Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
With its first short, Kayua-sama: Love is War -Ultra Romantic- foreshadows a pattern. Like last week’s premiere, this week’s episode starts with a short focusing on Ishigami and Miko. It’s too early to say for sure if this pattern will continue, but the routine as established here is certainly fruitful ground for comedy, so personally I hope it does. Even just Ishigami and Miko’s self-aggrandizing alone is pretty funny.
It does not take a terribly deep reader to understand that Ishigami and Miko don’t get along terribly well. The student council—as well as Miko’s own friend / “handler” Kobachi Osaragi (Rina Hidaka)—are naturally concerned about this. It hurts the student council’s image if its members are seen bickering, and beyond that there’s a general agreement that life would be easier if these two would just stop being at each others’ throats all the time.
The question, of course, is how to get them to get along. To that, both Osaragi and Our Protagonist Miyuki Shirogane have some ideas, and it’s this particular round of harebrained schemes that drives the first short. The visual style is great here; much of this segment is animated almost as if the characters were still models on popsicle sticks. Elsewhere, when the plan to reconcile the two is explained, we get this particularly cutesy illustration to demonstrate.
The first idea here is for the two to complement each other on their good points. Ishigami can pull that off just fine, though not without effort. Miko, though? Well.
The suggestion to have the two clean each other’s ears (ew) is similarly ill-fated. The position Miko and Ishigami end up in while doing this simply cannot be described in words. Not by me, anyway.
It’s like he’s changing the world’s crankiest lightbulb.
Eventually, it’s Osaragi who figures out the solution (or at least, something resembling one) when she points out that it’s fairly common for teenagers to pretend to dislike someone if they’re actually harboring a crush on them. This causes Miko and Ishigami to be style-shifted into something that, to me, evokes a horror manga page that’s been colored in and then left out in the rain. The two promptly turn into autotuned, canned phrase-repeating robots to complete the transformation.
As with any comedy, relaying this kinda kills it, but it’s really funny to watch, and it’s also a nice reminder of what Love is War! can pull off, stylistically, when it wants to, even in service of something very goofy.
Most people will not be talking about the first segment of the episode, though, I imagine. Because the second and third are combined to make a single longer story, and it is a doozy.
Before we get into why, it’s helpful to briefly discuss Ai Hayasaka, probably Love is War!‘s most important supporting character, frequent recipient of fandom “best girl” awards, and perhaps most prestigiously of all, subject of the Bonus Hayasaka Screencap segment on this column. Hayasaka is an interesting and useful character for many reasons. She’s Kaguya’s right-hand woman and is frequently pulled into her schemes. She’s something of a stand-in for the segment of the audience who got sick of the actual “love is war” gimmick of the manga a long time ago. And, increasingly, she’s a touch bitter about her life situation.
Hayasaka, as we all know, is Kaguya’s maid. Kaguya, being a rich mostly-shut-in from an abusive family, lives a life that was quite unhappy until recently, in-show, but it is still a privileged life, regardless of that. And Hayasaka’s entire situation is a manifestation of that privilege. She has little say in her own day to day activities. In many previous episodes, Kaguya has come up with some ridiculous idea that she thinks will make Miyuki confess his deep-held feelings for her, and Hayasaka has been used as a tool in those ideas. She’s even adapted an entire alternate identity in service of Kaguya’s scheming. Kaguya, it’s important to note, does not heap these responsibilities on Hayasaka out of malice, really. She’s simply ignorant—willfully or not is hard to say—of the nature of the extreme power imbalance in their relationship.
All of this means that in this episode, when one of those schemes is a bridge too far and Hayasaka acts out entirely of her own free will, it’s completely understandable, even if you don’t dislike either her or Kaguya. (And just speaking for myself, I’m very fond of both characters.)
The premise is pretty simple. Miyuki gets invited to a karaoke mixer without entirely understanding what he’s getting into. Kaguya is paranoid that he’ll get whisked away by some bombshell before the two of them ever have a chance to hook up, so she orders Hayasaka to slip into the mixer as well. Incognito as her alternate identity, following up on the fourth episode of last season. She is less than thrilled about this.
Those with sharp memories might recall that the last time Miyuki and Hayasaka met, Hayasaka was on a dare to win him over, if she could. The details of this have become a bit foggy since I last saw the episode, but Hayasaka seems to have taken the fact that she couldn’t do it pretty hard. (That much was evident even at the time, but perhaps how hard wasn’t totally clear.) When they meet again here, Hayasaka awkwardly refers to their past meeting as Miyuki having “dumped her.” In general, she’s pretty cold to him for a minute, here. (It’s hard not to have some real sympathy for Miyuki during all this, in fact.)
It’s notable that when Hayasaka’s turn at karaoke comes up, she picks a forlorn love song to sing. A galloping, Eurobeat-y monster of a thing that she sings the utter hell out of. (I don’t know if Hayasaka’s regular voice actress Yumiri Hanamori is doing the vocals or if it’s someone else. Either way, I must say I hope the dub covers the song as well, given that Hayasaka’s dub actress Amanda “AmaLee” Lee is an accomplished singer with a real talent for belting.) The show briefly becomes a pastiche of the kind of heartbroken, theatrical nonsense that the videos for this sort of song specialize in.
Miyuki and Hayasaka also get into a long talk about honesty, in one of the more revealing character moments for the both of them. Miyuki puts forward that Hayasaka always seems like she’s putting on an act (and, indeed, in the context of the two’s interactions, he’s entirely right.) The camera is close to his face, and the background goes solid white as Hayasaka asks if he could really show people his true, honest self. But even more tellingly, a bit before that, the camera “pulls back,” peeking into the karaoke room through a cracked door, and she says this.
Yeesh.
Between this and her thinly-veiled complaining about her “little sister’s” terrible personality (she admits she’s gotten better recently, but it feels like an afterthought on her part), it is pretty obvious that Hayasaka is dealing with some serious headsnakes, and not dealing with them well.
And then, as Miyuki goes to leave this—admittedly, incredibly awkward—situation, pondering perhaps if he should start being more honest with some people in particular, a weird, leery creep starts harassing Hayasaka. Nothing actually happens, thankfully, and Miyuki is able to make up a quick excuse to get her out of the room.
Here though, things take another turn. Hayasaka’s particular mix of feelings; a genuine crush on Miyuki, her resentment over how Kaguya keeps treating her, and perhaps just a general sense of being fed up with how her night is going, convinces the Shuchiin Academy student council president to slip away with her into a different karaoke room. One she just booked. For the two of them. Alone.
She’s not shy about relaying exactly what she’s doing to her boss, either, with the magic of tiny transmitter earrings. (One of many, essentially, spy gadgets, that’s Hayasaka’s been given by Kaguya over the years.) After all, she says, it was Kaguya who first came up with the “try to seduce Miyuki” dare in the first place. What is Hayasaka doing but trying again?
Kaguya then takes a moment to realize that she has created the exact problem she was looking to prevent.
A crueler show would either stop the episode dead here or, even worse, twist this into a major rift between the characters. We don’t get that here, instead, Kaguya has the rather sudden realization that Hayasaka has been very angry this entire time.
Nothing gets past this one.
But, as she often does, Kaguya cooks up a scheme. This one involving her very own secret weapon.
Kaguya’s plan to have Chika barge into the room Hayasaka and Miyuki are in is not exactly sophisticated, but there’s no reason to believe it wouldn’t work. Before Chika even gets there though, Kaguya makes the mistake of trying to eavesdrop. The tension of the prior 10 or so minutes unravels in an instant thanks to a string of frankly hysterical misunderstandings. All you really need to know is that Miyuki was singing, and then rapping (itself a recurring gag.) To Kaguya, it sounds as though Hayasaka is talking about….something else. Things get even worse when Kaguya actually barges into the room (conveniently, while Miyuki is using the restroom and thus isn’t present.)
The misunderstanding cleared up as it possibly could be, Kaguya escorts Hayasaka out. With Miyuki still in absentia, the poor guy.
By the time Chika finally shows up, the mere mention of the president’s legendarily awful vocal abilities—which she knows more about than anyone else, mind—is enough to get her to turn on her heels and immediately leave.
And in case you were wondering what lesson Miyuki took from all this?
As for Kaguya and Hayasaka, the earlier subtext of the episode is brought directly to the front. Hayasaka straight up says she’s jealous of how happy Kaguya’s been lately. The two more-or-less reconcile here, at least for now, but—very, very minor manga spoiler here—this is not the last time this is going to come up, as we’ll eventually see. Love is War! has a way of looping back on itself with regard to things like this.
All told, this is probably the strongest second episode of anything that’s yet gotten one so far this season. If anything it’s actually better than the premiere, which was also quite good but was squarely comedic.
