Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

It’s Out of Touch Thursday – How A “Lucky Star” Edit is Keeping Us Sane

“But I’m out of my head when you’re not around….”

How oh how did we get here? If you had asked me a year ago, I’d have told you that Lucky Star seemed like one of those shows whose cultural footprint was not destined to outlive the 2010s. That’s not a knock, plenty of great shows aren’t widely remembered a year after they come out, much less thirteen in the case of the seminal school life comedy. It wouldn’t have been that weird either, a lot of Lucky Star‘s humor is reference-heavy and was deliberately “dated” even when it was new. I can tell you with certainty that the series is the only reason I or any other otaku of my general age knows what the hell Timotei shampoo is.

So it seemed like plenty of great shows from the late 2000s and early 2010s, that Lucky Star would be a victim of the changing tides of the English-speaking anime fandom.

Then, at the start of this deeply unlucky year, something weird happened.

This video, an absolutely inexplicable but oddly inspired remix of the show’s frantic opening sequence, started making the rounds on tumblr. The clip makes a few edits to the OP–the footage is slightly slowed down and a transition is doctored out, but other than that, it’s downright bizarre how well the song chosen–“Out of Touch” by Hall & Oates–fits. Especially given that it has almost the polar opposite energy of the show’s actual opening theme, a goofy ode to school uniforms called “Motekke! Sailor Fuku!”

I am not a music critic (thank God), but the particular song choice strikes me as interesting. “Out of Touch” dates from 1984, 23 years prior to the Lucky Star anime’s premiere. Yet, in what is part of a fascinating ongoing deliberate cultural back-collapse, nowadays 1984 and 2007 feel like they might as well be equally long ago in the present moment. This is the same spirit of deliberate anachronism that inspired the vaporwave movement at the start of the decade.

But you may notice that the video itself was actually made a full two years ago, in 2018. So why has it blown up and become a full-fledged meme now? Well, the answer is likely multifaceted. Youtube’s algorithms increasingly like to put oddball things in peoples’ recommendations, for one thing, but I think the real heart of the matter might speak to a particular zeitgeist. For one, that the term “Out of Touch Thursdays” can be taken (by total coincidence) as an entendre about social distancing has been lost on precisely no one. (Do give @sampapaste here a follow.)

In a more general sense, in an era of lockdowns and stay-at-home orders, “timekeeping memes” have become a popular daily pastime. Both as a way to wring some humor out of the current situation and literally as a way to help keep the days of the week straight in a time when it can be kind of hard to do that. “Out of Touch Thursday” is probably the most popular of these, but there are many others.

Indeed, the meme’s popularity is such that it’s begun to take on something of a life of it’s own. There’s a dedicated twitter account, which has created something of a community unto itself around the meme.

Someone even went through the trouble of making an honest-to-god You’re The Man Now Dog page (which is a whole bygone phenomenon in of itself). Spinoffs include Out of Time Wednesday, featuring a pitched-up version of the song set to footage from elsewhere in the series.

And a personal favorite, this frankly inexplicable edit that features the core Generation 1 Decepticons from Transformers and is a full-on redraw. (Perhaps an attempt to get a cartoon that’s actually from the 80s involved? Who can say.)

I think what all this speaks to is that “Out of Touch Thursday” happens to hit a rare sweet spot. It’s an instant nostalgia (or fauxstalgia) hit, and it is completely innocuous–anyone who’s not a complete stick in the mud can enjoy the video at least occasionally. I mentioned vaporwave earlier, but the sort of forceful reclamation of “disposable” pop culture like synthpop and late aughts anime does really remind me of the subgenre. A declaration that the past belongs to us as much as the present that goes beyond just simple nostalgia. As we watch a lost spring tick on by, four anime girls doing a dance routine might be contributing more than we think to keeping us–funnily enough–in touch with each other, and ourselves.

Darlin’ darlin’ please!

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Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

Seasonal Check-in: Spring 2020

Gleipnir

Let it be said that if nothing else, Gleipnir is far better than it has any right to be. To strip away all the extraneous guff (and my own biases at least for the moment) what Gleipnir essentially is, at least right now, is a battle shonen with a much darker outlook than most. I would also argue that because of said darker outlook it thinks it’s about a hundred times more clever and insightful than it actually is in a way that is sort of insufferable, but a lot of people like this kind of thing so it’s not a huge surprise that Gleipnir is proving to be one of the season’s bigger shows.

Now, to be frank, I think the show is flat-out ugly both in its thematic core and occasionally visually. PINE JAM largely do their damnedest to bring this material to life, and, god help them, make Shuichi’s ridiculous fursuit look seem intimidating, but it only intermittently works and occasionally the production values slip, depriving the show of its biggest asset. When the visuals don’t connect what you have is a fundamentally wrongheaded show that is constantly working against itself in an effort to wring some kind of pathos out of its setting and characters in a way that frankly gives me secondhand embarrassment. Yet, that said, the most frustrating thing about Gleipnir is actually that it’s occasionally kind of stupidly cool.

