Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
Another day, another episode of Sabikui Bisco that is certainly not the best thing airing right now but is pretty damn entertaining. That’s about what I signed up for with Bisco, so I’m pretty satisfied with it.
“Children’s Fortress” splits its time between two stories. Which is an expedient way to keep track of multiple groups of characters at once and also keep the pacing up, but it does make it a tad annoying to summarize. Let’s start with the “B-plot” first, since it’s shorter and simpler.
Pawoo–Sabikui Bisco‘s coolest character and also my future wife–has been pursuing Bisco and Milo since they left Imihama. We don’t get a particularly precise idea of how far off their trail she is so far, but it’s evidently far enough that they don’t interact at all during the course of this episode. Instead, the B-Plot kicks off when Pawoo’s bike pops its tires in the midst of an abandoned town. Evidently from a trap left by some bandits who have themselves long since vacated the area. While trying to sort out what to do about all this, she sees a kindly old couple being menaced by an overgrown mutant spider. This being a shonen anime, she of course casually kills it with her giant iron pole thing and finishes it with a kick. (What is that thing, anyway? No one ever calls it anything but a “pole.”)
You really have no idea how hard it is for me to not just caption every single picture of Pawoo with “SHE’S SO COOL!!!!” written exactly like that.
Grateful, the couple allow her to stay with them while she fixes her bike. They also take the time to explain that an eeeeeeeeevil mushroom keeper is the cause of a Rust outbreak that whittled the town’s population down to just the two of them. Whether or not this is true, we don’t learn here and may never directly learn, but there is reason to doubt the couple’s story.
There are many great things about Pawoo, but I would not say that her calm demeanor and even temper are among them.
Pawoo isn’t with these people for terribly long before she discovers that something is off. By “discovers something is off,” I mean she comes across a bunch of rotting corpses propped up like they’re watching TV in one of the couple’s rooms.
They drop the act pretty much immediately and go all blatantly evil knife-sharpening on her, also threatening to “turn her into a statue of a female oni.”
It’s all rather silly, and of course Pawoo escapes the entire mess unscathed (although I wouldn’t be surprised if the fucking zombie she encounters in the couple’s hideout breathing some kind of toxic fumes on her comes back in some way or another). She doesn’t even actually kill the couple herself. They plea for mercy, but before she can make any meaningful response, retreat back into their hideout, which promptly explodes. Which they seem to have done intentionally? This whole half of the episode is, frankly, kind of absurd. But I do like the idea that whenever Pawoo isn’t directly on-screen she’s off having some kind of bizarre Samurai Jack-ian adventure.
Then there’s the A-plot, which is a tad more involved. In last week’s post-credits teaser, we saw Bisco and Milo come upon a building / small city inhabited solely by children, two of whom were sniping at them from the rooftops. Bisco and Milo end up willingly letting themselves be captured by these kids. Why? Well, mostly because they think they might have food. There’s also perhaps the unspoken implication that even the antiheroic Bisco would prefer to avoid hurting kids if he can.
Mostly this serves as a vehicle for us to learn this town’s woes. All the kids have Rust and all the adults have left town to try to raise money to buy treatments for it. We’re not directly told how long they’ve been gone, but it seems to be a few years minimum, based on the other major threat the town faces; annual giant flying blowfish attacks.
Yes, you read that correctly. Sabikui Biscoreally loves its funky bio-engineered deadly wildlife. Here, they even have the audacity to appear out of season due to “unusual weather.” (We are helpfully told that this is normally a winter problem, and it’s currently summer in-show.) Unlike some of the other dangers our heroes have faced, which have been either cool or genuinely grotesque, the blowfish land more on the doofily cute side of the spectrum. But they are dangerous; one of them almost eats support character Kousuke, who spends most of the episode as Bisco’s “jailor.”
It also turns out that, surprise; the infection the kids have is not Rust, but some far more benign and easily treatable disease called shellskin. Milo treats them (and in the process, teaches one of the kids, Plum, enough about medicine that she can become a doctor herself.)
Plum also has a precocious crush, which adds her to the long list of women in this show that mistakenly think Milo is available.
But the facts are simple; their parents have been misled. And by who else but Imihama’s governor? I hadn’t considered this while actually watching the episode, but comparing the two, it makes me wonder if he–or someone working for him–wasn’t the mysterious “mushroom keeper” the couple from the B-Plot were referring to. The man seems to have a vested interest in making sure Imihama is the only habitable place around.
On the other hand; maybe not. Sabikui Bisco is good for what it is, but this is very much an episodic episode. The biggest change here being that Bisco exits town with a new weapon (a harpoon), and some directions pointing him toward an abandoned subway line. It does all feel a touch filler-y, which is a little strange given how short this series is planned to be. Perhaps they’re already banking on a second season, or maybe what’s gone on here will have more significance than I’ve given it credit for.
Still, it’s a minor complaint. Sabikui Bisco‘s goals seem to be fairly modest ones of entertainment and telling a story that’s base-level compelling. There’s nothing wrong with that at all, and it’s succeeded at it admirably so far. Will next week bring us more of the same or are things going to start getting a little more ambitious? There’s only one way to find out.
Until then, anime fans.
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.
I’ve been a bit sick over the past week. Not enough to impact my blogging, thankfully. I was originally going to have just three shows for you this week, but, what the heck, why don’t we start with a new face?
Seasonal Anime
Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure
If you write about a chosen medium, it’s generally good to know what your Geek Buttons are. A Geek Button is a thing–and it can really be anything, a series, a whole genre, a visual style, a specific actor, whatever–where the more “objective” part of your critical toolkit just fails to work, and you are reduced to a blubbering fangirl (or fanboy, or fanby, as the case may be). For me, magical girls in general, and especially Pretty Cure, are a Geek Button. I cannot pretend to be remotely reasonable about them. I love almost all of them like they’re my children and the few exceptions are girls who I just wish were in better shows. I will die on the hill that the magical girl warrior archetype is one of anime’s best and most important contributions to general popular culture.
So with that in mind, please say hello to the newest Pretty Cure series. And indeed, the newest Pretty Cure; Yui Nagomi, AKA Cure Precious (Hana Hishikawa in what is, astoundingly, her first named character role in an anime.)
She is adorable. Dare I say precious?
The first episode of a given Precure series has a lot of beats to hit; introducing the protagonist, introducing her mentor / helper characters, if any, establishing the broad strokes of the plot for the season, nailing down the basic thematic overtone it’s going for, and of course, introducing the bad guys and their particular version of the monsters of the week. It’s a lot of stops to have to hit in a 22-minute episode, but DePaPre swings it admirably. The general direction in this first episode is really just fantastic, and notably, it’s helmed by animation director Akira Inagami, who had a role as a character designer all the way back on the original Futari wa Pretty Cure. (A hearty shout out to my good friend Pike, curator of Dual Aurora Wave, for that information. I’d have never known!)
The whole thing is bouncy and joyous and just alive in a way that really defines the best kids’ anime. The episode is great looking from start to finish, though obviously the real Peak TV moment is Cure Precious’ first henshin sequence.
Also scattered throughout are the traditional “Precure Leap,” a fun nod to an episode of Futari wa, and some truly ludicrous attack names (a 500 Kilocalorie punch, huh?)
