This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Josh. Thank you for your support.
This one’s tough, folks.
Surveying Patlabor: The Movie, now that I’ve finished it—and doing so in isolation, watching the slightly older Patlabor OVAs was not part of this commission, and I’m assured that they’re not necessarily to properly appreciate this film—feels like taking in a kingdom divided. On the one hand; I really do get why people love this movie. It is absolutely gorgeous, and when a certain kind of anime fan talks about the unimpeachable visual panache of 80s anime, how nothing looks “like that” anymore, it is stuff like this that they’re referring to. Watercolor-and-smoke sunsets, gleaming white structures that look like bleached Rubik’s cubes, piles of twisted metal and gunsmoke. Tokyo itself a dreamlike industrial purgatory. It feels so real you can practically smell the asphalt of the roads.
On the other hand…well, the property is called Mobile Police Patlabor. There is a bit of an elephant in this particular room, isn’t there? I put this one into what’s now a small pile of classic anime movies next to Paprika and the like. I love the visuals, I wish the thematics were better. There is no polite way to say this; this film is pretty brazen police apologia. I will avoid the question of whether it qualifies for the neologism “copaganda”, as that term greatly postdates the film and some would argue it’s a uniquely American phenomenon. But there is no getting around that Patlabor: The Movie follows a sci-fi twist on a fairly conventional “rogue hero cop (or in this case, a few of them) busts open a coverup” plot. It is a genuinely interesting and even enjoyable take on that format, and I would not accuse it of completely uncritical lionization, but we need to call this what it is. We are dealing with a piece of media about cops, and future or no, and that comes with some baggage.
But, let’s set that aside for now. It is fair to argue that not every piece of media ever made is obliged to be didactic, so let’s at least attempt to take Patlabor on its own terms.
The plot is thus; it is the then-future, now an alternate present, and mecha called Labors permeate everyday life. They are used as tools of the workforce, the military, and of course, illegally by the criminal element. It follows logically—at least, given a society broadly similar to our own—that they are, then, employed by law enforcement as well. Excepting a mysterious, alluring hallucination that forms the pre-credits act of the film where a man leaps off of an iron girder into the sea, we open on a land reclamation plot. Tokyo Bay itself is being drained away and dotted with artificial islands. (Shockingly, stopping whoever’s responsible from draining Tokyo Bay is not the plot of the movie.) The largest of these, a facility called the Ark, is the aforementioned bleached Rubik’s cube, a latticework of metal and computerstuff that maintains, repairs, and upgrades Labors. It is also home to a branch of the Tokyo Police Department, who serve as our protagonists. Over the film’s opening act it becomes clear that someone has slipped something sinister into a recent operating system upgrade for the Labors—everybody’s, not just the Tokyo PD’s—and it becomes the job of these cops (SV2, as the division is called), mostly but not exclusively our main protagonist Asuma Shinohara (Toshio Furukawa), to figure out what, precisely, is going on, and how to stop it.
As a combination near-future story of computer technology gone awry / police procedural, Patlabor: The Movie is pretty damn compelling. Asuma doesn’t have to carry the entire thing himself, as he’s backed up by a phalanx of strong supporting characters, my favorite of whom is the division captain Kiichi Gotou (Ryuusuke Oobayashi), who gets invested enough in the investigation that he threatens to lose himself in it. (One gets the sense that he appreciates the challenge. The disappointment is nearly audible in his voice when it turns out that Hoba E’ichi, the mastermind behind the entire plot, is already dead.)
The actual plotting is solid throughout as well. Hoba is a mysterious villain, largely absent from the actual narrative who nonetheless provides a compelling and sinister foil for our protagonists. Even earlier on, before the Hoba narrative entirely forms, there are interesting moments and setpieces, and the film never drags by any means. There are a number of large and small details throughout which provide a bit of extra gristle to chew on, as well. For example: the man in charge of Labor repairs aboard the Ark is a well-meaning but compromised sort who began his career as a truck repairman for the occupying Allied forces in the wake of WWII. We should also mention the detectives who hunt Hoba throughout the film, often engaging dialogue that stacks up into a dense membrane of allusions and concepts, including heaps of Biblical allusion, as these portions of Patlabor provide an almost dreamlike thread that weaves some of the otherwise disparate parts of the film together.
By the film’s climactic act, where Asuma and co. have heroically figured out the exact mechanism for Hoba’s nefarious system upgrade scheme, we move into a full-on assault for the action-packed finale. SV2 defeat the Labors, which go autonomously rogue as part of Hoba’s plans, and the already-dead programmer’s evil plot is foiled. It’s entertaining stuff.
Enough so that I feel like a bit of a killjoy that I can’t get over the fact that this thing is about cops heroically triumphing against all odds in the face of a coverup, plus general incompetence from other civil agencies.
In fact, Patlabor seems to say that cops don’t have enough leeway. In spite of an early scene where pigheaded bumbler Isao Oota (Michihiro Ikemizu) causes a ton of collateral damage by recklessly shooting off a freeze ray, there’s really not much in the way of even token criticism of the methods here, implicit or explicit. (And, it should be said, the fact that here-minor character Kanuka Clancy [You Inoue] is on loan from the NYPD feels weirdly prescient.) I have heard Patlabor previously described as a satire, and maybe that is true for the TV series or some other incarnation of the franchise, but it’s certainly not the case here. SV2 are presented in a fairly straightforward manner as, perhaps, flawed human beings, but still ones with the public’s best interests at heart.
