Posted on July 10, 2022July 12, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) I Would’ve Written a Review, But SHIKIMORI’S NOT JUST A CUTIE

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

Sometimes I open these reviews by calling something unusual, weird, or peculiar. This is not one of those times; Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, a romcom from this already romcom-saturated year, is pretty normal. It’s about a pretty normal pair of high school sweethearts, who attend a pretty normal (by anime standards) high school, and have a relationship that is, all around, pretty normal. This is neither a strength nor a weakness, on its own, but it’s worth keeping in mind what we’re actually looking at here.

Even compared to, say, the also fairly conventional My Dress-Up Darling from just a season prior, much about Shikimori is very much standard for its genre. There are really only two axes along which it will catch any interest; for one, the couple are actually dating even from the very start of the story, admittedly a bit of a rarity for the genre. For two; Shikimori herself (Saori Oonishi) is….well, cool. Princely, as more than one character puts it. The series goes out of its way to suggest that, between her and her boyfriend, the easily-flustered shortstop Izumi (Shuichirou Umeda), she’s actually the more masculine of the two. (This despite being shorter and having pastel pink hair. It’s mostly a vibe thing, and it’s usually sold pretty well.)

An important thing to note is that Shikimori began life as a series of Twitter comics. In their original form, Shikimori’s “coolness” was essentially the punchline to a joke. A very simple subversion of expectations that works well in that format.

As such, while Shikimori and Izumi, as well as their supporting cast, are definitely decently-written, both they individually and the anime on the whole feel underdeveloped. The main pair are cute together and I buy that they’re in love—I get why she likes him and why he likes her, which is important—but there is just a little something missing. And over the course of the anime adaption, that absence becomes more and more pronounced, even in the show’s best episodes.

But, let’s focus on the positives first. As mentioned, while most of the characters fall into broad archetypes they are at least competent executions on them. Shikimori genuinely does come across as pretty cool, and maybe even a little intimidating. Izumi seems nice, and is a total softie in an endearing way. Their main group of three friends includes a chummy hothead (Shuu Inuzuka; played by Nobuhiko Okamoto), a feisty wildcat who’s good at sports and also herself seems to have something of a thing for Shikimori (Kyou Nekozaki; Misato Matsuoka), and a stoic, somewhat snarky lovable weirdo (Yui Hachimitsu; Rina Hidaka). All are solid, and it’s fun to watch them interact.

^{Magic Planet Anime understands the glory of Hachimitsu.}

Visually, the series is excellent, directed by a team that includes many staff who will eventually be making the Oshi No Ko anime. They breathe a sense of vibrancy into the school life setting that really does make it feel like a real, present place, and the set design in particular contributes a lot to that. Watching it, you can practically feel the Sun illuminating your face as you walk through the school courtyard. It takes talent to do that, and that talent is worth pointing out and respecting. And at times, it does manage to be genuinely romantic, with relative mundanities like theater and theme park dates blown up big enough that you can really immerse yourself in the emotions they convey. In these moments, when Shikimori is essentially at its peak, it does a good job of that.

And I really wish I could say those moments defined the whole show, that Shikimori lived up to such strong visual work, but mostly they don’t and it doesn’t. It’s pleasant, it’s decent fun, but it is rarely anything more than that, despite these highlights.

Fundamentally, it’s unfair to say any of Shikimori‘s strengths are in some way insufficient because it fails to measure up to some imagined version of what it could be. Things like that are pat and they’re rarely particularly substantial. Yes, Shikimori would be a bit more interesting if, say, Izumi was a girl (he wouldn’t need much of a design change to pass), but a criticism that basic misses the fact that Shikimori is routinely unwilling to commit to even its fairly tame level of gender non-conformance. The entire premise of the anime is that Shikimori is a cool, princely type, but just as often, it’s Izumi who is the assertive one in their relationship’s key moments. A trend that continues up until the last episode, where it’s Izumi who plants the couple’s first kiss on….Shikimori’s cheek.

And this would itself be fine if the show had a bit more fire to it. Comparing almost anything to Kaguya-sama: Love is War! is going to make that thing look bad, but it and Shikimori aired in the same season, and (spoilers here) they both have a kiss in the finale. It is telling that Kaguya‘s finale is a heart-pounding hurricane of grand romantic gestures that defy all common sense and reason, and the kiss that caps that episode is a full-on makeout. Shikimori just can’t compete with that kind of thing, even with all the visual panache in the world. It can’t even really compete with the aforementioned Dress-Up Darling, a series that is in many respects much less consistent, but by simply having the running plot of two crazy kids who aren’t dating yet but clearly eventually will be, it feels much more urgent. And, frankly, that show’s unabashed horniness—tasteless as it could often get—feels more reflective of a lived-in teenage experience than Shikimori is. (So does Kaguya, despite its absurd premise and in-theory unrelatable rich kid cast, for that matter.)

As it is, Shikimori is clearly is aiming for a laid-back, iyashikei-esque easy pace. It achieves that, so it’s perhaps even more unfair to complain that that’s “all” it does. But at the same time, this absence of any more substantial emotional weight is highlighted by the show itself, because when it can find a piece of the original story that it can make something truly wild out of, it does so with gusto.

Take, for example, the side character Kamiya (Ayaka Fukuhara).

Kamiya once fell hard for Izumi, too, but no longer pursues him because she knows he’s taken, and she has no chance. Over the course of the episode-ish’s worth of material that focuses on her, she imagines herself as a counterfeit Cinderella, her glass slippers and Prince Charming alike missing.

The series itself bends around her, bringing a rainy overcast to the serene high school rooftop, threatening a Biblical flood. Hers is a deep, dramatic, and messy love. And it demands a story louder, wilder, and more complicated than Shikimori, one that could accommodate the drama that inherently comes along with this kind of thing. But Shikimori is not that story, and her feelings prove too much of a challenge for it to wholly untangle. It’s not coincidental that when her short arc reaches its conclusion, she essentially disappears from the show entirely.

It still feels wrong to judge a series based on what it isn’t, rather than what it is. But the pieces of the show that focus on Kamiya—and other, smaller shards of something that is simply bigger than the rest of the series, always out of shot or between the frames—almost demand you to imagine a world beyond Shikimori‘s fairly limited notion of teenage romance. There is a lot else out there, and on some level, Shikimori knows this. In a few places, it almost seems frustrated with itself, that it cannot truly cut loose from the bounds of its own genre. The most obvious of these is perhaps the OP animation, which depicts a dimension- and genre-hopping pair of micro-vignettes for our lead couple, far removed from the series itself. Including even, perhaps most tellingly, one where there is a token acknowledgement of that same basic criticism I mentioned earlier; a version of the series in which Izumi and Shikimori are both girls.¹

^{These two shots are literally all of Fem!Izumi we ever see, but they raise the question of why she looks so sad and troubled. In this tiny bit of non-verbal characterization, the OP animation establishes that she and Shikimori must have a rather different relationship than that between regular Izumi and Shikimori. The fact that I’m able to write this much about it is ample evidence both that this team is quite talented and that there’s a lack of stuff like this to chew on in the main series.}

What you get, then, is a series that is a warm, personable elevation of what is ultimately very thin material. This isn’t to say that the Shikimori is a bad show—if I thought that I’d say so outright—but its origins as a gimmick strip on Twitter never really stop casting a long shadow over it. And in the end, it comes across as an elaborate expression of a very basic thought; “wouldn’t it be great if I had a tall, cool girlfriend?” Sure, it would be. Lots of people would love that. But you need something beyond that to push it past the realm of the merely cute, and Shikimori can only manage that in frustratingly short bursts. I find it almost impossible to imagine actively disliking Shikimori, but at the end of the day, you are basically watching six hours of fluffy Pixiv fanart.

The ongoing new romcom boom will do weird things to this particular period of anime in the long view of history. It’s hard to say if this show—or My Dress-Up Darling, Komi Can’t Communicate, etc. etc.—will persist particularly long in the public memory. In the case of Shikimori specifically, I rather doubt it. If it picks up a long-term fanbase, it will be a cult one, made up of people for whom the show offered some measure of comfort during difficult situations or simply helped them get through a day. To those people, Shikimori will be a cup of tea during an illness or a cool breeze on a summer day. To everyone else, it will be a pleasant, but half-remembered memory that pops up like a firework into the sky; brilliant for a fleeting moment, and then gone.

1: A correction: A commenter pointed out that this is actually Kamiya, which comparing the screenshots is obvious and I feel a little silly for thinking otherwise. Still, given its juxtaposition with all the alternate universe stuff I think my confusion is a bit more understandable, and my larger point still stands.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

Posted on June 29, 2022April 7, 2023 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) BIRDIE WING -GOLF GIRLS STORY- Just Doesn’t Give a Damn

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

“The Symphogear of Golf”

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

Just accept that it makes no sense. Birdie Wing doesn’t care about your feelings—toward golf or toward anything else—and that includes how serious you think it’s being. This is sports anime as Rorschach Blot, a series that practically dares you to take it on its own terms even as it’s consistently the goofiest fucking thing that aired in its season.

Consider this; it’s ED theme (which I may or may not be listening to as I write this), is the achingly beautiful Tsukuyomi track “Nightjar.” For a series like this, it’s totally incongruous as an ending at first glance; a deeply sincere piece of work attached to an anime that is on its face, absolutely ludicrous. It’s right there in the premise; golf taken as deadly-serious as a shonen martial arts tournament or a mob movie, with all the camp that tonal dissonance implies. Over Birdie Wing‘s criminally short 13-episode first season, lives and livelihoods alike are staked on golf games. Pride is, too, and absolutely all of this is given the same narrative weight. (With one exception, as we’ll get to.)

Somehow, in that ED, when a shot of a golf ball dissolves into the night sky, an eagle cutting a shadowy figure against the moon, it makes a kind of sense. If it’s absurd, it’s not in a bad way at all.

