Category: anime

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Think Like a Biker – The Slowness and Sweetness of SUPER CUB

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

“We’ve already decided on our destination. The farthest end of Japan our Cub can take us.”

It’s about three minutes into Super Cub‘s first episode before anyone says anything. It’s nearly twelve before any kind of background music kicks in. That alone, and the show’s locale–rural Japan, somewhere along the Chuo Line–will clue you in that Super Cub is not merely your average slice of life series. This is an iyashikei, a tone genre that focuses on producing a healing, meditative effect. Any iyashikei is a thing of note; it’s not a particularly saturated genre. A genuinely good one is a precious treasure.

I must confess though, I went into Super Cub skeptical. I’m not afraid to admit I’m something of a snob about the genre, and not always in a good way. In my defense, the very first thing I learned about Super Cub was that it was sponsored by Honda. A “Super Cub”, as both we and protagonist Koguma quickly learn, is a sort of motorbike. Models have been consistently produced for 50-some years, and as more than one character goes over, they’re widely liked and appreciated even outside of Japan itself. Super Cub riding is a hobby in its own right, and if you’re already part of the Cult of the Cub you probably won’t need more convincing to watch this anime.

But, just speaking personally, it’s Koguma herself who won me over. Super Cub has a fascinating little trick that it uses to indirectly convey her mood; the show’s color saturation is directly tied to it. When we meet her at the start of the first episode, she is visibly extremely depressed. She lives alone, apparently abandoned by her parents. With, as she puts it, no hobbies, and very little money. The colors are, for most of the episode, muted and grayed. When a generous old shop proprietor sells her the titular used scooter, the simple feeling of sitting on it literally lights her world up, and the colors bloom into full saturation. It’s a wonderful technique, and it’s one the show uses enough times to fairly call it a signature. For the still-young Studio KAI, it’s a promising visual showing.

Also of note is Reiko, to whom Koguma is extremely married.

Super Cub, like any good story about vehicles, knows that it’s not really about the vehicles. They’re about the freedom and liberation that comes with being able to go where you want with very few limits. Koguma’s story is one of a girl breaking out of her shell with the help of her new hobby, it’s a tale as old as the medium itself. And its best episodes and moments tend to reflect this. Things as mundane as trips to an unfamiliar grocery store, or, later on, an unplanned highway trip, can be magical in the right context. This understanding bleeds into the series’ very aesthetic. Both its soundtrack, which is excellent, and its tour of Japan’s vistas, most exemplified by the road trip in the final episode. It is in this context, with this understanding of its appeal, that Super Cub truly shines.

But it doesn’t always shine, unfortunately. In less impressive moments, it does have the misfortune of feeling like an ad. Which, in its defense, it sort of is. There is fun hobby talk; the sort that tells us as much about the characters as it does about what they’re discussing, and there is dull hobby talk. For Super Cub, this manifests as occasionally becoming dangerously close to replicating the feeling of loitering around an AutoZone. The line between the two is razor thin and Super Cub sometimes crosses it and back again multiple times within the span of a single conversation. It’s believable that a teenager might want to squeeze more power out of their motorbike. A teenager complaining about “environmental regulations” that lead to less powerful engines, as Reiko does at one point, is less so.

It doesn’t cut Super Cub‘s engine, thankfully, but it does occasionally make it feel more corporate than cozy, which is unfortunate. It is the show’s only real weakness, but it’s a notable one.

But, conversely, even at its comparative lowest, Super Cub is simply too odd and too thoughtful to really write off. Weird asides like the character Shii’s family of europhiles, Reiko’s attempts to conquer Mt. Fuji, and so on, prevent the shop talk from ever overtaking the core narrative. Koguma herself, too, develops into something of a snarky, playful type, at least in the presence of friends, over the course of the series. A notable progression from her status as a near-silent protagonist in the opening episodes of the show.

It also picks up something of a dramatic streak in its final few episodes. If the more serious turns here don’t entirely fit the series like a glove, they do reinvigorate it through its final stretch. Koguma’s broadly philosophical musings on her relationship with Shii, the series’ own use of different vehicles as metaphors for moving through life at different “speeds”, and the eventual use of Spring as both a literal coming change and a proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel” all tie together wonderfully. Flaws and all, Super Cub cannot be said to have its heart anywhere but the right place.

So if it’s a rocky journey, it’s still a worthwhile one. It seems doubtful that Super Cub will ever rock anyone’s world, but it’s not trying to and doesn’t need to. All it’s trying to do is offer a small comfort in the harsh times we live in. Koguma closes the series by musing that a Cub is not some kind of magical do-it-all machine. The desire to turn an unfamiliar corner must come from within. All told, that is a pretty satisfying note for such an unassuming series to end on. And hey, if it can sell you a bike too, all the better.

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

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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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(REVIEW) Total System Failure in VIVY – FLOURITE EYE’S SONG

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

“….Goodbye, shattered dreams….”

To evaluate art, you must first understand what it is trying to do. This is a simple maxim of modern criticism and is one applied by myself and many thousands of other writers up and down the length of the medium and beyond. It borders on a truism.

So, then, the question practically asks itself. What do you do when “what it’s trying to do” turns out to be “not very much”? This is a conundrum I struggled with throughout Vivy – Flourite Eye’s Song as it neared its conclusion. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

First, the craftsmanship side of things. It’s a Wit Studio production, and looks it. Vivy joins last year’s The Great Pretender as a resoundingly stylish visual affair. The series looks and sounds great and is extremely well-directed. In particular, if all you’re looking for is a fun brain-teaser plot that you don’t intend to take too seriously, and some excellent action pieces and fun character animation, there’s enough to love here to keep you happy.