Much of episode 5 centers around Shunichi and Clair fighting a huge skeleton dude with blade arms who kinda looks like Summoned Skull from Yu-Gi-Oh! I love everything about this character design. He looks like he just walked off a DeviantArt page. And holy hooray, he actually survives to the end of the episode, so we’ll probably get to see him in action a bit more. (The show is swiftly approaching the point where I dropped the manga, so who knows, maybe it becomes Actually Good at some point going forward. Honestly my recollection of Skeleton Boy here is pretty fuzzy, which makes me wonder if he doesn’t die in short order or something. I guess we’ll find out).

On another note entirely: I wish the show had the good sense to let Shuichi and Clair’s relationship breathe a little more. You can do a lot with the idea of two fundamentally broken people finding solace in each other, but the series’ approach to writing this is so clumsy that it actively gets in the way of the surprising amount of genuine chemistry they have. But, of course, if it had good sense it just wouldn’t be Gleipnir. Lastly, because I feel compelled to mention it somewhere. What is it with this show and a commitment to just being stepped-on-a-slug gross about once per episode? A few episodes ago we got some bafflingly grody empty visual metaphors. Last episode we were treated to the sight of the alien slurping down one of Clair’s hairs like a spaghetti noodle. This week we get This Fucking Thing.

Sigh, why did I pick this up instead of My Next Life As A Villainess again?

Sing “Yesterday” For Me

I have never been so purely flummoxed by enjoying an anime as I am with this one. You don’t really watch Yesterday it more just kind of….happens to you. It’s an odd show. Despite its very grounded premise (Serial Experiments Lain this is not), its portraits of lives gone sideways feels weird and surreal; like a Mountain Goats song or a Youtube video on a little-visited channel.

The most recent episode introduces a photographer character with a tendency to perhaps unwelcomely subject others to his strong opinions on the artform and a fondness for circular metaphors. Yet, I find Yesterday‘s literal plot to be kind of hazy and hard to recount, it’s almost the least interesting thing about the show. (It helps that the gist of it is simply a complicated love triangle.) Instead, I was struck by, how, when taking screencaps for this very column, I ended up (by pure happenstance) grabbing a picture of Haru in the exact same manner that said character photographed her at episode’s end, just facing the opposite direction. It is not often that an anime gets one’s head all a-tizzy about their role as a critic, but here I am.

Wave, Listen To Me!

Now this is a show with a few screws loose. Some four or five weeks ago I called it the most promising premiere of the entire season. That of course does not mean that it would actually live up to that promise. So far, of Wave‘s five episodes I’d say only the most recent (the fifth, at the time of this writing) really lives up to that first episode, which is a little disappointing but maybe a good sign that the show is finally starting to get somewhere.

The issue with Wave is that when it’s focusing on what it does best: being a vehicle for voice actress Riho Sugiyama‘s portrait of Minare, its protagonist, it’s great. This is a woman whose life is in shambles and maybe always has been, saved (well, “saved”. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves) from both existential despair and the setting-in realities of poverty by the magic of early-AM radio. Minare’s a very three-dimensional character, which is great, but does leave much of the rest of the cast feeling a mite flat by comparison and branches of the story that revolve around characters that aren’t Minare tend to feel kind of underdeveloped. In particular, the gaggle of men that exist as supporting characters (some of whom the show is trying to build as potential romance partners for Minare) are slight, and the chemistry between any of these pairings is pretty minimal.

By contrast, Mizuho, the other woman in the show with a large role, really seems to be hitting it off with our heroine. Especially given that the two are now rooming together. It’s probably too early to hope for a gay conclusion to this particular part of the story, but Minare’s cracks about the chef who owns the curry restaurant she works on and off at being gay do kind of come across as jokes from within the closet. Time will tell.

But the romance outlook being kind of dicey would be less of a problem if the show spent more time elsewhere. When Minare finally gets another chance to cut loose in episode 5 like she did in the premiere it instantly ratchets the show back up to a real contender. Sugiyama’s performance, giving Minare a convincing, blown-out, rambly bluster is something you just don’t see that often in anime, especially for women. This is without mentioning the bizarre radio drama she manages to adlib about half of on her own, involving a woman who murders her boyfriend and then gets abducted by aliens.

More of this, please.

Even here though the show tries to tie things back to relationships. The character of Matou, Minare’s greasy boss at the radio station, essentially openly fetishizes her voice, which makes Sugiyama’s performance a bit harder to appreciate, adding a totally unnecessary sleaze to the proceedings. The entire thing comes across as a bizarre attempt to make the audience complicit in a creeping “man vs. woman” streak within the show’s writing. One that it’s not difficult to interpret as simple misogyny if you’re feeling uncharitable. Of course, we do need to be open to the possibility that this is all being set up to be knocked down later, and indeed at the end of episode 5 Minare explicitly rejects romance at least for the time being.

