Category: anime

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: LAZARUS is Dead on Arrival

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.

More than its genre, who was involved with the actual creative process of making it, etc., the involvement of one person in particular stands head and shoulders above everything else when talking about Lazarus, the latest from Cowboy Bebop brain Watanabe Shinichirou, and it’s not Watanabe himself. No, upon starting the first episode of the show you’re greeted with the [adult swim] logo, and then, a few minutes later, an executive producer credit for [adult swim]/Toonami….main guy, Jason DeMarco.

I have dreaded the day I would have to talk about DeMarco at length on this blog, but the time has finally come, so here are the very basics. Back in the day, DeMarco was in charge of the original Toonami block. In that role, he was responsible for bringing a number of generational anime over to Cartoon Network, most notably Dragonball Z and Sailor Moon, and exposing them to a broad, English-speaking audience for the first time. He’s certainly not solely responsible for that, although he sometimes certainly likes to make it sound that way, but credit where it’s due, the guy had taste and not just for obvious hits, not just anyone would think to pick up, say, The Big O. In the years since then, though, with the rebooted Toonami block that proved a surprise success for [adult swim] back in 2012, DeMarco has taken a more active role in getting anime actually made, usually by putting up funding and often snagging one of those executive producer credits for himself in the process. The first results of this particular effort were the original pair of FLCL “sequels,” the extremely controversial FLCL Progressive and FLCL Alternative. To defend DeMarco (and just the entire staffs of those shows) here for a minute, I actually like both of those seasons, essentially because they’re so different from the original and indeed from each other. (Alternative honestly has more in common with one of Gainax’s other out-there 00s anime, Diebuster.)

Somewhere along the way, though, DeMarco’s involvement began to be associated with a certain kind of staid, neo-traditional action anime. Examples include the Shenmu anime, Fena: The Pirate Princess, and last year’s Ninja Kamui, which, again, to be entirely fair, I actually liked at first, but it quickly dropped off in quality. Whether DeMarco’s presence somehow causes these anime to be like this or if it’s more the other way around—that he’s attracted to projects that will end up like this because of his own tastes—I can’t say. But the point is, there’s a pattern. If DeMarco’s name is attached to it, and it has a somewhat subdued color palette, you pretty much know what you’re getting. (The less said about the other half of DeMarco’s credits in this position, which include the Rick & Morty anime and last year’s instantly-infamous Uzumaki adaptation, the better.)

I bring this up despite the fact that DeMarco’s actual creative involvement on the project was, we must assume, fairly minimal, because again, it feels like a tell. Consider the actual creative force behind this project, Watanabe, nearly thirty years removed from his masterpiece.

In fact, here’s a brief review of that masterpiece, and also the other two Watanabe anime I’ve seen. Cowboy Bebop? Genuinely really good, although admittedly outside forces (mostly a certain kind of tedious forum nerd insisting it’s The Only Good Anime) have dimmed my opinion of it over the years, and it’s been a long time since I last watched it. (Speaking of Toonami, I always preferred Outlaw Star. How much can I trust this opinion I formed as a teenager now that I’m 31? Who knows.) Space Dandy? Solid but very much not my thing, one of the first shows the revived Toonami block had a hand in bringing into existence, and I dimly remember that back in 2014 this seemed like a good thing, although I can’t remember precisely why we all thought that. Carole & Tuesday? Eugh. It really feels like an anime that is in part about how computers can replace human creativity should have a lot of relevance and vitality in 2025, but anecdotally, I don’t know anyone who rates this series particularly highly and I never even finished it myself, mostly because what I did see was maudlin to a ridiculous, Hallmarkian degree.

All of this is a lot of context, most of which is about me and my own relationship to these peoples’ works, and a lot of bolded, italicized titles that are not Lazarus. But I can only blame Lazarus itself, because the show itself doesn’t give me a lot to work with in this first episode. There’s not really much of a hook, I don’t care about any of these characters, and what we get of a plot is boring and simply not engaging. As is usual in Watanabe’s anime, there are some good moments of moody contemplation, (though they’re obviously not nearly as memorable as Bebop‘s) some solid action pieces (although I found these lacking compared to past works), and some well-chosen bits of background music. Not to mention Watanabe entirely does deserve credit for being one of the few anime directors that seems to give a shit about having a realistically racially diverse cast. But I have to be careful here, because if I’m talking about a sci-fi anime with good music and action, but with bad writing, you might assume I was talking about Metallic Rouge. This is a rude comparison, partly because Lazarus‘ writing is not wildly irresponsible (at least so far) in the way that Metallic Rouge‘s was, but honestly? Also because Metallic Rouge was actually intermittently fun, and did manage to put together a solid first episode, despite its many flaws in other areas, something Lazarus doesn’t have much of a handle on.

Incidentally, aside from the waxy look of the 2D art, this girl’s underdye is about the only indication that this anime was made in the 2020s.

Just to not make this piece entirely me being a hater, here are the simple facts of Lazarus‘ plot. A scientist named Dr. Skinner, some years prior to the events of the series, developed a miracle drug called Hapna. Skinner disappears for three years as the world happily embraces freedom from pain and sickness. When he returns, it’s to sound the trumpet of Judgment Day. Hapna, he reveals, is actually designed to remain in the body permanently, and will kill anyone who takes it about three years after the first, and the first deaths will start just 30 days after his announcement. So betrayed, the world quickly descends into chaos.

In the midst of all this, Brazilian escape artist Axel Gilberto [Miyano Mamoru/Jack Stansbury] is serving an 888-year prison sentence. In the midst of a visit from the mysterious Hersch [Hayashibara Megumi/Jade Kelly], he makes another break for it and spends the remainder of the episode on the run. Thus, we follow Axel as he dodges the law before finally being cornered by Douglas Hadine [Furukawa Makoto/Jovan Jackson], who he seems to think is a police officer. One more escape attempt and a final subduing later (by having local blonde girl Christine [Uchida Maaya/Luci Christian] lure him into taking a picture with him and then zapping him with the shock bracelets on her wrist, naturally), it is revealed to Axel, and to us, that all of the people who’ve been chasing him are actually part of a secret organization called (dun dun dun) Lazarus! The first episode ends there, roll credits.

If that seems a little thin on the ground in recap form, I promise you it’s moreso to actually watch. Yeah, chase scenes are cool and all, but it’s hard to get a bead on who any of these people are or why I should care about any of them. My gut reaction is that introducing so much of the cast at once was a mistake and it would’ve made more sense to have us spend time with Axel. Maybe this will all make sense by episode six or seven, but I’d have to actually want to watch that far to see if it does. At present, I don’t. I really, truly tried to go into this series with as open a mind as possible, but there’s just nothing here to reward that.

Upsides are minor and fleeting. There’s a funny moment where Axel runs into a police officer while still in his jumpsuit from prison and the officer convinces himself that it’s “some fashion trend.” The action setpieces are cool enough, although some of them, especially later in the episode, feel bizarrely floaty. Axel himself is….likable enough, I guess?

Can you tell I’m grasping for straws here? Last season I wrote a scathing writeup of Sorairo Utility‘s first episode and I kind of regret it because A) that was not the most objectionable thing to air that season by an order of magnitude, Zenshu, which I did not and will not cover on this site, was, and B) because a slice of life series, no matter how bad—and don’t get me wrong, I do think that first episode of that show was very bad—just doesn’t deserve that vitriol. So, I am trying to frame my dislike of things in a more productive way when I dislike them, but I truly cannot think of anything nice to say about this show beyond what I’ve already said. It really is just a very dull first episode.

That, and it also seems very convinced of its own importance. The whole engineered drug-based death epidemic plot is extremely “hard sci fi with something to say.” In this way, Lazarus almost feels more like a very dim reflection of something like Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex more than anything else. It’s not cyberpunk enough for that comparison to be airtight, but what I mean here is that that was a series that also had a lot on its mind. The difference of course is that GiTS:SC, or any other such show you care to name, did not need to try to convince you that it had some relevance to modern life, it just was relevant to modern life. I am not saying that GiTS:SC is itself flawless or that its politics are beyond reproach (they certainly aren’t), but it is at least worth having a conversation about. That’s an ineffable, hard-to-pin-down difference, but it is unfortunately what ultimately puts the final nail in the coffin for this premiere. I simply don’t think, unless its subsequent episodes are a massive improvement, that anyone is going to care about what Lazarus is saying enough to talk about it. This feels absurd, given that the show is so obviously Trying To Say Stuff that it even features an economic crash just days after this fucking mess. Normally, coincidental timing like that locks a series in as a must-discuss talk of the season, but I just can’t see it happening with Lazarus.

I have never liked the “it insists upon itself” chestnut. Especially because, in the Family Guy scene that it’s from, the joke is that Peter is voicing a pompous opinion on something inane in the middle of a life-threatening situation. But hey, given the state of the world right now that’s basically what I’m doing, too. So sure, we’ll say Lazarus insists upon itself. Tedious, dry, lacking charm or compelling drama, the latest product of the Neo-Toonami Industrial Complex simply feels replaceable.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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: UMA MUSUME CINDERELLA GREY at the Starting Gate

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.

Somehow, this is the first full article I’ve devoted on this site to Uma Musume. I have to admit that that’s mostly my own fault, I was very late to this particular party, and only got onboard the proverbial horse-drawn carriage earlier this year. (I still haven’t seen the series’ proper third season.) Uma Musume, occasionally also called Pretty Derby, is a series whose reputation precedes it, given its odd premise and ties to a large, very successful franchise that most English-speaking anime fans are unfamiliar with beyond said premise.

