Category: anime

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 3 – Cleanup, Run Run Run

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

Okay, yeah, we’re doing this.

Healer Girl, if you’ve not seen my prior post on it, is an absolutely mesmerizing little series from Studio 3Hz. It’s about girls who sing to heal people. Songstress-doctors. Idol-medics. Whatever compound term you care to come up with. It is the best anime airing right now, and even though I have basically no “good reason” to cover it from a practical point of view—it’s not that popular from what I can tell, which is a tragedy I hope to play some small part in fixing—I definitely have a good reason from a personal point of view. I love this series; it’s a sparkling, scintillating ocean wave of pure joy.

So, this is the only warning you’re going to get. If you’re averse to just straight-up fangirling, this is probably not a column you’ll enjoy. But if you aren’t, well, welcome to the cult.

We’ve missed an episode, but thankfully Healer Girl‘s second was not too complex, so we can quickly run through it here. The episode introduced two new characters; the stuck-up Healer prodigy Sonia Yanagi (Chihaya Yoshitake) and her assistant / friend, an aspiring composer named Shinobu Honosaka (Miyu Takagi). The former is obsessed with trying to show up the clinic that our main girls work at, and essentially strong-arms her way into the story as their self-declared rival. The latter just sort of goes along with it. These two will doubtless play an integral role in the story going forward, as will another fact established in episode two—that Healers panicking can adversely affect their ability to treat patients—so that’s the gist of what we skipped by my not covering episode two.

Episode three is about our girls studying for, taking, and waiting for the results from, the stressful medical exam they need to pass in order to become certified Healer Assistants. They spend most of the episode’s opening half studying for and/or panicking about this. Particularly Kana, whose pharmacological (there’s a fun word) knowledge is sorely lacking. Because this is Healer Girl, the episode actually opens on the three studying by singing. Remember; this is also a musical. I’m particularly fond of the bit where one will call out a music term and another will sing back the definition. It’s wonderfully bouncy. Toe-tapping, even.

The series manages the difficult feat of showcasing the three’s personalities through their singing alone. Kana is Healer Girl‘s ostensible lead character, but it’s really more Reimi who is the “leader” of their little clique, and her forceful, almost rock singer-ish vocal style and fuller timbre emphasizes that. Kana, meanwhile, has a peppier and lighter tone, which fits her status as the not-too-bright lead. Hibiki, the most mature of the three, actually has the highest tone, but it only serves to reinforce her playful, never-taking-things-too-seriously nature.

Of course, the show’s spoken dialogue is full of personality, too. During a study session, where Kana and Reimi stay overnight at Hibiki’s room at the clinic, Kana recounts a story about why she’s so bad at learning about medicine, and I really cannot do justice to her completely absurd excuse except to reproduce it in full.

Any Discord servers out there looking for a :NotLikeKana: emote?

To which Reimi correctly replies.

In general, the whole “study scene” does a lot to remind us that, while it’s true that these girls have an extraordinary and very important job within the context of their world, they’re also still just teenagers. (And frankly having to take a medical licensing exam when you’re in high school sounds like an utter nightmare.) Given how important it is for any “slice of life” anime to make its characters feel human and relatable, this is pretty important.

There’s also an interesting scene where the three visit a shrine (to pray for success on the test, natch) and Hibiki, witnessing some miko perform a kagura, wonders aloud if Vocal Medicine works by faith. Reimi even mentions that the exact mechanisms by which it functions are obscure, even though it’s been proven to work. (This part is less absurd than it sounds, given how opaque the precise workings of even a lot of chemical medicine were and, in some cases, still are.) If you were being really uncharitable, you could maybe spin this into Healer Girl promoting pseudoscience or faith healing. Suffice it to say, I think such a reading would be an extreme stretch.

Boxing at shadows aside, the shrine scene (and a sung-over montage immediately after it) transition us into the second half of the episode. Here, the girls have already taken the exam and are simply waiting for their results. The stress from the waiting has made them, shall we say, a bit off-key.

I’ve been there, girls.

Ria (the girls’ teacher, and the Healer they’re assistants to, if you’ll recall), decides to try to get their minds off of things. How? By entering them in a town sport and field competition. Why not?

The girls sing all of their dialogue in this second half of the episode in an amusingly flat, slightly off tone, to illustrate how tired they are. This continues—with slightly more spirit in the singing—even when Sonia shows up to cause a general ruckus and gets on Reimi’s bad side by dissing Ria. Naturally, the two decide to settle things by seeing which team between the two of them can score more first-place leis. (They give out leis instead of medals at this competition. I don’t know.)

I really must make it totally clear that Reimi’s half of this whole exchange is sung. It’s great.

Things are neck in neck, until the grand prize for the overall competition winner is announced. You may wonder what a mere county meet could offer as a compelling first prize. I will tell you in three words; Enormous Dog Plushie.

The injection of pure motivation this provides is instantaneous and noticeable.

This is also how I feel about large plushies.

Reimi wants it too, since conveniently apparently Ria collects merchandise of this character and this is another chance for everyone’s favorite blonde lesbian disaster to get in good with her teacher (in her own mind, anyway). With the spirit of competition raised to even greater heights than before, Sonia also starts singing. (Her second number in the show, in fact, after her Healing Song from last episode.)

But Reimi and Sonia’s fired-up neck and neck competition ends up not mattering. Because apparently Hibiki, who quickly overtakes both of them from behind, is a musical Speed Force user or something of the sort.

The competition ends with the giant plushie going to Hibiki. She promptly sends it to her many adorable younger siblings, meaning no giant plushie for Reimi to give to Ria. Don’t worry, though, because Reimi did win the second-place plushie, and gives that to Ria instead. Ria is duly grateful and hugs her student, thus giving Reimi specifically a very happy ending for this episode.

After the ED, we see that the girls also did, in fact, pass their exams. It’s a heartwarming note for the episode to end on. And, for us here at MPA, an apropos one, too.

Song Count: Two full songs in the episode’s first half. The girls’ dialogue is almost entirely sung in the back half, as mentioned, depending on how you want to count 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 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, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Weekly [4/17/22]

Anime Orbit Weekly is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

New title, same old format. I don’t have too much to say, this week, despite the title change. I’ve been going through some medical stuff (which I’ll not bother to recount in detail here) over the past two weeks, so I’ve been a bit tight on time. Nonetheless, I hope the below writeups will slake some of your curiosity as to the current goings-on in the more esoteric corners of the seasonal anime universe. And beyond, as you’ll see.

Weekly Anime

Birdie Wing

Birdie Wing‘s second episode is surprisingly, almost disappointingly, tame compared to its utterly ridiculous first. Expecting it to top its premiere would’ve been unreasonable, but I don’t think the same is true of hoping it’d keep that same energy up throughout the course of its run. The second episode, unfortunately–and to paraphrase a friend–is just golf. The presentation still leans into the absurd and showy, but the actual shots here are not anything that defies description. They are just golf shots; very good golf shots, golf shots that would be notable if they were pulled off by a real person. But there’s no passing betwixt train cars or bouncing off of rakes here. Most of the episode takes place on a regular green course. (Albeit, one with an admittedly nasty L-shaped design.)

Fly true, Pac-Man.