On yet another hand, this episode introduces an actual murder subplot which, who knows if we’re ever going to actually follow up on that. This show is certainly going somewhere, but it’s still an open question as to where, exactly, that is.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Spring Anime Season First Impressions – Round 4

Mewkledreamy

One of the most purely un-available shows of the season, Mewkledreamy lacks an official pickup and has currently been subtitled by only a single person who’s made it clear that they’re probably not going to sub beyond the first episode. That said, even if it were more widely available, it’s a little hard to imagine recommending Mewkledreamy to many people.

The core premise of the 48-episode(!!) series is that the Queen of The Sky commits some humans to being “dream partners” by way of a magic stuffed animal. These partners can enter other peoples’ dreams and purge them of evil influence. If you’re looking for a more grokkable explanation, this is basically Precure with the caveat that all of the monsters and such exist mostly in the dream world. With only the stuffed animals (and their evil counterparts) being physically present in the real one.

What Mewkledreamy has going for it is some great expression comedy and a colorful art style. Working against those strengths though is the show’s general flow. It’s a hard thing to peg more concretely but the series’ first episode just feels oddly-constructed, not helped by the J.C. Staff‘s somewhat floaty animation. This does occasionally work in the show’s favor. When we see the first dreamworld in this first episode the sheer surreality of its setting (some kind of office/dance club embodying our main character’s mother’s dueling desires to be a responsible businesswoman and uh, get lit, apparently) is an asset, but elsewhere it just makes the show feel kind of off.

The earlier Precure comparison wasn’t solely on the basis of them both being kids’ shows, as that’s clearly what Mewkledreamy is trying to model itself after, down to the placement of the henshin sequences, design of the mascots, and an all-CGI dance routine ED. The key difference is that Pretty Cure generally has its core thematics sorted from the word “go”. Even the first episode of a given Precure season will clue you in as to what the writing team is going for. Mewkledreamy by contrast feels aimless so far, with even the requisite “buy the toy, kids!” portion of the transformation sequence feeling abrupt and peripheral.

It’s certainly possible that Mewkledreamy will find its footing a little later on, being four cours long, it has a lot more time to do so than most things I’ve been covering in the first impression roundups, but at this stage it really seems like that unless you literally are a Japanese middle schooler, there’s not a ton of reason to watch Mewkledreamy except perhaps idle curiosity.

First Impression Score: 6/10

Diary of Our Days at the Breakwater

“Virtues of rural livin'” stories really are the same everywhere, huh?

Snark aside, Diary of Our Days at The Breakwater (formerly and unofficially known as Afterschool Embankment Journal in the anglosphere) is a pretty simple little thing. Protagonist Hina is a city girl recently moved to the country, where she is roped by lanky redneck Yuuki into joining the Breakwater Club, a line- and rack-fishing club at the local high school.

To lay it all on the table, as someone who lived in a rural town for most of my life, I find stories that focus on romanticizing these locations a bit inherently offputting (it’s why I could never get into Non Non Biyori), so I will never claim to be entering into this particular sphere of subject matter unbiased.

My own life experience aside, though, the series is well-animated and well-composed. Fans of cult studio Doga Kobo (who it feels weird to call that, but it’s true) will find another entry in their oeuvre to enjoy here. To be sure, there’s a lot to like if you’re into slice of life comedies. Yuuki in particular is a great character, and the series even this early on radiates a genuine love for its setting and characters. A lot of the comedy though does lean heavily on Hina getting freaked out by “country folk stuff”, especially in relation to fishing as you might expect given the show’s premise. If you find that offputting, you’re probably better off getting your seasonal dose of this genre elsewhere.

There’s honestly not much else to say about this one. You’ll figure out pretty quick if it’s your thing or not.

First Impression Score: Fishing/10

Princess Connect! Re:Dive

Princess Connect! Re:Dive is a show brave enough to ask the simple question; what if the chosen one sent to save your generic fantasy world was a complete idiot? No no, dumber than that. No, dumber still. There you go.

Princess Connect! is based on a mobage but I don’t know offhand if the series inherits much of that game’s tone. Disguising itself as an impossibly-generic straight fantasy anime for about 60 seconds, Princess Connect! reveals its hand pretty early. The series has pretty much exactly one trick. It will set up a situation that seems like it should be a plot beat in a fantasy series, or have some sense of gravitas, and then let the air out of it by having everyone be, to a man, unbelievably stupid.