The long and short of it is this; Uma Musume takes place in a world where horse-eared animal girls compete in vigorous races. The horse girls are named after actual, real horses—and in Uma Musume’s fiction they actually are those horses, reborn into the show’s setting—and the races themselves are largely patterned after real races. Using the real-world horse races as a scaffolding, Uma Musume then constructs a triumphant, pulse-pounding sports anime. Visually, the later Uma Musume entries, especially the OVA series Road To The Top and the movie Beginning of a New Era (which I have been trying to write an article about for months, incidentally) are some of the best and most intense anime of the 2020s, and one ignores them because they’re “silly” at their own peril. The rough-around-the-edges first season followed ambitious sweetheart Special Week. Season 2 traced the path of rocketship superstar Tokai Teio and her shonen rivalry girlfriend Mejiro McQueen. The Road To The Top OVAs studied a trio of often-intense rising stars, and the New Era film explored a rivalry between its leads that bordered on a deranged, psychosexual obsession. Each entry in the series has been increasingly spectacular, especially visually, which only makes sense. Remember: this is a sports anime.

All this in mind, Cinderella Gray has big horseshoes to fill, following as it does the story of Oguri Cap [Takayanagi Tomoyo] and her rise to fame. Perhaps wisely, right out the gate, Cinderella Gray actually engages in some scaling-back from the New Era film, the otherwise most-recent Uma Musume anime. We don’t begin our story at Tracen, the prestigious racing academy from the previous three seasons of the anime. Instead, our setting is a smaller academy that trains racers for regional competitions.

Our point of view character for most of this opening bit of scene-setting isn’t actually Oguri Cap herself, but rather Berno Light [Seto Momoko, in what looks to be one of her first roles], a much more ordinary horse girl (although one whose cute hair decorations shaped like capital Bs should not be ignored), and it’s through her that we get some sense of the reduced grandeur here. When she asks her homeroom teacher about the national races, she’s just straight up told that it’s not something she needs to worry about. A little rough! Inauspicious beginnings for what’s sure to be a tale of a meteoric rise to the top!

In fact, the very first character we follow isn’t even Berno, but rather Kitahara Jou [Konishi Katsuyuki], a trainer—and a human, as is traditional in Uma Musume’s trainer / horse girl setup—who laments the sorry state of the local scene. He’s looking for a star, and he’s pretty sure he’s not going to find one in the Gifu regionals.

Enter, of course, Oguri Cap. Cap, whose real-life counterpart was nicknamed “The Gray Monster,” is presented here as, essentially, an old-school shonen protagonist. She’s kind of dim, eats her own weight in food on the regular, and trains way, way harder than anyone else. She’s an archetype to be sure, but an instantly likeable and endearing one. “Someone you can root for from the bottom of your heart,” per Jou’s own words.

Not everyone necessarily feels that way, though. For much of her first day (and thus much of this episode), Oguri Cap is actually bullied by a trio of delinquent horses; the gyaru Norn Ace, the mean-looking Rudy Lemono, and the decidedly short Mini the Lady.

Lest anyone get the impression that Uma Musume is taking a sharp turn into being a school drama however, Oguri Cap is actually so oblivious to anything that’s not food or running that these attempts to get under her skin completely slide off of her. Up to and including Norn Ace, her dormmate, making her sleep in a supply closet. (Oguri, the very definition of a cartoon country girl, is just stoked to have her own room.)

She has the last laugh anyway. The episode’s final stretch consists of a practice race where Cap is set to run against Rudy, Mini, and Berno, and the former two prank her by undoing her shoelaces before the start of the race. In spite of having to stop to re-tie them, Oguri absolutely annihilates her competition, leaving them in the dust as she blasts past them, completely outpacing them.

Uma Musume has developed its own visual language with which to depict racing as its gone on; broad sweeping ‘karate chop’ hand motions, coiled cock-and-fire pistol shots of forward, springing motion, glowing Black Rock Shooter eyes and electrical auras, and so on. Oguri is drawn in a subtly different way, telegraphing her unusual gait, the secret weapon that makes her interesting to Jou beyond her raw talent, it’s explicated in just a line or two of dialogue, but as is often the case with Uma Musume, seeing is believing.

Can we root for Oguri Cap from the bottom of our hearts? It doesn’t take much to convince me when the show looks this good, but I do really think that this is not only a treat for longtime fans of the series but also an ideal jumping-on point for anyone who’s been waiting for one. Being set chronologically earlier in the franchise than seasons 1-3 means that the attention-grabbing cameos of previous seasons’ characters are kept to a minimum. There’s no real risk of feeling lost here, so I would say that just about anyone should check this thing out. You really have nothing to lose. (If anything, I think longtime fans are the ones more likely to have nitpicks. One could argue this is a slower start than, say, the first episode of season two. But this feels like such a minor point that, to me at least, it isn’t really worth making.)

Personally, what interests me most is not just Oguri Cap and the way she runs. We’re introduced to another horse girl here as well, alongside Cap, Berno, and the delinquent trio. That girl, Fujimasa March [Ise Mariya], who shares Cap’s white-gray hair and her immense talent as a runner, but is distinguished by an intense, sharp gaze, and a serious demeanor, seems like she’s being set up as Cap’s long-term rival. As Oguri Cap wins her practice race, blowing her competition out of the water, March is watching from the sidelines, ignoring the trainers trying to get her attention. Fujimasa March clearly knows that something big has just happened. In a subtle way, here in this particular place, the world has changed, and she can feel it. Can you?

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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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Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal Anime First Impressions: The Thorny Debut of ROCK IS A LADY’S MODESTY

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.

Suzunomiya Lilisa [Sekine Akira] is repressed. The daughter of a rich family by marriage, she doesn’t really feel like herself at her prestigious finishing school, the kind of all-girls mannering academy that’s all but extinct in real life but lives on through cultural touchstones such as anime. It’s not that her classmates dislike her, quite the opposite actually, she’s very popular. It’s that the academy’s curriculum of education, culture, and politeness does not come naturally to her, and she works very hard to keep up appearances. This is in spite of what’s implied to be a pretty strong culture shock from her current living situation. Throughout this first episode we see glimpses of a very different home life than the one Lilisa currently lives: not one of wealth and class with a real estate mogul father who’s yet to be seen on camera, but one with her loving, guitar-playing biological father. Unless I missed something, we don’t directly hear that said father is no longer alive, but that’s certainly the implication.

What does all of that add up to for Lilisa? Well, she’s left most of her passions behind her, and is focusing on getting a prestigious award from her school. (She has a reason for wanting it, we don’t yet know what that is.)

The internal turmoil of a repressed rich girl is not that interesting on its own, and I will be honest in that Rock is a Lady’s Modesty took a while to hook me here. It does help that there’s an eclectic set of influences being worn on the show’s sleeve right out the gate: the shoujo and Class S yuri manga responsible for keeping these sorts of girls’ schools in the public memory, Love is War!‘s later arcs, with their fixations on the often-empty inner lives of the wealthy, and of course the broader girl band current of which Lady’s Modesty is undeniably a part. (Although, as a matter of record-keeping, this is an adaptation, not an original series. The manga dates from late 2022, and having to adapt an existing story explains some of the more unusual structural choices, as we’ll get to.) These disparate sources add up to a very straightforward core conflict: the person who Lilisa is trying to be and the person who Lilisa is do not match up, and this is getting to her.

Which again, would not be that interesting, were it not for Kurogane Otoha [Shimabukuro Miyuri]. Otoha is a similarly well-mannered girl from a rich family. She and Lilisa meet by chance when they literally bump into each other, causing Otoha to drop a guitar pick. Lilisa tries to find a good time to return it to her—a classy lady having a guitar pick is uncouth, of course, especially one with a Hot Topicky skull-and-blood design like this one has—and in doing so learns that Otoha has been using an abandoned building on campus as a makeshift practice room. Now, small twist here, Otoha is actually a drummer. We don’t know who that guitar pick originally belonged to or what its significance is, but Otoha doesn’t use it herself.

Instead, she talks Lilisa into a jam session, first just by asking, and then, when Lilisa pushes back, by insinuating that Lilisa might not be very good at guitar.

Our heroine takes this very personally, and what ensues is a 1v1 music battle, the two trying to outdo each other, Lilisa on guitar, Otoha on the drums, over a backing track called “GHOST DANCE.” Lilisa, tellingly, imagines Otoha’s overpowering, thunderous drumwork as akin to being made to submit by a dominatrix. Those are her words, not mine.

And it only makes sense that she sees it this way, because Otoha really does overpower her completely. Which is to say, Lilisa’s guitar playing really isn’t that good. It’s fine. But not only are her actual skills not all that impressive for this genre but the show doesn’t really pick up any slack for her visually. (Most of the visual panache goes into her fantasies of being tied up in thorned rose vines instead.) We get shots of her playing, clearly very intensely focused and pouring a huge amount of sweat and effort into what she’s doing, but it lacks that ephemeral quality to make it truly memorable.

That’s how I’d put it, anyway.

Otoha is significantly less nice.

So that’s our big first episode twist. Surprise, you were supposed to think her guitar playing is kind of lame! It’s an interesting idea, certainly, but it’s not actually that unusual given that at this point a show actually having a barn-burner first episode performance would be the more surprising thing. (My baseless guess is that we’re saving that for, I don’t know, episode three?) Still, it’s a nice setup; Otoha flips her off before instantly flipping her ojou-sama switch back on, and just fuckin’ leaves, leaving Lilisa to stew in her own failure. The implication being of course that she’s realized that she cares about being good at this much more than she cares about being a good student. It’s a good hook, and I’m interested to see where the show takes it.

Of course, all of this is dodging a simpler question: is this show, at least this first episode, like, you know, good? I’d say so, but that comes with some caveats. The great Girl Band Renaissance in anime is, in the grand scheme of things, a recent and ongoing development. Bocchi the Rock, for reference, only aired in 2022, and the source manga for this series is from around the same time. Still, I have a hunch some might find the relatively slow start here a turnoff, and it is admittedly hard to imagine it stacking up, in the long run, to elephants in the room like Girls Band Cry or the It’s MyGO!!!!! / Ave Mujica subseries of BanG Dream! But Bocchi itself isn’t a bad reference point here, that show also took a bit to really get going, but once it did, it was one of the best anime of its year and is easily as iconic—moreso, honestly, if we’re talking simple name recognition, at least in the Anglosphere—than the other two shows I just mentioned. Still, by directly making competition part of its narrative, Rock is a Lady’s Modesty invites these comparisons, which I would probably otherwise avoid.