Now, for the moment you’ve all been waiting for. It feels a little odd to put a Bonus Hayasaka Screencap in a writeup for an episode almost entirely about her, given how many other Hayasaka Screencaps I’ve already shared with you today. Still, I do have a pair that I couldn’t otherwise find a place for. Enjoy this from-behind shot where Hayasaka engages what I call her “trolling mode,” as she “explains” what karaoke clubs are like to Kaguya, and the art style shifts to accommodate.
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 Directoryto 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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Have you ever thought to yourself; “what if classical Chinese military strategist Zhuge Kongming was transported through time to the present day and became an idol manager?” Well, if you have, then you’re a very strange person. Or you’re the original writer of Ya Boy Kongming! One or the other.
Anime as a medium is sometimes underrated (or occasionally, even ridiculed) in its ability to just casually roll with absurd elevator-pitch concepts. A legend of East Asian military strategy as the manager for a modern-day pop singer? Sure, why not. It should surprise no one that the “mechanics” of how Kongming (Ryoutarou Okiayu) ends up in modern Japan are pretty vague and are glossed through briskly in the show’s opening minutes. There’s something about a dying wish for “a life without bloodshed” in his next life, but beyond that it isn’t elaborated upon much. That’s just fine, because Ya Boy Kongming! is primarily a comedy, and when it does dip into other modes it has the good sense to only touch very briefly on how the whole Samurai Jack-ian “flung into the future” thing works. There are other things to be focused on here.
Instead, he wakes up in a random alley in modern Japan during a Halloween celebration. A pair of randos drag him to a club, where one of them makes him drink some tequila. He then comes to the obvious conclusion; he’s in Hell.
It will shock you, I’m sure, to learn that I–a professional anime critic–am not really the clubbing type.
But then, he hears the voice of an angel in this clamorous and disorienting place. That voice belongs to Eiko Tsukimi (Kaede Hondo when speaking, 96Neko when singing), who quickly establishes herself as Kongming’s co-protagonist.
She ends up taking him home because he gets blackout drunk. (This is kind of crazy, if you ask me, and she seems to think so too; muttering to herself that she “must be a saint.”) The following day, she–somewhat reluctantly–helps him adjust to the modern world, all the while still being mostly convinced that he’s just a guy who’s gotten way too into method acting. (Everyone seems to think this, in fact, including Eiko’s boss, who ends up hiring him because he, too, is a Three Kingdoms-era history nerd.)
This is all pretty funny, and Kongming goes from totally lost about present-day society to reasonably able to navigate his way around a smartphone in surprisingly short order. (A joke in here even implies that he learns about cryptocurrency. Truly a terrifying thought.)
Given all this, one might reasonably assume that Kongming! is purely a screwball comedy. But while the series is definitely funny, it’s not only funny, and the fact that it understands that having a beating heart under the gags is important speaks to a certain consideration of its own goals that isn’t ever a given with anime. (Or for that matter, art in general.) The turn begins when Eiko sings a song in her bedroom, seemingly as much for herself as to comfort Kongming. (Who is, understandably, a bit blue over, you know, everyone he knows and loves having been dead for almost 2,000 years, his country having long since fallen, etc.) Eiko has a seriously powerful voice, and the fact that she’s such a good singer is hugely important here, because Kongming!, remember, is also an idol anime.
Eiko’s whole situation is given as much focus as Kongming’s own unusual circumstances. She’s a bartender and sometimes-club singer. And while her boss is a decent guy in his own way, the job itself seems pretty dead-end. This, and the fact that she keeps failing auditions, makes her consider quitting music altogether. When Kongming asks what drew her to music in the first place, we get a pretty damn bleak flashback to her high school years. The short version; she was nearly a train-jumper, until the man who’s now her boss literally grabbed her out of the way. Taking her to his club to perhaps jolt her out of the whole idea, Eiko is moved by an American guest singer’s performance. This whole idea; that music can sometimes quite literally save people, is at the very core of the idol genre, and snaps Kongming! pretty firmly into place within said genre’s modern zeitgeist.
Plus, on a basic level, all this helps Eiko feel like an actual co-protagonist instead of a backup character. But more importantly, it nails down the show’s stakes. Kongming! appears to want to be both a goofy comedy with a casually fantastical premise and a heartfelt story of a struggling musician trying to succeed in a difficult industry. That’s a hard line to tow, but at least one other idol anime in recent memory managed it. If it worked once, what’s to stop it from working again? The show’s general character helps a lot, too. In both more lighthearted and comparatively serious moments, it has a vibrancy to it that’s easy to take for granted but should always be properly appreciated when it’s there.
The episode ends with Kongming convincing Eiko to keep at it–though by phrasing it that way I’m way underselling the scene, which is legitimately heartwarming–and offering her “his services.” What services? Why, just the finest military mind of Chinese Antiquity. Turned toward helping her make it as a musician, naturally.
Grade: B+ The Takeaway: While the apparently history nerd-baiting nature of its premise may scare some off, this is a show with a huge amount of potential, and fans of “music stories” like this should definitely check this one out.
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 Directoryto 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.
The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.
Believe it or not, anime fans, I’m not dead! After a rather rough week and a half I managed to recover enough this week to watch a bit more than just the bare absolute minimum of anime. I’m not quite 100% yet, to be totally honest, but hopefully you’ll enjoy my small writeup below. I won’t pretend it’s terribly likely that next week will be much beefier, given that Elden Ring just came out, but I’ll try to not make it totally barebones. 😛
Maybe I’ll end up bringing back Magic Planet Arcade, while I’m making lofty promises. Ah, that’s a joke. I suck at reviewing video games.
Seasonal Anime
Princess Connect Re:Dive Season 2
What is Princess Connect? On the surface, that’s a simple question with a number of simple answers. It’s a fantasy anime series. It’s a tie-in to the mobile game of the same name. It’s a hell of an animation showcase. Priconne is all of these things, that much is true, but one layer beneath all of that, it’s also a story about memories. Making precious ones, yes, but also about things that are forgotten, and that those who’ve forgotten them may be better off not remembering.
Even though its lead has amnesia, it took me a long time to pick up on this particular thematic thread of the series. It’s an embarrassing admission, but I’m not in the business of lying in these writeups. For anyone who’s like me and is similarly having parts of the show go over their head, this past week’s episode about a memory-altering spirit plaguing the cast should help. I won’t give you the play-by-play–the episode is great enough that if you haven’t caught up yet, you absolutely should–but it does certainly push this particular part of Princess Connect to the front and center. The spirit’s brief effects on Yuki, where he appears to remember some part of his past life, are the main plot development here.
But even outside of all that, it’s just another really great episode. Doubly welcome in the wake of the previous week’s still solid but rather puzzling story about a blind swordsman that only just barely involved our core cast at all. The fluid and expressive animation everyone’s come to expect from Princess Connect is all here, and there are some great character moments. My personal favorite being here, with Karyl and Pecorine’s romantically shaded journey to a spring.
Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 8 – “Backlighting is the Best”: On the other end of the scale entirely, we have easily the best My Dress-Up Darling episode so far. As a sidebar; how successful do you think this show would have to be for someone to make a real Flower Princess Blaze anime? I kind of want that. I kind of need that badly. Honestly, now feels like the perfect time. When Magia Record‘s third season and Tokyo Mew Mew New premiere later this year, we’ll have the second time in two years that three magical girl anime are airing at the same time. Obviously FPB couldn’t join that particular class, but in a few years, who knows? I’m just saying, anything can happen.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
The people behind CUE! likely don’t know–or care–about this, but the show’s very premise is a particular form of critic bait. That’s part of why I liked it so much last week, and that’s why I’m taking a very real risk by committing to covering its entire run week-by-week here. (24 episodes is a lot for this sort of column! Who knows what could happen!) But I have faith in the series, and that “critic bait” nature is some amount of why.
TV Anime is a pulp medium, and pulp media are inherently built on standard character archetypes and story beats. This is not a good or bad thing, it’s just a fact. CUE!, with its story centered around voice actors, highlights those tropes by its very nature. In our second episode, “Their Respective Colors”, the girls of the AiRBLUE Voice Talent Agency tackle their first real audition, putting their full weight into embodying those character archetypes. But what makes CUE! fascinating from a critical point of view is that the AiRBLUE girls, being anime characters themselves, also embody different character archetypes. The entire series, if sufficiently abstracted, can thus be thought of as these archetypes interpreting each other. Just on its own, that’s very interesting.