But what’s it about?

That is a surprisingly tough question.

Vivy is a sci-fi series. In a purely literal sense, it’s about AI, meaning generally androids with artificial intelligence here. It joins a long lineage of anime that tackle this topic, going back to the dawn of the medium.

Vivy herself, the title character, also called Diva, is a singing AI, whose “life mission” (all AI here get one, and only one) is to make people happy with her songs. She’s also the agent chosen by Matsumoto, a cube-shaped automaton who somewhat resembles a cubified version of Wheatley from Portal 2, for a seemingly-impossible task. A century in the future, a war will break out between AIs and humankind. The AIs will decidedly win.

Matsumoto has been sent back in time by his own creator to prevent this, and Diva essentially must help him, or else the future will be doomed. Across a baker’s dozen episodes, she does so. Vivy is the very image of a reluctant adventure protagonist. She rescues politicians, evacuates satellite-hotels as they fall out of orbit, confronts super-factories of autonomous drones, and so on. As a pure spectacle, it’s easy to make a case for Vivy.

The unfortunate, if perhaps predictable, rejoinder to that then, is that despite this Vivy still falls well short of its goal of being a truly new spin on the AI-focused part of the sci-fi genre. Unlike a lot of fiction that tackles this topic, Vivy is keenly uninterested in asking any hard questions of itself, or of its audience. No thought is given to the AIs as their own characters, except in service to their human masters. For Vivy herself the problem is slightly more abstract, but still present.

The series has what I can only call a perspective problem; while Vivy‘s literal plot is tightly-written, at least until it falls on its face in the series’ final third, the actual ideas it presents often come up short. Thinking you have something to say, and actually having such, are, after all, different things.

At the series’ two-thirds mark, it is established that Diva and Vivy are, in fact, different people. What is still often incorrectly referred to as a “split personality” situation but is more properly called plurality. We spend most of the series with Vivy, but starting at episode eight we spend a significant amount of time with Diva, too. Just an episode and a half later, at the climax of episode nine, she dies, done in by a virus that deletes her “personality construct” from the shared body.

On its own, there is nothing inherently wrong with killing a character as the take-a-bow moment to finish out a story arc. In certain genres, and in the proper context, it can work very well. When I say Vivy‘s problem is one of perspective, what I mean is that the trope as used here resoundingly doesn’t. The narrative wrings her for pathos, and when it can no longer think of a way to do that, she gets the proverbial gun to the temple.

The actual scene itself–where Diva and Vivy briefly meet for the first time as the former sings her heart out even as her code unravels by the second–is an audio-visual triumph, one might go so far as to say it’s powerful. But when the songs fade and you catch your breath, you are left with the fact that you’ve just watched a character die because the story could not see fit to let her live. It feels pointless, offensive even, with the benefit of even a few minutes of hindsight.

The scene I outline above is certainly the worst of these that punctuates Vivy, but it’s not the only one, and the series’ habit of killing characters willy-nilly for no good reason is a bad Achilles’ Heel for an anime to have. It doesn’t tank Vivy entirely, as that production aspect is still there, but it completely neuters the series as a narrative piece. It’s genuinely impressive how irrelevant to the current moment it feels in a world overrun with algorithms, deepfakes, and machine learning.

In general, the broadness of Vivy‘s view is tied directly to its success. In the rare moments when it remembers to actually humanize all of its characters, not just the ones who are literally human, it sings.

When it does not, it feels crushingly lonely in the worst way possible. It never finds a real core in any of this death and twisted metal. It’s all story beats run through with impressive, but mechanical precision. In a somewhat grim irony, given its subject matter, it feels like a facsimile of a better anime. It has no soul.

In the end, Vivy‘s narrowness is its undoing. In its final few episodes even the previously solid plot begins to unravel, and the ending escapes being worth detailed analysis. It’s a hodge-podge of garden variety time-loop nonsense, the series’ audacious but completely unearned attempt to transmute flashbacks into an AMV of itself, and finally, of course, the death of Vivy herself. I will leave the issue of whether her resurrection, with amnesia, in a post-credits scene makes this slightly better or even worse to you, the reader.

When Vivy began some naysayers made a called shot about what the problem would be; that Vivy would be a slickly produced series with nothing at all interesting to actually say. With the further note that the series lacks warmth or empathy, I’d now say those people were unfortunately correct, regardless of if they were actually foreseeing potential issues or simply guessing and being right by happenstance. The series has enough merits to avoid being a total waste of time, but conversely I cannot imagine it enduring the march of history for long. Nor does it deserve to.

It is a shame. Speaking only for myself, I go into every anime I watch with the assumption that it will become the best version of itself. That decidedly did not happen with Vivy – Flourite Eye’s Song. Perhaps, someone, someday, will extract its worthy elements and build a better AI anime out of them. But Vivy is not, and can not be, that series of the future. Only just concluded, it is already long obsolete.

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

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 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) Now That it’s Over, What Even was BACK ARROW?

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

“An arrow to end God’s tyranny.”

BACK ARROW, its name proudly and pointedly stylized in all capital letters, is a gem. Not a gem in the “hidden gem” sense where it’s a fantastic show that’s underappreciated by the masses, (although certainly some might say it is that also) but a gem in the way that you might call your quirky friend who’s a little too into conspiracy theories a gem. It’s not the best show of the Spring 2021 season, and not a personal favorite (I more respect it than anything else), but it’s among the most unique. It’s also by far the one I most expect to pick up a cult following.

