Category: anime

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch LYCORIS RECOIL Episode 2 – The More The Merrier

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

I know on some level that I can’t just spend every one of these columns gushing about how goddamn entertaining Lycoris Recoil is, but I really, really want to. If anyone had any lingering doubts, “The More The Merrier” proves that Lycoris Recoil’s spy movie chops are no fluke. It’s stylish and intriguing with a fun little left turn at the end. Basically, the perfect second episode for something like this.

We open on a delightfully Lain-y scene of two hackers meeting in the confines of cyberspace. One is Walnut, who we met last week, and the other is a new face (or mask, anyway), Roboto.

The two’s relationship can perhaps best be described as tense, and we learn early on here that it was Roboto who told the mysterious billionaire Allen Adams where Walnut’s apartment was. You may remember said apartment getting blown up via car touchpad toward the end of the premiere. Walnut, perhaps out of options, hires the LycoReco cafe girls to get him out of the country. This seems like a fairly straightforward premise, and it mostly is, but many small details shade the entire journey.

To start with, before the mission even begins, we learn Takina and Chisato have been paired up for about a month now. And we learn that Adams, under the alias “Mr. Yoshi,” has become an occasional customer of the cafe. (He tries very hard to play the role of the nice, well-intentioned wealthy customer. Maybe a little too hard, even bringing Chisato a souvenir from a trip abroad to Russia in the form of a small toy.)

The mission itself is a study in contrasts. Chisato and Takina have very different personalities that happen to work pretty excellently together, and almost every single facet of the job they pull off here sees the two’s approaches deliberately juxtaposed. Chisato evidently spaces out during much of the briefing and doesn’t note down most of the minute transit details about where she’s going or how to get there, Takina has them memorized. Takina drinks a “jelly drink”—Soylent or something?—to quickly and utilitarianly get a boost of energy before anything actually dangerous happens, Chisato on the other hand chows down on a bento box.

The actual spy work part of the mission consists of escorting Walnut while a group of mercenaries in the employ of Roboto—who we eventually learn is himself working for Allen—pursue him. There’s some fun stuff in here, too. When the two meet up with Walnut (who spends the entire episode dressed in a squirrel suit, in a truly inspired bit of costume design), for example, Chisato is disappointed that the flashy Lambo-like supercar she’d spotted in the parking lot isn’t their ride for the mission.

When things inevitably get hairy, culminating in an office building shootout with Robot’s mercs, Chisato’s still using her rubber bullets while Takina has made only the minor compromise of aiming for shoulders instead of heads. Even here, the two are very different. Chisato’s approach, tellingly, seems to be the more effective of the two. In an impossibly cool moment that I really hope has some eventual sci-fi hokum explanation, Chisato is able to calmly sidestep her way out of point-blank rifle fire, literally waltzing between shots like it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

Minutes later, in what’s becoming a recurring pattern, she tend the wounds of one of their enemies so he doesn’t bleed out.

This seems like a mistake; as she’s doing that, Takina and Walnut leave the building, only for the squirrel-suited hacker to be riddled with bullets from across the rooftop. The ensuing bloody mess is the first time we’ve seen Chisato even remotely rattled at all in the entire first two episodes, and she and Takina grimly escort his dead body in the back of an ambulance.

But then, just as the episode seems like it’s going to end on a down note, Walnut rises from the ambulance bed, and takes off his helmet, revealing himself to be….

Mizuki??

Yes, it turns out that the entire time, it was Mizuki in the suit, and this entire episode’s plot was a blind op. The Lycorii handled the hard part while, simultaneously, Mizuki and Mika handled the fakeout, which included the stupid squirrel costume; itself both bulletproof and stuffed with exploding blood packs.

This kind of borderline-corny twist is the sort of thing you can only get away with if you’re completely un-selfconscious about your genre. And thankfully, Lycoris Recoil seems to be. The episode ends with the real Walnut, a young girl who promptly switches to the also-fake name Kurumi (Misaki Kuno, thankfully operating in her lower, more naturalistic register rather than what she used for Chisato recently over in Prima Doll), moving into the cafe as payment for helping them out with future missions.

Spot the squirrel.

And we close on Mr. Adams once again patronizing the cafe, before asking Mika point-blank what sort of work he and Chisato actually do. Perhaps a lead-in for next week’s episode?

I realize I’ve leaned really heavily on the “recap” aspect of this column for this one. To be honest, so far almost all of Lycoris Recoil‘s strengths are in intangibles like style, tight pacing, and just generally being fun as hell to watch. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing thematic here; it really is worth noting how hard that contrast button between Takina and Chisato is being slammed, and who knows what the addition of Kurumi to the cast is going to do to that. This is to say nothing with the further hints at some larger overarching web of conspiracy, here, including the DA still hunting for the man in the blurry background of that photo from last episode and, of course, Allan Adams’ recurring appearances.

Until the answers make themselves known, see you next week anime fans.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Let’s Watch LUCIFER AND THE BISCUIT HAMMER – Episode 1

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

Oh god.

Do we really have to?

If you had told me a year ago, when we didn’t know anything about this, that this was how I’d be reacting to its first episode, I’d have never believed you.

The thing that sucks most is that I am not this person. I am not the person who goes into every anime season looking more for what I can drop and complain about than what I can watch and enjoy. I have met people like that, and they’re annoying. I certainly have never wanted to give that impression from my website, which by and large I try to devote mostly to positive anime criticism. The series I’ve disliked enough to review them negatively are few and far between. Enough so that it’s a tag on my review archive, specifically so people can avoid it if they want to.

But sometimes, unfortunately, for many of the same reasons that art can be an essential balm to the soul, art can be bad. The anime adaption of Lucifer and The Biscuit Hammer is bad.

Guys. It is so bad.

How did this happen? Why did so many of you vote for it in the poll? Did I do something wrong?

Okay, no, to be fair. To be so fair that it is physically painful, this is not the worst-produced anime I’ve ever seen. Barely. I’ve seen a couple that look worse. Magical Girl Spec Ops. Asuka was down there. Pride of Orange was down there (how the fuck have I had to reach for that thing as a comparison point twice in one day?). Modern Magic Made Simple, a tragic conflux of rancid taste and animated-at-gunpoint production values that I have blessedly only ever seen one episode of, is worse.

