Category: anime

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Weekly [4/24/22]

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.

Hello, anime fans. Once again, I’ve got a couple short writeups for you below, and some links to my work of this past week below that. Don’t have much else to say this week! (Still dealing with Medical Issues™) So please, do enjoy.

Seasonal Anime

Estab-Life

Before we talk about the episode of Estab-Life that actually aired last week, I want to discuss the first one again. Why? Because the show has actually gotten an English dub, and against all odds, a solidly good one. The real stars of the production our are leads, Julie Shields is a touch stiff as Equa, but given the character’s weird nature that only makes sense. Alexis Tipton‘s take on Feles really gets the “always at least a little fed up with everyone’s nonsense” aspect across splendidly, and the dub impressively manages to amp the ship teasing between Equa and Feles up even more. Martes, played here by Sarah Wiedenheft, is also done very well. Wiedenheft’s take on Martes’ fake-drunk rambling near the conclusion of episode one is a particular highlight.

The supporting characters are also dubbed well throughout, and Anthony Bowling‘s take on the robot buddy Alga sounds totally different than the original JP dub but in an interesting, transformative way. He’s gruffer, here, and his snarky side made more obvious. Good performances require a good director, of course, and it’s probably thanks to ADR Director Jeremy Inman that all of this comes together so well. All in all, a solid dubbed start to the series that I hope will give it a somewhat wider audience, it deserves one.

This week’s episode is leaner than that explosively weird premiere. Essentially; Equa has a cold, so the rest of the team needs to extract their client (a wheezy otaku) without her. They fail to do so, because their mission devolves into bickering and they don’t communicate with the client terribly well. What they seem to not quite get—but Equa definitely does, as she demonstrates when she shows up anyway toward the episode’s end—is that the Extractors’ main goal is to give their clients some agency. Without doing that, they can’t accomplish anything else, either. I suspect this theme will come back around as the series enters its second half.

The Demon Girl Next Door – Season 2

It took a bit, but it seems like the second season of The Demon Girl Next Door is starting to find its footing. The first segment of episode 3 is about Shamiko learning to use the computer (and then, more specifically, Twitter). Gags like this are arguably old hat at this point, but the execution here is pretty good, starting from Momo’s “Magical Girl Lesson on Internet Literacy.”

The pair’s inability to be honest with each other is also brought back, here. Both want to connect with the other on social media but can’t get themselves to directly say it, which leads exchanges like this, where Yuuko tries to be sincere.

Only to course correct moments later.

In the episode’s second half, Momo takes Yuuko’s ever-present, normally statue-bound ancestor Lilith (Minami Takahashi) on an outing to a health spa. This is mostly an excuse for the self-proclaimed Witch of Eternal Darkness to annoy the magical girl. There’s a few moments of genuine bonding in here, too. (This is also the best-looking part of the episode. I’m a sucker for the shadowless technique.)

….but of course, this being Machikado Mazoku, that much is also rolled into a gag, where Momo promptly uses the newfound knowledge that Lilith is scared of the dark to blackmail her.

It’s good that the series seems to be finally stabilizing after a somewhat rough first two episodes. (They were hardly bad, but the lack of structure was noticeable.) Next week promises to get the ball rolling on the show’s actual plot once again, something I quite look forward to.

Summer Time Rendering

Somewhere in the Pacific, there’s been a death on the island of Higotoshima. A tragic accident; a girl drowning at sea while saving another from the same fate. Shinpei Ajiro (Natsuke Hanae) returns there—to his home—for the first time in two years to pay respects to the departed; his sister by all but blood, one Ushio Kofune (Anna Nagase). For its first fifteen minutes, it’s all atmosphere. The palm trees hang huge and crooked like hangman’s gallows, and the summer sun beats down a heat so hot it’s oppressive.

Every bead of water—from tears to air conditioner condensation—is placed with elegant finesse. At night, Ushio’s own sister Mio (Saho Shirasu) stares at her own house from outside, like she’s a stranger. The island goes eerie. Something is in the air. This is Summer Time Rendering.

Eventually, something like an explanation creeps forward, though not without a payment in blood. The so-called Shadow Sickness, a haunting via doppelganger that ends with the victim being killed by their own double. This, it seems, is the island’s secret. By the time Mio’s holding herself at gunpoint at the end of the episode, everything’s spun into freefall. Shinpei gets a bullet to the brain for his troubles, only to wake back up on the same boat he arrived on the previous day.