I’m also fond of Yui’s “mentor” character here, the lavender haired gnc king Rosemary. He’s delightfully camp in a way that doesn’t feel overbearing or like it’s making fun of anyone.
Her fairy is adorable too, of course.
And I must make a nod toward Gentle (or “Gentlu” as Crunchyroll’s official subs hilariously render her name), who both puts in a supremely cool showing as the anime’s starter villain and is also the smart pick for Character Most Likely To Undergo A Face Turn And Possibly Become a Precure Herself. It wouldn’t be the first time the series has done that. (My favorite example being from Fresh. Which, fun fact; was the first Precure series that Hana Hishikawa watched as a young child in nursery school, going off an interview she gave a few weeks ago.)
Gentle wouldn’t even be the first villain with this specific hair color to eventually become a Precure. Will history repeat itself? Time alone will tell.
The only “bad thing”, really, about DePaPre, is that it won’t appear in this column much. I’ll try to make exceptions for particularly great episodes but given that I watch it with friends on its premiere night, much like Tropical Rouge Precure before it, it can be difficult to find the time, given that these Reports go up on Sunday.
Still, I’ll absolutely be watching every single week. And if my opinion is worth anything to you, I think you should be too.
CUE!
I don’t really know what to think about CUE! Any time I feel like I should just write it off and stop following it entirely, it does this.
“This,” for reference, is another subtly great episode about the inside of the voice acting profession. It doesn’t start out that way; the first third or so of this episode is actually mostly about Haruna’s pet turtle, about whom she says increasingly ridiculous things. (To wit; it’s not a turtle because he has a name, she asks him for advice, and he looks like “an old man” and “a philosopher. It’s all pretty funny.)
But the episode gets serious at around its 1/3rd mark, honing in on the art of injecting emotion into even very short exchanges of words. Haruna’s role, remember, is just “additional voices.” So in her first scene in Bloom Ball, which the girls record here, she only swaps a single sentence with Maika’s character, who only replies with one of her own. And we hear those two sentences some four or five times over the episode’s duration.
I’ve said this before, but running the same scene back-to-back, for any reason, is challenging. You risk boring your audience, and when the scene in question is this short you risk it even more. But, somehow, CUE! pulls it off again.
The mechanics are very simple; the girls learn a little bit about how voice acting works. They record their lines, Haruna and Maika’s get held because the author (present at the recording) remembers that the bit character Haruna is playing comes up again way later in the story. Once again, this is supposed to sell Haruna as someone with an immense amount of untapped voice acting talent. It doesn’t work quite as well as the showstopper she drops in episode 2, but it’s still pretty good, and it proves that when CUE! is on, it’s on.
For something that should be super dry, it manages to stay quite interesting, employing its favorite trick, jumping in and out of the world of the show-within-a-show. Here, since all present are actually recording, things are further embellished by the show being mid-production. No full-color cuts here; it’s all monochrome and pre-correction. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate the nightmare that making a finished cut that looks convincingly unfinished must be.)
Flummoxing as it sometimes is, if CUE! keeps making episodes like this I will continue to watch them. Just, please, I’m begging you, either focus on the idol girls less or make them more interesting.
Princess Connect! Re:Dive
One of the reasons I declined to give Princess Connect! Re:Dive its own dedicated column is that I know my limits. A picture truly can be worth a thousand words, and a gif from a show like this can be worth a short novel. What am I supposed to say about this?
Okay, fine. If you wanted to, if you were some kind of joyless miser, you could be mad that this episode is all set up and no resolution. Frankly I think that’s an absurd criticism, and the idea that everything must be resolved within the space of a single episode just because this show started out as a “slice of life series” is so far removed from how I experience art that I have a difficult time even comprehending it. Nonetheless it is what some people think, and I’ll give those people their moment of acknowledgement here.
For the rest of us; holy shit.
Princess Connect season 2’s fourth episode is the sort of absurd instant-classic that demands rewinds, screencapping, and a visit to Sakugabooru. And it’s the fourth episode of a twelve-episode season. That’s nuts. That’s the kind of comically overconfident flex that usually presages some great disaster. But why would that be the case here? CygamesPictures aren’t working on anything else this year. It’s amazing what a well-equipped studio can do when actually giving its workers proper time to do so.
The actual plot here is cartwheeling fantasy screwiness that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the many, many books with dragons and swords on the cover that I read in middle school. That sounds like an insult, but this sort of high-stakes epic-in-the-old-sense-of-the-word plot is what’s missing from a lot of modern fantasy anime. It’s spectacle; even down to details like Karyl still playing both sides, the guild of animal girls we meet here, and the giant golem fight that caps the episode.
I feel legitimately bad for the other fantasy anime airing right now. It’s not like In The Land of Leadale or Reincarnated as a Fantasy Knockout don’t have their merits, but they aren’t this. The only competition Priconne really has in this regard is Demon Slayer, but while that show definitely looks great, it’s always had issues with making its flashy animation feel like it entirely fit with the rest of the world. Priconne never even sniffs that problem; the compositing is as excellent here as anything else. Even moments where characters are literally just standing around look incredible.
The only real issue is that Priconne’s plot is so mile-a-minute I could see it getting hard to keep up. (I’m already a bit lost myself. Having not played the game probably doesn’t help.) But even so; at least for me, that feeling actually adds to the exhilaration of watching this thing in motion. The Proper Noun Machine Gun has rarely been put to such good use.
Tokyo 24th Ward
Unfortunately we must end this section of the week’s writeup on something of a sour note.
If I had known I was going to be covering Tokyo 24th Ward this frequently, I’d have just made it another weekly column. Maybe that would’ve been a bad idea, though, given how the show’s shortcomings are generally more compelling to me than its strengths, which I increasingly think are actually rather modest.
Fundamentally, the problem is this; if your anime (or movie or book or album or whatever) invokes political themes, you are inviting all comers to scrutinize it from their own political point of view. Everyone on Earth has such a point of view, whether or not they’re cognizant of it. In of itself, that’s fine, but if your work’s political themes are, say, shallow and inadequate, it raises a problem. Are Tokyo 24th‘s shallow and inadequate? I don’t really know. The signals are, shall we say, mixed.
Getting a big head over this kind of thing is nothing new to mainstream TV anime. Turn of the decade classic Code Geass, for example, managed to be good largely by trading away any actual meaningful political commentary for sheer camp value. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to nail more specific and well-thought-out political messages. Akudama Drive did it only two years ago. (Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Akudama Drive myself, at least not yet, but I trust Inkie’s judgment on the series utterly.) It’s also possible–although both less rare and not as impactful–to make broader statements without rendering them entirely meaningless. Something as goofy as Rumble Garanndoll managed that much just last season.
The gist of the plot forming over Tokyo 24th‘s last two episodes has been this; the graffiti artist / hacker Kunai (Souma Saitou, who has been in many support roles like this) is going to blow up a cruise ship full of the ultra-wealthy.
Normally I’d here provide his motivations, and just from what little we’ve learned about him–his upbringing in the ridiculously named Shantytown ghetto in the poorest part of the Ward, his grandmother’s illness, the fact that Ran has eclipsed him artistically–one could come up with a good half dozen motivations for why this poor man might feel motivated to extreme action.