On one level, BACK ARROW is a perfectly logical synthesis of the previous work of its two main creative minds; Gorou Taniguchi, creator and director of Code Geass on the one hand, and Kazuki Nakashima, scriptwriter of a number of Studio TRIGGER’s most famous work, notably Kill la Kill, on the other. The result, as anyone familiar with both of these things might guess, is a decidedly strange fusion. BACK ARROW is political, silly, grandiose, philosophical, and ridiculous. This puts it in the same broad thematic space as most of its “parent” anime, like the aforementioned Code Geass and Kill la Kill as well as some work in a similar vein (say, Symphogear). It’s not quite as good as any of those, but it manages to make a strong showing of things regardless.

BACK ARROW concerns the geopolitics–and eventually, the cosmology–of a world known as Lingalind. It is surrounded in its entirety by a massive wall. Were it not for the presence of mecha conjured up via magic circlets called Bind Warpers, Lingalind would be a fairly typical fantasy setting for an anime. I suspect this is deliberate, as one of BACK ARROW‘s aims is to explore the logical conclusions of such a setup. There are two main nations; Rekka and Lutoh, (respectively loosely based on China and a general mish-mash of Western Europe) as well as a number of smaller powers. The mecha are powered by a force known as Conviction, and each owner of a Bind Warper has a statement that they hold as a sort of personal code which changes their mecha’s form and what it can do. (As an example, Atlee, a green-haired sheriff girl, has a conviction of “I’ll manage somehow!”)

Do you like GIANT ROBOTS throwing DARK ORBS? BACK ARROW might be for you.

None of this is all that complex on its own. However, when BACK ARROW‘s title character, Back Arrow (a homophonic pun name on baka ero, “perverted idiot”) arrives, Superman-style, in a capsule from the sky, things quickly change. Across twenty-four episodes, Back Arrow goes on a capital-J Journey across and eventually beyond Lingalind. Along the way, he helps dramatically reshape the world’s political landscape, and eventually comes face to face with a man named Rudolph, who claims to be “God’s arbitrator”. What this means in practice is that Rudolph–a villain so deeply goofy that at one point he drinks wine with his shoulders–plans to destroy the world.

If you thought any part of that was a joke, nope! Completely, literally true.

Things go well and truly off the rails as the series enters its latter half, and if you’re the sort of person who values sheer scale above all else, BACK ARROW will be a likely anime of the year contender for you.

BACK ARROW‘s only main flaw is a sort of inarticulateness. It is fairly hard to say what the point of the series is, exactly, until its very end. Ultimately, it is the same message that almost all of Nakashima’s work imparts; no matter how great the force that holds us down, by coming together, we can overcome it. A simple message of unity in the face of any odds met that settles well with BACK ARROW‘s inherent silliness.

An acquaintance put it best, Nakashima’s main strength as a writer is “to script things that make enough sense internally even if they sound completely wild and dumb when taken out of context.” I could sit here all day and relay miniature stories of conviction particles and nested giant mecha and baby gods, but there’d be no point. These things tie together surprisingly well in the moment, but make little sense outside of them. This is the man who penned what was translated as “kick reason to the curb”, after all.

You understand by now whether or not you’d get anything out of BACK ARROW. If it is a minor work in its creators’ body thereof, that really only speaks to the strength of the competition.

I suspect in the months and years to come, those who would appreciate it will, indeed, find it. It has a magnetism to it, and like attracts like. Don’t be surprised if, five or ten years down the line, you see BACK ARROW topping a lot of “underrated anime” lists. Until then, it flies on, like an arrow in the face of an angry god.

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

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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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The Door To The Common is Closed – The Ambiguity and Ambition of BLUE REFLECTION RAY

“Three days from now, we died.”

When I first wrote about the series just a month ago, I said I felt like Blue Reflection Ray had not entirely found its audience. Rather than doing so per se, several weeks later as it nears its halfway point, it almost seems to be growing more esoteric and hard to place by the episode. Blue Reflection Ray, in both its best and worst moments, feels like a show destined for cult fandom. It is still airing, and already has the aura of an anime forgotten by time.

How accurate that feeling will prove to be remains to be seen, we’re still in the first cour after all. But, BRR itself has taken no steps to make itself more accessible. It’s certainly not the best anime airing this season, but Blue Reflection Ray might be the anime airing right now that is the most its own thing. As it’s gone on, it’s drifted ever farther from the obvious touchpoints I and others previously named. Comparisons that may have done it more harm than good early on to begin with. But, that ambiguous approach may in fact be closer to familiar ground than many viewers (even myself) have realized.

At the time of this writing, the most recent episode of Blue Reflection Ray is its ninth. It’s a classic bombshell-style plot twist sort of episode. But even before then, there were signs that BRR was not content to just rotely copy anything, touchstone or no. Episode six gave us the emotionally scalding backstory of Nina Yamada, one of the “evil” red Reflectors. Most anime do not try to handle episodes juggling such topics as child abuse, the young girls of the world who are lost to sexual exploitation, and codependency. Blue Reflection Ray did. Was it entirely equipped to do so? Well, I suspect many would find the episode in question problematic, or at the very least in over its head. They may even be right to, but I myself cannot help but respect something with that level of self-confidence. A bat was swung, and it was for the fences.

And that self-belief is important, because no matter what else can be said about it, Blue Reflection Ray always scans as genuine, which allows it to succeed even when making surprisingly ambitious narrative plays like those, that well outstrip what something of its fairly limited production values “should” be able to accomplish.1 That brings us to episode nine.

