Category: Reviews

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime, Reviews

Ranking Every 2020 Anime (That I Actually Finished), From Worst to Best – Part 1

It’s always a weird thing to have to write about why you didn’t like something. I’m a big believer in the idea that positive criticism is both more important and more difficult than negative. Yet, the format of the list means that we’re starting with several anime that I consider the very worst of the year (and indeed these first two entries are….not what I’d call favorites, we’ll put it that way). It admittedly makes me a bit nervous, because negativity is not my preferred mode of criticism.

Yet, at the same time. I think that even bad anime can expand one’s frame of reference and provide interesting insights into the medium in general. My hope is that this first part of the list does the same for you.

#20: The Day I Became A God

As I write this, it’s been about half an hour since I finished The Day I Became A God. This is the second-to-last anime I needed to finish for this list (the entire thing, all four parts), and I really, genuinely did not think I’d be adding something this far down this late in the game. I have to rewrite the opening sentence of my next entry, which in its current draft now-falsely claims that it is the only anime on this list to make me genuinely angry. That’s no longer true! Frankly, The Day I Became A God‘s final three episodes are so far and away the worst television period that I have watched this year that it’s made me see every subsequent entry on this list in a better light.

To talk about the latest from Jun Maeda and his colleagues at Key, we need to talk about how it starts. Because understanding how The Day I Became A God transforms from a pretty solid slice of life comedy with a supernatural edge into one of the most galling, maudlin, hacky attempts at a make-you-cri-everytiem love story that I have ever seen requires understanding how we got here. Or rather how we didn’t.

The Day I Became A God concerns Hina, alias Odin. It feels like a lifetime ago that the character was introduced to us as a blithe esper with the power to know anything. The first two thirds of the series chiefly concern her adventures with Youta, the inoffensively bland everydude protagonist. They do fun things like cheat at mahjong and help a ramen restaurant turn its fortunes around. It’s hardly groundbreaking, but it’s good fun, and if that were what we were discussing here this series would be assured a comfortable spot somewhere in this list’s mid-section with all the other solid genre anime.

Jun Maeda’s signature as a writer–so I’m told, anyway–is to build up the relationship between the characters and you, the audience, with this kind of every day life fun. Then, near the series’ end, some sort of Sword of Damocles will drop, the drama will hit, and tears will flow. Indeed, I knew this going in to The Day I Became A God, and am familiar with the device from the only other work of his I’ve seen–Angel Beats!, an anime I actually like quite a lot. The show even appears to foreshadow this; the anime’s other core premise is that Hina can sense that the world will end in thirty days.

So, fair play, right? Why am I mad?

If only this show dealt with something as interesting as apocalypse. Instead, for its final third, through a series of plot contortions so mind-bogglingly ridiculous that I will not recount them here, Hina is abducted by a shadowy government organization and has the source of her powers, a machine in her brain, removed. It’s revealed to us that, actually, Hina was severely physically and mentally disabled this entire time. (Because of a fictional Anime Illness, of course. God forbid you give your disabled characters any actual condition.) It was only the sci-fi magic of the machine that was allowing her to do what she did with Youta and friends, in addition to being the source of her omniscience. Are you crying yet?

The Day I Became A God‘s final three episodes are not just bad, they’re slimy. I actively felt repulsed by 11 and 12 especially. I absolutely loathe calling things “cringey”, but I physically winced at the screen during scenes in which (through another series of plot contortions) Youta, woefully-unqualified, tries to return her to his home where she lived for most of the series by posing as a physical therapist. These episodes go through great pains to portray Hina as pitiable because she is largely nonverbal and physically handicapped. In a particularly insidious twist, the show frames Youta’s generally ridiculous actions as being somehow, secretly, what Hina “wants”. It is a framing that cannot help but feel gross, ableist, and exploitative.

The finale, in which her actual doctor lets her return with Youta and the gang watches a student film they shot during the series’ first half (pointedly, when Hina was still verbal and able-bodied), feels like having this nonsense rubbed in your face. One has to go back a solid ten years, to 2010’s Occult Academy, to find a series that suffers a drop in writing quality this precipitous in its final 90 minutes. Even then, I think this example is genuinely worse.

I am left to wonder; who is this for? I make no secret of the fact that I am a massive sap, but the tearful reunions in the final episode of The Day I Became A God did absolutely nothing for me. My eyes remained dry, my fingers drummed in irritation on my desk, and I could only feel relief that the show was over.

Maeda has said he intended to create “the saddest anime ever” with this series. The only thing he succeeded at was making one that is profoundly frustrating, disappointing, objectionable, and, frankly, insulting to its audience. I considered cutting this series some slack with its placement here; after all, those first two thirds do still exist. But I actually think that they make the finale even worse. By the end of The Day I Became A God, all of my goodwill and any endearment I felt toward any of its characters had been sandblasted away by one of the most colossally inept TV anime endings in recent memory. All involved can–and should–do better.

#19: Sing “Yesterday” For Me

The operative word for Sing “Yesterday” For Me is “unfortunate”. This is another one with a promising start that slowly careens into an unsatisfying finish. It’s not quite a worst-case scenario for adapting old material into new anime, but it’s close.

But let’s start with the positives, because despite what that sentiment might imply, I can easily imagine why people who aren’t me might like the series. “Yesterday”‘s earthy, grounded visual style and accompanying soundtrack give it an aesthetic sense that is a genuine treat. Plus, it helps make the show’s slow narrative go down more easily than it might otherwise. It also has its moments of self-awareness, such as in an episode about a photographer whose obsession with one of the female leads, high school girl Haru, parallels protagonist Uozumi’s own.

So what’s wrong with it? Nothing and everything.

“Yesterday”‘s entire premise rubs me the wrong way. What is markedly worse is that through no one’s fault but my own, it took me the entire length of the series to realize this. (You can find material on this very blog where I praise the series, in fact.) Saying I have something of an irrational grudge against this anime wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

“Yesterday” is ostensibly the story of the aforementioned Rikuo Uozumi, a young adult working a dead-end job, and two potential love interests; Haru Nonaka and a former classmate who is now a teacher, Shinako Morinome. To its credit, both Haru and Shinako feel like fully-fledged characters. While their relationship (or lack thereof) with Uozumi does dominate their arcs, it dominates the entire plot, so that only makes sense. The real issue is pretty simple; Uozumi is a college graduate, and while Shinako is his age, Haru is a narratively-convenient eighteen. After much hemming and hawwing over the course of the series, Uozumi and Haru kiss in the final episode. Roll credits.

Fundamentally, even if you don’t find age gaps creepy, the way Uozumi treats Haru until the closing fifteen or so minutes of the final episode gives every indication that he’s going to end up with Shinako, despite what is framed as a somewhat childish fixation on Haru. But if this were merely a case of bait-and-switch or of one’s preferred Best Girl not winning, it’d be a minor gripe at most. The back half of the show’s final episode throws everything the narrative has been building toward wildly out of whack. The series’ real, actual problem then, is that like so many romance anime, it ends where it should begin.

The idea of a college grad who is finally starting to pursue his photography dreams after waking up from the torpor of the layabout life while having to juggle a relationship with someone years younger than him is wildly interesting. It’s also arguably super weird, but that’s an angle a story can work with. Why does Sing “Yesterday” For Me take so long to get to what is by far the most interesting development in its story, and then just end?

There are no answers, at least none for me. I have spoken to others who enjoyed the series and a common view I find is that the series is about building up to lifechanging moments, to sudden pivot points from which there is no return. More power to the folks who can find it in them to read the series this way, but I cannot. Thinking back, I find myself craving a more properly developed drama. I can only consider “Yesterday” a disappointment.