Kunai’s actual motives are different, and much more personal. He’s been tricked into selling an app he developed by the owner of an enormous corporate megalopoly, a fellow named Taki. Taki rewires the program to turn it into that mysterious “Drug D” we’ve been hearing so much about over the past couple of episodes. Kunai’s resentment, then, is borne not from his situation but from something very specific. He feels as though he’s been used. And he’s right about that! He has been used. Ran correctly points out, when the two meet at the episode’s climax, that Kunai is not the “criminal” he self-laceratingly claims to be. He’s a victim of circumstance. On one level, Tokyo 24th humanizing an actual terrorist to this degree is admirable. On another, it seems like an easy out to give Kunai a single grudge motive rather than anything more circumstantial and messy. Plus, there is what actually happens to Kunai.
At the episode’s end, Kouki–that’s Cop Boy, if you’ve forgotten–bypasses the advice of his friends and orders Kunai shot dead by a police sniper. Kunai bleeds out in Ran’s arms, begging his friend to continue to be the one thing he couldn’t: an artist.
It is difficult to know how to take this.
Is it a shocking display–and condemnation–of police brutality? Does the show think he’s in the right to have done that? (I don’t want to think so, but I’ve gone broke overestimating anime before.) Or is this another thing where Shuuta’s enlightened centrist fence-sitting is going to somehow turn out to be the solution? Tokyo 24th has given me very little reason to believe the former might be what it’s going for, but I suppose it’s not impossible. A number of details about Tokyo 24th‘s worldbuilding lead me to believe that won’t be the case (it’s insane that an anime that uses so much graffiti aesthetic has perhaps two Black characters and zero major ones), but I’ve been wrong before. Honestly in this specific situation I’d be happy to be. But for the record, I’m not alone here. Some critics have been far harsherthan me. And I’m split between feeling like I’m giving the anime way too much slack and coming down on it way too hard.
It’s unfair, in a way. An anime that tries to be a Statement opens itself up to all kinds of nitpicking from audiences both domestic and abroad that other anime could easily dismiss out of hand. Should I not be giving it some points for even trying? Maybe, but “some points” might add up to a 3 or 4 out of 10 depending on how badly it fucks up the landing, and I’m not at all confident it won’t. Wanting to be a critique of the state of the world isn’t the same as actually being one. All of Tokyo 24th‘s effort will be meaningless if it cannot find some way to intelligently apply it.
We will see Tokyo 24th here again, maybe as soon as next week. For good or for ill I cannot yet say.
Elsewhere on MPA
Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 4 – “Ride the Crab” – For an episode that features absolutely zero Pawoo, this was still quite a good 30 minutes of Sabikui Bisco. There must be a solid Milo / Bisco shipping community out there, right?
That’s most of what I’ve got for you this week, anime fans. But before I go, a small recommendation! A new manga was picked up by Jump recently, and is available officially in English on the MangaPlus website. It’s called Magilumiere Co. Ltd., a magical girl-action-office comedy whatsit that poses the question; “what if being a magical girl was, you know, a full-on career? And what if an ordinary college grad seeking to enter the workforce suddenly found herself basically dropped into a small Magical Girl Company’s employ?” That’s kind of a long question, admittedly, but Magilumiere does have answers.
It’s to soon into the manga’s run for me to have any terribly detailed opinions on it, but I like it so far, and “magical girl + other stuff” is always a fun combination. Give it a read if you’re so inclined.
See you tomorrow for more Sabikui Bisco, friends!
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!
You can’t be mad at something for being what it is, right? That’s been my philosophy since I started casually writing about anime on Anilist several years ago. I think it’s largely a good one, but it can be difficult to apply when something is working in a space that you’re only a bit familiar with. My Dress-Up Darling is a romantic comedy, and I’m versed enough in those to know what I like and don’t like about them. Less familiar to me is the ecchi side of the series. It’s not like the genre is alien to me–I was a hormonal teenager once, too–but it does put you in a truly weird headspace when you ask yourself what separates a good ecchi anime from a bad one. Is it a certain tone? A general sense of taste? A lack of taste? Maybe it’s better for these things to be totally shameless? I don’t know; I am many things, but I am not a connoisseur of Boob Anime. What I have discovered over the course of watching My Dress-Up Darling is that one thing I do require is for the show’s ecchi and non-ecchi parts to feel like they fit together, and if Dress-Up Darling has a single problem, it’s that they really don’t.
Before I go into detail and risk seeming like a total shrew, let me be clear; I don’t have a conceptual problem with Dress-Up Darling‘s premise. “Guy who makes cosplay outfits and girl who is a cosplayer” is a perfectly fine and cute idea for a fictional couple. I even completely get why one would want to extend this premise into the ecchi genre; it’s a natural fit for it. But Dress-Up Darling is still also a romcom. Gojo is supposed to be our likable everyman lead, and Marin, by all accounts, is way too enthused with cosplay as a craft to really care about how other people might react to her outfits. These are pretty ordinary teenagers, not H-manga characters. What you end up with is a series that occasionally feels like it’s trying to shoehorn fanservice into a show where it doesn’t belong, or, conversely, an ecchi series that is misguidedly trying to be romantic. If it were that simple, it’d probably be easier to dismiss Dress-Up Darling out of hand. Instead, it is somewhat more complicated. I didn’t have a problem with episode 2, because it dedicates to the bit. That episode is almost entirely fanservice. Here, things are more complicated, because it’s trying to do two things at once.
This week’s episode–the ludicrously-titled “It’s Probably Because This Is the Best Boob Bag Here”–centers around the show’s core strength, the simple, infectious joy of two people who share a passion for something geeking out over it. In theory, this should be one of Dress-Up Darling‘s best episodes. And there is a lot to like here! Marin comes up with a hilariously uncreative cosplay alias (Marine. That extra E is really gonna throw ’em off, girl.), and she and Gojo attend their first cosplay event. There, she poses for pics and mingles with other attendees.
In one of the few moments where the episode’s generally horny atmosphere makes sense, Marin is the one who sizes up the other cosplayers while Gojo just stands there feeling generally out of place.
Again. Bi icon.
The “infectious joy” side of things is pretty simple here. And when Marin bounds toward Gojo and the background music swells and the whole thing is just so melodramatic, it makes sense. He’s done something genuinely nice for someone, and it happens to be the person he’s crushing on. You get why he’s happy, and if the episode were fixed more on that emotion, I’d probably like it more.
But Dress-Up Darling is what it is. So, throughout this entire part of the episode–which takes up a good 2/3rds of its runtime–there are constant horny gags, mostly revolving around Marin’s figure. She sweats a lot because the dress’s fabric is heavy. She’s wearing two bras to emphasize her bust because the character she’s cosplaying has bigger boobs than she does. She nearly passes out from the heat and Gojo ends up having to cool her down on a random indoor stairwell, and as he wipes down her back with a cold cloth, she starts moaning in a comedically suggestive fashion. Marin Sexy: Do You Get It?
At least we get some Good Faces out of it.