But this is bad. Make no mistake. Not mediocre, not so-so. Bad. The kind of bad that really makes you say to yourself “holy fuck there is too much anime being made right now.” I invite you to look at any random 5-minute slice of this episode and then do the same for any other anime I’ve covered so far this season. Hell, any anime I’ve ever covered on this site. Lucifer and The Biscuit Hammer‘s anime looks worse than the vast majority of them. This is unacceptable on a basic level.

I really want to know what happened. Studio NAZ are not really a known quality, they assisted on Sabikui Bisco two seasons ago, and that show certainly did look pretty rough in spots, but the Sabikui Bisco anime was also not adapting one of the best manga ever written. (Even so, I don’t remember it being this bad.)

Maybe it’s a difference in expectations. In this sense, I am That Person. Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammer is one of my favorite manga of all time, a masterful pastiche of action shonen from the pen of the endlessly talented Satoshi Mizukami, one of his medium’s true modern auteurs alongside the likes of Dowman Sayman, Imitation Crystal, and in a more mainstream sphere, perhaps Tatsuki Fujimoto (I’ll get back to you on that last one once I finish Chainsaw Man). The man’s work is sprawling and spans a number of genres and almost 25 years of history. If you’re here for recommendations, go read—read, do you understand? Not watch—Biscuit Hammer. Then read Spirit Circle. Then watch Planet With. Even his minor stories are homeruns, but those are the big ones, the ones that truly are essential and some of the best manga penned in the last 20 years. (Or anime, in the case of Planet With.)

Biscuit Hammer, in its original form, is fun, riveting, full of interesting little twists and turns, and has a profound thematic core that cuts to the heart of the genre it so clearly admires and, more broadly, resonates emotionally with many, many readers. We will get into some of the specifics of that over the course of these twelve weeks—god, twelve fucking weeks of this—but that’s the short version. The Cliff’s Notes.

Adapting this thing to anime was probably always going to be really hard. But I must ask; would it have been too much to ask to at least try?

The main problem actually isn’t even the piss-dull production values, although they certainly don’t help. It’s the pacing. In the manga, main character Yuuhi Amamiya (Junya Enoki, completely phoning it in) comes across as a tedious, self-absorbed, petulant dick. He is those things, and that characterization is on purpose. But the first half or so of this first episode is an instructive exercise in the difference between manga pacing and anime pacing. Yuuhi being a jerk on the page is easy to breeze through because, in a comic book, you can read at your own pace. In an anime you are simply stuck there for however many minutes a scene lasts.

Over the course of the first half of this episode, Yuuhi gets roped into being a chosen one by a magic lizard (Noi Crescent, played here by Kenjirou Tsuda) and blows that off. Understandable, but we have to sit through his annoying dialogue about why he doesn’t want to be part of it. Less understandable, you could cut that down. Later, when he starts to develop the powers granted to him in service of this world-saving quest, namely a form of limited telekinesis, he uses it to get a peek at his teacher’s panties. At some point, choosing to preserve this—one of several such scenes from the early portion of the manga before it really found its footing—instead of cutting it in lieu of almost anything else feels like active taunting.

Yuuhi gets some much more granular characterization later on that helps me, as someone with prior knowledge, deal with all this. For a total outsider? I would blame no one for dropping the anime right then and there. Which would be tragic only because they’d be unlikely to give the much better manga a shot.

Eventually, through a combination of a laughably middling action scene and some exposition, Yuuhi gets the gist; the world is being threatened by a, we’ll say sorcerer for now, who summons monsters called golems, and who threatens to crack the world asunder with the giant invisible-to-normals mallet that gives the series its English title. (It’s called Hoshi no Samidare domestically, if you were curious.)

It’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm to go into any of the specifics here. The fight scene is very short and scored by a wildly inappropriate EDM soundtrack that reminds me a lot of that of The God of High School. The golem here retains its charmingly doofy look from the original series, so that is a minor positive.

Indeed, I will say this much, buried under all this mediocrity is one single real bright spot. Something that the otherwise well below par anime adaption cannot smother. If you’re familiar with the manga, you can already probably guess what I mean.

For some people the term “tomboy” really just doesn’t cut it.

Samidare Asahina. Princess Samidare. Samidare of the Stars. Lucifer. Played here by Naomi Oozora, who, full credit, really seems to be trying, unlike almost the entire rest of the voice cast.

Samidare is the true focal character of Biscuit Hammer, and she is a fascinating individual, for reasons the show hints at here but won’t properly get to until later. (Assuming the pacing doesn’t also fall to shambles there, that is.)

I actually find describing Samidare’s character a little difficult, because there isn’t really much else like her. She’s a willfully authoritarian little brat who, for reasons as yet undisclosed to us, mostly wants to stop the Biscuit Hammer from falling so she can destroy the planet instead. Near the end of the episode, she jumps off of her own balcony to test both Yuuhi’s power and his loyalty. In its last minute, she demands he swear loyalty to him, and in an action that completely defies every single thing we’ve seen of the young man so far, he feels like he has to.

I would compare Samidare, specifically the anime’s Samidare, to Siesta from The Detective is Already Dead or Aika from Blast of Tempest. A young, strong-willed girl whose sheer force of personality and just sum competence are so much greater than everyone else’s that she warps the story around her. Unlike them and other “removed woman” characters, Samidare is very much alive and present, still able to actively wield that influence.

In the original manga, this had the fascinating effect of making it almost seem like Samidare was actively stealing the series’ protagonist spot from Yuuhi, only sharing it on her own terms. Here, because the adaption is simply not nearly as good as the original, it captures only a fraction of that essence. Still, no amount of incompetence can completely defang her. She’s a nugget of gold panned from muddy water. When she folds her arms, her back to the sky, with the Biscuit Hammer hanging ominously, obscured by the clouds behind her, you can see the spirit of the original Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammer in there, if you squint. Perhaps that sheer power of personality is why the manga is named after her in its original Japanese.

But those few feint echoes of the original manga are not enough to save this as an adaption, and trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who’d watch this knowing nothing about the original? Puh. I cannot imagine that this episode would make them at all interested in Lucifer. It does almost the exact opposite of what a good adaption is supposed to do, in that it magnifies every weakness of the original material and creates new ones while pruning off the areas where it excelled. Even purely as an ad for the manga, this first episode is an almost complete failure. Considered as its own standalone piece of work, it is perhaps even worse.