#18: The God of High School

I’m genuinely not trying to be meanspirited with these first few entries, because I fully acknowledge that making any anime requires an immense amount of talent from many people all working in concert. It’s a process I could never be involved with and I do genuinely respect anyone in the industry grind, no matter what the end result is.

So with all that said; what on earth do you say about something like The God of High School? The God of High School is not really what I’d call a bad anime, and despite its abundance of hyper-compressed shonen cliche I’d say it’s still fun enough on a moment to moment basis. But it really is the sort of series that one struggles to describe not because it’s particularly inscrutable but because anything you could say about it also applies to many other, better-known (and just better) anime. For instance; I could tell you that it’s a tournament arc-heavy series where the protagonist lacks much characterization beyond a desire to fight and is loosely based on Sun Wukong, but you might then assume I’m talking about Dragon Ball Z. Other aspects of the series similarly feel so heavily indebted to its predecessors that saying anything positive (or even neutral) about it that couldn’t easily be mistaken as praise for Dragon Ball or Bleach or Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure or almost any other shonen series is extraordinarily difficult.

The issue is just that The God of High School feels very much like what it is, which is an animated adaption of a webcomic written by a shonen junkie. Consequently, while it’s fun in the places where it truly lets itself cut loose (such as the more out-there fight scenes), it feels dreadfully anonymous much of the rest of the time, and even when it is firing on all cylinders the breakneck pace of the adaption means it’s generally for only a couple minutes at a time. There are worse things to be than a decent way to burn six hours, but as it further recedes into the rearview I’ve come to realize I cannot imagine I’ll ever watch even a second of it again. And more than any other show on this list, I can even less imagine what a diehard fan of The God of High School would look like. If this is more indicative of the quality of what’s to be produced under the Crunchyroll Originals banner than a certain other Webtoon adaption that shows up elsewhere on this list, that is really not a great sign for future CR Original material. I would like to think it’s an outlier.

#17: 22/7

Maybe it’s unfair to call 22/7 disappointing. Yet, looking back on it a few months removed from its airing that’s the adjective that first springs to mind. 22/7 seemed poised to offer something interrogative and worthy of thought; early episodes gave the impression of building up to some kind of grand reveal, positioning the series as something of a would-be Madoka for the idol girl group anime genre. Whether through deliberate misdirection or just too-high expectations on some part of its audience, it never got there. Instead, as weeks stretched into months, it simply gradually ran out of steam until limping across the finish line at the end of its season.

Even setting that aside though, 22/7‘s command of character writing is pretty limited. Every character arc is hamstrung by the show’s bizarre editing, which likes to cut backward and forward, interweaving flashbacks with scenes of the present day. It seems likely that this is supposed to draw a deliberate contrast; how our idols got from where they were to where they are. Instead, it generally makes episodes thematically and tonally incoherent. Even the best of them (such as Jun’s focus episode) are often hamstrung by dicey writing. At its worst, as in episodes revolving around more minor and frankly less-interesting characters like Reika, it hauls in hoary sexist ideas of what an idol should be that feel stuck in the ’80s. It’s impossible to prove that these somehow stem from the involvement of industry oldguardsman Yasushi Akimoto, but his presence in the background of the series’ production does not incline me to charitable interpretations of the 22/7‘s flaws.

The show does have its positives, of course. It’s generally nicely-animated and sometimes well-directed, especially in the case of the aforementioned Jun episode, and it has solid character interactions even if the arcs are not particularly strong. But I think if 22/7 the series survives in the collective cultural conscience at all, it won’t be through the lens of the show itself. 22/7 is also an actual idol group, and their music ranges from solid to, at its best, fantastic. The melodramatic cloud of black smoke they turned in for the show’s opening theme–a cheery number about how life is hard and no one understands each other called “Muzui” or “It’s Difficult”–remains one of my favorite pop songs of 2020, and I found myself returning to it many times over the course of this difficult year. Far more time than I ever spent appreciating the series it’s a theme to. 22/7 the group have a bright future. 22/7 the anime is best left in the past.

#16: Burn The Witch

Burn The Witch is a weird one, for one several reasons. It’s not a TV series, for one thing (the only such entry on this list), and it’s in the odd position of being the adaption of just the first few chapters of its source material. Something that would likely have never happened were the writer of said source material not Tite Kubo. The man most famous for the polarizing–but undeniably very successful–Bleach. Burn The Witch has a lot of things going for it. It’s animated by Studio Colorido, and being made as a three-episode special means that it’s never less than great to look at, and the fights in particular here are superb. The worldbuilding is goofy but in a fun sort of way; you know that things are off to a good start when we get a made-up statistic about dragon-related deaths in London right off the top. Our two protagonists, Noel and Ninny, are also quite fun to follow, each in their own way. Even the show’s magic system is a good time, more anime could stand to experiment with goofy horn-guns as their weapons of choice.

So all that said, why isn’t this higher up (or, well, lower down, one supposes) on the list? Well, not to repeat myself, but Burn The Witch has a man-shaped millstone hanging around its neck.

It’s really hard to overstate how much of a problem male lead Balgo Parks is, as a character. He’s sexist, he’s obnoxious and he’s everywhere. He completely kills the fun any time he’s on-screen, and he’s on-screen all the time. It’s a terrible, terrible problem for an otherwise solid OVA to have, because every second he’s there he’s cutting into the actually enjoyable parts of it, and ultimately, he ruins it. Time will tell if this applies to any further adaptions of Burn The Witch we get (and it’d be surprising if we didn’t get at least a season or two of a TV series), but I certainly hope it doesn’t.

#15: Gleipnir

Grisly, grody, sometimes flat-out exploitative seinen adaption that’s a mess from top to bottom. I feel like if I were a more “respectable” commentator on the medium I’d hate this show. But I’m not, so I don’t. I wouldn’t say I like it either, exactly, but it’s definitely the entry in this part of the list I have the most nice things to say about.

Gleipnir‘s been a part of my life for an unusually long time compared to the rest of the entries on this list. I first read the manga (which I markedly did not care for) back in 2017. When I heard of an anime adaption premiering this year I was curious to see if it’d be improved at all by the change in medium, and, admittedly, I was hoping that if it didn’t, it’d at least be a fun thing to riff on with friends.

To a point, that is exactly what I got. Gleipnir‘s idiosyncrasies too often fall on the bad side of good taste for me to really call it great. There are too many offputting shots of the show’s female lead in her underwear covered in fluid, weird problematic or just straight-up uncomfortable elements (a centipede demon from the show’s 2/3rds mark springs to mind as an example) for that to be the case. And its male lead is the kind of shonen-protagonist-but-edgier that just doesn’t leave you with a ton to work with most of the time.

But nonetheless, there’s just something about this series. Maybe it’s the surprisingly good action direction and atmosphere, which is certainly a credit to both director Kazuhiro Yoneda and his team at PINE JAM in general. The man has episode direction credits on the grandfather of 2010s trainwreck anime; Code Geass R2. While I can’t prove that the experience somehow uniquely equipped him to deal with Gleipnir‘s ridiculously up and down source material, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Over the course of its single cour Gleipnir manages to, in spots, eke out some surprisingly affecting character writing, has a downright haunting final few episodes, and, as mentioned, some great fight scenes. An example in the final episode might still be one of my favorites of the year as it unites both the show’s literal reality and its thematic core of relying on others to compensate for your weaknesses and confronting your demons in a way that it otherwise struggles to articulate. Gleipnir‘s central issue is its tendency to get in its own way, but that’s hardly a rare problem for the medium.