Instead, Birdie Wing makes the puzzling decision to get a bit more psychological. This isn’t an idea wholly devoid of merit; throughout the episode, our protagonists Eve and Aoi are contrasted in numerous ways. In their literal playstyles, yes, but also their entire personalities. Eve is cynical and mercenary, her only real motivators are money or the rare thrill of a genuine challenge. Aoi is studied, formal, and has a genuine love of the game. (Tellingly, her mother is a CEO.) The two are total opposites. Consequently, they fascinate each other, and that is what Birdie Wing‘s second episode chooses to focus on, not the theatrics of its first.

We do still get a lot of shonen-y, sports anime-adjacent guff here about how Aoi is an “innocent tyrant” who “crushes people with her smile.” Read: people find her sincerity disarming. Most of this comes from her manager. (If Aoi herself is even aware that she has this effect on people, she doesn’t really show any sign of it.) But the thing is this; all this stuff is kinda funny. It’s not actually interesting. Those are different things, and I think Birdie Wing may be confusing the two. It might become genuinely interesting later on, but Birdie Wing hasn’t earned this kind of self-indulgent character study yet, there are a lot more basics to be snapped together about what this show is even about, and frankly Aoi isn’t a complicated enough character to warrant all this. It really feels like the series is getting ahead of itself. Although, it should be said that Aoi’s fangirling is at least cute.

In its final third or so, after Aoi and Eve’s match, things take a turn back toward the more pleasantly ridiculous. Eve busts up a rigged trick golf game (sure) and then confronts another wonderfully absurd character; new addition Rose Aleon (Toa Yukinari). Rose is….a golf mob boss? I guess? Continuing the show’s already-a-tradition of affixing “golf” to the start of various professions and pretending that that’s a thing. Rose and Eve’s banter is fun, but the end result is that she sets Eve up in a tournament where she can play against Aoi. In my view, this makes Rose something of a golf lesbian wingman.

My hope is that when we get to the actual tournament(s?), the show will regain some of its visual oomph. Until then, this is a decent but only marginally compelling episode to bridge two parts of the story. Hopefully, Eve and Aoi can bring each other happiness. You know, through golf.

Golfing!

Estab-Life: Great Escape

One show that has not had any issue keeping up the WTF factor is Estab-Life. The peculiar Polygon Pictures product premiered and then released two more episodes almost immediately. It’s been two weeks since then, and as such, we’re already up to episode 5, almost halfway through the run of what is easily the season’s weirdest show. Previous episodes have involved yakuza bosses with dreams of magical girldom, KGB penguins, and a whole lot of lesbianism on the part of little Martese. This week’s episode continues the tradition of being unmistakable for any other show airing right now.

Unfortunately, this is probably also the weakest episode of the series so far. It’s the farthest Estab-Life has ever leaned into comedy, which feels odd to say, because the entire show sometimes feels like a prank being played on the viewer. If it is, this week is a bit of a mean turn. Have you ever wanted to watch an entire 22-minute episode of TV based around the fact that some people think the word “pantsu” is really funny? I haven’t either, but apparently one of Estab-Life‘s writers did.

Most of the episode is frankly not worth recapping, at least not in detail. The gist is that the undergarments-forbidding cluster is the location of their new client; a priestess in the religion of “the Goddess” who rules over the cluster. That goddess? The Statue of Liberty in a bath towel. Obviously.

Unfortunately, a lot of this just gets put toward the end of making Feres uncomfortable because she doesn’t want to go commando in public. At one point she is publicly shamed for this, at another she is felt up by robots. It’s not great!

Me too, girl.

The episode is home to some solid action scenes though (where Feres is at her best), and we find out upon the episode’s conclusion that the cluster administrator changed their mind about the “no underwear” rule. This is absurd, of course, but the idea that administrators even can change their minds is a new one to our cast. Including to Equa, who’s otherwise seemed to know just about everything. Things like this save the episode from being truly inessential, and I doubt this marks any kind of serious downturn, but it’s definitely the least fun of Estab-Life‘s episodes so far.

The Executioner & Her Way of Life

Executioner remains one of the most purely compelling shows of the year so far. For an action anime, its production values lean more toward “solid” than groundbreaking, but Executioner’s real appeal is in its intrigue-laden story. Since we last spoke about Menou and her way of life, she’s picked up a co-protagonist, the otherworlder Akari Tokitou (Moe Kahara). Akari’s “pure concept”—the show’s name for the magical superpowers every otherworlder has—is time manipulation, although as far as we know, she doesn’t actually know that, believing that her powers relate to healing.

There’s reason to be suspect of that assumption, but before we get to that, it’s worth mentioning this episode’s actual plot. In concept it’s not anything new; terrorists intercept a train for dubious reasons, are killed by the heroes in the process. The execution is fairly interesting, though. In particular, the show sidesteps having to show any actual terrorist tactics by giving the terrorists….poison gems in their stomach that merge them all into a blood monster when they die. That’s a new one to me.

The train is nearly crashed by the terrorists’ plot, and a mysterious ripple of magic ends up helping Menou out. She later openly muses on the possibility that she actually failed to stop the train and Akari rewound time. I found the direct pointing of this out a little on the nose, but the idea itself is interesting. Akari in general is a bit of a riddle; she seems too genuinely cheerful to be out-and-out manipulative, but her body language—particularly a tendency toward owl-eyed, watchful stares—and some of the things she says hints that there is more to her going on than simply being a naive new arrival in the show’s world. I look forward to learning what, precisely, is going on with her.

The bloodthirsty princess Ashuna (Mao Ichimichi), introduced last episode but given more of a spotlight here, is also worth highlighting. She and Momo end up squaring off atop the roof of the train and eventually fall off it entirely. Executioner is perhaps not an amazing-looking anime, but the action setpieces are solid, and in particular the magic effects look quite nice. Momo manages to make a, I suppose, chainsaw-dagger? Out of a length of metal chain.

That’s pretty rad, and it’s hard to too harshly criticize a show that’s willing to go that ridiculous in spite of being otherwise pretty serious in tone.

This is very much a minor episode for Executioner, but I wouldn’t be surprised if much of what’s brought up here comes back around eventually. So far, the writing has been tight enough that I’d be more surprised if it didn’t. If you’re not watching this one, I’d really recommend picking it up.

Non-Weekly Anime

Wow, there’s a heading I haven’t broken out for a very long time. In fact, I think I’ve only ever used it once before? In any case, I do occasionally find it pertinent to write about a show I’m watching “on my own time,” at least a little bit, in spite of its marginal or nonexistant relevance to the seasonal hype cycle.

Witch Craft Works

A romance-action-comedy-drama anime apparently originally salvaged out of a rejected yuri manga pitch, Witch Craft Works is really something else. It’s an interesting illustration of how much the anime zeitgeist has changed in just the short time since it originally aired (the show is from 2014, so it’s not quite yet 10 years old.) It’s also noteworthy for being helmed by a true puzzle-box of a director; Tsutomu Mizushima. The man’s works are frequently separated by light-years in terms of genre, theme, and even just quality. Some of which is explained by most of his stuff being adaptions, but still, his credits include everything from Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan to ANOTHER, CLAMP adaptions Blood-C and xxxHOLIC, modern ecchi landmark (for better or worse) Prison School, banner “girls and military hardware” show Girl und Panzer, even also-ran early ’10s slice of life hit Squid Girl….the guy’s an enigma, a sort of curious anti-auteur. I find him interesting, even if he seems to bat 50/50 on whether or not the stuff he adapts is actually good.