Can it live up to those expectations? I’m not sure, but I want to at least see it try, and that counts for a lot all on its own. Besides, I really do just need to see what is going on in Lilisa’s head that makes her imagine a guitar/drum duet as some kind of BDSM thing, although admittedly, the fact that she refers to Otoha in her narration as her “lifelong partner” might be a clue. I think you might be repressed in more ways than one, girl.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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, Reviews

AVE MUJICA at the Edge of the World

This article contains spoilers for the reviewed material, and assumes familiarity with it.

Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.

This is going to be a mess, so let’s start it with a question, so we at least have something to work off of.

Is a tragedy deferred a happy ending? Ave Mujica is at least willing to entertain the idea, but it’s never a clear-cut thing. Nothing about Ave Mujica is clear-cut, and the thinkpieces that will roll out over the coming weeks and months about this series might obscure how much of a rollercoaster ride it was, week to week, start to finish, in the moment. They might also obscure how wild it will keep being, as we now know—we’ll get back to this—that this isn’t the end.

To trot out the neatest and tidiest labels possible for a show that is the neither of those things, Ave Mujica is a series that deals with, among other topics; familial violence, how generational wealth drains the humanity from those that hold it, a number of different expressions of trauma and self-loathing, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and incest. All of this from a series that—despite some misguided English marketing trying to downplay this fact—is part of the BanG Dream! franchise. It, thus, is also still an anime about guitar music, at heart, a cousin of other recent genre entries like Girls Band Cry and Bocchi the Rock! (not to mention the other entries in its own series), in that it does still very much deal with a group of young girls using that music to process their traumas. The methodology is very different, and if Ave Mujica is the best of these (and I’d be willing to say that it is, even if the competition is very close), it’s not because its approach is inherently “just better”, or because more serious subject matter automatically leads to better content, but rather because it’s a logical outgrowth of what this genre was already doing. People will make their little jokes, of course: you can call it the dollposting anime, Perfect Blue for zoomers, etc. But none of these really capture Ave Mujica‘s fundamental observations and themes, and none of them can dent a show that’s this bulletproof.

All this to say, the walk from the earliest days of the BanG Dream! project to here is less extreme than it might appear at first glance. Poppin’ Party never went through most of this stuff, that’s true, but they’d absolutely be willing to throw horns at one of Ave Mujica’s concerts. The music, even when it’s not actively being heard—and it’s not heard for long stretches of this series—is both a connective tissue and a useful metaphor. If you can’t say something, maybe you can sing it.

That was the main thesis, too, of Ave Mujica‘s immediate predecessor and sister series, It’s MyGO!!!!!, effectively the first season of what becomes a two-parter here. AveMuji puts that theory to the toughest stress tests it can think of, and for a while, it seems like it might break under them. Consider that this is a band anime, and then recall that there is a gap from episode 2 to episode 7—almost half the season!—where there are absolutely zero in-show performances. Consider that this seemed at the time, given everything else going on in the narrative, more like a disband anime, an argument that Ave Mujica the group were not a good thing for anyone involved and maybe they’d all be better off apart.

It’s tempting to run through the absolute basics one more time. High school girl and neurodivergent icon Takamatsu Tomori [Youmiya Hina], and her first real friend Togawa Sakiko [Takao Kanon] form a band. This band, CRYCHIC, collapses not long after their first concert for a plethora of interpersonal reasons that are not really anyone’s fault in particular. It’s MyGO!!!!!, the first season of this show, focused on Tomori healing from this fallout with the help of both some of her old CRYCHIC bandmates and new friends alike. That group formed MyGO, title band of that season, pledging to build the rest of their lives, moment by moment, together as a band and as friends. So far, so girl band.

Ave Mujica—both the band and the show—run in the opposite direction, Sakiko attempts to put on a cold, merciless persona, and gathers a band based not on shared experiences or even particularly liking each other, but by a cynical rundown of what each member can add to the group. Sakiko’s childhood friend Mutsumi [Watase Yuzuki], another former CRYCHIC member, is added because of her guitar skills and her famous parents. Nyamu [Yonezawa Akane], the band’s drummer, is recruited as much for her looks and the flashiness of her ambidexterity as her actual chops, etc. If you’re reading this, you know all this already, so I won’t get too much farther into the nitty-gritty.

The result of all this? Probably the most seismic anime event of the 2020s thusfar. If not that, at least one that has exerted a deep and powerful pull on a certain kind of person. If you’re active on certain corners of tumblr or BlueSky you already know who I’m talking about. If not, we’ll just say: queer, gender-nonconformant, neurodivergent sorts. Which is a more formal and less fun way to say: the girlies. Ave Mujica takes the already intense emotional palette of MyGO and freezes it solid, erecting gothic cathedrals around the sharp, jagged pieces of pain and trauma that inform who we are, with a particular focus on the inherent violence of the family unit. Do you have bad parents? Mutsumi has the worst parent, a controlling, cruel stage mom who sees her daughter as competition instead of family. Furthermore, she’s plural, hosting, among others, a rambunctious protector alter who adopts the name Mortis from her stage name. From what we see, her mother treats this as a frightening burden, a sadly true-to-life read on how many singlet parents treat their plural children.

Uika [Sasaki Rico], the band’s singer, might be even worse off, the daughter of an illicit relationship between Sakiko’s grandfather and a house servant who has lived much of her life isolated from society. If this all seems rather melodramatic, I can only reiterate that that’s exactly the point, and anyone who writes the show—and honestly, much of this genre—off on those grounds is missing the most interesting artistic movement in the medium to happen this decade. More specifically, that heightened, arch theatricality has been present in the Ave Mujica project since we first knew it existed. This is a group of girls who were introduced to us as masked dolls, and who here leave us again as knights of a forgotten god. It feels a little ridiculous to criticize the series for a lack of “realism,” whether we’re referring to its literal events or its emotional palette. (And anyone who calls Nyamu and Umiri’s problems minor, even by comparison, is missing the very fact that by show’s end they’ve still willingly thrown their lot in with everyone else in the band.)

That tense, coiled sense of façade is also why it hits so hard when, in its very last episode, Ave Mujica finally lets all of that tension out. No one would walk away from this series thinking everything is neatly solved, but the finale is more concert than anime episode: 5 songs, two from MyGO, three from AveMuji themselves, all fantastic, and importantly, both bands are clearly having a blast. MyGO have the simpler story, but their sound has genuinely developed in some interesting directions, and centering a new song around Tomori’s jumbled, Jenga Tower-block poetry is never going to be a bad call.

Ave Mujica, meanwhile, have somehow gone stadium-level yet again (the episode’s lack of a traditional narrative leaves us in the dark about how that happened. Season three material, most likely). Their doll motifs replaced with a warped Round Table-style knightly mythos, Uika-Doloris as an amnesiac who finds herself returning to the embrace of Oblivionis, god of forgetfulness, over and over. Sakiko literally portraying herself as a deity within the world of the scripts is sure to have ramifications going forward as a plot point, but, consider that outside of the series itself, it also easily cements her as one of the most interesting and iconic characters of her generation. It has been way, way too long since we had someone to add to the Anime Girl Pantheon, and if Sakiko needs to actively force herself up alongside older legends like Lain, Haruhi, and Madoka, that’s all the better. It fits.

(Also, let’s just be honest here. Sakiko’s god complex is probably not great for her, mental health-wise, but if it’s making her write stuff like this, well, at some point you can’t argue with the music.)

As for the literalities of the last story arc, episodes eleven, twelve, and so on, it seems impossible that this won’t all fall down around them someday, possibly even someday soon.

So again, to ask the question, can tragedy deferred really be considered a happy ending? Even a bittersweet one?

Maybe we should reframe that, and turn it back on ourselves; can you be happy, knowing you will one day die? If Ave Mujica are a fleeting dream, that’s at least partly because everything is a fleeting dream. Any comparison between MyGO‘s “a series of moments adds up to a lifetime” and Ave Mujica‘s embrace of an illusory eternity needs to understand that, despite the obvious differences between these groups of people, these are fundamentally two ways to say the same thing. Something lasts forever until it doesn’t. You take things day by day, and one day is eventually the last one. (I don’t have much to say about this series, as I’ve made clear from how I’m framing this article, but I am a little surprised how rarely I’ve seen discussion of death in relation with Ave Mujica; Sakiko’s late mother is a shadow who looms over much of the series, and there is a broad implication that Uika’s sister, the actual Uika, is no longer with us either.)

I have spoken before in my work about hating the term “messy” and how it’s often used to paper over the flaws in works that a certain stripe of critic, myself very much included, like. Something is messy if it induces strong emotion but has some kind of missed shot or some kind of frustrating loose end. To that, I refuse to apply the term to Ave Mujica, even though I’m sure many other people will. Every time I had a doubt about this show, it proved me wrong. Mortis disappearing for much of the show’s final act? She shows up in the finale to wink at the mirror and reassure us she’s fine. Umiri “not getting” a proper character arc? Her tragic backstory is presented in a funny way, sure, but it’s as legitimate a reason for trauma as anything else, this stuff isn’t a competition. Not enough songs? The last episode has fucking five of them. The fact that Hatsune is down awful for her niece? That makes their relationship more interesting, and sure, more troubling. I won’t entertain any suggestion otherwise. You can’t catch Ave Mujica off guard.

Even if you could, the curious thing about something as arresting as Ave Mujica is that after a while one’s emotional attachment stops being to the work itself so much and more the general orbit of it. The characters make such an impression on screen that they will live in our hearts forever. There is also the actual band, of course, who are fantastic, and a small spiderweb of ancillary media that enhances and sharpens the show in a number of interesting ways. None of this softens the point that the show itself is excellent, of course, one of the best I’ve ever seen, but it is worth keeping in mind.