It begins with illegal betting; our protagonist Eve (Akari Kitou) makes what little money she can to support her adoptive family by pulling off impossible shots. Golf balls fire like revolver bullets between moving train cars and lop the limbs off of trees. It’s totally insane, and, in its own way, hilarious. But as Eve meets her rival / golf girlfriend Aoi Amawashi (Asami Seto), and the series continues to tick on, things like that just keep happening. Every time, you expect Birdie Wing to tip its hand and reveal that the entire thing is a joke, but it never does. Not when we’re introduced to Golf Mafia Boss Rose Aleone (Toa Yukinari), not when we see that another mob boss owns an illegal underground course that can physically morph its shape into a new, random course every time, not when Eve’s first major hurdle as a player is a woman with a snake motif named Viper the Reaper (Kaori Nazuka) who tries to psyche her opponents out with a scented tattoo. Not ever. It almost feels like a challenge, Birdie Wing dares you to blink first, because it certainly isn’t going to. About the closest it ever gets is this joke about Eve’s inexplicable, fluent Japanese.

Rose Aleone eventually dies. Seriously, she loses a golf game, and her life is snuffed out in a pastiche of old gangster movies that is way, way better and more genuine than it really seems like it should be. Eve moves to Japan and effectively stars in a second, different, marginally more conventional absurd-serious golf anime for the series’ second half. That shouldn’t really work either. It does too, to the surprise of no one. I’ve barely even found time to mention the flirty toying that Eve and Aoi are constantly engaged in. It definitely slots the series comfortably next to, if not outright in, the yuri genre.

I’ve spent a lot of time describing Birdie Wing and rather little elaborating on my own feelings on it. To tell the truth, because of its nature wherein what one brings to Birdie Wing strongly influences what one takes away from it, I almost think it’s not really meant for people like me. Folks who can’t really shut off the analytical part of their brain even when they’re totally enjoying something. But enjoy it I did, so on the other hand, maybe I’ve been played as thoroughly as any other member of this show’s audience. (In this respect, it very much is like Symphogear, making it the second anime in as many weeks that I’ve reviewed to have some trace of the seminal singing-girls-punch-things anime in it.)

Let me put it this way. Late in the series, we’re introduced to supporting character Kinue Jinguuji (Mai Nakahara). Jinguuji is a fairly classic character in the “had to give up on her dreams because a passion for something is not the same as being good at it” mold, something many other anime have done before and plenty others have done in a way that is, at least on paper, more poignant. But somehow, the fact that Jinguuji’s dream is this—golfing, the most boring sport in the world, and one of the hardest to take seriously—makes what would ordinarily be a light tap feel like a sucker punch. Through sheer commitment to the bit, Birdie Wing will make you care about this.

In the end, the show’s first season ends in a shrug, setting up more plot points than it resolves. Why? Because it knows it’ll return like a golfing T-1000. The 13-episode count was a fakeout, and season two is slated for next winter. What else is there to say? Bury Birdie shallow, it’ll be back.

Update: Season two has premiered! You can read my coverage here.

Posted on June 21, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) To Heaven & Back on a Song: The Soothing World of HEALER GIRL

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

“These are the beautiful miracles sung by humanity.”

The first thing to know is that Healer Girl was inspired by Symphogear. Comparisons between anime rarely do either work any favors, but for Healer Girl, knowing the name of its stylistic ancestors puts some things into perspective. The Symphogear comparison is merely the most recent in a list that also included Macross and, less centrally, G Gundam.

Ostensibly, these are strange bedfellows for what is at its heart an iyashikei series / sometimes-musical. In practice, it makes perfect sense. Like in Symphogear, the music in Healer Girl is not a background element; it’s diegetic, and the very source of the protagonists’ abilities itself. I’ve taken to calling this sort of thing the “dynamic music” genre, perhaps you have some other pet neologism. In either case, understanding that the music is not just a plot element but what the entire work is built around is key to understanding Healer Girl at all. It’s not a complex series, but there is stuff going on here beyond pretty songs.

Take our protagonists. Three young girls; Kana (Carin Isobe), Hibiki (Akane Kumada), and Reimi (Marina Horiuchi). For the majority of the series, they serve as interns at a clinic run by their teacher, Hibiki’s cousin Ria (Ayahi Takagaki).

A clinic, because as Healer Girl quickly establishes, in its world, the power of music is literal. Carefully-applied musical treatments can literally heal injuries, soothe sickness away entirely, and aid in surgery. This sort of there-is-power-in-the-song thing is something idol anime have been flirting with for years but never really commit to. (A personal frustration of mine.) Part of me enjoys Healer Girl just because it has the stones to actually dive into this idea. At twelve episodes, it doesn’t have the time to answer every question I had (I really want to know what healing music looks like around the world, but the show sadly doesn’t really go into it), but maybe it doesn’t need to.

From that central premise, Healer Girl builds a few strong, simple metaphors. Healing music as art is the easiest to understand, and effectively renders the series as a defense of itself. Taken through this lens, the anime is a series of iterative exercises; how much can art really help with? In the first episode, Kana sings a song to a boy who’s scraped his knee to take the pain away. Just three episodes later, the girls assist in a surgery where someone nearly dies on an operating table, and they face the truly harrowing experience of possibly failing to help someone. Much like conventional medicine, healing music definitely has its limits, but also like medicine, it certainly helps. Is this Healer Girl‘s argument, that art can heal the world, if not by itself, at least in a supporting role? It’s a strong reading, and I do think that’s at least partly what the series is going for.

Consider also the show’s actual music. A lot of people—including myself—initially assumed Healer Girl was going to be an idol series, and it is true that there is an associated idol unit, the Healer Girls themselves. But, if we consider it a part of this idol anime lineage, it’s a highly unconventional one, at least for 2022. In style, the Healer Girls are a lot closer to forgotten ’90s American soft-pop sensation Wilson-Phillips than anything presented in, say, its seasonal contemporary Nijigasaki High School Idol Club. More to the point is the presentation; the titular healer girls don’t really dance, and their songs are not performances. They’re tools. And learning how to use those tools forms the show’s other main theme; the passing of knowledge and love from one generation to the next.

Much is made of the girls’ relationship with their mentor Ria, a well-developed character in her own right. Reimi has a cute, one-sided crush on her, and much is made of her incredible skills. (Which we finally get to see in action in episode 9.) Over the course of the series, Ria guides the girls through simply being her pupils toward being healers in their own right. In the show’s finale, it implies via paralleling that Kana may herself one day take students of her own. It’s rare to see teaching and imparting wisdom treated as something beautiful and graceful, but that just makes appreciating it when a show can properly pull it off all the more important.

And look, all this writing about what the show means, and I’ve barely told you anything about why you might want to watch it! The simple truth is that, like most of Studio 3Hz‘s productions, the show is just damn good-looking. It’s beautiful, colorful, wonderfully vibrant, almost a living thing itself, in a way that is truly rare and all too easy to take for granted. That vibrancy makes Healer Girl something to be treasured. Naturally, it translates to the soundtrack as well; Healer Girl is at most half a musical, but enough of the show is sung—including incidental dialogue, in some episodes—that if you enjoy that medium, you’ll like Healer Girl as well.

And on top of that, it’s simply fun to watch. Rarely are anime fans starving for some classic slice-of-life antics, but Healer Girl‘s are a particularly well done set thereof. The show is very funny when it sets its mind to it, and not working in that mode 100% of the time only renders it more amusing when it does.

There’s even a pastiche of an old, old slice of life trope, the obligate “high school rock band” episode—episode 7, here—that’s been sorely lacking from most modern anime for a whole generation at this point. I have to admit, seeing one in this day and age made me nostalgic, so I suppose that’s another emotion that Healer Girl can effortlessly tap into.

Because of this kaleidoscopic emotional approach, Healer Girl‘s characters feel truly alive as well, even comparatively minor ones like the girls from the rival healing clinic (of course there’s a rival healing clinic), Sonia (Chihaya Yoshitake) and Shinobu (Miyu Takagi).

And, of course, we should discuss Healer Girl‘s visual ace in the hole. The girls don’t merely sing; the world changes around them as they do, a literalized, visualized version of the consensus fantasy-reality created by the most powerful music here in the real world. But in Healer Girl‘s universe, it can change the world in a truly direct and immediate way, and these bubbles of magic are called image songs. Episode 9 is the best showcase of them, where we see Ria greatly aid a surgery with hers; she influences literal events by manipulating abstract visual material within the image song. In doing so, she herself is a metaphor for the real impact of art in our own world. It’s a curious, but justified little thematic mobius strip, something that impressively never feels pretentious or self-impressed. Healer Girl knows what it’s doing, maybe that’s why there isn’t a weak episode in the whole thing.

The only real tragedy about Healer Girl is that its strongest moments are those where it instills pure awe in the audience. And that, unfortunately, is not something I’m truly able to replicate in text format. You will just have to take my word for it, that my jaw dropped more than once throughout the show, that I teared up a few times, and that several episodes—particularly episode 5 and the latter half of the finale—left me frustrated, although in a strangely positive way, over my inability to fully convey their emotional impact in mere words. You will just have to see it for yourself, and if you haven’t, I again strongly recommend that you do.

If there’s justice in the world, Healer Girl will be a watershed moment. But even if it inspires nothing, even if this artistic lineage ends here, I find it impossible to imagine that it will ever lose its potency as a work unto itself or, indeed, as a healing tool.

There is often a desire—spoken or not—in seasonal anime watching culture for something to get “another season.” Healer Girl, however, was clearly crafted with just these twelve episodes in mind. That renders the show small, certainly, but it does not rob it of its power. In a way Healer Girl is like the over-the-counter medical records mentioned in the first episode. It will soothe your sickness if you let it; simply rewind the tape and play it all back again. One more time; if you feel it, it’ll heal you.

If you’d like to read more about Healer Girl, consider checking out my Let’s Watch columns on the series.

Posted on April 3, 2022April 3, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Reckoning with MAGIA RECORD: DAWN OF A SHALLOW DREAM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on April 1, 2022April 2, 2022 in anime, Misc. Anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Lost Legacy of FLOWER PRINCESS BLAZE!!: How a Forgotten Toei Series Shaped 15 Years of Magical Girl Anime [April Fools’]

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

“This world was not made for us. But I understand now that it’s the only one we have.”