Who can say, really, where all this is going? Summer Time Rendering is not going to be a regular fixture of this column. (It’s being held in streaming jail, for one thing.) But I may cover it occasionally. In truth though, if you want to see what happens, you’ll just have to seek it out for yourself. Good luck.

Ya Boy Kongming!

Over the past few weeks, Kongming has strategized and schemed his way into getting Eiko, his friend, client, and the idol singer he’s an unashamed fan of, into bigger and bigger placements. Last week that culminated in stealing the thunder of a popular indie band at a pop-up festival. Here, Eiko presented with a choice. She’s invited to a second festival of a similar size. Or, the festival-runner making this offer explains, a truly massive summer music festival, but there’s a catch on that one. She needs 100,000 likes on social media. Eiko, no longer content with taking the easy route, opts for the latter option, to the amusement of the festival organizer and the comical distress of her boss.

Kongming brainstorms several solutions, but one is to hire other personnel to join Eiko’s backing band / form a group / etc. Specifically, he suggests “a mighty rapper.”

This is an interesting obstacle for a series like this to hit. Hip-hop and anime are uneasy bedfellows and trying to integrate one into the other usually results in—at best—offputting results. And as someone who’s a lifelong fan of both, I feel pretty qualified in making that statement. (Not for nothing will I never cover Hypnosis Mic on this site.) But there are degrees here. “Rapper” is vague, does Kongming mean an actual, full-on hip-hop artist? Or more of an EDM / pop rapper, someone constant late ’00s / early ’10s Billboard Hot 100 presence Flo Rida? In either case, there’s a lot of leeway. To put it another way; chelmico. aren’t Lauryn Hill. Calliope Mori is not Paul Wall. “A rapper” can be a lot of different things. What does the show actually mean when it says it’s going to involve one?

For the time being, it seems like neither Kongming the series nor Kongming the person are actually interested in answering that. Kongming spends several nights (it’s not clear how many exactly) chatting up a hypebeast outside of the club he and Eiko still both work at. The scene contrasts the two’s approaches for this stretch of time; Eiko hustles with her singing at home, Kongming seemingly skips out on his duties to go party early in the morning. Eventually, when Eiko confronts him about this, he convinces her to come with her one night to a club in Roppongi (an area of Tokyo I mostly associate with being the setting of the truly god-awful Speed Grapher. But it’s hard to hold that against the place). Kongming rubs shoulders with quite a few people while out, including a ripped Black American who speaks no Japanese, several girls who are club regulars and seem to think Kongming is cute, and the aforementioned hypebeast guy. None are the mentioned “rapper.” We don’t meet them here at all, and they remain a question mark for the series, for now.

Eventually, he explains to Eiko, all of this is “intel gathering.” He’s trying to read the scene, and the two resolve the minor misunderstanding over bowls of udon, after the club.

The climax of this scene sees Eiko reveal the full scope of her ambitions to Kongming; she doesn’t want to just be a singer. She wants to perform at the world’s largest EDM festival. A concrete, but absurd, goal, for someone who is still at this point a fairly unknown pop singer from Tokyo. This is, she says, the first time she’s ever told anyone she wants to do this.

Kongming thanks her—he also lightly reprimands her over her continued lack of self-confidence–and there are no hard feelings here. At episode’s end, Eiko passes Kongming her phone, and asks for his thoughts on her new song. The credits creep down the screen as 96Neko‘s voice hisses out of the tinny iPhone ear buds. I could describe how I feel about the song, but how Kongming feels is a lot more important.

She is, of course, embarrassed by this high praise. But it’s a good reminder of why anyone is watching this show in the first place. Yes, the premise is funny. But what Kongming is actually about is how one person can be so moved by music that they need it like a fish needs water—again, Kongming’s words, not mine. Kongming may be the one to put Eiko on the path to stardom, but he needs her, too.

Elsewhere on MPA

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

I picked up a third seasonal. Why? Because I really, really love Healer Girl, and I hope to contribute in some small way to it becoming even a little more popular. That’s genuinely it.

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 3

Kaguya‘s episode this week mostly focuses on a trio of the series’ less well-known characters, but it’s a treat nonetheless.

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 3 – Prepare for The Interview

A downbeat turn from Spy x Family this week. Comparatively, anyway; there are still a lot of great little character moments in here, and it’s worth watching for those alone.