And if you don’t agree….well honestly that’s fine? Why is talking about anime expected to be didactic like this anyway?

Isn’t all of this sort of silly? Another thing Ave Mujica has made me realize is that, despite the fact that I enjoy writing about anime, I also kind of hate doing it. (A love-hate relationship that I am all too aware is ironically somewhat reflective of what I’m reviewing.) Not because I’ve lost any love of prose or any love of analyzing fiction, but because there is this constant unending pressure to be correct about everything. (Or at least, I feel that there is. Maybe this feeling says more about me than it does anything else.) I had an inkling of this back when I reviewed Wonder Egg Priority years ago, which is why the two are somewhat connected in my mind even though the reception to AveMuji has been much more positive overall. Most of my really fulfilling engagement with Ave Mujica has not stemmed from my collective efforts of reviewing it. (Longtime readers will probably remember that we are a system ourselves, and if you didn’t know, well, surprise.) I—Ediva—have gotten much more out of talking about it with others, making of it a living discourse as opposed to a series of endlessly prolix pages where I try to prove that my opinion is the right one, man!, than almost anything else I’ve ever seen. I, Opal, have written fucking fanfiction for this series, weird and outlandish fanfiction—fanfiction I would never in a million years link here, mind you!—that has made me feel so much more connected to its world and its characters than laying them down on a table to cut them open ever could. And I, Ollie, have simply reveled in the fact that I got to feel seen. It’s very rare for popular fiction to touch on systems. I am not going to quit writing about anime—this is not my version of Brent DiCrescenzo’s To the 5 Boroughs review—but Ave Mujica has once again made me reevaluate how I really think about this stuff. How I feel about this stuff. In a way, that’s a higher compliment than anything I could actually say about it could ever be. Here’s something that sounds like a joke but isn’t: in the previews for one of the later episodes, 10 I want to say, Sakiko was shown reading Hermann Hesse’s Demian. We decided to read it too—why not, right?—and loved it. Some shows are bigger than just what’s on the screen.

None of me are saying that any of this makes analysis of the series wrong. But it does, increasingly, feel wrong for us. This is a world to be lived in, an atmosphere to be breathed, and a dream to set drift upon. I can’t pin the butterfly to the board like that. If you can, I’m not going to tell you you’re doing something wrong, but it’s not the right fit for how we feel about this show. Hence this instead of a “proper” review. Hence leaving it all up in the air.

That’s a temporary solution, but this, too, is the beautiful paradox of Ave Mujica: we can stay asleep in this dream forever—Until we wake up.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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, Twenty Perfect Minutes

Twenty Perfect Minutes: BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! Episode 13 – The Only One I Can Trust Is Myself

Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column where I take a look at a single, specific anime episode that shaped my experience with the medium in some way, was personally important to me, or that I just really, really like. These columns contain spoilers.

This column contains additional spoilers for episodes 1-5 of BanG Dream! Ave Mujica.

This column is a companion piece to the 2/2/25 edition of The Weekly Orbit. They can be read independently, but make more sense together.

“Because….you seem like you’re about to break apart, Sakiko.”

No one ever would, but if someone were to ask me what the biggest whiff of my career was, it was far and away not covering BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! while it was still airing. I wrote a little about it, but not nearly enough. Hilariously, in that article, I call the series “fine,” and mostly gloss over Togawa Sakiko as a character except in how she relates to Tomori. Readers with long memories will recall it actually took me until last year to even finish the damn thing. I can’t defend my own lack of taste there, but I’ve certainly come around since then. (And to anyone who thinks I’m overrating the hell out of one or both seasons of this series, well, you’re not going to come away from this article with your mind changed.)

So, think of this as making up for lost time. As I’ve watched Ave Mujica, MyGO‘s direct sequel and a significantly darker take on (and inversion of) some of MyGO‘s same themes, I’ve felt compelled to revisit the origin story of that season’s eponymous band. With the benefit of hindsight, this feels like doing an autopsy. Anyone caught up on Ave Mujica as of the time of this writing knows that Ave Mujica themselves have broken up. If they get back together, it probably won’t be for a while, and it probably won’t be in the same way. So in hindsight, the first episode they appear in, MyGO‘s thirteenth (which is essentially just Ave Mujica episode zero), feels like the only real example of Ave Mujica as Sakiko, their founder, keyboardist, and composer, intended them to be. Sakiko’s unwillingness to compromise on her vision is one of a number of factors that led to the band’s eventual dissolution, but really, we should have seen this coming.

I mean, it’s kind of right there in the title, isn’t it?

The episode actually opens, at least after a brief and ominous prelude, by focusing on MyGO‘s own core cast. This only makes sense, It’s MyGO!!!!! the band are MyGO‘s main characters, and this is the immediate aftermath of their moment of triumph. Things are, for once, relatively clear, and the anime’s opening song is as clear and shining as the sapphire sky in its visuals. Of particular interest to us in this first half of the episode is a scene between Soyo and Tomori on the bridge near the latter’s home. Soyo says plainly that initially, when they were both members of their previous band CRYCHiC, the emotional rawness of Tomori’s lyrics was never something she was entirely comfortable with. But now, she says, she realizes the emotions expressed in those lyrics weren’t Tomori’s alone. They were hers, too.

Through Tomori’s music, she and Soyo are able to relate to each other. This of course is MyGO‘s last great expression of its thematic core, music as a tool of communication, openness, and honesty. In this, MyGO is overall not entirely dissimilar to the show that replaced it as the girl band anime of the moment the following year, Girls Band Cry. (A fact both franchises took notice and advantage of.) The two have one major difference though, Girls Band Cry wraps its story up around the time that main band Togenashi Togeari’s members begin to truly understand each other, and in this way it’s actually fairly straightforward. (Not even remotely a knock on it, I must stress.) MyGO does not do this. It knows it has to set the stage for its successor, and it knows that it has further work to do.

Thus, when Tomori attempts to reconcile with the last former CRYCHiC member she’s yet to reach out to, it doesn’t go nearly so well, and she finds Sakiko, her former bandmate, holed up in her school’s piano room banging out the sinister classical music like the Phantom of the damn Opera, a final indication, if anyone really needed one, that this is not going to all work out so neatly.

After Sakiko coldly brushes Tomori off, Anon, the somewhat airheaded guitarist of MyGO, attempts to cheer Tomori up by taking her out and about. At a planetarium, they run in to Uika, who Tomori has met before but doesn’t really know. The three have a nice chat, although after Uika leaves, Tomori notes that it’s odd that she calls her by her name, given that Tomori never told her it. All of this is significant because immediately after this conversation, Uika gets in a black cab, and is driven to the first night of her new job: the vocalist for Ave Mujica.

Again, hindsight makes two things really obvious: one, we almost immediately flip the “music is a tool of honesty and open communication” thing on its head. Sakiko’s plan for Ave Mujica requires deliberately obfuscating everything about its members, naturally including Sakiko’s own involvement. As far as she’s concerned, this is her show, and the rest of the band are actors within it. Which leads us to two: this band was never going to stay together. It’s at a fairly tame level here, but even this early on it is very obvious that Ave Mujica do not really “get” each other. Nyamu records behind-the-scenes footage on her phone, which Sakiko confiscates since if it ever got out it would destroy the band’s mystique.

There’s also this little exchange which….honestly, good question?

Nyamu also directly mentions rhythm guitarist Mutsumi’s famous parents, something she’s insecure about to put it very mildly, while Mutsumi ignores her and continues stone-facedly practicing her guitar. All of this was easy to dismiss as light bickering during the episode itself. Five episodes deep into Ave Mujica, where Mutsumi has retreated into herself, Nyamu has publicly unmasked the entire band, Uika’s obsession with Sakiko is starting to bubble to the surface, and Sakiko’s own self-loathing is at an all-time high, it reads as some truly spooky foreshadowing. This is also where the episode gets its title, upon presenting the girls with their masks, Sakiko says that on stage, the only person one can trust is themselves. A little under halfway into Ave Mujica, we can see how that attitude worked out.

And yet, for all that, the closing minutes of this episode are still such a trip. Ave Mujica are introduced to the world with a stage play about dolls discarded by humans who come to life under the light of a certain moon, and following that, a grandiose, fuming fire of a debut tune named after the band itself. Obviously, the idea of the discarded doll reflects back on Sakiko herself, but Ave Mujica’s audience have no way of knowing that. To them, and really, to us, while we’re under the anime’s spell, Ave Mujica’s purple and red gothic smoke is something enticingly dark and obscure.

This is the first and best argument for the exact opposite of MyGO‘s own point of view. Maybe “communicating your feelings” is secondary to putting on a good show, given that all of these characters are, you know, in a band. That’s certainly what Nyamu thinks, and it’s why, a third of the way into the Ave Mujica anime, she asks if the band even needs to be a band. She’s probably not entirely right to suggest that even in-context, and hell, Ave Mujica’s actual music is some of the absolute best that’s ever come out of girl band anime as a format, but there’s a grain of truth in there. We are all at least a little complicit, because we clearly love the drama, and the drama is why, both on a Watsonian and Doylistic level, the music even exists to begin with. This episode was our first hint of how truly toxic this story would get, and far from being taken aback—checking on this stuff is one of the few things reddit is useful for—people wanted things to get worse. And, fair play to Nyamu’s point of view, they did! And it’s really only seemed to raise the show’s esteem in the eyes of its audience. The series has given us exactly what we asked for. As a production, it’s realized it doesn’t actually need the music of the group itself to capture our imagination and attention.

I resurrected the Twenty Perfect Minutes name to talk about this episode because I do really think the seeds of Ave Mujica the series, probably the best thing airing right now, really start germinating here. But admittedly it’s an uneasy fit for what this column is about, to the extent that it ever had a specific, rigid format. Ideally, these episodes should stand out starkly from the anime they’re part of. This much is definitely true of “The Only One I Can Trust Is Myself,” but because it’s in large part a torch-passing to the Ave Mujica anime proper, it feels a bit like cheating. And since that series isn’t over yet, I have no definitive thesis or grand prediction to make. Some forecasts feel safer than others, especially with the sheer amount of ancillary text surrounding the series (the ARG for example), but anyone who says they know where Ave Mujica is going to go is lying to you.