I don’t know if a second season would fix (or even mitigate) that problem, but Gleipnir is the only anime in this part of the list where if one were released I’d be interested in watching it. That must count for something, surely.

And thus we finish the “unpleasant but necessary” part of the list. Still, even among these unlucky few there is not a single one among them I actually regret watching, not even The Day I Became A God. I have said many times that part of what draws me to anime as a medium is its infinite capacity for surprise. That surprise is not always pleasant! But you take the bad with the good.

Speaking of the good, I will see you in Part 2 when it goes live. Happy Holidays!

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

Ranking Every 2020 Anime (That I Actually Finished), From Worst to Best – Introduction

Before I start, let’s take a moment to breathe.

What a year it’s been, am I right or am I right?

I think I speak for a lot of my readerbase when I say that 2020 has been the most taxing, challenging, and just flat-out exhausting year of our lives. Finding the time and energy to devote to experiencing, thinking about, and talking about art this year was not always easy. But by the same token, I’d say that a lot of the reason I’m handling it as decently as I am is because of said art. This is hardly unique to me; many critics, commentators, bloggers, and journalists have spoken about the importance of their medium(s) of choice this year.

To that end, rather than simply doing a Top 5, or a “Best and Worst”. I decided I would rank the anime I’ve seen in 2020, from worst to best. I’ve only seen twenty shows this year, which is not that many, in the grand scheme of things. But it’s enough that writing just one article was…not feasible, and as such, this post here will link to the four articles constituting the four parts of the list. Why worst to best? Well, I think it makes for a better dramatic arc, mostly. But also because even the shows I liked the least this year played a part in helping me keep myself together. It’s not an exaggeration to say that anime has helped my emotional state this year more than it ever has in my life.

I tried not to sweat the minutiae of placement too much; while last and first place are definitely where they belong, some stretches in the middle are occupied by shows that I’d say I liked about equally. So it goes!

Not present are non-serial anime (with apologies to music videos like “Ruru’s Suicide Show“ and “Study Me“ and shorts like Puparia) and, obviously, things I didn’t see or didn’t finish. (Which, those range from Akudama Drive to Healin’ Good Precure and everything in-between.) What it does include are 21 20* shows that, despite everything, I believe all have some merit, and are all worth talking about. Some of these writeups are short, a few are very long, some are more informal, and for others I endeavored to look at them through a more focused lens. Some lean heavily on personal experience, others, uh, don’t. Variety is the spice of life.

And of course, we’re required to use terms like “worst” and “best” because for a critic it is generally expected that one use the language of objectivity. I don’t really believe in that in the arts, and I don’t think most of my readerbase does either, but I feel the need to clear up any possible misconception nonetheless. This whole list is, obviously, of course, only my own opinions, thoughts, and observations. As says the disclaimer at the bottom of every Magic Planet Anime article.

But enough beating around the bush. Here is the list, divided into four parts for your reading pleasure. In order to stagger things out (and because I’m not done with some of the writeups on some of the better anime here), I’ll be rolling out one part per day over the next several days, starting with Part 1 today (December 27th, if you’re reading this in the future). Hopefully I will be able to finish by the new year! I hope, also, that you find some tiny crumb of insight, interest, or just plain enjoyment from these walls of words.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

*I made an embarassing fencepost error when writing up the list, which is why not all four parts of the list have five entries each. I think it’s been fixed now. Whoops.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Sakae Esuno Has a BIG ORDER

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

What is a “bad anime”, exactly? If it’s an anime that fails at being something it’s trying to be, I find it difficult to stick the label on Big Order. Because on the one hand, the 2016 manga adaption seems to know exactly what it wants to be. On the other hand, maybe a “bad anime” is an anime whose very aims are somehow defective. Being a case where “what it wants to be” is arguably somewhere between “bad for the medium” and “reprehensible”, Big Order‘s a bit of a hard one to evaluate. Too beholden to a wide slate of action-anime cliches to be truly unique. Too weird to be rightly called generic. Big Order largely succeeds in its aims, but that very same success makes the series impossible to defend. Speaking less roundaboutly; this show sucks and you probably shouldn’t watch it unless you have a fascination with shows that suck.

Very broadly, Big Order is about people who have superpowers based on “wishes” they had at the time a disaster called The Great Destruction (yes, really) hit, circa ten in-show years ago. This ostensibly-kinda-interesting premise means very little, because in practice these powers–called Orders–can just kind of Do Whatever in all but a few cases. Our protagonist is Eiji Hoshimiya, a chuuni’s dream. In a more self-aware show, the similarity of his first name to the word “edgy” might be deliberate. Eiji accidentally killed billions-with-a-B people when he got his Order, causing the Great Destruction in the first place.

If that seems like an odd fit for a protagonist, it’s here where we have to break out our critical lens. Because very little about Big Order makes much literal sense, and internal logic phases in and out at the story’s whim. However, considered through the prism of a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the stereotyped ideal anime-watcher (that is to say, a young straight man), everything clicks into place perfectly. In this way, Big Order is a bad anime, but an excellent peek into the mind of the kind of person who thinks good anime begins with Code Geass and ends with Darling in The FranXX. Which is to say it is also a ten-car-pileup of barely-disguised fetish plots, some more objectionable than others. A large chunk of Big Order revolves around Eiji’s desire to save his sister from her Incurable Anime Disease. If you guessed that they’re also hot for each other, put your chip on your bad anime bingo card.

Along its ten episodes, Big Order manages to hit stops that include Eiji accidentally (but only temporarily!) impregnating a girl by touching her fake bunny ears.

This is a real screencap.

There’s also a man with a sword that can cut through time and space. A final episode plastered with an awful-looking monochrome filter in what I dearly hope is not a misguided attempt to homage Gunbuster. And the entire character arc of Rin; who enters the series in episode one trying to murder Eiji for killing her parents, and by the tenth minute of episode two has been mind controlled by Eiji’s ill-defined powers and wants to hatefuck him. I’m not normally this crass when writing on this blog, but no other language exists for Big Order. It is a crass anime.

This is to say nothing of the anime’s ugly thematic heart. Much ink has been spilled over the otaku persecution complex, a phenomenon that has given us many of the worst light novels, manga, and anime of recent years. It feels fair to say that it’d be hard to top Big Order, though. Eiji’s responsibility for the Great Destruction becomes public knowledge early on, and by consequence, the entire world hates him. Combined with his near-omnipotent powers and you have a character who has both the ability and moral license to do whatever he wants. He uses it, too. The above example with Rin is just one of several. The show’s entire premise reeks of repressed straightboy nerd “I’ll show them for making fun of me!” rage. This kind of dynamic has sexist echoes throughout the entirety of art, and it’s certainly no knock on anyone if they’re plainly sick of it.

You are at this point probably not surprised by there being a harem in this show.

Yet, I remained strangely fascinated with the show as I watched. All of this would ruin Big Order if there were anything to ruin. What prevents Big Order from falling into the lowest rung of mainstream TV anime is that it is a bizarre combination of astoundingly incompetent, yet tightly-edited. Things just kind of happen, but often in very entertaining ways. Episode four remains the show’s most infamous, featuring the aforementioned plot point of ear-pregnancy combined with Eiji and co. running to and ‘fro throughout a war-torn city and trying to come up with a way to stop it from being nuked. The entire series is this level of unintentionally hilarious. In a more self-aware show, it would seem deliberate, but Big Order‘s full-tilt commitment to its own inane thematic core makes it impossible to believe it’s anything but accidental. In this way, the show is enjoyable if you like seeing an anime fall apart at the seams when its premise and plot are put under the slightest bit of scrutiny. For whatever reason, I kind of do.