Now, one might argue that the film really has no obligation to examine problems in policing. Maybe that is, in some abstract sense, true, and I cannot claim to have the full social context surrounding the film’s original release in late-80s Japan. But I do know that today, in 2023, it mostly just leaves me mildly disappointed. Even at the original time and place, it is difficult to imagine a different way to read what Patlabor puts down here. Maybe that is a failure of imagination on my part, but sitting here several days after I’ve finished the film and make some final touches on this review, I can’t come up with a more charitable read on the film, sans maybe as a goldmine for some truly haunting screencaps.
So don’t get me wrong, the Patlabor movie is not a bad film by any means, especially when taken as a film. But its thematic core leaves a lot to be desired, and while its craftsmanship and technical artistic value are undeniable, sometimes one does expect a little more than that.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand 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.
Sometimes, my job is a bit hard. Not because writing about anime is physically difficult or anything, but because sometimes it’s hard to articulate when something manages to tap into a pure, raw, and very basic emotion. I can hardly contain my kiddish giddiness. On the one hand, what is there to say? New year, new Precure season. This makes Jane happy; we’ve been here before. On the other, this is possibly the strongest Pretty Cure premiere I’ve ever personally been here for. 24 minutes of high-flying, rollicking action, a white-hot streak cut through the blazing blue sky.
Soaring Sky! Pretty Cure, the first entry in the series to use the full “Pretty Cure” title instead of the shorter “Precure” in English since the original Pretty Cure, opens with our heroine, Sora Harewataaru (Akira Sekine) atop a giant, talking bird, arriving in a floating sky city for some reason or another just as—wouldn’t you know it?—an evil pig man shows up to kidnap the local king’s daughter.
Sora, as we very quickly find out, is not the sort of person to simply sit idly by and let that happen without comment. She rushes headlong into trouble, pulling off a pretty damn impressive little bit of parkour a full 15 show-minutes before she ever gets her powers.
She tries to part this villain from his ill-gotten gain and, whoops, falls into the portals he uses to teleport around. Soon, she finds herself falling out of the sky over a strange city that is wholly unfamiliar to her, the infant princess Ellee (Aoi Koga, yes, they got Kaguya to voice the baby) in hand, a literal bolt from the blue.
That city would be pretty familiar to anyone reading this. Because where she ends up is Earth. Yes, the latest Pretty Cure series is a reverse isekai. And it slaps.
You know the drill if you’re even passingly familiar with this franchise, but how this all goes down might surprise some. Sora joins the rarefied tier of Pretty Cure protagonists who have done a fair bit of heroism even before getting their magic, and the sheer determination on display here, even through Sora’s obvious jitters at facing down an opponent who is, with her not yet powered, way above her level. When she actually gets those powers, via Ellee (the baby princess is this season’s fairy, you see), she stomps the monster that our pig friend summons flat in only a few minutes. To top it off, her transformation sequence is one of the most elaborate that the franchise has ever produced, complete with an image stage—an imaginary ‘platform’ on which the transformation takes place—that itself shifts and changes as she does.
All of this serves to make Sora seem incredibly cool, on a very elemental, hard-to-quantify level. Her personality has layers even this early on, and the little pocket diary she keeps on her, and the motivational doodles within, imply a level of deliberate building of her own confidence. This is someone who is earning her reputation as a hero, from episode 1, minute 1. She has a cape. What else could I possibly tell you? Of course this character is the first blue lead Pretty Cure. How could she not be? There’s no way someone with this big of a personality was ever going to settle for second banana.
Per the end of the episode, Sora, now Cure Sky, is trapped on Earth with no way to return herself or Ellee home, providing an obvious (and promising!) driver for the series’ first main storyline. Time will tell precisely how co-lead Mashiro Nijigaoka (Ai Kakuma) factors in, although even this early on she’s already an effective foil for Sora. The future is bright for this one, there’s nothing more to say.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand 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.
Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.
Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
In general, this season has been full of quiet surprises. Ippon! Again, a series about a girls’ judo team, is among the quietest. Aside from the trivium that it is the first TV anime from relatively new studio Bakken Record, almost no one seems to be talking about this thing. Which is a shame, because I think it’s quite good overall, and it’s powering through the woes of being produced by a minor studio in the midst of possibly the worst phase yet of the production bubble very well. That is to say; it looks good most of the time, too.
But I wanted to zone in on just one aspect of that for this small article, because it’s not something I’ve seen discussed much, and I think it really helps establish Ippon‘s visual identity; the judo itself.
It seems obvious enough that an anime even vaguely adjacent to real-world sport would try to depict that sport in the best light possible, but while Ippon! Again mostly looks good, it is very much a production with limits. In the most recent episode, there are several places where those limits are visibly being hit; somewhat wonky character art being the most obvious giveaway. One would thus perhaps think that the actual judo matches themselves would be only passable, but they’d be wrong. Instead, these are easily the strongest moments of the series.
Ippon is, it should be said, more grounded than is usual for an anime production in the 2020s. There are occasional embellishments, such as chibi heads and whatnot, but for the most part this is a series that is decidedly trying to remain in the realm of the plausible. Something that could happen in reality, even if it hasn’t exactly. Working in this mode—where most of the traditional action anime tricks present an unacceptable compromise to the show’s artistic vision and are therefore off-limits—presents the challenge of rendering something as intense as a judo match in “strictly” realistic terms.
The match in question, between the characters Towa Hiura (Chiyuki Miura) and Erika Amane (Aoi Koga), succeeds here with flying colors. The entire fight channels a genuine, raw intensity with technical fighting that seems to me, as an admitted layman, surprisingly realistic. Much of the combat focuses on extremely minute motions; grabbing, counter-grabbing, pulls and steps. It’s deeply compelling stuff on a moment-to-moment basis, as much as any flashier and more “out-there” action moments to come out of this season so far. For added support, the episode at several points flips back and forth between the present match and a flashback, imbuing the present round with a real sense of urgency and stakes. Not always an easy thing to do for something like this.