And right now the “myself” I’m choosing to trust in is my theory that Uika is a lesbian, but we don’t need to worry about that for right now.

But, I did build in the caveat that sometimes this column is just about episodes that I really like, and I really fucking like this episode. I like its starry, clear opening half, where it feels like everything’s been resolved and anything is possible in the best way. And—this is bad of me—I love its second half, where it becomes clear that anything is possible in the worst way. I really like more than one episode of both of these seasons, in fact. (Off the top of my head I could probably do one of these on both the third and fourth episodes of Ave Mujica, if I wanted to. And as for MyGO, my first impressions column basically already is about its third episode. I’d be remiss to not mention that the very first hints of these themes are present even there. After all CRYCHiC is only founded because of a miscommunication, when Sakiko mistakes Tomori’s diary pages for song lyrics.) Will I do any of that? Who knows. It’s been three whole years since the last TPM column, so I’m clearly not exactly in a hurry to crank these out. But, like I said, I’m making up for lost time. To me, this episode is really special, and everything that’s happened since has only made it moreso.

This is Ave Mujica in the brief, shining moment when Sakiko was still in relative control. Before the inevitable clash of personalities tore it all apart. This is about as close as she ever gets to being genuinely cool, in fact, but even she seems to know that it can’t last. One of the very first things she does in this episode, when recruiting Uika to join the band, is declare that the weak version of herself is dead, a completely untrue statement that nonetheless sounds like irrefutable fact when she says it. Her very last action in the episode, in all of MyGO, in fact, is to icily suggest that she needs to come down from the stage high of Ave Mujica’s triumphant, cult-making first concert. She changes back into her everyday clothes and takes a public train back home, a dingy little place with a small forest of beer cans dotting the floor. She grimaces, she sneers a greeting to her “rotten” drunk of a father. If you didn’t understand before where her need to be in control, to portray herself as this theatrical, literal puppet-master came from, it hits you all at once. And then, just as you’re processing the thought, it ends.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.

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 manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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: Pining For Those SAKAMOTO DAYS

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.

Picture a killer of legend. The kind of man whose very presence makes the blood of his foes freeze in their veins. Picture an unstoppable, elemental force of violence. Add gray hair and a pair of round spectacles, and you’ve got Taro Sakomoto [Sugita Tomokazu]. Now, picture what it would take to tame that man. Picture what could remove him from this life of ceaseless bloodshed. What could that be? What could possibly get him to hang up his gun?

Well, a pretty store clerk with a winning smile is probably a good start.

This, the tale of an ostensibly-retired uber-hitman, is Sakamoto Days. It’s a member of a particular genre that’s found increased purchase in recent years, a kind of post-Spy x Family melding of action anime with the domestic comedy. Usually involving a fundamentally good natured protagonist who can, nonetheless, throw down with the best of them. Spy x Family has the likable but duplicitous Loid Forger. Kindergarten Wars has its single woman—seeking good man—in Rita. And of course, Sakamoto Days has Sakamoto himself. Sakamoto Days has been a favorite among Jump readers in the know for a good while now, and thus this adaptation comes with a pretty weighty set of expectations placed upon it. For my purposes, I’m not super interested in engaging with that, although I will say this is the rare case of a shonen manga I actually follow somewhat regularly getting adapted into animation, so I’m happy for the series if nothing else. (It’ll be joined in this category by Witch Watch, also from Shonen Jump, later this year.)

Our story really begins when Shin [Shimazaki Nobunaga], formerly one of Sakamoto’s partners-in-crime, is tasked with killing the man. He left “the organization” which he and Shin both belonged to without permission and thus, he’s gotta die. Shin is initially perfectly willing to go along with this, and when he first sees the retired Sakamoto, he’s upset by what comes off to him as weakness. Most obviously, Sakamoto has put on quite a lot of weight in the five years since he retired, and we should take a quick detour to talk about this.

So! Fat jokes! There’s quite a few of them in Sakamoto Days. In the anglosphere, these have generally been considered in poor taste for a good 20 years now, but obviously, this isn’t the case everywhere. I reiterate all this basic-ass explanation of cultural differences just to say, as someone who’s also fairly big, I am not super upset by how Sakamoto Days handles its main character in this regard, even later on when we get into less-jokey but arguably dicier territory. I also think it helps that the character himself seems to have a good sense of humor about it (check the “Slim” shirt in the picture above). But if you are upset by it, I get that, and I’m also not going to tell you you Need To Get Over It or whatever other piece of canned finger-wagging rhetoric a certain kind of anime fan is sure to lean on when people want to discuss this subject. This is an area on which people will understandably be pretty polarized. So at the risk of making it seem more serious than it necessarily is, I think it’s important to just acknowledge that this specific subject gets under some peoples’ skin, and that’s fine. I have a very live and let live approach to arguably-problematic material in the arts, and this is no different a case than anything else, it’s just somewhat new territory for anime I’ve covered on this site specifically.

It is worth noting though, that Shin’s initial judgement of Sakamoto is wholly incorrect. He sees Sakamoto, now grown happy and fat and the proud proprietor of a small konbini with his wife [Aoi, played by Touyama Nao] and their adorable daughter [Hina, played by Kino Hina, no relation], and assumes he’s grown soft in a metaphorical sense, too. This is not so.

Despite some reluctance once he senses that Sakamoto’s killer instincts haven’t actually dulled terribly much—he’s an esper, and can read minds, and is thus treated to Sakamoto’s amusingly gory idle fantasies of stabbing him to death—Shin is eventually convinced to try taking him out. This goes poorly for him, and this is where we get to the anime’s biggest strength.

All told, it is simply just a solid, good translation of the manga’s inventive action scenes to animation. Sakamoto immediately gets to flex both his wits and his still-sharp combat skills here, deflecting a pistol bullet with a gumball and using various other random objects around his store to render Shin harmless. There’s too much slow-mo, and the presence of merely some traditional sakuga instead of wall to wall sakuga will leave some unhappy, but so far, there’s really not a lot to complain about. (I’ve seen some scuttlebutt about the color palette, too. But honestly I think the gritty, somewhat dingy look works well for this series.) The vibe is captured pretty much perfectly.

These setpieces are what Sakamoto Days is about. There is a story, to be sure, a decently interesting one at that, where various characters are torn between the sprawling assassin underworld and the call of a normal, quiet life. There’s comedy, which is amusing if rarely laugh-out-loud funny. And there are also some quite sweet domestic scenes, as well. But the real main concern of Sakamoto Days are these setpieces, wild everything-but-the-kitchen-sink affairs that grew only moreso as the manga went on, and which make a good first showing here. There’s an escalation in the first episode already, even, as Sakamoto opts to rescue Shin once his employers try to take him out for not fulfilling his contract. This second scene is even flashier, all glinting gunmetal, roundhouse kicks, and taser lightning as Sakamoto cuts through a warehouse of goons with ease.

The sell is simply this, if you liked those scenes, you’ll get a kick out of Sakamoto Days. If you like the scene afterward, where Sakamoto hires Shin as an employee at his store, since the esper has nowhere else to go, you’ll like Sakamoto Days a lot. What you see is what you get. I think what we see is pretty cool.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.

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 manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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: Check in to TASOKARE HOTEL

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.

Among the crop of a given anime season, you can usually sort the premieres into three categories: promising, not-so-promising, and those that make the viewer emit a long, drawn out, neutral “huuuuuuhhhh.” Tasokare Hotel is one of these. A decidedly low-key one, in fact. And in being so, it proves itself to be an understated, surprising standout of the season so far.

Tasokare Hotel‘s premise is quite simple. A hotel stands, bathed in perpetual, pinkish twilight as it straddles the world of the living and the world of the dead. Those on the brink of death, whether they actually pass on or not, visit this place, where they are checked in by a friendly flame-headed doorman [Yamamoto Kanehira]. They don’t necessarily remember who they are or how they got here, but over the course of their time as guests of the establishment, they will hopefully come to remember their past life. Aiding their quest to remember who they are is the invisible “room service” of the hotel itself, the suites magically fill themselves with items relating to the deceased. As they remember their pasts, the guests themselves change, starting out as caricatures, sometimes faceless and sometimes with their heads replaced with relevant objects, and eventually recovering their human appearance. Around then, most move on, either back to the world of the living or onward to the world of the dead. This isn’t so for everyone, though. Case in point, our protagonist Tsukahara Neko [Momokawa Rika, in what seems to be her first role of note in any anime].1

Neko, an idol fangirl in life, opts to stay at the hotel long-term, joining its staff. Her real role in the story though is to act as a sort of detective / memory recovery assistant. Across the cases in the two episodes so far she helps a prospective fortune teller disentangle herself from an occult streamer she was parasocially fixated on, and also aids a gambling addict remember the final bet that stuck him in the grave situation he presently finds himself in. She’s perceptive, quite cute, and has a dry wit about her. (This latter trait is emphasized by her similarly-dry, open vocal tone, which is a bit unconventional for an anime lead. I’m fond of it.)

Overall, the writing involved in these “cases” is fun, but it’s not terribly subtle. The fortune teller spends most of her screentime pining for her “boyfriend” (spoiler alert: he actually turns out to be the aforementioned streamer), and as such, her head is replaced with the Lovers tarot card.

The gambler? Well, his noggin is a giant pachinko ball. I have a serious soft spot for shows that are in love with blindingly obvious symbolism, so I’m into this. (And they make more sense when considered that Tasokare Hotel is actually an adaptation of a video game. I imagine what we’re seeing here is the equivalent of the tutorial and an easy first mystery.) Opinions will vary, naturally, but for me at least, it’s more endearing than anything. It also provides the additional bonus of allowing these characters to start out as flat, almost literal caricatures of themselves, before growing into the complexity they had in life. The gambler’s story in particular becomes genuinely affecting by its end, and even when the show isn’t quite hitting that high, it’s still interesting and charming.