And that’s all for this week. See you next time and keep out for an additional article on Tuesday in addition to the Healer Girl recap on Monday, this week! It marks the return of a column we haven’t seen around here since last year. I hope you’re all excited.

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 3 – Prepare for The Interview

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

Spy x Family takes a slightly more relaxed, downtempo turn this week. Really, that’s fine, with two cours split across half the year, the series has time to stretch its legs. As such, “Prepare for the Interview,” its third episode, only briefly involves any actual forward plot motion. It’s mostly scene-setting, and an opportunity to put the Forgers in a genuinely domestic context. If only, perhaps, to endear us to them further so that later, when this status quo is threatened, we feel all the more sympathetic. (Not to be cynical about it, that’s just good storytelling.)

We can basically break the episode down into a couple different kinds of scene. There are scenes where the Forger “family” achieve the illusion of domesticity, there are scenes—usually immediately following that—that break said illusion to comedic effect, and there are finally the scenes that actually move the show’s core narrative forward. All three are important in different ways, and there is groundwork laid here that’s sure to pay off later.

The actual interview bit is a fairly minor part of the episode, coming after Loid and Anya help Yor set up in their new, collective home. (Everyone has their own room, which we’re shown in detail. More importantly, we’re reacquainted with Anya’s plushie Mr. Chimera.)

They briefly try some interview practice right away, but it doesn’t go particularly well. I like this little gem here, Yor’s response to the question of what her “parenting philosophy” is.

The bulk of the episode simply revolves around the Forger family having a nice “upper-class outing.” Loid reasons that maybe getting some culture will help.

This is all on the quiet side, but there are still some pretty great gags in here, like Anya briefly getting scared of Yor when the latter has a stray thought about how she once accidentally hugged her brother too hard and cracked his ribs. Anya’s pretty great in general in this episode. She expresses shock when Loid bluntly tells her that she didn’t really help get the house ready for Yor to move in, she falls asleep at an opera, and at an art museum, this happens.

Yor gets in a few good gags too, mostly revolving around her character tic of blushing whenever something related to violence is around. (At one point she fiddles with a knife at the restaurant they’re at. At the museum, she gets all dew-eyed over a painting of a beheading.)

There are a few more serious scenes as well, such as Anya getting a bit of esper overload when the family hangs around a political rally and has to be escorted away.

The episode’s focal point, though, comes when the trio, taking in some fresh air at a small overlook, happen to see a purse snatcher rob an old woman. Loid, being naturally inclined to not draw attention to himself, doesn’t initially do anything, coldly commenting that the woman should’ve been more careful. It’s Yor who springs into action, and while Loid is eventually the one who takes the crook down (Yor loses him), the old woman thanks them both. Loid thanks Yor for inspiring him to action, and she blushes, which leads to another astute observation from Anya.

The episode concludes with more interview practice, and the promise that we’ll see the real thing next week.

If I don’t seem to have much to say about this episode that’s because, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a terribly important one. Other than that scene with the thief, this one is best enjoyed by just hitting play and letting it wash over you.

Until next time.

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 3

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

Here’s the first line in this week’s episode of Kaguya-sama: Love is War -Ultra Romanic-.

Pretty bad, right? Of course, because this is this show, it quickly becomes obvious that Nagisa Kashiwagi (Momo Asakura), the short-haired girl there, is overreacting, and that her boyfriend, fellow C-String character Tsubasa Tanuma (Taku Yashiro) is not actually cheating on her. But he has been spending time with another female student, one Maki Shijo (Kana Ichinose), Kaguya’s distant relative and perpetual loser of the love games that the entire rest of Shuchiin Academy seems to be caught up in. And that’s suspicious enough for both Nagisa herself and for Kaguya. This leaves Miko to play the role of the straight man. Pity her.

As always, -Ultra Romantic- spices up what was a fairly straightforward scene in the manga with all kinds of weird audiovisual tricks. When Kaguya and Nagisa both immediately conclude Tsubasa is cheating, their halves of the table are “squished together,” and their voices are run through what sounds like a flutter filter. A pretty effective way to convey that Miko, the only reasonable voice at the table, feels like she’s losing her mind.

When the topic turns to the fact that the accused were recently at a karaoke booth together, Kaguya of course immediately changes her tune, only for Miko to agree that that is solid evidence of cheating, since “people often do indecent things at karaoke.”

