Tag: 2022 Summer anime season

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Cat Comes Back in TOKYO MEW MEW NEW

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.

In 2005, Tokyo Mew Mew, under the localized title Mew Mew Power, became one of the very, very few non-Sailor Moon magical girl anime to ever make any real inroads in the United States. It wasn’t a runaway hit—in fact, it was one domino among many that eventually lead to downfall of infamous chopjob dub house 4Kids Entertainment—but it’s stuck around in a nebulous, cultural sense. As one of the tiny handful of magical girl anime that’s ever made any kind of dent stateside, it’s at least stuck in peoples’ memories. I was not one of the people who saw its US run, and in fact today marks the first time I’ve watched any Tokyo Mew Mew in any form, but the fact that it has that tiny little toehold in the minds of Anglophone magical girl fans matters, and it makes the series’ return in rebooted form as Tokyo Mew Mew New something of an event (if perhaps only a minor one). I imagine at least a few people will find their way to this article by looking up the new series.

New arrives nearly 20 years to the season that the original Tokyo Mew Mew premiered in its home country, and it returns like no time has passed at all. Almost every element of the series is relentlessly, unapologetically old school, for both good and ill, and it’s hard to imagine something like this being written nowadays were this not an old property for a lot of reasons.

At its core, the story is a simple one. Ordinary high school girl Ichigo Momomiya (Yuuki Tenma), has a crush on her school’s kendo star, Masaya Aoyama (Yuuma Uchida). She gets word from the mysterious Mint Aizawa (Mirai Hinata) that the guy loves his animals and, what a coincidence, she happens to have two tickets to an endangered animals exhibit at a local zoo that she’s willing to part with. Ichigo, being a pink-themed magical girl protagonist, does not think twice about how odd this is, and takes her up on the offer. At the zoo, Ichigo is hit with some kind of magic ray gun by a pair of handsome scientists(?!), which causes her to commune with some kind of cat spirit, and transforms her into a magical girl. Then, of course, she has to fight off a giant rat monster. You know, typical schoolgirl stuff.

You know, normally only Medicine Cats have visions of Star Clan.

Tokyo Mew Mew New arguably doesn’t really need to “separate itself from the pack” or anything of the sort. (There really isn’t much of a “pack” nowadays, with New‘s only direct competitor being the concurrent Delicious Party Precure.) But it does so regardless via two main things; the aforementioned old-school sensibility, which mostly comes through in its heavy focus in the first episode on an idealized sort of teen girl romance, and its concern for the environment.

The former is….a bit of a mixed thing. In a way, it’s charming to see something this straightforward and earnest in 2022. Ichigo’s brain seems to be stuffed with romantic notions of movie dates and love letters, and the show itself is absolutely flooded with classic shoujo tropes, many of which I imagine might be wholly unfamiliar to some younger viewers. Speaking personally, it’s been a long time since I last saw the whole “gaggle of girls fawning over a hot guy doing A School Sport” thing played completely straight. (Emphasis on the “straight”, perhaps.)

Some of this brushes up against uncomfortable implications, but it doesn’t cross that line yet, even as details like Ichigo’s magic power tattoo appearing on her thigh and an actual, honest-to-god, “whoops I fell on top of you and we accidentally kissed” scene make me raise my eyebrow a bit.

This happens. They even show the lip lock in the cut after this, a genuine rarity for any TV anime these days.

It’s too soon to call whether the environmental messaging will be put to good use or not. Certainly, it is a hell of a bit of tonal whiplash to go from Ichigo and Masaya enjoying their date to the latter gravely expositing about the Endangered Species List and how “humanity has committed sins” (that is a paraphrase, but he seriously does put it in roughly those terms). Certainly the climate crisis has not gotten any better since the original Tokyo Mew Mew aired, but there is a thin line between an actual effective thematic core and one that’s confusing, hysterical, or just bizarre. Time will tell which side of that line New falls on.