But of course, it’s also quite a lot of heady material to get into over CUE!, an anime series primarily about cute girls doing their best to voice other cute girls. The audition–which takes up the entirety of this episode–works on a lot of levels. On the one hand it is very much all that I said above, but it’s also just a lot of fun, which is arguably more important. Before I get into anything more specific, I should point out how absurd it is that CUE! is able to inject so much personality into a given episode despite its fairly workaday production. We don’t get nearly as many of the cut-asides where our characters imagine themselves as literally embodying the roles they play here, so the actual voice acting itself is left to pick up a lot of the slack. It manages it. And from my point of view, the second episode, even moreso than the first, proves that this anime has real legs.
So! The audition. Last week I mentioned that Bloom Ball–the show-within-a-show that’s the focus here–looked like a magical girl anime. It is…not that. (Although you maybe could argue it’s a battle girl series.) It’s some sort of hot-blooded sports anime shonen thing that frankly looks way better than most actual shonen anime. (Am I saying that because of its all-female cast? Maybe.)
As mentioned, the actual episode consists almost entirely of auditions. Enough care is taken to make sure that things do feel genuinely tense. AiRBLUE are the last agency auditioning, and in contrast to everyone else, they’re woefully inexperienced. The voice director (an everyman type in a pink polo) is very clearly a bit done with all of this. The author of the original Bloom Ball manga, a woman named Kei, has actually fallen asleep in her chair from consulting on so many auditions.
I have seen so many manga and anime depict mangaka exactly like this–dark-haired women who are visibly not getting enough sleep–that I have come to believe the entire manga industry is sustained by people of that specific description.
Nobody really expects AiRBLUE to make much of themselves here, and several members of the agency, including our protagonist Haruna, (Yurina Uchiyama, part of the idol group DIALOGUE+ in her first major VA role) aren’t actually familiar with the manga. (They’re given some time to read a bit of it and go over some reference sheets to pick a character to audition, but it doesn’t seem like the individual tryouts take very long. My impression is that Haruna, who eventually auditions last, got maybe an hour or two at most?)
The pressure is palpable, and CUE! really makes you feel that tension, here, with nothing more than some closeups and other clever “camera angle” tricks. This is an actual audition, none of these girls were prepared for it, and some of them don’t even know what Bloom Ball really is. It’s an unenviable position.
And yet, in the face of all this, our girls make a good show of it anyway. Most try out for the role of Bloom Ball‘s main character. We see most of these only in passing, with the most attention being given to Yuki Tendou’s (Ayaka Takamura, also a member of DIALOGUE+) take.
Yuki’s read is hyperactive and energetic, but it’s notable that she doesn’t get one of those fancy cut-asides. We also see Haruna’s fast friend Maika (Nene Hieda, whose most recent role I’m familiar with was Miyako in Warlords of Sigrdrifa) give her take on Ball Bloom’s secondary protagonist. A fun nod to her own status as Haruna’s best bud in this series, but not one that necessarily indicates she’s great for the role. Maika’s read is boisterous and hot-blooded, an ill fit for a blue-color-schemed deuteragonist whose role in her home series is clearly “the logical one.” This is yet another example of how CUE! toys around with character tropes, and the interesting mismatch here highlights the differences between Maika and the role she’s chosen to play. Although it’s worth noting that the mangaka seems to find her take on the character interesting, at the very least.
And then we get to Haruna’s tryout. Haruna initially auditions for, again, the lead role. She’s pretty good at it too, only fumbling once when she knocks her script into the microphone (illustrated by a very funny cut-aside where she is Bloom Ball‘s lead…and then falls over with a loud conk sound. It’s very shonen slapstick.)
If her audition ended here this would be something of an anti-climax. So, CUE! employs another clever trick here. Haruna’s performance as her initial choice is solid, but the mangaka hears something else in her read, and asks if she can record lines for a different character. One who–in the very brief time we get to know her–seems even more boisterous and hot-blooded than Bloom Ball‘s lead. (Bloom Ball seems like a very good series. Were it real, I would probably love Kuwai here.)
She then does it again, having Haruna read lines for a third role as well. The other AiRBLUE girls in the casting room are a bit shocked to see this all happen, and it’s even directly called out as rare. (In fact, I was a bit worried it’d be milked for cheap melodrama, but there’s no sign of that so far. AiRBLUE’s girls are professionals!)
This all has the effect of making Haruna seem like a voice acting wunderkind. To be fair, her own VA is pretty damn good (and again, I just love the fact that Haruna is voiced by someone in her own first major VA role. That’s just perfect.) But this would not work nearly as well without the mangaka seizing upon Haruna’s first performance. It’s a trick to convince us that Haruna’s an amazing talent just waiting to be discovered, and it works. That kind of thing is why CUE! is so entertaining, and it’s a general presentational technique I hope the show keeps up as it rolls on.
Haruna and Makai end the episode by hitting a cafe to relax and reflect. Two of the other girls from AiRBLUE, Honoka Tsukii (Yuuna Ogata, who previously played Gloria in the Pokemon: Twilight Wings ONA) and Shiho “just Shiho, please” Kano (Kyouka Moriya, whose sole other role was as Hemo Midori in 2020’s Dropout Idol Fruit Tart), chat them up as the four unwind and discuss a first day’s work well done. It’s a low-key ending to a fairly exciting episode. I look forward to many more like it in the weeks ahead as we get to better know not just Haruna and Makai, but Honoka, Shiho, and the other girls of AiRBLUE as well.
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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.
Special Notice: This should really go without saying, but since I’m going to be talking about all of these shows in general, overall terms, you can expect spoilers for all of them, up to and including their endings.
So here we are again, anime fans. Another year firmly in the past tense, not just within our specific sphere of interest but in general. Time is a funny thing, it’s already late November as I write this opening paragraph, which isn’t much less time than I gave myself last year, but despite the fact that I am demonstrably writing about fewer shows, I wanted to at least try and give each of them a bit more attention.
Yes, this marks a change in format. Last year I undertook the–in hindsight rather absurd–task of ranking every anime I’d finished that came out that year. The format required me to spend a fair amount of writing real estate on anime that I either didn’t like or simply had no strong thoughts on at all. This year, I wanted to simplify a bit. Only a bit, mind you. This is still me we’re talking about, after all.
So, this year the job is less complex, but simultaneously more difficult. 5 Anime I liked more than the rest; five that stuck with me and that I think will continue to stick with me. Plus, a handful of honorable mentions to get a positive word in for some anime that I enjoyed but couldn’t wholly self-justify putting in the main top five.
Just to fully disclose; as usual, these are indeed only my opinions, thoughts, and observations. My opinions that I consider reasonably informed and well thought out, but opinions, nonetheless. There is also the fact, of course, that anime I didn’t watch cannot make it onto this list by default, with apologies to the several anime I heard very good things about this year but did not find the time to watch myself. (Chiefly here I am thinking of ODD TAXI and Eighty-Six, but there are other examples too.) This list also consists exclusively of serial fiction, in the interest of keeping things fair, so the final Rebuild of Evangelion film isn’t here either. (Which is a shame, because it would’ve easily earned a spot on this list. My hope is that next year I’ll have seen enough anime films that actually came out in 2022 to make them their own list, but we’ll see.) And it’s only shows that are actually finished, so if Ousama Ranking ever shows up on one of these lists, just as an example, it’ll be the list for next year, when it concludes.
Ultimately then, what you have is a snapshot of what I consider particularly worthwhile in the medium of serial anime. A couple things went into picking shows for this list. The simple question of how much I enjoyed watching it week to week is obviously the biggest factor, and all else being equal is what I prioritized. But I did try to give at least some consideration to more nebulous things, such as general public reception, whether I think they will stand the test of time, etc. etc. (Factors that I am of course completely capable of being wrong about. But hey, I try my best.) Above all else was the simple fact of what they meant to me. It is, after all, my list, no one else’s.
Anyway, enough beating around the bush, let’s get to it.
#5. Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Season 2
Madoka Magica was not the only franchise to make a welcome return this year, but of those that did, it’s probably the one closest to my heart. I will fully admit, there’s some circumstantial bias here. I missed out on the original Madoka Magica when it was airing now a good ten years ago. On some subconscious level it’s possible that my opinion of Magia Record is elevated by the simple fact that I get to see it unfold in real time. I’d be hard pressed to say that MagiReco’s second season was the most accessible anime of 2021–that’s part of why it rounds out the bottom of the list–but it was certainly among those I felt the most connection to. (Covering it week by week, on what would become my last bit of work for The Geek Girl Authority, probably helped.)