As for Witch Craft Works itself, the premise is a light novel-esque unfolding origami box of absurdity. Our main character, Honoka Takamiya (Yuusuke Kobayashi) may be a meek and average high school boy, at least at first, but his love interest, the high school “princess” Ayaka Kagari (Asami Seto), is anything but. What starts as a fairly simple “how did she fall for him” premise, a la this current season’s Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie, quickly reveals itself to be something way weirder when we learn that Ayaka is a witch embroiled in a simmering war between two factions–her own Workshop Witches and their rival Tower Witches. Full disclosure; it’s actually a manga adaption, but I associate this sort of rapid-fire proper noun machine gun approach more with light novel adaptions. Perhaps just a personal bias.

The witch factions are where the action element kicks in, and the show is excellent at this. Every episode crackles with energy, and the magic is made to look truly wild and dangerous, backed up with the sort of super blown-out, loud-as-fuck, almost dubstep-ish sound design that I sorely miss from this era of anime. Ayaka’s magic in particular is given a lot of attention, which makes sense, she’s a fire witch, and fire is an ideal showcase for flashy visual effects.

Eventually, Honoka takes a more proactive role in his own defense—oh yeah, that war between the witch factions is over him, we only know the vague reasons as to why at the point I’m at in the series—and dons a witch outfit as well. In general, Honoka and Ayaka have an absolutely great dynamic, and it really feels like almost nothing has been changed from the pre-draft lesbian versions of the characters, down to Ayaka calling Honoka her “bride,” “princess,” and a number of other pretty explicitly feminine terms, with Honoka only occasionally and wealky protesting. Ayaka herself makes the icy-cool kuudere archetype seem fresh again. She also gets a lot of funny lines, delivered in total, profound deadpan.

In general, Witch Craft Works is great at pulling off character concepts that sound middling or even outright bad on paper. Even the annoying brocon character—a trope I normally cannot stand—is pretty good here. It’s hard to hate someone who’s as much of a loopy firecracker as Kasumi Takamiya (Ai Kayano), and her crazy magic (she can summon giant teddy bears, what’s not to love?) helps too. In general, the costuming is also excellent, with almost every important character—and many non-important characters, like the Tower Witch quartet who serve as the show’s Team Rocket analogue—having absolutely ridiculous fits that perfectly telegraph their personalities..

All in all, the show is a ton of fun. I don’t know if it’s going to keep that up as it heads into its more serious second half (I’m at the exact midway point, having watched episode six previously), but even if it doesn’t, it’s worth recommending off the strength of its truly outrageous opening half alone.

Elsewhere on MPA

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 2

I spend a lot of time thinking about Kaguya-sama: Love is War! in basically any season it airs in. Maybe overthinking it. The result is rather wordy columns like these where I often spend as much time on individual episode chunks as I do on whole episodes of other shows. Still, I hope y’all appreciate the writeups. I enjoyed this episode a good deal, and I’m interested in the long-term implications of its character development for Kaguya and Hayasaka.

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 2 – “Secure a Wife”

This is a weird comparison that I doubt anyone else has ever made, but Spy x Family actually reminds me a tiny bit of the aforementioned Witch Craft Works. Mostly just in the fact that both are action-comedies with a romance angle that are tons of fun and deliver a steady stream of thrilling absurdities every episode. The styles are different—Spy x Family is a lot slicker and is comparatively more subdued than WCW—but I feel like the similarity is there. I love covering this show and I hope to continue to for quite some time. Also; the OP, formally introduced this week, absolutely rules. I link it in the article above, clearly you should go read it just for that reason alone. 😉

That’s about it for this week, everybody. I can’t promise what the size or distribution of next week will look like, given that I’m still going through the aforementioned health stuff. Still, I hope you enjoyed this week’s AOW. See ya starside.

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 SPY X FAMILY Episode 2 – Secure a Wife

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

What’s the hardest thing an international superspy has to do over the course of their career? Raising a child, as we learned last week. But “finding a wife” is a close second, and that’s the next step of Loid Forger’s mission. And so, it is also the second episode of Spy x Family.

Enter Yor Briar (Saori Hayami, whose clear, bell-like timbre really adds a lot to the character), a mild-mannered civil servant with a younger brother in the state police. She works a rather unfulfilling-seeming job with a bunch of catty coworkers who seem to hate her mostly because she’s pretty. Also, because this is Spy x Family, she’s an assassin who works for the government. Her code name is “Thorn Princess.” This, objectively, is sick as hell.

You really do not know the restraint it takes to not caption every image of Yor with thirsty screaming.

Yor’s an interesting one. Essentially, she’s the old “prim and proper lady” anime trope welded to the apparent incongruity of, you know, having been born and raised as a super-assassin by some kind of government program. (We don’t get many details here, and I suspect we won’t for a long time. Wouldn’t it be funny if it were the same program that Anya came from?) As with Loid and Anya, the show draws amusing connections between these seemingly unrelated things; you could easily say that Yor is simply every definition of the word “cleaner” rolled into one.

She’s also quite likable. Personality-wise, Yor is actually pretty forthright most of the time, and her difficulty with understanding social cues—including her coworkers’ attempts to get a rise out of her—and self-consciousness about not being “normal” seem to both mark her out as some sort of neurodivergent. (You will pry this scrap of representation, intentional or not, from my cold, dead hands.) In any case, she gets talked into attending a party over the coming weekend by some of those rude coworkers. Worse, when talking with her aforementioned overprotective younger brother in state sec, Yuri (Kenshou Ono), she lies to him, telling him she has a boyfriend who’ll be at said party. Suddenly, Yor Briar needs a bf stat. And that is where our other lead comes in.

Loid has become desperate enough to find a suitable wife for the academy interview that he’s resorted to having his infobroker Frankie (Hiroyuki Yoshino) run paperwork on every single woman in the city. (In literally any other context this’d be absurdly creepy. It still kind of is, but, y’know, spies.) He needn’t really have bothered, though, because when he runs into Yor at a tailor—she ripped her dress when doing some assassin stuff, you see—it’s love at mutual convenience. (Loid also finds himself flummoxed that Yor is able to accidentally sneak up on him, initially blaming it on “dropping his guard.” I wonder if he ever catches on?) That and Anya playing the pintsized wingman in order to get the two talking.

The party itself has to wait, though, because even with their alliance of convenience worked out, Loid has another assignment on top of Operation Strix; breaking up an art smuggling ring. This actually makes him late to the party, and Yor has to endure the frankly horrifying prospect of being at a couples’ party alone. This is where she spends some time fixating on how she isn’t “normal.” The party seems to wash out as this happens, with Yor being only dimly aware of her coworkers increasingly blatant badmouthing until one of them—-named Camille—literally gets right in her face.