But in general, New‘s fuck-the-trends attitude helps it a lot more than it hurts. It’s honestly just invigorating to see something this classically magical warrior mahou shoujo, even as it also evokes, as well, sci-fi tropes that are much less common to the genre. (Remember Corrector Yui?) More than anything, I’m just happy to see another magical girl anime airing at all. The genre has seen healthier days, but maybe a bit of mew mew power and mew mew grace can breathe some new life into it.

The Takeaway: Keep a cat’s eye on this one if you’ve got any interest in the genre at all. If not, still check it out to see if the retro shoujo vibe catches your interest.

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

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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Logged in and Losing it in YUREI DECO

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.

Entertain this particular dystopian thought for a moment; what if the world ran on Twitter likes? That, more or less, is the backbone of the society envisioned by YUREI DECO, a neon-block dystopia where the Metaverse has grown beyond its Silicon Valley bounds and swallowed the real world whole, such that there is no longer any meaningful distinction between the two. (This isn’t me reaching, it’s literally called “The Hyperverse” in-show.) Social media tokens called “Love” equate one to one with the sum total of your personal value, and seemingly the whole world is overlaid with a second digital layer of reality that there is no meaningful escape from. Dual implants in each eye, the DECOs of one half of the title, ensure that everyone is plugged in at all times. Truly, Yurei Deco‘s world is one where we are all terminally online, and there is no logging off for anybody.

This is the setting we’re dropped into, handy explanation and all, at the start of this series’ first episode, as we sit in on our main character, Berry (Mira Kawakatsu) and the glorified Zoom class that she calls school. Immediately, we get the sense that Berry is someone who plays outside the rules, as she pulls off some minor computer wizardry to be able to talk to two of her classmates without their teacher noticing. Passing notes for the cyberpunk age, perhaps.

(Somewhere in his lecture, which also serves as our introduction to the setting, Berry’s professor calls the city they live in “the purest expression of liberalism ever to have existed.” Subtle!)

We soon learn that a mysterious person—or perhaps a force—called Phantom Zero has been hitting whole neighborhoods at a time and draining their Love accounts, a big deal in a city where Love is both money and social status. Berry is obsessed with Phantom Zero, and it’s through her eyes and ears that most of this first episode takes place. Including when one of her DECO implants starts glitching out, and she finds a strange origami flower stuck to a lamppost.

That flower, we eventually learn, is the doing of our other main character, a slang-tangling hacker-conman who initially seems like they might be behind the whole “Phantom Zero” thing, given that one of the first things we see her do is sucker a random influencer out of most of his Love. This character’s name, incidentally, is actually just is Hack (Anna Nagase), although you’d have to look at supplementary materials to know that at this point, since it’s not said outright in the first episode.

.hack//Cool Visor, Kid

Berry of course becomes fixated on Hack, who she believes to be responsible for the Phantom Zero phenomenon. Without indulging in an overabundance of detail, she turns out to be wrong, and the real culprit is someone even more mysterious.

The show’s actual plot details aside, what do we make of YUREI DECO so far? Personally, I’m happy to have it around. It’s been a bit since we had a show with interesting visuals that tried to tackle Serious Subjects, or at least, one that didn’t flame out disappointingly. (Sorry, Tokyo 24th Ward.) The series definitely reminds me a fair bit of DECA-DENCE, another colorful cyberpunk series with an all-caps title. More distantly, it recalls Kaiba, and while I’ve not seen Dennou Coil I know enough about it for the multiple comparisons I’ve seen between the two on social media to make sense to me.

A lot of lofty expectations tend to get placed upon anime like this, and this one in particular also happens to be its director’s first TV anime (Tomohisa Shimoyama, though it’s worth noting that he has various credits on things going all the way back to some animation work on Chobits. There’s a show you probably haven’t thought about in a while). While this first episode is a pretty good indication that YUREI DECO is up to that challenge, I do hope folks won’t lose the forest for the trees. There’s a lot to love here already, regardless of where it ends up going.