To a point, a show that looks like this speaks for itself. Public consensus has held for some time that Studio SHAFT‘s golden age is firmly in the past tense, but if there’s a case to be made for that whole “SHAFT Renaissance” idea that bounces around Anime Twitter from time to time, it’s somewhere in the frames of Magia Record. The season’s stronger episodes (which make up a good chunk of its brief eight) absolutely drip with style, and its premiere in particular is the sort of love letter to both the fans and the series itself that you just don’t get super often. Combine that with its wildly ambitious (some might say overly ambitious!) storyline that attempts to mythmake by tying together disparate parts of the wider Madoka ‘verse, it giving relatively minor characters like Kuroe a chance to shine, and just the frankly kinda insane fact that the Madoka Train is still chugging along at all a full decade later? Yeah, Magia Record earns its spot on the list, even if it is “only” at #5.
It’s totally possible that MagiReco’s third season–whenever it arrives–won’t be as good as this, or indeed that it’ll be much better, but this list is a ranking of what’s aired this year, and this year, the oddball middle segment of a three-part story happened to be the fifth-best anime of the whole damn thing. Go figure.
#4. SSSS.DYNAZENON
As a sequel to one of the best anime of the 2010s–2018’s SSSS.GRIDMAN—SSSS.DYNAZENON is odd. It takes place away from that anime’s setting and involves only two of its characters (and only in a supporting capacity.) But considered thematically, these deviations from its predecessor make perfect sense.
If, as is often held to be the case, we can map GRIDMAN‘s characters to the inner workings of a single mind, and thus make the case that that series is about self-acceptance, DYNAZENON is the logical progression. The exterior to GRIDMAN‘s interior. Like a lot of anime this year, DYNAZENON dealt in themes of alienation and misplacedness. Common emotions that we all struggle with in a world where things feel like they’re falling apart faster and faster all the time. Yet, at the same time, it re-lit the fire of that old truism; no man is an island.
How? Easy. Director Akira Amemiya proved yet again that, yeah, you can still make a show that’s at least 50% giant robots fighting giant monsters by volume actually say something and have it not come across as corny or just over-wrought. DYNAZENON manages the impressive task of welding those fight scenes together with interrogative character work all over again, in a way that feels distinct from, but very much related to, GRIDMAN‘s approach to that problem.
All five members of our core cast are disconnected from society in some way. Be it Yomogi’s parents’ separation, the death of Yume’s older sister, Koyomi and Chise’s mutually-enabling shut-in habits, or even how Gauma is lost from his own world entirely. Over the course of the series they heal, but the journey is not a smooth or easy one, and the kaiju represent allegorical threats to their wellbeing as much as physical ones.
This is to say nothing of the Kaiju Eugenicists, those alarmingly-named villains who serve as the main four’s opposites on the other end of the good guy / bad guy spectrum. They’re alienated too, but their alienation consumes them, and is the driving force behind their desire to subjugate and destroy. In the case of Sizumu, it quite literally turns him into a monster.
DYNAZENON‘s driving question is thus how to move on from that alienation, from those things that drive a wedge between us and others. To its credit, it offers no easy solution, although in showing what really happened to Yume’s sister when no one was there to support her, it offers a dire warning of the consequences of not at least trying. The Dyna Soldiers find solace in the pieces of the Dynazenon itself, which, perhaps tellingly, is formed from what appear to be mere toys in their dormant state. But more importantly, they find solace in each other. To quote my own writeup of the tenth episode from back in June:
The only reason she couldn’t be saved like Yume herself was just a single episode ago is that, in a very literal sense, no one was there to support her. I suspect that SSSS.DYNAZENON may lose some people off that fact alone, but the point here is that Yume is still affected by her death. There are no easy outs, not even here.
But there are words of advice. Before the two leave each other for the last time, Kano tells Yume that she needs to rely on others more. And that, right there, is the entire thesis of SSSS.DYNAZENON as a series. Where SSSS.GRIDMAN dealt with the internal, all of its characters mapping to different parts of a single psyche, SSSS.DYNAZENON is external.
It’s known that a third part of the trilogy; a crossover, likely in film form, called GRIDMAN x DYNAZENON, will round out this particular series of stories from Amemiya and co., beyond that, details remain scarce. But SSSS or no, if they can keep making stuff like this, stuff that hits you right in the heart? His place as one of the new decade’s best directors is assured. Keep broadcasting, kaiju king.
#3. Sonny Boy
Another theme we’re going to be seeing a lot of here is transience. It’s rather been my “word of the year,” so I hope you’ll forgive my use of it again, here, but it’s true. All things pass, and for many people our whole lives involve, at least to some degree, reckoning with that fact.Sonny Boywas not the only show this year to grapple with that fact, but it was notably thorough about it.
It begins in the void, but soon crash-lands into an island on the far side of summer. There, surreal parables about life, death, and everything in-between unfold like the show’s own Matryoshka Doll worlds. Universes within universes, wheels within wheels. The purpose? An ode to our lost digital generation; the Millennial/Gen-Z continuum. Adults are imposters putting on a show or so distant that they’re divinity. No one is truly there to guide the cast, much like there’s no one truly there for us except ourselves. They, as we, need to make peace on their own.
Of the anime on this list, I will cop to “understanding” Sonny Boy the least. There is a lot of symbolism here; it’s a dense show. (Which, hey, means it’s good for a rewatch.) But the series’ core of melancholy-hopeful nihilism is easy enough to map out, and that’s what earns it a spot on this list. Well, that and its absolutely stunning visual style. Sonny Boy looks like very little else that aired in 2021, and its surrealist, painterly looks would earn it a spot in the honorable mentions even if the show genuinely was all talk and no walk. But thankfully, while it may occasionally lean inscrutable, its heart beats strong.
Of the various treatises on the passing of everything that 2021 produced (gee, I wonder why that was on everyone’s minds), Sonny Boy stands as one of the more accepting. But in a way, my typing this is pointless. One of the show’s own characters put it best.
Perhaps I should be giving Rajdhani a co-writing credit for how often I’ve used these screenshots when talking about Sonny Boy.
(As a side note; creator Shingo Natsume‘s next project is a sequel to The Tatami Galaxy. So, it seems like this is hardly the last time he’s going to direct something delightfully confounding. Perhaps it’ll show up on the list next year!)
#2. Heike Monogatari
If Sonny Boy explored transience via surreality and imagined worlds far from our own, Heike Monogatari grounded its own investigation of the concept firmly in the real-world concerns of history and myth. Based on a historical Japanese epic, The Heike Story has the benefit of hindsight. From the beginning of the first episode, each character’s steps fall with inevitability. From Lord Shigemori, who takes protagonist Biwa in after her father is callously murdered by members of his own clan, to Taira no Kiyomori’s heartless power-grabbing ploys, every man, woman, and child here has their fate sealed before the first episode of the series even begins.
There is one exception: Biwa herself. (She’s voiced by Aoi Yuuki, in what would be the strongest role in the career of almost any other voice actress but is just another casual triumph for her. She brings alternating innocence for the Biwa we see most of the time, and stately, religious gravitas for the white-haired “seer” Biwa.)
Her role? To be conscripted as fate’s chronicler and become representative both of the nature of the original epic itself and more generally as a symbol of all of us. Witnesses to history, as we are, who so often are powerless to change it despite our own strengths. It can feel grim and fatalistic; seasons change and an empire falls like a leaf from a tree in autumn. But Heike Monogatari never makes it feel that way. Things simply are, and then they aren’t. Dust becomes dust, time ticks on.
Heike Monogatari is observance and acceptance, and the stormy lining to its silver cloud is that it’s so obviously timeless that even writing about it feels sort of pointless. It’s like trying to review The Iliad. It could have been #1, easily, and in almost any other year it would’ve been. Yet, at least to me, it was still somehow “only” the second-best anime of 2021.
But, before we get to the top of the list, let’s go through some honorable mentions. Because you’re worth it, dear readers.
Honorable Mention: takt op.Destiny
Ribbons of highway and a great blue sky way. Ruins, cities, deserts, forests, monsters, and song. A world that’s lost its music. That was takt op.Destiny. Hardly the year’s most “together” production, takt op has the dubious distinction of sharing a bizarre ending twist with notable “would’ve probably made this list if quality wasn’t a factor at all” shortlister The Detective is Already Dead. But obviously, its spotty ending is not why it’s here. Of what I saw in 2021, takt op had some of the most purely joyous animation. Most of it took the form of fight scenes, and it’s easy to dismiss that sort of thing as lowbrow. But by tying it together with a thematic core about rescuing a world that thinks it no longer needs art with that art, it manages to make it all feel meaningful. For the bounty of good to great anime 2021 did have, it was rather short on anime that I felt compellingly made the case for art itself–something last year had in spades–boiling down to mostly just this, Love Live! Superstar!!, and Kageki Shoujo!! (Which itself only missed the list by dint of a dry run of episodes in its middle third.) So, for filling that niche, I am quite grateful to takt op, perhaps the year’s messiest pile of camp.