It is at that moment that Loid arrives, bleeding from the forehead, with a flimsy excuse about “one of his patients” acting up. Camille promptly loses her shit over the prospect of Yor having such a hot boyfriend (I think Loid is like a 7 myself but I’m not the one being asked, here) and embarrasses herself by trying to mess up her dress, only for her brilliant plan of “accidentally” dropping food on her to backfire spectacularly. Loid sticks up for Yor as Camille continues to berate her, in a moment that’s very touching (although like a lot of such things it loses some of its power in the retelling.) The two ditch the party not long after, but not before Loid mistakenly refers to himself as Yor’s husband instead of simply her fiance or boyfriend.

This has repercussions almost immediately. The two end up having to flee from the art smuggling ring, who are still pursuing Loid. (He reassures Yor that these are still his patients. Hilariously, she completely buys it.) While they’re escaping, Yor, now genuinely lovestruck, manages to straight-up propose to Loid mid-chase scene. It’s genuinely sweet, and it’s one of the year’s best love scenes so far. Loid literally puts a ring on her finger behind a dumpster. The direction is just incredible.

And on that note, episode two more or less ends, with the imposing family interview for the academy being the obvious next obstacle for our cast to conquer. Until then, anime fans.

Oh, but before we leave for the week, the show’s absolute monster of an OP is worth highlighting. The song is pretty great in of itself, but the visuals are something else. I look forward to enjoying it every week as I continue covering the series.

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 SPY X FAMILY Episode 1 – “Operation Strix”

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

“Papa is a huge liar. But he’s such a cool liar!”

His codename is “Twilight,” alias Loid Forger (Takuya Eguchi). His real name unknown and unknowable. He is a spy; an international man of mystery. A shadow, a whisper. No one knows his name. In what is not said to be but clearly is the cold war, a certain nation stands divided in two. There, Loid is deployed for the commencement of “Operation Strix,” his toughest assignment yet. What could possibly challenge this earl of espionage? This master of manipulation?

Well, domestic life, for one. Loid’s assignment: find a wife and adopt a child, blend in as seamlessly as possible, and send said child to a prestigious private academy to get close to one of the nation’s top political leaders, a man of near-paranoiac caution who rarely makes himself available except at events for that very school. So begins SPY x FAMILY, Wit Studio and CloverWorks‘ adaption of the wildly successful Shonen Jump manga. So also begins our second Let’s Watch column of the season. We’re in for a ride, folks. Strap in.

For Loid, the first order of business is procuring a child. Time is of the essence, so doing so the—ahem—traditional way is out of the question. As such, the first major undertaking our big heroic superspy sets out on in SPY x FAMILY is a trip to a run-down, skeevy orphanage. There, he adopts Anya (Atsumi Tanezaki), a six-year-old girl with a very cute hair style.

Seriously though what ARE those things on her head? Antennae?

She’s also telepathic, which leads to quite a few shenanigans. Namely; it takes Anya only a few moments to learn that Loid is a spy, being able to read his mind and all. This creates a fun dynamic wherein Loid thinks he has to hide his profession from Anya, who knows what he’s thinking at all times anyway, but who in turn also hides the fact that she knows what Loid really is. The implicit comedic observation that SPY x FAMILY makes here is that children, like spies, have thought processes that are pretty incomprehensible to the rest of us.

Anya is also afraid of what might happen if Loid finds out she can read minds. We’re told upfront that she’s been adopted and then returned to the orphanage four times before. This is a cloud that hangs over all of Loid and Anya’s interactions and provides an interesting shade to even Anya’s silliest antics. Her deep and abiding love of peanuts, for example. (Atsumi Tanezaki also deserves some real credit here for lending a believably childish air to her vocal tics.)

SPY x FAMILY is not a drama, really. But you could make the case for “dramedy,” perhaps, if heavier on the “edy” side. It has the good sense to cut its comedic side with more tonally complex moments, creating an actual emotional core as opposed to just a parade of gags. Anya fucking around with Loid’s spy equipment is funny. Her then panicking, wondering if she’ll be sent back to the orphanage if he finds out, and flashing back to her days as “Subject 7” in the facility she was born in? That’s sad. And like any good dramedy, SPY x FAMILY can juxtapose these polar opposites without making either feel out of place. This is, after all, a little girl that we’re talking about. Kids do think like that, and Anya’s been through more than most.

That’s not to say that all of this totally works. Later in the episode, after a great action sequence where Loid rescues Anya from the direct result of said equipment-fuck-arounding, he engages in a bit of self-lionizing, and we get some rather leaden backstory. This comes too early and too unearned to really hit the way the show seems to want it to. (This is to say nothing of it bumping up against the fact that, you know, real spies are generally not great people. SPY x FAMILY generally renders the profession too ridiculous to feel like it’s glorifying it, but it does occasionally come close.) Thankfully, it’s brief, and not enough to seriously ding the episode in any real way.

The episode ends with Anya successfully passing the exam to get into the private school that forms the crux of Loid’s mission. Perhaps more importantly; it ends with Anya snuggling up to her adopted dad on a couch (and him slightly freaking out about it. He fell asleep in front of someone! That’s a huge no-no for a spy). Then things, as they always do, hit a slight snag.

But we’ll discuss the full implications of that next week. See you then, anime fans.

Oh, I think I already have, episode title. I think I already have.

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 KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 1

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

Kaguya-sama: Love is War! returns like it never left at all. Mercifully, unlike the second season, 2020’s Love is War?, the third is marked by an actual, distinct subtitle: -Ultra Romantic-. The first episode is, of course, excellent, and we’ll get to the how’s and why’s of that momentarily. First though, it feels right to simply appreciate the familiarity, here. Speaking just for myself, with as much of a gamble that any given anime season can be, it’s nice to have one or two things that you’re pretty damn sure are going to be great.

Eventually, this season will likely delve into the more dramatic parts of Kaguya-sama‘s storyline to an even greater degree than the second season did. I’m not sure what the reception will be–like many popular romcoms, Kaguya‘s wide popularity does not always shield it from backlash–but for now, it’s simply nice to have it around again. Since the second season concluded, the only real drop of Love is War! we’ve gotten was a short OVA from last year, which, frankly, is best left unremembered.

It’s natural to wonder, all this in mind, how something this widely anticipated marks its dramatic return, and the answer is very simple.

One of the characters completely embarrasses herself in a very funny way.

Keep an eye on the camel, it will be relevant momentarily.

Miko Iino (Miyu Tomita) and Yuu Ishigami (Ryouta Suzuki) are perhaps Love is War!‘s second-most important pair of characters, after the leads. -Ultra Romantic- chooses to open on a somewhat lowkey note by focusing on the two of them for the episode’s first “short.” (If you’ve forgotten; Kaguya-sama tends to divide its episodes, with only rare exceptions, into three “chunks” of about equal length.) The core premise with this one is very simple. Have you ever accidentally left your headphones slightly unplugged? Especially while listening to music you don’t necessarily want others to know you listen to? No? Just watch this short, then. It encapsulates the feeling of total, day-ruining embarrassment perfectly.

Miko sits down to study after chewing Ishigami out for not doing the same. Her case here is actually worse, because what she’s listening to isn’t music at all. It’s ambient sounds. First, fairly normal (soft rain noises). Then, somewhat odd (the sounds of a construction site). Then definitely odd (the loud braying calls of a camel). And finally, outright embarrassing (ASMR recordings of a bunch of “heartthrobs” telling the listener that she’s a good girl and is doing her best).