I will say, I am going to try to cover the remainder of the anime in the best faith possible. (What you are reading is the kindest version of this column that I can manage, and I mean that in total seriousness.) So whatever lies ahead, we will face it together. You all wanted me to cover this, for whatever reason, so I am going to cover it. If that means twelve weeks of scrounging for bright spots, then so be it.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Robotic World of PRIMA DOLL

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.

Generally I end up covering at least one or two things here per season that are total misses. Prima Doll is only one episode in, so even with everything I’m about to say about it I feel like I’d be jumping the gun by calling it a total miss. What I am comfortable saying is that of the anime I’ve so far done first impressions articles on, it’s by far the least essential. This isn’t to say that it’ll never mean anything to anyone, but I found it lacking in a crucial, tangible warmth, something that is extremely important if you’re trying to make a show that can either offer some sort of comfort to its viewership or can make them cry. Prima Doll is trying to do both, and it feels underequipped on both counts. And hey, if that’s not enough of a red flag for you, it’s also pretty dull and charmless.

The important note to make off the top here is that Key are involved with this. Key, the visual novel studio behind Clannad, etc. have a reputation for a pretty specific kind of work; shamelessly melodramatic, heavy on obvious emotional cues, and dedicated to making you cry, every time. I’m a fan of a small slice of that work—I really like Angel Beats!—but their only other series I’ve seen is The Day I Became a God, which I absolutely hated, and has put me off of seeking out much else by them. (As far as material I’ve covered on this site, I’d put it somewhere just above Pride of Orange, last year’s worst anime, which is terrible for totally different reasons.)

But that really just informs the mood of the piece. What is it actually about?

Well, if you’ve played or even heard of Girls’ Frontline, basically that. Robots in the shape of cute anime girls are, for reasons unexplained and perhaps unimportant, the main language of warfare spoken in this world. Our protagonist, Haizakura (Azumi Wakai), is one such robot, here as in Girls’ Frontline called a doll. (No “T” this time.)

For reasons currently unknown to us, she ends up repaired by mysterious café owner and employed there, along with other “broken” dolls, all of whom have various quirks that prevent them, one must assume, from being useful in military action anymore.

Haizakura herself is very clumsy in a way that, to be honest, I found extremely grating.

It should not make me actively annoyed when a character is subject to slapstick.

She also faints whenever she uses her abilities, which at one point she does to deactivate a rampaging military drone. Drones and dolls are different. I Guess.

This first episode’s plot involves her trying to reunite a young girl named Chiyo (Misaki Kuno) with the doll who served as her surrogate older sister, Yugiri, who looks, sounds a bit like, and has the same name as Yugiri from Zombie Land Saga. (Whether this is an intentional reference, a coincidence, or a mind-bogglingly ballsy example of plagiarism is unknown to me.)

Yugiri, coincidentally, is deactivated in the cafe’s basement. Somehow, Haizakura turns her back on (or something else does and Haizakura is just there when it happens, it’s not totally clear), and Yugiri and Chiyo spend some time together. But oh no! The ending of the episode reveals that Yugiri actually has amnesia and feels terrible about it, so she lies to Chiyo and tells her she’s “going on a journey” so as not to hurt her feelings, and is then deactivated again and promptly returns to the cafe basement.

Look, I’m a pretty huge sap, and I’m not shy about admitting it. But even as I could actively feel it trying to tug at my heartstrings, most of Prima Doll‘s tearjerking did nothing for me. It’s really hard to nail this kind of thing down when it’s done right, and maybe even moreso when it’s done wrong. Obviously this is all very fiddly and subjective, but to me there is simply something too self-conscious, too obvious, and maybe even too contrived about Prima Doll.

There is certainly potential in the notion of a group of “broken” people—very literally, here—discovering a found family in each other. This is a notion that unites works of fiction as disparate as, indeed, Angel Beats! and, say, James Roberts‘ More Than Meets The Eye. (Hey, the dolls from this and the Transformers from that are even both robots! There you go.) But that’s the sort of thing that requires a delicate touch and a good command of character writing. Prima Doll displays zero evidence of having either at this point, and if it’s this unwilling (or unable) to show off even a little bit of that, I see equally little reason to give it much chance.

And as a final note, yes, there’s some potential also in the background and setting, but when stuff that’s actually good at worldbuilding—say, Lycoris Recoil, which is even also partly about a café—is airing this season, why on Earth would you bother with this?

The Takeaway: Pass.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CALL OF THE NIGHT Episode 1 – Night Flight

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.

Ko Yamori (Gen Satou) is having girl problems. Quite the opposite of the many heartbroken protagonists who litter his genre, Ko has recently turned someone else down, on the grounds that he doesn’t really understand what “love” or wanting to date someone actually are yet. Through a combination of resultant bullying and just plain ol’ feeling bad, this has made him want to stop going to school. So, he does. He skips class by day and walks about town late at night. The city is neon-on-black and blown out around him as he absorbs the relative tranquility of a small playground and rambles to himself.

Scrolling post-sundown social media (never a great idea), he gets it in his head to try drinking, despite being only 14. He finds an alcohol vending machine—did you know those were a thing? I certainly didn’t—and, more than a little paranoid as he does so, slips a few coins in. The machine emits a yellow-amber glow all the while, almost sickly in its illumination of the scenery.

He is then promptly jumpscared.

That is Nazuna Nanakusa (Sora Amamiya), nighttime socialite, owner of a pretty cool cloak, and vampire. The specifics are less important than the broadstroke; Nazuna turns Ko’s life on its head over the course of their single night together, which takes up the entire first episode, with not a single second of concession to the morning after. She chats up drunk salarymen, she teases and prods Ko, she says she likes to help people who can’t sleep at night solve their problems.

She takes him to her apartment.

Sadly, she does not climb up the side of her apartment in lizard fashion.

An aside; Call of the Night is somewhat new territory for this site. Despite being the holder of the seasonal romcom slot like previous Let’s Watch subjects My Dress-Up Darling and Kaguya-sama: Love is War!, Call of the Night is not particularly similar to either, and it would be a mistake to lump them together simply because they’re part of the same genre. Call of the Night‘s pedigree is older, and puts the series itself in a more sensible context. After all, people being attracted to vampires instead of (or in addition to) being afraid of them stretches back to the very dawn of popular vampire fiction. They’re nothing new in anime, either, with more or less popular titles that are about or prominently feature a vampire love interest including, just off the top of my own head, Rosario+Vampire, Vampire Knight, Actually, I Am…. / My Monster Secret, Seifuku no Vampiress Lord, Vampeerz, etc.