On the whole, Big Order is the rare series I’d say has fully earned the term “guilty pleasure”. It’s a kind of bitterly ironic that despite Big Order being a financial flop, the only project animating studio Asread has worked on recently is the similarly-reviled Arifutera. I’d say “you reap what you sow”, but the complex dynamics of how a studio picks up a show to work on render that moot. Besides, no one deserves to work on Big Order-quality projects forever, it’s simply too cruel.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime, Other Posts, Reviews

(REVIEW) RURU’S SUICIDE SHOW ON A LIVESTREAM

How the hell do you review a music video? Even as someone who really loves animated music videos, it seems impossible, and before I saw the MV accompanying Shinsei Kamattechan’s “Ruru’s Suicide Show On a Livestream” I’d have had no motivation to try. Yet, like many commentators on the arts, I have a weakness for taking wild swings at the zeitgeist. Sometimes, even if only for yourself, you come across a singular piece of art that seems to just click things into place. Seems to “get it” in a way that most do not. The “Ruru’s Suicide Show” MV premiered all the way back in early January, just eight days into what would become what is unquestionably the darkest year for the world-at-large that I have ever lived through. 2020 finally winds down in just over a month as I’m penning this, and I think I can safely say that somehow, no other anime anything this year captured the unique mixture of toxic, spiraling misery, delirious, denialistic euphoria, and the tragic endpoint of both quite like this song and this video.

All of this, I must imagine, is very much accidental. Perhaps it’s unique to me, even, and given that the video with its scant runtime of just four minutes sits atop this article, perhaps you’ve watched the whole thing and are feeling very confused as to what I’m on about. But, as I write this the video sits at over fourteen million views, far more than any other music video ever associated with a Shinsei Kamattechan song. It makes sense; the band are immensely talented and wildly creative, but they’re definitely niche despite being signed to a major label (Warner Japan, via their Unbonde sublabel). Lead vocalist Noko is an acquired taste, (I’m not even sure if that’s them on “Ruru’s Suicide Show”. It doesn’t entirely sound like them, but their voice is very flexible, so who knows.) and the band in general are no one’s idea of a shiny-polished pop group.

“Ruru’s Suicide Show” itself is the kind of song whose utility is difficult to put into words. It is based, albeit only loosely, on a very real tragedy involving a young girl named Roro that occurred some seven years ago*, which can make it seem odd, possibly even exploitative, to the uninitiated. More broadly, it taps into a long lineage of Japanese rock that I’m frankly a little unqualified to explore in-depth. (And it’s beyond the scope of this article anyway.) On a surface level, it isn’t hard to understand why a song about suicide would resonate in a particularly bleak year for the world, but I think dissecting our opening question of why specifically this requires digging a bit deeper than that.

Songs that are simply sad are one thing, “Ruru’s Suicide Show”‘s “trick”, such as it is, is relatively simple. Despite its bleak subject matter it is sonically upbeat. However, most songs like this rely on simple lyrical dissonance, the classic example over here in the US being OutKast’s “Hey Ya” (which itself is merely about heartbreak). “Ruru’s Suicide Show” goes well beyond that. Its relentlessly upbeat sound is pushed into the proverbial red, becoming first disquieting, then almost a kind of confrontational, and finally cathartic. “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is not a song for people who need a pick-me-up, it is a song one listens to so that they know that they aren’t the only person in the world who’s ever suffered like this. And whether or not “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is the sort of music that resonates with you can be correlated pretty well to whether you know what I mean when I say “like this.” It is a song for a very specific sort of person. That a major label–even an ‘indie’-focused subsidiary of one–would bankroll a video for this thing is nothing short of astounding.

And yet, there it sits. Fourteen million views and counting throughout the course of just one calendar year. Some of that popularity (like with many things nowadays) can be thanked to / blamed on TikTok, where the song caught on as something of a minor meme of all things. But while that might account for an initial spike in popularity it does not account for its continued success. And indeed if one visits the video’s comments section it is mostly people (fairly young ones, is my impression) defending the song, the video, the late Roro herself, and so on from being appropriated as a fad / fandom / meme / whatever term you care to use. These users, to whom the song clearly means as much as it does to me, demand that it, and its subject, be treated with respect.

I think some of this broad resonance may have to do with the elephant in the room. The music video itself, and how it welds to the song. Enhancing, as it does, every line with surreal, dire imagery that expertly conveys internal crisis through symbolic destruction of the outside world. And, sadly, the very literal destruction of the self.

Music videos, like other short-form projects, can be some of the “purest” animation imaginable, unbound by conventional narrative. Some months ago I compared Eureka Seven to a collage of images, but that’s often literally all music videos can afford to be, given their limited run-time. It’s no surprise then that “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is on the more surreal end as far as such things go. One can map out the broad story of the main character, but the real resonance lies in the details.

To state the obvious; the “Ruru’s Suicide Show” music video is gorgeous. Director Rabbit MACHINE has built up a body of music video and commercial work over the past decade or so, but it’s hard to imagine any of it could top this. There’s a particularly unnerving edge to the editing in this video. I imagine it’s an attempt to underscore the sharp distinction between the main character’s flights of fancy–often rendered in an even more cartoonish art style and depicting such feats as her miraculously ducking under and dodging a train–and the darker side of her psyche, including the suicidal ideation itself. To me, the grimmest shot in the entire short is a first-person aside where the “camera” is tossed into the path of a speeding train, presumably the Chuō Line mentioned in the lyrics.

Elsewhere; our protagonist laughs, lugs her stuffed rabbit around an unfriendly city, stands alone in a classroom, at one point in front of chalk drawings of butterfly wings and at another as the world outside explodes, is lost among a forest of nooses, envisions a rose blooming from her corpse, poses atop an ocean of (what else?) power lines, and pictures herself crawling into a coffin. She speaks of being bullied, of “building a gravestone” for herself on-camera. Finally, she laughs again, as she jumps.

Despite many of the details matching to the real tragedy alluded to in the song’s title, I don’t believe most of this is intended to be literal. Even the bleakest moments of the video are defined by a bright art style that does not lend itself to such interpretations. Our protagonist seems cast less as specifically Roro and more as an amalgamation of all who’ve taken their own life because they could see no other way out and were spurned there by the uncaring masses of the world. She wants to stop hurting, she wants to stop being lonely, she wants people to look at her. All of this is driven to its horrible endpoint.

Her look–downright stylish, if we’re being honest–might seem at odds with the core theme of the song and the video, but the same dynamic present between the music and the lyrics is repeated here. Her blonde hair, the pink smartphone taped to her face, the black lightning bolt hairclip providing a visual metaphor for the term denpa, all of it is intended to push past merely cute into a funhouse mirror reflection of getting lost in your own head. If you’re the sort who demands evidence of a mask slip, there is a literal one in the video, though only for the briefest moment.

We are clearly intended to both sympathize and empathize with the protagonist, but what happens to her is tragic, and here we have to return to the song itself again and more generally to Shinsei Kamattechan as musicians. I am admittedly a neophyte when it comes to the band’s discography, but I can tell (and have been told as much secondhand) that much of their work deals with alienation and a feeling of not belonging. Be that to some specific part of society or simply the world in general. It is an uncomfortable feeling, and one far more people have than I think many others may realize. It is no wonder so many of us want to be witches that talk to kittens, or aliens riding in a UFO. It is no wonder then again that so many of us come to eventually half-believe we really are. Checking each other, keeping each other in good spirits but away from the brink, is arguably the duty of those of us afflicted by mental illness. Because the consequences of dealing with this alienation alone, or with the toxic fake-help of bad actors, can be, as “Ruru’s Suicide Show” illustrates, tragic.