Much of the first episode takes place in a typical RPG-style “starter town”. The banner image is from our hero, Yuuki, trying to eat a coin. This is the show’s sole trick, but damn if I didn’t have to stifle laughter every single time it happened. Comedic fantasy anime are nothing new (even relatively recently most people are at least aware of Konosuba), but this is a good one. The show’s sheer stupidity manages to leverage its relatively mediocre visual presentation as something of an asset–I think it would actually be less funny if it looked better. Even later in the episode when a surprisingly well-done fight scene breaks out, it’s undercut by several deliberate matches to less-well-animated cuts for comedic effect.

It is admittedly hard to imagine that this will still be funny twelve weeks from now, but who knows? Perhaps it has some other tricks up its sleeve or maybe it’ll simply keep setting up situations to pull the rug out from under. Either way, if you’re a fan of the truly dumb, this is one to check out.

First Impression Score: 7/10

Shironeko Project Zero Chronicle

Astoundingly artless JRPG adaptation by chronically low-ambition studio Project no. 9. Writing that makes Sword Art Online look profound locks blades with uninspired art direction, mediocre animation, and a lame, hollow, plot that is stuffed with cliches that were hoary 30 years ago. The first episode’s meager positives: two or three (not an exaggeration) competent cuts done by animators who will hopefully find a better studio to work at some day soon, some okay character designs, the writing being so bad that it’s sometimes unintentionally comedic, are vastly outweighed by the general sloggishness of the entire affair. If you want to watch a fantasy shonen this season watch Tower of God, if you want to watch a not-very-ambitious fantasy shonen this season watch Princess Connect or Shachibato. We have only so many years on this planet of ours, and there are not enough to waste time on something this boringly meritless.

First Impression Score: 2/10

Shadowverse

People have been riffing on Yu-Gi-Oh! since it was new, and Shadowverse is no exception. This particular entry in the “card game battle shonen” subgenre is an adaptation of the digital card game of the same name (which, just to point it out, yours truly is in fact a casual player of). Honestly, if you’ve seen any of these shows you’ve got a decent idea of what to expect here. Kid with a funky haircut defeats bullies and villains in card games with the power of friendship and/or a magical artefact of great power. Fans hoping for a straight adaptation of the game’s story mode might be disappointed, but it’s hard to imagine such an adaptation doing much justice to that bundle of oddness anyway.

The animation is solid and fun enough to make up for most of the cliche in the writing, and it’s great to see some beloved cards in animated format for the first time. Although it’s not a great sign that our token girl cast member gets shafted already in the first episode in order to play up the MC’s talents by comparison. Still, this is another one where you’ll know pretty quick if you’re in the target audience, it’s worth checking out if you like this kind of thing or are a fan of the game.

First Impression Score: 7/10

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Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Spring Anime Season First Impressions – Round 3

Shachibato! President, It’s Time for Battle!

I’m not one to accuse shows of going through the motions, but it feels fair to say that Shachibato! is aiming pretty much exclusively for one crowd–people who like the mobile game it’s an adaptation of–and nobody else. The ultratypical fantasy series is spiced up with the minor twist that the main character is the president of an adventurer’s guild rather than a hero archetype, and thus has to contend with all manner of humdrum business stuff as well as the usual monsters and mages.

To be honest, what this series mostly has going for it are some neat character designs, high production values, and a certain ease-of-watching. If that sounds like faint praise that’s because it kind of is. I can’t imagine anyone following twelve weeks of this, despite a perfectly inoffensive and pleasant first episode that looks nice and hits its plot beats just fine. The main thing I ended up walking away from Shachibato!‘s first episode thinking was that one of the characters–Akari–looks a lot like Hatsune Miku. It did also make me want to check out the mobile game, so it succeeds as an ad, at the very least. Will the series greatly improve and stage a come-from-behind takeover as one of the best anime of the season? Well, anything’s possible, but it doesn’t seem terribly likely, let’s put it that way.

First Impression Score: Aquamarine Twintails / 10

Wave, Listen To Me!

In an already ridiculously strong season, Wave, Listen To Me! might have the most singular premiere of anything currently airing. Our main character; Minare, an office worker with a drinking problem and the worst-best case of The Rants you’ve heard this side of a pompous rockstar concert intermission. A chance meeting at a bar with a scuzzy radio producer prompts an angry mid-workshift drive to the radio station the next day as Minare finds her bar ramblings being used as cheap airwave drama fodder. Then, our heroine is unceremoniously dropped into the role of amateur-hour radio DJ.

Lead actress Riho Sugiyama talks like a waterfall runs. Insanely, this is only her second main-cast role ever following a run in Franken Family back in 2018. She absolutely makes the show, and her performance as Minare is probably the best single character performance of the season so far.

The series itself is spellbinding, almost entirely because of that performance. Minare is clearly a trainwreck of a person and I’m certain the show will delve deeper into the how’s and why’s later on, but even at this early juncture she’s just fascinating. It’s easy to speak of “realistic” or “grounded” character writing, but Minare is intriguing specifically because she’s so bombastic and rambly. All this is tied together with a distinct look and, fittingly for something about radio, incredible sound design. I don’t think it’s absurd to say that this the most interesting thing airing right now. Watch this.

