Posted on June 29, 2024August 5, 2024 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Rock Will Never Die, But You Will – Youth, Guitars, Emptiness, and Catharsis in GIRLS BAND CRY

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

“We believe there’s a place where we belong. That’s why we sing.”

There is something fitting about the fact that, as of the time I’m writing this after the anime’s just ended, there is no way to legally watch Girls Band Cry in the west. It’s completely meaningless to call anything, much less an anime—the end result of many, many corporate machinations at the end of the day—“punk” in 2024, but there is something at least a little rock ‘n roll about how if you wanted to watch Girls Band Cry as it aired and you lived in North America, the UK, or many other parts of the world, you had to pirate it. Steal This Anime, they’ll call the documentary.

It’s appropriate because Girls Band Cry is a thirteen episode ode to the power of rock music, of youthful indiscretion, of the power of spite—of doing something just because everyone tells you you can’t—of love, of rebellion. I’m 30 years old, now, so I can’t speak to how Girls Band Cry may or may not be resonating with the actual teenagers of today, but I can say that for myself, for a generation that grew up on the pop-punk explosion, perhaps rock n’ roll’s last gasp of any real cultural relevance in the United States, it hits like revelation. The very short version is that this is an absolutely kickass tour de force, a complete triumph for Toei’s burgeoning 3D department, proof that Sakai Kazuo (also of Love Live! Sunshine!! fame, among other things) still has it and that his best work is ahead of him. This is a show that cements itself as an instant, iconic classic, and a series that other anime will build on in the future. If you haven’t watched this, you need to. Go look around, or ask a friend in the know if you don’t know where to search. You’ll find it, and it’ll find you. It’s a story about teenage rebellion. It’s a straightforward underdog rock band story, the best we’ve gotten in years, and a rare recent example to feel truly connected to the real world. It’s also, if you’re paying attention, a love story. Suffice to say, as is obvious from my effusive praise, I think Girls Band Cry is great. I could nitpick various things, and I don’t think it’s literally flawless, but it’s about as perfect as anime gets for me, at least. It’s an admirably dense text for its genre, too; thirteen episodes of the most emotionally resonant shit you’ve ever felt in your life. It’s an electric, nervy thing with a ton of heart. I love it.

Would you believe it all starts with a middle finger?

There’s an entire sub-article to be written about how Girls Band Cry makes use of the middle finger gesture. It starts as a running joke in the first episode, before being traded off for its more polite counterpart, giving someone the pinky finger. But then that becomes an in-group thing, something Togenashi Togeari, the band in Girls Band Cry (the name means something like ‘spineless spiny ant,’ I’m told), use to identify themselves, each other, their fans, their supporters. It becomes a fandom thing, a scene thing. A sign of belonging.

But before even that much, there’s Nina [Rina, in her first-ever anime role. All of Girls Band Cry‘s voice actresses go by mononyms and are new to the industry], a lonely girl keenly aware of her place in a world that is much, much bigger than she is. As our story begins, she’s just arrived in Tokyo, leaving behind a complicated home situation that we won’t learn more about until near the end of the series. The more specific reasons aside, the main sense we get early on is that the real reason Nina struck out on her own in the big city is just a sense that she felt like she didn’t belong in her hometown. Given some stuff later in the show, it is really easy to read Nina as a closeted (maybe even to herself) lesbian, but more generally, she definitely at least feels like a stranger in her own home. Getting away from it all makes an amount of sense. Much, much later in the series, we’ll learn that this all stems from trying to stick up for a girl in her class who was being bullied and being smacked down hard by the school system (and more literally, the actual bullies) for doing so. It quickly becomes clear that Nina is a pretty angry little thing, and that most of this anger is a justified expression of disgust with a deeply unfair world. That kind of anger can ignite a fire in a person, and I’ve always found these stick-to-your-guns-at-all-costs types admirable. I have a few friends like that, and they’re some of my favorite people.

Something that gives Nina relief from the general, well, pain of being herself, is the music of rock band Diamond Dust. Or at least, Diamond Dust as they used to be, before they replaced their lead vocalist Momoka [Yuuri] over what we later learn was a falling out about a shift in style at the behest of their label.

Nina, a real head, is a fan of their older stuff with Momoka, particularly the original version of their song “Void”, which makes things pretty astounding for her when she meets Momoka on a street corner, putting on a street performance. Nina introduces herself, starstruck, extremely awkward, and maybe a little smitten. The two hit it off pretty well, but Momoka plans to leave town the next day and quit the music business entirely.

Suffice to say, that doesn’t happen. Over the course of the remaining 12 episodes, Togenashi Togeari (who only actually get that name a fair ways into the series), gain three additional members; drummer Subaru [Mirei], keyboardist Tomo [Natsu], and bassist Rupa [Shuri]. All are fantastic characters, although they don’t get an even split of focus, as this is mostly Nina’s story, at the end of the day. Before we get more into that, though, we should actually talk about how this story is told, since the presentation is so important here.

Any anime is to some extent defined by its visual identity, and the sound work is always important as well, but both of these are particularly crucial to Girls Band Cry, which is genuinely attempting something new on the visual front, and sonically requires its viewers to buy into the idea of Togenashi Togeari as a credible rock band. The look of the show is the most notable thing about it, I’d argue (aside from that other elephant in the room we already addressed, anyhow). If you are one of the people who has held off on GBC because “it’s CGI” or “it just doesn’t look good,” this is me telling you, as politely as possible, that you are having an Goofball Moment and need to gently shake yourself out of it. I’ve long been a defender of 3D CGI in anime, but this is not a case like say, Estab Life, where the series is using CG to emulate the traditional “anime” look. Instead, Girls Band Cry focuses on capturing the feeling of being an anime, as opposed to clinging to techniques that don’t necessarily work in its particular format. This is obvious in details as basic as its apparent framerate. The common 3D CG shortcut of halving the final product’s framerate to make it look more like a series of traditional anime cuts is not present here, as Girls Band Cry‘s visuals are able to capture that look without relying on doing that. In general, the CG is fluid, cartoony, and wonderfully expressive. Not every trick it tries works perfectly, but it has an astoundingly high hit-rate for something that’s basically extending anime’s visual language on its own as it goes.

In more general terms of style, the show manages to pull off keeping things relatively grounded on a presentational level while still feeling cartoony. Some of the usual anime hallmarks are absent here—no one but post-Momoka-split Diamond Dust have any of the usual anime hair colors, for instance, and in their case there’s decent reason to think it’s dyed—and the backgrounds in particular lean toward the realistic. Despite this though, GBC is perfectly willing to break that illusion of restraint whenever it has a reason to. This can be as simple as a character making a goofy pull-face (something the show is shockingly good at considering how hard that is to do in 3D), or giving a character a literal aura that radiates off of them and impresses the other characters or telegraphs an emotional state to us, the audience. In one scene, for example, Momoka is given a gentle, cool lavender aura. We don’t need Nina to directly tell us that she thinks Momoka is beautiful and admirable. The entire series is loosely from her perspective, and devices like this let us directly see how she feels. This is even more obvious in the “rage spikes” the show draws around Nina when she’s angry; she literally brims with red and black needles, representing the barely-contained boil of her temper flares.

Girls Band Cry can and does use traditional 2D animation as well, but only in very specific contexts; the idealized, crystallized memories that we all have as part of our core personalities, very occasional flights of fancy when the show dreams up what “real rock stuff” looks like, including the opening theme, and for minor characters. If we interpret the show as being from Nina’s perspective, we can think of the 2D segments as her romantic notions filling in the gaps as she’s telling us her story, even in remembering minor characters she has no real extended contact with. It is certainly not a compromise or a concession, which is what a lot of people—myself included—might’ve initially thought, as it’s important that these are the only times when Girls Band Cry uses these techniques.

In terms of sound, Togenashi Togeari are surprisingly believable as a rock band. Obviously, despite the show’s gestures toward an independent rocker spirit—gestures that become more and more important as the show goes on—this is an anime series, and those need to be backed by corporate money, so they’re not, like, The Clash or anything. They’re pretty fucking good, though! It takes several episodes for their sound to really come together, as it doesn’t entirely click until they pick up Tomo for keyboards and Rupa for a real bass about a third of the way through the series. In the great Girls Band Anime Power Rankings I’d put them somewhere above (don’t kill me here) honestly most of the BanG Dream groups, and Kessoku Band, but below Ave Mujica, Raise a Suilen, and Sick Hack, bands whose very existence kind of feels like the series they’re from is getting away with something. (Even accounting for the last of these having only one song.) TogeToge aren’t that, but they’re great as the protagonists of this kind of thing, since they make straight-down-the-middle, fist-pumping, angst-shedding alt-rock of a kind that’s basically extinct as anything with any real cultural currency in the United States but remains a viable commercial and artistic force in other parts of the world, obviously including East Asia. Their biggest asset is Nina’s vocals; clear, piercing, incisive, bright as a shooting star. She sings like her vocal chords are trying to climb out of her throat to strangle everyone else in the room, and while she lacks the complete knockout punch holler of someone like, say, real-world rock star LiSA, she more than makes up for that in knowing her instrument and in her sheer on-mic charisma. This all rounds together as TogeToge being a pretty damn good band, I’ve found myself spinning their songs both from the show and from their album Togeari a fair bit, which is more than I can say of a great number of in-fiction acts from anime in this genre.

The important thing to note here is that TogeToge don’t have to be better than every other rock band from every other series, though. The main thing they have to do is be better than Diamond Dust, as over the course of its central narrative, Diamond Dust become TogeToge’s main rivals despite appearing only very rarely; TogeToge’s opposites in approach and philosophy, and also subject to a personal grudge from both Nina and to a lesser extent Momoka. This, TogeToge easily pull off. To the point where I feel a little bad for the actual people behind Diamond Dust, as DD’s music is just not nearly as good or interesting. (It’s polished and professional, certainly, but it lacks the magnetism that TogeToge eventually develop, and their own lead is a much less compelling vocalist.) The deck is clearly stacked in TogeToge’s favor in this way, but that’s not a bad thing. I think stoking a bit of fannish partisanship within its viewers is likely intentional, in fact. As though you’re supposed to hear Diamond Dust and think “what, people would rather listen to this than our girls?!” Given that Girls Band Cry clearly takes place in some version of ‘the real world,’ it’s distressingly plausible! It’s a fun little story-hack, and it makes GBC a nice exception to the trend of band anime main character bands being the least interesting groups in their own shows.

There’s a level of cognitive dissonance here that merits a quick aside. TogeToge, despite the show’s own themes, are, in fact, exactly as much a commercial product as Diamond Dust. The main reason this doesn’t really matter is that getting you to buy into the illusion that they aren’t is something the show goes through great lengths to accomplish, and I’d actually argue this is the main reason the show works at all. (It’s also why it took a few episodes to click for me! Nina is such an incredibly polished and talented vocalist right off the bat that I found it a little unbelievable. Imagine my shock upon learning that her voice actress is actually a year younger than she is.) I will confess that I think I’d like TogeToge even more if they had a little more grit in their sound, but that’s a personal preference.

In any case, the story of Togenashi Togeari has elements of a traditional up-from-the-bottom rock underdog story, but more important is the band’s members using music to process their personal traumas. Nina has the whole bullying situation, as well as an overbearing family and an equally-stubborn father who are not supportive of her sudden decision to drop out of school and pursue rock music when they learn about it. Momoka has the lingering pain of leaving the original Diamond Dust, and ends up projecting her own experiences onto Nina who she clearly sees as a slightly younger version of herself. Subaru is the granddaughter of a famous actress, and is expected to follow in her grandma’s footsteps despite her own disinterest in the profession. (She calls it “embarrassing”, even!) Tomo is living separated from her family for reasons we only get a very broad picture of, and has previously dealt with people cutting her off when they can’t handle her frank personality. Rupa, Tomo’s roommate and easily the most mysterious character of the main five, is originally from Nepal, and lost her mother in an unspecified tragedy before moving to Japan with her father. A common thread here is that of seizing your life, every minute of it, to do what matters to you, not bowing to anyone else’s whims. In one of the most casually-devastating lines in a series full of those, Rupa lays things out in one sentence.

In other words; Girls Band Cry will be romantic, because it clearly cares about that starry-eyed rocker girl shit a lot, but it’s not going to bullshit you. The window for anyone to make an actual rock band and have it work out in any way is very short, and Girls Band Cry is keenly aware of that. This frank attitude extends to the characters’ personal problems as well, and each has an issue they struggle with over the course of the show. Nina is a cute anime girl and she’s ridiculously fun to watch, but her prickly personality makes it hard for other people to get along with her and she tends to retreat into her anger when in difficult situations. Momoka is genuinely a beautiful and cool rocker lesbian¹, but she also actively uses that persona to deflect tough conversations that she doesn’t want to have, and as mentioned she tends to project her own hangups onto Nina. Subaru is easily the funniest character in the series, a lovable goofball who gets most of the show’s most comedic moments, but her screwy attitude seems to stem from feeling repressed in her home life, and it’s downright uncanny how she acts around her grandmother. Tomo is similar to Nina in a lot of ways, as her blunt, often critical way of talking about things with people can make her seem rude or thoughtless to those not attuned to how she thinks. Rupa, lastly, actually seems to be the most well-adjusted member of the group, but there are a few moments when the façade cracks and it’s clear that something, perhaps the loss of her mother, is still weighing on her. It’s also worth noting that she drinks a lot, and while the show mostly plays this for laughs, it’s hard not to read a certain level of coping mechanism into it. The show’s command of characterization is just excellent overall, and it reminds me a lot of another anime original with a script by screenwriter Hanada Jukki, A Place Further Than The Universe, which also had a cast of strong characters and a deft hand with staging conversations.