It’s all just a bit much, isn’t it? The sweat and the jiggling and the leering camera and all? Part of me feels bad for even criticizing this. Dress-Up Darling is lightyears away from the worst offender in this genre, and it does not even speak the same language as some of those manga and anime do. On top of that, Dress-Up Darling‘s original mangaka is a woman, so I should at least be cutting her a little slack, right? Well to tell you the truth I think I have been. Maybe a little too much.
I know how even saying this sounds, but I didn’t hate this episode, and I really liked some parts of it. Perhaps I only feel this way because I’ve been talking about the show a lot today, including with some friends who like it far less than I do, but this was the first time where My Dress-Up Darling‘s flaws prevented me from enjoying the show as much as I want to, and that just sucks. I really hope this is as far into the H Valley as the show ever goes. This doesn’t sink the show for me, and I doubt other people who were enjoying it will be dissuaded for much the same reason, but I definitely didn’t love the episode.
To not make this article an entirely bum note, there were, as mentioned, parts of the episode that I really enjoyed. Marin posing for pics is really cute in a genuine and enjoyable way, and on the topic of things that are horny but don’t bother me, there’s this lady, who seems even more into Marin than Gojo is in the minute or so of screentime she gets.
There’s also the very genuine moment of emotional connection that Marin and Gojo share on the train ride home. Sleep-deprived as hell, Gojo says she looked beautiful, and we get Marin blushing like a dummy. It feels sincerely romantic in a way that most of the rest of the episode is clearly reaching for but just doesn’t get ahold of. I can only speak for myself, but I’d love to see more of that going forward, and less of the egregious leering.
And speaking of egregious, I’m putting this episode’s Egregious Horny Score at a solid 4/5. There’s probably less of it overall than episode 2, but it’s more interwoven into the actual, you know, story, which really pushes up the “egregious” part. Egregious is a funny word, don’t you think? (There was no Nowa this week, sadly. So, no bonus Nowa screencap. Those are also egregious, but in a good way.)
Now, if you’ll all excuse me, anime fans, I have a big event to go prep for. See you next week.
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!
Folks, I’m gonna level with you. It’s 10am local, and I, your illustrious blog-owner / writer, have not slept. This happens to me sometimes. I have insomnia. Pretty bad insomnia! I could just have slept in today and decided to cover Sabikui Bisco later tonight or possibly tomorrow. But let me ask you this; do people who work real jobs get to decide to just not go in for their morning shift because they’re tired? No, they do not. They probably should! But they don’t. So why should I get that luxury? I say fuck it. I’m here to deliver to you, loyal readers, however many paragraphs of grade-A Insightful Anime Criticism (TM, TM, TM), and by god, I am going to get it to you even if I have to shotgun six Red Bulls to get there.
So here’s where I’m at, alright? I have the episode queued up on my laptop (not CUE!’d up, I dropped coverage of that show). I have my breakfast; a delicious slice of Edwards’ Chocolate Creme pie ($2.50 for 2 pieces at the local dollar store) and what I will refer to only as a Caffeine Drink. As I type this, I have not yet started watching the episode. Why draw it out any further? I’m Jack Kerouackin’ it. You do not get the polished Jane The Anime Critic today, you get the rambly one. Let’s rock ‘n roll.
An observation right off the bat; I have not appreciated this OP enough. The song kicks ass. It makes me want to traverse the Rust-infested desert searching for a wanted man. Or maybe lost love. Or maybe I just really wish I was Pawoo. God, Pawoo is great.
You may recall last week’s post-credits scene ended on a cliffhanger. Our episode does not open addressing this–which is a thing I kinda hate?–but we get Milo and Bisco bickering like a married couple to make up for it, so it’s fine.
Some important business is established here. Point 1. Pawoo has only three months to live. Given that she’s the most attractive, coolest, most dashing, and just generally best character in the show, and is in fact absent from this episode, this is tragic. Point 2. Bisco’s mentor, Jabi, has only about one month to live. This is also pretty awful. Point 3. There is no way to get to where Milo and Bisco need to be in time without attracting a huge amount of attention the twosome can’t afford to attract.
Except of course, because this is an adventure anime. There is a plan. (There’s always a plan.) Bisco knows of an underground mine complex whose railcarts run the length of the area they need to traverse. This complex is part of the kickassedly-named Bonecoal Mountains. Which of course, because this is an adventure anime, is an absurdly dangerous route that will present them with all kinds of challenges and tests of both physical and intellectual might. (One of the dangers namechecked here? “Iron mice” which can skeletonize a man in seconds. Piranhas, watch your backs!) After overcoming them, of course, they will grow both individually as people and closer together as friends. All of this is fine, though. Bisco has an ace up his sleeve.
The ace is a giant crab.
Yes, the pair link back up with Actagawa here. Actagawa, a giant “steelcrab,” has a shell tough as iron and can amble over any terrain with ease. He is, as Bisco explains, the ideal mount for their journey. (He may be a bit biased, given that he calls the giant friendly crab his “brother.”) Giant crabs objectively improve any work of art in which they appear, so I have to say I am quite satisfied with the ratio of giant crabs to things that aren’t giant crabs in Sabikui Bisco so far.
But much like a horse or, really, any tamable animal, Actagawa has to be eased into putting up with Milo. Progress is…slow, over the course of this episode. And eventually one of Milo’s attempts to ride the crab (a phrase that really sounds like a euphemism but somehow isn’t), literally tosses him headlong into meeting up with another character we’ve seen before.
Yes, Chiroru unexpectedly returns here. She’s chased off after trying to steal Actagawa, but it’s not long before our heroes meet her again at a small rural rest station. There, things promptly get weird.
The two approach her from behind as she appears to be sitting idly by a fire. Initially it seems like she’s simply giving them the cold shoulder, but a well-executed sudden jumpscare proves that, no, she’s got some kind of horrible infection in her mouth. It’s pretty goddamn nasty!
Worse, Milo somehow deduces that it’s something in her stomach. That “something?” A parasitic creature called a balloonworm that inflates and kills from the inside out; used as a tool of control by particularly bad dudes who force those they make use of to eat the creatures’ eggs and then keep them in line by drip-feeding them a drug that prevents the eggs from hatching. It’s a favored tactic of Imihama’s governor, Chiroru’s former employer. Did I mention that Milo is able to get this thing out of her by locking lips with her and pulling it out with his mouth? I reiterate; goddamn nasty.
Chiroru is grateful to Milo in her own way. But, assuming ulterior motives, tries to, ahem, pay with her body.
I think her main mistake here is assuming Milo is straight.
This starts off Bisco on another annoying, sexist spiel. The only thing that prevents that from being as much of a black mark on this episode as on last week’s is that Chiroru can hit back about as good as she gets. (Milo, bless him, prevents a fight from breaking out. And buried within that exchange, there’s actually a telling little character moment where Chiroru seems genuinely surprised Milo doesn’t expect to be able to sleep with her for doing her a favor.) Everyone hits the hay, and Chiroru–a travelling merchant when she’s not working as a bounty hunter, apparently–tosses out a few old wares she can’t reasonably sell, including a can of “liquid bonecoal.” (Gas by another name or some sort of futuristic fossil fuel? You decide!)
This turns out to be a mistake.