So the real power of “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is in melancholic solidarity. You are not alone, but giving in to this feeling will not end well. It’s also a plea for understanding; some of the lines spoken by the protagonist in the chorus could just as easily be said from a child to their parent, the so-simple-its-devastating “Mama please listen this isn’t a phase” foremost among them.

In this strength we find that “Ruru’s Suicide Show” is, in a peculiar way, a sort of two-way elegy. On the one hand it is a memorial to the titular Roro and many others like her. On the other; it is a prayer from those who did not make it for those who are still alive.

In my heart I am a worrywort. Any time I listen to this song I think about those people in the video’s comments, many of them obviously kids, and I hope that they’re okay. It’s naïve, but my hope is that by writing this, I am somehow doing some small portion of my part in the “duty” outlined above. To you, my limited audience, I simply want to reassure you, if you are reading this, you are still alive. For those who aren’t, the most we can do is to remember, and to eulogize.

Take care of yourself.

*The “Roro-chan Incident” as it’s come to be called is the sort of case where rumor and reality have bled together so much that it’s hard to know the truth of things. I will not deny that several times while writing this I did wonder if this song could be construed as exploitative. I have no real answer, the question of how much leeway a musician (or anyone) gets via artistic license is, as far as I am concerned, an unsettled one. Regardless, I find the song and video’s power impossible to deny.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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(REVIEW) DRACULA: SOVEREIGN OF THE DAMNED is A Graveyard….Something

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 Myrdradek. Many thanks, as always.

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

“Count Dracula fled to the United States of America, seeking to hide himself in the city of Boston.”

Happy Halloween.

You know what’s truly scary? Not ghosts, ghouls, goblins, monsters, demons, and certainly not vampires. It’s the inexorable march of time, and its effect on popular culture. Today’s big-budget blockbuster is tomorrow’s piece of trivia, and we have quite the piece of Did You Know? fodder today.

Everyone’s favorite sitcom family.

The result of a partnership between Marvel and Toei, Dracula: Sovereign of The Damned (Yami no Teiō: Kyūketsuki Dorakyura in Japan) is loosely based on Marvel’s own The Tomb of Dracula comics. The same that would give rise to the character Blade. (Who, incidentally, has a mostly-forgotten anime series of his own at this point.) Originally released in Japan, it was, as far as I can tell, dubbed into English by the infamous Harmony Gold a few years later, and enjoyed limited screenings on cable TV and possibly some sort of VHS release. A DVD remaster also exists, though information on any of this is rather sparse.

Sovereign of The Damned is not anyone’s idea of a lost classic. It’s campy, corny, and about five different kinds of a mess. I’m not allergic to any of those traits, as I’ve well established elsewhere on this blog, but Sovereign of The Damned is a special kind of Very 80s so-bad-it’s-good, that one has to be of a particular mindset to enjoy.

Do you like Sinister Pointing? Dracula: Sovereign of The Damned might just be the film for you!

There’s a lot of up and downs here, starting with the production. Visually, the film’s quality is a mixed bag. The realities of footage degradation over the years have rendered some parts of even the remaster rather hard to parse, as once-present color detail is smooshed into what is essentially different shades of black or dark blue. Even at the time, I imagine it was a bit of a struggle.

The animation quality is also spotty. While it’s hardly the worst thing this era of cartooning produced (not by a longshot) it rarely looks particularly fluid or pleasing, further hampered by the semi-realistic style that was the norm for this sort of thing at the time. In particularly bad moments, characters sometimes seem to more morph into new poses rather than move per se.

On the other hand, it does admittedly have its visual highlights, too. There’s a particularly nice cut in the film’s first half when we see Satan raise Dracula from the grave, the bizarre but visually striking “resurrection scene” of Dracula’s son Janus, the looming gothic air of its depiction of Dracula’s tenure as Vlad III of Wallachia, and some cool flame and beam effects elsewhere.

The backgrounds are quite good as well. Generally, they consist of nicely-painted pieces that set the mood effectively. The city backgrounds in particular have a peculiar unreality to them that was common to backgrounds depicting such settings at the time.

Broadly speaking, it’s the weirder and more abstract parts of the film that look the best. It’s hard to say if that’s simple circumstance or the result of the artists being given more room to experiment with the more out-there sequences. It’s a real treat though, and it saves Sovereign of The Damned from being visually boring.

On the audio end, the experience is similar. The soundtrack is weird and bloopy but it’s effective at mood-building when it’s actually present. But decently long stretches of Sovereign of the Damned simply do not have BGM, leading the generally poor FX work to struggle to pick up the slack. The voice acting is similarly lackluster. Other than the amusingly hammy performances of Tom Wyner in the lead as Dracula, and Richard Epcar as Satan, none of the voicework is particularly memorable. Even these performances seem to be more the result of actors simply realizing they may as well go all-in on a film this corny. They’re fun, but hardly genuinely serious or dramatic.

But of course if anyone knows Sovereign of The Damned it’s not for its production values. The film’s script has the unenviable task of trying to condense 70 issues of full-length comics into just 90 minutes. It’s untenable, and as a result Sovereign of The Damned blows through some six or seven only very loosely-related plotlines in its hour and a half runtime. Elements are brought up, used once or twice, and then dropped. Satan, for example, is set up as a major antagonist, but disappears two-thirds of the way through the film, swearing a revenge that he never comes to collect.

There’s also a notably bad “telling over showing” problem. Decent tracts of reel estate are eaten up by long spools of narration. Without fail they’re flat, dull, and serve only to shuttle the characters along from one plotline to another. The entire B-plot about the vampire hunter team seems superfluous until Sovereign‘s closing minutes, where bearded brains-of-the-operation Hans Harper* is unexpectedly able to overpower and impale a newly-re-vampirized Dracula on a silver wheel spoke before taking out both the vampire prince and himself with a self-destruct button in his wheelchair. It’s as silly as it sounds.

A stone-cold killer, apparently.

Which is honestly not a huge issue. Sovereign of The Damned is at its best when it’s silly, whether it’s the high school play melodrama of Dracula’s bride’s backstory, the comically bitchy essentially-a-cameo by Layla**, the random aside where Dracula must hide from a bunch of bats in a cabin with three small children near the film’s end, or even Dracula mugging a man to get money for a burger at one point. (And yes, it is this film that that particular piece of internet ephemera comes from, if you’ve been getting deja vu from the image embeds.)

There are a few moments that approach genuine pathos. Such as Dracula’s rage at the accidental murder of his infant son, but they’re rendered absurd by the voice acting. I can’t help but wonder if the film “works” a bit more as a serious piece in Japanese, but the English subtitled version of the film is not easily available, so a mystery it will remain for the foreseeable future.

In the end, Dracula: Sovereign of The Damned is not actually unusual in any of these regards. Most animation, and indeed, most media, falls in this same collective cultural memory hole. Too weird to be completely forgotten, but certainly not remarkable enough to have lingered in any serious capacity. So it is reduced down to a few clips, and passes into the great pop-cultural beyond, with all the elegance of Dr. Harper’s exploding wheelchair. So it goes.

*, **: In the comics, their names are Quincy Harper and Lilith respectively. Why they were changed here is a riddle for the ages.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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(REVIEW) Shadows on The Sun: The Forgotten Flames of DAY BREAK ILLUSION

All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

I’ll be the light that breaks the sky.