Honorable Mention: Zombie Land Saga Revenge
If someone asks me what I thought about the general quality of anime in 2021, I will tell them that I had to relegate the second season of Zombie Land Saga to the Honorable Mentions list.
Honestly it barely feels fair. Zombie Land Saga Revenge is everything you could want out of a sequel; it builds on the original in logical and interesting ways. Franchouchou start the season having blown their biggest concert, washed up and down and out. But the mountain waits for no one, so what can you do but try to climb it again? And we saw them climb again. Those ridiculous zombies fought claw and jaw to bigger and bigger concert placements, and along the way we saw them grow as people, with particular star turns for Junko and Yuugiri. Let’s not forget that in the latter case, Revenge decided to just become a historical drama for several episodes, an outfit it wore better than many actual historical dramas do. Zombie Land Saga truly can do it all. The best idol anime of 2021, and almost certainly its best comedy. And I had to put it on the HM list. What a year it’s been, eh?
Honorable Mention: BLUE REFLECTION RAY
More than any other anime on this list, and maybe more than any anime I’ve ever covered period, I really strongly think Blue Reflection Ray is underrated. It’s a victim of circumstance, really. Animated by a studio long past its prime in a year that had two other anime that did many of the same things as it but in a more flashy and accessible way, there is a real case to be made that BRR never had a chance. But this list is, ultimately, about anime that I love. And I truly do think BRR was something special.
And not just because it’s really gay, although that certainly helps.
As a love letter to the magical girl genre, as a scrappy example of what even the most “low budget” of anime can accomplish with enough sincerity and grit, and as a rumination on how society treats young girls–another theme that came up quite often in art this year–Blue Reflection Ray stands tall with the best of them. When, in its penultimate episode, the Reflectors transform back-to-back-to-back just like a “real” magical girl team for the first and only time, BRR felt just as important as any other magical girl series. Girls in a world of lies living their truth for the first time.
Speaking of other magical girl anime.
Honorable Mention: Tropical Rouge Precure
This was the hardest cut from the proper list. TroPre is relegated to the HMs by a technicality; it’s not actually over yet, a quirk of the show’s odd schedule. (Precure series generally run for a full four cours over the course of an entire year, which makes accounting for them in otherwise neat and orderly lists like this one difficult. And yes I’m aware I said that only finished shows would be on the list. Sue me.) But that’s okay, because while Tropical Rouge Precure is great, it’s on this list less for what it actually is and more for the experiences I had while watching it. Its placement here is not due to its excellent sense of humor, its wonderful characters, or its at-times gorgeous animation, even though those are all very much merits the series has.
Unlike most other anime on this list, I did not–and do not–watch TroPre by myself. I watch it with a group of friends, every weekend, at around the same time. In this way, I get to have an experience that I very much would’ve liked to have had as a little girl; getting to talk about one of my favorite magical girl anime with some other girls my own age. A sense of lost youth is a common side effect of being transgender, and while never having gotten to chat about Sailor Moon with schoolmates is pretty low on the list of things I’m sad I missed out on, it is still on that list. So, as a balm for that particular little hole in my soul, I value the series a lot. We plan to continue this practice next year, so unless something goes horribly wrong, you can expect to see Delicious Party Precure somewhere on the list next year, too.
There have already been three magical girl anime somewhere in this article, and that’s the end of the honorable mentions. So you may well wonder; what’s at #1?
Well, a different sort of magical girl anime.
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Oh come on, you can’t actually besurprised.
#1: Wonder Egg Priority
I knew from the minute I started writing this list that Wonder Egg Priority would be my #1.
I tried to talk myself out of it more than once; to convince myself to put Heike Monogatari at the top of the list instead. I like that show and Wonder Eggalmost as much as each other. It would’ve been a compromise, but it was one I could’ve lived with.
But that’s the thing, right? It still would’ve been a compromise. And it’s my list, so there is no room for compromise. Wonder Egg Priority is my favorite anime of the year. Is it the best anime of the year? That’s a level of definitiveness that I don’t normally strive for when writing, even if this sort of format implicitly demands it. But if I’m the one being asked the question? Then yes, it absolutely fucking is.
Quite unlike my #1 pick for last year, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Wonder Egg Priority ends the year not as a widely beloved (or at least liked) exemplar of its staff’s prowess. Its place in the popular discourse is, and probably always will be, that of a great folly. A production train-crash that physically hurt the people working on it and squandered its potential and left its audience profoundly disappointed.
Which, of course, is a massive oversimplification. I try to at least pay some attention to what The Public At Large think about the anime I cover, if anything. But the fact remains that while the consensus will probably always be against WEP, and not totally without reason, there are people who still like it. I am one of them. There are dozens of us. I just happen to like it more than anything else that aired this year.
But of course you want to know why, which is a fair question, given what this website is and what I write about on it.
It would be fairly easy to fall back on its many technical merits. Wonder Egg Priority is an incredible-looking show, constantly toeing a line between appearing pristine as jeweled glass and wild as paint-buckets tossed at canvasses. If CloverWorks never make anything that has quite this level of visual pop ever again, it would not be a mark against them in any way. We could talk also about its soundtrack, an underappreciated aspect of the series that colors every moment of it in a way rare both this year specifically and in general. (Sonny Boy is its only real competition from 2021 in this aspect.)
If we wanted to really stretch our critic-brains, we could turn toward its thematic merits. To try to break down the series’ elaborate use of symbolism. Or perhaps its understanding of how gender roles define and oppress us, and how the modern world will beat any young girl it can’t control into submission, co-opt her for its own ends and twist her into hurting others like her. (See: Frill.) We could cite its deeply compelling four main characters and their own specific twists on this notion; a recovering hikikomori (Ai), a former idol with past sins on her mind (Rika), a mysterious wunderkind with a vanished sister (Neiru), and the series’ own high-strung, gender-nonconformant take on the obligatory “boyish one” (Momoe).
We could talk about how they smash personifications of pedophilia, misogyny, and transphobia to paint-colored smithereens and are pursued by anonymous maniacs called Haters through their imaginary worlds. We could talk about how their mysterious “benefactors” who promise they can restore the dead to life turn out to be little more than hucksters past their prime. We could talk, at length, about all of this.
We could even talk about this!
But frankly, I think “all of this” is, incredibly, at least to me, somewhat secondary. It is true that Wonder Egg Priorityhas all these merits, and I think they alone could be used as an argument for why the show is very good. And if they were all that Wonder Egg Priority did right, it would have earned a comfortable spot somewhere a few ranks back. Maybe between Sonny Boy and Heike Monogatari, as “merely” a show from 2021 that I’m confident I’ll still be thinking about in 2031. In truth, what is often cited as its greatest “objective flaw” (and oh, how I hate that phrase), is what locked me into holding it close to my heart forever, and why, if asked, I will say it’s among my all-time favorites.
Wonder Egg Priority doesn’t really have an ending.
Its story comes to an abrupt halt. Little is resolved, one of the main characters is missing. It’s a question mark. There is no “to be continued.”
This is, I realize, a stance held by very few. But endings are rarely what truly move me about stories. (Heike Monogatari is one of a quite small number of exceptions.) So on its own, WEP’s lack of an ending is no serious fault to me. Indeed, Wonder Egg Priority could have ended in any number of ways, from the sappy to the depressing, that would’ve given it some measure of critical and fan acclaim. If it had really nailed it, it could’ve sat alongside modern born-classics like Revue Starlight, hailed as a truly great example of what TV anime as a medium could achieve.
Instead, it dissolved into a cloud of smoke, seeping into our collective memories forever. It became an unanswerable question and an unsolvable puzzle; quiet as God and twice as unknowable. In doing so, it embodied the boiling haze of steaming existential confusion that is the modern zeitgeist better than almost any work of fiction I have ever experienced. Wonder Egg Priority left an axe-wound in the popular imagination. For that, I love and respect it immensely. In a way, it is this aspect that most closely ties Wonder Egg‘s form to its message. The girls’ struggle, ultimately, is against suicide personified. The Temptation of Death. The fact that they don’t explicitly “win” is contentious. But that’s the whole point; we don’t see how this story ends. Some small glimpses of incremental progress aside, we know nothing. Only that Ai marches forward, in spite of it all, to try again.
I have seen it argued that this is a relentlessly bleak ending, but both the reality of the subjects Wonder Egg speaks on, and its own stylistic flourishes make it fairly obvious that this is, in fact, hopeful. To live in the modern age is to live in a world filled with poison. To live on in spite of that, to get up every day, to snap your gaze toward the horizon and walk–as Ai does–is optimism. This world wants us dead. We live anyway.