Fundamentally, “What She Said”, as the episode is called, is two characters challenging each others’ worldviews. On one side is Mio Hirahara, the leader of the red Reflectors and main character Hiori’s sister. On the other side is Momo Tanabe, ex-delinquent and most senior of the blue Reflectors.

The moral differences here are stark, and while Momo’s red Reflectors’ actions are not excused, the series does paint them in a more sympathetic light than one might expect, even if they are still ultimately “the bad guys” in a narrative sense. It does this mostly by way of what is essentially an expository monologue on Mio’s part. As a sidenote; it’s to the credit of the show’s director (Risako Yoshida) that this somehow feels gripping and compelling instead of dry.

These revelations are, themselves, plot points. There is a lot to process here; time loops, monsters called Sephira (briefly shown without explanation way back in episode one), the mysterious “Door to the Common” that Mio and her Reflectors are working to open, the confirmation that Mio and Momo were partners–as we now know, quite literally in another life, in the previous timeline–the ominous fact that three days in the future is when Mio and Momo originally lost to the Sephirot. It’s all quite much.

What remains true regardless of the literal plot developments, is that Blue Reflection Ray is a portrait of emotional dysfunction gone horribly wrong. In this specific way, it actually is similar to many of its contemporaries, and it’s here that we can most understand what it’s trying to do. Only what every magical girl series does; prove the worth of human connectedness in a world that has forgotten it. Its route is just more circuitous than most.

Of course, the obvious caveats apply. Sure, the series could crash and burn in its second cour. It’s possible there really isn’t a plan and I am simply reading too much onto a production with low ambitions. But, with all respect to this hypothetical negative reader, that is true of almost any anime with truly few exceptions. I would, a million times over, make the mistake of giving something too much credit than the inverse.

Blue Reflection Ray‘s first cour is approaching its end, and I suspect we may finally have at least some answers soon. Until then? The Door to the Common remains closed, and all we can do is wait for it to be unlocked.

1: I like Blue Reflection Ray‘s visuals. I think its watercolor palette, the general shoujo aesthetic of the character designs, and the gaudy computer art mish-mash of the Leap Ranges are all strengths. However, if an anime eventually comes along that will rehabilitate J.C. Staff’s reputation for odd, spacey, and sometimes just straight-up bad animation, it will not be this one.

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

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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, KeyFramesForgotten

(PODCAST) KeyFrames Forgotten Episode 2 – SPEED GRAPHER

You gotta believe us, folks. Speed Grapher is not the sort of thing we started this podcast to cover. I’m kind of amazed we got to something this bad this early! In this episode of KeyFramesForgotten “planet” Jane-Michelle and Julian discuss a long-forgotten mid-aughts action anime with a dark aesthetic and a serious chip on its shoulder.

On the more technical side of things, we’re still working out a better audio setup. But on the plus side, we’re now available, uh, well, lots of places! Anchor’s one-click linker has put us on Spotify, among other Podcast-Having Areas. Plus, the traditional mirror on Youtube is still up as well. Listen wherever you please below. Major NSFW warning and general content warnings for sexual violence and child abuse all up and down this episode.

KeyFramesForgotten is a podcast about anime you haven’t thought about in a while. Join anime nerds Jane-Michelle and Julian as they discuss anime from the recent or not-so-recent past that the general public has forgotten about. We discuss the merits of these anime, why the public has left them behind, and whether we think they’re worth a second look.

You can follow Jane on Twitter here and Julian on Twitter here.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Revisiting The Revue in REVUE STARLIGHT: RONDO RONDO RONDO

This review contains spoilers for both the original Revue Starlight anime and material original to the film. This is your only warning.

“Take it, the star you wished for.”

“They make more sense in Japan.” That’s long been the party line of the occasional North American defender of the anime recap movie. The sub-medium is much-maligned, but only rarely watched, on this side of the Pacific. An apologist will tell you that TV reruns are rare in Japan, so recap movies help cement a series’ legacy in a way analogous to what syndication–or more recently, finding a second life on streaming–does over here.

Perhaps they’re right to be defensive. The format is intriguing in its own right, and Revue Starlight: Rondo Rondo Rondo is an exceptional example. On their own, recap films present a “greatest hits” version of a TV anime. The fights, the dramatic dialogue, the moments of deep emotion, without, necessarily any of the downtime, exposition, or more minor character moments of the parent series. This also means that they’re generally pretty impossible to follow on their own. (That’s very much true of Rondo Rondo Rondo, certainly. This review, as well.) But if it’s a price paid, it’s a minor one.

But all of this is true of recap films in general. Of Rondo Rondo Rondo in particular, several things are notable. The film does not merely simplify and compress its parent series’ plot, it actually rearranges and recombines it. Splicing in new footage to these films is a common practice, but Rondo Rondo Rondo uses the technique to add a number of extra scenes, which explores the role of Daiba Nana, the mysterious 99th Class Student #15. The core story remains the same, and anything that could be said about Revue Starlight could equally be said about Rondo Rondo Rondo, but this central alteration is worth exploring.

Nana, by many’s account, is Revue Starlight‘s most interesting character. Rondo Rondo Rondo doesn’t exactly expand her role’s scope, but it does elaborate on her nature as a commentator, as the only one of the stage girls who understands the nature of the revues, and so on. More here than in the main series, Nana is Revue Starlight‘s “villain”, in as much as it has one. Her arc, laid out in more compact terms here, hits a bit harder, and the “behind the scenes tours” she gives of the other side of the revues are illuminating.