Our central story is actually fairly straightforward, compared to all of this complex characterization. For the most part, we’re tracking TogeToge’s formation, relative rise, and as it turns out, very brief time on a major label here. I don’t want to bleed the anime of its specifics, but the short version is that the first 2/3rds of the show focus largely on Nina and Momoka’s relationship, which goes from that initial meeting to a sort of strained friendship before the two come to accept each other in episodes seven through nine.

We need to talk about one other character here, Mine [Sawashiro Miyuki], a singer-songwriter whose time in the show is brief but makes a huge impact, especially on Nina. In episode seven, Mine, who is an indie musician getting by even if she’s not famous, explains to Nina, after a joint show, that the reason she still does music for a living even if it’s very hard is that it feels like she has to. She goes into some detail about how she tried to compromise with herself, to take up a teaching position or something else more “stable”, but she couldn’t do it. Making songs, performing those songs, connecting with people via her art. It was too important. Nina seems to really internalize this. I’d argue it’s also basically the thesis of Girls Band Cry itself. Everything else is extraneous, what matters about making music—or any kind of art—is that you’re getting something of yourself, your soul, across to your audience. That’s what Nina got from the original version of “Void,” and that’s what she hopes to do with TogeToge.

Momoka can’t quite see that. She spends most of the early series convinced that Togenashi Togeari are destined to fail. Not just fail, crash and burn. Because she failed with Diamond Dust, and can’t seem to consider that the only data point she’s working off of is her own. Given what little we see of Diamond Dust, who mostly seem to be happy with their new direction, it’s entirely possible that Momoka splitting off was actually the best thing for both her and the band, but Momoka just can’t see it and continues to insist that she’s going to quit TogeToge in the near future. At one point, Nina is so fed up with all this that she just slaps Momoka across the face.

Would you believe that doing so actually makes their relationship much stronger? In fact, you can pretty easily argue that shortly after this, they become more than just friends. Nina, in episode eight, straightforwardly confesses to Momoka in the middle of a very hectic scene that I can’t bring myself to spoil the minutiae of. If you see people call Girls Band Cry a yuri series, that’s why. Does Momoka reciprocate? Well, she never actually says so, and I know that the lack of verbal confirmation will disqualify it in the minds of some, but based on what we actually see throughout the rest of the show; the two affectionately leaning on each other at various points, the fact that Nina has Momoka’s name circled on a calendar and a note reading “spend time with Momoka after practice” jotted down at one point, etc., I think the situation is fairly obvious. Maybe more than any of that is Momoka’s constant reassurance that she loves Nina’s voice. It’s clear that she’s not just talking about her literal vocals—although probably those, too—but Nina’s point of view, her passion, and her inner fire.

In fact, after this point the entire band seem to form a really coherent unit not just musically but as friends. I saw another fan of the series mention that the way you can really tell that TogeToge get along is that they’re comfortable being jerks around each other. And that’s honestly, completely true! TogeToge love to mess with each other, but it’s also obvious that they really do care. This is most obvious, at least it was to me, in episode ten, where Momoka has to be stopped from driving all the way back to Nina’s hometown by herself to pick her up. You don’t do long highway trips for people you only kind of care about.

About that; episode ten sees Nina return home to try to explain her situation to her parents, mostly her dad. Nina’s father is another great character who really shines despite a limited lack of screentime, and I’m absolutely in love with how the show stages the first conversation between the two where they’re not really listening to each other. How does Girls Band Cry communicate that? By sticking them on opposite sides of a sliding door. Subtlety is for losers.

The entire episode is fantastic, but the key points touched upon here, particularly where Nina says that the original Diamond Dust’s music saved her when she was feeling—she says this explicitly—suicidal in the aftermath of the bullying situation at school. That is the real power of art. That’s what TogeToge are seeking to channel, and episode ten is where Nina really starts understanding that. The self-acceptance she shows here is hard-won, and this is the sort of thing I refer to when I say that Girls Band Cry is really Nina’s show at the end of the day. I have rarely felt proud of an anime character, an emotion-object combination that just objectively doesn’t make any sense, but Girls Band Cry got it out of me.

As for the band themselves, they eventually sign with a real publishing company. (Or are they a label? To be honest, I am a little unclear on this point, but it doesn’t really matter.) The episode after this is where all of this buildup—the character arcs themselves, the emotional peaks, the sound, the love, the lightning—hit their climactic note. This is the best episode of the series, the best anime episode of the year so far, and one of the best of the ’20s in general. They play a festival, with TogeToge on a B-stage, in what is nonetheless the biggest moment of their careers. Diamond Dust are at the festival, too, but we only get to see a very brief glimpse of them playing, because this is not their story, and they’re not our real stars.

Togenashi Togeari aren’t up on the main stage, they aren’t playing to the biggest crowd, and they aren’t the main attraction, but for the three minutes and ten seconds of “Void & Catharsis”, their big roaring emotional fireworks display that is, in its own way, a response to Diamond Dust’s own “Void”, they feel like the best and most important band in the world. The entire series hinges on this concert scene, which is good, because it’s one of the best of its kind, and “Void & Catharsis” is TogeToge’s best song. It’s been weeks since I first saw it and it still blows me away. I might go as far as saying that it’s the best in-show rock band concert since the iconic performance of “God Knows” in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a full eighteen years ago. If it’s not, it’s definitely at bare minimum the best of this decade so far, and it’s hard to imagine it being topped by anyone any time soon.

It’s not just the visual tricks the show pulls out here; wild, zooming camera angles, cuts to 2D-animated segments that dramatize the girls’ own backstories and traumas in the way that so much great art does, some of the most raw rock poster animation I’ve ever seen in any television series, etc. It’s the song itself, a screaming and, yes, cathartic anthem about rebellion as personal salvation. Nina has no time for anyone’s bullshit. She’s busy screaming about insubordination as admiration, how telling someone they’re aiming too high is a rotten thing to do. She won’t be obedient but she’s scared to even try to resist. She doesn’t want to die. She wants to live so bad it hurts. She inhabits not just her own trauma but her bandmates’ as well, singing brief sections of the second verse from the perspective of Momoka, then Subaru, then Tomo, then Rupa. She channels the painful split Momoka endured from the original Diamond Dust, the towering expectations placed on Subaru, the forced clamping up that Tomo put herself through, and the unimaginable tragedy of Rupa’s loss of her mother. She’s not just a singer, she’s a medium. She takes on their pain as her own and lets every razor sharp line bleed her voice until there’s more blood on the stage than sweat. In a particularly astounding lyrical turn that I’m not entirely sure of the intentionality of, there’s a line in the chorus that is a completely coherent sentence in Japanese, translating very roughly to something like “because my anger can’t be stopped”, but sounds phonetically like the English phrase “so I can die young.” That kind of intentional bending of language, to facilitate a bilingual pun that calls back to and reinforces an earlier line, no less, is normally the domain of rappers. Particularly heady, lyrical ones (the likes of Kendrick Lamar or Lupe Fiasco or such), so part of me wonders if it’s not just an astounding coincidence. But if it’s not, that’s some 5D chess shit, and I feel wrong not pointing it out even if it is an accident because, holy fuck, what an accident.

It must also be said, she looks amazing throughout the entire concert scene; an honest-to-god icon of rock n’ roll rebellion in an age where the very idea should be a laughable archaism. She pumps her fist both toward the crowd and back at her own band to egg them on. She stomps around on the stage like she can barely control her anger. She glares at her audience, maybe Diamond Dust specifically, since they’re also watching, like she’s trying to kill them with her mind. All this while rocking a billowing yakuza shirt and with quick-apply teal dye that I must imagine smells like an unfathomable mix of chemicals slapped on the underside of her hair. In one particularly great moment, she makes an open-palmed gesture toward the crowd and then clenches her fist tight. It’s clear that not only is she insanely good at this, she really loves doing it. For all of her fury and thunder it’s also obvious that she’s having the time of her life on that stage, and who could possibly blame her? She gets to be in a rock band. Who wouldn’t love that? That feeling itself is embedded in “Void & Catharsis” as much as the righteous anger stuff. It’s subtextual, but it’s definitely there.

All this about Nina and barely a word about the other girls. The truth is that despite being a hobbyist musician myself I’m not much of a music theory gal, so I can comment only in generalities. Still, Rupa’s pounding, oscillating, heavy bassline grounds the song, as do Subaru’s nimble drums. Tomo’s key work—some of her best—provides some much needed texture to contrast the main sonic palette of the song, Momoka’s guitar, and have a sparkling, star-like quality that really reinforces the piece’s sky-looking aspirations. On the note of Momoka’s guitar, holy shit Momoka’s guitar. For the most part her riffs here are the song’s muscles, they give it strength and fullness and make it more than just a bed for Nina’s vocals, but there’s a really great moment where Momoka gets a full-on solo, a sparking piece of pyrotechnics that really sends “Void & Catharsis” over the top. I have it on authority from a guitarist acquaintance that it’s also fairly technically tricky, and I have no reason to doubt them.

All this to serve a song and a scene that streaks across the show like a comet. 3 minutes isn’t that long for a rock tune! I listened to the song a number of times while writing this piece and I was always astounded by how brief it is. Because in the moment, in the context of the show, it feels monumental and eternal. It’s not, though. When Nina hits that last note, the song ends, and in fact episode 11 on the whole ends. We are left with the feeling that we’ve just witnessed something rare and special. I wonder if the crowd that TogeToge attract during the show feel the same.

The rest of the show, really, is denouement. Falling action, of a sort, something that single cour anime have largely forgotten how to do. Episode 11 is the show’s peak both emotionally and qualitatively, but the miniature drama that follows, where TogeToge are briefly part of a real label, have their first single flop hard, and then quit to return to the indie grind, is compelling on its own. It’s a full extension of the show’s passion-driven spirit, and it also allows Nina to reconnect with an old friend.

Hina [Kondou Reina], the vocalist for the incarnation of Diamond Dust that TogeToge spend the entire show in the shadow of, was a classmate of Nina’s. She was there during the whole bullying thing, and she told Nina not to get involved. Nina, as we know, did get involved, and this led to a rift between the two that still doesn’t fully heal even by the end of the series. Honestly, in her sole on-screen appearance of any length, Hina comes across as a pretty nasty piece of work! Some of this is clearly affect, and the show’s final minutes state outright that she was deliberately pushing Nina’s buttons during their one meetup, but still! I would say that Hina would be the main character if this were an idol anime, but frankly I don’t think most idol anime have it in them to portray their characters with this much honesty. (Shinepost did, which is why Shinepost rules.)

The charitable read is that she’s a realist. Someone who knows how to play the game, someone who is actually interested in the monetary side of the whole industry, someone who wants to be famous. In pretty much every sense, she’s Nina’s complete opposite. Their meeting is enough to convince Nina that she was in the right back then, and she’s in the right now. This also concludes an entire plot about a dual Diamond Dust / Togenashi Togeari concert, that ends with TogeToge amicably leaving their label. Momoka, in one of her last lines in the entire series, gently teases Nina by suggesting that this whole thing was Hina trying to extend the Diamond Dust / TogeToge rivalry, partly because she enjoys playing the part, but also partly because Hina really loved Diamond Dust’s music too! Maybe not in the same way, maybe not to the same extent, but she did, and this is a commonality that connects the two similarly-named vocalists permanently, whether they like it or not.

This, then, is how the series ends, with Togenashi Togeari back on the indie circuit, a cult phenomenon at most. We will never know if they achieve success beyond this, although we do know they’ll keep trying. Either way, at the end of the day, part of the very point of this show is that success is secondary to being able to look yourself in the mirror. Nina is ridiculously, astoundingly, monstrously stubborn, but she sticks to her principles. In one of the flashbacks that dots the finale, Hina tells her that Nina’s intense “spikes” of justice make her feel like the bad guy. The thing is, in those flashbacks, Hina is the bad guy. She seems to even know this, on some level, given how she does everything she does in the last episode specifically to prod Nina into sticking to her guns. Arguably, that’s a pretty cold mercenary move too—after all, TogeToge and Diamond Dust are direct competition—but I choose to take it both ways. Yes, Hina is conveniently knocking a rival band down a peg, but she really does seem to care about Nina, too, in her own way. (Implicitly, there’s also some reason to wonder how happy Hina really is about having basically sold out, despite her own claims in the finale about how important success is. We may never know for sure.)

By design, we don’t see the rest of Togenashi Togeari’s story. We could write it ourselves, we could choose to extend the show’s text into the real world and keep an eye on how the inevitable actual touring version of the band do. You could argue, well, hey, Diamond Dust aren’t the ones with a Spotify ad or the goddamn branded earbuds. You could even argue there’s room for a hypothetical second season (there is, but I think people get way too caught up in that particular discussion). Ultimately all of that, all of the money and fame and success and legacy and popularity and on and on, is less important than the show’s overall dedication to sticking to the spirit of rock n’ roll in a time when that is a fast-fading phenomenon in even the most vestigial sense. These girls appreciate music as art, as life. They’d die without it. Even if TogeToge are never bigger than they are in episode 11, I have no trouble at all believing they will play together for the rest of their lives. In their very last concert of the series, in the middle of a charmingly awkward monologue, Nina declares her audience rebels and misfits, and while that’s true of TogeToge in a very different way than it was for rock and roll’s originators many years ago, it is still true, and it’s true of Girls Band Cry itself, too. In one very specific sense, TogeToge have a luxury that real bands don’t have. They get to ride off into the sunset and into our memories forever. The ED is something of a very short postscript, and it seems to suggest that TogeToge will soldier on together, living that indie rocker life, into eternity. That’s a bit ironic for a series that’s also in decent part about seizing life while you still can, but hey, it’s one of the perks of being an anime character instead of a flesh and blood human being.