Recall that cliffhanger I mentioned earlier. The unnamed area our heroes stopped at here and the War Memorial from last week’s post-credits scene turn out to be the same place. And it’s here, at about the episode’s 2/3rd’s mark, that the story loops back around to where it left off last week. Not time wasted! I enjoyed the whole ride; but it’s good to know what the heck was going on.
So how does this all end? Well, the “living temple” decked out with cannons and whatnot is, as we learn, actually a colossal, fuel-eating shrimp. Milo is able to use his newfound bond with Actagawa to have the crab land a fatal blow on the shrimp’s noggin, which Bisco finalizes by splitting it open with an arrow. All’s well that ends well…
Except that a stray shot from one of the shrimp’s mounted cannons ignites the mine entrance they were hoping to use and just happened to be near. Bisco’s plan, it seems, did not account for that. The two, seeing no other immediate option, settle down for the night. They awake to find Chiroru’s run off again (and taken a good chunk of their money with her, although she’s left a bunch of food and such in return.)
Our postscript here sees Bisco and Milo wandering a salty-looking desert some days or weeks later, hard up on food. Bisco spots a watermelon–yes, a watermelon. Just lying on the ground–and things quickly escalate into a standoff.
But that’s something we’ll see play out next week, what about this episode?
Honestly, perhaps it’s just the lack of sleep, but I’m dry on sweeping, grandiose statements for this’n. It’s a good episode and I like that Milo can ride Actagawa now. It was cute to see them bond and the critter has a surprising amount of personality given that he’s a huge crustacean animated via a slightly stiff CGI rig. Milo and Bisco’s bickery bromance continues to be incredibly entertaining, and I was thrilled to see Chiroru again in a slightly more prominent role this episode. (Less thrilled to see her hock up a giant worm. Seriously, that shit was disgusting.)
So, anime fans, I leave you with those as my thoughts for this week. Those and one more; yes, if you’re wondering, the pie I mentioned in the opening paragraph was delicious. Thank you as always to my supporters, who allow me to indulge in such luxuries as occasional $2 pie.
Until next time.
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.
Hello, friends! I’ve tried to keep busy this week, but some of that is with projects you all won’t see the results of for some time yet, including another commission series I’m watching. I try to make the Frontline Reports a little beefier in weeks like that to compensate, so I hope you’ll enjoy the three writeups I’ve prepared for y’all this week. (Plus, of course, the other articles linked to elsewhere down below.) We’ve got a really good episode, a somewhat troubling episode, and a sendoff to one of my favorite anime of the last twelve months. Enjoy!
Princess Connect Re:Dive – Season 2
It feels odd to say this, but there’s more going on in Princess Connect: ReDive than almost any other series airing this season. I don’t just mean sheer density of events-per-episode, although there’s that too (it might be the show’s only flaw, if you’re inclined to view it as one.)
To wit: this past week, the Gourmet Guild was roped into helping the elf Aoi (voice acting legend Kana Hanazawa), who you may remember from last season, fit in at the school she’s transferred to.
She wants to get along with her illustrious senpai, the soft-spoken and serious Yuni (Konomi Kohara. Notably for this blog, she was the title role in Pompo: The Cinephile). Plus, by implication, Yuni’s own two friends, Chieru (Ayane Sakura, who has been in a ton of things. Last season she was Julia in Mieruko-chan) and Chloe (Atsumi Tanezaki, probably best known to readers of this blog as the titular lead from Vivy – Flourite Eye’s Song. She makes the otherwise minor character stand out by performing her with a notably deep voice. The performance is just awesome all around, really. I’m not familiar enough with Tanezaki’s work to know if she just decided to go really hard on this character for some reason or if her voice just actually sounds like that. In the latter case, you can catch me swooning over in the corner.)
In an anime that was merely a fantasy adventure / comedy series, you might correctly predict that this eventually involves investigating a haunted forest which turns out to have a super haunted graveyard in it. Less expected are the bizarre turns this episode takes for the surreal; touches like skeletons rising from the grave glitching the very video around them. The wight of a powerful king somehow transforms the surrounding landscape into an echo of his own burning kingdom. It’s Pecorine who takes him out, with a soft hug and some kind words rather than her sword.
When this whole haunted graveyard deal is over, we cut to some time later. Yuni’s been doing research, and the nation marked on the gravestones in the forest doesn’t exist and never has. She’s content to have briefly grasped that something’s going on, but for us, the mystery remains. Some aspects of Princess Connect‘s first season implied the cast (or at least Yuuki and maybe Pecorine) might be faced with the classic stuck-in-a-game isekai scenario and not know it. If that’s true, this is the hardest the series has leaned on it in the second season so far. Questioned are raised, and the answers seem still far off.
That intriguing idea alone would ensure Princess Connect Re:Dive a recurring spot in this column. But I should at least mention the show’s absolutely dynamite production, too. This isn’t Sakugablog and I am not kVIN, so I couldn’t begin to tell you the specific ins and outs of how the show manages to consistently look this good, but I know that it does. Maybe it’s Chief Director Takaomi Kanasaki (Director of PrinConne’s first season, and also quite a lot of stuff for its genre-fellow, Konosuba) and his…what’s the word here? Assistant? The ‘regular’ director, Yasuo Iwamoto (an industry lifer with credits, many as a storyboarder or episode director, going all the way back to 1988 space opera classic The Legend of The Galactic Heroes). Maybe it’s just that CygamesPictures only takes on a reasonable amount of projects at once. (That amount appears to be roughly “one.” If every anime looked this damn good, I’d be happy getting far fewer per year.)
Regardless, the show has yet to have a weak-looking episode. The lack of a huge combat setpiece in this episode shouldn’t detract from the great character acting we get. There’s a bunch! Look at how expressive those faces are! That’s quality.
Suffice it to say, we will see Princess Connect around these parts again.
Tokyo 24th Ward
I wasn’t going to do even a short writeup about this episode, but then a plot developed where the titular ward’s mayor is nakedly employing media manipulation to turn the ward’s populace against the local shantytown that’s literally called Shantytown so people will file complaints. Complaints he will use as pretext to redevelop it into a casino. (Yes, the whole town apparently. I don’t know, maybe it’s a really big casino.)
What a shady place. There are women wielding pipes!
Part of this campaign also involves disseminating a highly addictive and dangerous drug simply called “D” into the streets. This drug is vaped, because of course it is. Also in on this whole racket are SARG, who punish use of the drug that their boss is (presumably unknown to them) supplying. This becomes an inflection point in Shuuta’s increasing uneasiness with Kouki’s authoritarian leanings, but the issue isn’t explored in detail here.
There are ups and downs here. On the one hand, the episode correctly points out that places like Shantytown arise from government disinterest or even active malice, and that bringing them under a tighter grip (especially to “redevelop” them) is no answer. By the same token, the series’ repeated use of “third choices” as a motif seems to present a dichotomy between Kouki’s borderline fascist point of view and Ran’s free-spirited art anarchy.
There is a real distinction there, but the narrative continues to center on Shuuta, who by all evidence, seems to think the solution to most problems is to just talk things out.
I hate raking an anime over the coals for not even bad politics but possibly iffy politics, but Tokyo 24th has Gone There, so I feel as though I have no real choice but to take it as seriously as it clearly wants to be taken on this subject. Next episode involves one of Ran’s friends plotting a terrorist attack, so who knows where this is going. I probably say this too often, but, well, time will tell.
Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure
In a way, I feel bad that I haven’t written about Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure more. I’ve already shared why the series means so much to me personally in myend-of-year writeup from the tail end of December, so I won’t repeat myself here. But even at as much a remove I can muster from my own experiences, TroPre was something special. And to again return to my own feelings, that finale had me crying like a baby. I was not the only one.
“I can feel it in the air. The summer’s out of reach.“
TroPre will comfortably settle into its place in fandom memory. Pretty Cure fans don’t let favorites die, and it’s not controversial to say TroPre earns its stripes as one of the strongest entries in the franchise. In a sense, the endless summer that the final episode promises will be as real in our own memories as it is on the shores of Aozora City. The closing scenes are things of simple and pure beauty; Manatsu (Ai Farouz in the defining role of her young but already illustrious career) and Laura (brought to brilliant life by Rina Hidaka) meeting again for the first time, the sheer strength of their bond overloading and destroying the “memory machine” that lurked in the background as the show’s only unresolved plot thread.
The flood of memory is literal; bubbles containing the girls’ precious moments with each other pour out of the Aqua Pot. And just like that, Tropical-Rouge! Pretty Cure makes a graceful, joyous exit, off the silver screen and into our hearts forever.
Keep tropica-shining, girls.
Elsewhere on MPA
Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 4 – “Are These Your Girlfriend’s” – Some anime start out strong, others take a while to find their footing. If episode four of My Dress-Up Darling is any indication, it’s in the latter camp. This episode humanizes the lead, Gojo, to a degree we haven’t really seen before. As a direct consequence, the show comes alive in a way it never previously has. I have thought some prior episodes of this anime were solid or even good, this is the first I’d say was outright great.
Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 3 – “Tag Team” – Back again, Sabikui Bisco takes a bit of a downturn this week. I still liked the episode overall but the show’s rough handling of Pawoo–its only major female character so far–feels like a possible bad sign. My hope is that this is a fluke, not a pattern.
But, of course, we’ll learn together tomorrow. See you then for more Sabikui Bisco, anime fans. Stay safe out there, if you’re in the continental US like me! The weather’s been rough.
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!
“It’s because you want to make someone happy that you can keep going, even when it’s hard.”
Gojo has a problem. Well, it’s more like he has several problems. Near the start of “Are These Your Girlfriend’s?”, My Dress-Up Darling‘s fourth episode, Gojo’s grandfather takes a nasty fall. It’s not bad enough that he needs to spend weeks recovering in the hospital, but his adult children temporarily take him in to care for him while he heals up. This puts Gojo, already short on time to finish Marin’s costume, in a bind. Oh, and midterms are coming up. Someone visiting from France wants to visit his and his grandfather’s doll shop on super short notice. It’s all just quite a lot.
This is probably the most relatable Gojo has ever been, at least to me. Yeah buddy, I let stresses pile up on top of each other until I feel like I’m physically going to sink into the floor, too. I feel you.
These things stack on top of each other until Gojo is little more than a ball of anxiety. He works himself to the bone on all of this; the outfit, taking care of his grandfather, the exams, etc. Frankly he overworks himself, to the point where I wondered if Dress-Up Darling‘s sharp turn into the dramatic signaled some sort of permanent tonal shift for the anime.
It doesn’t, which is perhaps for the best. Gojo is able to pull through by remembering some words of wisdom his grandfather once offered about why he’s able to paint Hina Dolls every day. By the episode’s final act, Marin’s outfit is done.
The real irony is that he needn’t have rushed. The entire “deadline” has stemmed from a misunderstanding; Marin simply mentioned a cosplay event that was happening, not one she intended to participate in. But, despite the fact that the two swap phone numbers in this episode, Gojo never thinks to ask for clarity. He works himself ragged for, basically, no reason!
That might sound like a criticism of the episode, but it isn’t. It’s very easy to get wrapped up in things you think you have to do in this manner, especially for a teenager whose brain is probably boiling over with feelings he doesn’t fully understand at this point. So yes, when he collapses on his floor crying that he’s a failure because he can’t seem to get all this shit done on time? That’s the dash of realism something like My Dress-Up Darling needs to feel like it has real emotional stakes. The poor guy is pitiable, here. He’s arguably acting pretty stupidly, too, but he never feels like he’s doing something incomprehensible. It makes a perfect, sad sort of sense.
All of this, to Gojo, becomes worth it. Because in spite of the misunderstanding, Marin is genuinely very happy to have the outfit finished, and her happiness informs his. And hey, for what it’s worth, she does look pretty good in it.
-Listens to The Cure Once- Two weeks later:
This is probably the most genuine connection they’ve yet had in the series, and I think this is the first time I’ve really bought them as having romantic chemistry as opposed to a simple friendship based on some shared interests. She’s angry at herself for the misunderstanding, a little mad at him for overworking himself so hard, but also truly, genuinely happy that she has this wonderful gift that Gojo’s made for her, now. There’s a real potpourri of emotion going on in just this single sequence and it’s to both the original mangaka’s credit (Shinichi Fukuda) and to Hina Sukuda’s performance that it all comes across so well.
All this is also the first time that My Dress-Up Darling‘s slowball pace has entirely made sense. Giving this whole episode its own…well, episode, makes it feel complete in a way it probably wouldn’t if it were splitting time with, say, another 15 minutes full of Marin in a bikini.
In the end, the payoff is Marin dressed in her Shizuku outfit and the two of them–a near-ecstatic Marin and a deeply exhausted but still enthused Gojo–geeking out about how great she looks. That’s a fun end to what is certainly Dress-Up Darling‘s most involved, and frankly, best episode so far. I would like the series to eventually dive into the roots of Gojo’s workaholic and perfectionist tendencies. Whether or not it ever will is another question, but there’s only one way to find out.
Until next week, anime fans.
Bonus Nowa Screencap:
Egregious Horny Score: This one’s a solid 1/5. It’s not like there’s no fanservice here, but it’s pretty tame compared to other episodes and it’s entirely restricted to the last couple minutes when the big emotional beats are firmly over.
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.
If you’re looking for the ingredients of a classic adventure story, they are there in Sabikui Bisco. That’s more evident in the third and most recent episode (“Tag Team”) than it has been. This is probably the weakest episode of the series so far, but it’s good enough that the very term “weakest” feels a bit too harsh. There’s a lot of promise, here, but also some notable room for improvement.
So Bisco fails to take the hat trick. Still, it’s a solid episode. We’re introduced to a couple key points here. The main one is that the mushrooms that we’ve so far been led to believe spread the Rusting sickness actually feed off of it and can thus cure it. This has interesting implications for Bisco’s wider world. Almost everyone thinks the mushrooms cause Rust. The episode opens with a loudspeaker announcement warning the residents of Imihama City to avoid inhaling spores, and elsewhere another character calls the fact that mushrooms create Rust “common sense.”
This is framed as a simple misunderstanding; people assume that mushrooms cause Rust because they grow where it’s found. But I would not be surprised if it later turned out that someone was lying about something for some ulterior motive. It would slot in well with Sabikui Bisco‘s more ambitious storytelling aims.