Similar charm also runs through the show’s presentation, which is largely on the simple side. It’s crass and a vast oversimplification to reduce how a show looks to questions of its “budget,” but Tasokare Hotel gives the impression that those working on it knew they’d have only so much money and time to get everything done and plotted out how to use their resources very wisely. The set design carries most of the visuals, as animation is sparse and unshowy. This, in tandem with how dialogue-heavy the episodes are, can leave them feeling almost more like theater than anime per se. What might be a downside in the minds of some ends up being a bit of a blessing in disguise, focusing the viewer’s attention on what’s being said and saving focus on what’s being shown for a few key moments in a given episode. The device of physical objects appearing in the hotel rooms works really well here, as it allows the show to shuffle in meaningful, charged imagery “off-screen,” creating a subtle sense of momentum that carries the stories forward.

All told, these little mysteries work together in a perfect little clockwork. If you’re the sort of anime fan who enjoys the quieter side of the medium, check this out. You won’t be disappointed.

1: She was in Magical Somera-chan about a decade ago. Does that count as “notable”? I leave that as an exercise to you, the reader.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.

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 manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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 Poet’s Soul of FLOWER AND ASURA

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.

“For in my wrath, I am Asura.”

Can I level with you? The anime season’s been a bit rough so far. I’ve certainly lived through more dire seasons in terms of there just being nothing to watch, but it feels like a lot of the more up-in-the-air premieres have been whiffs. Even some of the actual good stuff is being held back by extenuating circumstances. Things are tough in the winterlands right now.

But, spring is on the way. And if you feel the Sun on your face and can imagine it as the warmth of the green season, Flower and Asura might be why. Blessedly, this is probably the best premiere of the season so far, a study in subtle emotional shades, and an interesting, empathetic look into the mind of a performer. Longtime readers will know that anything of that nature is absolute catnip to me, but even so, this is a strong, strong, strong opener. I could nitpick a handful of things, but just as a fair warning, I am absolutely not going to.

Our main character is Haruyama Hana [Fujidera Minori], the sole teenage girl in the tiny island village of Tonakijima (population ~600). Hana, who’s entering high school soon, spends much of her time reading children’s books for the local kids. Her readings are popular, and she’s clearly pretty good at them. What these kids of course do not know is that they stem from something deeper in the back of her mind.

As a child herself, Hana saw a young woman, of about the same age that she now is, recite a poem on TV. That poem, Miyazawa Kenji’s “Haru to Shura”, is, at least as translated into English, an angry burst of splintering, smoldering imagery. It’s not something that one would necessarily assume a child would like, and yet, that poem and that recitation of it, grabs Hana’s imagination in a stranglehold. Here, at this very early moment in her life—the very start of the episode, as well—her passion is ignited.

Cut back to that quaint reading circle and, we will learn over the course of this first episode, you have a girl who is trying to channel this roil inside of her into….reading books called things like Mr. Seagull’s Deep Sea Adventure to a gaggle of children. There is, of course, nothing wrong with reading books to children, and she’s damn good at it from what we see here. But given what we later learn about Hana, it feels fair to say that there is something going unfulfilled. She’s using a wildfire to light a candlestick.

One person who seems to immediately pick up on at least a little of this is Usurai Mizuki [Shimabukuro Miyuri]. Mizuki is our other main character, and she blithely walks into Hana’s life after one of those quaint little reading circles, immediately trying to press her into joining her high school broadcast club. At first, it’s as simple as the fact that Mizuki loves Hana’s voice. But as the first episode progresses, it becomes clear to Mizuki, and to us, that there’s more to Hana than is necessarily obvious at first glance.

Mizuki, I think, will in fact be a sticking point for some people. While clearly friendly, she is determined to recruit Hana for the broadcasting club. To be honest, she’s pretty overbearing. I like this—anime girls with less-than-perfect personalities are always a good thing to have more of—but I could imagine someone finding her sheer inability to take ‘no’ for an answer annoying, and she’s even a little manipulative over the course of this premiere. That said, it takes Hana actually mentioning the poetry recitation for Mizuki to really double down on the idea of her joining the club, so I think much of this insistence can in fact be attributed to the fact that Mizuki is also very observant. She’s enough so that she waves off a logistical issue, Hana being able to catch the last ferry back to her home island in time. “It isn’t right”, she says, “to assume something’s impossible just because it’s difficult.” She’s right about that, and this is one of a few central ideas that the episode quietly expands on over the course of its premiere. (Still, that couldn’t be me. I’d be in that clubroom in a heartbeat.) Hana takes a bit more convincing than this, but before we fast forward to that, it’s worth going into some detail, given the emphasis on voice here, what these voices are like.

Hana has perhaps the closest vocal to a typical “protagonist voice” in this sort of thing, but her sometimes stopped-up cadence has a halting shyness to it that most lesser anime would overplay, and it’s to Flower & Asura‘s benefit that it knows to keep it on the subtle side, for the most part. Mizuki’s voice is rustic, narrow, and scratchy, and it often sounds like she’s talking directly from her throat. This compliments her appearance, to be sure, but it also makes her sound bolder and more assertive than Hana. It also makes her sound older, which makes sense. I’m not going to call this a yuri series just yet, but if it does go that route, I want to commend whoever did the casting for having the main girls not just look good together but sound good together. That’s an attention to detail that’s all too rare.

Cut to classroom, Hana’s first day of high school. Things are going as they often do in a show like this, Hana settles in and meets a friendly classmate. Things are straightforward, until the Broadcast Club takes over the morning radio. Evidently, at this particular high school, morning poetry is recited over the speakers. This sounds, frankly, crazy to me. (If anyone had played poetry over my high school’s speakers there would’ve been riots.) But it’s an effective bit of scene-setting, because who else should read the poem but Hana’s now-senpai, Mizuki?

Poetry, of course, is not merely about being able to set scenes. It’s about using words to conjure images, and also knowing when and how to deploy them. In its mirroring of its subject matter, Flower & Asura demonstrates this beautifully. The poem in question, Takamura Kotaro’s “The Journey”, is not just read aloud, but also visually depicted. Hana, listening intently, imagines herself on a grey train track, walking through a void. She isn’t alone for long; Mizuki is there as well, blazing a trail of light through the black, providing a beacon despite her sly smirk.

The imagery of a track for Hana’s reaction is apt—she is moved. Continuing the show’s generally understated vibe, Hana’s reaction to hearing the poem read is not big or loud. It’s very soft, and very quiet. Just a wordless shiver of a sigh as the classroom window blows the spring breeze through her hair and things wind back down. The interlude ends, and Hana presumably has an unremarkable rest of her schoolday.

After school is a different matter. On the ferry home Hana begins reading some poetry to herself. Aloud, but, perhaps due to the presence of the ferry captain, given that the boat is quite small, rather quietly. She’s interrupted, as who else but Mizuki makes her presence known aboard the boat, once again pestering Hana to join the Broadcast Club. Mizuki needles Hana with pointed questions, asking why she restrains herself so much when reading this, here, as compared to when she reads for the kids back home. That’s interrupted by a much more pressing and practical concern, though. The ferry Hana goes home on is the last for the day. Thus, Mizuki has no way to get home.

Perhaps feeling obligated, Hana’s family houses Mizuki for the evening. Surprisingly, Hana doesn’t seem to mind this so much. She says she’s never had a sleepover before, so it may be the case that she’s simply unwilling to look a gift horse in the mouth. Mizuki stays on the attack throughout this entire sequence. Even when the two are ostensibly trying to get to sleep, Mizuki catches Hana staring, and takes that as yet another opportunity to pepper her with questions, whether out of genuine curiosity, out of trying to find something she can leverage to get Hana onboard with joining the Broadcast Club, or both, Mizuki’s sheer persistence has a charm of its own. But things hit a slightly off note when Hana admits that she likes recitation because it lets her be someone she’s not. Mizuki, for the first time in the episode, frowns, and bluntly asks,

“Do you not like yourself?”

Hana admits to it. “I don’t. Because I have no confidence.”

“That can’t be true. It’s there, somewhere in you.”

To that, Hana offers only a meek “I’m sorry” before rolling over and nodding off, and we end on a shot of Mizuki’s expression. Puzzled, frustrated. What does she have to do, she seems to wonder, to get through to this girl? We don’t get an explicit answer as to why she just can’t let go of Hana. That’s likely a thread to be pulled on in a future episode.

An earlier scene may provide a smidgen of clarity, however. Here, Hana’s mother briefly talks to Mizuki after dinner. She explains outright that Hana’s reluctance to seek better things for herself comes from feeling that she needs to be a role model for the island’s younger children. One could argue, perhaps, that Hana’s mother simply directly spelling out her daughter’s reticence and the reason for it is lazy writing, but all of this is noticeable well before this scene, and her mother’s comment to Mizuki is mere confirmation.

Put together, these two scenes paint a pretty sad portrait of Hana, someone who’s repressing herself less because of any particularly strong singular reason and more because she just feels that she has to. That it’s part and parcel of being who she is. (And I have to admit that by this point in the episode I was already really feeling for Hana. I have been in her shoes here, down to the meek saying-“I’m sorry”-and-retreating-to-your-comfort-space-trick.) But that portrait isn’t entirely complete. The last, boldest stroke is the one hinted at by the start of the episode.