We don’t actually see the conclusion of Towa and Erika’s match in this week’s episode, as it ends on a cliffhanger. Still, if Ippon! Again can continue channeling its strengths into areas like this, where it really matters, it will remain worth watching.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later is a podcast mini-series where I and Julian M. of THEM Anime Reviews discuss the rise and fall of the infamous TRIGGER/CloverWorks mecha series.
Due to the nature of this series, some of the material discussed is Not Safe For Work. Listen with discretion.
In the second episode of our Darling in the FranXX retrospective, we cover several of the show’s best episodes, but also more than one that emphasizes the cracks in the facade, which are already beginning to show as we approach the end of the first cour.
Listen below on Youtube, or via the Anchor service, either here directly, or on your podcasting platform of choice.
You can follow Jane on Twitterhereand Julian on Twitter here.
Magic Planet Arcade is an occasional column where I peek into the world of gaming, and report on what has meant something to me personally over the past while.
I’m not a games critic. I am, I would say, unreasonably cranky about the state of that particular industry. Every once in a while a game comes along that I do genuinely really like; last year there was Signalis, which to be honest I probably could’ve wrung an article out of were I not in the throes of depression and already busy with a year-end list at the time. Back in late 2020, there was OMORI, the subject of, before today, the only Magic Planet Arcade column I’ve ever done.
What prompted me to bring back the label? A ludicrously simple webtoy made by the developer/artist duo of Tamani Damani and nako775, called Nijika, whose ahoge can grow infinitely. It is based on 2022 anime BOCCHI THE ROCK!, my sixth-favorite anime of last year. There is nothing even remotely complicated about this thing; you click on Nijika’s ahoge (for those of you who are perhaps new to otakudom, that’s the little fringe of hair sticking to the top of her head. Generally seen as the sign of a foolish or dim-witted character, although not necessarily always). Clicking causes the ahoge to duplicate. You can drag the detached ahoge around the screen, shoving them into a (previously empty?) Doritos bag, for example. Do this enough, and the bag will fill up and you can feed it to a hungry Ryou. Bocchi herself appears only in her “small, depressed octopus creature” form and can be bounced around the screen by colliding her with another object, should you wish to abuse poor Bocchi and increase her already-significant suffering. All the while, Nijika herself looks around the surreal void she and the others find themselves in. Sometimes she looks at you. At no point is she impressed.
There are a few other things you can do with various combinations of the game’s elements, but honestly, not terribly many. That’s fine, this is a dumb web toy that a couple of friends knocked out in, I imagine, a course of only a few weeks at most. It’s not that deep.
But that’s precisely what makes it a fun little diversion. I am of the belief that anything that can get your mind off your troubles for a few minutes is worth something, and there is a kind of dead-simple brilliance to the whole thing. It reminds me pretty strongly of Cartoon Network’s mid-2000s run of web games, and those could honestly be pretty brilliant too. (The Courage the Cowardly Dog pyramid game is both shockingly solid and an early example of the whole “trapformer” genre.) So, for that small joy, and as a nostalgic throwback to simpler times, I am just happy Nijika’s Ahoge exists. Hopefully you are, too.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand 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.
It was, in a shameless embracing of cliche, a dark and stormy night.
Somewhere on an island, a girl with the power to conjure explosives out of thin air breaks into a fortress in a bid to steal a suitcase full of playing cards. She accidentally opens the briefcase, and the cards—themselves, imbued with a strange power—scatter to the winds. A man makes a phonecall; ‘Assemble High Card’ is the order.
This is how HIGH CARD begins, and incredibly, that opening few minutes of notably taut worldbuilding are just one of several such runs throughout the episode. A month later, in a non-specific North American city (it’s basically New York), a blonde huckster named Finn (Gen Satou) cons a rich man out of his watch with a complicated confidence trick involving an escaped dog and a hot dog stand. Don’t worry; he’s doing it to help keep an orphanage open. Actually selling it—or any of the other bits and bobs he’s conned off of various suckers—is another story, and the one thing he has that isn’t stolen and is genuinely worth a lot isn’t something he’s willing to part with: a 2 of Spades playing card, with a bullet hole design through the top pip.
Inspired by the card, he hits “Bell Land”, a not-Las Vegas of similarly ill repute, and hits up a casino. An initial lucky run hits a brick wall when Finn encounters an apparent fellow swindler, a middle aged man with the rather silly name of Lucky Lunchman (Shigeru Chiba). Lunchman’s own luck runs out when the casino becomes suspicious of his winning streak, but an attempted shakedown in a false “VIP room” takes a turn for the decidedly surreal, and it is here that HIGH CARD reveals its hand in full.
It’s obvious throughout much of what precedes that there is something going on with these, essentially, magic playing cards. Finn and Lunchman both have them, but it’s not until we meet a third card user (“Player” in the show’s own parlance) in the VIP room that things really get gnarly.
It rapidly becomes clear that the story that Finn and Lunchman have stumbled into is not, as is the case with writer Homura Kawamoto‘s previous best-known work Kakegurui, a series focused on gambling. Instead, it is a straight-ahead action anime that ticks two of the three blood, money, and romance boxes pretty damn hard this early on. The VIP room turns into a bloodbath as the third Player reveals himself; the man can turn anything to marbles. Including people. You can see where this is going, and things quickly dissolve into a horrific bloodbath that Finn and Lunchman are caught in the middle of. Lunchman does not make it out of all of this alive, Finn does, through the indirect help of a fourth Player, Chris Redgrave (Toshiki Masuda), who distracts the man with the marble card long enough for Finn to A) swipe Lunchman’s card off of him after the former stole it and B) make his escape, a mad dash out the casino doors that concludes with him hijacking an expensive sports car. If you suspect that all of this concludes with a chase sequence, a tense standoff where the marble card Player bites it after seemingly killing Chris, who is himself, shocker, actually still alive, you’re totally correct. Also! We find out what Finn’s card does; it gives him a magic gun.