All this said and there is so, so much I haven’t touched on. I think time might risk forgetting how funny Girls Band Cry is (seriously, it’s borderline a slapstick series in some spots). The girls have incredible costuming both in their day to day life and especially on stage. I didn’t talk at all about Subaru’s character arc, nearly as important to the show as Nina and Momoka’s. I didn’t talk about Tomo or Rupa that much even though they’re probably my favorite characters (one of the very few criticisms I could make of the show is that I wish it were just a bit longer so Rupa could’ve gotten an episode). I didn’t talk about Tomo’s pet snake or the fact that her outfit for the festival concert is an extended reference to Undertale. I didn’t talk about Rupa’s legion of gay fangirls, a real, canonical thing that we are shown in the series. Even in the parts of the plot I did go over, I skipped a lot of details. Hell, if I’m honest, I could write a whole other article about the sleazy indie rocker sex appeal of Momoka’s stupid fucking trucker hat that she wears while piss-drunk and acting like a jackass in one of the episodes. Like any good rock band, TogeToge have way more to them than any single writeup, video, whatever, could reasonably cover. The list is endless! But this review is not, and I need to stop somewhere, even if any point is ultimately going to feel arbitrary.

If this is the end of the series the fact remains that we were all here to see this, together. The moments themselves are more important than any lofty discussions of success or legacy, and if the show does find a long tail, which I really hope it will, it will be because it feels so huge and fiery in the moment. If you’re going to make an impact, make it electric. Connect with people, find your voice, live your life. Everything else is fluff.

^{1: Source: I’m Gay And I Can Fucking Tell, OK?}

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Posted on June 26, 2024June 26, 2024 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Pop Music is an Ocean: JELLYFISH CAN’T SWIM IN THE NIGHT and the Rough Waters of The Girl Band Genre

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

We aren’t there yet, so it’s an educated guess at most, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spring 2024 season is remembered in hindsight as that of the yuri-inflected girl band series. You had the return of Hibike Euphonium, you had Girls Band Cry, you had Whisper Me A Love Song, for what little it contributed, but Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night was, we’ll remember, there as well. For its first half dozen or so episodes, you could easily have argued that it was in fact the most beloved of all of the new entries here, as Girls Band Cry‘s anglosphere cult following had not yet reached fever pitch. In an even broader view, I wouldn’t be surprised if the long view of history lumps Jellyfish together with an even wider circle of anime; Bocchi the Rock!, It’s MyGO, whatever becomes of the Ave Mujica anime slated for next year, etc. Grouping all of these anime together is, of course, ultimately reductive, but something I’ve learned over the several years that I’ve been writing about anime is this; nothing escapes the context in which it is created.

This is particularly unfair to Jellyfish for a number of reasons, but one of them is that on a basic premise level, Jellyfish differs a bit from its contemporaries. JELEE, the “band” in Jellyfish, is really more of an arts collective centered around a pseudonymous vocalist. My immediate point of comparison was ZUTOMAYO, but really, any of the night scene bands that followed in their wake are a decent point of reference. Like some of those (but unlike ZTMY itself), JELEE’s membership is fairly small, consisting of vocalist Yamanouchi Kano [Takahashi Rie], composer and keyboardist Takanashi Kim Anouk Mei [Shimabukuro Miyuri], visual artist Kouzuki Mahiru, who also goes by Yoru [Itou Miku], and social media wizard Watase Kiui, who is also a VTuber under the name Nox Ryugasaki [Tomita Miyu].

The show is divided roughly into two parts, with the former half focused on JELEE coming together and then attempting to make a name for themselves, and the latter with the emotional fallout of Kano’s former career as an idol under the emotionally abusive management of her mother. Bluntly, the former works a lot better, and while there are a number of threads and subplots here, the ones that are successful share a certain verisimilitude. They focus more on things that seem like actual issues a contemporary pop group would encounter while trying to find a foothold in the uncaring ocean of the modern internet. These are generally simple. Some are pragmatic questions of how to get your music out there, others are more abstract and deal with things like finding artistic drive within yourself, being unashamed to express yourself for who you truly are, etc. The common element is pursuing your passions in a world that may be apathetic or even actively hostile to your doing so.

This takes different forms depending on the character. For Mahiru, who is perhaps the show’s “main protagonist” in as much as it really has one, it’s as simple as a lack of self-esteem and a tall order of impostor syndrome. For Kano, it’s significantly more complicated; she struggles to be noticed as an utaite¹, making cover songs in the aftermath of her failed idol career, there with a group called the Sunflower Dolls that she left under decidedly acrimonious terms after slugging one of the other members in the face. Mei and Kiui² have it hard, too. We meet the former after years of burying herself in fandom for “Nonoka,” Kano’s old idol persona, as a coping method for dealing with the bullying she endured in school for being “weird” (read: neurodivergent) and for being biracial. We meet the latter, Mahiru’s childhood friend, constantly lying their ass off through the other side of a computer screen. Kiui spends most of the early show immersed in their VTuber persona and telling tall tales about how popular they are at school and such. (They aren’t.)

Jellyfish splits its time unevenly between these characters—not inherently an issue—with most of the early show focusing on Mahiru and most of the latter half of the series focusing on Kano. It’s not a clean split, as episodes primarily about Kiui are sprinkled throughout. Mei gets the short end of the stick, with only her introductory episode and a handful of stray scenes later on really focusing on her as a person.

For the first part of the show, the main thrust of the plot is the formation of JELEE itself, the arts collective that the girls create as a vehicle for Kano’s singing, Mei’s composition, and Mahiru’s visual art. JELEE finds a fair amount of early success, and this early phase of the show hits its peak during one of Mahiru’s bouts of self-doubt. Admitting that she resents that other artists can draw JELEE-chan—the jellyfish-themed mascot she created for the group—better than she can, she and Kano have a heart to heart in the snow, and Kano kisses Mahiru on the cheek. (Followups to that particular development are indirect, manifesting in such forms as Mahiru gently teasing her about it an episode or two later.)

Throughout all of this, the traumatic fallout from Kano’s previous career as an idol remains a lurking background element, but it’s only when her mother, Yukine [Kaida Yuuko], is properly introduced as a character, a fair ways into the anime, that it really becomes a central focus, and the anime shifts gears to reorient around this. It’s hard to call this change in direction a mistake, exactly, since it leads to some of the anime’s best scenes, and probably its overall best episode in its ninth, but it’s definitely a stark change, and the show handles it unevenly.

Throughout the ninth episode, we get flashbacks of how Kano came to be the original center for the Sunflower Dolls and how she was eventually kicked out of the group. Here, Kano becomes “Nonoka.” Her mother controls her style and manipulates her talents for her own ends in a plainly vile way that paints a very clear picture of her as an old-school slimeball record exec. Really, the moment that seals the deal in hindsight is when she lays out her goals to Kano. “I want to one day nurture an artist who sings to 50,000 people.” (Jellyfish floats a lot of numbers around over the course of its runtime, but that one, the 50,000 associated with the maximum seating capacity of the Tokyo Dome, is the one it runs back most frequently.) Unfortunately, Kano’s time with the Sunflower Dolls comes to an unceremonious end when she discovers that Mero, one of the other girls in the group, has been running a Youtube page that spreads gossip and inflames scandals about rival acts. Enraged, Kano punches her—the incident we’ve known about for the whole show, but only then get the full context for—and her career in the traditional idol industry ends in an instant. She’s so overcome with shame and emotion that the show actually switches art styles. In a compelling, lightly experimental touch, the visuals seem to turn into something like a burning oil painting, as though Kano is physically igniting under the harsh, dispassionate glare of her mother.

All of this portrays Kano as a victim in an industry that is certainly no stranger to victimizing even its youngest performers, and paints Yukine as, at best, deeply callous about her daughter’s suffering, and at worst, an outright abusive figure, a gender-flipped version of the archetypal sinister record executive-patriarch. It’ll make you want to scream “leave Kano alone!” at your TV, if you’re anything like me.

It’s worth noting that all of these flashbacks are broadly from Kano’s own point of view, but there’s relatively little evidence of some kind of unreliable narrator thing going on, and the trauma Kano endures from all of these events is obviously very real. This is unfortunate in its own way, because it feeling so raw and so emotionally resonant means that when the show tries to tie Kano and Yukine’s relationship up with minimal fuss in the last episode it really doesn’t work, as we’ll come back to. And as a further side note; we have no reason to directly suspect that Yukine was encouraging Mero’s little side activity in running the Youtube channel, but it so clearly seems like the kind of thing she’d do, given what little we have to go on, that I have a hard time imagining at least some of the story here isn’t trying to imply that.

Back in the show’s present, Yukine approaches Mahiru with an offer to do some visual work for the current incarnation of the Sunflower Dolls. (One with Mero as the center, mind you.) Yukine certainly seems to have ulterior motives for doing this, and when Mahiru tells Kano about her plans to take the job offer—pushing back a release of one of JELEE’s own songs in the process—Kano absolutely blows up at her, calling Mahiru a liar and ranting about how she’s the only reason anyone knows Mahiru’s art in the first place. It is legitimately hard to watch, and in the moment, it made quite the strong impression on me. (Especially when coupled with the absolutely diabolical editing decision to have that episode’s outro mostly be a montage of the two calling each other’s names.) With hindsight though, I actually think this is where Jellyfish starts to fall apart. Kano and Mahiru don’t really get many scenes together in the episodes after this, and those that do are brief and feel unsatisfying. Is that realistic? Sure, maybe, and if the series wanted to lean in to the emotional hurt there, and make it seem like these two would never be close again, that would also be a valid artistic decision. The problem is that it doesn’t really do either of these things, as we’ll circle back to.

Not every plot the show tries is derailed in this manner, of course. Kiui gets a great arc wherein they manage to overcome some of their severe social anxiety. The work with JELEE brings them out of their shell somewhat, but they really begin to undergo some proper character development during a small arc where they’re attempting to get a motorcycle license, staying at a driving school for a time, with Kano, in pursuit of that goal. There, they meet an older woman named Koharu [Seto Asami]. Koharu is an interesting, if minor figure in Jellyfish, an all-but-outright-stated-to-be-trans woman who’s an implied former yakuza and who hits on Kiui basically as soon as they show up. The two hit it off, and their budding romance is a very small but legitimately sweet part of the show, and the few conversations they have over the course of the series feel very lived-in, especially when they get into nerdy areas of discussion like denpa visual novels and the like. (Even this isn’t perfect and I might rewrite some of Koharu’s dialogue, to put it mildly, but you take what you can get with these things.)

Kiui even gets what is probably the last great moment in the series. In episode 11, they and Mahiru are at an arcade and run into some former classmates of theirs. Jellyfish takes a moment to get extremely real here, as the kids hate Kiui not just for how they’re generally “weird” but also for their apparent lack of conforming to the gender binary.

Kiui, in a minor moment of triumph, gathers the inner conviction to tell them off by tapping into her own VTuber persona, which, they seem to realize in doing so, is in some ways more “real” than their outward physical self. That kind of thing, with a constructed persona that feels more in tune with “who you really are” than your actual body does, is extremely common among a certain kind of internet-native queer person. I’m speaking from experience here, and I think this plot is probably the best single thing that Jellyfish pulls off. Making people feel seen is valuable.

Mahiru and Kano’s ongoing tension, meanwhile, goes largely unaddressed during all of this, and they appear to forgive each other in the final episode—after the big, emotional finale, which, with a few days of hindsight behind me, feels quite flat—based on….vibes, I suppose? They don’t really talk anything out! And I’m not the sort of person to demand lengthy on-screen Healthy Emotional Communication, but something a bit more substantial than the little we get here would be nice, and that really is my central problem with Jellyfish. It has all of these moments that are good to great, but they don’t cohere, because the show either can’t make them fit together in a way that feels holistic or it simply drops them entirely.

If I had to guess, what Jellyfish wants to do is use this act of simply stopping at a certain point as a statement unto itself. In the last moments of the show there are clearly still some unaddressed problems. Kano, for instance, obsesses over her performance in the finale being seen by over 50,000 people—that magic number her mom planted in her head as a kid—and the rest of JELEE are rightly weirded out by the whole thing. But we’re clearly also supposed to feel that this is essentially a happy ending for them, as the show’s last real scene is JELEE banding together to paint over the jellyfish mural—an old piece of Mahiru’s art—that inspired their endeavor to begin with. It’s beautifully drawn and composed, and it tries so hard to sell these big emotions, but it feels almost perfunctory, regardless. As though Jellyfish is doing this because it can’t stomach showing us an actual unhappy ending, or because it thinks we’d be angry if it did so.

Whether one wants to see Jellyfish as an anime that is sabotaged by this flaw or one that manages to work in spite of it is largely a matter of perspective. Can you ignore Yukine’s abuse going unaddressed? Can you ignore that the show never circles back around to Mero torpedo’ing the careers of the Rainbow Girls? Can you ignore the unshakeable feeling that this whole thing really needed another six episodes or so to really breathe? That it really clearly does not have the space to do everything it wants to do? All of that is going to depend on the person. For some, this is going to come off as extreme nitpicking and I will seem very shrill. I must again stress however that I’m fine with these things not being solved on-screen, I just want the show to follow up on them, any of them, in some form.