For most here in the west, the history of Toei‘s forays into the magical girl genre begins with Sailor Moon, a monstrously successful franchise that is widely beloved to this day. If they know a little more, it ends with Pretty Cure, another monstrously successful franchise that is widely beloved to this day. Those with a still more slightly expansive knowledge of the company’s history might also be aware of Ojomajo Doremi, a marginally less successful franchise that is still beloved enough that it spawned a sort of distant sequel film, Looking for Magical Doremi, as recently as 2020, a full fifteen years after its original conclusion. Those who particularly care about the genre might point out that they’ve made all sorts of magical girl anime over the years, including Himitsu no Akko-chan, one of the very first. Regardless, all of these anime get their flowers from those in the know, and none could rightly be called overlooked by anyone with a decent knowledge of the medium.

But the same is not true for every magical girl series they’ve made.

The year is 2006. Futari wa Pretty Cure has just ended its second and final proper season. Alongside Splash Star, a reboot of the Precure IP, Toei launches a second action-oriented magical girl offering; Flower Princess Blaze!!

Time and the language barrier have rendered this decision obscure and puzzling, but in the moment, it must’ve made sense. Splash Star was the “safe bet”, essentially a retuning of the original Pretty Cure concept. Blaze was the wildcard; stranger, more experimental, and airing a bit later in the day. (Perhaps aiming for a slightly older audience–the 10-14 demo, perhaps–than Pretty Cure and its predecessor Doremi did.)

Splash Star has proven divisive over the longview of history, but in the moment, it absolutely crushed its younger sibling in terms of popularity and sales. Flower Princess Blaze did not do badly; it pulled decent ratings and sold decent amounts of tie-in merchandise. But it was nowhere near as successful as Precure, and “decent” only goes so far. That is perhaps why, when its second “season” concluded in late 2008, the IP was shelved.

(Technically, when airing, the show was split into two “seasons” which aired back-to-back with only a short break between them, Flower Princess Blaze and Flower Princess Blaze!!–yes, the exclamation points are the only difference in title–but the distinction is minimal, and the few later releases of the series haven’t made it, applying the second title to the series on the whole and treating its combined 126 episodes as a single, sprawling saga. The only place I’m aware of that still draws a line between the two is Wikipedia.)

To this end, Toei evidently decided their grand experiment had failed, and cut back to just one girls’ anime. Pretty Cure soldiered on and continued to be insanely popular, but its shadowy younger sister disappeared like a thief in the night, never to be heard from again.

Despite this, Flower Princess Blaze has proven to be quietly influential, with a diverse array of artists and industry figures both within the anime medium and without citing it as an inspiration. Puella Magi Madoka Magica‘s soul gems were taken directly from this series in all but name. And not one but two Pretty Cure seasons–Heartcatch and Happiness Charge–would later make fairly obvious homages to some of its villains.

Even outside the specific lineage of Toei magical girl anime, there are nods in works separated by space, time, and even medium; Steven Universe‘s Gem Homeworld draws on the Midnight Kingdom for architectural inspiration, Wish Upon the Pleiades xeroxes its finale outright, Anime-Gataris features the show’s real-life director as an in-show character. Most recently, and perhaps most famously, My Dress-Up Darling licensed the name and worked actual footage from the series into its own plot, giving lead girl Marin a fixation on secondary villain (and fan favorite) Black Robelia, (rendered “Lobelia” in that show’s official subs) whom she cosplays in several episodes.

And yet, in spite of the shadow it casts over the past 15 years of the magical girl genre, the series remains fairly obscure, especially in the west. Well, I’m not naïve enough to think I can change that on my own, but perhaps this, combined with the renewed interest from MDUD’s cameos, can help a little bit. Today, we dive into one of the strangest magical girl sagas of all time. Wilted flowers and shattered crystals. A hundred worlds in peril and the six girls who’ll save them. Midnight cities and a battle at the end of the universe. This is Flower Princess Blaze.

It starts out so simply. We follow two girls; one of them, Mirai Tengeji / Princess Daisy (Sakura Tange), cast in the then-young but already-typical mold of the upbeat, peppy lead magical girl. She has her foibles (the most obvious of which being her comically rough manner of speaking), but she is certainly what we’d now recognize as the most “typical” of Blaze‘s characters. With a minimal amount of tweaking, she’d fit right in with any given Pretty Cure season.

But she’s not the real main character, not really. Much of the show instead centers on her rival–then friend, then rival, then friend again–Shion Nikaido / Princess Lily (Rumi Shishido). Some context: it’s established before too long that the Midnight Kingdom, the requisite baddies-of-the-week, both a group and the physical place they hail from, form when ordinary people fall into despair, that word that translated anime love to use as a catch-all for negative emotional states. That’s not a background detail; each and every episode features someone, whether it’s a minor one-off character or one far more important, joining the Midnight Kingdom. Sometimes they’re rescued by episode’s end, but it’s far from a sure thing. As such, even early on, Flower Princess Blaze operates with a level of intensity and tension very rare for children’s anime.

At the climax of the series’ first major arc, Shion, learns that her own sister (and former comrade) Neon, (Houko Kuwashima) joined the Kingdom’s ranks after abandoning her position as the Flower Princess Hydrangea.

The revelation that Neon and Black Robelia are the same person remains one of the show’s most iconic twists, eventually fully elucidated in flashback, as does the ensuing scene. Hints peppered throughout the show’s first cour that Shion and Neon are not blood related come to a head here, where Robelia lays out her motivations plainly. People look down on them for their familial situation, she feels like a burden on her parents, she basically flat-out says she wants to die. She’s sick of the world and wants to burn it to the ground. (Her heartbreak over teenage crush Soma probably didn’t help either. Although I think some reads of the character over-emphasize that point.) But this scene is illustrative for another reason; in most magical girl anime, at least those aimed at a young audience, this is not a point of view that would be given any serious credence. There’d be a rebuttal, Shion would assure Neon that people really do love her, something.

But earlier in the episode, Mirai tried that on Shion, and the two had a (comparatively rare for the genre) mahou-on-mahou scuffle. It’s perhaps for that reason that Black Robelia’s speech is so effective that Shion actually defects too. Her flower crystal goes black, and the Midnight Kingdom gains another soldier. This sets up a pattern that recurs three more times over the remainder of the anime, until Mirai is eventually the only Flower Princess still standing. (Not for nothing is Flower Princess Blaze one of the few magical girl anime I can name where the bad guys are also given henshin sequences.)

One of the reasons that the late-series development of all the Princesses eventually shaking off this evil influence feels so well-earned is that we know why they felt this way to begin with. It’s the old adage; no man is an island. Or, well, no little girl in this case.

There’s a lot of good in this show, and much I haven’t mentioned (the other three Flower Princesses; Anemone, Azalea, and Rose, all get solid character arcs as well.) But that’s not to say the series is flawless. Something that Dress-Up Darling lightly pokes fun at when discussing the show is that it’s 126 episodes long. By the standards of the day, that probably didn’t seem unreasonable. For many modern anime fans, however, it’s untenably long, not helped here by the fact that Blaze is a victim of the same spotty visual consistency as any anime of that length. (Plenty of episodes look great, but plenty of others look…well, less than great.) It’s also the only magical girl anime I’ve ever seen with a form of Dragonball Z‘s fight length problem. There are a few encounters in the series that take up entire episodes or even several episodes in a row, and while that certainly does make them feel suitably epic, it can make a few stretches of the show feel oddly empty, too.

Not helping matters is the fact that the show’s main big bad, The Wilt Princess Spiderlily (Minami Takayama), does not appear at all until episode 60. She does not appear in person until almost 20 episodes later, in episode 78. There is a fair amount of running around, here. Adding to this is that while the defection of one of the Flower Princesses to the Midnight Kingdom is shocking the first time, it does become a bit predictable by the time Rose, the last of them, falls to the darkness. Although Blaze doing the whole “adding magical girls to the team as the show goes on” bit in reverse is certainly not something I’ve seen before or since, and Mirai’s few episodes totally alone are suitably harrowing.

This all said, even in its less substantial stretches, there’s a lot to appreciate. The surreal atmosphere of the Midnight Kingdom itself, which our protagonists eventually visit–as well as the surrounding Land of Sadness–is just wonderful. In the second half of the series, Mirai and the remaining princesses leap across a good dozen different worlds when the Earth itself becomes too inundated with negative magic for them to stay.

At show’s end, The Princesses are eventually turned back to the side of good, in some of the show’s best episodes. There is of course a magical doodad, the Miracle Seed, which they assemble. Reunited, they’re faced with a choice. Spiderlily lays it out for them plain; they can destroy her with the artifact and end the threat of the Midnight Kingdom forever, but if they do, they’ll be sent back in time. From our perspective, just before the very first episode. Their memories will not stay, and they’ll forget all the times they’ve had together. A square-one reset, like the whole thing never happened.

Of course, none of them hesitate, and we are treated to a shockingly rough scene where Spiderlily dissolves into red smoke as the girls’ memories are literally ripped from their heads. Time rewinds, and for 5 of the last episode’s final 15 minutes it really does seem like we just watched the entire series be undone in an instant. We soon learn one person does remember, Mirai, whose companion is the only one who seems to have survived the time reset. The exchange that follows, as Mirai breaks into tears and her fairy tries to comfort her, is one of the most eerily prescient in animation history, given the series’ obscurity. Especially the mention to the now ex-magical girl that even if no one else remembers their adventures, they still happened. Forgetting does not undo the work they’ve done.

Of course, both within the show and without, it turns out that people do remember. There’s a brief timeskip to the following day, and Mirai’s interactions with Shion are cold until she lets slip a small detail from their now-past lives. At this, Shion’s demeanor changes in an instant, and the two break into happy tears. The montage that follows weaves some adorably fluffy nonsense about how the strength of one’s heart means that true friends never forget each other. It’s a sweet, and surprisingly simple, end to one of the wildest rides in mahou shoujo history.

After its conclusion, the Flower Princess Blaze IP, as mentioned, was shelved. Enigmatic director Ryusei Nakao (no relation to the voice actor of the same name) had an apparently acrimonious (sources differ) break with Toei over this fact and dropped out of the industry entirely. It’s unfortunate, since Nakao’s distinct style does lend an unreal air to the show, especially with regard to the surreal liminality of the Land of Sadness episodes. Most other staff on the project went on to other things, largely much more successful than FPB had been. (Some, including character designer Yoshihiko Umakoshi, already known for his work on Doremi, would even work on later Pretty Cure seasons. Heartcatch in his case) Even with regard to the director, if he was only going to make one project, this is a hell of a legacy to leave.