Elsewhere, the changes are more general, and on the whole are more or less a lateral move. Suggestion is traded in for explication, subtlety for drama. Rondo Rondo Rondo on the whole is more upfront about what it means, but that’s not a bad thing, given that Revue Starlight is still sometimes misunderstood.

Part of Revue Starlight‘s core is that on a basic level, the promise the Giraffe represents; eternal brilliance through artistic transcendence at any cost, is false. All art, no matter its renown, its resonance, or its craft, is transient. Likewise, the flickering flame of fame is fickle, and burns as short as it does bright. Even among those who scale the summit, no one reaches the top alone. This emphasis on transience is partly why Revue Starlight is based around theatre in the first place. It, alone among the major art forms, is infinitely transient. No play is ever performed the same exact way twice.

As a critic, a commentator on the arts, Revue Starlight is the sort of series that puts you in your place. What truly great art accomplishes, what Revue Starlight accomplishes, and what Rondo Rondo Rondo cements, is that for every rule or bit of theory written, every genre named and tagged, every character archetype analyzed and catalogued, there is always, always the possibility of shattering the glass. There is always another path.

This reflects, of course, on Nana’s own circumstance. Locked by her own fear of change into repeating her first year again and again, it is only an unpredictable outside actor that diverts her course. And within this fact, lies the second half of Revue Starlight‘s core thesis.

The paradox is this; despite its transience, art matters, so much, to all of us. Stage Girls as Revue Starlight renders them commit the “sin” of striving for transcendence, but by the actions of Aijou Karen, they’re redeemed. But Karen herself can only move to action by their help. And they, in turn, are fueled, even after they fail the auditions, by that same striving. Through transient bonds–between people, between works, and between each other–something eternal is, nonetheless, created. It’s not an exaggeration to call this one of the miracles of humanity. Rondo Rondo Rondo‘s great triumph is making it even clearer just how well Revue Starlight gets all of this.

Which brings us to the very, very end of Rondo Rondo Rondo. After the TV ending, there is an ominousness. A note that the book on which “Starlight” is based has an unknown author, flashes of uncharacteristic, violent, and disturbing alterations of the series’ own imagery–the stage girls lay dead, blood stains cape clasps and outfits, and splatters the theater floor. It’s all quite a lot!

What to make of this, in light of everything else? A more definitive answer must wait for the release of the film that serves as a proper sequel to Revue Starlight (and to Rondo Rondo Rondo). But for now? Only the reaffirmation that nothing is truly ever settled. Revue Starlight has never seemed to be the sort of series that is comfortable tying things up neatly. Not when there is drama yet to be had, not when there are stories left untold.

The show, as they say, must go on.

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

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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, KeyFramesForgotten

(PODCAST) KeyFrames Forgotten Episode 1 – And Yet The Town Moves

In our inaugural episode “planet” Jane-Michelle Auman and Julian Malerman discuss SHAFT’s 2010 maid cafe` slice of life comedy And Yet The Town Moves (aka Soremachi).


KeyFrames Forgotten is an anime podcast where two nerds talk about shows you haven’t thought about in a while, if ever. Where they came from, what we like (or don’t like) about them, and why it’s been so long since you last heard about them.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Raindrops on Lilies – What is BLUE REFLECTION RAY?

This article contains spoilers.

“It has to be you, Ruka-chan!”

Every few years there seems to come along an anime season that is ridiculously packed with well-liked shows. Spring of 2021 is shaping up to be one such example; long-awaited sequels, spinoffs, and reboots like Zombie Land Saga Revenge, SSSS.DYNAZENON, and Shaman King are competing for cultural real estate with fan-anticipated adaptions like Super Cub, Shadows House, Combatants Will Be Dispatched, Eighty-Six, and I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, and even the odd compelling original like Vivy – Flourite’s Eye Song. There’s something for almost every kind of anime fan airing, and each series in turn seems to have found its audience with a consistency that is rare in the current anime production bubble, which often has more shows broadcasting per season than anyone really knows what to do with.

Among all of this is one notable semi-exception; Blue Reflection Ray.

BRR’s very existence is somewhat puzzling. It’s a spinoff of magical girl RPG BLUE REFLECTION, but BLUE REFLECTION did not exactly set the world on fire commercially when it was released in 2017. It’d be an odd choice for an anime adaption to begin with, but that it’s a spinoff and not a sequel (and thus features none of the game’s characters), and has been greenlit for two consecutive cours, is even odder. This is all evidently part of an effort to continue to expand the franchise; which now includes a mobile game and is getting two more console games. So it’s clear somebody really believes in this thing, but if you were to only glance at Blue Reflection Ray, that confidence might not make a whole lot of sense.

What does make sense is its place within the modern anime zeitgeist. Blue Reflection Ray will immediately make most viewers think of a few touchstones from the past decade of TV anime; namely Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Flip Flappers. Blue Reflection Ray is more traditional than either of those, but it explores some similar territory. It deals, at least so far, primarily in thematics of empathy and human connection coupled with a heavy dose of lesbian subtext. (Enough so that I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns into plaintext before too long.) That, and a particular pastel-y visual style that harkens back to classic shoujo.

Blue Reflection Ray‘s four main characters are simple, but well-used. Hiori is cheerful and outgoing, but tends to neglect her own needs. Ruka is thoughtful and contemplative, but reclusive and has trouble understanding other people. Momo is a half-reformed delinquent perpetually on the run from her past. And Miyako, rounding out the current four, is a neglected rich girl. Hiori and Ruka, especially, form the show’s main pair, and the bubbling lesbian subtext present here defines quite a bit of the series’ tone. Everything, as it often is, is about connection.