For me, the clearly stitched-together nature of the writing in the show’s latter half kills much of the emotional resonance I felt in its best moments. Some anime are camp enough, strange enough, or challenging enough to get away with ending on what’s essentially a shrug. If it clicked enough with you, you can say “well, the show is messy” and declare its flaws ignorable. Unfortunately, the emotional math involved here just doesn’t work for me. The fact that the Rainbow Girls are not characters in this narrative because we’re just supposed to write them off after their single appearance does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mero never even really directly talk, but that we’re clearly supposed to assume they’ve somehow reconciled does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mahiru are, in fact, entirely kept apart for most of the show’s final third does not work for me. The fact that Kano’s lack of forgiveness to her mother is signified by nothing more than playfully brushing her off in the show’s closing minutes after she sends a goddamn limo to Kano’s school does not work for me. None of this works for me! That’s really frustrating!

Let’s circle back to the term “messy”, in fact. “Messy” is often used, as a descriptor, to smooth over the rough edges of art we love. A way to excuse conflict and problematica because the art resonates hard enough with us that we have cause to explain its uncomfortable aspects away. You could call Jellyfish “messy,” for certain, and there are parts of it I’d apply that label to (Koharu and Kiui’s relationship, perhaps), but for the most part there’s not a lot of what I’d call messiness in Jellyfish. All of these aspects that don’t work are not messy, they’re just some shit that happens that the show gets in over its head in trying to address. This is why it feels unsatisfying on the whole despite a number of strong moments. The actual tone the show is going for gets lost somewhere in the shuffle.

The show attempts to do right by its queer audience in spite of all this; mostly in terms of Kiui’s subplot, but I think people have been a little unfair in labeling the show ‘queerbaity’ in the fairly subtle way it handles Mahiru and Kano’s relationship, as well. This, and the other more general ways the series fails to come together, creates a situation that practically begs for baseless, conspiratorial thinking. Did some suit decide the show was Too Gay, prompting a last-minute rewrite? Was there some kind of cut in episode number that impacted the narrative? Did network censors object? There’s no actual reason to believe these things, but they are the sort of theorizing that tends to pop up in the wake of an anime ending like this, because it’s an explanation. An explanation, no matter how convoluted, seems to make more sense than what appears to be the actual case; the show just faceplanted in its final stretch without a single specific cause. It happens. My personal theory is that primary scriptwriter Yaku Yuki, best known as the novelist behind Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki, had trouble adapting to the switch in format. There’s not really any more evidence for this than any of these other theories, but it would make sense, and would account for the show’s sometimes cramped and overstuffed writing. (In fact, I have somehow gone this entire review without mentioning the weird little side plot of Miiko [Uesaka Sumire], the 30-something idol that JELEE butt heads with a few times and eventually become friends with. The whole plot is actually pretty much fine, if not necessarily a highlight of the show. But a longer anime could have things like that without it feeling so incongruous with the rest of the series.)

I’ve spent a lot of time wracking my brain about what exactly my takeaway from Jellyfish has been without simply turning in basic qualitative assessments. It’s true that it’s probably always going to be considered in the broader “girl band anime” context, and that it isn’t the best series in that subgenre by any means. (I will also quickly make the point that, on the other hand, this is not a Metallic Rouge situation where hindsight makes it clear that the show never had any idea of what it was doing.) But putting it in those terms feels incredibly reductive! I’ve said a lot that’s negative about the show, but there is a lot to like as well! Visually, it’s pretty damn incredible! I’ve already mentioned its shift into a moving oil painting during one of Kano’s flashbacks, but it uses quite a few interesting tricks throughout, from video effects like a simulated VHS tape in the first episode, being drawn as though shot on a smartphone in the last, to rapid animation cuts to signify time passing quickly (often because Mei is enthusing over something), there’s a good amount to enjoy here in the visual dimension. The soundtrack is great, too! While I wasn’t enthused about JELEE’s music for the most part, the actual BGM is a weird, synth-heavy, analog-sounding thing that burbles and strains and hums expressively throughout essentially the whole show.

Generally speaking, the show is very stylish! The first episode in particular is a masterclass in visual storytelling! And even back on the writing end, the series’ portrayal of the suffocating smoke of having a controlling parent be absolutely furious with you is spot on! Kano pecking Mahiru on the cheek seriously does matter even if the followup isn’t as strong as we may have wanted it to be! Kiui’s complex gender identity is some of the best representation of its type I’ve ever seen in an anime! All of this is just as true as the show’s more frustrating aspects, and I think if the series develops a cult following in the years to come (and I would be unsurprised to see that happen) it will be off of these strengths. Those people will watch Jellyfish in a different way than I did. It’s true that nothing really escapes the context it’s created in, but we often only have a clear picture of that context in hindsight. Maybe, somewhere between all the aspects that frustrated me so much, is a better show that is only visible with some remove.

So that’s where we’re at. I wanted to like Jellyfish more than I did, and that’s admittedly an annoying position to be in. Because I simultaneously feel like I’m giving the show more of a pass than I should be and also being way too hard on it. But that’s the way things go sometimes! If any part of Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is truly encapsulated by the term ‘messy,’ it might be that very relationship that I, and many other viewers, have to the series in of itself. It’s obvious, but, sometimes art is not strictly good or bad! Sometimes it gets in your head in a way that causes you to spout a gushing torrent of thoughts that only barely cohere and sometimes outright contradict each other. I have said things of this nature many times on this blog, and I’ll probably say them many times more. Maybe, if all Jellyfish wanted to do was leave an impression—to shine a little, to borrow Mahiru’s own words—then my big judgy opinion about whether it’s peak or mid, man, matters less than the fact that it made me think this much about it at all. Jellyfish can’t swim, night or day. But sometimes it’s nice to just drift in the currents of the ocean and let them take you where they will; you can’t complain too much about choppy waters.

^{1: A kind of internet-based singer, originally associated with NicoNicoDouga, now common on Youtube as well. Perhaps the most famous utaite-turned-professional in contemporary J-pop is Ado, apparently a deliberate influence, in the case of this anime.}

^{2: I’ve mostly spelled it “Kiwi” up until this point on this site, but “Kiui” with a U is apparently the official romanization. As for my use of they/them pronouns for the character throughout this piece, it’s clear to me that Kiui is some sort of genderqueer or nonconforming. Since it is impossible to ask a fictional character their preferred pronouns, and we’re unlikely to get official word on the subject for a variety of reasons, I am being as general as possible.}

“Goodbye, sekai!“

Posted on June 25, 2024 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Revolution Never Ended for CODE GEASS: ROZÉ OF THE RECAPTURE

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.

They fucking got me again.

Let me explain. Nearly 20 years ago, a little anime called Code Geass (subtitled Lelouch of The Rebellion) premiered, and it barged into the hearts and minds of myself and so many other impressionable young teens with reckless abandon. Short of perhaps Death Note, no anime was more synonymous with a certain kind of mid-aughts I’m 14 And This Is Deep chuuni shit. Quite unlike its former chief contender, Code Geass has remained an active franchise in the years since.¹ I haven’t seen them myself, but the Akito the Exiled spinoff films have their following, and the series has kept chugging along with various ancillary media too, some available in English and some not. In 2019, the Lelouch of the Re;surrection film staked out an alternate continuity where Lelouch comes back to life. That movie was a bit of an up-and-down experience, and mostly succeeded off the strength of being a movie full of Lelouch doing Lelouch Shit, but its best moments were classic Code Geass camp and proved that the franchise still had some life left in it. Code Geass has been around, so the existence of Rozé of the Recapture, a new series of theatrical OVAs that are also being streamed week to week as a regular TV series (don’t ask me how this works, I don’t know), is not too surprising.

It’s also probably not too surprising to any longtime readers of this blog that I, the Magia Record defender, think that the first episode of what some would deride as a pointless spinoff project is actually really fucking good. In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever doubted the project. I am still the same person I was in 8th grade in one very important way; I love campy goofball shit, and Code Geass is and always has been some Grade-A campy goofball shit.

Rozé of The Recapture takes place many years after some version of the original series’ events—I’m not totally clear on how many, but it’s been long enough to let some additional light sci-fi elements seep into the setting—but rehashes the same fundamental premise. A resurgent “Neo-Britannian”² empire has once again conquered and subjugated Japan (or at least Hokkaido), once again rebranding the region itself as Area 11 and its citizens as second-class Elevens. Once again, an underground cadre of resistance fighters struggle against their imperial overlords. There are some extra elements this time around (such as a gigantic energy barrier called the Situmpe Wall that surrounds Area 11), but the fundamental premise is the same. And once again, it’s up to a Britannian outsider to help the resistance win the day. More or less. We’ll come back to that part.

The main difference is the most obvious one. There’s no Lelouch, here. He’s gone. The emperor is dead.

In his place we have a mysterious pair of Britannian siblings named Rozé [Amasaki Kouhei] and Ash [Furukawa Makoto]. Ash has yet to make much of an impression on me, but his brother is a different story. Rozé is not Lelouch—nobody could be Lelouch, that’s an impossible pair of shoes to fill—but he’s a pretty fun protagonist so far, with a whimsical and playful personality that belies the brain of a serious tactician. Rozé, however, commands a battlefield that is significantly weathered from his predecessor’s day. In general, Rozé of the Recapture has a marginally more grim aesthetic sensibility than the original series. It’s as though the order was to make it just as camp but twice as dark. Everyone still dresses like a lunatic, and the show has that same love of cutting from battlefield to command room shenanigans to domestic scene and back at a wild pace that the original did, and it even also has its love of bold—perhaps reckless—incorporation of very bleak imagery into something that’s otherwise so fun, but it does feel a bit less bright, even literally, than the original Code Geass did. It’s as though Code Geass knows it is returning to a world that is, if you can believe it, even bleaker than the one it left in 2008. Having not seen them, I can’t comment on how directly this follows from the sensibilities of the Akito the Exiled side series, but I wouldn’t be shocked if those have been quietly building a bridge from the original series’ point of view to that of this anime.

As for the actual events of this episode, despite the slightly updated setting they’ll be very familiar to any returning Code Geass heads. We open with some exposition, and after the OP, a pretty grim scene of Britannian noble siblings—both of a class of knight called Einbergs, something that seems like it will be a recurring thing over the course of this show—Greede and Gran Kirkwayne [Nojima Hirofumi and Ono Yuuki, respectively] being absolutely horrible to a group of random Japanese citizens. This culminates with Gran, the more hotheaded of the two, shooting a man he’s holding hostage in the head. When his wife cries out in grief, Greede makes a token effort to perfunctorily apologize, only to then shoot her when she understandably spits on him. The scene ends with Greede ordering his men to unceremoniously massacre the rest of the gathered group. The message is pretty clear; the Kirkwaynes are bad people, power-drunk authoritarians and bigots with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Fair enough.

So of course, our protagonists are tasked by the fabulously-named Seven Shining Stars resistance group with taking them out. Their infiltration into the Britannian base, to the extent that it even counts as infiltration, is classic Code Geass. Ash’s knightmare frame emerges from a wrapped-up present box and Rozé spends much of the scene dressed like a clown; you can’t ask for much better than that. Rozé does eventually actually properly infiltrate the base, confronting Greede, the brains of the operation, directly.

The two have a very classically Geassian back and forth. The series’ famous chess motifs return here, as absolutely ridiculously goofball as they were in 2006. Rozé and Greede strategize while poking at some kind of holographic tabletop chess display. When the moment is right, Rozé orders his brother to go all out, and back in the actual battlefield we get some genuinely riveting mecha action, complete with Ash skewering Gran and his knightmare frame with a pair of its own swords after laying down some pretty fantastic shit-talk about how Gran’s a worthless coward.

^{The robot is pretty cool too. We don’t get a name for it here, but look at it!}

Back in the base, we get a fantastic twist here as Rozé, with Greede at gunpoint, offers the Britannian noble a choice. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that he doesn’t give him a choice per se. Because Rozé doesn’t do anything per se. There is no Rozé.

Meet Sumeragi Sakuya [Ueda Reina], the actual protagonist of Rozé of the Recapture.

I am almost never at a loss for words when writing these columns. There’s a lot to say about even fairly uninteresting anime, and Rozé of the Recapture is anything but that so far. But seriously, what the hell does anyone want me to say? They made a character who looks like Lelouch a woman and had her crossdress for most of the first episode. I’m in love, sue me. I’ve seen the phrase “Lelouch of the Transition” drift around the Internet in regards to this twist and, I mean, what can I possibly say that’s better than that? (It does say a lot that this random tweet showcasing the scene immediately following this has done more marketing for Rozé of The Recapture than Disney+, who are distributing it in North America, have, but that is perhaps unsurprising, given their track record.) This scene is what made it truly obvious to me that the show is dedicated to recapturing that spirit of the original as much as possible, hopefully without too-directly rehashing many of its plot points. Rozé of The Recapture does basically nothing at all here to endear itself to any new audiences, and it definitely isn’t going to change the opinion of anyone in the “Code Geass sucks, actually” crowd, but I honestly think that is fine. Code Geass is so entirely itself that trying to “adapt to the times” would’ve been doomed to fail. Call this the rare Millennial nostalgia play that I’m fully onboard for.

In any case, Sakuya shows off her Geass. We don’t know how she got it or precisely how it works—my reverse-engineering attempt here is that it somehow forces the target to choose between two options if they hear her give a command—but she offers Greede the choice of saving a hundred times more Japanese people than he’s ordered dead or killing himself. Suffice to say, Mr. Kirkwayne does not survive to the end of the episode.

We close on Sakuya—back in-character as Rozé—talking to the Stars. She says that she and Ash knew from the jump that this entire mission was more of a test than anything else, and asks what the real objective they’re being hired for is. The answer? To liberate an Alcatraz-like offshore prison to free some of the Stars’ comrades. It just so happens that someone that Sakuya euphemistically calls a ‘friend’—someone named Sakura, who looks so similar to Sakuya that they could be mistaken for each other—is also being held there, under the pretense that she’s Sakuya. The amount of hilarious shenanigans this is setting up is truly dizzying to consider, but the main takeaway is one very important thing; if Code Geass isn’t back per se, that’s only because it never really left.