At the conclusion of these 22 or so minutes, you are left with possibly the single most unhinged stretch of anime of the young year thus far. Whether or not it’s “any good” is going to depend on how strongly you prioritize a sense of sheer fun; I think this thing is fantastic, and it easily stands alongside other strong premieres from this season like Buddy Daddies, and I suspect it, that anime, and the Trigun reboot will form a sort of trifecta of fun, colorful action anime to round out the Winter ’23 season. Where all of this will gois of course an open question this early on, but it’s hard to go too wrong with a colorful cast of prettyboys with superpowers.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand 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.
Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later is a podcast mini-series where I and Julian M. of THEM Anime Reviews discuss the rise and fall of the infamous TRIGGER/CloverWorks mecha series.
Due to the nature of this series, some of the material discussed is Not Safe For Work. Listen with discretion.
The DarliFra retrospective gets off to a rocky start through some technical difficulties. Along the way, Julian and I discuss the comparative merits of the opening episodes of the series, and talk about easily the worst thing about DarliFra: the fact that a decent chunk of it is actually pretty good. Listen below on Youtube, or via the Anchor service on your podcasting platform of choice.
You may listen to the Anchor upload directly, here, or on any service fed by the Anchor platform, such as Spotify.
You can follow Jane on Twitterhereand Julian on Twitter here.
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.
Somewhere in Nagasaki, many years ago, a samurai is tricked into killing his father-in-law. He doesn’t know what to do with himself now, as he’s pursued by both his father-in-law’s men and his own guilty conscience. It is on this note, and with a flurry of katana slashes, that Revenger, the latest from the pen of Gen Urobuchi, opens. You know, just in case you were laboring under the misunderstanding that something called Revenger was going to be a happy story.
The samurai, we eventually learn, is Kurima Raizo (Jun Kasama), a retainer of the Satsuma daimyo. His father-in-law was, or at least, Kurima thought he was, involved in illegal opium trade with English merchants. In fact, the daimyo was innocent, and it was Satsuma’s chief financial officer, a man named Matsumine, who’s orchestrated the whole thing. The man who brings all this trickery to light for Kurima? A mysterious fellow with a dashing hair style and a Virgin Mary back tattoo (Usui Yuen, not directly named here, voiced by Yuuichirou Umehara) who claims to handle “odd jobs.” One of those very ‘odd jobs’ is—wouldn’t you know it?—killing Matsumine.
Thus begins a sudden, deep, and dark plunge into the Nagasaki underworld. Don’t mistake Revenger‘s grittiness for realism, per se; there’s a guy here who’s basically Gambit from the X-Men (Souji, Shouta Hayama) and another (Nio, Hisako Kanemoto) who garrots people with razor wire kite strings.
Instead, Revenger‘s first episode is, true to title, a classic revenge tale. Kurima does eventually corner and kill Matsumine, but he certainly doesn’t feel any relief from doing so. His fiancé, Yui, has already killed herself by the time Kurima and the rest of the misfits intent on avenging the original Satsuma daimyo’s death arrive. Kurmia’s foolish attempt to repent for wrongly killing a man by killing another was doomed from the start. No life springs from death, and all that.
It’s not really a surprise that no one gets out for the better here. But it is a slight surprise that Revenger manages to take something this straightforward and classic—few tales have been iterated as often as that of a samurai gone rogue—and twist it up into such interesting shapes without even really trying. This is setting aside even the more basic, visceral thrills that Revenger offers; the plot to infiltrate Matsumine’s estate and kill him is very tactical and immediate, and everyone seems to have their own little offensive gimmick for taking down the estate’s guards. (In addition to those already mentioned, Usui has a bizarre, glittering cloth that seems to freeze on a man’s face, suffocating him instantly. Nasty stuff, really!)
The show’s larger mysteries loom in the background throughout all of this, just establishing themselves to give you a reason to tune in next week. Usui’s group seem to be Christian, or at least, something Christian-adjacent, given the Virgin Mary tattoo and a few other clues (one mentions ringing a bell in a chapel to indicate that their work is done), and it’s anyone’s guess why all of Usui’s assassins have a theme loosely based around some craft (for Usui himself, it’s maki-e, a kind of gold lacquering). It’s very hard to say, so early on, where any of this might go, but that it’s so easy to get invested speaks to the show’s obvious quality. If you’re into any of this kind of thing, you’ve got no good reason to not check this out.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand 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.
As I write this opening paragraph, it is May 11th, 2022. By the time you read it, more than six months will have passed, and it will be winter of the following year. Such is the magnitude of this endeavor.
“This endeavor,” as you’ve probably gathered, is an investigation into the rise and fall of Darling in the FranXX. DarliFra; a 2018 split production between Studio TRIGGER and A-1 Pictures‘ Koenji Studio, who rebranded as CloverWorks during the project, was an extremely polarizing series even when it was new. Five years later, it has been solidly placed on history’s pile of Bad artistic endeavors. When it is remembered, it’s often as an embarrassment. (A random sampling of paraphrased scathing comments I’ve heard over the years; a fundamentally bad idea that should never have been made at all. A piece of pigheaded conservative propaganda, twelve hours of animated bioessentialism, late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s secret plan to get the otaku of Japan to have some kids, damn it. A total waste of time, when considered as either a piece of entertainment or a serious artistic statement.)