First Impressions Score: 10/10

Gleipnir

Sigh.

Gleipnir is another manga adaptation, this one coming to us courtesy of studio PINE JAM. I can’t in good faith say I went into Gleipnir’s premiere unbiased. To the casual observer it might seem like a good (maybe even great) first episode of a solid action anime. Unfortunately, I’m familiar with the manga, which I’m on record as thinking is pretty awful. The good news here is that the production values are uncommonly high for a seinen adaptation and the animation and soundtracking work are good throughout the episode (if occasionally bizarre, listen to whatever the hell plays as BGM when Claire is getting changed, for instance). So if you are a fan of the manga, this is going to be a high point of the season for you, certainly.

The real issue with Gleipnir is its scuzzy writing, which shows through even at this early stage. Mostly in the first episode this deals with the treatment of the female lead–the 15-year-old Claire Aoki–as some kind of sexpot femme fatale, but it gets worse in widely varied ways later on. Even if you’re unbothered by that kind of thing on a moral level, it’s incredibly hokey. Male protagonist Suichi Kagaya doesn’t fare much better, being the same kind of self-loathing pseudo-nice guy that stars in the vast majority of the sort of manga that the original series is a part of, squandering his singularly weird superpower of transforming into a Five Nights At Freddy’s reject. It’s a tired archetype.

I can’t in good conscience score the episode too low because of said production strengths, but this isn’t one I can recommend to most people. At best, if you’re the same sort of animasochist I occasionally am, it’s shaping up to be a decent hatewatch to riff on with friends.

First Impression Score: 5/10

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Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Spring Anime Season First Impressions – Round 2

LISTENERS

Self-empowerment parable through the medium of superpowered CGI rock n’ roll-robots. You’ve heard this story before even if you didn’t realize it–the folks behind Listeners are surely familiar with the seminal FLCL–but wearing its influences on its sleeve is no knock. Call Listeners a “high variance” seasonal, this one could end up being the best of the season or it could putter out into the same disappointment pit that Darling in the FranXX fell into. Perhaps most likely is that it could stay the course and turn out to be Just Solid. It’s hard to say right now.

The show’s got a fair bit going for it; a strong aesthetic that welds a 2000s-era look (I’ve seen Eureka Seven brought up as a point of comparison and I do see it) to clear inspirations from classic rock album art, and a good command of what differentiates the retro from the merely dated. On the less positive side, the animation is inconsistent and there are some very unwelcome sex jokes in the first half of the first episode. Listeners is a “who knows” right now, but consider keeping your eye on it if you’re the gambling type. Speaking personally, I’m also a sucker for anything whose first episode ends with its protagonists having to flee from their hometown (well, one of theirs’ hometown, it’s complicated) on a train. We’ll see where it goes.

First Impression Score: 6/10

Gal & Dinosaur

One of the season’s true oddballs, Gal is ostensibly an adaptation of the manga of the same name, a comedic slice-of-life series about a gyaru and her unexpected new roommate, a blue dinosaur. While it does directly adapt the source material the approach is….eclectic, to say the least. This all makes more sense if you consider the director here–Jun Aoki, of Pop Team Epic fame.

This isn’t to oversimplify, as the two shows are far from identical. Even the animated front half has a slow, loping pace that flows like not much else airing right now, and very differently from the hyperfrantic PTE. The second half of the series, which is in live action and reprises some of the same material, is more in line with what Aoki converts from Pop Team Epic will be expecting. The altered context and different medium changes the way some of the gags land and it’s interesting to compare and contrast the two. Of course, even if you’re not one for that kind of thing, it’s hard to deny the simple comedy appeal of airhorns.

I suspect whether you prefer the more traditionally adaptive first half or the weirder, more experimental second will come down to how big a fan you were of the manga. Personally, I was never huge on the Pop Team Epic adaptation (as far as bizarre slapstick anime I prefer Teekyuu and the brain-melting Ai Mai Mi!), so I know my preference, but both halves excel at what they’re trying to do. It’s hardly “essential TV”, but this is the kind of thing that if you’re part of the intended audience, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly. Definitely one to at least give a cursory watch to see if it’s Your Thing or not.

First Impression Score: 7/10

Sing “Yesterday” For Me

Straight-n-true adaptation of a classic drama manga makes its way to television. The original manga dates way back to 1997, and some of the plot beats here make that pretty obvious even if the setting didn’t (and it does). Yet, despite going into this being pretty sure I wouldn’t like it, I found myself surprisingly compelled by the cast of castaways that are Sing “Yesterday” For Me‘s characters. To a one, they’re burnt-out young adults ranging from a high school dropout to a high school teacher to our main character, a disaffected convenience store worker and self-described “loser”.