^{1: Technically, there actually have been a few short story collections and one-shots and things. But I think there’s a reason that there’s no Death Note spinoff airing right now. Lelouch would whip Light’s ass in any serious battle of wits, by the way. Just saying.}

^{2: I will be using the series’ ridiculous alternate history terminology religiously while discussing it as it airs, thank you.}

Posted on May 13, 2024May 13, 2024 in Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [5/13/24]

Hello anime fans, it’s another light week here on Magic Planet Anime as I fight against the raging tide of getting sucked into playing Hades II all day every day. Anyhow, here’s what I do have to report on this week. Enjoy!

Anime

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 19

We’ve got a split episode this time. Firstly dealing with Izutsumi joining the party.

I have to say, I think somebody on the staff is a bit thirsty for her. I can’t precisely explain why I think that but it has something to do with how her face is drawn compared to how it’s drawn in the manga, or even in scenes after this opening one.

The directing in the first half of this episode is otherwise actually a bit dry, but the second more than makes up for it.

The decision to render Marcille’s nightmare in black and white is bold. I don’t think many other studios would’ve even tried it, but it pays dividends here. Not just because it enhances the alternating terror and, yes, comedy of the nightmare. (Do keep in mind that against the backdrop of Marcille running from a monster symbolic of her fear of death we also have Laios Being Laios. Poor guy.) The moment where she retrieves the book from the monster, and it’s a golden yellow in contrast to the black and white dream is just absolutely brilliant. I love it.

Also, the Falin doll is really, really cute.

GO! GO! Loser Ranger! – Episode 4

God Suzukiri is so good here. Anyway!

The transition to Red just laying into the guy mouthing off to him is very sudden and I think it’s effective in how out of nowhere it is. This is the first time we really see unambiguously that the Rangers are deeply corrupt.

Thus begins Loser Ranger‘s flirtation with political metaphor. It’s, uh, a lot. The Invaders are genuinely a threat here; we see so in Hibiki’s flashback as their general murders his whole family. Yet, he clearly bears individual invaders like Footsoldier D no ill will.

What is the show trying to say by this being the case? Hard to say. This is very slight manga spoilers, but the series’ worldview eventually develops into what I’d call nuanced (although not without problems), but it takes a while to get there.

In any case, the fights remain tricky and full of surprising little twists and turns, and by episode’s end we’ve got D and Hibiki set up as our Lelouch and Suzaku (so to speak) respectively. Fun times all around.

Girls Band Cry – Episode 4

The fact that Momoka’s high school band photo is 2D and is thus literally a window into a prior era of the girls band genre is pretty great. I wonder how intentional that is.

We here meet the stern aristocratic grandma. Who is also a minor himejoshi, if her choice for the improv scene that she makes the girls act out is any indication.

Said scene is genuinely so intense with the secondhand embarrassment that I had to mute the audio on the first bit. The second half where it turns into Nina just putting Subaru on blast is brilliant though. (Also, hm, comparing being in a band to dating. Interesting angle for a show airing in The Yuri Season to take.)

There’s something about the visual of an anime girl saying she doesn’t like acting “because it’s embarrassing” and calmly turning off the TV behind her. Interesting stuff.

I was repeatedly warned by people that this episode has a “weird resolution.” I don’t really agree, Subaru clearly is more conflicted on her split loyalties than she’s actually letting on, and the final scene is Nina realizing that. I will grant that it’s an unusual emotional expression to hitch an entire episode on, but it’s far from the strangest I’ve ever seen.

Also, Nina being a serial meddler is going to come back to bite her at some point. Sadly, it doesn’t seem like SobsPlease have gotten to episode 5 yet. If they still haven’t fairly soon I might try out the other group fansubbing this. It would be a shame though, I really like SobsPlease’s work thus far.

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 5

This adaptation reminds absolutely confounding.

In what I assume is some attempt to get around broadcast standards, the bath scene that should chronologically have been in the last episode has been split up in two, and the longer half has been wedged in here. It takes up a good half of the episode, isn’t titillating, and is only “comedic” in a very technical sense.

What survives the transition are little character moments; Oto’s friend getting annoyed that she can’t peep on the girls undressing, Oto herself being wooed by snacks into visiting the teacher’s apartment and later leaving some of those snacks at the altar of her late grandmother, etc.

In the episode’s last third, Oto is scared awake by haunting knocking and disembodied footsteps in the rain, creating a tension that is completely shattered the second that a new character is introduced by rushing at Oto, sans context.

There’s some other stuff in here. But for the most part, Mysterious Disappearances is so far mostly an example of the truism that horror anime are never anywhere near as good as horror manga. The original manga is trashy but fun. The anime has been mostly a series of puzzling decisions that dull the manga’s strong points and create new weaknesses. There’s still time for it to recover, of course, but this weak opening half is going to make it a hard sell to anyone who’s not already a pretty big fan.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 6

Is your favorite girl band anime this season Girls Band Cry or Jellyfish? If you’re undecided, can I interest you in a dark horse candidate?

Salad Bowl is thankfully back on track this week, and quite honestly this episode is a complete odyssey, more than making up for last week. I’m never going to claim that an obsessive lesbian cult leader like Noa is good rep, exactly, but in The Yuri Season it’s as on-tone as anything else. The sugar mama arrangement that Livia stumbles into with Noa is pretty fantastic, whether it’s in the realm of taking her clothes off so Noa can 3D scan her and make dolls of her or convincing Noa, who is also a bedroom musician, to join Puriketsu’s faltering band.

This episode is the best of Salad Bowl as a series and as a concept. Pure uncut zaniness, no chaser.

As a side note, this is really the first time I’ve bought into Livia being hot. Maybe it’s the sharper visuals here than in prior episodes, maybe she just looks good with a guitar. You decide!

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 49

Dot episodes are always fun, and I’m a sucker for anything that even remotely touches on the performer / performance dichotomy, as this episode does with the dichotomy between Dot and Nidothing. So this episode was just an all-around hit with me. Also it’s a 2-parter! Cool!

That’s it for this week. Please bask in the glory of this week’s bonus thought before you go.

Posted on May 4, 2024May 31, 2024 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) A Strange Dream About the Sky – The Weight of AIR

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

If you close your eyes, you can immerse yourself in it. The sweltering Sun, the sea breeze messing your hair and running the sharp scent of salt past your nostrils. The sound of the cicadas lighting up the trees with their songs, and the humid heat. During the day; the brilliant, sapphire-blue sky and the billowing white clouds across it. At night, it’s an inky black streaked by the starry Milky Way. This is a series of blurry photos from a blazing-hot July buried somewhere in your memories. This is Air.

If it seems strange to tie an adaptation of a member of the infamous nakige (“crying game”) genre to a specific season, it might help to think of it as Air‘s way of contextualizing its attempts to tug at your heartstrings; the joy and sadness of a human lifetime distilled down and squeezed into a single, eternal summer, bringing to mind similar works in different media, like Fennesz’ album of that same name. When the series began airing in 2005, I myself was a child, in Florida with my father, and the heat of the Sun feels as real in Air as it does in my own recollections. Air‘s vision of summer is mercifully devoid of crocodiles, geckos, and palmetto bugs, but the feeling is the same, and the tense dichotomy between “these days feel like they will never end” and “we don’t have many days left” is thick enough to break scissor blades. The summer lasts forever, until it doesn’t.

Air, you see, is not just a story, it’s a dream. A reference point, and a map for its structure and storytelling aims, that recurs many times over its twelve episodes. Its logic is dreamlike; characters are introduced suddenly and vanish out of sight when their stories conclude, the series is peppered with elements of magical realism, and the environment itself seems to bend around the characters’ emotions, especially in its last stretch when the cast winnows down to just two main characters. Its emotional impact is dreamlike, too; it can make you very sad without you necessarily understanding what’s happened or why. (If I seem to skimp on describing Air‘s actual plot throughout this article, that’ll be why. Some articles are very easy to write; this one was not.) Dreams are, too, a recurring story element. Our main heroine, Misuzu [Kawakami Tomoko], dreams of another version of herself, suspended in the sky and flying on wings of pure white feathers. Our main hero, Yukito [Ono Daisuke] is a crow who’s dreamt himself into the shape of a man, or perhaps the other way around. These dreams are just part of the larger dream of the series itself, one that only ends when Air concludes. It’s a vast dream, too, encompassing over a thousand years, from 994 AD to the summer of 2000. Millennium to millennium, era to era, life to life.

Fittingly, Air‘s depiction of the human condition is impressionistic and emotional. Its core concerns are faith, family, and the preciousness and brevity of life. At its best, it feels as light and ethereal as its namesake or as heavy as torrential rain; lifting you up and pummeling you back down. This isn’t to say it’s always at its best—this is now the third Maeda Jun project I’ve seen, and I’m starting to get a good sense of his strengths and weaknesses as a creative, and there are some questionable decisions in the show’s final stretch in particular—but the highs are very high, and they’re plentiful enough to make the series worth watching.

In terms of literal narrative, Yukito arrives to a nameless town (modeled on the real-world city of Kami, Hyogo Prefecture), searching for a place to stay and a way to earn money, yes, but also a half-remembered vision inherited from his mother; something about a woman in the sky. In an early indication of the series’ magical-realist bent, Yukito is a puppeteer whose magical control of his doll is treated as nothing more than a mildly amusing parlor trick. He meets Misuzu, an odd, clumsy girl who trips a lot and says “gao!” when frustrated, and is eventually roped into being Misuzu’s live-in caretaker by Misuzu’s surrogate mother, a drunkard aunt named Haruko [Hisakawa Aya].

From this setup, Yukito becomes entangled in the lives of a number of women around the city, possibly a consequence of the series’ origins as an eroge. (This adult VN -> clean rerelease -> anime pipeline used to be quite common, back in the day.) Stripped of their original context, Yukito meeting these characters and witnessing their stories takes on an anthology-esque quality. Among those we meet are the self-styled ‘alien’ Kano [Okamoto Asami], Kano’s older sister, the town doctor Hijiri [Touma Yumi], the rambunctious redhead Michiru [Tamura Yukari], and her older sister, the deliberately-spoken, astronomy-fixated Tohno [Yuzuki Ryouka]. Each of these girls has some issue that Yukito aids in, if not resolving, at least providing closure for. In the earlier episodes, anything explicitly supernatural is pushed to the margins and the tone is fairly ambiguous. However, in episode four, the series stops playing coy, and from the moment that a magic feather in a temple induces a shared hallucination of a bygone era, the show’s magical realism is fully realized.

The show’s main theme of family comes into focus over the course of these stories. Each one centers around a frayed familial connection of some kind—Kano’s strained relationship with Hijiri, Michiru being the disembodied spirit of Tohno’s miscarried sister, Tohno’s mother completely forgetting she exists, et cetera—all of which is just windup to the two main stories of the series, the one between Misuzu herself and Haruko, and a very different, but intimately connected tale that takes place a thousand years prior.

Because, you see, the recurring image of the flying maiden is what ties all of these disparate stories together. Sometimes mentioned directly, sometimes only alluded to. Air reflects its own structure here, as this unknowable woman in the sky means something different to everyone. Air’s big halfway point twist, then, is when we learn the story of that woman. This is the other half of Air, a story taking place in the Heian Era, first at a secluded temple-palace and then all up and down medieval Japan. Kannabi-no-Mikoto, alias Kanna [Nishimura Chinami], an enshrined woman who is among the last of a mystical race of angel-winged people. Her attendants Ryuuya [Kanna Nobutoshi] and Uraha [Inoue Kikuko] serve to care for and comfort her at the shrine, drawing a parallel between these characters and those taking care of Misuzu. In an act of grim foreshadowing, Kanna’s life at the palace is disrupted when forces unknown infiltrate it, seeking certainly to capture, and possibly to kill her, leading Kanna and her entourage to flee and seek her also-imprisoned mother. Here, Air‘s visual presentation completely flips upside-down; these portions of the story are clouded over with heavy monsoons of rain, and when the Sun does poke out, it looks noticeably different than it does in the modern day portions of the story; less omnipresent and less oppressive.

Really, this part of Air is a different anime entirely, a feeling further enhanced by the two-part Air in Summer OVA which further fleshes it out (you could give yourself a “streamlined experience” by weaving both halves of Air in Summer into the main anime’s episode count). Kanna’s status as a winged person marks her as both something divine and an outcast. We don’t get many details; when we eventually meet Kanna’s mother, she only mentions that she herself is ‘tainted,’ and Kanna eventually comes to realize that her life, at least, what of it we see, may be the dream of someone else. (There’s a real Butterfly Dream thing going on here.) When she and her attendants can no longer escape their would-be captors, she unveils her wings. And thus, in one of the story’s two climactic points, Kanna is shot to death. Riddled with arrows against the backdrop of the white, caustic moon.

Death marks the final boundary for Air‘s narrative. Kanna’s story ends—at least for us—when she dies, and so too does Misuzu’s when the series returns to her side of the story for its final stretch. Back in the (relative) present, Misuzu’s illness, now fully revealed to be a curse, worsens. She loses the use of her legs, and eventually her memory starts to go, too, leaving her unsure of who Haruko, the woman who has been her surrogate mother for many years, even is. (This is another unifying thread between Misuzu, Kanna, and the rest of the show’s heroines. None of them have a normal relationship with their mother figure.) The final arc sees Haruko attempting to prove that she’s worthy of being Misuzu’s real mother, to herself, implicitly to us the audience, and to Misuzu’s actual biological father, a man named Keisuke [Tsuda Kenjirou].