Flower Princess Blaze has had a particularly bizarre half-life, not just for its genre but anime in general. Comparable in some respects to other non-Sailor Moon, non-Precure magical girl anime of the time period and slightly before. The main difference of course, is that there aren’t any fingerprints from Cosmic Baton Girl Comet-san or such on Steven Universe and whatnot. FPB’s legacy is paradoxical; forgotten by most but embedded into the very DNA of many far more successful anime.

There is one famous example, in particular.

I have heard it claimed that Homura Akemi is directly patterned after Shion. (The show’s TVTropes page once called her an “expy,” site slang for a copycat character, until some roving Madoka fan removed the line, and to be fair, not without reason.) There are definitely parallels to be drawn between Shion’s quest to save her sister and Homura’s to save Madoka. There are important differences here, though (for one thing, Shion is only subjected to a time loop once, and it’s along with everyone else. Shion also fails pretty early on but unambiguously succeeds once she becomes the first Princess to return to the side of good. A very different structure than Homura’s story), and it’s important to not confuse influence with rote copying, but it’s hard not to see at least a faint resemblance. One can definitely see many traces of Flower Princess in Madoka in terms of mood and atmosphere as well, and the bizarre “Deep Wilt” creatures that the Princesses encounter later in their adventures are almost certainly one inspiration for the Witches. It’s an askew influence, and not purely 1 to 1, as some other anime bloggers with too much time on their hands have previously argued, but it is definitely there, and it continues to be a source of contention.

I would say that if Flower Princess Blaze really did inspire even some part of Madoka Magica (and it seems unlikely, all told, that it didn’t), that casts its shadow even wider, including to relatively recent fare like Wonder Egg Priority and Blue Reflection Ray.

But to an extent, the ongoing debate over its impact muddles a simpler truth. Even if FPB had inspired absolutely nothing, it would still be a damn good show. I said earlier that Flower Princess Blaze is obscure, and that’s true in the grand scheme of things, but it’s never really gone away either. In the late 2000s and very early ’10s, it made messageboard rounds as a stock “hidden gem you have to see” recommendation, alongside anime such as RahXephon and Read or Die. (It helped that it was given an excellent fansub treatment by one-off group Mid-Nite Subs in 2010.) It’s managed to stick around in some corners of the internet, both domestically and abroad.

It’s a decent fanart magnet to this very day, and if you stick your ears to the walls of those anime forums that are still around, it’s said you can still hear Shion / Neon shippers (hmm) fighting with Shion / Soma shippers (also hmm). This is to say nothing of the aforementioned cameos in Dress-Up Darling, which have reignited fan interest even further. (It’s worth noting that because of the MDUD dub, Mirai, Shion and Neon are the only three Princesses to have official English voice actresses; Luci Christian, Monica Rial and the ever-underrated Jamie Marchi respectively.)

Maybe, to cheesily echo Robelia’s famous quote moments before she returned to her true form, this world just wasn’t made for Flower Princess Blaze. But it’s become a part of it anyway, and its impact on anime–as a medium and an artform–is an inarguable good. That counts for a lot.

Until we meet again, Princesses burning bright with hope.

“Lustrous flowers bloom bright from dark soil. I believe that we, too, will live on in a way.”

Like what you’re reading? Unfortunately, the anime you just read about does not exist, and this post constitutes an April Fool’s prank of truly stupid proportions. Seriously, you have no idea how long it took to write all this and make it feel semi-believable, and that’s with me fudging a few details, like its alleged air-hour. Anyway, if you want to see me write in terms this grandiloquently pretentious about actual, real anime, (such as My Dress-Up Darling, where Flower Princess Blaze originated and which I covered week by week). Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders. I don’t plan to do this again next year, but no promises. I figure, if you can’t laugh at yourself once in a while, what’s the point of even having a job this silly? PS: The joke is not that this anime doesn’t exist. It’s that I just made you read a fanfic formatted like a review.

Posted on March 12, 2022March 12, 2022 in anime, Monthly Movies, Reviews

Magic Planet Monthly Movies: Half The Battle is Being There in POKÉMON THE MOVIE: I CHOOSE YOU!

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

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rakhshi. Thank you for your support.

^{A Small Note: Because}^Pokémon^{is in the rare position of being an anime where the English localized names are more well-known–at least to my Anglophone audience–than the JP originals, I have largely used them here, crediting some major characters with both, divided by a slash mark where applicable.}

Pokémon is a cultural phenomenon with rare company, comparable in terms of pure success and footprint to, quite literally, no other Japanese series. It is such a global phenomenon that it stands far removed from other anime or games, and comparing it to them makes little sense. You have to turn to other media, toward juggernauts like Star Wars or the MCU, to see similar impact on the world of pop culture.

I’ve never written about Pokémon on this blog before. Not for any particularly strong reason, really. It’s just felt a little…unnecessary? What does anyone have to say, really, about Pokémon? If I had been approached to review the first Pokémon film, I’d have declined. Some works of popular culture are so thoroughly absorbed into the fabric of the times that reviewing them is like trying to review Shakespeare. No other series I will ever cover on this blog is known so widely to so many people.

With that in mind, it is a shame that the specific iteration of said series I am reviewing today feels so minor.

Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You!, the franchise’s banner movie for its anime’s 20th anniversary, is not a direct adaption of any of the widely beloved games. It is not, either, directly related to said TV anime, which has run without any major interruptions in both its original language and in many, many dubbed forms since 1997. It is directed by series stalwart Kunihiko Yuyama, who has done almost nothing else but direct various Pokémon projects since then as well. (With apologies to fans of Wedding Peach, and, uh, Minky Momo.) But while his directorial eye, going by this film, is as sharp as it was in ’97, he’s using it to tell a different story here. (Likewise, as you might guess, it’s animated by OLM.)

I Choose You! is an alternate continuity of sorts. Based on the TV anime, but with other elements from later generations of the games blended in. The idea is pretty simple; in theory, you’re making a fresh, original take on something people already love. This has a lot of precedent in anime, and it’s part of how things like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood happen. But if I Choose You! was meant to draw new people into the Pokémon ecosystem, it is woefully unfit for the task.

If we wanted to look at it cynically, we could call I Choose You! an excuse for a parade of references to and evocations of prior Pokémon media. The vast majority of these are from the original anime, and most are beat-for-beat recreations of certain plot points from early in its run. There’s the introduction where protagonist Ash Ketchum / Satoshi (Sarah Natochenny / Rica Matsumoto) oversleeps and gets an unruly Pikachu (Kate Bristol / Ikue Ohtani) as his partner, the escape from the flock of Spearow that he accidentally aggravates early on, Ash sighting a Ho-oh in the sky after beginning his journey, finding a Charmander abandoned by its previous owner in the rain, his Butterfree departing to find a mate. ETC.

We’ll get to some of the shortcomings of this approach momentarily, but, to dial back the grumpy-old-woman-ism for a moment, it is at least a pretty solid effort. The first season of the anime was hardly bad looking, but the updated scenes here do look nice as well. Even if the iffy blending of the 2D and 3D animation dates the film even now, just five years after its release.

Where things begin to become muddled is the film’s original plot, which forms about 2/3rds of its runtime. In the original anime, when Ash saw Ho-oh, it was a mysterious and tantalizing glance at a world beyond the Kanto region and beyond the original 151 Pokémon. Here, it serves to kick off the story, and because we’ve long known what Ho-oh is, it feels substantially less special despite the film’s efforts to sell it as otherwise. The legendary bird bestows a (or rather, The) Rainbow Feather upon Ash. This apparently makes him a hero. The Rainbow Hero. And entitles him to meet Ho-oh at some point down the line. And also maybe means he’s the chosen one or something.

If this seems rather vague, it feels so in the film as well. An issue here is that there are actually multiple plots, of which this whole journey to find Ho-oh is just one. Another revolves around Charmander’s original trainer, Cross (a character made for the film, voiced by Billy Bob Thompson in English and Ryōta Ōsaka in Japanese.) Cross is in the typical mold of the “trainer who values raw strength over ideas like the power of friendship and properly bonding with your Pokémon.” He is much like Gary (who he rather strongly resembles aside from his truly absurd crossed bangs.) Or Paul. Or any number of similar characters that have populated the franchise over the years. It’s a solid, homegrown archetype. And true enough, it is very easy to dislike Cross here, but he never really does much other than beat Ash in battle and insult him a bunch.

And if you’re prepared to hold abandoning his Charmander against him, the film is not on your side there, as he and Ash reconcile at I Choose You!‘s conclusion without much fanfare, and he’s shown to have truly bonded to his main Pokémon, a Midnight-form Lycanroc. (Said Lycanroc is, puzzlingly, one of just two Alolan Pokémon in the film, despite it being made during the Gen VII era.)

And in conjunction with these two stories, there is also the issue of Marshadow, a Gen VII mythic Pokémon. The film was presumably intended at least in part to promote it, but despite this, Marshadow’s plot is the least developed of all of these. It follows Ash around, inflicts a bizarre nightmare of a world without Pokémon (imagine that) on him, and does other generally “Ghost Pokémon-y” things, but its motives are never established beyond very vague terms as some kind of spiritual counterpart to Ho-oh, and it simply disappears at the film’s end.

Combined, these three plots make the film pretty darn incoherent. It holds up just fine on a moment-to-moment basis. As mentioned, I Choose You! looks quite good and is competently directed and such, but it has a real identity problem. It wants to be a retelling of the first season, but it also wants to be fresh, so it brings in new characters like Verity / Makoto (Suzy Myers / Shiori Sato) and Sorrel (David Oliver Nelson / Kanata Hongō) as substitutes for Brock and Misty.

It wants to actively tug on your nostalgia strings, so as aforementioned it recreates some scenes from the first season of the anime verbatim. But it also needs to promote Marshadow, so that’s in there too. On the whole, the film feels decidedly random, more like a long, glossed-up episode of the TV anime itself than a proper movie. It never quite seems to know what it wants to focus on, so it ends up focusing on nothing.