This is stuff that’s fairly well-tread ground for the genre and it wasn’t exactly revolutionary in ’97 either. Yet, somehow, I feel more of a beating heart under this show than I do many similar titles, perhaps it’s just the age range of the cast, perhaps it’s that even in the first episode said cast picks at and openly questions the value of stories like this in the first place. Maybe I’m just kind of amazed that there was a confession in the first episode of something based on a romance manga. Who knows? Yesterday is one to keep your eyes on. Those familiar with the original will have more concrete opinions, but even for someone like me who isn’t, the possible ceiling for this series seems very, very high.

First Impression Score: 8/10

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Spring Anime Season First Impressions – Round 1

The first few weeks of an anime season are always the most exciting to me. You get to see how the short little clips and promo art pieces of preview materials translate into actual, full-length episodes. So to share that joy, I’ve decided I’m going to pen short little thoughtpieces (or maybe not-so-short in some cases, who knows) on each show I’m checking out this season. I’ll be doing these at basically arbitrary points, whenever I have enough shows under my belt to make a post of decent length.

BRAND NEW ANIMAL

This is the one, if you’re curious. Technically, I’ve been following BNA for two weeks now. The first six episodes were unceremoniously dump-trucked onto Netflix some time back and Little Witch Academia standbys Asenshi.moe have been subbing them at a roughly weekly pace, so I’ve only seen two of those episodes thusfar, but what I’ve seen puts it at the top as far as promising shows for this season.

I’ve loved TRIGGER basically since the original LWA movie dropped so this will probably surprise nobody, but among their big ticket directors I’ve always felt that Yoh Yoshinari was among the most underrated. His style’s in full force here, but the story being told has much higher stakes than the relatively school life genre-indebted LWA. Michiru (our protagonist) has already questionably-legally immigrated to a city full of beastmen, had her wallet stolen on her first day there, and been inadvertently involved in busting up organized crime. God knows what else is in store for the poor tanuki.

The show’s gearing up to tackle some pretty big ideas, and it’s entirely possible that it’ll fumble the ball there, but the visual chops can’t be denied, and given some surprisingly subtle character design decisions (making our Big Badass Cop archetype a social worker instead, for instance) it might have a more nuanced approach than some might assume. This is some great stuff, folks. Keep your eye on Asenshi’s uploads.

First impression rating: 9/10

TAMAYOMI: The Baseball Girls

On a totally different note, we have this. Tamayomi is, at least so far, a nearly perfectly archetypal slice of school life-meets-sports anime. It’s almost comically orthodox for this particular genre intersection, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s bad, necessarily. In what I assume is a strength inherited from the manga it’s adapted from, the show has a warm inner glow that goes beyond mere cuteness (although there’s that, too). Add a little dollop of some pretty on-the-nose lesbian subtext–a pair of twins are fawning over protagonist Yomi’s pitcher hand before the ten minute mark–and you’ve got a perfectly good little anime.

I will say, the visual work is shaky at the best of times, and in some cuts the characters are downright badly-drawn, with inking errors like mismatched eyeshadow thickness and such, which does undercut some portion of its charm. My hope is that this is the result of either the current global unpleasantness, the fact that the first episode had to be done a month ahead of schedule for a preview screening, or both. Otherwise, while it’s certainly the least essential of the four shows here, it’s perfectly good and worth watching if you like this kind of thing.

First Impression Rating: 6/10

Kakushigoto

From the mind of Zetsubou-sensei creator Kouji Kumeta comes an oddball comedy about a dad who draws a dirty comedy manga and his quest to keep his beloved young daughter from ever learning that fact. This one took me slightly by surprise, as I wasn’t originally aware of Kumeta’s involvement and was expecting more of a heartstring-tugging father/daughter bonding type of story. What it actually is is great too, though, and as someone who mostly passed over Zetsubou-sensei in its popular heyday I was a bit surprised to find myself grokking the sense of humor here as quickly as I did. They don’t quite operate on the exact same wavelength, but this is one fans of stuff like Nichijou and Daily Lives of High School Boys should keep an eye on. Even if it’s not quite that frantic. This is definitely the best comedy of the season so far, with a gag late in the episode about how Starbucks orders sound like magic spells being my favorite.

If I do have a complaint it’s about the odd coding of Mario, the extremely campy owner of a fashion boutique the main character works near, but he’s not onscreen enough for it to be a major strike against the series yet.

First Impression Rating: 8/10

Tower of God

Roughly once a season, some huge shonen series drops that seemingly everyone and his grandmother watches. I’m only rarely interested in these shows (by and large, despite being a known fan of gaudy fight scenes and overdesigned characters, it isn’t my genre) and have a bad habit of thinking “oh this is the one” about once a year and then dropping it four episodes in. It’s too early to say if Tower of God will be the thing that breaks that trend, but it just might be. This one’s got an interesting IP history, too, being an adaptation of a South Korean web-manhua that’s been running since the beginning of the last decade. The original comic was among the first such properties to ever get an official English translation, and Crunchyroll of all folks are partly bankrolling the anime.