Quite unlike last year’s #1, I do not expect that Wonder Egg Priority will ever be hailed as timeless or classic. I think if it is remembered at all, it will be as a mistake. The avalanche of public consensus is hard to fight against, particularly in the age of social media. But, as I have learned many times this year, I can be wrong. If I have ever been wrong about anything relating to this medium I’ve devoted so much of my time to writing about, I would like it to be this.
Because whenever I so much as think about Wonder Egg Priority, it comes back to me in an instant. The hyper-technicolor magical girl psycho-drama that no one asked for, but that we–or perhaps just some of us–sorely needed. Wonder Egg Priority might never gain any coveted status as a must-watch, as a classic of its medium or genre, as “one of the good anime,” or anything of the sort, but if it does not gain some kind of following, there is something truly wrong with this world indeed. We endure precisely because we know we’re not alone. It would be a horribly cruel thing for one of the best articulations of that idea ever put to the silver screen to be lost to obscurity.
Yet, in spite of everything I just said, I hold no delusion that I am the Wonder Egg Guru. I have spent the better part of a year attempting to reckon with the WEP Project’s first, last, and only output. To explain it succinctly, to square how much I love it with how strongly I oppose the worst parts of the industry that let it exist. But the fate’s-honest truth is that I am not much closer to “closing the book” on Wonder Egg Priority, for myself or anyone else, than I was when the TV broadcast ended in late March. It’s an enigma. I think at least some part of it always will be. And maybe it seems unfair to give the gold medal to an enigma. Maybe the #1 spot should be saved for something I can explain better. But it is my view that the role of the critic and commentator is not that of an interpreter. It is that of an honest witness. I could have sat here and thought myself into circles. I could have tried to justify putting something–anything–else at #1, but that’s not honest. And if I don’t have honesty, what do I have?
So, there it is. The most magical anime of 2021. The best anime of the year, so says me, is a series that draws a line from the strained psyche of four teenage girls to our own place, lost in the fog that smothers this haunted planet. Then, in a grand confrontational hammer-smash, it reveals that there is no line at all; these things are one in the same.
Now that’s a magic trick.
And, yes, that’s the list.
What did you think? As I mentioned last year, I try not to pay too much mind as to whether my picks will be “controversial” or not, but, well, last year I didn’t top the list with what is probably the most divisive show of the entire year. So tell me your thoughts! Did you love my picks? Were they utterly baffling to you? Maybe 50/50? What were your top five, top six, top whatever anime of 2021? I’d love to hear from you, so please do leave a comment here or on Twitter. If you’re one of the folks who was disappointed by my #1 (and more than one person explicitly said they would be, whoops!) then…well, I hope this will spurn you to write your own lists, at the very least. (I maintain that basically everyone’s life could be improved by running a blog.)
Incidentally, I rana very small little competition on my twitter account yesterday, and wanted to shout out @lilysokawaii, @pikestaff, and @theplatinumdove for correctly guessing my #1 pick. For the rest of y’all: better luck next year!
Tomorrow, an article will go up that briefly discusses my plans for 2022, as she fast approaches. I’ll see you then, anime fans.
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Hello, treasured readers! I don’t have much to say this week, but I will remind you to pop on over to the poll to choose what I cover weekly on Let’s Watch sometime before December ends if you’re interested in doing that and haven’t done so yet. Other than that? A fairly short one this week with just two shows, but on the plus side; they’re both anime that haven’t appeared in this column for quite a while.
Komi Can’t Communicate
It’s been quite a while since Komi Can’t Communicate last appeared here. If you’re wondering why, I will remind any returning readers that I am following NovaWorks‘ fansub release, which is going slowly, but remains absolutely worth it because of their inventive typesetting and clear love of the material.
In the third episode, their most recent release, we’re introduced to a new character, Himiko Agari.
She’s kind of…weird. Initially it seems like her main role will be to give Komi a friend who also has pretty severe anxiety. And most of her introductory segment focuses on a miscommunication the two have. (Or rather a lack of one; Komi wants to introduce herself to Himiko but instead just follows her around the school building silently. Which understandably freaks Himiko out.)
And then we get to the climax of the bit and the punchline is…this.
It’s just a bit confusing, really. For one thing, it isn’t much of a joke. For another, this particular shade of Himiko’s personality seems to flip on and off like a lightswitch as the scene demands. This is hardly the quandary that Najimi’s characterization posed, but it is symptomatic of a strange tendency for Komi to sometimes squish its characters down to one-note cutouts for the sake of gags.
Even the soundtrack gets in on this. Komi‘s OST tends to slide into a gentle sway full of plucked guitars and soft strings whenever it wants to sell a genuine “friendship moment.” But it’s just as quick to cut the music entirely if it can subvert that for a quick joke. In general, this all still works a lot better here than it did in the source material, but it’s a notably odd sensation nonetheless, and prevents the show from flowing well at times. Does Komi want to have a core of real, warm compassion for its characters, or is everything just a setup for a parade of gags? One gets the sense that the series itself doesn’t quite know the answer, and on the occasion that it tries something, and it falls flat, that tends to be why.
What tends to work a bit better than the personality gags are situations where the humor comes from Tadano (or one of Komi’s other friends) attempting to help Komi socialize more, and inadvertently speeding into a brick wall in the process. That’s more or less what happens with the final segment of this episode, where Najimi invites the two of them to play a chant game. Style checks of the Pokémon anime and some classic “comedy anime treats a mundane activity like a shonen battle” humor follow, and it’s genuinely great.
You don’t need to know that the studio behind Komi Can’t Communicate is OLM, who have also done the Pokémon anime since it premiered in 1997 and made a hot-streak return to non-primetime anime production this year between this series and ODD TAXI to find this funny. But, hey, now you do anyway.
Elsewhere, a bit about cellphone-related anxiety taps in to the sort of universal cringe-beholding-cringe feeling that tends to make the best sort of this kind of comedy tick. All of this, of course, is accentuated by the visual treat that the series continues to be. It remains one of the best-looking anime of 2021. (An aside should be made also to also again shout out Komi’s voice actress, Aoi Koga, who gets barely two actual lines in this episode but still manages to somehow make the character burst with personality even when she’s mostly communicating through wordless single syllables.)
So if it’s rough around the edges, maybe that’s worth sitting through for the moments when it really shines. Komi is an odd one, and if it hasn’t entirely kept that “must-watch” mantle from its premiere, it’s at least a worthwhile watch regardless.
Rumble Garanndoll
It’s been a while since we last checked in with Rumble Garanndoll. To be fair, the fact that it airs on Mondays makes covering it here a smidge inconvenient. (By the time this article goes live, the “next episode” will already have aired.) Nonetheless; I’ve kept up with it intermittently. My opinion on the show’s merits (of which it has quite a few) and flaws (same) has evened out into thinking it is a solid little action series with a quirky aesthetic bent that, as a nice bonus, has something to say. This is roughly how I felt about BACK ARROW from earlier this year–also a weird mecha anime–although I think Rumble‘s self-aware otakucore vibes might fit with how I like my media a little better. (Which probably says nothing good about me, but oh well.)
Since I last wrote about it, Rumble has introduced a third (and presumably final) Battery Girl; Misa “WerdCat” Kuroki. Misa is the youngest of the Battery Girls and, in a refreshing change of pace, looks to Hosomichi more as a surrogate older sibling than a romantic interest. Her story manages to squeeze some life out of the ancient “pa went missing one day and never came back :(” trope, to surprisingly affecting….er, effect.
I remain undecided on the main visual metaphor here, a bright red linker cable, of the sort that was used to connect handheld consoles in the pre-WiFi era. (Specifically the consoles that show up here are NeoGeo Pockets. Presumably the Gameboy would’ve been too mainstream.) Much of these episodes’ plots revolves around an attempt to find one in the dungeons under Akihabara (yes, there are dungeons here. Don’t question it.) And in the flashbacks when we see Misa’s father go missing, they are the only thing fully colored in the otherwise sepia tone scenes. It’s a silly visual symbol, but this is just the frequency Rumble operates on, and one must accept it if they wish to enjoy the show.
Similarly, when Misa takes control of the Doll itself, turning it into “Cat Three,” the series manages the impressive task of making a giant robot-sized kotatsu table look rather cool as it turns into an artillery platform. Rumble Garanndoll is nothing if not devoted to its shtick.
Y’know, like, nya?