And even some of that randomness isn’t borne out well. Verity, for instance, seems like she’s going to get a proper subplot about some issue she has with her mother (who looks an awful lot like Sinnoh champion Cynthia), which would at least be something. But this development is quietly dropped until the very end of the film, where she simply offhandedly mentions that she feels like visiting home for the first time in a while, resolving that particular subplot in an unceremonious finger snap. Likewise, Sorrel’s only real depth is brought in when he abruptly brings up a depressing anecdote about how his childhood Luxray wrapped around him to save him from the cold when he was lost in a blizzard, only to die in the process. This is used to illustrate a vague point about how sometimes “departing with Pokémon” is necessary, and is meant to foreshadow Ash’s Butterfree departing. But these are wildly different situations, and the film’s attempt to draw parallels between them is just one instance of its broad, scattershot plotting making the entire thing feel strangely half-baked.

Overall, I Choose You! relies heavily on the viewer having already very much “bought in” to Pokémon as a franchise, given the huge amount of pre-existing knowledge it attempts to cash in on to get you to care about any of this stuff. Consequently, it is totally unsuitable as anyone’s first introduction to the series. (If such a person exists, spare a thought for them.) What prevents it from totally failing as a project in a more general sense is that it is pretty good at nailing the very basic building blocks of “being a Pokémon movie.”

Anyone to whom the series’ quirks are more endearing than grating will probably be more forgiving than I’ve been here. And I must admit that while I was actively watching it, I was more caught up those basic building blocks. I enjoyed the small appearances from personal favorite Pokémon–Pinsir, Paris, and even a very brief cameo from the underrated Gen V Pokémon Gothitelle, among others–and the movie’s colorful visuals and solid fight choreography carry it enough to at the very least make it not a slog. It’s a brisk film and has the good sense to end around the 90-minute mark. (Pompo would be thrilled.) Its overall highlights? Likely the showdowns between Ash’s Charmeleon (and later Charizard, of course) and Cross’s Incineroar. I might also count Ash’s Marshadow-inflicted nightmare, which lends a nice bit of spooky, almost denpa energy to an otherwise fairly inconsequential run near the film’s middle.

I Choose You! is, thus, not a bad movie. But it does feel pretty pointless. I’ve never counted myself among the skeptical crowd with regard to Pokémon. I still play and enjoy the mainline games, and while I haven’t followed the TV anime regularly since I was a child, I will occasionally watch a stray episode or three, and am almost always delighted by them. But if one wanted to paint The Pokémon Company as nothing but a soulless machine that prints money on the back of, alternatingly, kid appeal designs and pure nostalgia-baiting, you could certainly pick worse places to start than here. I Choose You! feels like it exists for no reason beyond an imagined mandate for More Pokémon Stuff.

But it did, at least, get this fourth fork of major Pokémon continuities off the ground. As of 2022, when I’m writing this, 3 of the 4 most recent films in the Pokémon franchise were set there, the only exception being the all-CGI remake of Mewtwo Strikes Back. So, despite my complaints, it seems to have certainly found some sort of audience. Perhaps that’s all it was truly intended to do.

I can’t find it in myself to actually dislike this film. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s visually competent. Maybe it’s pure nostalgia. Maybe it’s both! Regardless, while I Choose You! is certainly not the highlight of the series, it is at least entertainingly nostalgic enough in spots. If that’s all you want out of Pokémon, the movie will suit you just fine. But it still feels frustratingly half-committed to its core idea of being a new take on the old Pokémon formula, so don’t expect anything more than that.

^{A second small note: Yes, this is the second “monthly” movies column to come out in March. The Yoyo to Nene review was supposed to come out in late February, but things happened. Y’all know how it is.}

Posted on March 11, 2022March 11, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Six Minutes of Madness in THE IDOLM@STER CINDERELLA GIRLS: SPIN-OFF!

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. Given this item’s short length, I would strongly recommend watching it before reading this.

Sometimes you are really left with no choice but to try, probably in vain, to, if not properly review, at least talk about something.

I’ve done this before, and it’s always for very odd short-form animation projects. “Ruru’s Suicide Show on a Livestream” is a poignant miniature generational touchstone about the depths of despair one can become stuck in by mental illness. ENA is one of the most singular artistic achievements of the decade so far, and remains one of the very few non-anime cartoons I’ve ever written about here. Artiswitch is a uniquely artistic prism through which six different life stories are viewed. This is the exclusive club that gets a new member today.

THE IDOLM@STER CINDERALLA GIRLS: Spin-Off! The all-caps being their doing for once, not mine, is not any of those things. What it is, however, is six of the most utterly bugfuck minutes of animation ever put to the silver screen. Or whatever artistic turn of phrase we use for a computer screen, since something this beautifully batshit could only ever exist online. It truly defies description.

And really, what point is there in recapping what plot this thing has? You want a plot? Fuck you, you get a really cool chase sequence, some “trapped in the matrix” technobabble that vaguely implies Idolm@ster idols might all be robots or something, and Risa Matoba (Hana Tamegai), an obscure franchise character who has never had a main role in anything else, toting a pump shotgun that she uses to blast holographic cars.

Okay, fine. The “plot” is that a minivan full of lunatics rescue a young bride named Chitose Kurosaki (Kaoru Sakura) from a sham wedding. But they do that by kidnapping her. And the only reason the wedding is a sham is because Chitose’s husband doesn’t actually exist. They flee the scene, but are pursued by unmanned hot-rods with holographic tires. And then hot-rods that are manned, but only by android dummies toting rocket launchers.

It all caps with the “reveal” that the entire reality of the short is some bizarre VR future-nightmare. Nothing makes any goddamn sense. It’s amazing.

3DCGI is often criticized for looking stiff or primitive. But for the Reboot-esque virtual plaza that Spin-off! appears to take place in, that’s a benefit, not a detriment. Everything looks exactly as whacked-out as it should. The dialogue is delivered mile-a-minute, from a cadre of voice actresses who range from experienced to industry novices, but all of whom absolutely nail their performances here. And that’s good, because the dialogue forms a huge part of what makes this so damn weird. What does any of this mean? Why does its acknowledgement of its own nonsensicality somehow make it seem all the stranger?

This is to say nothing of the finale, where what few rails remain are so thoroughly disintegrated that the entire thing watches like being struck by lightning. You could put this on one of the Genius Party compilations and no one would bat an eye. Our girls escape their reality itself, their van hitting warp speed as they “clip out of existence” and into a new world. Our own, maybe?

Is there an explanation for any of this? Is there some deeper meaning? Or is it just a full-on defacement of its parent franchise? A hastily-scrawled WTF-bomb left on The Idolm@ster‘s doorstep, with the full knowledge that it’s still one of the most popular idol series around? Risa’s bizarre crack about “not getting updates” might be some sort of meta-joke about her character card in the game all of these characters are from. But beyond that, it’s a baffler.

Well, one very limited kind of explanation can be found, not in the short itself but in the credits. Spin-off! is one of just two full projects to have been directed by one Naoki Yoshibe. (So far, anyway.) The other? Another bizarre web anime; The Missing 8, which, incredibly, I have actually covered on this site before.

While it’s impossible to prove that Yoshibe is “the reason” this short is so out there (scriptwriter Nanami Higuchi, who has also contributed to some TRIGGER anime, likely had a role in that, too. Perhaps we can thank them for the short’s shockingly tight, playful banter dialogue, which shines through despite all the surreality), it does provide, at least, some kind of reference point. Even if Spin-off! and The Missing 8 are pretty distinct forms of weird internet animation. (If I would compare this stylistically to anything, it might be the particularly far end of [adult swim]’s “is this deep or just stoner comedy” school. Off The Air, eat your heart out.)

Beyond that, what else is there to say? The net is vast and infinite. God bless every inch of it that produces wonderful nonsense like this.

Posted on March 4, 2022 in anime, Monthly Movies, Reviews

Magic Planet Monthly Movies: The Magic was Inside You All Along in MAJOKKO SHIMAI NO YOYO TO NENE

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

^{This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Josh, from The Mugcord Discord Server. Thank you for your support.}

“Hoi!”

-Yoyo, too many times to count.

Just off the cuff, there are a number of interesting things about 2013’s Majokko Shimai no Yoyo to Nene. It was directed by Takayuki Hirao. If that name sounds familiar, it may be because he also directed the last film I was commissioned to review. This was during his time at ufotable, a powerhouse of a studio both then and now. Also notably, Yoyo to Nene is an isekai, dating from the period when the genre was just in the process of resurging and conquering the anime landscape. But conversely, it’s miles away from the modern isekai zeitgeist, being more reminiscent of the fantasy fairy tales that birthed the genre in the first place. (Or much more distantly, 90s iterations like The Vision of Escaflowne.)

You could also argue that it’s a magical girl story (the term is, in fact, used here.) Though if so, it’s based on a much older version of the “mahou shoujo” idea than what we usually see today, which tends to directly stem from the “magical warrior” archetype that was also seeing a resurgence around this time. All this, contrasted with its distinctly modern look and feel, makes Yoyo to Nene seem like a film unstuck in time. A fact that, along with its general defiance of easy genre labels, may contribute to its relative obscurity in the Anglosphere. But if so, it’s a shame, because while the film falls short of being truly essential, it is quite good, and it’s definitely worth watching.

But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. Before delving into goods and bads it’s helpful to know what the film actually is. The very short version of the plot is thus; after a routine day on the job of battling giant monsters, our titular protagonist Yoyo (Sumire Morohoshi, who has kept busy in the years since. In 2020 she was Michiru in Brand New Animal.) and her sister Nene (Ai Kakuma, also still in the industry. She’s even worked with Hirao again since, playing Mystia in Pompo: The Cinéphile.) are called upon to investigate the sudden emergence of a curious structure in the magical forest where they make their home. (To our eyes, it’s quite obviously a modern high-rise apartment building.) Inside, Yoyo becomes stuck in an elevator, which as it turns out, is secretly a portal to other worlds. As such, she’s promptly spirited away to another universe. Namely, our own. Also tagging along is her adorable….cat? Bihaku (Shouko Nakagawa, an idol and second-generation celebrity who seems to occasionally do roles like this. She’d later play Diana in Sailor Moon Crystal.)