As for the show itself? Dirt-simple story (“girl leaves boy, boy goes on epic adventure to find girl”) meets lavish fantasy worldbuilding. There’s not a lot out there that’s like this, in spite of its simple building blocks, and it tickled a part of my brain that I don’t think has been buzzed since I watched MÄR on Toonami as a kid. Despite the stock protagonist archetype that male lead 25th Bam (yes, that is his name) falls into, the first episode was quite engaging, involving our hero having to figure out how to crack open a black orb in a giant water tank while being hounded by a sea monster. Also introduced here is Ha Yuri Jahad (seen up there in the header picture) who I took an immediate liking to. There’s just something charming about seeing the “rebellious princess” archetype played perfectly straight in 2020 and with a character with such a great design, too. I was also interested by the mysterious, rabbit-like Headon, who seems to be the titular Tower’s caretaker.

I don’t need to tell anyone to watch ToG–you’ll know pretty much right away if it’s your bag or not–but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. If every episode is this interesting this might be the first shonen series in some time that I actually finish.

First Impression Rating: 7/10

So that’s it for Round 1 of the Spring Anime Season impressions. Everything I’ve seen so far this season is at least solid, and I think all four of these shows have the potential to get even better. This is the most excited I’ve been going into a fresh season in some time, and we haven’t even gotten to some of the real heavy hitters yet (in particular, a certain beloved romcom from last year returns next Friday), so I’m thrilled. What about you? How’s your season looking so far?

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Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 9

Catching up was not as big an issue as I thought it’d be. However, this shorter length is probably going to be the norm from here on out rather than the exception. We’ll see what the future holds, though.

This is another simple character study episode. This time covering Hinata and her attempts to take her two friends to a photoshoot boutique at a mall (not something that really exists in the US but my understanding is that they’re not rare in Japan). Hinata continues her reign as the show’s at least-semi-intentional neurodivergence rep. The trip goes wrong a few times because of Hinata attempting to jump the gun on things–something very familiar to anyone with ADHD or the like. She even tries to take on this week’s Megapathogerm all on her own, which doesn’t work out for her. Though, we do get another great fight scene out of the whole ordeal.

Hinata’s a great character in general and probably my favorite of the three leads so far this season. Intentional-ness of the representation aside, she’s broadly relatable to anyone whose short attention span has ever gotten them in trouble, and as a woman who was a chronic C student in grade school, I feel it. I also really like whoever in the writer’s room is playing cupid between her and Nodoka, because they really poured it on this week.

Absolutely superb.

Puppy love or not being its own thing, this is a great episode and showcases some positive character development for Hinata, whose arc continues to be the one I’m most excited about. Behold our Shot of The Week, a Very Surprised Cure Sparkle.

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Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 8 Mini

Sorry for the short article. Some stuff has come up and to put it plain I’m going to be an episode behind for a while. Here’s a small writeup about episode 8 in the meantime.

The premise of episode 8 is extremely simple. Chiyu, who is her school’s star hi-jump athlete, suddenly has a case of the cantdoits and finds herself unable to perform to her usual standard. The episode is in most respects a brief study of the character. There’s lots of great moments showcasing the trio’s friendship here, too, but Chiyu is the main star. The best bit is when we learn why she took up jumping in the first place. A beachside trip as a child lead to a fascination with the sea and sky and how they can meld together into a seemingly infinite blue. (Which leads to our Shot of The Week for episode 8). This sort of visual poetry isn’t rare in Pretty Cure, but it’s worth appreciating when it happens.

There’s a fight scene in this episode too, of course. It’s quite short, but well-done and enjoyable. It’s perhaps predictable that Chiyu’s jumps end up also letting her finish off the Pathogerm, but predictable isn’t necessarily bad. Despite the abundance of terrific Hinata faces in this episode (and a good Chiyu face too!), that shot up there is the best of the lot.

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Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 7

This is probably the weirdest circumstance I’ve ever started one of these posts under. As I type this it’s 1AM during week one of what is likely to be a weeks- to months-long lockdown of most places and people in my residential state of Illinois because of the COVID outbreak. I contemplated not updating the blog for a while given Healin’ Good Precure‘s subject matter. Yet, I ultimately thought that doing as much as I can to distract both myself and everyone else from the whole Thing going on outside is probably for the better.

That’s the last I’ve got to say on the subject. Let’s get to the mahous.

This is basically a “funny” episode, and the gag it runs on is a fairly simple one. We get introduced to a b-character here by the name of Masuko, the president and sole member of our heroines’ high school’s newspaper club. He introduces himself and slaps together some awful portmanteaus (yes, if you’re wondering, Chiyu does crack up at this)

He has, as it turns out, come to the exact wrong conclusion about Nodoka. That is to say, he accuses her of somehow being the person summoning the Megapathogerms.