In Air‘s last episode, we see Haruko’s desperate attempts to connect with her daughter finally begin to bear fruit, only for Misuzu to realize that she is, in a sense, still sleeping. Air ends with her death, as she and Haruko both accept that their time together is over. It hits in the heart, unifying the series’ themes of faith and family as Haruko reflects on her mistakes in treating Misuzu poorly¹. If you’re the type who can be hit by that kind of thing (and I definitely am), it’ll get you, but there are questions to be asked, here, and this is where we have to put on our rational hat a little bit.

For one, Maeda certainly has a thing for young, disabled girls, doesn’t he? I don’t necessarily mean that in an outright condemnatory way—although some would, and I wouldn’t even say they’re wholly wrong to—but it is a noticeable recurring character type throughout his work; a girl whose emotional fragility is reflected by physical frailty. It feels rooted in ableism and misogyny. Plus, on top of that, this ending is just sort of basic. Yes Jun, to paraphrase Young Thug, we all hate when girls die, but is that really all?

To be fair, in the case of Misuzu’s death, and the closing chapter of this story, it quite literally isn’t all. Misuzu’s soul reunites with Kanna, and it is implied (albeit only indirectly), that this frees both of them—since they are ultimately, metaphysically one in the same—from their shared curse. Still, there’s a very fine line being walked here. “Life is incredibly frail, and there is a certain tragic, inevitable beauty to death” is a perfectly fine notion. Adding just a couple of words in there to make it specifically about the disabled very quickly turns it ugly, and I am not sure Air manages to say the first thing entirely without saying the second even if it doesn’t ‘mean’ to, which is a shame, to say the least.

On the other hand, you can try to ignore any themes built into Air entirely. That seems to be what much of the Japanese game-buying public did with the visual novel. Maeda has recounted² how many players’ main takeaway was that the game was “soothing,” and how frustrating this was to him. From a certain point of view, this is definitely true of the anime as well, and you’re free to strip it for parts if all you really need is a sumptuous bath of wonderfully retro visuals and sound. Indeed, in addition to its very deliberate sense of place, Air lives and breathes its era; it is Early 2000s as hell, and all of the signifiers that have become so inseparable from this era are present. This is especially obvious with the highly sexually dimorphic character designs, where the men are all tall, lanky, and comparatively realistic, and the women are all short, soft, and have huge headlight bug-eyes. There’s some really strong animation, too, especially in terms of the near-constant sea breeze that blows throughout the show. Every hair on many of the girls’ heads will happily billow in the wind throughout the series, it’s quite something. Reducing the series to its aesthetic components in this way, however, requires actively disregarding what Air is about. I can’t speak for the game, but I don’t think the series is helped by trying to flatten it into a Pure Moods CD, even given its flaws.

If you wanted to, though, you had an option there, too. The series’ companion album Ornithopter, a sprightly thing where trance and instrumental city pop meld and melt together into a hazy heat blur, is an interesting counterpoint to the sadder parts of the anime. Like a pleasant dream the night after a bad day, it seems to gently nudge us into remembering that life will go on.

Life did, in fact, go on for all involved with Air. This series was director Ishihara Tatsuya‘s debut in that capacity, and he shortly thereafter went on to helm the world-conquering anime adaptation of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and a number of excellent Kyoto Animation titles thereafter including Nichijou, arguably the best comedy anime ever made and certainly one of the best of its era. He’s still at it now, directing the currently-airing third season of Hibike! Euphonium. Main series compositionist Shimo Fumihiko is also still working, currently fulfilling that same role on the fifth season of cult series Date A Live. A good chunk of the voice cast is still active, not always a given for an anime that’s nearly 20 years old, although sadly Misuzu’s voice actress Kawakami Tomoko, perhaps best known as the title character in Revolutionary Girl Utena, passed away in 2011 after a battle with cancer. She was an incredible talent, and was taken from us too soon.

And then, there’s the case of Maeda Jun himself, certainly worth discussing given that he seems to have been the main creative brain behind Air. Maeda, of course, had a pretty successful career for quite a while after Air, working in a similar capacity as the main force behind Clannad and Angel Beats! (the latter of which became an anime that I deeply love), among other things. Then, in 2020, came The Day I Became A God, and, well, if you’re a longtime reader of this site, you know how that went. I more or less stand by what I said in that article, and Air‘s lowest moments foreshadow some of The Day I Became A God‘s core problems, but it’s worth noting that I was hardly alone, there. The Day I Became A God was so widely disliked that the backlash prompted Maeda to retire from writing for anime and the like entirely, and he claims he felt so disheartened by the reception that he apparently considered killing himself.

It never feels great to be a part—even a very small part—of that kind of reception. I would like to think Maeda has good work in him still, and overall, I’d say I quite liked Air, despite its flaws. (Certainly my feelings on Angel Beats! remain unchanged, as well.) But you can’t change what’s already been done, and if Maeda has decided to stick to composing, he’s at least certainly very good at that as well.

As for Air itself, the series, there’s a lot I haven’t touched on, here. The series’ first half has a lot of great storytelling moments that I have both skipped recounting for the sake of not making this article even longer and to leave some of the magic intact for anyone who reads this and wants to check the show out. I’ve also not really gone into the various highs and lows of the show’s comedic moments, of which it has a surprising amount. (The very short version; most of the humor is actually surprisingly great, but a few things have not aged well. Sexual harassment-as-joke is something we should be glad we’ve largely left behind.) There are lots of bizarre little details, like Misuzu’s constant referring to chicks as “dinosaurs’ children” (she knows her cladistics!), a dog that makes “piko-piko” noises instead of barking, and so on. Despite all I’ve written, I feel like I’ve only really scratched the surface, and the years of surrounding context that have built up around Air have only amplified that feeling.

In the end though, Air has given me a wider appreciation not just for Maeda’s work but for work in general. Art reflects life, and life doesn’t stop for anyone. There’s no point in not trying to enjoy every day you have, and the fact that Air could make me reflect on the value of my own life and the time I have left in it is, in a way, the greatest argument in favor of it being a worthy piece of art. Dreams can be beautiful, yes. But, we all wake up eventually.

^{1: In general, as I’ve pointed out in my previous writing on this series, their dynamic reminds me a lot of Rosa and Maria’s from Umineko. I do wonder if it was a direct inspiration or just a coincidence.}

^{2: In the initial version of this article, I said I couldn’t find this interview. However, since then, someone has backed it up on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and if Google Translate is to be judged good enough to get the gist of the interview, that does in fact seem to be what he said, in essence if not literally.}

Posted on April 12, 2024April 12, 2024 in anime

Seasonal First Impressions: Flipping The Haters Off in GIRLS BAND CRY

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.

There are two immediately noteworthy things about Girls Band Cry, one fairly frustrating, and the other very much a selling point for a series that is going to need it. Point one; you cannot legally watch Girls Band Cry anywhere in the anglosphere as of the time of this writing. There’s just no way to do it. For whatever reason, none of the major streaming services have picked this thing up, and it’s only because of a fansubbing team going by SobsPlease that this article exists at all, since I don’t speak Japanese and would otherwise have written the show off as beyond my reach. If we were talking about a show that was fairly uninteresting, this would still be a little sad, but mostly of no major consequence. However, in the case of Girls Band Cry it is very annoying because of point two. This series has an extremely distinctive visual style. I would go so far as arguing it doesn’t really look like any other TV anime. At the very least, it certainly doesn’t look like any that I’ve ever seen.

All-3D CGI is not new anymore, it’s been an accepted approach to creating TV anime—if a contentious one—for over a decade by now. What separates Girls Band Cry from even its most immediate peers like Bang Dream! It’s MyGO!!! is a stark juxtaposition between its fairly grounded environments and incredibly fluid, almost cartoony character animation. These twin approaches, combined with a flair for directly incorporating visualizations of pure feeling into the series, create a world that feels simultaneously very physical and very stylized. It’s a very interesting contrast, and I imagine some will be turned off of it just because it’s so different from even other 3D CG anime, but it works very well for what the show is trying to do, and I would not be at all surprised if Girls Band Cry ends up influencing other anime to attempt a similar style.

So, you may ask, what is the show trying to do? A fairly simple underdog story about rock bands, so far, but it’s doing it with a real, competitive vigor that’s all the more important because of where and when this is airing.

Our main character is Iseri Nina [Uchiyama Rina], newly arrived in Tokyo*, and apparently fleeing a somewhat difficult home situation, although the details are vague. Following the compass of some online hearsay, she, after a series of minor mishaps, catches a street performance by her favorite musician, Kawaragi Momoka [Yuuri]. Momoka is a former member of and songwriter for a group called Diamond Dust. They’re broken up now, and Momoka and Nina happen to meet after the latter awkwardly introduces herself to and professes her fandom of the former. Hijinks ensue, wherein Momoka is chased from her spot by a pair of punk-looking people, who she promptly flips off as Momoka and Nina, who finds herself caught up in all this, flee together. Momoka also happens to flip the double birdies to their pursuers, beginning both a running gag and an honest-to-god visual motif that I really hope the series keeps coming back to, because it’s funny and earnest in a way that centers the entire narrative.

Nina and Momoka develop a fast friendship, and as they learn about each others’ woes (Nina’s buttoned-up home life, Momoka’s falling out with her bandmates over a song ownership dispute), Momoka lets it slip that she’s moving away the very next day. Obviously, this doesn’t really happen. Nina, who is left Momoka’s guitar, pursues her, and with the unlikely help of the same punks that chased Momoka off earlier, convinces her to stay, and they put on an impromptu street performance that ends the episode. The real lingering message is the one Nina shouts into the crowd while trying to get Momoka’s attention in the show’s closing minutes;

What helps sell this whole unlikely, delightfully cartoony story, is that the motivation for Nina moving to Tokyo in the first place isn’t some grand ambition, it’s just a feeling that she doesn’t belong. As somebody who also moved halfway across the country to get away from family who just Kind of Don’t Get It, I am immediately and immensely sympathetic to her plight. This is admittedly a stretch, but given her reaction to learning that Momoka’s roommate is a gay man, I think she might be queer and closeted, possibly even to herself. I’ll admit that present textual evidence is minimal, but the situation makes the shoe fit. More generally, and even if that turns out to not be the case, there’s a real sense of earnest sincerity to the show’s pop-tough-guy fuck-the-world attitude. “Punk” is a meaningless descriptor in 2024, but the show is genuinely doing something pretty different here, and I think that counts for a lot on its own.

Because while its story is straightforward the way in which it’s delivered sets Girls Band Cry apart from its peers. When Nina is upset, she literally seethes prickly red particles. When she first hears Momoka’s song on the street, the first chord becomes a physical smear of pure blue that wafts over to her ears. When she hears Momoka sing, it’s with such force that an explosion of rock glass erupts behind her. None of these things physically happen, but the show’s willingness to illustrate feelings as though they were literal events is very striking. It also puts it in direct conversation with that other rule-bending underdog story about the power of music airing right now, Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. In a battle of the bands setup, I still think Jellyfish might win, but it’s not really a competition in that way. (And both shows are still very early on in terms of episode count, so who knows where things will eventually end up.)

It might sort of be a competition in another sense, though. Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article about the state of the then-omnipresent idol girl group genre. In the nineteen months since then, that entire format of anime, quite contrary to my prediction in that article, has virtually disappeared. The only idol anime airing right now is THE IDOLM@STER: SHINY COLORS, and of the type that we normally think of when the term “idol anime” comes up, it’s the only one slated to air this year at all, every other example being a movie, a spinoff, or shows which fall outside of the traditional format (like Oshi no Ko‘s second season or, on the other end of things, kids’ anime Himitsu no AiPri). I bring this up not to make the claim that idol anime are dead necessarily, but to underline that there does seem to be some kind of shift occurring, as we move back to the similar but markedly less formulaic girls band genre. Once (BOCCHI THE ROCK!) is a fluke. Twice (the aforementioned MyGO) is coincidence. Three times is a trend. What’s remarkable is that despite these shows all being very different, there’s a running thread of visual experimentation that makes them exciting. If these two facts really are connected, then it’s a damn good time to think girls playing guitars are pretty cool. The rocker girls are back, and if this wave continues, they just might be the future.

^{1: Technically the place she moves in to is just outside of Tokyo, but even in-text, this is acknowledged as splitting hairs. A bit like the Chicago / Chicagoland distinction where I live.}

Posted on April 6, 2024April 7, 2024 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: JELLYFISH CAN’T SWIM IN THE NIGHT, But With The Moon on Them, They Can Shine

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 think most people know that jellyfish aren’t fish. They’re cnidarians, part of an ancient order of primitive animals that date back to the earliest days of multicellular life on earth. Perhaps because of their ancient origins, or simply because they’ve never been pressured otherwise, jellyfish do not actually swim per se. They have no muscles with which to do so. Instead, jellyfish are carried along by the ocean’s currents. Clearly, this has worked out just fine for them, but what any one person might make of that situation is going to vary. When you see the jellyfish, do you see something hapless, or something that just needs a little help to get going?

This question, of course as a metaphor, is central to Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night, which, over the course of one of the year’s strongest premieres, establishes itself as a fairly unique take on an old, old story in the TV anime format. Jellyfish is not technically an idol show—indeed, the industry seems to be moving away from those over the past year or so, and Jellyfish here premiered on the same day as another non-idol music anime, Girls Band Cry—but it shares much of the DNA of one. Specifically, a kind of starry-eyed, emotionally-driven resonance, which it spins into an underdog story about the difficulty of pursuing your passions against the backdrop of a world that may be apathetic or actively hostile to your attempts to do so, not to mention the specter of self-doubt, a force that should not be underestimated.