These span several different genres, but what all have in common is that the vampire is portrayed, at least initially, and in line with their origins as a creature of the horror genre, as something dangerous. Something that warrants caution. This is true of Call of the Night as well, even as Ko himself throws that caution to the wind not long after discovering Nazuna’s true nature and he decides he wants in on the whole “vampire” thing, the framing never lets her seem too innocent for too long. For every cut that depicts Nazuna like this, where she says something goofy or outright dumb.

There’s another that portrays her like this; a predatorial-in-the-animal-sense midnight stalker. She’s a vampire. Let her bite you.

Now, while danger can certainly be scary, it can also be salacious, and unsurprisingly that’s the angle that most of Call of the Night‘s more intense scenes take. Even less surprisingly, the attempts to play up Nazuna’s conventional sex appeal don’t work nearly as well as those that focus her vampiric features. The former are simply too clean. There’s a shot in here where the camera rotates around her body in an attempt to show off her midriff and it just looks absurd. (What is she, a sports car?) This is without mentioning what looks a lot like airbrushing on parts of her body, it just all looks too silly to take seriously.

The latter though? Well, there’s an old joke in some circles about how you can tell when they get someone who’s “into feet” (or into whatever) to animate a given scene. I think Call of the Night‘s team has someone who’s into teeth.

If they could only nail one, though, it’s actually better for it to be the latter. Ko, after all, is not so much attracted to Nazuna yet as he’s attracted to the idea of becoming a vampire, as is established not long after Nazuna reveals that she is one. We need to see this stuff through his eyes for that desire to make sense on a literal level (and on a less literal one, depicting some kind of temptation only works in any context if you can successfully convey said tempting). Fill in your own vice or vices here; is “vampirism” code for sex? Drugs? Booze? Just the general nightlife experience? There’s no reason it can’t be all of the above, and by keeping the metaphor fairly broad and open to finer interpretation, Call of the Night‘s first episode mostly succeeds in its aims of making Ko’s attraction to Nazuna—or perhaps more, what Nazuna offers—understandable, in spite of some minor flaws.

Call of the Night does also zero in on one particular thing. Nazuna, at one point, asks Ko why he thinks people stay up late in the first place. It’s a rhetorical question, and she provides her own answer.

This is an interesting notion, and certainly one that maps to why a lot of say, millennials like myself stay up too late, but the way Nazuna plays it is even more interesting. Later in the episode, Ko expresses that he knows he shouldn’t be doing “something like this”—that is to say, this whole skipping school and staying out at night bit—in the first place. Nazuna, who seems to have taken an interest in him despite herself, responds to that thought by hovering above the ground, and asking him this.

The question pierces the thematic heart of Call of the Night in general. How does Ko feel about all this? He says to himself, remembering back to the incident at school, that he tried to do the right thing. Nazuna cuts in—literally invading the flashback—to ask why he even cares.

It’s clear that Nazuna, for whatever reason or reasons, wants to bring him over to the very literal dark side. He can be a creature of the night too, if he wants to be. And that is, abstractly, what the show says for anyone; the only requirement for being an outcast, after all, is that you are cast out. Ko, at least in his own mind, already has been. The freaks come out at night, the question for Ko—and more broadly for anyone—is simply whether they feel they fit in more with them, or with the normal folks who thrive while the Sun’s up.

On another level; the extent to which Nazuna is a shamelessly bad influence adds further knots to the already twisty question of how “okay” any of this is. But personally, I’m less interested in the question of if Nazuna’s actions are in some way moral and more in the question of if this resonates both with its intended audience and more generally.

That’s a question that it will take the rest of Call of the Night’s thirteen episodes to answer, so for now, it’s an open one. But! I think this first showing is promising. Toward the end of “Night Flight”, the episode earns its title, as Nazuna gives Ko the thrill of his life whether he wants it or not.

She kicks him off of a roof, and lets him panic mid-freefall for a moment. Of course, she swoops down to save him, picking him up and carrying him away as ED theme kicks in.1 In that moment, Call of the Night is pure black magic. If it keeps figuring out how to do that, it has nothing to worry about; the night is still young.

1: Also called “Call of the Night”, and after which the manga was originally named. I did not know this when I wrote the article and have updated the phrasing here and added this footnote to reflect the reality of the situation.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Something is Wrong in SMILE OF THE ARSNOTORIA THE ANIMATION

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.

As we stand in the blistering spring wind,
we are resolute, humble, and decorous.
We are Pentagrams,
and with the pride of flowers,
we learn and study hard.

I really must, before saying anything at all about this series, direct even site regulars to the warning in the header. Arsnotoria is the sort of thing I’d recommend going into as blind as possible. (Even saying that much is a bit of a giveaway, but there’s a certain amount of that which can’t be helped.)

But let’s get into it, shall we?

You get them a few times per year; anime whose premieres just make you go “huh?”

Often, they start out as one genre and then take a left turn into another. Or their tone does a total headstand somewhere in the first episode or two. Something like that. By me even mentioning this, you can guess that Smile of The Arsnotoria: The Animation—clunky title and all—is an example of this, but it’s worth explaining why even bringing that up is noteworthy. These days, these kinds of swerves don’t have much impact anymore. Somewhere after Gakkou Gurashi people started to almost expect them, and most modern examples don’t even bother waiting until the premiere to tip their hand, with, for example, one of Arsnotoria‘s contemporaries Lycoris Recoil not even keeping up the facade for all of its preview trailers. So, if nothing else, if the entire rest of the series is a total, out-and-out bomb that drops off the face of the Earth after it finishes airing, it should at least be noted for its restraint.

There are 22 minutes in Arsnotoria‘s first episode. About 20 of them are extremely pleasant, almost iyashikei-esque slice of life coziness. Let’s talk about those minutes first, since they form the bulk of the episode.

Right from the top, we’re dropped to the goings-on in a magical academy of some sort, and into the lives of five schoolgirls. These are Arsnotoria herself (Misaki Kuno), Mell (Miharu Hanai), Ko Alberta (Miyu Tomita), Picatrix (Eri Yukimura), and Abramelin (Eriko Matsui). No, I don’t know why Ko is the only one with a last name either (although there is brief mention of a Grand Alberta, also. Maybe they’re related).