It’s the next morning, and Hana has woken up before Mizuki and seems to have gotten up to go somewhere. This is a bit puzzling to Mizuki, given the early hour, so she sets out to find Hana, perhaps worried, perhaps simply curious. She finds her standing on the beach in the rain, oblivious to it, or uncaring of it, as it pours down on her. Here, Hana recites. She declaims. Performs. Performs for no one but herself and the crashing waves of the ocean. Her script is the same poem we heard back at the start of the show, but when she recites it here, she absolutely subsumes herself into it. The image-space that breaks into Mizuki’s reading of “The Journey” earlier in the episode is fairly restrained, fitting her declarative, guiding tone. Hana’s is the exact opposite, in reciting “Haru to Shura”, Hana completely turns herself inside-out. Vines sprout from the ground to restrain her as she thrashes against them like a wild animal, she crumbles to pieces against them, and those pieces turn to shreds of paper. Those shreds are blown into the sky, carried away on the cold wind. She is a woman possessed, drunk on the power of her own voice as it bends and warps around the poem’s syllables in ways that make the entire preceding 20 minutes of the episode feel like a distant dream as the paper-scraps she’s been reduced to return to the sand, sewing her back together as she raises her arms to the sky, a wild, ecstatic grin across her face as she screams truth to the heavens: in her wrath, she is Asura. Hana is gone during this reading. The manic, glowering figure who remains is someone else entirely.

Mizuki, of course, is the one feeling all of this in her mind’s eye, and we see that depicted almost literally as the scene unfolding before her fills the width of her iris. She, too, is consumed.

It goes without saying that the visual work here, the best in the episode by a fair margin, has to work hard to match Hana’s energy here, and that it successfully manages to do so is no small feat in of itself. But the incredible strength of Hana’s performance, really Fujidera Minori’s, is such that even if you completely shut your eyes during this segment, you would not just know something had changed, you’d be able to feel it.

And then, as quickly as it came, this moment ends. Hana, in an act that showcases nearly as much talent as the recitation itself, simply flips her act back off like a light switch, reacting initially with trepidation and embarrassment that Mizuki has seen her doing something that, we must assume, is very personal for her. Mizuki herself meanwhile, looking utterly spellbound (who could blame her?), grabs Hana by the shoulder, once again insisting, pleading that she join the Broadcast Club, fingers of light piercing the grey sky as the rain ends at precisely the right moment. Mizuki has figured out what’s going on here, but despite her persistence, she wouldn’t actually force Hana to do anything even if she could. She leaves the decision in Hana’s hands, asking to know what she wants, even though she already knows. Hana, tearful, confirms it a moment later. She really does want to join the Broadcast Club. She wants to—this part she doesn’t say aloud—find a place to be free, she wants to find some actual confidence in herself, and she wants to find people who understand the passion within her. Her self-loathing means that she’s spent the whole episode running from it. But nonetheless, here it is. The hardest part, Flower and Asura seems to suggest, was getting her to be kind enough to herself to ask in the first place. Still, both she and we would do well to remember, just because something is difficult, doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

The episode ends with Hana entering the Broadcast Club’s clubroom for the first time. The show has a sizable cast, so it’s doubtful that every episode will be quite this much about Hana and Mizuki. Still, the groundwork here naturally leads to so many questions that I am desperate to know the answers to: does anyone else in the club get like that too, or is Hana the odd one out? What of Hana and Mizuki’s relationship going forward? Friends? Mutual inspirations? Something more? What about the rest of the club? What are their stories? All of these are questions that, with variation, you could ask about any good show in this genre, but Flower & Asura‘s strength is not in reinventing the wheel, it is—fittingly enough for a show about an artform where you perform work written by another—in artfully expressing the emotions that define this genre’s very best work. It’s poetry in motion, keep an eye and an ear on it.

“Say what it is you really want. And I’ll make it happen.”

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. If you’re looking for me to watch a specific show, watch this space. I am planning to reopen commissions in the near future.

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 manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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 First Impressions: SORAIRO UTILITY Is NOT Up to Par

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

I told myself I was going to take today off. No such luck, I suppose. Rarely have I been this annoyed by an anime’s opening episode, consider this one unofficially—and when I put it in the archive, maybe actually officially—slapped with the [Negative Review] tag. Maybe bring in Fantano’s “NOT GOOD” just to underscore the point.

Sometimes, a work of art comes along, and it is not bad on the technical level, but it has such a clearly poor understanding of the medium or genre that it’s working in, that the base level technical competence is not enough. Work made with, if not active contempt, certainly a lack of care. An assumption that you don’t really need to try because, hey, the people who like this shit will watch anything, right? Making it is so easy, so why make it good?

This, fundamentally, is what Sorairo Utility is an example of.

We will spend very little time here talking about Sorairo Utility‘s “plot”, since I am more interested in its failure as a presentation, but certainly we can lay out the basics. High schooler Minami Aoba [Takagi Miyu] finds herself in crisis when her favorite mobage is shut down, as she no longer has a huge fucking waste of time to sink all of her money and effort into. Her friend, Akina Izumi [Hanamori Yumiri], suggests she join a club. Aoba spends much of the early part of the episode trying out various things; basketball, baseball, badmiton, traditional tea ceremony arrangement, tennis, sewing, etc. and finding that she sucks at all of them. She doesn’t quite care that she sucks for the reasons you might expect. Instead of being frustrated at being at a beginner level—an understandable thing—she is frustrated that none of this comes naturally to her. That itself would be understandable, even relatable, if it were for its own sake. I certainly have sometimes felt like I have no particular talents, and if the show were to explore that it would maybe be genuinely interesting. Instead, Aoba reveals herself to be, on a basic conceptual level, a gender-flip of a certain kind of narou-kei protagonist. She is mad that she can’t do any of this because it makes her “an NPC” instead of “the protagonist.” Oh god, she’s one of those people.

Aoba’s whole general vibe is my first problem with Sorairo Utility. It’s fine enough to write a character who’s bad at things, it’s even fine to write a character who’s sort of obnoxious about being bad at things, but you need to give her an actual motive. Certainly, there is a kind of person who is perpetually mad that they’re not instantly great at everything and are thus not the protagonist of reality, but just because that kind of person exists doesn’t necessarily mean they’re inherently interesting to watch.

Misstep one is thus that Aoba is just radioactively annoying, not in the fun way—I am on record as usually liking anime girls with bad personalities, ones with blue hair, even—but in a way that just makes you want to block them on Discord and never speak with them again. It’s made all the worse by the fact that her friend Izumi, a gyaru who joins the shogi club, is sitting right there, a much more interesting character embodying a frankly more unique setup overall, but who is in this anime relegated to a supporting player. Aoba’s personality has a “how do you do fellow kids?” stink to it as well, in that the writers seem to think that being obsessed with all those mobile phone video games the kids love and thinking of herself and reality in aggravatingly tropey terms—I used to use the TVTropes.org forums, I am an expert on this subject—are relatable and interesting qualities instead of profoundly irritating ones. I do not think this is an issue of my own age, either. It’s hard to imagine anyone finding Aoba endearing.

So OK, the protagonist kind of sucks. That’s bad, but she’s not alone, right? There’s an extended cast supporting her, surely? Nominally, this is true, but aside from Izumi there’s not much evidence in this first episode of any of these people being interesting. We’ll skip ahead to Aoba meeting Akane Haruka [Amami Yurina], deliberately overlooking the old man who is responsible for Aoba ending up at a golf range in the first place, since he’s just a walking Old People Are Old joke. Haruka becomes Aoba’s golf instructor over the course of this first episode. Given that these are two women, one of whom instructs another in a sport, you’d think there’d be some chemistry here. Not necessarily romantic chemistry, although that’d certainly be ideal, but something, right? Indeed, the show actually does make attempts to paint Aoba’s interest in golf that way. She seems to find Haruka’s form as she golfs impressive and maybe even attractive, but to talk about why that doesn’t really come off how it’s presumably supposed to, we need to talk about the show’s presentation, or rather it’s lack thereof.

Look, TV anime is in such a place as a medium right now that complaining that a show merely looks mid, man is always going to feel wrong. Nonetheless, that’s what I’m going to do here. There is a whole tidal wave of isekai dreck that I have not covered this season, because I’m trying to be nicer to myself and to my readers. I have no expectations for 99% of that shit. When it turns out to be bad, I’m not disappointed. I shrug my shoulders and wave my hands and say “well, it sucks, but I knew it was going to suck.” Something like this is a different thing. I didn’t necessarily go into Sorairo Utility thinking it would be a masterpiece, but the loosely-defined “girls get into some kind of hobby and are very passionate about it” supergenre comes with a certain set of expectations, and throughout, Sorairo Utility meets the letter of those expectations while stridently avoiding their spirit. Let’s hone in on one very specific example.

A common visual piece, one might even say internal cliché, to the aforementioned umbrella genre is the “passion ignited” sequence. This takes roughly the same form in most anime it’s in: our protagonist witnesses that special something being done just so, and it lights a fire in her heart. Often there’s a juxtaposition where we cut from the protagonist’s face, to the action being witnessed, and then back to their face as their expression slowly lights up with their new lease on life. Sometimes this happens several times, oftentimes there’s embellishment of reality as the sequence comes to an end; wind in the hair that can’t logically be there, lights that shine down from nowhere. Yes, our heroine decides, I am going to dedicate my life, or at least some part of it, to this. Naturally, Sorairo Utility has one of these, and like the rest of the show’s visual work, in isolation it looks fine, but when placed in the larger context of the show there’s a certain uncanny, going-through-the-motions-ness to it. I love these sequences; the best of them make you feel actively jealous of the protagonist, who has very literally found something to live for. Sorairo Utility‘s, despite being composed on a technical level just as well as anyone’s, makes me feel nothing. I even went back and rewatched it while writing this just to make sure it wasn’t the environment I was in while watching the show, some other aspect of my mood, something independent from the work itself. Nope! Nada. Hit it with a stick and it rings: it’s hollow.

In a broad sense, there is an ineffable lack of style that permeates the whole episode and, since the first is rarely the worst looking episode of an anime, probably the whole show. The show just feels fundamentally without passion. You can’t make an effective anime in this genre, a genre whose entire point is finding passion in things, even things some would deride as mundane or stupid, without having passion yourself. I don’t want to come out and say that no one who worked on this cared about it, but it definitely at least gives that impression. This is also why the anime’s attempts to play up a flirty tension between Aoba and Haruka don’t work, aside from some other nitpicks I could make as a yuri fan (the two just don’t look good together, mainly), the feelings conveyed here just don’t come across. I can see what the series wants me to feel, I just don’t feel it.