The Takeaway: If you’ve been looking for the next visually interesting Big Ideas show to come along, you should absolutely be watching this. As for anyone else, I think it’s certainly at least worth checking 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 Directory to browse by category.

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch LYCORIS RECOIL Episode 1 – Easy Does It

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Erase, delete, eradicate, and beautify.

It opens like this; sunrise over a peaceful Tokyo, a gleaming monument to some sin or glory enshrined in the skyline. Our lead, Chisato Nishikigi (Chika Anzai), does stretches in front of her apartment window. A call comes in, and she’s out the door like a bolt of lightning. She monologues, extolling the virtues of Japanese politeness and the serenity of her hometown at dawn while the visuals supercut through scenes of high school girls packing pistols as they apprehend criminals. One appears to execute somebody. These are the Lycoris—named for the spider lily—agents who manufacture the peace that this Tokyo’s citizens enjoy.

Halfway across town, she arrives in time to see another such high school supercop toting a chain gun—that’s Takina Inoue (Shion Wakayama), our other lead—gun down a room full of arms dealers, and nearly hit one of her teammates in the process. Chisato, watching from a building over, whoops and cheers.

Takina’s stunt, meanwhile, gets her expelled from her department—the “DA”—and transferred to Chisato’s, LycoReco, which is rather inexplicably based out of a cafe. (This was the source of much of the show’s early promotional material.) There, she meets Chisato herself, the enigmatic owner Mika (Kousuke Sakaki), and alternately tries to adjust to her new role and openly wonders how she might find her way back to the force.

This, all of it, is Lycoris Recoil. This missile barrage of violence, cute girls, cafes, and tension-ratcheting authoritarian imagery is how it chooses to open. There have been anime somewhat like this before—Princess Principal, RELEASE THE SPYCE, to a lesser extent Assault Lily Bouquet—but of them, this might have the most openly bonkers, beat-your-fucking-head-in introduction of all. There is a sublime unease to the juxtaposition of Chisato’s cheery, upbeat narration and the blunt violence of what we see, even as all of the visuals have a sleek, modern edge that distantly recalls but does not actually look like its ancestors in the “girls with guns” boom of the 2000s. (Rest in peace, Bee Train.)

The episode’s second half sees some additional context. The Chisato and Takina’s unit handles what one might charitably call odd jobs. Chisato’s description is….vague.

They help out at a daycare, then a Japanese-as-second language school, and deliver rare coffee grounds to a mob boss. In the second half of the episode, they help a woman deal with a stalker. The woman’s stalkers turn out to be connected to the same arms deal that got Takina shunted over to Chisato’s unit, and Lycoris Recoil quickly establishes that in its world, everything is a connected, dizzying clockwork of interlocking plots and motivations. Coincidence is for suckers. That’s how we go from “three girls talking out a problem in a restaurant” to “hostage situation” in perhaps ten real-time minutes.

Takina actually intentionally lets the woman get kidnapped, to lure them out. Real piece of work, this girl.

This is all also connected to a mysterious hacker named Walnut—think The Laughing Man from Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex if he had a fursona1—and an eccentric, sinister billionaire named Allen Adams, who at one point we see cause an explosion in a building by remotely tapping a few commands into his Tesla’s touchscreen.

The inevitable and valid question is what all this adds up to, but the fact of the matter is that we simply don’t know yet. It’s clear that Chisato, despite her sunny front, has seen some things. The “symbol of peace” in Tokyo is evidently the result of some situation that she was involved with, and in deed, if not by name, she’s famous throughout the country. She lets a few remarkably cynical comments slip a couple times, and, frankly, given that supporting character Mizuki Nakahara (Ami Koshimizu) notes that Lycorises (Lycori?) are often recruited from orphanages, it’s not hard to imagine why. She and Takina’s original department also seem to have very different ideas of how to keep a place safe and worth living in; her narration—and her habit of helping out just about anyone—point to a belief in focusing on the community itself. And the DA, well, we see them shoot people. It’s not hard to draw a contrast, there.