The main antagonist of this arc, Yakumo Kamizuru, is also intriguing. Perhaps best described in a nutshell as a “fascistic shrine maiden who is also a mecha pilot,” Yakumo is one of the show’s more interesting antagonists. She retreats at the end of the arc, despite only minutes prior disparaging the entire resistance as “failures” and “losers”, chuckling to herself as she does so. Her name, an apparent allusion to Koizumi Yakumo, is interesting to me. The historical Yakumo was a Greek-Irish-American who eventually settled in Japan after developing a fascination with its culture in the late 1800s. (And much besides, he’s an interesting figure.) If I may wander into fan theory territory here, I do wonder if this is meant to indicate that our Yakumo here isn’t actually from “True” Japan. Perhaps she’s a defector originally from “Illusory” Japan. Her general attitude belies an interest in older Japanese culture. So part of me wonders if, assuming this is true, she didn’t defect just because she was bitter about people caring more about modern pop culture than older things. (I may of course, be wildly wrong. But hey, if I make a called shot about this, I want the credit.)
All this is to say nothing of the most recent episode, the ninth.
Episode Nine takes place almost entirely at a festival organized by the Resistance. In some anime, this would be a filler episode. Here, it leads directly into our presumable final confrontation (there are, after all, only three episodes of this thing left).
Much of the episode revolves around a ramen stand, where Hosomichi meets an in-disguise Captain Akatsuki Shinonome and, of course, the stand’s owner. Said old man (who goes unnamed here) serves to show us both what life is like for the older ordinary residents of Akihabara, including why they might join up with the resistance in the first place, and to start a conversation between these two opposing people.
Now Rumble has to be careful here, because we’ve never really been given a look inside Akatsuki’s head, and there has been prior to now little reason to not believe he’s simply a garden-variety authoritarian. Here, he gains some character detail as he veiledly explains his own point of view to the ramen shop owner (and to Hosomichi.) The danger of doing this of course is always that your work’s audience might end up sympathizing with the fascist; an especially real possibility here at the end of the episode when a drunk-off-his-ass Anju (that’s Hosomichi’s “boss” if you’ve forgotten) shows up, makes a huge show of representing the resistance, and starts bullying the ramen shop owner. My main hope is that this is obviously enough meant to not be a real criticism from the show’s end of the resistance, so no one will take it that way.
The shop owner himself, incidentally, may go down as one of the great relatable anime characters of the year. At least to me.
Amen, brother.
And lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Rin and Hayate’s meeting here. We get to see sadly little of it and it’s most likely setup for something in the next episode, but they make a rather cute couple. (Which a random doujin shop owner voiced by Mayumi Shintani actually mistakes them for.)
The final confrontation is set to take place just outside what looks an awful lot like Tokyo Big Sight, AKA The Comiket Building. Which, honestly, where else would Rumble Garanndoll finish?
Wanna 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 Directoryto 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
When people talk about bonds, this is what they mean, isn’t it?
At just 40 minutes long, Alice in Deadly School only barely qualifies for this column, but I’m bending the rules for a reason here. Not a single thing about this OVA makes a lick of sense. In origin alone, it stands as a notable example of how odd the margins of the mainstream anime industry can get, stemming as it does from post-apoc idol show also-ran Gekidol (which, full disclosure, I haven’t seen). A friend called it the best anime of the year. Another absolutely hates it. It takes a truly special kind of anime to inspire strong feelings on both ends of the whatever-number-out-of-ten spectrum like that. And whatever else one may say about it, “special” is a word that describes Alice in Deadly School to a tee.
It tiptoes over the course of three or so different genres during its brief runtime, has a nowhereman visual style that, if you didn’t know, you could conceivably place anywhere from the past 20 years of mainstream anime, and is utterly fucking heartbreaking. I’ve tried to avoid using this phrase much over the course of the past year writing for this blog, as I was guilty of trotting it out too often in 2020, but the fact of the matter is that there just isn’t much like this.
Premisewise, at least, it has some ancestors. “Zombie outbreak at a high school” is not new ground for anime and manga; a cursory glance at anything from the infamous High School of the Dead to Dowman Sayman’s black comedy one shot “Girls’ Night Out of The Living Dead” will tell you that much. It’s hard to even argue that Alice in Deadly School brings much new to the table from this angle. Crossbreeding that particular premise with the girls’ club school-life genre has been done before too (see 2015’s SCHOOL-LIVE!). What Alice offers is lightning-electric resonance. Do you feel doomed every single day because of the relentless onslaught of soul-crushingly miserable news that permeates our lives, from the outrageously petty to the globally catastrophic? I have a pretty strong feeling that the people who made Alice do too.
The term “zombie” itself is never used–standard for the genre these days–but it’s pretty clear what the creepy undead Things taking over the high school Alice takes place in are. Our cast then, naturally, are the outbreak’s few survivors. The main focus is on the “manzai club”, in truth just a pair of girls–Yuu and Nobuko–who aspire to be a manzai duo.
They’re hardly the only characters (and I’m doing the film a disservice by only briefly mentioning the Softball Club duo here), but they’re the two most important. Through their eyes, we see the broken-down remnants of the high school’s world, and their character interactions are great too. Some of this is funny; the OVA opens with the two riffing about why melonbread doesn’t actually have any melons in it. (Because a melon is too large, of course.) Some if it is melancholy; the two ruminate on their pasts more than once, and we find out that Yuu lost her mother some time ago. Some of it is just upsetting; the pair also witness the zombie of a former classmate being shot through the head, and the OVA’s whole color palette goes black, white, and blood-splatter red in the aftermath.
About that; Alice has a tendency to warp its visual style toward whatever emotion the story is trying to convey in the moment. This is not at all rare in anime (or in film in general). In 2021 alone, works as diverse as Super Cub and Sonny Boyhave done it to lesser or great degrees. But a case this extreme in an OVA whose visual style is otherwise pretty grounded is notable, especially with regard to the backgrounds, which often take on a hand-painted look when the film needs to move away from “reality” to convey a particularly strong emotion; nostalgia, sadness, disquiet, etc.
As Alice ticks on, its cast hatch a plan to escape the titular deadly school. This part of the OVA particularly is rather straightforward, but it works.
Who says kids don’t need to know Chemistry?
And as Alice in Deadly School nears its end, I face a particular challenge.
You see, conveying why something hits you emotionally is hard. It’s arguably my entire job, but that doesn’t make it easier in cases like this. There are a lot of anime that end with a character death. It’s not rare, and most of the time it does little for me. I tend to consider it a little cheap; something of a writer’s shortcut. An easy way to tug on your audience’s heartstrings and also ditch a character you’ve run out of ideas for at the same time. It’s only rarely actually objectionable, but it’s one of the immortal tools of literature that does the least for me.
So when I actually am hit by one, I have to really sit and think about why.
Nobuko dies near Alice in Deadly School‘s very, very end. We don’t even see it on screen, but it’s clear that she’s contracted the virus and is starting to slip. Her and Yuu’s final conversation–in a strange, green dreamspace that is mostly in Yuu’s own mind–is devastating. One of the film’s key themes is that dreams, even if we don’t achieve them, can keep us going through even the worst times in our lives. Nobuko’s is her shared dream with Yuu, to be a comedy duo, and it tangibly, provably, does not happen.
But Yuu can carry on–though not without heartache–because Nobuko’s spirit, her own aspirations, live on inside her. Alice seems to offer the minor salve that perhaps no one is truly dead if they’re remembered. The final piece falls into place here, in one of the year’s single most….I don’t even really know. Brilliant? Audacious? Just plain weird? Artistic decisions; an apparent riff on the Love Live! series’ famous “Kotori photobomb”, here reappropriated as a symbol that no matter when those close to us may leave our lives, we will always carry a piece of them with us. It’s contrasted with a final cut to the reality of the situation; Yuu posing by herself in front of an empty swing set.
This theme of carrying your torch as long as it’ll stay lit bears out in a few other ways near the OVA’s conclusion, too. A character whose lifelong goal was to become an idol finds herself trapped in the school’s announcement room, and sings her heart out over the school broadcast system even as she’s actively succumbing to the virus. She imagines herself in a pastel pink music video even as she’s literally bleeding from the neck. For a single moment, she is who she’s always wanted to be. And then she’s gone, and her song ends like the flip of a lightswitch.
So is Alice in Deadly School ultimately a hopeful work? It’s a bit hard to say, but I’d like to think so, although maybe “cautiously optimistic” is a better way to think of it. The girls who escape only do so after they give up on any hope of outside help and basically rescue themselves. If we take Alice as an allegory for our fears about the future of the world–and goodness could it apply to a lot of them, as is a long-standing tradition in zombie fiction–maybe the message is that action is our only option. Then again, the girls flee to a nearby mall, apparently being maintained as a shelter by some other group of people. So perhaps the takeaway is that we can only survive with the help of others, but that we need to take the effort to actually reach out into our own hands.
The real brilliance of course is that you can take all that and more from Alice in Deadly School. It’s a truly fascinating little film. Not unlike a certain other short-form anime project that I covered not quite yet a year ago, it reads as a eulogy to those who are gone from the ones who are still alive, although its scope is broader. It offers a small hope; maybe some of us can make it out of all this alive. And for those who’ll die either way? Perhaps we can at least go out on our own terms. The same, really, could be said of Alice itself.