Depending on who you ask, it is either a rare black mark on Studio TRIGGER’s strong 2010s run, or the moment where they lost the plot for good and never recovered. On a personal level, its very existence indirectly led to the dismantling of a TRIGGER Discord server I used to moderate, and I know for a fact we were not unique in that regard. To hear some tell it, Darling in the FranXX is straight-up digi-paint poison. Nothing less than the whole anime industry’s recurring sexism given form and doled out in 24-minute installments over six months.
And yet, it’s not really gone away either. Winter of 2018 was not exactly stuffed with great anime premieres. We did get some good stuff, including A Place Further Than the Universe, my favorite anime of the 2010s full stop, but notable shows were few and far between. Most of that season was stuff like Katana Maidens or Killing Bites, or the ill-fated Marchen Madchen. Shows basically no one remembers and rather few people were excited for even at the time. (I’ll stick up for Katana Maidens, myself, though it only really picked up in its second cour.) DarliFra, though? That was a different story. People were invested in Darling in the FranXX. It was an event. As I write this, it’s still the 40th most popular anime on Anilist, outstripping fellow bonkers mecha anime Code Geass by several places, and TRIGGER’s own Kill la Kill by several more. It’s been catalogued by more people than such disparate hits as KonoSuba, Angel Beats!, Bleach, and even one of its own primary inspirations, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and well outstrips one of its others, Eureka Seven. Some of this can be chalked up to the age of the average Anilist user (and the age of the site itself, it was just starting to gain a foothold as a viable alternative to MyAnimeList back in 2018), but it does reveal the fact that DarliFra had an iron grip on the western anime fandom for a little while. Even just five years later, it can be hard to believe that! But it’s true, and the proof remains in the numbers. And beyond that particular subculture, it’s inspired everything from celebrity hair styles to New York Times-bestselling fantasy novels. Not only is it remembered, it has reach.
The question, at least to me, is of course, why? What was it about this show specifically that made so many people, even those who would normally be skeptical of its very premise, willing to at least give it a chance? How did it so badly lose all that goodwill? To me, a simple case of a series failing to live up to expectations does not explain it, especially since our third question must be; why has it lingered on in the popular imagination, even when many other anime that once had similar reputations have faded?
Well, as we’ll learn over the course of this project, there are a lot of answers to that first question. But the first part of the answer is just that it made sense at the time. TRIGGER were hot off the heels of the TV version of Little Witch Academia, and the now cult classic Space Patrol Luluco was only just reaching two years since release. People did not really talk about A-1/CloverWorks’ involvement in DarliFra quite as much at the time, although it did become the subject of some discussion once the show reached its halfway mark, as we’ll get to.
Those in the know were also interested in the director, Atsushi Nishigori, and to be fair, he’s an interesting figure. The public loves an auteur, someone who can put their personal stamp on a project and have it be instantly recognizable as their own. There are a fair few of these in the realm of anime, but Nishigori wasn’t quite one yet. Some ten years prior to DarliFra, he’d left behind a position at the flagging Studio Gainax to join A-1. There, he directed 2011’s The Idol Master, apparently out of personal passion for the franchise. It paid off; the series was extremely successful, and today,Idol Master stands as one of the best idol anime of all time, and the template for the girl group anime boom that followed. That series and DarliFra itself make up the sum total of his leading roles on TV anime projects. I have my guesses as to why this might be, but I’ll hold my tongue for the moment.
As for what form this investigation will take, well, I couldn’t do something like this alone. Instead, I’ve conscripted KeyFrames Forgotten co-host Julian M. Together, we’re tackling this in the only format we really know how—a podcast, which will be available here on Magic Planet Anime via Youtube uploads and hopefully a few other outlets starting this coming Tuesday, on January 10th. We’ll be covering the series in chunks; five episodes of DarliFra for each episode of the podcast. If you want to keep pace with us, you have until then to catch up. The podcast should be enjoyable even if you’re not actively rewatching (or watching for the first time, god forbid) the series, but that is how it’s “intended” to be enjoyed, so I do hope at least some of you will join us on this deeply silly endeavor.
You’ll hear from us again on the 10th.
You can follow Jane on Twitterhereand Julian on Twitter here.
I have to be honest, for whatever reason, much more than the past two years, I feel actively nervous about posting this. I’m not sure why? It’s not like my picks for last year were uncontroversial. Regardless, after a very extensive regime of writing, re-writing, editing, and re-re-writing(!), I have settled on a form for this list that I am mostly happy with. Hopefully you enjoy it, as well.
#5. SHINEPOST
Yeah, I like SHINEPOSTmore than BOCCHI THE ROCK. I almost feel the need to apologize for that opinion, but I can’t lie to y’all. Between the two, I liked this one just the slightest bit more, despite it being arguably the more conventional of the two. It is what it is, I could’ve gone either way. (And as mentioned yesterday, I did. SHINEPOST and BOCCHI switched places on this list several times.)
But enough handwringing, why’s it actually good? Well, SHINEPOST is rather unlike its genre-fellows on this list. It’s not utopian and relentlessly pleasant like Love Live, and it’s not a candy-surreal kids’ anime dream sequence like Waccha Primagi. Instead, SHINEPOST‘s best and most defining moments chronicle the stomach-flipping knots of anxiety that come from being a performing artist, the demons that can eat a performer’s psyche alive if left unchecked, and the very real camaraderie to be found in those fields anyway, in spite of all that. (In that sense, it’s actually slightly more of a piece with BOCCHI, although they, too, are fairly different.) SHINEPOST, in its brisk single cour, manages to touch on the pressure to succeed, how even modest fame can both weld new friendships together and cleave old ones apart, the fear of never being good enough and the burden of being too good, plus the ticking clockwork of the industry itself. The goal is simple and straightforward from episode 1; TINGS, the protagonists, must fill Nakano Sunplaza to its pleasantly symmetrical 2,222-person capacity for their first anniversary concert. If they can’t, their time with their agency, and as an idol group, is over.