That may well be the source of Takina’s already-established tendency to use violence as her first and only solution to any obstacle in her way. And this is to say nothing of the Lycoris Cafe’s owner, Mika, who himself seems to be an old hand in the field, the aforementioned villains, the DA’s director, who seems to have her own agenda, and on and on. There are a lot of interesting characters in Lycoris Recoil, and an absolute ton happens, even in its first 24 minutes.

No matter what happens from here on out; Lycoris Recoil should be remembered for a premiere that hits like information overload. Between the silenced pistols and shining city streets, conspiracies form in the broken glass on the floor. I won’t pretend to have all—or even any—answers, as this is clearly a series with a lot going on. But to me, that is part of the adventure. What’s next is unknown and unknowable, and for us to discover together.

1: I did not know this myself, but the text circling his avatar is a reference to a James Joyce story. God knows how that factors in to all this.

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

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.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

Announcing the Summer 2022 Let’s Watches

That’s right, we’re doing this in style now.

I’ve changed my methodology for these a few times over the past couple seasons, but this time it’s very straightforward. After voting myself to break a tie (something I’ve not had to do in any previous community poll, things were much closer this season than they’ve been in any past season), I took a screenshot of the final vote tally at around 10PM last night (I checked again this morning just to make sure nothing had changed, don’t worry). I will be covering the top three shows, because honestly, I’ve been at a bit of a loss for what to cover this season. Putting it in the fans’ hands is a simple and practical solution.

Why don’t we make it a bit of an event? Here are the winners, starting from the third-place winner, and working up to the first.

Third Place: Call of the Night

Filling in the “exceedingly horny rom-com” gap that must have been left in all your hearts following the end of My Dress-Up Darling a season ago, Call of the Night is an interesting one. I read a very small bit of the manga for this, back when it was new. I liked it but failed to keep up with it (I am very bad at keeping up with manga), so I’m going into this just-shy-of-blind. Still, what I do know is promising. Take the Sentai blurb, for instance.

Wracked by insomnia and wanderlust, Kou Yamori is driven onto the moonlit streets every night in an aimless search for something he can’t seem to name. His nightly ritual is marked by purposeless introspection — until he meets Nazuna, who might just be a vampire! Kou’s new companion could offer him dark gifts and a vampire’s immortality. But there are conditions that must be met before Kou can sink his teeth into vampirism, and he’ll have to discover just how far he’s willing to go to satisfy his desires before he can heed the Call of the Night!

Sentai Filmworks

That’s really quite a lot to fit into your high premise. And it’s not like vampirism as a metaphor for coming of age—especially the less wholesome parts of that whole process—is anything new, but I do think this really has the potential to be something special. Whether or not it will actually deliver on that is another question, of course.

I do also want to point out the involvement of Tomoyuki Itamura in the director’s seat here. Just earlier this year, he wrapped up his work on The Case Study of Vanitas, a completely different horny vampire anime. That show is very good (if certainly not without a couple issues), so it gives me hope that Call of the Night will similarly be so. I suppose we’ll all find out together.

Coverage begins on July 8th. (If you’re reading this the day it goes up, that’s a week from today.)

Second Place: Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer

Ahahaha. Oh no.

This one getting as many votes as it did quite surprised me. If nothing else, you can take its presence here as evidence that I didn’t tamper with the vote in any way, because I actually wasn’t planning to watch it at all, at this point!

I love the original Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer manga. It’s one of my favorite action manga full stop, actually, and that’s mostly because of its deep characterization and solid thematic core. But it’s also because Satoshi Mizukami is a goddamn genius, and everything he draws is gorgeous. The only other anime he’s ever had a strong hand in, Planet With, did manage the incredibly tall ask of translating his distinct visual style to animation. Because of that, it managed to stand out in a year that was absolutely stuffed with great anime.