Much of the episode details his antics tailing Nodoka and our heroines’ attempts to thwart him. He even hides in a painting at one point, which, this scene just begs the question of why exactly there’s a portrait of George Washington in a Japanese school, but perhaps some questions are riddles for future generations.

As far as distracting him; Chiyu casually breaks a prefectural high-jump record and Hinata calls his newspaper lame and tries to get him to turn it into a fashion magazine. Everyone makes great use of their talents, one could say.

Eventually he apologizes. Explaining his love for journalism with a cute little anecdote about spiderwebs after a fresh rain. It’s cute, and Nodoka is her soft and caring self as always.

Beyond that there’s not a ton else to this episode. Though our journalist boy up there does hilariously try to interview a Megapathogerm.

The fight at the end is fairly peripheral, if solid.

Amusingly, at the end of it all, while Masuko does see the Precures in action and acknowledges that he made a mistake in assuming Nodoka was connected to the Pathogerms, he doesn’t actually put 2 and 2 together to figure out that our three leads are the Precure themselves. On the one hand; of course he doesn’t, but it’s still very silly.

Our shot of the week is this, one of the episode’s last, and a veritable buffet of good faces.

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Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 6

This week’s episode is interesting. It focuses not on any individual character, but on several. We learn a bit more about Latte (the dog princess and our seasonal mascot), Nodoka’s mother, and Nodoka herself. As a small note before we get started, the regular opening this week is replaced with footage from the upcoming Precure Miracle Leap movie! So be wary if you don’t want to be spoiled!

As for the episode itself; we firstly learn that Nodoka’s mother quit her job when Nodoka was ill. I happen to like this extra little bit of detail; fleshing out Nodoka’s illness and the period of her life that was defined by it makes it feel more like an authentic part of the character as opposed to just a tacked-on element. Nodoka’s mother, as it turns out, was a delivery driver (a job during which she met Nodoka’s father). Seemingly what’s actually meant by this is that she delivers produce by truck, but the ambiguity here does indeed invite you to imagine a young Japanese bachelor falling for his Uber driver.

Importantly though, the show does go out of its way to portray this as a respectable job that people find interesting, which is good! It’s a nice contrast to how such work tends to be treated in American media in the rare instance it’s brought up at all (namely, as a punchline).

A good amount of the episode’s first half is actually spent with Latte and the other mascot animals. Nodoka’s mom was her primary caretaker when the young Precure was at school, and now that she’s working again the dog princess finds herself lonesome at home. This particular plot thread is briskly resolved by the mascots resolving to look out for her more, missing her mother Queen Teatine (that’s the dog in the dress in the first episode if you’ve forgotten), as she does.

Daruizen is this episode’s baddie, and sics an animated strawberry patch on Nodoka’s mom and a local farmer while the former is making a delivery. Nodoka’s illness comes up again here, as when the Precure rush to the strawberry farm Nodoka struggles a bit to keep up. What drives her forward is the knowledge that her mom’s in danger of course, and who could blame her? Nodoka really does seem to have enviably great parents.

Daruizen also sets up what is probably the (unintentionally?) funniest moment of the episode. The Pretty Cure franchise occasionally has comedic timing that many actual comedy anime would kill for.

You fuckin’ got him, dude.

Of course, the Precure soon arrive to put a stop to all this. Daruizen seems to take a particular interest in Nodoka/Cure Grace herself. Initially he derides her as weak while she’s immobolized by some of the corruptive gunk that this week’s megapathogerm generates, and in fact smears some of it on her face, which is honestly just kinda nasty. Then, when she bounces back, seems rather curious about her apparent strength before teleporting away (as Precure villains do).

This is pretty much the end of the episode. The strawberry elemental (yeah) that the Pathogerm infected gives our girls an Element Bottle, presumably closely based on a new collectible doodad of some sort being rolled out in real life, but this is more amusing than anything.

Presumably something will happen once our girls get all nine. My personal bet is on either some kind of augment to their abilities or on a slightly more outside chance; a fourth Precure for the team.

There’s also a small pair of mirrored asides where Nodoka’s mom thanks Chiyu and Hinata for befriending her daughter and, in the Healing Garden, Queen Teatine thinks about the wonderful friends Latte must’ve made. It’s cute, and we also get another shot of that mysterious statue-fied woman down there.

Is this ultimately a filler episode? Yeah, kind of, in that it has little to do with the show’s overall narrative through-line, but it’s the good kind. We learn a little more about our characters and their lives. Solid stuff all around.

This week’s shot of the week is this, the result of me desperately trying to catch the spirit of a nice cut that happens during this episode’s fight sequence. The cut itself is simply too short to capture it this way, but I did get this, which looks like some kind of meme-in-the-making. I kinda can’t stop laughing at it.

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