About the less ambitious ones, though. As foreshadowed at the end of last week’s episode, Bisco and Pawoo* get into it here, and while their actual fight is pretty good, this is where some cracks start showing.
Sabikui Bisco is, at the end of the day, a shonen series. And while it’s not universal, that does tend to imply certain things. One of them is what I will call a, I don’t know, casual sexism tax? Bisco remarks on Pawoo’s looks some three or four times during their fight, and while his internal monologue and later actions imply he doesn’t “really” believe any of the things he says, they’re still kind of shitty. This is the guy we’re supposed to be rooting for, mind you, so comments like this coming out of his mouth unchallenged reflects pretty poorly on the series at large.
Worse, at the end of the fight (which Pawoo only loses because Bisco snipes her with an arrow tipped with some kind of knock-out poison), she’s left behind in the City Watch’s care while Bisco and Milo set off on their journey. (Which, we’ll get back to that momentarily.) Effectively, this writes her out of the series for the time being. I don’t really want to add Sabikui Bisco to the long, long list of otherwise solid action anime that treat their female characters like trash, but this is not a terrific start. A kinda-goofy “sexy” outfit is one thing. This is quite another.
At the very least, the fight itself is pretty good. One can’t say that Bisco wins too easily. Pawoo is the uber-serious shoot-first-ask-questions-later type, so she doesn’t buy any of Bisco’s talk about mushrooms healing the Rust. She does nearly beat the hell out of him, though, which is pretty great. There’s also some truly weird set dressing going on here. Why does their fight at one point pivot to being on top of a huge bowling pin inexplicably in the middle of Imihama? Who knows! It definitely rules, though. Moreso when Pawoo shatters the thing and there’s an audible “bowling strike” sound effect.
You might say Pawoo has no time for games.
There’s also some brief but fun color commentary from recurring secondary character Chiroru Oochagama. (Miyu Tomita, probably best known as the lead character, Riko, in Made in Abyss.) Her cowardly put-upon minion vibe makes her great for this sort of thing, and I hope she never stops doing it.
Intercut with all of this is Milo healing up Bisco’s mentor, Jabi. He eventually recovers enough that, when the time comes for Milo and Bisco to split at episode’s end, it’s he who stays behind to provide a distraction. (At least Pawoo will have some company in Good Characters Temporarily Absent From The Show Jail.)
As for where Bisco and Milo are actually going, it turns out that the “Rust-Eater” alluded to in the series’ alternate English title is, in fact, a mushroom. One that can heal just about anything, including Jabi’s (and presumably Pawoo’s) particularly bad Rust infection, which will eventually claim both of their lives if it’s not treated.
It’s worth noting in the latter case that Milo does give her some of the same injection that fixed up Jabi, but that the mushroom is still being sought out at all implies that this is only a temporary solution. Also, there is a bit where Milo gives a very long, heartfelt, tearful goodbye to his unconscious sister while saccharine music swells. The entire time, Bisco impatiently taps his foot in the background and then tells him off when he’s done. It’s pretty funny.
So, there you have it, Bisco and Milo exiting Imihama and setting out on an epic quest to get a special mushroom. Complete with all the fightbro homoeroticism so common to this sort of anime.
It’s classic stuff, and despite my criticisms of the episode’s handling of Pawoo I did enjoy it overall. (Time will tell if that continues to be the case, but here’s hoping.) There’s a post-credits scene here where Milo and Bisco come across a “war memorial,” a temple made out of and absolutely covered in ancient, rusting war machines. It promptly comes to life when they attempt to stop there for the evening. Thus, cliffhangers beget cliffhangers, and the adventure continues.
Until next week, anime fans.
*Official sources seem to disagree on whether her name should be romanized as Pawoo or just Paw. Because of how these things work, neither is exactly wrong, and they’re pronounced the same way. But the official subtitles use “Pawoo”, so it’s what I’ll be using from here on 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.
Hello anime fans! What a week it’s been over here! Commissions, seasonals getting better or worse, schedule shakeups, and more. There’s a lot to talk about, so I won’t waste any more of your time. Let’s dive in.
Seasonal Anime
CUE!
Maybe it’s a good thing that I stopped doing weeklies on this show? This episode, only CUE!‘s third, really meanders. That’s not inherently a problem given that the show is slated for two cours, but it does raise some possible problems going forward.
To put it very briefly; there is now an idol anime happening within CUE! Almost literally, even. We’re formally introduced to another “unit” of four characters this episode. We met one of them–Yuki Tendou–last week, but the other three have basically been background characters before now. These are Airi Eniwa (Mayu Iizuka, in her first major role), Yuzuha Kujo, (Manatsu Murakami, also voicing the lead in the deeply creepy Akebi’s School Uniform this season) and Chisa Akagawa (Satsuki Miyahara, another member of DIALOGUE+).
Yuzuha, Airi, Chisa, and Yuki, from left to right.
The four of them volunteer for a project AiRBLUE is considering picking up; a four-piece idol unit called Project Vogel. Which itself seems to be…honestly it’s not entirely clear? They’re playing characters who have designs and such, we even see said designs, which implies that this is a VTuber thing or is itself an idol anime of some sort? But no one ever actually explicitly says either, it’s just referred to as “a project.” It’s a little confusing.
It may not matter, because on top of everything else, this project is being crowdfunded on what looks like Kickstarter. Someone even explicitly points out that the project has only 52 backers at the moment. Which, to give the show due credit, is pretty funny.
This could all conceivably be pretty interesting, and it might even become so at some point, but there’s a lot of daylight between then and now. Because of the team of four we’re introduced to here, three are just not compelling characters. In contrast with Haruna (still our ostensible lead) and her genuinely endearing everywoman charm, they barely even qualify as caricatures. Only one rises above the level of a complete cardboard cutout.
That’d be Yuki, the only one of the four with some actual spark. She wants to land a role in something as quickly as possible because her dad might be forcing her out of the business to work in the family restaurant, and she’s willing to take a gamble on Vogel Project being something she can do. It’s basic, but that’s a real character motivation, which is more than the other three get. Also, she has an exclamatory catchphrase that gets subtitled as “D’oh!” for some reason, which is fun.
Airi has perhaps a dozen lines this episode and more than half of them have to be variants on “I’m sorry.” There’s also a bizarre dialogue gimmick where she says vaguely rude things and then justifies them as being things her horoscope told her to do? She’s honestly pretty annoying! And Mayu Iizuka’s all-nose vocal performance does not help. Yuzuha “wants to make precious memories.” Chisa is “the serious one.” We don’t get to learn much about those two beyond that. Their introductory scene drags like hell and it’s easily the worst part of the show so far, across all three of its episodes.
These are issues that a series could fix with time and development, but it’s a bad first impression to make for what is presumably going to end up becoming a major part of the cast. Why do an introdump like this if you’re going to make the characters seem so dull? It’s worth remembering here that CUE! exists partly to promote a mobile game. No one is going to roll the gacha for characters this boring. (The show’s character designs tending toward the pedestrian certainly doesn’t help either. Though within the context of CUE! as fiction, it does make the designs of the various shows within the show pop more.)