The whole thing turns out to be a misunderstanding, of course. Maki and Tsubana had spent the day together because the latter wanted help picking out a six-month anniversary gift; an extremely cheap-looking heart necklace. All girls present—including Chika, who happens to arrive just as this is all happening—think it’s hopelessly tacky. But Nagisa loves it, so this particular sketch ends on a happy note. At least, for her. Not necessarily for everybody.

If you’re next thought, for some reason, is “but what about Maki?” Do not fret, Love is War has you covered. As mentioned, Maki is the loser of Kaguya-sama‘s cast. She, as we learn here, has been crushing on Tsubasa for months, maybe years, and is all burnt up about Nagisa hooking up with him, so seeks out the Student Council’s advice on the matter. Specifically, that of Shirogane and Ishigami. (Irony of ironies, you may remember Nagisa and Tsubasa only got together in the first place because of Shirogane’s advice, way back in season one. If you don’t, the show explicitly calls attention to it, so no worries.)

Maki is a somewhat pitiable character. She’s basically Kaguya herself minus the charisma and most of the status—she takes a lot of pride in being a member of a minor branch family of house Shinomiya—down to the fact that they have similar mannerisms. This segment of the episode is less heavy on the wonky visuals, although there are still certainly some. Especially when the series needs to draw comparisons between Maki and Kaguya.

Ishigami has an interesting role here. He completely cuts through all of Maki’s anime trope defenses, eventually getting her to drop the tsundere act, but also making her pretty sad in the process when he outlines how being someone’s second girlfriend is different than being their first.

But eventually, the two do convince Maki to at least make an earnest attempt at telling her crush how she feels. She also does explicitly say that even just talking to someone about this makes her feel a bit better. I’ve never been entirely able to love the Maki mini-arc, maybe because she reminds me too much of a few people I’ve met over the course of my life whereas most of the other romantic misunderstandings in Kaguya are firmly in goofier territory. Nonetheless, she does get a last laugh here, as she’s about to leave (and as Kaguya enters), this happens.

Of course, to keep the show’s main plot going, Shirogane can’t exactly just say that it’s because Maki reminds him of Kaguya.

The third and final segment of the episode is a classic “Chika sets up a game” sketch.

The series has done these since near the start of season one, and they’re always fun, so I’m happy to see them make a return. Chika’s grand plan for this particular round is to play a common group date game. (Called the “Ten Yen Coin Game.” It’s basically group truth or dare without the “dare” part and restricted to Yes/No questions.)

Chika has never struck me as all that interested in romance, quite unlike the entire rest of the cast. Indeed, a throwaway line in the manga seems to imply she’s aromantic, whether or not she was deliberately written as such. But she does love games, especially if she can use them to fuck around with people, and that is precisely what she does here. She even brought a lie detector along, just to make sure no one tells any fibs.

The questions quickly take a turn for the heavy as soon as it’s Ishigami’s turn to ask. This is, of course, played for comedy. But damn dude, asking people if they secretly hate you is not generally a great strategy toward making sure they don’t. (One person answers yes anyway, probably Miko. Ishigami promptly breaks down in happy tears that it’s only one person.)

Miko isn’t much better, asking if they really need her around. And when no one answers no, she’s also absolutely ecstatic.

Ishigami tells her that she shouldn’t go on group dates because she’s so easily swayed by flattery that she’d be an easy mark. It’s a little rude maybe, but honestly, it’s solid advice.

As for Kaguya and Shirogane, you can probably guess that they use the game to convolutedly try to scheme into getting the other to confess their feelings. It does not work out, although both leave the game on a positive note. As they clean up, Shirogane feels the need to make it clear to Kaguya that nothing, you know, happened during that whole karaoke incident. Kaguya believes him, though she doesn’t make that totally clear.

The episode ends on a sweet note, then. But I can imagine that some of you might be hungry for this plot to move along a little faster. I can’t say when, but I do have a hunch that more substantial developments are on the horizon. There’s only one real way to find out if that’s true though, so to that end, I’ll see you next Friday, Kaguya fans.

Bonus Hayasaka Screencap: This one was hard. Hayasaka isn’t actually in this episode at all other than a brief flashback scene (and I feel like that doesn’t really count.) So instead, have a shot of her appearance in this season’s ED, a wonderful fantasia where Shirogane and Kaguya are star-crossed lovers on opposite sides of a war in a faraway steampunk kingdom. The whole thing is just Shirogane’s dream, of course, but he does have quite the imagination, doesn’t he? Anyway, Hayasaka sells the soldier look quite well.

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.