In modern tarot fortune telling, a card being dealt inverted is generally a bad sign. A portent of something ill, or at the very least, great obstacles to be overcome. This perhaps explains Day Break Illusion, an anime that uses tarot as a motif and often feels like a dark mirror of a traditional magical girl series. Generally regarded as the first of the “Madoka Clones” in its day, it was rarely given much of a chance. It’s dimly remembered, seven years on, and many who do remember it don’t seem to hold it in high regard. Yet, I found myself oddly drawn to this series. Maybe it was the stylish character designs. Maybe it was that middling reputation–I do have something of a contrarian streak with certain things, after all. After I watched the first episode, the opening theme–a soaring ode to bitter defiance in the face of impossible odds–was definitely a factor. 

No matter why, I found myself taken in by Day Break Illusion almost immediately. Perhaps because how despite its reputation, it feels like it has much more in common with a “straight” magical girl anime than it does Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

More specifically, it often feels like a particularly black take on a Pretty Cure season. Where that franchise is, thematically, generally a celebration of female youth, Day Break Illusion is a depiction of a loss of innocence and an examination of how the pain that comes from that might be overcome, or at least dealt with. It is not a happy series, and it is certainly not for the faint of heart. It is also the rare anime I’ve seen that I would call deconstructive, in that in the process of not being a “traditional” magical girl series, it helps define what one is, both in the breaks in tradition it makes and what it chooses to hold on to.

In brief: Day Break Illusion is the story of magical girls who wield the power of tarot cards and channel them into elemental powers. Our lead is Akari, who wields The Sun. The series goes through no pains to pretend her story will be a happy one. In the very first episode she loses her cousin Fuyuna, who becomes a Daemonia, this show’s version of the various baddies that populate Pretty Cure, Sailor Moon, and so on. This awakens her card, and she is brought to a magical school to become part of a team with three other students: Luna (The Moon), Seira (The Stars), and Ginka (Temperance), with whom she must learn to fight, and to deal with her unique gift; the ability to hear the cries of the Daemonia. Throughout the series’ thirteen episodes, the girls learn about each other, they have conflicts, they grow closer, and they suffer. 

That last part is actually surprisingly important. It’s easy to read Day Break as doing what it does for shock value. But while its bevy of cribbed horror anime tropes, weird digital visual effects, monsters begging to be killed, and even a few particularly nasty sequences that both draw on and snipe at the imagery of certain noxious kinds of hentai, are all both a lot in the dramatic sense and quite the emotional assault, they almost never feel pointless. This is important, and in the realm of the “dark mahou shoujo” series, is what separates the wheat from the chaff. 

That long, arduous ride through the dark night of the soul is what, I imagine, gives the show its polarizing reputation. Day Break Illusion is a good series, but it’s also a rough watch, and it plays its cards (pardon the pun) close to its chest until the very end. Perhaps I’m simply naïve, but I genuinely did not not know until the series’ closing episode if the misery of the final arc would pay off in any way. It does, but the journey there is fraught. Combine this with the lead villain’s goal being to–his words–”mate with” Akari in order to bring about a new species of super-Daemonia, and certainly, Day Break Illusion is a show that it is easy to read uncharitably. 

And I might well be in that crowd if the anime’s character building were less delicate and if its refutation of the world’s most predatory ills felt less pointed. Cerebrum, the aforementioned lead villain, is a bad guy in almost every sense of both of those words. The emotional manipulation he puts the cast through is often reminiscent of actual tactics used by real abusers despite its fantastical nature, and the parallel feels intentional. With this in mind, the show’s harder-to-swallow points–the blood, re-contextualized horror and H-adjacent imagery, the juxtaposition of all of this and the fact that it’s a magical girl series, and even just the storyline itself–begin to make much more sense. As do the ways that this ties into one of the show’s other main themes: self-acceptance.

Each of the four leads has a central flaw that is the source of their woes. It is confronted, admitted as part of the self, and reckoned with. In this way, Day Break Illusion often feels like a strange, shadow universe take on a specific Pretty Cure season, HeartCatch, which dealt with that same theme of self-acceptance. The difference is in execution, but drawing on some of the same thematic material places Day Break Illusion in conversation with the broader genre even as it stands perpendicular to it. 

So if another series, one that has more universal appeal, already exists and explores the same territory in the same genre and, arguably, does it better, what need is there for Day Break Illusion? 

Well, my theory resides in the show’s hardest sell: that dark nature itself. As we grow older, we become accustomed to the ills of the world. Magical girl anime, by and large, deal with simplified versions of such problems. This isn’t a flaw in the genre; children need stories they can relate to and for adults such stories serve as an important narrative place of healing. The key difference is that Day Break Illusion, by bringing the subject matter closer to home, closer to what is for us genuinely scary, functions to adults in the same way that those very anime do for children, by using this much more intense nature to raise the stakes, and produce an (ideally) even greater catharsis at its end. In the show’s own words; dark days help us appreciate the Sun. 

For every horrific moment in the series; every bit of slow-motion nightmare logic, every turn-key tension-building piece of music, every fright, every shock, Day Break Illusion ends happily. Not happily ever after, but with enough light left in the world that its cast both can and choose to carry on. 

In this way; Day Break Illusion absolutely deserves to be mentioned alongside more traditional genre touchstones. It is true that it lacks the same near-universal appeal of more straightforward magical girl anime, but what it doesn’t have there, it makes up for in its astounding belief in the power of the human spirit. Akari, who goes through so much, reminds me a bit of another orange-haired magical girl often compared to the Sun: Hibiki Tachibana of Symphogear, an anime that uses some of the same techniques as Day Break, to even greater effect. Day Break Illusion never found that series’ popular success, but maybe it didn’t need to. Sometimes all that needs to be done is to listen, and if you’re willing, Day Break Illusion has a lot to say.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in Other Posts, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Cat’s Out of The Bag: MAO MAO: HEROES OF PURE HEART

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 Yarrun. Many thanks, as always.

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. This review is for an ongoing series. Facts and opinions are subject to change. Images occur courtesy of the Mao Mao Fan Wiki.

“Has anyone ever told you you have issues?”

Cartoon Network’s slow slide into a streaming-first content mill as opposed to a TV network per se has been equal parts troubling and kind of fascinating. One consequence, among many, is the increased reliance on the short-form action-comedy formula repopularized by Teen Titans Go!. This isn’t anything actually new for the network exactly, but the pace of these shows has gotten increasingly frantic over the years. Whether the actual result of the decreased attention span of the internet age or just some executive’s delusion of such is a question for sociologists and fans of TV programming inside-baseball, but one can’t deny that the trend exists.

Mao Mao, the protagonist. He sounds a bit like Batman, that’s how you know he’s a good guy.

Thus, we have Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart. Set in something akin to a lower-fantasy version of Adventure Time’s Kingdom of Ooo, our three leads are the titular Mao Mao and his friends / roommates / co-heroes of justice Badgerclops and Adorabat. Their job, at least in theory, is the defense of Pureheart Valley, the sleepy abode where they live and act as “sheriffs”, which is populated by a technicolor gaggle of cutesy animal-people called Sweetypies. 

Lest one get the wrong idea about Mao Mao, the series’ (actually quite thorough) fan-wiki singles out just six of the 40 episodes that make up the first season as having “full story progression”. This is not a cartoon where the narrative through-line is the main focus. It is also, it should be emphasized, not a series that likes to neatly package itself into simple life lessons. Many episodes either subvert their apparent theme or never bother to build one up to begin with. What, for example, would one make of “The Truth Stinks”, an episode chiefly about how Badgerclops does not like to shower and resorts to hokey new age trinkets to “purify his toxins” instead, and thus smells bad as a result? Maybe, one could argue, that the target audience should shower, but the episode itself doesn’t really go that route, and neither do almost any of the episodes that seem inclined toward a simple lesson. 