I’m loathe to even float the word “deconstruction” in my writing, especially in its latter-day TVTropes-y usage. But it’s worth pulling up here, not because it describes SHINEPOST but because it neatly defines what it isn’t. All of this, frankly, pretty heavy shit, comes not from some desire to criticize or pull away from the girl group idol anime genre, but from a real love of it. Something that was trying to put distance between itself and its genre’s foundational texts would not be mythologizing something as mundane as a venue in the way SHINEPOST does.
More than that, though, the series’ real strength is that by laying its characters bare; showing their insecurities, their weaknesses, the complexes that gnaw away at their very psyches, it can really make you root for them in a way that something comparatively fluffy (such as again, Love Live) can’t manage to the same degree. If anything, SHINEPOST reminds me a lot more of that series’ perennial rival, Idolmaster, whose 2011 TV series remains the definitive golden standard for this genre. SHINEPOST is a true underdog; a scrappy series about a scrappy idol group from a still relatively-young studio (Studio KAI. Their second entry on this list after Fuuto PI), and all of those hardships, no matter how serious or melodramatic, are buildup to the absolutely electric immediacy of its finale. Even the absolute corniest plot details, like the etymology of the show’s very title (it’s a portmanteau of “shining guidepost”), hit like pure bolts of lightning.
And that kind of momentary transcendence, where you forget that you’re watching a silly cartoon and feel the energy? That is why it’s the best idol anime of 2022. TINGS kill it; accept no substitutes.
#4. CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS
Few anime come with this mixed a pedigree. Sure, Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a TRIGGER series directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, a fact that comes with a hell of a lot of goodwill, but pretty much everything else about this thing would give anyone good reason to be skeptical; start with the fact that it’s a tie-in to the rightly-polarizing open world game Cyberpunk 2077, skip over to the fact that it’s got a Franz Ferdinand song as its OP theme, and roll on from there. I won’t lie, there’s a part of me—and it’s not a small part!—that wanted to boot Edgerunners from the list entirely. I considered deliberately putting off watching it until next year so I wouldn’t have to rank it, and even now that I have seen it, there remains a temptation to dock points less for what it is and more for where it came from. I’m not sure I want many anime to be globally-released tie-in promos for broken-on-release AAA video games. Certainly, the fact that you still, months after the anime’s been out on streaming platforms worldwide, can’t reasonably watch the Japanese audio track with English subtitles (well, you can try, but the sloppy dubtitle track doesn’t really work with the JP audio at all. Thankfully the dub is excellent; this is the only release on the list I watched dubbed, in fact!) is case enough that this probably isn’t how anime should be made.
All this in mind, it’s almost painful how fucking good this thing is. Edgerunners burns so bright that it leaves scorch marks: black as melted plastic and twice as toxic, pure neon, grime and dirt.
David, our protagonist, is a person stripped of his humanity both systemically, and, eventually, with violence. He loses his mother, his home, his status as a citizen, his sanity, his humanity, and, eventually, his life. In one sense, Edgerunners is a gradual sanding-down of his personhood until nothing is left.
Lucy, his co-lead, is an unscrupulous hacker who runs with a mercenary crew. Secretly, she harbors a dream of visiting the moon. It’s a poetic hyperbole; the stars we hang in the sky to keep ourselves going made very literal.
To home in on one specific example, no single moment in anime this year conveys the sheer amount of blasted-out trauma as episode six, which sees the character Maine completely lose his mind as a side-effect of his cybernetic implants. The result is harrowing; all gunfire and blood on the floor. That point is where I realized that putting this anywhere outside the top five would’ve required me to do some major mental gymnastics.
On the whole, the series is deeply discomforting and utterly visceral to watch in action. If this isn’t how anime should be made from a production pipeline point of view, it definitely is how they should be made in terms of having a strong creative vision and following it through to the end as thoroughly as you possibly can. RIP David Martinez; reduced to a tale for the next dreamer.
#3: Chainsaw Man
Forget, for a moment, everything else. Forget the rest of this list, forget that there ever was a Chainsaw Man manga, forget the very notion of ranking and reviewing and processing, debating, analyzing. Focus on one image; a chainsaw, covered in rust, and in blood – which itself will be rust soon enough. Now focus on the boy holding it, the boy who became it. And think, for a moment, about what it takes to travel the vast canyon between those two images.
I have called Chainsaw Man many things on this site, but if you strip everything away; the need to intellectualize the art we love, the fanbase, even the original material itself, you are left with those two images and the gap between them. A boy and his dog; a boy and his instrument of bloody fucking murder. Love twisted up and turned violent in the name of protection, in the name of needing to escape, in the name of trading bad for worse because you don’t know what better looks like. A frizzy-haired punk kid with a drawn knife; that, essentially, is Chainsaw Man.
A lot of other things are Chainsaw Man too, of course. Everyone Denji meets during his journey is or becomes part of him. In some cases, in ways the anime itself has yet to reveal. Death is ever-present, and any insinuation otherwise is a facade.
So, what form does this take? Well, young Denji is a devil-hunter, a professional mower-down of wicked monsters that spawn from humanity’s own fears, from the trivial to the deep-seated. He’s raised by a coldhearted yakuza, only to end up in the care of Public Safety, Japan’s own government-controlled devil-killer force. Along the way he strives for any kind of human connection, gleefully oblivious to his own desires. A recurring refrain from the character is that all he really needs or wants is a roof over his head, three meals a day, and maybe, ambitiously, to touch a girl’s chest before he dies.