They fall into familiar and broad character archetypes; Arsnotoria is the cutesy and naive one, Mell is rambunctious and michievious, Ko is a sleepyhead who’s more aware than she lets on, Picatrix is an ojou complete with ending most of her sentences with “desu wa”, and Abramelin is the serious, responsible one. These aren’t the most compelling or deep characters, but they work in the sort of easygoing, slice of life mold that most of the episode traffics in.

“Easygoing” might be underselling it, really. Much of the episode is positively languid, and it’s telling that a solid 10 minutes are taken up by the characters discussing tea. This admittedly gets a little boring toward the end, but it’s to Arsnotoria‘s credit that it manages to actually keep this fairly engaging for most of that time. Discussions of what side one butters their scones on recall the (in?)famous chocolate coronet scene in Lucky Star. And at one point, Ko tries to bash a sealed jam jar open with some lavishly-animated and quite powerful looking magic wherein she summons a huge, bandaged hand to punch it.

Aside from this, there are a few setting details. The school this all takes place at, the “academy city” of Ashlam, seems to basically be a furnishing school for young arcanists, which is perfectly fine as a setting and it’s one plenty of other things have done (in anime alone you have everything from Tweeny Witches to Little Witch Academia to Mahou Girls Precure to, perhaps most relevant for this part of the episode, Mysteria Friends). A fair bit of proper terminology gets lobbed at us here. Not quite enough to be a Proper Noun Machine Gun, but maybe a Proper Noun Slingshot.

And mixed in with all this are some interesting bits about London being on “the surface”, which seems to both imply (somewhat surprisingly) that this takes place in a version of our world, and that Ashlam is actually physically above the ground.

All of this may seem irrelevant, given the total tonal 180 that you’re all aware, if you’ve gotten this far in the article, is coming, but there is one other detail that seems significant; the opening of the episode sees our characters return from a “watch” shift. A watch for what is not a question I thought to ask while first viewing the scene, but it’s certainly on my mind at this point.

Because, yes, in its final two minutes or so, Arsnotoria completely tips its hand, in perhaps the most dope slap-blunt way possible. A cut to black, the word “WARNING” inexplicably written across the screen in bright red, and then this.

A scene of total, apocalyptic ruin. (Complete with some very nice billowing fire animation.) Inquisitors patrol streets and slaughter citizens for being “Negatives,” explaining nothing with their cryptic comments as they do so. It does not even look like it’s from the same universe as the entire preceding 20 minutes, and with just that little bit of footage, Arsnotoria goes from being enjoyable if predictable to a total fucking wildcard.

None of this necessarily means that Arsnotoria will be good. It is entirely possible to have an interesting structure but fail on any number of other counts (or even all other counts), but it’s at least a good sign.

The Takeaway: Really, this one is pretty simple. If you enjoy throwing caution to the wind and gambling on something that no one has any real idea as to where it’s going, you want in on this. If not, you can probably skip it.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Cat Comes Back in TOKYO MEW MEW NEW

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.

In 2005, Tokyo Mew Mew, under the localized title Mew Mew Power, became one of the very, very few non-Sailor Moon magical girl anime to ever make any real inroads in the United States. It wasn’t a runaway hit—in fact, it was one domino among many that eventually lead to downfall of infamous chopjob dub house 4Kids Entertainment—but it’s stuck around in a nebulous, cultural sense. As one of the tiny handful of magical girl anime that’s ever made any kind of dent stateside, it’s at least stuck in peoples’ memories. I was not one of the people who saw its US run, and in fact today marks the first time I’ve watched any Tokyo Mew Mew in any form, but the fact that it has that tiny little toehold in the minds of Anglophone magical girl fans matters, and it makes the series’ return in rebooted form as Tokyo Mew Mew New something of an event (if perhaps only a minor one). I imagine at least a few people will find their way to this article by looking up the new series.

New arrives nearly 20 years to the season that the original Tokyo Mew Mew premiered in its home country, and it returns like no time has passed at all. Almost every element of the series is relentlessly, unapologetically old school, for both good and ill, and it’s hard to imagine something like this being written nowadays were this not an old property for a lot of reasons.

At its core, the story is a simple one. Ordinary high school girl Ichigo Momomiya (Yuuki Tenma), has a crush on her school’s kendo star, Masaya Aoyama (Yuuma Uchida). She gets word from the mysterious Mint Aizawa (Mirai Hinata) that the guy loves his animals and, what a coincidence, she happens to have two tickets to an endangered animals exhibit at a local zoo that she’s willing to part with. Ichigo, being a pink-themed magical girl protagonist, does not think twice about how odd this is, and takes her up on the offer. At the zoo, Ichigo is hit with some kind of magic ray gun by a pair of handsome scientists(?!), which causes her to commune with some kind of cat spirit, and transforms her into a magical girl. Then, of course, she has to fight off a giant rat monster. You know, typical schoolgirl stuff.

You know, normally only Medicine Cats have visions of Star Clan.

Tokyo Mew Mew New arguably doesn’t really need to “separate itself from the pack” or anything of the sort. (There really isn’t much of a “pack” nowadays, with New‘s only direct competitor being the concurrent Delicious Party Precure.) But it does so regardless via two main things; the aforementioned old-school sensibility, which mostly comes through in its heavy focus in the first episode on an idealized sort of teen girl romance, and its concern for the environment.

The former is….a bit of a mixed thing. In a way, it’s charming to see something this straightforward and earnest in 2022. Ichigo’s brain seems to be stuffed with romantic notions of movie dates and love letters, and the show itself is absolutely flooded with classic shoujo tropes, many of which I imagine might be wholly unfamiliar to some younger viewers. Speaking personally, it’s been a long time since I last saw the whole “gaggle of girls fawning over a hot guy doing A School Sport” thing played completely straight. (Emphasis on the “straight”, perhaps.)

Some of this brushes up against uncomfortable implications, but it doesn’t cross that line yet, even as details like Ichigo’s magic power tattoo appearing on her thigh and an actual, honest-to-god, “whoops I fell on top of you and we accidentally kissed” scene make me raise my eyebrow a bit.

This happens. They even show the lip lock in the cut after this, a genuine rarity for any TV anime these days.