Dissecting humor like this tends to kill it, so it’s not nearly as funny in the retelling. But Love is War!‘s ability to simply ramp up a joke like this is easy to underappreciate. The final blow comes when the rest of the student council returns. Ishigami–in-line with his habit of falling on the sword for others, no matter how trivial the reason–then deliberately leaves his music leaking for all to hear. (The track must be heard to be believed. Its lyrics consist entirely of “moe moe kyun kyun.”) Only for Miko to then scold him, talk about how embarrassed she is for him, and then promptly not realize that her phone is also still leaking audio.

Fatality.

The second segment is more frantic and uptempo. Love is War! has repeatedly used a trick of directing comedic scenes revolving around misunderstandings–or the leads’ attempts to get each other to confess their feelings–like high-suspense thrillers. The approach makes its triumphant return here, as the technological inexperience of title character Kaguya Shinomiya (Aoi Koga) ensnares her in a trap laid by the greatest adversary of any modern woman. No, not her love interest / rival Miyuki Shirogane (Makoto Furukawa). I’m talking, of course, about read notifications. Kaguya leaves Miyuki on read because she’s just so happy to have gotten a text from him. Miyuki can see the notification but, obviously, not her reason for doing this. He is a bit panicked.

Another key part of Love is War!‘s appeal is that it understands how to involve the foibles of modern life in its scenarios. Many anime only touch on technology briefly, but this entire segment rests on a social stress stemming entirely from what is supposed to be a convenient feature of instant messaging platforms (LINE here, rather than iMessage itself) but, is more often than not, a total headache. On the character side of things, there’s also Kaguya’s far more tech-savvy maid Ai Hayasaka (Yumiri Hanamori), who could explain all this to Kaguya, but opts not to. Hayasaka has long served as something of a stand-in for the section of the audience that wishes Kaguya and Miyuki would just knock it off and kiss already. It’s hard to imagine that fact not playing some role in her decision to not bother here. Even so, for the second time in the episode, second-hand embarrassment plays a big role.

The whole thing is resolved with a lie and minimal social casualties, but not before Hayasaka gets hit with quite the death glare.

Continuing the escalation, the third segment is the goofiest of all. The impetus? An arm-wrestling tournament, started by Chika Fujiwara (Konomi Kohara), but certainly not ended by her.

This is probably the short with the least to talk about, which is a shame because in spite of the lack of any pesky things like “emotional resonance” or “forward narrative development”, it’s pretty fucking funny. It’s also the most visually engaging of the three, integrating a grab-bag of visual tropes from fighting games and shonen anime (especially Dragonball Z). Conceptually, rendering something ridiculous by welding it to shonen tropes is nothing new. (Hell, Birdie Wing did it only a couple days ago.) But as it has in prior seasons, what sets Love is War! apart is sheer commitment to the bit. We even get a battle shonen-esque vaguely plausible-sounding explanation for our protagonist’s extraordinary abilities. Kaguya wins the tournament. Why? Well, she’s in the archery club and bow drawstrings are heavy, helpfully illustrated by a cute callback to season two’s OP.

It’s hard to be too surprised when the entire thing caps off with what I’m fairly sure is a Cho Aniki reference after Kaguya wins. Why wouldn’t it? The show’s grip on reality is loose at the best of times, and when it goes headlong into full surreal comedy mode it feels like it can do just about anything and have it make sense. A giant pile of muscle men, why not?

Sadly, not everything is entirely smooth sailing. While the actual show remains as great to look at as ever, this is the second romcom this season to be afflicted by a pretty bad case of subpar typesetting. The translation is as good as it’s ever been, but there is enough text on screen that plain multi-tracking (one up top and the other on the bottom) just doesn’t cut it anymore. I will still be covering the anime weekly as it releases officially, but if the more patient among you were inclined to wait for fansubs I would completely understand.

As for this episode? It’s a solid return for the series. Some might take issue with the series not launching right back into The Heavy Stuff ™, but we’ll get there soon enough. In the meantime, I can again speak only for myself, but I’m happy to just be along for the ride.

Ah, and since I like to make a habit of including a small something extra for folks who make it all the way to the end of the column, please enjoy this Bonus Hayasaka Screencap. A recurring feature from this point forward.

I’m sure some of you will be looking forward to 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 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 DEMON GIRL NEXT DOOR Moves Back in For Another Season

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.

Where does the time go? It feels like only yesterday that I was going over the relative merits of The Demon Girl Next Door—Machikado Mazoku to most, and throughout the rest of this article–over on GeekGirlAuthority. But it’s actually been nearly a full three years. Machikado Mazoku is a product of the pre-pandemic era. And perhaps it’s that knowledge, as much as anything else, that makes me consider the anime to have a throwback feel, for better and for worse.

If anyone’s definitely not feeling the passage of time, it’s the show’s characters. In-universe, only a few days have lapsed since season one’s finale, and the show wastes zero time with catching anyone up. Instead, it strolls on in like no time has passed at all. If you could prevent someone from looking the information up, you might be able to convince them the seasons aired back-to-back.

The core conceit here is simple. We follow Yuuko Yoshida (Konomi Kohara), rarely-used alias “Shadow Mistress” Yuuko, a demon girl, as she attempts to corrupt her ostensible rival, the magical girl Momo Chiyoda (Akari Kitou). In practice, they’re basically girlfriends-in-denial, and that dynamic only grew stronger over the course of the first season. It’s back in full force here, complete with the usual suite of miscommunications.

Supporting characters include Yuuko’s ancestor, the demon Lilith (Minami Takahashi), who is stuck in a statue, and the cursed, citrus-themed magical girl Mikan Hinatsuki (Tomoyo Takayanagi), who plays a fairly major role in this first episode.

What does not play a major role is pacing. While this first episode is definitely funny–and there are a lot of individual great gags–it’s also very quick. Quicker than I remember the first season being, although, again, that could just be my memory failing me here. Most of it is fine, although combined with the haphazard subtitle work (a lot of effort went into it, maybe too much, since I’m not sure literally every tiny “gurgle gurgle” sound effect or what have you needs a translation) it can make the episode oddly hard to follow on a basic, visual moment to visual moment level.

Does this interfere that much with the actual plot of the episode, a boondoggle wherein Yuuko now finds herself living next door to both Momo and Mikan on opposite sides?

Not really, but it is a touch disappointing, and it makes one hope that the subsequent episodes will handle this aspect a little better. Beyond that, though, there’s really not a ton to say here.

The Takeaway: It’s more Shamiko. Most likely, you already know if you want that or not.

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: BIRDIE WING Tees Off

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.

“The Symphogear of Golf”

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

From the start, I suspected there was something strange about this one. Even by the standards of the “cute girls doing cute things” pseudogenre, golf is a reach. Pairing up a genre of anime that already gets criticized for being dull with what is unquestionably the most boring major sport in the world seems like a recipe for disaster, on the surface. Thankfully, Birdie Wing isn’t anything like that at all. Instead, it’s one of those shows where a random game or spectator sport–golf, naturally, this time around–is taken with a seriousness by absolutely everybody that, in the real world, is usually reserved for matters of religion and politics. Late in its first episode, someone in Birdie Wing calls golf a “sacred sport.” They are not being ironic.