Mao Mao, thus, tends to eschew easy morals in favor of presenting itself as “pure” comedy. Comedy that is, by and large, quite solid. Mao Mao’s characterization as a self-sabotaging neurotic is fairly rare among this kind of series. And while it’s not hard to sympathize with the guy, he does run himself into the ground so often that you can’t help but laugh, too. Occasionally to the point of a full-on odyssey, as in say the absurdly-named “Mao Mao’s Nakey”, where the herocat loses his clothes to a stray gust of wind and must dart around town frantically to find them while avoiding the prying gaze of his constituents.

There’s a lot of terrible jokes one could make about this image. I respect my readership, so there are none in this caption.

Mao Mao‘s general vibe may have something to do with its pedigree. In addition to another entry in this subgenre, OK KO!, showrunner and voice actor Parker Simmons has a history with [adult swim] that includes Metalocalypse and Superjail. The adult subject matter is largely absent from Mao Mao, of course, but an [as]-like sense of humor does run through the series.

Like many of that sub-network’s shows, the weaker episodes here tend to take their comedic grounding to an unfortunate extreme. As a result they often feel less like episodes and more like just a sequence of Things Happening. Occasionally the jokes hit oddly, too. “Popularity Conquest”, an early episode full of ambiguously-intended swipes at other Cartoon Network shows (going especially hard at Steven Universe), is a prime example. By far the worst though is the series’ occasional attempts to frame its protagonists’ cop status as a joke. Gags involving riot gear and the failures of the justice system have arguably never been funny, and they certainly aren’t in 2020. These particularly egregious examples are, thankfully, rare.

One could thus argue that Mao Mao has something of an issue with undercutting its own emotional core. But on the other hand, when it does let that core come through untouched, it tends to make for the strongest episodes of the series. Mao Mao’s judgmental, emotionally abusive, perpetually-disappointed father, Shin Mao, haunts him, (sometimes literally, as in “Scared of Puppets”), and informs his character flaws. The show is named after him, so it’s fitting that Mao Mao is the most rounded character in the series. More than even many more serious shows, Mao Mao understands that trauma tends to outlive the malice or carelessness that births it. 

Shin Mao doing what he does best; looking vaguely condescending.

“Small” does not end with Mao Mao overcoming his complex. Even at the episode’s end, when he saves his father from a rampaging beast, finally earning his respect, Mao Mao is apologetic and self-deprecating. Later episodes like “Super Berry Fever” or the aforementioned “Scared of Puppets” illustrate in a surprisingly subtle way how the fallout from malformed family relationships can infect the most random of things, damaging one’s emotional functionality well into adulthood. The idea that fruit cobbler or a fear of ventriloquist dummies could possibly reflect deeper emotional trauma can seem superficially ridiculous, and the series is in fact occasionally guilty of treating it that way. But in general, these episodes are the strongest of the series, and bely a more thoughtful emotional sensibility than one might assume.

The other two leads, and their own sets of issues, get a similar focus, though not as much. Adorabat in particular is the star of “Adoradad”, perhaps the single best episode in the series thusfar and its most straightforward story-driven adventure to date. “Adoradad”, in fact, with its complex family dynamic, impressive art, and commendable economy of character, may point to a way forward for Mao Mao on the whole. 

As good as Mao Mao can be–and at its heights, that’s a good deal more than your average jaded animation fan may expect–what it feels like it’s missing is that sense of forward drive. “Adoradad” offers up the notion of Mao Mao as a more narratively-driven experience. Still with laughter at its core, but with a more ambitious goal of weaving sophisticated stories for its young audience without falling into being rote or crass. In a very literal sense, the story of Mao Mao is still being written, and if there’s anything worth hoping for, it’s that like Adorabat herself, it lives up to its potential.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Love in Wartime: The Politics and Emotion of EUREKA SEVEN

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

Amazing grace
how sweet the sound

Sekai-kei, or “world story”, is a term of disputed origin. Held by many to be a westernism, invented by bloggers searching for a term to describe Neon Genesis Evangelion and stories of its ilk. Stories where the fate of the universe is tied inextricably to that of a central relationship and the mental state of its lead characters. NGE may hold the title as the series that inspired the term, but no anime has ever worn it as well as Eureka Seven. And no matter its origin, more than many anime the phrase is used to describe, “world story” feels like it fits Eureka Seven like a glove. Fifteen years after it began airing, E7 is capable of an astounding thematic and emotional resonance that hits as hard in 2020 as it did when the series ended in 2006. It’s matched by little else.

Try to grab hold of it, and it breaks down into images. Blood on wedding rings, underground rainbows, Superflat monsters and sky-fish, mecha on surfboards, political intrigue, social upheaval. Love, war, death and more, all soundtracked to trance, house, pop, and soul. This is Eureka Seven. Wildly ambitious, flawed but magnificent. Riddled with paradoxes, it is gangly and perfect.

It’s not hard to understand E7’s methodology. It combines an older, political strain of mecha anime with the metaphysical, psychological approach of the NGE* era. In this way, its closest contemporary cousin, funnily enough, might be another ambitious mecha series of the same era that attempted a similar approach; Code Geass. But while that anime traffics chiefly in camp, the minutiae of revolution, and shock value, Eureka Seven deals in much simpler, more universal substance. As promised in the title; emotion, politics, and the messy grey area that is their intersection.

It is again helpful to consider Eureka Seven as a series of meaningful contradictions. It bursts with music, but is punctuated by the shellshocked silence of war trauma. Dozens of opposites run through the show; love, and death, built things and natural things, Wide-eyed romantic idealism and stoic pragmatism, new life and disease, and so on. In this way, despite the fantastical nature of its soft sci-fi setting, Eureka Seven’s world is a lot like our own. This is important, because Eureka Seven is an anime with things to say, even if it takes a little while to get there.

Eureka Seven opens presenting itself as a classic adventure story. That of Renton Thurston, son of the late war hero Adroc Thurston, and his encounter with–and eventual admittance to–‘terrorist’ group The Gekkostate. It never sheds the structure of a latter-day bildungsroman, especially since Renton’s romance with the titular Eureka is a key part of the series, but it does go significantly beyond it in several other ways.

Other coming-of-age stories have dealt with the realities of growing up in a politically tense period. Few have depicted the rise of fascism with such polished, unsettling ease as Eureka Seven. The ascent of the dictatorial Dewey Novac ties to broader political sensibilities throughout the show. It is not a coincidence that Novac’s forces are generally clad in Nazi-evoking black uniforms, while the Gekkostate and affiliated resistance have a wide variety of looks, often inspired by musical subcultures. (The series overflows with musical reference, down to the name of Renton’s father. A namecheck of Beastie Boys member Ad-Rock.) Later, as Novac’s regime seizes power (complete with a by-the-fascist-book “big speech” to accompany his coup in episode 37) he launches a genocidal campaign against the scub coral. And plans involving surgically-altered super soldier children stretch back in-series years.

Elsewhere, the plight of the Coralians and their complex relationship to the humans in the world of Eureka Seven speak to an environmental bent. The series’ use of what is essentially technobabble may seem campy or silly, but it belies an internal logic that maps cleanly onto many different real-world problems. The “Question Limitation” is not something we will ever have to deal with, but similarly ominous two-word phrases (such as say, “Global Warming”) seem quite certain to define our immediate future.