It’s too soon to call whether the environmental messaging will be put to good use or not. Certainly, it is a hell of a bit of tonal whiplash to go from Ichigo and Masaya enjoying their date to the latter gravely expositing about the Endangered Species List and how “humanity has committed sins” (that is a paraphrase, but he seriously does put it in roughly those terms). Certainly the climate crisis has not gotten any better since the original Tokyo Mew Mew aired, but there is a thin line between an actual effective thematic core and one that’s confusing, hysterical, or just bizarre. Time will tell which side of that line New falls on.

But in general, New‘s fuck-the-trends attitude helps it a lot more than it hurts. It’s honestly just invigorating to see something this classically magical warrior mahou shoujo, even as it also evokes, as well, sci-fi tropes that are much less common to the genre. (Remember Corrector Yui?) More than anything, I’m just happy to see another magical girl anime airing at all. The genre has seen healthier days, but maybe a bit of mew mew power and mew mew grace can breathe some new life into it.

The Takeaway: Keep a cat’s eye on this one if you’ve got any interest in the genre at all. If not, still check it out to see if the retro shoujo vibe catches your interest.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Logged in and Losing it in YUREI DECO

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.

Entertain this particular dystopian thought for a moment; what if the world ran on Twitter likes? That, more or less, is the backbone of the society envisioned by YUREI DECO, a neon-block dystopia where the Metaverse has grown beyond its Silicon Valley bounds and swallowed the real world whole, such that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the two. (This isn’t me reaching, it’s literally called “The Hyperverse” in-show.) Social media tokens called “Love” equate one to one with the sum total of your personal value, and seemingly the whole world is overlaid with a second digital layer of reality that there is no meaningful escape from. Dual implants in each eye, the DECOs of one half of the title, ensure that everyone is plugged in at all times. Truly, Yurei Deco‘s world is one where we are all terminally online, and there is no logging off for anybody.

This is the setting we’re dropped into, handy explanation and all, at the start of this series’ first episode, as we sit in on our main character, Berry (Mira Kawakatsu) and the glorified Zoom class that she calls school. Immediately, we get the sense that Berry is someone who plays outside the rules, as she pulls off some minor computer wizardry to be able to talk to two of her classmates without their teacher noticing. Passing notes for the cyberpunk age, perhaps.

(Somewhere in his lecture, which also serves as our introduction to the setting, Berry’s professor calls the city they live in “the purest expression of liberalism ever to have existed.” Subtle!)

We soon learn that a mysterious person—or perhaps a force—called Phantom Zero has been hitting whole neighborhoods at a time and draining their Love accounts, a big deal in a city where Love is both money and social status. Berry is obsessed with Phantom Zero, and it’s through her eyes and ears that most of this first episode takes place. Including when one of her DECO implants starts glitching out, and she finds a strange origami flower stuck to a lamppost.

That flower, we eventually learn, is the doing of our other main character, a slang-tangling hacker-conman who initially seems like they might be behind the whole “Phantom Zero” thing, given that one of the first things we see her do is sucker a random influencer out of most of his Love. This character’s name, incidentally, is actually just is Hack (Anna Nagase), although you’d have to look at supplementary materials to know that at this point, since it’s not said outright in the first episode.

.hack//Cool Visor, Kid

Berry of course becomes fixated on Hack, who she believes to be responsible for the Phantom Zero phenomenon. Without indulging in an overabundance of detail, she turns out to be wrong, and the real culprit is someone even more mysterious.

The show’s actual plot details aside, what do we make of YUREI DECO so far? Personally, I’m happy to have it around. It’s been a bit since we had a show with interesting visuals that tried to tackle Serious Subjects, or at least, one that didn’t flame out disappointingly. (Sorry, Tokyo 24th Ward.) The series definitely reminds me a fair bit of DECA-DENCE, another colorful cyberpunk series with an all-caps title. More distantly, it recalls Kaiba, and while I’ve not seen Dennou Coil I know enough about it for the multiple comparisons I’ve seen between the two on social media to make sense to me.

A lot of lofty expectations tend to get placed upon anime like this, and this one in particular also happens to be its director’s first TV anime (Tomohisa Shimoyama, though it’s worth noting that he has various credits on things going all the way back to some animation work on Chobits. There’s a show you probably haven’t thought about in a while). While this first episode is a pretty good indication that YUREI DECO is up to that challenge, I do hope folks won’t lose the forest for the trees. There’s a lot to love here already, regardless of where it ends up going.

The Takeaway: If you’ve been looking for the next visually interesting Big Ideas show to come along, you should absolutely be watching this. As for anyone else, I think it’s certainly at least worth checking 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 and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch LYCORIS RECOIL Episode 1 – Easy Does It

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

Erase, delete, eradicate, and beautify.

It opens like this; sunrise over a peaceful Tokyo, a gleaming monument to some sin or glory enshrined in the skyline. Our lead, Chisato Nishikigi (Chika Anzai), does stretches in front of her apartment window. A call comes in, and she’s out the door like a bolt of lightning. She monologues, extolling the virtues of Japanese politeness and the serenity of her hometown at dawn while the visuals supercut through scenes of high school girls packing pistols as they apprehend criminals. One appears to execute somebody. These are the Lycoris—named for the spider lily—agents who manufacture the peace that this Tokyo’s citizens enjoy.

Halfway across town, she arrives in time to see another such high school supercop toting a chain gun—that’s Takina Inoue (Shion Wakayama), our other lead—gun down a room full of arms dealers, and nearly hit one of her teammates in the process. Chisato, watching from a building over, whoops and cheers.

Takina’s stunt, meanwhile, gets her expelled from her department—the “DA”—and transferred to Chisato’s, LycoReco, which is rather inexplicably based out of a cafe. (This was the source of much of the show’s early promotional material.) There, she meets Chisato herself, the enigmatic owner Mika (Kousuke Sakaki), and alternately tries to adjust to her new role and openly wonders how she might find her way back to the force.

This, all of it, is Lycoris Recoil. This missile barrage of violence, cute girls, cafes, and tension-ratcheting authoritarian imagery is how it chooses to open. There have been anime somewhat like this before—Princess Principal, RELEASE THE SPYCE, to a lesser extent Assault Lily Bouquet—but of them, this might have the most openly bonkers, beat-your-fucking-head-in introduction of all. There is a sublime unease to the juxtaposition of Chisato’s cheery, upbeat narration and the blunt violence of what we see, even as all of the visuals have a sleek, modern edge that distantly recalls but does not actually look like its ancestors in the “girls with guns” boom of the 2000s. (Rest in peace, Bee Train.)