That said, with apologies to SolidQuentin, Birdie Wing is not nearly visually dynamic enough to be “the Symphogear of golf.” At least not yet. (And really, that’s no knock, that’s a hard bar to clear.) But it does manage to make an honest run at the “most unhinged show of the season” title in a season that also includes ESTAB-LIFE. That’s worth something on its own.

The trick here is that our protagonist, the mononymic Eve (Akari Kitou), is not really a golfer. She’s more of a….golf mercenary. A golf secret agent. A golf hitman. The first thing we see her do is impersonate a pro golfer–complete with a latex disguise–and play a qualifier tournament to said pro’s specifications (fourth place, nothing showy.) After she’s paid for that job, we eventually learn that she, her friend / girlfriend / something Lily Lipman (Akira Sekine), and Lily’s older sister live and work out of a bar, where they also take care of three orphans. Yes, really.

Eve’s golfing habits are half moneymaking scheme and half personal obsession. Over the course of the first episode we see her take on a masked, harlequin-themed golfer in the middle of the night and handily win 6,000 Euros in a bet. (Which she later loses by buying off a crooked cop harassing Lily’s sister.) She trains by bullseye-ing golf balls into rusty paintbuckets from a distance. There’s a flashback, which is inexplicably presented like a sepia-toned music video, where someone (presumably either her father or a former coach) compares golfing to firing a gun, saying that one should mentally destroy their opponents and “pierce their hearts.” All this in greyscale while Eve’s hair glows a fiery orange and she’s surrounded by whiffed shots.

Oh! And Eve has a nickname; The Rainbow Bullet.

It makes a kind of sense.

Despite all this, Eve mostly plays for money, downplaying her shonen protagonist-level skills by dropping this particularly great line.

She’s akin to an absurdist extension of the classic “perfect swordsman” trope. And it’s off that absurdity that Birdie Wing mostly gets its charge, as of now. (I could not help but laugh when, in her second match of the episode, Eve deliberately aims for a tree branch and breaks it with her shot, completely bypassing the course’s main obstacle.)

If you want to reach for themes, you could maybe dig up something about rich, establishment folk being more preoccupied with appearances than actual accomplishment. (Note how Eve’s second opponent first denigrates her for her appearance. And then tries to bail on the aforementioned broken tree branch match because she doesn’t want to “throw off her game for [a later] tournament.”) But that does feel like a stretch, this early on. And really, something this wonderfully stupid doesn’t really need themes, it just needs to keep up the absurdity.

Eve does meet someone who seems like she might become a worthy opponent–a short Japanese girl named Aoi Amawashi (Asami Seto) who, despite her small stature, totes an utterly absurd four-foot golf club–but we don’t actually see their match here. That’s presumably for next week.

The fact of the matter is that Birdie Wing‘s first episode works because of the sheer friction between the subject matter–again, one of the most boring sports known to man–and the shonen-esque seriousness everyone applies to it, especially Eve. And this is to say nothing of the dialogue, which serves as ample evidence that the folks behind this show aren’t taking it any more seriously than we are.

Golfing!

That’s a trick that works fine for now, but the show can’t simply coast for twelve weeks. It’ll either have to continually top itself (a difficult prospect, but not an impossible one), or it will have to actually wring some meaning out of all this absurdity (likewise). But I’m at least interested in finding out if it manages to do either of these, and if a first episode hooks you in, then it’s largely served its purpose.

The Takeaway: Fans of the sublimely stupid and of ridiculous premises should put this one on the priority list. As for everyone else, it’ll take you about five minutes tops to find out if this is “your thing” or not. There’s no reason to not at least check out the premiere.

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: Less Money, More Problems in TOMODACHI GAME

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

I hate saying that something “isn’t my genre.” Partly, it feels like an excuse. Surely any reasonably well-rounded critic should have an at least workable command of all major genres within their chosen medium?

Well, maybe so. But I’m not going to lie to you all and pretend I understand the whole “death game” genre. This isn’t technically a death game, as I’m sure some would hasten to point out. Instead, it’s a “debt game.” Similar names, but one only kills you indirectly. (And if you don’t think so, trying being poor for a few years.) I disclose this upfront because the truth of the matter is that I have no real idea what to make of Tomodachi Game. I certainly wasn’t impressed, but maybe that’s just because I don’t really know what I’m looking for.

The setup isn’t complicated, at least. Our core cast consists of five friends. I could introduce them, but the show pops these nice little on-screen intros up basically as soon as it starts, and since the effort was taken to subtitle them, why not just use those?

(Voiced by Tomohiro Oono, Satomi Amano, Daiki Hamano, and Yume Miyamoto, respectively, top to bottom.)

The only one not displayed here is Yuuichi Katagiri (Chiaki Kobayashi), our protagonist, who is portrayed as a hardworking but poor lad but who is probably hiding some skeletons in his closet. I base that guess on the fact that he shows up in the OP grinning like a maniac with money literally hanging out of his mouth.

In his guest verse on Nelly’s classic 2005 bling-rap track “Grillz,” rapper Big Gipp says he “has a bill in [his] mouth like [he’s] Hillary Rodham.” It’s such a viscerally unpleasant mental image that it’s bothered me for years, despite the fact that I love the song otherwise. And now I’m passing it on to you via an overlong image caption because the above picture kinda reminded me of it. Aren’t you glad you read this blog?

Our leads all attend the same high school, and the plot is kicked off when a collective funding pool for a class trip–two million Yen, all told, about $16,000 USD–goes missing, evidently stolen from Shiho’s locker. (You may ask why it was kept there to begin with and not, y’know, some kind of safe. I say just roll with it.)

Inevitably, there’s suspicion within the class, especially toward Shiho herself–she was the one holding on to it, after all–and Yuuichi, given his general poverty.

Eventually, a round of mysterious letters beckons our friend group to meet outside the school gates at 11PM. Inevitably, they are then knocked out, kidnapped, and hauled off to partake in some bizarre game for god-knows-what reason. No explanations are forthcoming this early on, which is fine. But it is kind of hilarious how abrupt all this feels. We’ve just met these characters, only just learned that they’re all friends, and now suddenly it’s time to do the thriller anime dance already. The extremely abrupt directing does the show no favors here. In general, there are tons of repeated cuts to the show’s “intermission card”, which is just the name of the series on a white background. You will get sick of this image fairly quickly, even with the couple variants the episode trots out.

When our heroes come to, they’re in an all-white, tiled room. I like to imagine this is somehow the same building that Cube 2: Hypercube takes place in. (Side note here; fuck that movie.) There, they’re introduced to the host of this “debt game,” one Manabu-kun (Minami Takayama), who takes the form of a small boy from an old children’s cartoon. He likes to, for instance, taunt Yuuichi about not trusting his friends. Sure, why not.

Manabu lays out the rules pretty plain; somebody among them owes a 2 million Yen debt. When they entered the game–which they allegedly all agreed to, even though none of them remember doing so–this debt was split up into 5 shares distributed equally to each of them. If they can win the game, their debt will be forgiven. If not, they’ll have to pay back whatever price of their share remains. (It will not shock you that we’re almost immediately introduced to rules that can change the amount of debt an individual person owes. Also; you’re allowed to tell people your debt, but not actually show them the electronic tag you’re forced to carry around which displays it numerically. Hmm.)