It seems doubtful that the film (or its parent series) will ever pick up much of a following. Weird little OVA projects like this almost never do, at least not over here in the Anglosphere. But for 40 minutes, it’s one of the strangest, most resonant, and yeah, one of the best anime of 2021. That counts for something. Hold it in your hearts.
Wanna 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 Directoryto 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.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
On a fundamental, very basic level, the absolute first thing a work of fiction ever has to do for you as the viewer, is convince you that the world that it exists in could be real. Not consciously, of course, but you have to accept the premise and the production–whatever they may be–on a subconscious level to even begin processing a story as such. That’s what the suspension of disbelief is. It is almost impossible to fail at this step when creating an even remotely professional work of art. And in anime, even very, very bad shows can convey a sense that the worlds they take place in exist in some sense. Even the worst things I’ve covered on this site, your Big Orders, hell, your Speed Graphers, can do that much.
Tesla Note, improbably, fails at this very first step. Even worse, it’s not even the first anime to do so this year, quickly establishing itself as a close cousin of the truly rancid Ex-Arm, which it makes some of the same mistakes as. Though in other ways, while Tesla Note is not quite as consistently awful, it is actually worse in the sheer number of ways it manages to be bad, as we’ll get to.
I’m not going to condescend to my readership by pretending any of you need to know about this thing’s plot. But if you are, for some reason, curious, here’s the official description, in its entirety.
Genius Nikola Tesla preserved records of all his inventions inside crystals known as Tesla Shards. After an inexplicable incident in Norway, Botan Negoro, a descendant of ninjas raised to be the ultimate agent, is recruited on a mission to recover the crystals. Her partner through this is self-proclaimed No. 1 agent, Kuruma. With the fate of the world at stake, the fight for the shards begins.
In practice this doesn’t matter. It’s a setup for garden variety super-spy BS that can absolutely be fun if it’s handled the right way. But folks? This is not the right way. Tesla Note is the first production from the brand-new studio Gambit, and I would not be surprised if it were their last. Surely no one enters the anime industry–hell, cartoons in general–and their desire is to make this? I’m not talking about the animators, who I have the deepest sympathy for. I’m referring to the higher-ups here. What led to this?
“This”, if you’re not picking it up just from the screencaps, is an absolutely eye-searing cornucopia of god-awful 3D CGI. And let me be very clear, I am something of a 3D CG apologist. There have been anime earlier this year that have made great use of 3D CG, one of which, Love Live Superstar!!, is airing this very season. I am not against the process on principle, and used well it can lead to wonderful things that are difficult or impossible to achieve with traditional 2D animation. In some sense, Tesla Note may also have been impossible to achieve if animated traditionally, but certainly not in any good sense.
Visually speaking, Tesla Note’s mix of stiff, under-rigged, poorly-lit, and generally bad-looking models for its main characters, its unconvincing backgrounds, the fever-dream editing style, its flat-out inexplicable decision to animate some but not all minor characters traditionally, and its profound failure to make any of this look like it exists on the same planet, much less in the same show, all combine into a symphony of incompetence. Tesla Note has all the visual panache of a teenager fucking around in GMod or a Virtual Youtuber working out the kinks in her rig before going live for the first time, which is funny, given that the main character is named Botan. It is the worst-looking anime of 2021, exceeding Ex-Arm, its only real competition, by lacking the one thing that show had, a unity of style.
Occasionally, the odd traditionally-animated cut will pop in, just for a moment, almost as a taunt. None of the few examples in this first episode are really any good, but they at least stand out.
Worse; Tesla Note is not merely awful-looking, it is also horribly-written. For nearly the entire 22-minute runtime of the first episode, no one ever shuts up. Almost every single second is filled with the characters chattering away in some of the most uninspired, cliché-ridden character dialogue I have ever seen. I was not super keen on the last series I did for this column, but this makes Selection Project look like The End of Evangelion. It is terminally charmless.
So does this thing have any merit? Well, if you’re the sort who enjoys gazing into the dying dreams of popular media, its first episode has some value as a thing to inflict on the unsuspecting. When it’s over, I could see it being an interesting thing to get wasted and binge watch with a particularly susceptible group of friends. Even then, be wary of falling on the wrong side of the Star Wars Holiday Special graph.
Other than that? No. Avoid Tesla Note at all costs.
Grade: F- The Takeaway: Don’t watch this. Seriously, love yourself. Even for those chasing a “so bad it’s good” “meme anime” or what-have-you, the novelty will wear off, and you will be left spiritually hollow by the experience. Self-care is important these days.
Wanna 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 Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture.
It probably says a lot about me that for this week’s Frontline Report the show I wrote the most about is the one I think is the least good. Oh well, you know what they say about tigers and changing stripes. As always, let me know what you think in the comments!
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The aquatope on white sand – This week’s episode deals with Fuuka being recognized, first by a coworker who happens to be deep into idol culture and later by a trio of curious teens. The bizarre public afterlife of people who aren’t famous but used to be is a fascinating and very complicated topic, and I’m glad that aquatope is not just conveniently forgetting Fuuka’s recent past. Something that’s interesting to me is that it’s not totally clear whether Fuuka actually regrets leaving the industry or if she thinks putting it behind her was the right choice. At different points in this episode you can make the case for either stance.
Blue Reflection Ray – This show is draining, man. For as good as BRR is, the fact that its episodes contain so much exposition combined with how heavy the show gets can definitely lead to episodes like this one where watching them just kinda feels exhausting. That may sound negative but I actually think that’s a positive trait. Is that weird? It’s probably weird.
The Detective is Already Dead – With the constant torrent of new anime, there’s a pressure to only let yourself watch the best of the best. Things that are masterpieces or at least seem like they’ll get into that conversation. If you subscribe to that philosophy, you can go ahead and move Detective to your Dropped list now. Detective is not the best, it’s honestly not even very good. But, when I find myself auditing my own time once a week (as I always do, it’s a bad habit arguably), I ask myself, “am I still getting anything out of this show?” Inevitably, I walk away answering “yes.”
Detective is…just kind of flummoxing. It has middling production values, and consists almost entirely of dialogue. (A trait I imagine works a little better in the original light novels.) Nonetheless, once or twice per episode it will do something that reels me back in, and temporarily banishes my skepticism. This week it was Nagisa talking down badly-traumatized cyborg idol Yui as she threatened both her and her co-lead with a pistol. Yet, while I maintain that Detective‘s problems have never been rooted in its premise (which I believe absolutely can be put to compelling ends), the fact remains that when Siesta reappears in a flashback in the post-credits, she is a dynamic, charismatic, theatrical presence that the show has no access to without her. Thus, the question of what happened to Siesta and how it will be resolved, and consequently whether Detective will ever actually earn its premise, is still an open one. She remains a compelling character, even in absence. A true “subtracted woman” who exists outside of the very narrative she controls. What can you do? The detective is dead already.
Magia Record Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Season 2 -The Eve of Awakening- – I made most of my thoughts on MagiReco’s second season premiere pretty clear in my writeup for GGA. But it bears repeating; this is probably the best premiere of the year. It is pure “fanservice” in the older sense of the word; it’s a love letter to Madoka Magica as a franchise, the fans who are still ride-or-die for it ten years later, and the magical girl genre itself. It’s an open question as to whether the rest of the season will live up to the admittedly very high standard set by this premiere, but even if it doesn’t, I remain confident the show’s going to continue to be worth watching.
Sonny Boy – Barely to its quarter mark, Sonny Boy is the season’s easy standout, the only thing in the same conversation as Sonny Boy is the aforementioned MagiReco, from which it is otherwise very distinct. If you’re only going to watch one show this season, make it this one.
A friend ventured that Sonny Boy, at present, is depicting its characters reinventing the worst facets of society from scratch, since it’s all they know. This week’s episode with its magic blackout curtains and supernatural NEET-ism solved only by empathy seems like it may gesture to a way out somewhere many weeks down the road. Honestly though, you don’t need me to say this, but as hard as it is to say where Sonny Boy is headed, the ride alone is worth the price of admission.
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.
According to the Twitter users, the title was only the beginning of the problems with Campbell’s overly enthusiastic analysis of the show. Most people took offense to this portion in particular:
“From the beginning are intricate layers of visual language that recall the work of A Silent Voice director Naoko Yamada (particularly her use of flower language) and the subjective, magical realist portrayal of reality that made Satoshi Kon a name. There’s even some Persona 5 in the way the show’s teenagers deal with the moral failings of adults.”
The Magic Planet 