But that was in 2018, four years that might as well be four centuries ago, given all that’s happened since. Now, it is 2022, and the Biscuit Hammer adaption is being handed to a studio of little note (NAZ, they did Sabikui Bisco earlier this year alongside the similarly named Studio OZ), a director who is basically a total unknown (Nobuaki Nakanishi), and a series compositor best known for an utterly infamous flop (Yuuichirou Momose, of My Sister, My Writer notoriety). Combine that with the utterly hideous key visual sitting at the top of this entry, and a pair of trailers best described as “absolutely terrible” and “okay I guess”, and this one is going to be an active challenge to get through, barring some miracle. It would not be the first time that Mizukami has drawn blood from a stone, but no one should be expected to pull that sort of thing off twice.

I guess we’ll find out if it really is that bad or if all this doomsaying will look foolish twelve weeks from now soon. Coverage begins on the 9th.

First Place: Lycoris Recoil

What is Lycoris Recoil?

The interesting thing about an original series that’s yet to premiere is that it can, in our hearts and minds, be literally anything. Lycoris Recoil has had Key Visuals and trailers and all the usual accoutrements that come with being a TV anime in the modern day, but no one really seems to have a good grasp on its character. Will it be lighthearted? Dark? How big of a role does the cafe` we know is a central setting point of the story play? The chrome pistols and spider lilies in the above KV art certainly imply something sinister is going on, and “Lycoris Recoil” itself is a two-language pun combining the scientific name of the spider lily with just one inevitable consequence of firing a gun. But all of these things raise more questions than they answer, and we’re all going into this show with little to go off of but our own notions about what makes art interesting.

To me, this is fascinating. I can recall an upcoming original series capturing the public imagination in this way twice in recent times. The first time, we got Wonder Egg Priority, an anime I dearly love, but that’s an opinion that puts me firmly in small company. The second, we got Sonny Boy, which I also really like, and is also divisive (although much less so). Putting Lycoris Recoil in that company is probably attaching unrealistic expectations to it; if you want my earnest guess, I’m thinking this will be more of a piece with anime like Princess Principal or the underrated RELEASE THE SPYCE than either of the aforementioned. But honestly, who knows?

Well, we will pretty soon. Lycoris Recoil premieres tomorrow. Coverage will begin then, barring some unexpected circumstance.

See you then, anime fans. But, as a parting item of interest, here is the entire top half of the poll, if you’d like to see what else got a lot of votes. I am particularly surprised at how well Uncle From Another World did.

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

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.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

Vote on the Next Let’s Watch for the Summer 2022 Season!

Summer is upon us, anime fans, and with the changing of literal seasons comes also the changing of anime seasons.

I think most of you know the drill by now, but just in case you don’t, here’s how this works. You go to this survey, you check all the boxes for shows you’d be interested in me doing one of my weekly Let’s Watch columns on (there’s no limit. Hell, you could check all of them if you wanted to, as pointless as that would be), and that’s basically it.

I’ve changed the way the list is organized, somewhat. This time around, it simply uses Anichart.net’s order, and I’ve put in every eligible series under both its English-market title and the Romaji title. (In some cases, these are one in the same, those would be the shows with only one title listed.) I don’t use unofficial synonyms. So, for example; Call of the Night is in there both under that title and under the Romaji version of its JP market title, Yofukashi no Uta, but it’s not there under the little-used manga scanlation title Night Owl Song.

As with last season, you’ll note there are a few notable omissions. This is for one of several reasons:

  • It’s a sequel to something I haven’t seen, or I otherwise don’t have necessary pre-existing narrative context.
  • It’s in “streaming jail”, making covering it weekly impractical or impossible.
  • Or I’m planning to cover it anyway. (Although that doesn’t describe anything

I’m not sure how many, exactly, Let’s Watch columns I’ll be picking up this season. There have been some recent structural changes on MPA (I’m sure you’ve noticed, say, the One Piece Every Day project), but I will certainly pick up at least one community pick. This past season I ended up covering the tied-for-third-place Healer Girl as well as the outright winner Spy x Family, so don’t be afraid to punch in votes for obscure stuff even if you don’t think it’ll win. You never know.

I look forward to seeing your responses, anime fans!

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 Directory to browse by category.

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