The first game–likely, one of many–that our cast have to play is a simple quiz involving a Kokkuri board. This scene forms the entire center of the episode. Thankfully; the core game as explained here is very straightforward. Our heroes need to answer some very basic yes/no questions by pushing a giant coin to one side or the other of the board (labeled Yes and No respectively.) But! The questions need to be answered with total consensus. If even one person disagrees with the others, the coin will favor the minority answer.

Even so, these are some seriously basic questions. We start with Japanese geography so simple even I knew the answers, and then move on to such brain-busters as “is one plus one two?” and “are there seven days in a week?” They only have to actually get one of these questions unanimously right to win the whole “debt game” outright, so this really seems like it should be easy.

Of course, Tomodachi Game would be totally pointless if our heroes just won outright this early. Thus, there’s the mandatory twist; someone pushes the coin toward “No” each time. Whether it’s the same person each time or not is left ambiguous, as is the question of why they’d want to do this in the first place. We get a hint, though; the fact that someone is clearly sabotaging things is enough to make Yuuichi consider doing the same. He doesn’t go through with it, but someone else pulls the coin toward “No” anyway. A pair of girls observing the game note that literally no team has ever gotten past this stage.

Thus betrayed, Yuuichi ends the episode on this note, before (presumably) sabotaging the last question himself. I must confess, this is one of the rare times an anime has ever put me at a total loss for words so early on.

Yes, that non-sequitur, delivered with total dead-seriousness, is how the episode ends. The closing shot is that ugly closeup of Yuuichi’s teeth.

I said this already, but death games–and their adjacent, related setups–are not my genre. I may simply be missing something here, but, if so, what? For all its bluster about how humans can’t endure hardship alone and the dichotomy between “money” versus “friends” being the most important thing in life. (Represented by flashbacks on Yuuichi’s part to conversations with people that appear to be his father and mother respectively.) The series feels much like any other adaption of a manga in this genre. Too edgy by half and ill-suited to the TV anime format.

I’m not comfortable simply writing the show off, mind you. Even the examples of this genre generally held up as all-time greats don’t make a ton of sense to me, and there are way too many things yet to be established for me to firmly claim this is just A Bad Show. But it’s definitely a series only for those of pretty specific tastes, and I don’t think I fall into that category this time.

The Takeaway: Genre fans should give it a look, but unless that describes you, you can safely skip this one.

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 Soothing World of HEALER GIRL

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.

Before we even talk about Healer Girl, Studio 3Hz‘ new original anime project, let’s briefly discuss its trailer.

Released inconspicuously back in December, this PV is absolutely spellbinding. As recently as a few days ago, I’ve previously called Healer Girl an idol series, and it does have an associated idol group. But the actual Healer Girls are more Wilson Philips than AKB48, and as the soft, light pop music flows out of your speakers you’ll eventually notice the visuals, too. Our girls fly in the air, their songs extend literal beams of music outward, raising stone pillars from the ground and healing all who hear them. They’re dressed in all white, like they were angels. It’s one of the most singular PVs in recent memory, and Healer Girl the actual show has a lot to live up to.

Let this much be said: it must know that, because it puts a strong foot forward. It is exactly three and a half seconds into Healer Girl before we get our first piece of music. Before the opening credits even drop, Kana Fujii (Carin Isobe), our lead, sings a soft little song to a group of schoolchildren who were roughhousing. The scrape on a little boy’s knee disappears in the blink of an eye. One boy points out to another that this isn’t “magic,” it’s healing. This is a pretty bold first step for your show to take, and it speaks to a lot of confidence on the part of the writers.

After the OP finishes, we get some explanations for what exactly is going on. Healer Girl takes place in a world where “Song Medicine” is an accepted, scientific form of treatment. (Here referred to as the “third major branch” of medicine. My brief time working at a pharmacy does not qualify me to speak on how real either of the other two are, I have no idea.) The few pieces of terminology we get throughout the episode are–obviously–audiomedical technobabble, but that’s fine. The point is made; these girls are less like idols and more like doctors. Or med students, since our three leads are apprentices. They mostly train rather than do anything more involved at this stage in their careers. There are pushups.

The first half of the episode plays out like a reasonably typical work or school life comedy, albeit one set in a world with key differences from our own. Healer Girl is certainly not short on the merits that the better examples of these shows have; there’s a lot of colorful animation, some interesting directorial decisions (the series has a fixation on rotating the POV of a shot), and the coveted Good FacesTM that seal the deal on any character comedy. Kana’s co-stars are fun, too, with simple personalities that avoid being one-note. Reimi Itsushiro (Marina Horiuchi) is the straightlaced one, but she has a fixation on the apprentices’ collective teacher, Ria Karasuma (Ayahi Takagaki). The crush she harbors on Ria is hilariously unsubtle. I might use the word “thirsty.”

Hibiki Morishima (Akane Kumada) is soft-spoken and eccentric, at various points in the episode she professes to be scared of manju(?) and white rice(??) and tries to freak out her fellow apprentices by claiming there are ghosts in her bedroom.

On top of all this, Healer Girl is also kind of a musical! There are, by my count, two proper songs and a medley in this first episode. Which, combined with those aforementioned strengths, would make Healer Girl recommendable on its own.

Before we get to the last thing about the show, though, we should back up slightly. It’s established that that little stunt that Kana pulled in the opening minutes isn’t something mere apprentices are actually allowed to do. For reasons left ambiguous to us, healing music is strictly regulated. Apprentices doing so much as singing away a knee-scrape is very much not okay.

Which leads us to the closing act of the episode. A little girl named Yui pounds on the front door of the clinic while Ria and the other in-house doctor happen to be out giving a conference. Her grandmother is in trouble, and she doesn’t know what to do. Our apprentices, accordingly, spring into action; dialing an ambulance, trying to get ahold of Ria, and heading to Yui’s house to comfort the patient, respectively.

It’s Kana who takes that last job, and good lord does she ace it. She knows–and we know, from earlier–that she shouldn’t try to heal this old woman, so she improvises, instead singing simply to stabilize her and calm her down while the ambulance arrives, and it is as she’s doing this that Healer Girl goes from having a good first episode to having an amazing one.

The central connection that Healer Girl makes, even this early on, is between music and medicine. One heals the soul, the other heals the body. Healer Girl‘s main trick is to make that connection literal with music that can soothe both. Other anime in and around the idol genre have occasionally flirted with spiritual, magical, or religious imagery, but, speaking personally, I’ve often been frustrated by how hesitant they are to commit. If you’re going to draw up grandiose metaphors, go hard on those metaphors! Restraint is for suckers, and it makes most popular art worse! Go fully unhinged! Have your idols literally heal the sick! Do it! Madonna wasn’t afraid to compare herself to Jesus and you shouldn’t be either!

Healer Girl seems to agree; when Kana sings to this poor old woman, a flower blooms beneath her feet, she levitates in the air and tiny poppets in her own image materialize from the ether to calm her patient down.

It is a beautiful thing to watch, and the show damn well knows it, because when Ria does arrive, she excuses her apprentice’s kinda-sorta rule break, and is as impressed with her display as any of us are. This is not the face of a woman who’s unhappy.