Its storytelling, meanwhile, is a curious mix of fairly simple and oddly cryptic. The high concept isn’t too hard to understand; there are (at least) two groups of magical girls called Reflectors, one of which can somehow transform negative emotions into phantasmal lilies called “Fragments” and steal them away for some purpose or another.

Opposing those Reflectors are our protagonists, who, well I’ll let lead character Hiori explain.

Hiori, one of the “Blue” Reflectors

The themes of this part of the series are pretty apparent; the Red Reflectors (The Bad Guys) want to simply lock peoples’ emotions away, whereas the Blue Reflectors (The Good Guys) defend the former’s victims. In turn defending their right to process their own feelings and deal with them. Unhealthy vs. healthy coping mechanisms, the importance of compassion (underscored by the rings the Reflectors use also being literal empathy machines); all stuff this genre has done before, but it’s rarely unwelcome. That’s the “simple” side of things.

The “cryptic” side is that, not unlike those touchstones I mentioned earlier, there is clearly more going on here than we can yet see. Some kind of system is in place that’s pitting the Reflector teams, who both think they’re in the right, against each other. And Momo in particular is in contact with a mysterious person via phone and clearly knows more than she’s letting on. I suspect, but can’t prove, that this will come to a head at some point around the episode 12 mark.

Nina, one of the “Red” Reflectors

So that’s the what of it all, but we’ve yet to answer the why. I’m just not sure how much appetite the broader anime fan community, at least in North America, has for anime like this. Blue Reflection Ray currently seems too “traditional” to appeal to fans of things like Madoka Magica and it is too adult-oriented to appeal to the hardcore Pretty Cure crowd. If someone is a general genre fan they might like it, but only if they can appreciate its slow pace. It struggles to secure a niche, which explains why it is being (or at least is perceived as being) overlooked. Why whoever evidently exists behind the scene has so much faith in it is another question, but one that it’s hard to answer only 4 of a planned 24 episodes into the series.

All works of art reflect, and are in turn, reflected by, their audience. Blue Reflection Ray‘s soft nighttime scenes, gaudy Windows 95 wallpaper otherworld, charmingly simple transformation sequences, and blushing gay subtext all, in the end, simply beg your patience. It is, quite obviously, a very slow series.

I think in the hustle and bustle of the seasonal grind, it may not stand out against more bombastic titles. (Or even those that are simply doing “slow burn” from a more approachable angle, like Super Cub.) But I have a sneaking suspicion that in the long run, it will finally find that audience it’s searching for. The rings may, so to speak, resonate with more of us yet.

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

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 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) A Mage, a Barrel, and a BLAST OF TEMPEST

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

“We are merely Caliban.”

Full disclosure, we’ve got a bit of a frustrating one today.

I have rarely ever in my limited time as a commentator on anime as a medium written two full-length “reviews” for a single series. I’ve certainly never done it for a show I don’t much care for. Yet, here we are, and here is Blast of Tempest, staring me down like an evil twin in the mirror. Let’s get started.

Very loosely inspired by William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”, Blast of Tempest falls within the zeitgeist that was the late ’00s / early ’10s urban fantasy anime tradition, a world quite far from its inspiration. Like many such anime, it is a stew of proper nouns and half-sensical plot developments. Also like a lot of them, it is very silly.

Our premise is founded upon the murder of a girl, one Fuwa Aika, and her brother Mahiro’s quest to avenge her death. From this humble beginning sprawls out what quickly becomes a rather convoluted story. Which eventually comes to involve Yoshino, Mahiro’s friend and (unbenknownst to him) Aika’s boyfriend, a sorceress named Hakaze stranded on an island hundreds of miles away, the acting head of Hakaze’s family, a pair of god-like trees that embody creation and destruction called the trees of Genesis and Exodus respectively, and quite a few more things. Furthermore, Blast of Tempest loves its flashbacks, used to establish characterization post-hoc, especially in Aika’s case.

At its best, Blast of Tempest is content to show you dangerous, motivated people quoting Shakespeare at each other while they run rhetorical circles around, physically fight, or blast magic at each other. This mode, where Blast of Tempest manages to present a flashy, devil-may-care attitude about itself, is where we find the few places where it truly shines. The specific mixture of the flowery Shakespeare quotations, the magic technobabble involved in many of the show’s plot points, the wide swings and consequent misses at commentary on the nature of free will, and the wowee-zowee magic fights combine to make the best parts of the series a kind of low-stakes fun, even if one gets the sense even early on that it’s trying to be more than that.

Near the end of the first cour there is a stunning run of episodes (from about episode 9 to the middle of episode 12), where Blast of Tempest is reduced to three characters smugly proposing thought experiments to each other while the Japanese armed forces assault a mansion protected by a magic barrier. That this run then caps with Hakaze teleporting two years into the future while leaving her skeleton behind in order to avoid creating a time paradox, an action a friend of mine called “reverse-telefragging”, is the icing on the cake. It’s ridiculous on its face, but it’s entertaining, a maxim that describes most of Blast of Tempest‘s high points.

Unfortunate, then, that those high points are as scattershot as they are, and that the show’s first half has the lion’s share of them.

A theory I have about anime like this is that the twelve-episode format actually works wonders for them. It condenses all the stuff of the series–the proper noun soup, silly plot twists, oddball worldbuilding, in-over-its-head themes, etc.–down into a single cour, which is easily kept up with over the course of a season or binge-watched afterward in a few nights. At absolute worst, it’s at least digestible. Here is the problem with Blast of Tempest in this regard; it’s twice that length, at 24 episodes long.