The episode’s second half sees some additional context. The Chisato and Takina’s unit handles what one might charitably call odd jobs. Chisato’s description is….vague.

They help out at a daycare, then a Japanese-as-second language school, and deliver rare coffee grounds to a mob boss. In the second half of the episode, they help a woman deal with a stalker. The woman’s stalkers turn out to be connected to the same arms deal that got Takina shunted over to Chisato’s unit, and Lycoris Recoil quickly establishes that in its world, everything is a connected, dizzying clockwork of interlocking plots and motivations. Coincidence is for suckers. That’s how we go from “three girls talking out a problem in a restaurant” to “hostage situation” in perhaps ten real-time minutes.

Takina actually intentionally lets the woman get kidnapped, to lure them out. Real piece of work, this girl.

This is all also connected to a mysterious hacker named Walnut—think The Laughing Man from Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex if he had a fursona1—and an eccentric, sinister billionaire named Allen Adams, who at one point we see cause an explosion in a building by remotely tapping a few commands into his Tesla’s touchscreen.

The inevitable and valid question is what all this adds up to, but the fact of the matter is that we simply don’t know yet. It’s clear that Chisato, despite her sunny front, has seen some things. The “symbol of peace” in Tokyo is evidently the result of some situation that she was involved with, and in deed, if not by name, she’s famous throughout the country. She lets a few remarkably cynical comments slip a couple times, and, frankly, given that supporting character Mizuki Nakahara (Ami Koshimizu) notes that Lycorises (Lycori?) are often recruited from orphanages, it’s not hard to imagine why. She and Takina’s original department also seem to have very different ideas of how to keep a place safe and worth living in; her narration—and her habit of helping out just about anyone—point to a belief in focusing on the community itself. And the DA, well, we see them shoot people. It’s not hard to draw a contrast, there.

That may well be the source of Takina’s already-established tendency to use violence as her first and only solution to any obstacle in her way. And this is to say nothing of the Lycoris Cafe’s owner, Mika, who himself seems to be an old hand in the field, the aforementioned villains, the DA’s director, who seems to have her own agenda, and on and on. There are a lot of interesting characters in Lycoris Recoil, and an absolute ton happens, even in its first 24 minutes.

No matter what happens from here on out; Lycoris Recoil should be remembered for a premiere that hits like information overload. Between the silenced pistols and shining city streets, conspiracies form in the broken glass on the floor. I won’t pretend to have all—or even any—answers, as this is clearly a series with a lot going on. But to me, that is part of the adventure. What’s next is unknown and unknowable, and for us to discover together.

1: I did not know this myself, but the text circling his avatar is a reference to a James Joyce story. God knows how that factors in to all this.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

Announcing the Summer 2022 Let’s Watches

That’s right, we’re doing this in style now.

I’ve changed my methodology for these a few times over the past couple seasons, but this time it’s very straightforward. After voting myself to break a tie (something I’ve not had to do in any previous community poll, things were much closer this season than they’ve been in any past season), I took a screenshot of the final vote tally at around 10PM last night (I checked again this morning just to make sure nothing had changed, don’t worry). I will be covering the top three shows, because honestly, I’ve been at a bit of a loss for what to cover this season. Putting it in the fans’ hands is a simple and practical solution.

Why don’t we make it a bit of an event? Here are the winners, starting from the third-place winner, and working up to the first.

Third Place: Call of the Night

Filling in the “exceedingly horny rom-com” gap that must have been left in all your hearts following the end of My Dress-Up Darling a season ago, Call of the Night is an interesting one. I read a very small bit of the manga for this, back when it was new. I liked it but failed to keep up with it (I am very bad at keeping up with manga), so I’m going into this just-shy-of-blind. Still, what I do know is promising. Take the Sentai blurb, for instance.

Wracked by insomnia and wanderlust, Kou Yamori is driven onto the moonlit streets every night in an aimless search for something he can’t seem to name. His nightly ritual is marked by purposeless introspection — until he meets Nazuna, who might just be a vampire! Kou’s new companion could offer him dark gifts and a vampire’s immortality. But there are conditions that must be met before Kou can sink his teeth into vampirism, and he’ll have to discover just how far he’s willing to go to satisfy his desires before he can heed the Call of the Night!

Sentai Filmworks

That’s really quite a lot to fit into your high premise. And it’s not like vampirism as a metaphor for coming of age—especially the less wholesome parts of that whole process—is anything new, but I do think this really has the potential to be something special. Whether or not it will actually deliver on that is another question, of course.

I do also want to point out the involvement of Tomoyuki Itamura in the director’s seat here. Just earlier this year, he wrapped up his work on The Case Study of Vanitas, a completely different horny vampire anime. That show is very good (if certainly not without a couple issues), so it gives me hope that Call of the Night will similarly be so. I suppose we’ll all find out together.

Coverage begins on July 8th. (If you’re reading this the day it goes up, that’s a week from today.)

Second Place: Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer

Ahahaha. Oh no.

This one getting as many votes as it did quite surprised me. If nothing else, you can take its presence here as evidence that I didn’t tamper with the vote in any way, because I actually wasn’t planning to watch it at all, at this point!

I love the original Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer manga. It’s one of my favorite action manga full stop, actually, and that’s mostly because of its deep characterization and solid thematic core. But it’s also because Satoshi Mizukami is a goddamn genius, and everything he draws is gorgeous. The only other anime he’s ever had a strong hand in, Planet With, did manage the incredibly tall ask of translating his distinct visual style to animation. Because of that, it managed to stand out in a year that was absolutely stuffed with great anime.

But that was in 2018, four years that might as well be four centuries ago, given all that’s happened since. Now, it is 2022, and the Biscuit Hammer adaption is being handed to a studio of little note (NAZ, they did Sabikui Bisco earlier this year alongside the similarly named Studio OZ), a director who is basically a total unknown (Nobuaki Nakanishi), and a series compositor best known for an utterly infamous flop (Yuuichirou Momose, of My Sister, My Writer notoriety). Combine that with the utterly hideous key visual sitting at the top of this entry, and a pair of trailers best described as “absolutely terrible” and “okay I guess”, and this one is going to be an active challenge to get through, barring some miracle. It would not be the first time that Mizukami has drawn blood from a stone, but no one should be expected to pull that sort of thing off twice.