The show’s long, rough middle third, meanwhile, where Renton is first hazed and then downright abused by many different members of The Gekkostate (but especially Holland) is a bleak, raw look at how such cycles of abuse perpetuate. Renton’s own journey to maturity is hamstrung by the existence of three malformed father figures; Adroc, the war hero who was never there for his own son, Holland, who grapples with his own complex feelings of responsibility regarding Eureka and often takes this frustration out on Renton in this portion of the series, and Charles, a loving father like Renton’s never had, but also a bloodlust-driven bounty hunter, whose conflicts with The Gekkostate eventually see him shot dead by Holland. It is only Renton’s ability to rise above all this–and to forgive–that allows these cycles to cease, and for him and Holland (the only one of the three still alive) to move forward.

All of this only scratches the surface, but you get the point. You may ask what ties all of these disparate themes together, and the answer is shockingly simple. One of anime’s great achievements as a medium is the ease and sheer emotional intensity with which it is often capable of portraying the simple, necessary, terrifying joy of human connection. In Eureka Seven, all of these problems, to a one, can be overcome by communication. By mutual understanding. By love. The show’s final opening theme–“Sakura”–interpolating, in a genuinely brilliant compositional move, the hymn “Amazing Grace”, gives the game away. It seems to say; If God lives not above, then we must love each other in his place. We have a duty to see the worth inherent in each other.

Indeed, Eureka Seven‘s greatest achievement is not any great subversion of expectations, any particular cut or shot (though many excellent examples of both exist throughout), its unique soundtrack, or anything else of the sort. It is this emotional core of empathy triumphing above all else that stands out. It is a spirit that persists in the medium to this very day, shining through from time to time in even the least of Eureka Seven‘s successors.

By Eureka Seven‘s end, and the incomparably romantic imagery of Renton and Eureka cradling each other in their arms as they hurdle through the sky, the series has made its point. Fifteen years later, in a world that every day feels closer to falling apart, Eureka Seven‘s message that even in our darkest hours we must hold each other close feels more resonant, immediate, and heartfelt than ever. That it’s so beautifully put together feels like proof that it’s the truth. How sweet, indeed, the sound.

*NGE of course did not invent this particular sort of mecha series, it merely popularized it. I’m inclined to suspect a shared lineage dating back to perhaps Macross. But without having seen that series myself it’s hard to say more, definitively. Eureka Seven is flooded with shared DNA both between and directly from other mecha anime and other sci-fi in general. I spotted more than one point of homage to another Gainax series; Gunbuster, and have been informed of several that draw from sci-fi novels. Director Tomoki Kyoda has called the series an “homage to his rebellious phase”, a sentiment that tracks with its empathetic state of mind and general feel quite wonderfully.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

Review: THE IDOLMASTER (2011)

“I believe in everyone!”

In the grand scheme of things, the 2010s are only just over. In every artform, at every level of discourse, there are discussions to be had and evaluations to be made. What defined the New ’10s, now that they’re in the rear view? Perhaps more importantly, what deserves to be taken into the future? 2011’s The Idolm@ster turns ten next year, but it remains the gold standard by which nearly every other idol anime since has been judged. If it’s not the best idol anime, it can feel, especially at its heights, like the only one that truly matters.

The first interesting thing about Idolm@ster is how unselfconsciously normal it is. This is an idol anime with zero gimmicks, perhaps simply due to being from a time where you just didn’t need one. (Being adapted from an already-popular IP probably helped too.) Instead you have a large cast of characters, a shared dream of stardom among them, and some snappy sugary J-pop to soundtrack it all.

Despite these simple and few ingredients (and the aforementioned size of the cast), Idolm@ster never really feels like a marketing tool, even though on some level it is. The earnest, unfiltered look into the lives of twelve girls who are, at the start of the show, working-class entertainers conveys a kind of honesty more associated with rock documentaries than it is the idol industry.

This is not to say that The Idolm@ster is realistic–that would be absurd. Rather, it has a kind of focused idealism. The Idolm@ster does not depict so much the realities of becoming an idol (though they’re an influence on it), but rather the dream of becoming one. The series imagines a world where the truism that hard work and dedication can lead even the most humble of person to fame and fortune is not just true, but provable. This is an important distinction, because for all the mundanities it does depict, especially in its forehalf, The Idolm@ster is interested less in being about idols than it is being about people who want to become idols. It is a series, at its best moments, of character study, which elevates it above idol anime that come off as simply trying to sell something.

In an impressive feat of economy, over its 24 episodes nearly every member of its cast (including a few who aren’t members of the core 765 Pro group) gets at least one focus episode, a few get full-blown arcs. Chihaya’s, where she comes to terms with the death of her brother and learns to sing for herself, is probably the best, but several others are also very strong. This includes Haruka’s, also something of a broad-reaching arc for the group itself, which concludes the series. Not all of them quite get the screentime–or the consideration–they deserve, and The Idolm@ster‘s few flaws are always somehow tied to this. Makoto’s abbreviated story never reaches any satisfying conclusion; the gap between the masculine way she is sold to her audience and the feminine way she wants to actually present herself is never properly addressed, and it is the series’ sole serious misstep.

Importantly though not a single character feels like anything less than a fully-fledged person. Even those with somewhat silly personalities (such as Hibiki and her affinity for animals) have layers to them, and the show is keen to show off its writing in this regard. Haruka’s aforementioned show-concluding arc takes a sledgehammer to her surface personality as a hardworking ‘good girl’, only to build it back up with a healthy dose of magical realism (present in a few of the show’s strongest moments) in the penultimate episode.

But of course, as with everything, technique is only as valuable as the resonance it creates. The thing with The Idolm@ster is that even though, statistically speaking, most people watching it are not, and will never be, idols, it is shockingly easy to relate to what these girls go through. I suspect what connects with whom varies somewhat, but, going back to that character writing; every character’s motivation is simple, concrete, and dead-easy to get your head around. That means that when you see them struggle, you can put yourself in their shoes.

I love, for instance, Zombieland Saga, but most people are not (say) undead biker-delinquents, and struggles that stem from being one require a lot more levels of abstraction to really hit the audience in the heart. By contrast, and to return to my earlier examples, things like Haruka’s fear that her friend group is drifting apart, Mikki’s simple desire to be the center of attention, and Chihaya’s near-compulsive need to keep singing are all things that will touch different kinds of people in a very immediate and personal way. I write about anime because I love doing it, and I often find myself internally debating whether or not doing it just because of that is okay. Chihaya sings, as she eventually comes to terms with, because she loves doing it, and struggles with whether or not that’s okay. We are, by any reasonable metric, vastly different people, but The Idolm@ster‘s strength of craft is such that I can see myself in someone who is fundamentally very little like me because when she bares her soul at the climax of her focus arc, belting out “Nemuri Hime” acapella, I feel it in mine. What is art even for, if not that?

And that, ultimately, is what I intend to reflect here. This is a show that gets it. The appeal of a lot of anime is that everyone, fundamentally, can sometimes use a glimpse of a world where pop music or some other silly thing really can save your soul, and getting there requires a deft touch and a subtle command of high emotion. And Idolm@ster is very emotional indeed.

So, nearly ten years later, it feels safe to say that we can–and should–bring it with us into the ’20s and beyond. This is the one almost every idol anime since is still vigorously copying notes off of, and it’s easy to see why. Something this focused on looking forward could only age amazingly. “Onward to a sparkling future”, as one of the show’s many songs would put it. Are you ready?

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.