Consciously, he probably does think that’s true, but it’s obvious from very early on that he’s looking for something deeper, and that un-articulated desire for true human connection lands him squarely in the palm of Public Safety’s obviously sinister head, Makima. This plot goes unresolved in the first season, but it is already obvious that she doesn’t have his best interests in mind. In this way, Denji is all of us, a hardworking guy being ruthlessly exploited by the system that provides him the few things that he can truly call his own. He makes and then loses his very first friend over the course of just these twelve episodes; how much more is in store for our boy, and how much more can he take?
That’s without even getting into the tangible specifics of the CSM anime as an adaptation. It is a markedly different experience from the manga; slick and polished but never sterile, engaged wholeheartedly in a deep emulation of the live action film that informs so much of original mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto‘s work. It also probably has the best soundtrack of anything on this list, with a truly ridiculous twelve separate ending themes—one for each episode!—all of which go ridiculously hard in their own way. On the whole, we can easily say that, yes, this is the best-case scenario for adapting this material. Season 2 cannot come soon enough.
So yeah, all that poetic nonsense and it’s still only at #3. Look! I hate feeling like I have to justify every placement on this list, but this one does warrant at least a little explanation, I think. Part of it is that the show does have a tiny amount of minor flaws—a handful of very minor production gripes in a few specific scenes in a few specific episodes. On a narrative level you could also maybe make the case that Himeno dies a little too soon—but mostly, it’s just that incredibly, the Chainsaw Man anime has not actually gotten to the truly unhinged parts of its source material quite yet, and I’d feel a little bad for putting the cart before the horse. What point is there in giving out a gold medal to a rookie athlete? Even the very best have room for improvement. If I’m going to rank Chainsaw Man as the best anime in a given year, I want it to be a season where it is at the absolute fucking apex of its powers, something I can’t deny. Until then, it can settle for the bronze.
So, on that admittedly shaky logic. Yeah, still just third place. I could have put it at #1, and I would’ve felt just fine about doing so. To be honest, I like this, my #2 and my #1 pick about equally (I could maybe even argue for Edgerunners back in the last entry). But the following two anime are a little more undersung, and they’re also more self-contained, two things that do matter to me. I have to confess a certain irrational fondness for the underdog, too. So just wait, Chainsaw Man. Your day has yet to truly come.
#2. Vampire in The Garden
To be honest, I so badly want to just tell you to read my review of this, where I was reduced to clumsy poetry in an attempt to convey, if not necessarily describe, what this series means to me. But for one thing that’s lazy, for another thing, would it really help? I am still not done processing Vampire in The Garden, an achingly beautiful piece of fiction, and perhaps an important one as well.
The real truth of the matter is that queer stories that treat queer characters as people are still far rarer than you might assume. There are plenty that are cute, or that use us as tear-jerking props in a cynical way, but there aren’t really that many that feel lived-in, studied, like they were made to resonate with an audience of proper fucking queers first and foremost, with anyone else as a secondary concern. Vampire in the Garden really does feel that way. Is it intentional or just a staggering coincidence? If it is intentional, as far as I’m aware, no one’s ever said as much, so ultimately, I can’t really say so. What I can say is that Vampire feels important, if not to “queer people” as a group, then at least to me, personally. Somewhat frustratingly, though, it is such a shining, glistening thing that it falls apart like gossamer if you try to grasp it too tightly. You can describe its plot, but describing why it’s great is much harder.
In basic terms, Vampire is a story about two people who fill a void in each other’s lives. Both protagonists, the human factory worker Momo and the vampire queen-on-the-run Fine, have lost someone close to them. Through the struggle of eventually connecting with each other and healing through this shared loss, they are beaten down again by the world around them; both the vampires that seek to return Fine to her throne and the humans who hunt Momo down as a traitor, to be returned to her dreary existence in the city-tower-prison that much of humankind now resides in. Along the way, they seek an ineffable “paradise”, somewhere they can coexist in peace. Will it surprise you to learn they never find it? Not really, anyway. They pass through Fine’s own dilapidated manor, a segregated town where vampires and humans live side by side in only the most literal of senses, a village run on blood sacrifice, and so on. Fine ends up dead long before they find this mystical paradise, and there is more than a little suggestion that it doesn’t really exist.
But does that render Fine and Momo’s time together moot? Absolutely not. And that is what makes Vampire feel so vital (and so vitally queer) to me; the world sucks, and it often conspires to rip us apart whenever it can. It is absolutely crucial that we appreciate our time together, while it lasts.
So! That’s most of the list. There’s only one entry left. As with last year, I put up a tweetabout a month before this went up,where I asked people to guess what they thought my number 1 pick would be.
This year, two people got it right.
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What can I say? Congratulations to Blue Dash. And hell, I’ll throw in a shout out to my good friend Josh, too, since he mentioned it out loud while were talking at one point.
#1. Healer Girl
I am keenly aware of just how transient what I do here at Magic Planet Anime truly is. Anime criticism as a medium is still essentially in its infancy—most of us aren’t much more than consumer advocates, telling you to either spend or not spend your precious leisure time watching some particular series or another—and it would be very, very naive to assume that anything I write here will ever persist throughout the ages. If anyone writing in this field now makes anything that endures, it’s unlikely to be me.
I write anyway because when something really does touch me on a deep, personal level, I end up feeling like I have to scream it from the mountaintops. This doesn’t happen often—I like most anime, but the amount that I truly love, in the way where I know I will come back to them five, ten years from now, is much smaller, and rarely does a given year produce more than one or two such pieces—but when it does, I really feel like little else in the world matters to me, in those moments. 2022, astoundingly, produced four, and we’ve just met three of them. This is the fourth. Healer Girl, my favorite anime of 2022.