On paper, that doesn’t sound like a huge difference, but Blast of Tempest is an unintentional study on the practical difference between about five hours of footage and about ten. After the end of episode 12, Blast of Tempest effectively runs short on plot, and its previously tight pacing starts to crumble. Half of its main conflict (that between Hakaze and her brother who is controlling her family in her stead) is resolved. Because there are still twelve more episodes to fill, the show must then stretch out the remaining mystery (who exactly killed Aika) for longer than it can reasonably sustain. One plot point must now do the work previously done by two.

Under this duress, its flaws transform from things that can be written off as inconsequential into damaging weaknesses that are fairly serious. The slow, ponderous pace the series adopts from roughly episode 13 to episode 18 is nearly unforgivable. Nothing working in the tonal space Blast of Tempest does survives at such a slow speed. Less because the question of who killed Aika isn’t interesting (it is!), but more because it takes quite a while to actually get to that. A good third of the show’s episodes are filled with narrative pillow stuffing like romance subplots and the non-arcs of characters like Megumu, whose defining trait is that a girl he likes dumped him.

Why does this guy exist?

It does eventually recover, regaining a decent bit of its flashy spirit in its final five or so episodes (things get even messier than before when time travel goes from a one-off and one-way plot device to a recurring element). And it’s not like this kind of middle-third slump is rare in anime like this, but this an uncommonly rough example.

There is another problem as well. Aika herself, as discussed at length elsewhere, stands head and shoulders above the rest of the cast in terms of character complexity, despite being dead for the whole series. Aika is established as a sharp thinker with a nonetheless carefree spirit, who subscribes to a peculiar sort of fatalism that doesn’t quite match her actual actions.

Her own musings are the only time Blast of Tempest‘s commentary on the nature of free will even approaches being thought-provoking, and in a better series Aika would be the main character. Ironically, pining for Aika’s full, developed character over the much simpler ones who make up the rest of the cast is, in a way, a reflection of Blast of Tempest‘s own plot. But even if this were intentional, it wouldn’t be to the show’s benefit. Writing an excellent character and then throwing them away isn’t impressive or deep, it’s just frustrating.

“Frustrating”, to go back to that opening sentence, is the operative word here in general. The closest Blast of Tempest gets to having any kind of real point is Mahiro’s declaration in the final episode that “in this crazy-ass world, there’s no point in playing the blame game.” A pithy chestnut that ducks the question of who is really ‘responsible’ for Aika’s death and is generally unsatisfying. It’s a decent enough idea when applied to the real world, but good advice does not necessarily make for good television.

In the final episode, in her second-to-last appearance in the series, Aika dismisses an unnamed book as “dull” and lacking in “inner light”. It’s cheap and honestly a little mean to say that the same could be said to apply to Blast of Tempest itself, but that doesn’t make it wrong. The series’ Shakespeare fixation is, in a meta sort of way, its own undoing. Anime can absolutely achieve the transcendence Aika alludes to in that conversation and that the series clearly strives for. It did so before Blast of Tempest, and would do so again after it. But Blast of Tempest itself just isn’t in that conversation.

I must, of course, turn the lens back on myself here. I have, even very recently, given anime much less ambitious than Blast of Tempest a pass for succeeding at the far more modest aim of simply being entertaining. Worse still, Blast of Tempest even is entertaining at times! But shooting for the moon is a double-edged sword. Blast of Tempest feels like it is trying so, so hard to shoulder an amount of thematic heft that it just cannot lift. I have a begrudging respect for its sheer effort, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that enough of it is just straight-up dull that, a few specific aspects aside, I can’t muster up anything more than that. A flaw that is, admittedly, perhaps as much with myself as the show. But let no one ever accuse me of not giving it every chance I could think to.

And so Blast of Tempest remains. Unsatisfying, inconclusive, and trying way too hard. It reaches, but it knows not for what. In this way, perhaps Blast of Tempest, like the Caliban of Aika’s metaphor, is all of us.

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

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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

The Wizard was Dead Already – The Paradox of Aika in BLAST OF TEMPEST

This article contains spoilers.

Let’s start with some basic facts.

Blast of Tempest is a 2013 Studio Bones anime. It’s named after and very loosely inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. My own knowledge of Shakespeare is limited to what I was taught in my literature classes in high school. We never got around to The Tempest, though I am fond of the other play Blast of Tempest likes to toss out quotes from; Hamlet.

As I often do for an anime I have no particular expectations for, I queued Blast of Tempest up in my video player some two weeks ago, and watched it late at night over the course of several evenings. My intent, as it generally is, was to review it if I had anything of substance to say about it.

But, as you have likely already guessed by this post’s odd title, that did not exactly happen. The fact of the matter is that I don’t really like Blast of Tempest. If you’re looking for your pure-utility “good/bad” recommendation, I’d steer most people away from it. My entire reason for throwing out the first, more traditional proper review I wrote of the series, is that reading it back over to edit it, I just felt like I was being….well, mean, I suppose? I began to really question if this was the right approach, and I’ve placed the review back in my drafts folder. It will see the light of day before too long, after I cut the worst of the bile and re-structure it a bit. Until then, let’s engage in something both a bit more positive and a bit more specific.

Let’s talk about Fuwa Aika.