In this apartment building, she meets Takahiro (Miyuki Sawashiro, who we’ve met in this column before. You may know her as the modern Fujiko Mine.), his largely unimportant-to-the-plot brother Takeo (Takahiro Sakurai, who this very season is playing Despa in Ousama Ranking and the protagonist, Burton, in Ninjala. And that’s just shows I’ve personally seen!), and their young cousin, the downright adorable–and much more plot-relevant, she gets a nice turn near the finale–Aki (Rio Sasaki, whose brief seiyuu career started here and never got much farther. As of last year, she’s only ever played two other named roles, with Emery Almond in Fafner Exodus being the more prominent of them.) She learns that Takahiro and Takeo’s parents are under the effects of a curse that’s turned them into grotesque slime monsters. Yoyo, as a proud curse-breaker and general magic problem-solver, is determined to uncover what’s hexed the Tak Twins’ parents, and in the process, free them from perpetual oozedom.

We eventually learn it’s because of a magic gacha game that grants wishes, of all things, but the real meat of Yoyo to Nene comes mostly from Yoyo herself. She’s an enrapturing little ball of pixie dust who brightens up the screen every second she’s on it. Making her the focal point of the film was a very wise choice indeed. (I’m not sure if she’s equally important in the manga that Yoyo to Nene is loosely based on, it’s never been available in English in any capacity.) Yoyo’s magic translates directly to movie magic; she’s the source, directly or indirectly, of many of the film’s visual highlights, and has a cute habit of capping her spells with a small exclamation of “Hoi!”

Much of the film’s emotional thrust comes from her interactions with other characters. She and Takahiro eventually develop a close bond (which the movie is smart enough to never explicitly frame as romantic) but getting there is another story entirely. She’s initially quite dismissive of him, and it’s only through the power of Anime Bonding Moments such as learning how to make instant yakisoba with no magic allowed that they come to understand each other.

She gets along more readily with Aki, who she charms with the film’s sole musical number about a third of the way through its runtime.

But in addition to these bonds, Yoyo has a more flawed and slightly darker side, which intuitively fits with her “witch” characterization and makes her more compelling than if she were wholly innocent.

Later in the film, the curse begins affecting more than just individual people, and assaults whole buildings and even whole parts of cities. When it bears down on a festival the three are attending, Yoyo is shown to be a bit callous toward the idea of Aki possibly being injured. There is an idea here that Yoyo–and perhaps residents of her native Magic Kingdom in general–do not truly understand the value of life and death. When Takahiro gets angry with her for not protecting Aki–noting that she got hurt, and far worse could’ve happened–Yoyo doesn’t really seem to get why he’s mad, suggesting that as long as the body’s intact, even raising her from the dead wouldn’t be a big deal. Indeed, earlier on, we’re shown a scene where exactly that happens to minor character Nils back in the Magic Kingdom, establishing this as being as much a societal flaw as a personal one.

Yoyo changes her tune when Bihaku is injured later that same night, and in easily the scene’s darkest film it seems like he might pass away entirely. Thankfully he eventually turns out to be fine, but the shock is enough to impart the lesson to Yoyo.

There is a question that’s natural to raise here, though. What, exactly, is Yoyo to Nene trying to say with scenes like this? There are a few in the film, although that’s the most prominent. The whole magic gacha game plot raises similar questions. Its resolution is fairly convoluted and involves both Aki’s father, the game’s lead developer, and her departed mother, who turns out to also have been an isekai’d transplant from the Magic Kingdom. On this level, Yoyo to Nene does break down; it seems to reach for a universal applicability, but doesn’t properly grasp it, leaving it feeling thematically confused.

There’s a sliver of light commentary in near the film’s very end, about how Aki’s mother wanted to use her magic for the good of the world, but people are selfish, so it’s become corrupt. There’s enough of a coherent thought there that when Yoyo finishes out the movie by absorbing magic from people making selfless wishes, it makes some internal logical sense, but all in all, the film, especially in the latter half, only just stays on the right side of “coherent.” Most of this is fairly broad “power of human connection” stuff, a thing many other anime have done better and more compellingly. But of course, many others have done it far worse as well. (You could also read some environmentalist messaging in here somewhere, perhaps, but you’d really have to squint.)

So, thematically it’s a bit broad and wishy-washy. And the film convolves and convolutes its own rules often enough to only just barely make sense. This is enough to raise the question of if it’s even a “good movie” at all, but I’d argue it still very much is. For whatever else it may misfire on, Yoyo to Nene succeeds on an emotional gut-check level, arguably the most important facet for any anime to nail, especially one that’s not even two hours long. It is, of course, also quite the spectacle, which certainly helps. It’s possible that if the movie looked and sounded worse, I’d be less forgiving, but–and I rarely mention this in positive reviews, though it’s true here as well–you review the art you have in front of you, not one that you can imagine existing.

On its own terms, Yoyo to Nene is an entirely worthy film. Most involved have gone on to do more notable things, but I do think the movie’s comparative obscurity in the West is a shame. By the end, in spite of any issues, I found myself happily grinning. More than any of its actual stabs at a theme, the film’s real strength is the sheer warmth it radiates. And in that sense, I think its closest cousins may less be any other isekai, and more work that centers on that same feeling of simple joy. Little Witch Academia and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! spring to mind as somewhat more recent examples.

At the end of the day, the “sell” on Yoyo to Nene is very simple. If magic makes people smile, well, that’s all that really matters, isn’t it? Yoyo to Nene brings smiles by the dozen, what else can you ask for?

Posted on February 13, 2022February 13, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Last Flight of DRAGONAUT – THE RESONANCE

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

^{This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rakhshi. Thank you for your support.}

The common wisdom is such; if you want to really take the measure of a period of time, don’t look at media from it that everyone remembers. Things that persist over the years tend to be your classics, your cult classics, and your so-bad-its-good’s. If you really want to get in the head of someone living in a period of time, look at the stuff no one remembers. Occasionally something will pick up a reputation as an “overlooked gem” and worm its way into that second category, but that’s rare. Things that are forgotten tend to stay forgotten and are often indicative of things that were popular at the time but not so much nowadays. So, the theory goes, they’re representative of an unfiltered look at a period.

If all this holds true, shows like Dragonaut – The Resonance may represent the true spirit of the late ’00s. A GONZO production from the period where basically all they were making was stuff like this, Dragonaut comes to us from 2007, one of an absurd even by modern standards nineteen projects GONZO produced that year. It aired that Fall to middling interest alongside similarly forgotten-today fare like Ayakashi and Night Wizard. As such, Dragonaut stands out not for any particularly exceptional quality but because, like many weird one-off projects from this era, it has ostentatious character designs and an absurd premise.

It is the near future, and poor Pluto, already stripped of the dignity of being a planet, has been obliterated by a massive asteroid called Thanatos. Some years later, a SpaceX-style civilian space plane launch goes awry when an alien dragon from said asteroid unexpectedly collides with the plane, killing everyone aboard sans a single survivor, the pilot’s son and our protagonist, Jin. (Voiced by the legendary Daisuke Ono.) The government promptly covers the whole business up, and a full two years pass as Jin has to endure the public at large blaming his father for the accident. He only uncovers the truth of things when by sheer chance, he meets a beautiful girl with supernatural abilities named Toa (Minori Chihara, best known as Yuki in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya). Obviously, she is also an alien dragon.

To put it bluntly, this is an absurd start to an equally absurd anime. Dragonaut isn’t totally devoid of merits, but the sheer, overbearing goofiness of its very setting makes it a little hard to take seriously. It quickly comes to involve bonded pairs of artificial dragon-people who can change from human to dragon-alien-mech-things (“Communicators”) and back and their riders / pilots who compose the titular Dragonaut program in the service of an international organization called the ISDA. It’s pretty cool and extremely dumb in equal measure. Moreso because the dragons, in dragon form, are handled by GONZO’s CGI department, which means we get huge, chunky CG rigs that are not quite articulated and lit enough to look fully convincing but do look like they’d make sick toys. (Their color palettes are also not the best, sadly. Which can make some of them hard to distinguish mid-fight.)

The corny tone is not really a bad thing. One of my favorite anime from this period is Witchblade, which has a similar issue. If anything, Dragonaut could stand to have been cornier. If there’s a real flaw here, it’s that Dragonaut starts out fairly self-serious and never really lets up. One might say it’s “very anime,” but it’s not camp. This contrasts in an ugly way with its sillier aspects.

Such as, for example, its character designs. With only a few exceptions each; the men are either emotionally sensitive feminine boys with period-appropriate emo haircuts, unreasonably diesel Chad-Gods who shake the Earth with each footstep, or grizzled, uniformed commanders who scowl as they make Tough Decisions. The women are warmhearted maidens who bring joy wherever they go, goofy brats, or gene lottery winners with chests so big that they have their own gravitational pull. I’m not one to moralize about this kind of thing, so to me the excessive fanservice mostly comes across as unintentional hilarity. If someone were less inclined to that point of view, I could absolutely understand it making the entire series unwatchable just on its own. Especially in the case of recurring antagonist Garnet MacLaine (played here by Haruhi herself, Aya Hirano), whose outfit looks like three other, unrelated, gratuitous sexy outfits crashed into each other at a hundred miles per hour, and also has the misfortune of being one of just two named POC characters in the series.

The plot is a sprawling kudzu vine of romance, political and military intrigue, and science-fantasy hokum. You might note that this is also true of a lot of great anime from around that time, but Dragonaut‘s handling of much of this material is pretty leaden. Enough so that details like, say, Toa’s name being derived from a bracelet Jin gave to his late sister Ai (“From Jin to Ai”, you see.) come across as comedic rather than stirring.

On one level, all this means that you could freely regard Dragonaut as the shlock that it is. By 2007, the hunt for the next Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the wave of “world story” anime it spawned had largely petered out. Eva had spawned numerous imitators and responses, and even shows outside its genre entirely were affected. By the late 2000’s, that influence had turned into background noise. The gulf between Dragonaut and something like, say, Eureka Seven, one of the very best anime in this vein and from just two years prior, is vast. If we wanted to draw an admittedly imperfect analogy, we could turn toward the history of pop music. If Evangelion was Nevermind–another 90s touchstone–Dragonaut is Daughtry. Everything challenging and artistically interesting about the movement has been squeezed out, and what you are left with is the sad backwash of an artistic point in time that was already firmly in the rearview. It’s not at all unfair to say that Dragonaut is a series of very limited ambition, at least.