Jellyfish‘s visual techniques are varied and are all applied very well. Chiefly, the show seems focused on cementing a solid sense of place early on, nighttime Shibuya rendered as a concrete but also almost supernatural nexus of nocturnal vibe, where anything seems possible if you reach out to touch it, and you can truly be yourself. The directing on this thing, courtesy of Takeshita Ryouhei (recently also known for the Paldean Winds ONAs), is nothing short of incredible. Our protagonist, Kouzuki Mahiru [Itou Miku], is an uncomplicated but fully-realized character, she is near-literally haunted by flashbacks throughout the opening episode, as they manifest in front of her as glowing apparitions of her former self and her friends. She has involved daydreams that interrupt the flow of the episode, only to be waved off or rewound back like a video tape; daydreams where she worries about a future as a “nobody”, or emotional outbursts she’s too self-conscious to actually have. (As a fellow serial imaginer, and hell, a fellow nobody, I sympathize.)

Mahiru used to be an artist. She isn’t anymore, but as we learn throughout the course of the first episode, after arguments with her sister about makeup, funny socks and TikTok influencers, and in-between hashing out tentative Halloween plans with her friends, she used to be an artist. Once, when she was a child, a drawing of hers was even selected to be made into a mural, a mural that still stands in the show’s version of Shibuya up to the present day; a sprawling tangle of bold lines and colors that, of course, form a jellyfish. Her friends, as kids often do, saw the mural and made fun of it, not knowing it was hers. This single act was enough to completely uproot her self-esteem, and eventually she takes a marker and scribbles over her own “Original Concept by:” credit on the mural. Thus rendered anonymous, it clings to a city wall, disowned but not disappearing.

As part of the landscape, it becomes a backdrop for—we must assume—many things, but the most relevant is a street performance by a random indie idol named Miiko [Uesaka Sumire]. Mahiru doesn’t much appreciate said performance using her mural as a backdrop, but can’t muster up the nerve to say anything. After all, it would, in her own words, take a real “hot-blooded weirdo” to speak up in the middle of a concert.

So of course, one does.

Yamanouchi Kano [Takahashi Rie] is, in terms of attitude, everything Mahiru is not. But she used to be something, too; an idol herself, part of a group called the Sunflower Dolls, in her case. We later learn that her departure from her chosen field was, unlike Mahiru’s, involuntary. (These things tend to happen when you deck another girl in your group, a murky incident we’re not given many details on here and which I’m willing to bet will form a strong running B-plot throughout the whole show.)

It’s a little funny to see a show frame street heckling as a powerful, heroic act, but in-context and in the moment, it really is. Mahiru comes off as a little mystified by Kano, but she’s clearly taken by her, and it’s very easy to read the relationship that almost immediately takes hold here as something more intense than simple admiration if you’re so inclined, but what’s truly important is that this provides a seed for Mahiru to realize that she wants to pursue art again.

She’s not the only one; Kano has a thing going on as an utaite¹ despite being blackballed by the idol industry proper. She does this under the name JELEE, providing another, marginally more literal meaning to the show’s title. Naturally the end of the episode sees the two combining their powers, but this takes some doing.

It’s clear that Mahiru’s insecurity, while it might stem from a single obvious cause, has since grown beyond it, and when Kano initially tries to get Mahiru to join her, she literally runs away, spouting a fountain of excuses and retreating to the relative anonymity of the evening train. Encountering Kano again, during Halloween night, while once again in Shibuya, gives Mahiru the final push. Once again, the pair encounter Miiko. Once again, she’s performing in front of the mural, this time covering “Colorful Moonlight”, a song Kano wrote during her days in the Sunflower Dolls. Once again, Kano tells her off. This time, though, things go a step further. Borrowing an acoustic guitar and stepping into the performer’s spotlight herself, Kano begins singing her version of the song, here stripped down to just guitar and vocals.

This marks the first time we hear the song unobscured, and this is where Mahiru finally frees herself of her own anxieties, even if only temporarily. She draws behind Kano, making huge, swooping lines with a stick of lipstick, she marks up her own mural with googly eyes; making it look like the jellyfish from the logo of Kano’s youtube channel. This whole thing is being livestreamed, and thus, JELEE ceases to be one person, and becomes a collective; what Mahiru cannot accomplish on her own, she finds is possible in the company of Kano, someone who stokes her creative fires and inspires her. On that beautifully-executed note, the episode ends.

^{Not long after this incredibly important shot.}

I’ve glossed over and simplified much in the recapping of this episode’s actual plot, because in some ways the literal events take a distant backseat to the emotional beats. I haven’t had space to mention the brilliant little scene near the beginning where Mahiru hesitantly chooses between an angel or devil costume, only for Kano—who we haven’t met yet—to snatch up the devil without a second thought. I haven’t talked about the series’ use of symbols; jellyfish obviously, but also lipstick as a signifier for all things simultaneously “adult” and ruthlessly constraining, a sort of deliberate inversion of how a lot of anime for young girls use that same symbol, the use of video effects to emphasize the artificiality (and thus lack of consequence) of Mahiru’s daydreams. Ultimately, the thing is that these are details, and while there is a lot going on in Jellyfish and such details greatly enhance it, it is very clearly a big-picture show. That’s why it feels like there really is something special about the idea of not an idol anime or a girls’ band anime but an artist collective anime. Something too to the idea that the lead is not even the singer, but the visual artist. (Our eventual other two members of this troupe are a VTuber and a pianist, who knows how that’s going to work? I’m excited to find out!)

This is not a perfect premiere—what is?—some of the dialogue is a little strained, and I would really like to see the camera be a bit less leery going forward, but these feel like such minor complaints compared to the pure pulse of breathtaking energy that is the rest of the premiere.

Jellyfish, in a word, is hyperactive. Eager to make you look at its murals and songs, its nighttime Shibuya, the strong, instantly-formed shock-of-destiny relationship between its two leads, its flashy camera tricks and video effects, its characters, its idea that everyone has a song inside of them. This is a show that wants to impress you. “Isn’t all this beautiful?” It asks, and the wonderful thing is that it’s completely right; it is.

Posted on April 6, 2024 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: ASTRO NOTE Isn’t Quite Out of This World

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.

Just because of the sheer number of people on the planet, there must be someone, somewhere, who tuned into Astro Note‘s premiere while knowing literally nothing about it. This person, I must imagine, was faintly confused. Not as much as they’d’ve been by Train to The End of The World‘s premiere earlier this week, but still pretty puzzled. Fakeout openings are nothing new in shows like this, but the disconnect between Astro Note‘s first minute or so—a retro sci-fi pastiche complete with space suits and ray guns—and the rest of its premiere episode, is pretty funny. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that this is the funniest thing about it, which when the actual main aim of your show is to be a romcom, is kind of a problem. On the other hand, as is always the case, I tend to not want to judge shows that are clearly Doing Something too harshly.

Let’s set the question of quality aside for right now. Astro Note‘s actual premise is thus; Goutokuji Mira [Uchida Maaya], an alien from the planet Wido, escapes a firefight and takes refuge on Earth, of course in Japan, sometime in the 21st century. There, she bumbles her way into ownership of a share house, the Astro Lodge, which has, as a living perk, free daily breakfasts. (Is this a real thing? I have no idea, probably!) The building’s tenants, a cast of colorful archetypes rendered with varying levels of success and clarity, demand she find them a new cook, since Mira’s own cooking is more or less inedible. Yes, a good chunk of this episode’s setup is based around one of the oldest jokes in the format. At the very least, said inedible food is not literally just rendered as purple gloop this time around.

She puts out a for-hire ad, which as it turns out is completely full of lies and other made-up things. (She’s an alien, which her housemates of course do not know, so she doesn’t know how job listings work. Obviously.) Nonetheless, they attract an applicant, our male lead Miyasaki Takumi [Saitou Souma], who first encounters Mira when she nearly falls off the Astro Lounge’s roof. He catches her, giving us our obligatory Meet Cute moment, and only then does he find out that she’s more or less in charge of this place.

Since the job posting was full of lies, Takumi cannot actually get the position, but he stays at Astro Lounge anyway, serving as the house’s daily breakfast chef regardless. Why? Because Mira is pretty, and he’s talked into it by two of the other tenants.

Fair enough, I suppose, but it seems like a lot of convulsion to get us to Step 1 of our romcom setup. The remainder of the episode is spent on Takumi settling in, interacting with the various other tenants, and getting a good idea of just how strange Mira is.

If the non-sci-fi portions of this premise seem familiar, and you’re someone with a decent command of 80s anime, that’s because this series appears to be heavily riffing on Takahashi Rumiko‘s Maison Ikkoku, which had a TV anime that ran for nearly a hundred episodes back in the Cold War era. I will admit that I’m not really familiar with that series beyond its basic premise, but I am assured that there are a number of references in this series to that one, despite the fact that they’re not officially “related” in any way. (You can draw a loose analogue here to how last season’s Brave Bang Bravern was heavily drawing from the Brave series of mecha anime despite not actually being part of it.) The most obvious of these is the name of Mira’s species itself; “Wido”, as in, a homophone for “widow,” which the female lead of Maison Ikkoku actually was, a mistake that Takumi makes when he overhears Mira talking to her dog—actually her superior from Wido—late at night.

Building on previous texts is all well and good, but this show still has to stand on its own two legs, and this is where I start to doubt Astro Note. A romcom needs to succeed at either the rom or the com to be tolerable, and ideally it should be good at both. So far, most of the humor in Astro Note is fairly rote and will be familiar to anyone who’s seen any character-driven comedy anime of the past several decades. This is hardly the worst I’ve ever seen some of these jokes done, but I have nonetheless seen them before; the hapless woman who can’t cook, the fish out of water who doesn’t know what these ‘Smart Phones’ and ‘Films’ you speak of are, the precocious kid who’s too smart for his own good, the scumbag cheapskate salaryman (who in this case is actually just unemployed full stop), the vicious little dog whose anger seems too big for its small body, the idol who’s a real piece of work in person. And so on, and so forth.

Now, is an anime (or any piece of art or entertainment) necessarily obligated to reinvent the wheel? Well, no, of course not, it just has to succeed at what it’s trying to do. Some of Astro Note‘s gags work better than others; it’s almost certainly just because I’m a sucker for the archetype, but I do find Matsubara Teruko, the aforementioned jackass idol, pretty amusing. (She’s voiced by Furihata Ai, AKA Ruby from Love Live!, which may help sell the joke for some.)

To my own surprise, I also liked Wakabayashi Tomihiro, the salaryman character [Sugita Tomokazu], whose blatant dickbaggery is so audacious that it can wrap back around to funny, given the right circumstance. These things are all matters of taste, though, and I imagine how willing you are to watch characters that you’ve almost certainly seen versions of before interact is going to drive how much slack you’re willing to give Astro Note.

And really, the question of how much slack to give the show is hounding me a bit, here. I feel like I’m being too mean and too lenient at the same time. On the one hand, no one wants to ever be accused of Not Getting It, so I am going out of my way to establish that I am aware that the show is deliberately working within a restrained, older format, and I think it does sometimes succeed within that format. On the other hand, this is a pretty busy season already, and it’s only going to get busier. Should anyone really be setting aside an extra 20 minutes of their own time each week to watch a show whose first episode could be charitably described as “decent”? I’m honestly not sure!

The show’s visuals are worth checking in on here, since that’s about the only thing I’ve not addressed. I suspect that these, too, will be divisive. Astro Note is definitely colorful and solidly-composed, which puts it a cut above anything actually bad (and feels like an oasis in the desert after a full season of watching Ishura and the like), but where we get into odder territory are the character designs. Some are pretty good; Mira is cute, and her curling hair is a nice visual touch that nods to the show’s inspirations. Our male lead is inoffensive but also visually a bit bland in a way that’s unfortunately inescapable with almost any male romcom lead. I actually quite like Teruko’s design both in and out of her idol getup, and the other designs range from decent to a bit offputting. I would’ve liked to see the retro influence come through a bit stronger in this area, and maybe they still will in characters we’ve not met yet, as the ED seems to allude to, but still. Also, at two distinct points, Mira is bowing and the camera is angled such that we’re staring at her ass. This is the kind of thing that would be excusable if the mood the show was going for was “horny,” but it seems to be aiming much more for cute and funny, so it’s just kind of offputting.

All told, and for me personally, I turn to the old post-2000s anime fan standby of the three-episode rule, which despite its name is more of a tentative suggestion. It’s good for anime of a couple different kinds, one of which is something like this, where it’s not clear whether its disparate elements are going to cohere in any substantial way, and how good at paying off its setups it’s going to be. Even then; this is a comedy anime, not Madoka Magica, so if someone were inclined to just write it off right here, I’d get that too. Certainly, I know people who I’m quite sure are going to like this a lot less than I did, and that’s even accounting for the fact that I’m only lukewarm on it. I’ve seen some other reviewers call it “dated” and I don’t think that’s entirely fair, it’s clearly attempting to be a deliberate throwback. But being retro can only get you so far.

Will Astro Note appear in the pages of Magic Planet Anime again? Certainly, that would be nice, but unless it does more with its central romance, or really picks up the pace with regard to its comedy, I don’t see myself finishing the series. On the other hand, who knows? The closing shots of this episode promise to lean more into the sci-fi elements, which could help build Astro Note a distinct identity apart from the show it’s riffing on, and would be one way to paper over some of the elements of the series so far that don’t work.

^{Birds aren’t real. They’re tools of the bourgeoise.}

So who can say? Maybe next week it will really blast off. Stranger things have happened, on this planet and on many others.

Posted on April 1, 2024April 5, 2024 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: 30 Stops to Ikebukuro – What Even is TRAIN TO THE END OF THE WORLD?

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.