It is a font of genuine, deep light and warmth. It’s really all in the name; Healing. The iyashikei genre rarely gets the credit it’s due over here in the anglosphere, but in Healer Girl, the genre has found its best representative in many years.
I have to confess; I spent much of 2022 so, so, so tired, and so, so, so sick. I have gone through more than one total emotional breakdown, caused at least in part by a ten-car pileup of illnesses I have been battling and continue to battle. I won’t go into details because to be honest it’s not anyone’s business but my own, but know that it has sucked. Many days, I have gotten up and wondered if I’d really be able to continue writing like I have been, even though this site, for better or worse, is the project I’ve started in my life that means the most to me, by an order of magnitude. Without embellishment, 2022 was a profoundly shitty year for me. Probably the worst I’ve had since moving to Chicago in 2018.
Through it all, Healer Girl, perhaps improbably, has remained a source of genuine comfort. In a year where I had been having less of a bad time overall, maybe I would’ve been more comfortable putting something darker at #1. But I didn’t, and I can’t truly see into those possible parallel presents. So Healer Girl it is, because I need it—because we need it.
Part of it is the music; the opening notes of “Feel You, Heal You”, tap into some deep, rarely-touched part of my psyche, perhaps it’s the part that used to fall asleep listening to Wilson-Philipps and Faith Hill on a grainy radio when I was very young, perhaps it’s the same part that, when I was a younger anime watcher, cemented Kamichu!, which I saw on a bootleg streaming site that no longer exists, as one of my very first favorite anime. Whatever it is, and no matter how corny I’m sure it may seem to anyone who isn’t me, that connection is real, and extends not just to the music, but to the series built around it.
Healer Girl’s premise promises a cross between a “magical girl“ series of a variety unknown ’til now, a medical drama, and a slice of life anime. In practice, it’s all of these and none of them. It has all of the magical girl genre’s storms of massive feeling and emotion, a medical drama’s focus on literal lifesaving, and the school life genre’s easygoing warmth, but even as it feels born of these genres, it stands apart from them. Its great visual trick is the “image song;” literal conjurings of the magic music that the series’ world runs on. This is not something that would exist in a lesser series, and I’ve seen similar things only a handful of times. Almost on its own, this is what elevates Healer Girl into a truly rare artistic achievement. (The show is so good that while it has probably the year’s single best episode, its fifth, the Night on the Galactic Railroad-referencing “Blue Skies, Green Mountains, River Battles and the Galactic Station“, this is almost an afterthought compared to its more general brilliancies.)
Healer Girl’s magnetism is difficult to explain in this way, because the series was not—is not—an event. There is no “Healer Girl fandom”, or at least, not a particularly large one. The show inspired no complicated thinkpieces or vigorous debates on its nature and true meaning. The impression I get is that the show was mostly liked, but just liked, by those who saw it, and I am something of an outlier for loving it as much as I do. Fundamentally, it’s a very simple anime, and whether or not it resonates with a given person is, I imagine, largely down to the old intangibles of feeling and mood. In this sense, I can imagine picking it as my #1, putting it in The Top Spot, might be contentious. (I doubt nearly as much as my #1 pick for 2021, admitttedly, but that’s another conversation.)
To me, Healer Girl doesn’t even really feel like a contemporary anime. It feels at once like a relic from a lost past and a transmission from some far-off, idyllic, solar future. A broadcast from a different universe; a softer world, one where the soothing tones of gentle music really can heal the sick. It is the endless everyday implicitly promised by all slice of life anime warmed with a gentle heat and decorated with floral blooms; an outstretched hand, whenever you need it. That, to me, is 2022’s best anime. If you feel it, it’ll heal you, a panacea in the darkness and the sickness.
Thus, the list—and the year here at Magic Planet Anime, although by the time you read this it’ll already be the first day of 2023—comes to a close.
I am very curious to hear your thoughts. Did you love it? Did you hate it? Were your picks similar or wildly different? I’m interested to know, so don’t be afraid to drop a comment or hit me up on any of my many social media locations below, I recently re-did my article footer with links to basically every site I maintain a presence for this blog on. Feel free to look around!
Let me take a moment here to also thank everyone who’s read this list—or any of my articles here over the past year—it really, truly means the world to me. While I’m at it, let me thank my good friends on the following Discord servers with funny names; The Magic Planet Anime server, the original The Magic Planet server, the Satellite Night Anime Block server, the Secret Scrunkly Server, Mugcord, and the Lesbian Radiohead Fans server. All of you have made ’22 so much better than it would’ve been alone, and I appreciate y’all a lot. I need to also give a shout out to my repeat commenters: you guys are the best, and make this blog feel so much more alive than it would if it were just me writing with no responses.
And lastly, just before I go, and as mentioned back in Part 1 of the list. If you can do so, and found the list worthwhile, please do contribute (either on Ko-Fi or Patreon), it was extremely effort-intensive. For your reference, I am writing this at about 8PM on the 30th. Crunch in writing is real, friends! Be careful out there! I’ve certainly learned some lessons about how I’m going to handle this for next year, now that I know there’s a real audience for the end-to-end breakdown rather than just a simple top 5. And for those who have already recently contributed, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Again, it’s hard to articulate how much that means to me.
As for the site itself, I don’t plan to do regular seasonal coverage for the upcoming season, but I may drop occasional articles here and there on the more interesting stuff and will probably do at least a small few first impressions. (I’m very interested to see what’s up with the Nier: Automata anime, for example.) More than that, I have a lot of commissions to get cracking on! Hopefully you’ll enjoy those reviews when they go live.
Until next year (which is already this year for you) Magic Planet Anime fans!
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, or Tumblrand 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.
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