There’s some more exposition here–apparently this transcendentally luminous phenomenon we just witnessed is called an “Image”, and the fact that Kana’s changes while she sings is somehow notable–but mostly everyone is just happy that the old woman is okay. Kana, deservedly, takes some time in the episodes final moments to bask in a job well done.

If you’re a certain kind of person I could see finding Healer Girl‘s whole thing offputting or even creepy. There is no denying that the little worldbuilding we get here also raises some odd questions about the setting. (What is the role of non-healing music, for example? Does it even exist? Does all of it sound like early 90s light pop?) But I can’t pretend to be part of that group, I’m all in on Healer Girl. I have tried to refrain from making predictions about a show’s success (doing so last season ended, I would say, embarrassingly), but I certainly want this one to keep up this level of quality.

Speaking personally, I had a very bad morning before I sat down to watch Healer Girl. A morning filled with medical anxiety, even, complete with missing prescription refills and an agonizing wait in a doctor’s office. Healer Girl made me feel better, too, and I cannot give the series a stronger endorsement than that. Early in the episode, Reimi compares recorded healing music to OTC drugs. But what can I say? Sometimes the over-the-counter stuff works.

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) Reckoning with MAGIA RECORD: DAWN OF A SHALLOW DREAM

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

Here we are, again and at last. I have written about Magia Record; the anime adaption of a mobile game spinoff of the original Puella Magi Madoka Magica, again, and again, and again over the past two years. This will, barring something truly unexpected occurring, be the final time. Dawn of a Shallow Dream is the final “season”–really more of a movie with intermissions–of the series. Part of me will miss it.

Magia Record on the whole is, to use a term I consider neutral, but some would call a denigration, messy. Its pieces do not all fit neatly together. It overreaches, and from a purely technical point of view, it’s a serious mixed bag, marrying near-immaculate directing with consistently inconsistent quality of actual, y’know, drawings. Its three seasons are all very different and its cast of characters is too large for it develop them all equally-well. Its core theme–persistence in the face even of impossible odds and crushing despair–is arguably overdone within this genre, and is better-executed by its parent series, by Symphogear, and perhaps even by distant cousins like Day Break Illusion. Aren’t we all a bit tired of this by now?

Well, if you’re reading this, you probably know how I feel about these things (and if not, you will soon enough.) So, it will not surprise you that the answer from me, the woman who thought Blue Reflection Ray was really underrated, is “no, I’m not tired of it at all.” Bring them on a hundred strong, I say.

My thoughts on Magia Record have shifted a bit several times since the first season originally aired, but I remain resolute on a key point. As a “Precurification” of the original Puella Magi Madoka Magica‘s general idea–that is to say, a vehicle for delivering and iterating on “Madoka stories” within a fixed format–it absolutely kills. Shallow Dream is its swing at a grand finale. It doesn’t hit every target perfectly, and I will discuss what bones to pick I do have a bit farther down, but it makes a good show of things in its own way.

Magia Record‘s plot has always been a point of contention; the show is very cognizant of its own worldbuilding. Lucid, even. But that doesn’t translate to it always being clear to the viewers. This is probably the simplest it’s ever gotten, and thankfully things are conveyed fairly strongly here. Even so, to sum it up I can only offer something like; Iroha (Momo Asakura) and friends stop Embryo Eve by weaponizing the power of human connection. Not perfectly, of course, because this is Madoka, but, you know, pretty well. Along the way we get some long-overdue explanations for what was going on with Iroha’s sister and their two friends. Also because this is Madoka, about a quarter of the cast dies along the way. You can’t win ’em all.

I completely understand why MagiReco’s insistence on burrowing so heavily into its foretext is offputting to some (I would argue it’s still in service of a solid thematic goal, regardless), but it does mean that for the hardcore magical girl fan, Magia Record has been a treat of well-done henshin sequences, fight scenes, and just in general, deliciously weird imagery that nothing else in the genre quite touches. We don’t get as much of that in “season three” here as we did last year for season two (there’s really only one fight in the whole thing and it’s pretty brief), but it remains a pleasure to look at, even when the character art goes headlong into “why is SHAFT like this?” territory.

The background we get for Touka (Rie Kugimiya), Nemu (Sumire Mohoroshi), and Iroha’s long-missing sister Ui (Manaka Iwami) fill in a lot of the gaps from the first two seasons, which does have the nice benefit of making this all feel a little more like it’s one thing instead of three discrete shows under a broad umbrella. Their turn from good intentions to total villainy makes sense in hindsight. From just wanting to save Iroha, to trying to loophole their way out of the magical girl system entirely–which of course, horribly backfires and is why Ui goes missing in the first place–and finally to their full villainous, cult leader-esque incarnation from seasons one and two, it’s all compelling stuff, a story of how the best of intentions can go horribly awry when met with poorly understood circumstances.

Elsewhere, Momoko (Mikako Komatsu) and Mifuyu (Mai Nakahara) give their lives to free as many of the girls trapped by Magius’ “witch factory” as they possibly can. The sequence is heartwarming and tinged with a cosmic all-is-love energy. Nothing in the Madoka universe comes without sacrifice, of course, but we would all be lucky to go out, if we had to, while helping so many others.

Not everything works quite so well. In particular, I can’t help but be a touch disappointed with the treatment of Kuroe (Kana Hanazawa), who becomes a witch here before being killed off, mostly to teach Iroha a lesson about how she can’t just impose her own worldview on other people. This feels like something that should’ve come up more strongly than this earlier in the series, and Kuroe being offed when we just got to really know her does leave something of a bad taste in my mouth. Even so, the sequence is undeniably pretty damn cool.

The last battle against Eve, in which it is only just barely prevented from merging with Walpurgisnacht, is suitably epic, even when it gets interrupted by the ranting, raving, honestly a little out-of-nowhere? Hijacking by Alina Gray (Ayana Taketatsu).

These scenes are all notable individually, and there are a number of others I’ve not discussed here. (Yachiyo (Sora Amamiya) makes up for her absence from much of the season by getting a lovely, touching reunion with her late partners, or rather, the magic they held that lives on inside her, for example.) But you may ask what this all adds up to. It’s a fair question.

The truth of the matter is that Magia Record is, again, messy. It is not an immaculate distillation of its core values down to a euphoric four-episode package. It does not “transcend” and become “more than the sum of its parts,” perhaps. But I challenge anyone with even the slightest shred of affection for this series–Madoka, not just Magia Record–to watch the closing shots; where the surviving magical girls band together and push forward, heads held high even in the face of their unenviable, tragic situation, and not feel something.

Magia Record ends with a literal closing of the book; the white-gloved hands of a Goddess (Aoi Yuuki) shutting it with an affectionate finality. The girls narrate that no one knows of the battles they fought and what they sacrificed. That no one knows of the dreams they held that were lost. Of their picking up the pieces and starting again. The existence of the series itself, and of this review, is proof otherwise, of course. And you could interpret this as a tragic ending, if you were so inclined. But what, really, is more positive than starting again? I have said this before in other columns and will say it again in many more. The true essence of hope–that nebulous thing–is to live on, and to help others do the same.

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.