Because whenever I so much as think about Wonder Egg Priority, it comes back to me in an instant. The hyper-technicolor magical girl psycho-drama that no one asked for, but that we–or perhaps just some of us–sorely needed. Wonder Egg Priority might never gain any coveted status as a must-watch, as a classic of its medium or genre, as “one of the good anime,” or anything of the sort, but if it does not gain some kind of following, there is something truly wrong with this world indeed. We endure precisely because we know we’re not alone. It would be a horribly cruel thing for one of the best articulations of that idea ever put to the silver screen to be lost to obscurity.
Yet, in spite of everything I just said, I hold no delusion that I am the Wonder Egg Guru. I have spent the better part of a year attempting to reckon with the WEP Project’s first, last, and only output. To explain it succinctly, to square how much I love it with how strongly I oppose the worst parts of the industry that let it exist. But the fate’s-honest truth is that I am not much closer to “closing the book” on Wonder Egg Priority, for myself or anyone else, than I was when the TV broadcast ended in late March. It’s an enigma. I think at least some part of it always will be. And maybe it seems unfair to give the gold medal to an enigma. Maybe the #1 spot should be saved for something I can explain better. But it is my view that the role of the critic and commentator is not that of an interpreter. It is that of an honest witness. I could have sat here and thought myself into circles. I could have tried to justify putting something–anything–else at #1, but that’s not honest. And if I don’t have honesty, what do I have?
So, there it is. The most magical anime of 2021. The best anime of the year, so says me, is a series that draws a line from the strained psyche of four teenage girls to our own place, lost in the fog that smothers this haunted planet. Then, in a grand confrontational hammer-smash, it reveals that there is no line at all; these things are one in the same.
Now that’s a magic trick.
And, yes, that’s the list.
What did you think? As I mentioned last year, I try not to pay too much mind as to whether my picks will be “controversial” or not, but, well, last year I didn’t top the list with what is probably the most divisive show of the entire year. So tell me your thoughts! Did you love my picks? Were they utterly baffling to you? Maybe 50/50? What were your top five, top six, top whatever anime of 2021? I’d love to hear from you, so please do leave a comment here or on Twitter. If you’re one of the folks who was disappointed by my #1 (and more than one person explicitly said they would be, whoops!) then…well, I hope this will spurn you to write your own lists, at the very least. (I maintain that basically everyone’s life could be improved by running a blog.)
Incidentally, I rana very small little competition on my twitter account yesterday, and wanted to shout out @lilysokawaii, @pikestaff, and @theplatinumdove for correctly guessing my #1 pick. For the rest of y’all: better luck next year!
Tomorrow, an article will go up that briefly discusses my plans for 2022, as she fast approaches. I’ll see you then, anime fans.
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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.