Aika is murdered before the series even begins. For the vast majority of it, who killed her is the driving question that motivates both of the actual protagonists; her step-brother Mahiro and his only friend (and, secretly, her boyfriend) Takigawa Yoshino. Very briefly; they enlist the help of Kusaribe Hakaze, a sorceress stranded on an island hundreds of miles away, to help find Aika’s killer and avenge her death against a backdrop of wider magical intrigue. Chiefly this involves two giant trees; Genesis and Exodus, one of which has the power to protect the world, and the other, to destroy it.

None of this is unusual, or at least not unusual for the late aughts / early ’10s urban fantasy zeitgeist that Blast of Tempest is part of. What is slightly unusual is how much more fully-realized Aika is as a character than the rest of the cast. It’s not that Blast of Tempest‘s other characters are flat, exactly, but Aika is markedly more complex than any of them, and this is true despite the fact that for the vast majority of the series, we only see her in flashbacks.

The other characters are fairly easy to figure out, even Hakaze, eventually, despite the fact that she’s away from the action for most of the show’s first half. Aika, meanwhile, is a riddle. We initially only see her interact with Mahiro and Yoshino. These interactions paint a picture of a difficult, strong-willed, and thoughtful young woman with a kind center that she only shows to some. But, the negative space created by the scenes she’s absent from–which is a majority of them, in spite of the frequent flashbacks–create a vastly more complex character by implication.

The latter half Blast of Tempest, textually, paints Aika as a fatalist obsessed with theatrical metaphor. She is the character who throws down the largest number of the show’s Shakespeare quotes. Late in the series she compares herself to an actress who can, at best, hope for “a beautiful exit” and who has no real control over her life. On its own, this is fairly interesting. I could devote this entire column to interpreting Aika as a “chained woman”, someone who is bound by the men in her life in a very real and immediate way, even if they don’t bind her deliberately. What’s even more interesting is that, in spite of everything, by the end of the series it seems as though Aika is the one who’s been pulling the strings the entire time.

Let’s get some major spoilers out of the way; Blast of Tempest involves time travel. Hakaze can leap through time and does so twice over the course of the series. The first instance isn’t relevant here, but the second, where she goes back to the night of Aika’s death to find out who killed her, very much is. Aika, as it turns out, is her own murderer. Not just that; she’s a powerful sorceress. Strong enough to defeat Hakaze, otherwise the most capable in the series, without much of a fight.

The specifics here aren’t super important. The fact that Aika willingly kills herself in order to facilitate a plan of her brother’s and her lover’s in the future directly contradicts her own statements about her life philosophy. She says one thing–that this is all inevitable, and comparing herself (and indeed the whole cast) to Caliban–and does another, seizing her fate with her own hands. She could, as is pointed out, easily avoid this outcome. If she were the blithe fatalist she paints herself as, the lack of an external murderer would make not killing herself the correct option. But she does anyway. Despite her insistence otherwise; she isn’t an actress playing a role. She’s a playwright all her own.

Which makes her absence from the rest of the anime all the more peculiar, doesn’t it? Why would you make a character like this and then kill her before the start of the story? I have to confess that I was hung up on this. You could argue that my own fixation on Aika as Blast of Tempest‘s most complex character mirrors the show’s actual narrative. I think, somewhat ironically, in trying to place Aika at the center of that narrative, Blast of Tempest frees her from it. Aika is the only one of the show’s characters who does not abide by the narrative logic it operates on–a principle that is called out nearly by name several times. She pretends to, but her compliance is false on its face.

What to make of all this? On some level, I’m aware that my reading of Aika specifically is likely the result of bias. I do just plain like the character a lot. On another, most of Blast of Tempest‘s other important characters either are male or are beholden to a male love interest. While it’s true that Aika and Yoshino dated while she was alive, she seems to revolve around him much less than, say, Hakaze, who eventually also develops feelings for Yoshino, does. And Yoshino and Mahiro’s actions for most of the series are almost entirely driven by their respective feelings for Aika. Later in the series, when the character of Megumu is introduced, he too is largely driven at first by unrequited love, in this case for a girl who dumped him. Of the main characters, Aika stands alone as a person who truly doesn’t seem to need anyone else, even if she does appreciate them. As someone who very much does feel reliant on other people, I can’t help but respect that, even if the endpoint she takes it to is pretty tragic.

Conversely, I’m not trying to make the argument that Blast of Tempest is some sort of feminist manifesto. (It would be fair to call such an idea a stretch.) Indeed, one might equally argue that the entire reason Aika is dead is because when writing within a certain framework, it is the only way she can exist in the story at all. A woman as smart and capable as Aika inherently disrupts the structure of a male-lead revenge story just by being there. The very nature of the genre requires her to only exist in the past tense.

But on the third hand, I would not simply condemn the series as sexist, either. Aika, as already mentioned, exits her “role”, and Blast of Tempest‘s backstory, of her own accord, through no one’s actions but her own. Violently, true, and one could write entire other articles about the lingering image of her, bled out, draped over a chair, that the series frequently returns to. However, I think it is helpful to consider all possible readings here. “Aika is a victim” is not an idea that, in my mind, holds up to the facts I’ve gone over here. I risk repeating myself, but perhaps it bears repeating; Aika is quite possibly the only character in Blast of Tempest who is truly the master of her own destiny.

And, despite the flaws and frustrations of her parent series, I think that all of this is why I find Aika so fascinating. Blast of Tempest ends like many anime of its ilk do; the dust settles and the cast go on with their lives. Only in this case, somewhere far beyond them, already long gone, is Aika. Never caught, she escapes like a thief in the night.

So it goes with those who can choose their own fate.

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

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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.