I guess we’ll find out if it really is that bad or if all this doomsaying will look foolish twelve weeks from now soon. Coverage begins on the 9th.

First Place: Lycoris Recoil

What is Lycoris Recoil?

The interesting thing about an original series that’s yet to premiere is that it can, in our hearts and minds, be literally anything. Lycoris Recoil has had Key Visuals and trailers and all the usual accoutrements that come with being a TV anime in the modern day, but no one really seems to have a good grasp on its character. Will it be lighthearted? Dark? How big of a role does the cafe` we know is a central setting point of the story play? The chrome pistols and spider lilies in the above KV art certainly imply something sinister is going on, and “Lycoris Recoil” itself is a two-language pun combining the scientific name of the spider lily with just one inevitable consequence of firing a gun. But all of these things raise more questions than they answer, and we’re all going into this show with little to go off of but our own notions about what makes art interesting.

To me, this is fascinating. I can recall an upcoming original series capturing the public imagination in this way twice in recent times. The first time, we got Wonder Egg Priority, an anime I dearly love, but that’s an opinion that puts me firmly in small company. The second, we got Sonny Boy, which I also really like, and is also divisive (although much less so). Putting Lycoris Recoil in that company is probably attaching unrealistic expectations to it; if you want my earnest guess, I’m thinking this will be more of a piece with anime like Princess Principal or the underrated RELEASE THE SPYCE than either of the aforementioned. But honestly, who knows?

Well, we will pretty soon. Lycoris Recoil premieres tomorrow. Coverage will begin then, barring some unexpected circumstance.

See you then, anime fans. But, as a parting item of interest, here is the entire top half of the poll, if you’d like to see what else got a lot of votes. I am particularly surprised at how well Uncle From Another World did.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) BIRDIE WING -GOLF GIRLS STORY- Just Doesn’t Give a Damn

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

“The Symphogear of Golf”

-Blurb for a now-deleted review of the first episode by Anilist user SolidQuentin.

Just accept that it makes no sense. Birdie Wing doesn’t care about your feelings—toward golf or toward anything else—and that includes how serious you think it’s being. This is sports anime as Rorschach Blot, a series that practically dares you to take it on its own terms even as it’s consistently the goofiest fucking thing that aired in its season.

Consider this; it’s ED theme (which I may or may not be listening to as I write this), is the achingly beautiful Tsukuyomi track “Nightjar.” For a series like this, it’s totally incongruous as an ending at first glance; a deeply sincere piece of work attached to an anime that is on its face, absolutely ludicrous. It’s right there in the premise; golf taken as deadly-serious as a shonen martial arts tournament or a mob movie, with all the camp that tonal dissonance implies. Over Birdie Wing‘s criminally short 13-episode first season, lives and livelihoods alike are staked on golf games. Pride is, too, and absolutely all of this is given the same narrative weight. (With one exception, as we’ll get to.)

Somehow, in that ED, when a shot of a golf ball dissolves into the night sky, an eagle cutting a shadowy figure against the moon, it makes a kind of sense. If it’s absurd, it’s not in a bad way at all.

It begins with illegal betting; our protagonist Eve (Akari Kitou) makes what little money she can to support her adoptive family by pulling off impossible shots. Golf balls fire like revolver bullets between moving train cars and lop the limbs off of trees. It’s totally insane, and, in its own way, hilarious. But as Eve meets her rival / golf girlfriend Aoi Amawashi (Asami Seto), and the series continues to tick on, things like that just keep happening. Every time, you expect Birdie Wing to tip its hand and reveal that the entire thing is a joke, but it never does. Not when we’re introduced to Golf Mafia Boss Rose Aleone (Toa Yukinari), not when we see that another mob boss owns an illegal underground course that can physically morph its shape into a new, random course every time, not when Eve’s first major hurdle as a player is a woman with a snake motif named Viper the Reaper (Kaori Nazuka) who tries to psyche her opponents out with a scented tattoo. Not ever. It almost feels like a challenge, Birdie Wing dares you to blink first, because it certainly isn’t going to. About the closest it ever gets is this joke about Eve’s inexplicable, fluent Japanese.

Rose Aleone eventually dies. Seriously, she loses a golf game, and her life is snuffed out in a pastiche of old gangster movies that is way, way better and more genuine than it really seems like it should be. Eve moves to Japan and effectively stars in a second, different, marginally more conventional absurd-serious golf anime for the series’ second half. That shouldn’t really work either. It does too, to the surprise of no one. I’ve barely even found time to mention the flirty toying that Eve and Aoi are constantly engaged in. It definitely slots the series comfortably next to, if not outright in, the yuri genre.

I’ve spent a lot of time describing Birdie Wing and rather little elaborating on my own feelings on it. To tell the truth, because of its nature wherein what one brings to Birdie Wing strongly influences what one takes away from it, I almost think it’s not really meant for people like me. Folks who can’t really shut off the analytical part of their brain even when they’re totally enjoying something. But enjoy it I did, so on the other hand, maybe I’ve been played as thoroughly as any other member of this show’s audience. (In this respect, it very much is like Symphogear, making it the second anime in as many weeks that I’ve reviewed to have some trace of the seminal singing-girls-punch-things anime in it.)

Let me put it this way. Late in the series, we’re introduced to supporting character Kinue Jinguuji (Mai Nakahara). Jinguuji is a fairly classic character in the “had to give up on her dreams because a passion for something is not the same as being good at it” mold, something many other anime have done before and plenty others have done in a way that is, at least on paper, more poignant. But somehow, the fact that Jinguuji’s dream is this—golfing, the most boring sport in the world, and one of the hardest to take seriously—makes what would ordinarily be a light tap feel like a sucker punch. Through sheer commitment to the bit, Birdie Wing will make you care about this.

In the end, the show’s first season ends in a shrug, setting up more plot points than it resolves. Why? Because it knows it’ll return like a golfing T-1000. The 13-episode count was a fakeout, and season two is slated for next winter. What else is there to say? Bury Birdie shallow, it’ll be back.

Update: Season two has premiered! You can read my coverage here.

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