On the other hand, that very inconsequentiality makes any judgement of Dragonaut that leans this harsh feel, frankly, a bit silly. (In much the same way that it’s hard to get too mad about the strained bluster of “It’s Not Over.”) No, it’s not some grand, generation-defining artistic statement. I doubt anyone–including anyone who worked on it–thought it was. That doesn’t make it criticism-proof and I certainly have quite a few qualms with it, but we should remind ourselves that we’re talking about a goofy-ass anime about goofy-ass space dragons, here. Condemning it in that manner is perhaps a bridge too far.

Because all this said and meant, the show does have its strong suits. Some of the character relationships are pulled off surprisingly well. Mostly these are various Dragon / Rider pairs. Jin and Toa will not win any originality-in-writing awards, but they’re cute together, and when they’re apart you do genuinely feel their longing for each other. Turning their couple into a trio is Gio (Junichi Suwabe, probably best known as Archer from Fate/), who seems to get on quite well with both of them. My favorite pair, though, is that of rider Akira (Miyuki Sawashiro, voice of Fujiko Mine since 2015) and her dragon Machina (Yuuko Gotou, VA of Mikuru Asahina, making Dragonaut something of a Haruhi Suzumiya cast reunion), whose affection for each other is warm and uncomplicated throughout the first half of the series series, as Akira grows to question the role that the ISDA has forced her into. The two are also very gay for each other; Akira here had a dragon wife long before Miss Kobayashi. (Sadly, the two are the victim of a pretty nasty instance of the “bury your gays” cliche, and they’re killed off around halfway through the show. I will leave the question of their sort-of resurrection as ghosts attuned to Thanatos making that better or worse as an exercise to the reader.)

Rounding out the most interesting characters are the rich girl / butler pair of Sieglinde (Nana Mizuki, who probably needs no introduction, but who you might variously know as Cure Blossom, Fate Testarossa, or Symphogear‘s Tsubasa Kazanari) and Amaedeus (Eiji Maruyama, active as both an anime VA and toku actor from the early ’70s until his death in 2015. Most of his anime roles were kindly and/or badass old guy parts like this, and if Amadeus is any indication, he was damn good at them) who have a cute surrogate daughter / father relationship, and lastly Kazuki (Tetsuya Kakihara and Sawahiro again, depending on where you get your credits from. I’m unsure of what the story was there. Perhaps it was a split role), who fosters an incredibly toxic yandere-leaning jealous streak over both Jin and Gio, and his dragon Widow, (Saeko Chiba, who has a string of supporting roles under her belt, although most of them were behind her at this point. You may know her as Nina Einstein from Code Geass) with whom he bonds over their mutual feeling of being spurned, until his jealousy inevitably mutates into an abusive streak.

^{Seen here in mid-distance, because getting an image of all of these characters together was quite difficult for some reason.}

Production-wise, Dragonaut avoids the pitfalls of some of its uglier GONZO brethren. While the airborne fights are janky because of the CGI’s general inflexibility, the on-foot fight choreography is pretty excellent throughout, accounting for almost all of the show’s visual highlights. On a less technical level it’s also competently directed (by Manabu Ono, who directed a bunch of things for GONZO and has since gone on to helm some later Sword Art Online material) and the color choices are solid. (Outside of the dragons themselves, that is.) There’s generally at least a few cool shots per episode, etc. These are modest strengths, but Dragonaut makes the most of them.

Story wise, things are dicier. The plot aims for profundity and complexity but only occasionally gets farther than simply being complicated. Some of the arcs the show sets up have decent payoffs and others very much do not. In its best moments, like the mid-series episodes 13 and 14, where the ISDA save the world from being blown up by a magic nuke (!), Jin, Gio, Akira, and Machina depart to rescue Toa, who is trapped on Mars (!!), only to be intercepted by a characteristically jealous Kazuki, who they must then fight and seemingly kill (!!!), it is at least quite entertaining. Plot threads roll into each other like tumbleweeds across the desert. Or, indeed, run-on sentences. Occasionally, it’ll make an emotional moment hit just so, and Dragonaut achieves its greatest feat; the ability to perform a half-decent imitation of shows like Eureka Seven, or Eva, or even RahXephon (which I haven’t seen, but a friend who I was watching the series with has). It’s hard to tell if Dragonaut wants to be counted among that number or if it’s content just cribbing notes from those shows. Either way, it’s very much an imitation, not the genuine article.

Things go back and forth like this up and down the whole length of the series. Sometimes these various subplots and diversions end in a way that’s satisfying or at least entertainingly silly, other times they’re straight-up bad. Coming down to an almost even split across the show’s 25-episode runtime, I’d say. The fairly strong character writing contrasted with the relatively weak plotting does make it sometimes feel like a gaggle of good characters searching for a good show to be in and never quite finding one. There is a solid theme wound through here about how different sorts of love mean more to different people, but it’s subsumed by world story tropes riffing on Eva‘s Instrumentality plot in the finale–tropes that had become cliches by this point–and the series ends with a whimper rather than a bang.

Watching it, I was acutely aware of how tired of the pseudogenre everyone must have been at this point. Dragonaut‘s final few episodes seem to default to the Eva mode less out of any real commitment to the themes it explores and more because it lacks any better or more original ideas. It is a decidedly fine ending. Not offensively bad. Not particularly great either.

But being fine was enough, at least, for Dragonaut to be decently popular while it was airing. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it seems to have done well enough financially, though not enough to warrant sequels or spinoffs aside from a manga adaption that apparently takes a somewhat different spin on things. It did get a bonus OVA included on its DVD box set, a supremely ridiculous thing where the cast have their characters switched around via a wacky science machine. It is mostly an excuse to parade screwball situations out and have the camera zoom in on the girls’ busts some more; every sense of the word “fanservice” rolled into one. Perhaps unavoidably, given the general thrust of the female character designs, it was a popular fanart magnet for a little while. The few English-language reviews it got predictably nailed the show somewhere in the C-grade range, a trend I am all too aware I’m contributing to here.

All of this constitutes a minor legacy for a decidedly minor show. It still is a legacy, and that is worth something, but there is a reason that people still talk about even other Eva-indebted mecha anime from this time–say, Gurren Lagann, which I’m not a personally huge fan of but which is inarguably a better and more striking an interpretation of some of these same influences–but not Dragonaut. It has largely been left in the dustbin of history. Pierce the heavens, this does not.

Rather than any of its contemporaries, Dragonaut‘s status as an Extremely 2007 Anime reminds me of another, much more recent show, with which it has almost nothing else in common, The Detective is Already Dead. Like that anime (and a few others I’ve covered here over the years), it was a fossil from the day it began airing. Ultimately, Dragonaut represents a small side branch of a larger artistic tradition. That branch has largely come and gone, but the larger Evangelion and Eureka Seven-indebted school it represents survives to this day. Even in terms of fairly specific setups, one of the very few times Dragonaut is brought up in modern anime discussions at all is to compare it with Darling in the FranXX, another extremely-of-its-moment child of Eureka with which it shares a broadly similar premise and some thematic points. There are worse fates for an anime to have, even if DarliFra itself is extremely polarizing.

Most people who worked on Dragonaut went on to bigger things. (“Better” is subjective.) So, while it is always tempting to view the story of any largely forgotten series as a sad one, that really isn’t the case here. While GONZO themselves are gone, as far as I can tell, most of the staff from this project have continued to work in the field. Those who don’t seem to have either later found success elsewhere or had already established a legacy by the time they worked on Dragonaut. I feel comfortable in saying that for almost every single person who worked on it, Dragonaut was a minor step along their paths. I could easily spin this into a condemnation, but I’d be condemning plenty of other shows too. It is the fate of the vast majority of anime that air every year, even now. Hard to hate, equally hard to love, Dragonaut simply is what it is.

Anime is an art form, but it’s also a craft and a field of the entertainment business. In entertainment, works arise to fulfill a desire from their audience. In 2007, people wanted hopelessly romantic stories where high-flying science-fantasy heroes saved the world with the power of love. Dragonaut, for whatever faults it has, is one of those, and it is if nothing else, a competently made one. It was not the most notable, most successful, and certainly not the best of that sort of story, but it gave the people what they wanted. Perhaps sometimes that is enough.

Posted on January 21, 2022January 21, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) A Blood-Red Sun Hangs High Over SCHOOL-LIVE!

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

“Yuki’s pretty amazing. With her around, we can always pick ourselves back up.

No matter what.”

The real giveaway is in the soundtrack. The canned, cheery music so common to the school life comedy genre drops out and is replaced by dead silence and howling wind. That’s the first real clue that something isn’t as it seems. Others arrive in carefully orchestrated, almost subliminal drips. A shot of a seemingly normal school hallway with the windows broken, students who seem rooted to their classrooms, and a vague sense of unease that surrounds the actions of every character but one.

By now, the twist at the end of the first episode of SCHOOL-LIVE! (Gakkou Gurashi domestically, and throughout the rest of this piece) is so well known that its reputation precedes the series itself. This is no comedy. A zombie apocalypse is upon the state-of-the-art school building that our four main characters, out of necessity, make their home. Possibly the whole world, too. That first episode is a masterful little clockwork of suspense building, but if the show’s entire legacy were staked on shock value alone, it would not survive in the popular conscience nearly seven years after it premiered. 33 other TV anime served as Gakkou Gurashi‘s co-seasonals in the summer of 2015. Of those, about a dozen persist in the collective cultural imagination. A work’s quality cannot be judged alone on whether or not people remember it, but it’s truly rare for something without some kind of spark to it to persist for that long. Gakkou Gurashi tapped into something. But what?

My pet theory is that as early as its second episode, Gakkou Gurashi draws on a deep, yawning sadness that resonates with those young enough to relate directly to the show’s cast on up. The melancholy, the anxiety, and the outright dread that come with knowing that who you are now is not who you always will be is deeply rooted in modern culture. If not a universal fear, it’s at least up there. Apocalypse fiction is an extremely direct expression of that worry, and after Gakkou Gurashi rips the Band-Aid off at the end of its first episode, it keeps hammering that button, and it’s never less than effective. Just last year, overlooked OVA Alice in Deadly School succeeded in doing much the same with some of the same methods.