Consider the train. Trains connect places, and therefore people. They shorten distances, enabling the average person to travel far and wide with relatively little of the immense pain that travel was in pre-industrial times. Nonetheless, trains aren’t cars. You can’t pick where you’re going to go; if it’s not somewhere on the line, you’re never going to get there. In this way, trains are both freeing and restrictive. They will get you where you want to go, but only if where you want to go is along a predetermined path. You know, like college.

I can’t prove it, but I have an inkling that this dichotomy was the genesis of Train to The End of The World (more snappily known as just Shuumatsu Train in some corners), or at least a small part of that genesis. Shuumatsu Train kicks the spring season off¹, notably, as an original production. So we’re all on the same page, equally travelling blind to wherever this railcar happens to take us, which is an inarguable positive for something that’s as out-there as this series is already shaping up to be. It comes to us from EMT Squared, who have been around for a while, and in fact, they also made Fluffy Paradise, the first anime I covered here on Magic Planet Anime last season, but are certainly not a household name. More immediately interesting to your average anime viewer may be the resume of director Mizushima Tsutomu, an industry lifer with a truly odd body of work. What sweeping statements can you make about the guy who directed Squid Girl, ANOTHER, Witchcraft Works, most of Girls und Panzer, Shirobako, and Joshiraku, among other things? If nothing else, you can’t pigeonhole the man. For reasons like its eclectic staff, and also its rather bizarre first key visual, it was hard to know what to expect from Shuumatsu Train. In a way, that’s exciting; some of last season’s best anime were originals (I am here thinking mainly of super robot pastiche / self-effacing yaoibait comedy Brave Bang Bravern! and superpowered delinquent punch-up Bucchigiri?!), so it would be great to see things continue in that direction.

However, the main question Shuumatsu Train wants to answer, as it begins, is “what would happen if a spam pop-up ad could abduct you in real life?” This is just one part of what I can wholeheartedly call one of the absolute goddamn weirdest pre-OP introductory scenes I’ve ever seen. A girl enters a train station, en route to it’s-not-really-important, and is promptly met with cheers, because she’s the 77,777th person to enter the train station that day. This, of course, means that she is immediately snatched up by a mobile owl statue and deposited at the top of a building. There, a black-and-silver-haired huckster named Pontaro Poison implores her to push a huge shiny button labeled “7G.” 7G, as you can surely intuit, is the successor to 6G, the successor to 5G, the communication standard. 7G, the huckster explains, allows us to “instantly broadcast” our thoughts and “make visions real.” After some chiding, the girl presses the button, an the world promptly dissolves into a surreal hell of abstract buildings, psychedelic colors, and warped faces. Cut to opening credits!

When we return from the admittedly very nice title sequence, two years have passed and the world has fallen into an incredible state of disrepair, and in the city of Agano, almost everyone has turned into animals. If Shuumatsu Train makes a mistake in its opening episode, it might be that the entire rest of it takes place here, in a setting that is certainly weird but doesn’t measure up to the sheer WTF factor of those first couple of minutes. It’s actually a bit tempting to say that the series overexplains itself a bit, because, courtesy of our narrator and main character Shizuru [Anzai Chika], we get a clean rundown of what actually happened. As one might guess, the present state of the world was indeed caused by the launch of this mysterious 7G Network. Here, it happens that folks from the area turn into animals at the age of 21 and 3 months. The town’s populace thus consists of a few relatively ordinary high school girls and a whole bunch of talking animals, at least a few of whom are struggling to hang on to the mental faculties they still have, and one of them, a sun bear, briefly leaps at one of the girls in a short but fairly uncomfortable scene.

It should be noted that this is said to be a state of affairs unique to Agano. Other regions have different, and, it’s implied, more overtly dangerous problems to deal with. Also, one guy has inexplicably remained physically human but can only run around making choo-choo noises, keep him in mind.

Now, it might be tempting to claim that Shuumatsu Train has scuttled its own mysteries right out of the gate here. But given how this information is presented to us, it doesn’t seem like the series is terribly bent on building up that sort of mystery. As becomes clear over its first episode, Shuumatsu Train is an adventure series first and foremost. Despite its bizarre premise, the series makes legible gestures toward themes of growing up in an indifferent world that is spiraling into chaos, a core that resonates not in spite of being buried under layers of surreality, but because of those layers.

For example; Shizuru and her friends, Reimi [Erisa Kuon], Akira [Kino Hina], and Nadeshiko [Waki Azumi], each take a different approach to coping with the strange state of the world they live in, exemplified by the goods they ask for from a caravan of armored trucks that visits the town once a month (apparently the last remaining of what was once several such caravans). This is most obvious with Reimi, who Akira not-entirely-incorrectly accuses of being an escapist, who dresses herself in gyaru fashion and wants cute manga and anime magazines to peruse. Akira, meanwhile, is cynical and often makes rude remarks, coming off as more than a little self-important. Accordingly, the book she asks for is an occult treatise by Japanese writer Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (I can’t quite figure out if it’s a real occult treatise or not. I’ll confess to not having been familiar with the man before now). Nadeshiko, meanwhile, seems adrift and aimless, and can’t even recall why she wanted the item she receives from the delivery company, a potted sweet myrtle plant, in the first place.²

Shizuru, meanwhile, has spent the past two years searching for her missing friend Youka [Touyama Nao]. If you’d hazard a guess that Youka is probably the girl from the pre-credits scene, you’d be completely correct, and nothing so innocuous as a random scrap of newspaper used as package stuffing for Nadeshiko’s plant gives Shizuru her first lead as to where Youka might be in years. The newspaper contains a photo on its front page, and Youka is in that photo. The problem? The photo was taken in Ikebukuro, far enough away that one would need to take a fairly lengthy train ride to get there. Running to show Youka’s grandmother, now an elderly guinea pig, this photo of her only granddaughter, Shizuru narrates; the distance between train stops has gotten much, much larger since the world went haywire.

Nonetheless, Shizuru is determined, because the last time she and Youka spoke, they had the kind of friendship-obliterating argument that can haunt you for the rest of your life. Her determination only grows when she discovers an unused train resting on the tracks while having her dog sniff out a cap lost by Zenjirou [Okitsu Kazuyuki], the aforementioned train noises guy. (He manages to just barely strain the word “cap” out, the only time in the whole episode he actually talks in this form.) By putting the conductor’s cap on his head, Zenjirou temporarily reverts to a youthful, vigorous appearance, during which time he mostly rages at “Pontaro,” from which we can conclude he’s a colleague of the huckster from the opening. Or a former colleague, given how angry he seems to be at the guy. And how Pontaro gave him a lobotomy. Such things have a way of destroying friendships.

With a lead on her friend’s location and her mind made up, and now possessing the means and approximate knowledge of how to operate this metal chariot, she promptly drops out of “school” (a tiny class consisting of herself and her friends, taught by an iguana), and attempts to make for Ikebukuro solo. Of course, her friends, for all their differences, won’t stand for that, and they all end up following her as the train’s sign flips over with its destination. Suddenly, the show’s English title makes a perfect sense; Ikebukuro is not the physical edge of the planet, but it is certainly the end of the world in another sense.

I’ve said a lot about Shuumatsu Train here, but honestly there’s also a ton I didn’t mention. The visuals are largely good, although the directing is a bit strange in a way that’s difficult to precisely place my finger on. More pertinently, they’re packed with subtle details that aren’t directly pointed out. When the caravan arrives, the handler who distributes the packages to the girls has an eyepatch, and the heavily-armored trucks are covered in bloody handprints, some of which are quite clearly not human.

There are also many bits and bobs crammed into the worldbuilding; the fact that the 7G Network delivers something that may or may not be electricity, but not enough of it to reconstruct life as it was before the disaster, exemplified by the fact that the Internet and traditional phone networks can no longer be powered, but the low-power, short-distance PHS System, a delightfully obscure piece of real-world communication tech, still works. Sharpening the already-present theme of coming of age in defiance of a world going to hell, there’s a detail early on where Shizuru gets a lecture from her iguana teacher about how she can’t just fill out all of her “plans for the future” worksheets with “I Want To Look For Her,” a heartbreaking bit of miniature characterization that only hurts more as the episode goes on.

Also, the show’s character comedy is mostly pretty funny; Reimi and Akira are introduced having a conversation that feels ripped from a manzai routine. As the series goes on, and likely gets heavier, bright spots like that will become more and more essential.

All of this to say; this is clearly a show with a ton of ideas, and while it’s always a gamble as to whether or not any given work will actually stick the landing, just having so much to chew on from the first episode alone is a great sign. Wherever this train is going, I’m confident the ride will be worthwhile.

^{1: Technically, the season started yesterday with the premiere of Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included. But I didn’t cover that! So we’re not counting it. 🙂}

^{2: There is almost certainly some layer of additional symbolism here with the choice of this plant specifically, as Akira directly calls attention to it before being cut off. A quick sojourn to Wikipedia tells me that there are two plants known by this common name, one of which is psychoactive and the other of which is used in chemotherapy, among other things. I think this particular shrub is the latter. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from that, but the fact that the show made me want to go look this up is a good thing in of itself.}

Posted on March 8, 2024March 8, 2024 in anime, Manga, Misc. Anime, Other Posts

Remembering Akira Toriyama

^{Header image from IMDB}

“The future of the planet is in your hands, may you fight with honor.”

When it comes to one’s personal journey through the world of anime and manga, every story is different. But, for many of my generation, those stories have a very similar start. It’s something like this; huddled in front of a slightly too-small CRT every weekday afternoon, you are transported to craggy canyons or alien worlds. Punches and kicks with planet-shattering force are thrown. Kiai yelled with immense force. Beams and blasts streak through the sky. If you’re lucky, you might get to hear a classic “ka-me-ha-me ha!” or see a character literally glow with power as they go Super Saiyan. This was, is, and will always be Dragon Ball Z. For many, many children, it was their first introduction to anime as a concept; if not the literal first—Pokémon beat it to the punch for me personally by a few months—it was definitely one of the first. That matters, and it’s the reason Dragon Ball, and Akira Toriyama‘s work in general, continues to hold such a strong grip on the popular imagination.

As you likely already know, Toriyama himself, the man responsible for that gateway into this wonderful world, passed away earlier this month, as per this announcement yesterday. This is the part of growing up that’s often danced around; as you get older, your childhood heroes will pass away. The paradigm-shifting shonen mangaka responsible for Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and a number of other works (perhaps most prominently, character art for classic JRPGs Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, gag manga Dr. Slump, and latter-day work Sand Land, which is receiving an anime in just a few weeks), is not the first such icon to pass on, and he won’t be the last, but that doesn’t make it hurt less. Not when the man contributed something so important to so many of us.

Toriyama’s work is of such impact that terms like “iconic” are rendered cheap in their usage. The man designed and drew Goku, perhaps the single most recognizable superhero figure on the planet after Superman himself, and to an extent, that is the kind of achievement that speaks for itself. Shonen manga before and after the success of Dragon Ball Z are notably different things, and the man’s influence can be felt when reading basically any contemporary action-shonen to this very day, either directly, or indirectly via the generation of mangaka that Toriyama influenced, the most prominent of whom are likely One Piece‘s Eiichiro Oda and Naruto‘s Masashi Kishimoto.

His work in video games should not be neglected either; as many have pointed out, much of the modern Japanese “western fantasy” aesthetic can be traced, either directly or indirectly, to Toriyama¹, via his work on Dragon Quest. Because of this, his influence extends to almost the entire modern genre of fantasy anime and manga. That this fact could be considered his secondary legacy speaks to the enormity of Toriyama’s contributions to Japanese, and indeed, global popular culture (just ask anyone from Latin America). This is without even getting into more marginal but still important stuff; the legions of Linkin Park / Dragon Ball Z AMVs that dotted early video-sharing websites, Dragon Ball Z Abridged as a foundational piece of internet humor, the very fact that “it’s over 9000!” was one of the first internet memes, a proudly irreverent tradition that continues to the present day (and one I like to imagine that Toriyama, originally known for Dr. Slump, appreciated on some level if he knew about it). The man was a legend, plain and simple; if you’re a nerd of a certain age, his work was inescapable.

I do feel that I’m perhaps getting away from why I wrote this column in the first place, which was to share my personal experience. Without getting so into it that it’s inappropriate, watching Dragon Ball Z with my stepfather is one of relatively few happy memories I have of the man; he’s still around, but we are, fair to say, estranged, and haven’t spoken in years. Of Toonami‘s main lineup, DBZ was the one show he didn’t find either too kiddish or faintly baffling, and I remember watching the earlier parts of the series with him on his VHS set with the bold, cheddar-y orange covers. (Later, he got a separate set with the “uncut” versions and we watched those as well, much to the displeasure of my mom.) Even as the show itself progressed on Toonami, we would occasionally watch episodes together, and I remember in particular enjoying the later parts of the Cell Saga with him. My experience is not, in any way, unique. It is the experience of literally thousands and thousands of people across the planet, all united by the cultural current that was Dragon Ball. That is why Toriyama, and his work, are special, and why the world is just that much darker without him in it.

I am cognizant of the fact that anything I have written or could write here is not going to be “enough,” just like any one person’s words are not going to be “enough.” My hope is that by telling you this and by sharing my own experiences, I can be part of a chorus of tributes and outpourings, a veritable Spirit Bomb of remembrance. I think Oda, who, in an obituary post, compared Toriyama to a great tree, said it best. Trees, when they finally fall to the forest floor, continue to nourish the communities around them even after they’re gone. In the same way, Toriyama is not truly dead, because the spirit of his work lives on.

^{1: I must admit with some embarrassment—but also with proper credit!—that this hadn’t immediately occurred to me, and it took being mentioned in this tumblr post for the idea to fully sink in. Still, this shuttershocky person is absolutely correct.}

Rest in peace Akira Toriyama, 1955-2024

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Remembering Akira Toriyama