Now I’m going to start being mean. Birdie Wing, a very different anime than this on just about every level, does not factor into this conversation. There aren’t really many anime of this type about golf, and Birdie Wing‘s globe-trotting adventure spirit is just a different thing entirely, so to compare them directly is unfair, even if I really want to, in order to point out how that show is both a better sports anime and a gayer one. Here’s what absolutely is a fair comparison though, almost every other goddamn anime in this broad genre.

Remember, we’re comparing Sorairo Utility not to other golf anime, of which there are very few, but other anime that revolve around a girl or group of girls getting into some hobby, some sport, some field, to use the broadest possible word, and living and breathing it. Again we come back to Aoba as a huge a problem here, even late in the episode, in addition to everything else, she just doesn’t actually seem that into golf. (Worth noting in an aside; when Haruka wants to cheer her on, her pump-your-girl-up catchphrase is “become the protagonist,” which, holy shit, yuck.) Compare her to someone like Uma Musume‘s Special Week, a golden-hearted sweetie who is similarly vague in her goals at first but grows to love her sport within just the first few episodes in a very heartfelt way the feels real. Compare her to Yua Serufu of forever-underrated Pine Jam woodworking anime Do It Yourself!, a lovable gremlin whose affinity for the DIY of the title stems from her relationship with her childhood friend. Sonoue Masaki, from Mayonaka Punch, whose deep love for—of all possible things!—making stupid Youtube videos is practically her animus for existence, so much that she persists through getting extremely cancelled for punching a co-host on camera and rises from death like her vampire girlfriend to get back on the scene? Asakusa Midori of Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, still one of the best anime of the decade, and her burning passion for animation and direction, which is reflected in the series itself? The prognosis starts looking even worse if we get into anime where the passion in question is music. If you stack Aoba up against almost any of those girls, she simply looks ridiculous. Tamaki Kyouka from SHINEPOST? Takasaki Yuu from Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, whose “passion ignited” sequence, there married to a full-on music video, was such a fucking barnburner that it was able to take up a huge chunk of that show’s first episode and not feel unearned? Bocchi, she of The Rock? Iseri fucking Nina??? None of these shows are perfect 1 to 1 comparisons, and some of them are polarizing, but I dare anyone to walk out of the first episode of any of them without feeling that these diverse fields mean the absolute world to their protagonists. That comes through in the passion of those anime, and of course the staff who make them, for the subject matter, to greater or lesser degrees.

That is the real, central problem with Sorairo Utility, as of this first episode. It has no actual investment in its own subject matter. It’s hard to make golf visually interesting! That’s a fair point! But come on, fucking try! There is no world where Haruka should be giving her big inspirational speech about how she’s looking to make just one perfect shot, and then have that point “illustrated” by her listlessly plonking a cheap prefab CGI golfball into a net.

I will confess that I always feel pretty bad about writing something this negative. But I feel like I have to. In a sense, I have to give the show credit for making me feel something. Whenever the millionth narou-kei adaptation is bad, I have no reaction whatsoever. Anger and annoyance are, at least, emotional responses. I actually saw a couple people complain about this show before I watched it myself, and foolishly, I rolled my eyes a little. How bad can an anime about girls learning to love life through the medium of some sport or hobby or whatever really be? About this bad, apparently. At least Tamayomi and Pride of Orange had the decency to be ugly, too.

It is not, theoretically, impossible for this series to improve, but when the first episode itself simply feels so artless I do not have a lot of hope. (I feel a perverse inclination to keep watching it just to see if it can redeem itself, but if I’m being honest, I will probably not actually do that. Remember, trying to be nicer to myself.) Aoba feels, compared to all of those other people I just mentioned, like a phony. She doesn’t actually care about golf, she just wants to be special. Sorairo Utility doesn’t actually care about golf, it just wants you to like it. There’s a similarity there, for sure, and if it were intentional I’d feel obligated to give the show some credit, but it clearly isn’t, so I can’t. I do have to pause and give some credit due to the OP and ED animations, both genuinely very nice and the former much better at selling the supposed joy of the sport than the show itself. Cut those out of the anime and pretend they’re standalone (like the OVA that originally started this project, which I’m told is much better overall), and you can pretend Sorairo Utility is fun and good and interesting. But that’s the problem; you’re pretending, as this show is none of those things. Don’t waste your time.

If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. I’m normally less of a grouch than this, I promise.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Enter Oblivion with BANG DREAM! AVE MUJICA

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.

“Will you give me the rest of your life?”

God help us all, a short girl with blue hair is here to make her trauma everyone’s problem.

At the end of the final episode of BanG Dream! It’sMyGO!!!!!, the show was essentially hijacked. That series’ finale doesn’t really have anything to do with MyGO directly. Instead, it follows Togawa Sakiko [Takao Kanon], a cryptic, antagonistic presence for of much of that season and a former member of pre-MyGO band CRYCHIC, whose extremely messy dissolution still haunts that show’s cast. MyGO‘s finale made the argument that Sakiko, actually, was more haunted than any of them. Recruiting a supergroup of musicians from across BanG Dream‘s talent-overstuffed universe, she made them wear black lace face masks and gave them goth metal code names; Doloris for lead singer, guitarist, and childhood friend Misumi Uika [Sasaki Rico], Mortis for rhythm guitarist and also childhood friend Wakaba Mutsumi [Watase Yuzuki], Timoris for bassist Yahata Umiri [Okada Mei]—she of the famous “I’m in roughly 30 bands” screenshot—Amoris for capricious drummer Yuutenji Nyamu [Yonezawa Akane], and, finally, Oblivionis for herself, Sakiko, composing and on keyboard. It is their story, we’ve been promised, that BanG Dream! Ave Mujica will tell us.

Thus so established, Sakiko joined a long lineage of real and fictional masked musicians. From Slipknot to Daft Punk, from MF DOOM to KISS. Her reason for adopting a mask is, at its heart, the same as many real musicians who do so: a rejection of her “real” face allows her to become lost in persona, the old self subsumed into a dramatic, shadow-casting new self. A puppetmaster in a near-literal sense, given how her stage shows involve so much doll imagery. Welcome to her beautiful dark twisted fantasy, right?

Wrong. A driving theme here is that Sakiko is not nearly as in control of any of this—not her band, not her life—as she’d like to be. Most of this first episode, aside from Ave Mujica’s killer performance of opening theme “KILLxKISS” at the start, an interview immediately after where there is some tension between Sakiko and Nyamu, and a sequence at the end, is flashback.

Here, we learn a little about Sakiko’s life. The usage of traditional animation for some of these flashbacks is interesting. Readers may recall that Girls Band Cry used a similar technique to similar ends; to emphasize an idealization of these moments, to underscore that we’re not necessarily seeing them as they really were but rather how they felt. Ave Mujica, befitting its goth theater kid vibe, hammers the point home further by also drowning the earliest, still mostly happy memories in an amber sepia filter. More memories follow, and these get no filter and no flat animation; we learn how Sakiko’s mother died suddenly, tragically young. We see her inspired to found a band for the first time after seeing BanG Dream! veterans Morfonica in a small concert. We briefly retrace the rise and fall of CRYCHIC, Sakiko’s father losing his high-paying job at his own father-in-law’s company, and his collapsing into a broken drunk. Sakiko’s struggles to find some kind of job—any kind of job—to make ends meet for herself and her father. We relitigate CRYCHIC’s breakup, this time from Sakiko’s perspective and with a whole lot more crying in the rain, making it clear that leaving the band was just as painful for Sakiko as it was for anyone else. At one point, later in the episode and back in the present day, her father chucks a beer can at her face, giving her a noticeable bruise, and tells her to leave the house. Sakiko can’t take any of this. Thus, the mask.

All of this theater, mind you, lasts for less than a single full episode. On the stage before Ave Mujica are set to give a performance to their largest audience yet, Amoris promptly torches the entire thing, tossing her mask off and unmasking the rest of the band’s members in short order, underscoring both her status as the cast’s wildcard and her general lack of patience for Sakiko’s theatrics. There is something genuinely bold about undoing your characters’ central gimmick right at the end of the first episode, but it only matters so much. It’s true that the audience now knows of Ave Mujica’s civilian identities, but the real masks are something much less material than the flimsy lace that Amoris chucks on the ground.

The command of drama throughout this first episode is superb, but it’s fair to say that where any of this will go is still very much up in the air. Ave Mujica is a theater kid at heart, it lives and breathes drama, and drama, as we’ve seen in anime like MyGO, or, to name an even darker example something like Oshi no Ko, can keep the fire burning for a long, long time. But not forever! This upturning of a core component of the band’s—and thus the show’s—mythos is a promising start, but I do hope we get some actual character growth here, in one way or another. Sakiko’s awful home life is another factor that I do hope the show explores. It’d definitely be a lot more interesting than another rehash of the usual commercialism vs. authenticity stuff, which some of Nyamu’s antics can’t help but bring to mind, given that she’s an influencer off-stage. (Any commentary along those lines is doomed to fail anyway. Ave Mujica are a lot of things, and they make great music, but they’re not any kind of “authentic,” in-universe or out.)

That’s all hypotheticals though. The real nitpick as of now is in the subtitling. What would a girl band anime release be without bitching about the subtitles? I’m only going to touch on this, since other people have already pointed out the obvious, but Crunchyroll’s subtitles for this first episode are notably subpar, stilted in places and lacking song translations. Hopefully this will be fixed at some point, to say the least. Regardless of this glaring issue, which isn’t really even the show’s own fault, I’ve left the first episode confident that we’re in for a hell of a ride, episode 2’s title, Exitus acta probat, “the outcome justifies the deed”, is hugely promising. 11 more weeks of this! Strap in.

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