Gakkou Gurashi pulling that same trick for a good five hours could conceivably become a slog. But it never does, because there is some sincere levity cut with all this tension; lighthearted moments colored by the characters’ friendships-of-necessity, or when the series indulges in traditional school life anime tropes, even sometimes in the panic-giggles induced by some of its dark comedy. But all of that only serves to ratchet the tension back up when things get more serious again. This is a show that leaves you with a gnawing fear in your stomach between episodes. There’s a rawness to it.

None of this would mean much if the show’s characters weren’t compelling. But each of them is. The titular School Life Club are a fantastic cast. We have Yuki (Inori Minase, who, among many other things, later appeared in Girls’ Last Tour as Chito), Kurumi (Ari Ozawa, who last year played Elisha in BACK ARROW), Yuuri (Mao Ichimichi, notable for voicing Pecorine in Princess Connect! Re:Dive this very season), and Miki (Rie Takahashi, who just a year after this series aired would land the role of Megumin in Konosuba), their teacher and club advisor, Sakura, AKA Megu (Ai Kayano. Perhaps you know her as Kirika from Symphogear?), and finally their cute little corgi, Taroumaru. (Emiri Katou, voice of Kyuubey.)

These characters largely defy easy archetype pigeonholing, but I’ll be as snappy as I can. Yuki, the heart and soul of the group, is burying repressed traumatic memories under her happy-go-lucky outer shell and spends much of the series knee-deep in delusion. Kurumi is the tough one; by necessity, not choice, and wields a gardening shovel she uses to fight off zombies when necessary. She also has what looks to my armchair-seated eye like an untreated case of PTSD. When it flares up, colors wash out in real time and her heartbeat is turned way up in the audio. Yuuri is the “club president,” and the older sister sort. She takes care of the planning and tries her best to keep everyone else in line. Beneath that facade, it’s her who cracks the worst when push comes to shove. (No one can bottle all that responsibility alone, Yuuri.)

Miki, rescued from a nearby mall, is the most reclusive of the four and takes some time to adjust to the others’ personalities. Megu tries very hard to be the best teacher to her remaining students she can be. Taroumaru is a good boy, as all dogs are.

The show’s structure is fairly simple for most of its runtime. The School Life Club must attend to some task, either something fairly serious like a supply run or some whim of Yuki’s. They do it, and along the way fun is had while, simultaneously, the knowledge that this can’t last forever looms large. It’s a difficult dichotomy to make work, but Gakkou Gurashi manages it, and it’s the show’s main strength.

One of the traits that separates art that is merely very good from that which is great is, in my mind, applicability. A story’s ability to resonate beyond the context in which it was originally written. In the seven years since Gakkou Gurashi first aired, the global climate crisis has escalated to the point of emergency. To the extent that even talking about it in contexts like this can feel like a cliché. Gakkou Gurashi so expertly plays that single chord of apocalyptic despair that when it strikes a nerve, the resonance is as deep and dark as an abandoned well. The “zombies” (or whatever they are) are a formality; they’re everyone who’s not looking out for us, either by malice or by being beaten down by the weight of it all. Our collective abusers and our fellow victims united into a single shambling mass of consumptive darkness.

This is to say nothing of any number of other global crises to which one could easily apply the zombie apocalypse metaphor. Some of the writing in the series would seem rather on-the-nose if it were penned today.

It’s pure projection, of course. But in hindsight, it certainly can feel like the “zombie fiction” boom that Gakkou Gurashi came about at the end of was prescient; the skeletal hand of the Grim Reaper knocking on our collective door. Going about our daily lives in spite of it all, we can all feel like Yukis in our own way. If she’s delusional, maybe she’s no more so than we are.

Perhaps that’s a bit heady, and one would prefer to look at Gakkou Gurashi as an outgrowth of or reaction to the school life genre. The endless everyday that defines that sort of work turned vile and strangling. Consequently, I sometimes see Gakkou Gurashi spoken about as though it is a singular, weird blip in modern TV anime history. I have seen it referred to as an attack on (or worse, a “deconstruction of”) that genre, and I’ve seen it criticized as being all shock value. (And to avoid seeming like I’m talking strictly about other people, I naively believed some of this myself when the series was new. It is a part of why it’s taken me so long to watch it.)

For my money, none of these things could be further from the truth. Gakkou Gurashi is a comparatively early example of a strain of anime that would come to define some of the very best of the 2010s. “Post”-school life work like A Place Further Than the Universe, O Maidens in Your Savage Season!, and even Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! It is distinguished from these far more grounded stylistic cousins by its apocalyptic setting. But if one views the slice of life genre as an organic, living thing, one can imagine Gakkou Gurashi as a sort of evolutionary defense mechanism. A warning: “Our daily lives are under threat, here are the stakes.” (If you wanted to, you could also probably draw a line backwards connecting it to other fare that combined a high school setting with supernatural elements and a broadly similar tone space. Say, Angel Beats!)

With all this in mind, Gakkou Gurashi is not without light. The School Life Club’s rare excursions outside their school, while dangerous, contain moments of joy and human connection they would never have if they stayed locked up. This is how they meet Miki in a flashback that spans most of episodes four and five. The original School Life Club trio is able to liberate Miki from her comparative isolation. Miki’s own history with her friend / maybe-more Kei–who struck out on her own out of frustration sometime before the events of those episodes–serves to frame all this. Both Miki and Kei eventually choose freedom over isolation, but because they don’t do so together, they lose each other. It’s a complicated tangle of cutting loss and the balm of simple contact, and it’s remarkable how well Gakkou Gurashi can walk that tightrope, and how well it continues to walk it as the series goes on. Nothing is without sacrifice, but at the same time, it tells us, no situation is truly hopeless, either. This is, I would in fact argue, Gakkou Gurashi‘s core thesis.

This is best expressed with Yuki. Yuki is, by any conventional definition, extremely mentally unwell. But while Gakkou Gurashi sometimes seems like it might play this for shock, it never really does aside from arguably that first episode swerve. Everyone who actually gets to know Yuki–including Miki, who is initially extremely offput by her mannerisms–finds her a necessary ball of joy in a world that sorely needs it. Her friends in the club indulge her tendencies where they’re harmless and curb them on the occasion they cause real trouble.

She is never treated as lesser than any of the other characters simply because she has specific needs, and when at the series’ end she becomes more lucid it feels less like some part of her is being erased and more that she has simply grown as a person. She confronts a truth she’s been hiding from; the fact that Megu sacrificed her life to save the School Life Club some time ago, and reconciles with the state of the world in general. A lesser “zombie apocalypse survivors” sort of story would frame her as a burden. But Gakkou Gurashi never even suggests it. The one and only time she ever voices the concern that she might be weighing the others down, she’s immediately corrected by all present. Yuki is a symbol of a hope placed not on some distant Other coming to the rescue, but in each other, a slice of life lead girl slipping that genre’s bounds to become, in her own way, a genuine hero.

In general, the girls’ relationships with each other feel as authentic as any friendship from a “normal” slice of life series. And that’s the thing, despite what it may be easy to assume, Gakkou Gurashi still is a slice of life series. Decent chunks of even very serious episodes are spent on fairly mundane activities. Some whole episodes are devoted to them, such as when the club gets the idea to send out letter balloons in episode seven. Or episode nine, where Gakkou Gurashi manages the impressively absurd feat of squeezing an egregious pool episode into its remaining runtime, complete, at least in the fansub I watched, with a random reference to the then-recent Kill la Kill. (It’s easily the least essential episode of the whole show, but even something that nakedly cliche is a welcome breather between what comes before and after.)

In its final stretch, the girls of the School Life Club are thrust into crisis. Zombies break through the school’s barriers. Kurumi gets bit. It’s bad. If Gakkou Gurashi were the shock schlock people (including my younger self) have mistaken it for at times, it would be very easy for the series to end on a down note to be “shocking.” Instead, we get a miracle. Yuki gets the idea to dismiss the zombie horde via the school PA. Improbably, it works.

The scene falls apart in the retelling, but in the moment, it’s magical. There are losses (poor Taroumaru really looks like he’s going to pull through, but he doesn’t), but the School Life Club carry on. Maybe all of this is helped somewhat by the fact that I binged the entire series in only two sittings. Maybe it is also helped by my new HRT regimen making me even more vulnerable to sappy bullshit than I already was. But I like to think I’d have bawled like a baby regardless. The show is as good at tugging your heartstrings as it is inspiring dread. Not many anime can claim that.

Gakkou Gurashi can get away with that heartstring-pulling because by the time it happens, we’ve already spent some five hours with these characters. We have seen them not just survive but thrive in a world that has well and truly gone to shit.

And that difference, the distinction between simply surviving and truly living, is what that line in the maddeningly catchy OP theme means. “We have dreams like we’re supposed to.” Different dreams, maybe, than the ones we had when we were younger, but dreams, nonetheless. Gakkou Gurashi‘s final shot is the School Life Club, having held for themselves a “graduation ceremony” now that hiding out in the school is no longer tenable, flying down the empty highway in Megu’s old car, seeking to link up with other possible survivors. The city they drive through is in ruins, but there’s barely a hint of melancholy. The future is theirs to seize.

The Magic Planet

Category: Reviews

(REVIEW) I Would’ve Written a Review, But SHIKIMORI’S NOT JUST A CUTIE

(REVIEW) BIRDIE WING -GOLF GIRLS STORY- Just Doesn’t Give a Damn

(REVIEW) To Heaven & Back on a Song: The Soothing World of HEALER GIRL

(REVIEW) Reckoning with MAGIA RECORD: DAWN OF A SHALLOW DREAM

(REVIEW) The Lost Legacy of FLOWER PRINCESS BLAZE!!: How a Forgotten Toei Series Shaped 15 Years of Magical Girl Anime [April Fools’]

Magic Planet Monthly Movies: Half The Battle is Being There in POKÉMON THE MOVIE: I CHOOSE YOU!

(REVIEW) Six Minutes of Madness in THE IDOLM@STER CINDERELLA GIRLS: SPIN-OFF!

Magic Planet Monthly Movies: The Magic was Inside You All Along in MAJOKKO SHIMAI NO YOYO TO NENE

(REVIEW) The Last Flight of DRAGONAUT – THE RESONANCE

(REVIEW) A Blood-Red Sun Hangs High Over SCHOOL-LIVE!