In more interesting territory, Maika and some of the other girls learn that they’ve landed a role in Bloom Ball. I’m pleasantly surprised that the zany sports anime-within-an-anime seems like it’s going to continue to be relevant. Haruna doesn’t get a major part, although she’s penned in to attend the first recording session anyway. Because you see, she’s got a role as “Student A.” It’s something?
Of all of CUE!‘s characters, I actually probably like Haruna the most. It’s a little disappointing to see her performance from last episode lead to a result that is, basically, a joke at her expense. I do still intend to keep up with CUE, but I can’t pretend that this episode isn’t fairly disappointing. Time will tell if this goes down as merely a rough patch or the point where the series just falls apart.
Tokyo 24th Ward
Normally I don’t cover anime in back-to-back Frontline Reports. (That’s what the dedicated weekly columns are for.) Nonetheless, I felt like I should take some time to appreciate the fact that Tokyo 24th Ward has appreciably improved from its snoozefest of a second episode last week to its third this week. Hopefully signing that the first episode will be more indicative of the show’s overall direction than the second.
Very briefly; the Gourmet Fest alluded to last week happens here, and Kaba, the event’s organizer, foils the scheme by a rival restaurant to win by cheating. All of this is fairly humdrum, though thankfully the production picks back up here (the pop-ins are back! Hooray!)
I would’ve written the episode off as just okay were it not for the fact that we get another one of those bonkers ghost phone calls here. The second half of the episode, which this kicks off, seems more indicative of where Tokyo 24th wants to go from here.
This time the disaster is a sudden tornado (!) striking the festival. Once again, it’s presented as a sideways variant on the trolley problem; choose to save Group X or Group Y, but not both. This time, though, our heroes don’t coordinate before moving out to enact their grand shonen-y rescue plans. As a result, things go badly, and for the second time, “RGB” fail to save everyone. One of those who loses his life is Kaba himself, marking the genuinely shocking removal of a character who had up to this point been a fairly major supporting player.
A willingness to buck expectations now, while we’re still rather early in Tokyo 24th‘s run, is a good sign. I legitimately felt for Kaba’s daughter, Kozue, previously traumatized by the fire catastrophe we learned about back in episode one. Here, on her first day out of the house in who knows how long, she’s caught in a tornado and loses her father. That’s just awful, and all the melodramatic touches in the world–Kozue sheds a tear as her father’s ripped away by the tornado, which mixes with one of his own!–can’t entirely blunt that sense of loss.
But if anyone had the absurd worry that Tokyo 24th was going to get too serious, the episode ends with the reveal that somehow, this fucking guy was behind the tornado.
And just like that, our little superhero team suddenly has a proper nemesis.
I don’t know where Tokyo 24th goes from here, but that’s an exciting feeling. I am sure it will appear in this column again.
Elsewhere on MPA
It’s been a productive week here on the site.
(Review) Pompo: The Cinéphile– One of two commissions I finished this week. I don’t love Pompo but it’s a pretty solid movie and it probably deserves more love than it’s gotten from western audiences. Check it out sometime, won’t you?
(Review) SCHOOL-LIVE! / Gakkou Gurashi – I think I’ve basically exhausted all I have to say about mid-’10s cult classic Gakkou Gurashi. I really loved this series despite a few problems and it’s probably the most an anime has made me cry since, what, A Place Further Than The Universe, maybe? There’s a reason this one has stuck around.
And that’s about all for this week. I’ll see you tomorrow for more Sabikui Bisco, anime fans. 🙂
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!
We’re in new territory for this site.
I am a lot of things as a critic. But I would not say I’m exactly a savvy predictor of an anime’s success or positive acclaim. Sometimes I stick to my guns in spite of public consensus, sometimes I do not. I went over the long and short of this in another postearlier today, but the very short version is this; the previous series I’d picked up as a weekly is just not working out. Instead, you get Sabikui Bisco every week going forward.
I’m going to go ahead and assume that if you’re reading this, you’re fine with that.
This column arrives rather late (and a bit short compared to my usual) as a result of this schedule shakeup, but I do intend to pick up episode 3 on Monday, so we’ll have to really haul ass through episode 2 here. But I’m fine with that. Do you know why? Because Sabikui Bisco is an utterly unhinged box of delights, and writing about it is fun.
If you don’t like my “rapturous praise” mode of writing you can go ahead and skip this column. I have nothing but good things to say about Bisco.
This week’s episode focuses more on the redheaded title character than the feminine Milo, who we got to know last week. We learn how he ended up in the city and that the reason he sought Milo out is because his traveling companion and mentor, an old man named Jabi (Shirou Saitou, who seems to play roles almost exclusively in this vein and has done so since he made his VA debut in 1996. He was also Jake in the Japanese dub of Adventure Time, isn’t that fun?), was injured by an attacking bounty hunter looking to take Bisco in. Now, that’s a fairly normal shonen plot beat. Less normal is the fact that the bounty hunter’s method of attack was “giant snail fighter jet.” Similar weaponization of animal life occurs throughout this episode and, I imagine, will continue to be a motif seen throughout the show.
One could speculate on the possible thematic implications of a world so war-torn that even ordinary fauna have been turned into weapons. But this early on, the sheer cool factor has yet to wear off. We’ll get there, and so will Bisco itself, presumably. Right now, the feel of the ride is what matters most. The episode ends with the promise of an impending duel between Bisco and Paw, who currently thinks (correctly) that Bisco blew up her brother’s hospital and possibly (incorrectly) that he’s killed him. This promises to be one of the most stylish fights of the season, and you’ll have to forgive me if I take this opportunity to again remind everyone that Paw is just an absolutely untouchable character.
I wish she’d look at me like that.🥺
So that’s the Cliff’s Notes for our second episode. I’m glossing over more than I’d like to here because I’m pressed for time. I almost didn’t even get to mention the fun little character aside where the aforementioned plane-owning bounty hunter grovels for her life at the feet of the villainous prefectural governor we met last episode. How he tosses her a pistol and tells her she’s still under contract, and how he offhandedly mentions that Bisco’s attack on the city has ruined his plan to host a totally sweet sci-fi movie marathon.
You know he’s a villain because he watches the Star Wars movies in chronological order.
Nonetheless, I hope I’ve impressed upon you how wonderfully bonkers the world of Bisco is. If you’re reading this, I assume you’re already onboard the mushroom hype train. If not, there’s plenty of time to climb on.
Until episode 3, anime fans.
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 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!
I’m revealing my age here, but humor me for a moment. Are you, dear readers, familiar with classic party rock track “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band? (If not, Stereogum’s Tom Breihan, a critic I admire very much, wrote a pretty great article about it as part of his pretty great-in-general column The Number Ones. You can consider this a recommendation.)
That song is a boiling soup of emotion. The song’s narrator finds out his high school crush poses in an adult magazine now and he’s hit by some admixture of guilt and desire. “Centerfold” doesn’t sound guilty, though, it sounds celebratory, from its production to the nagging “nah-nah nah nah nah nahs” in the chorus. Any actual negative feelings in the song are washed away by its presentation. It all sounds like a good time, and because pop media’s presentation informs its message, it is a good time.
I bring this up because, in a very roundabout way, that’s also, in a very broad sense, sort of what I think of My Dress-Up Darling. The situation presented in its second episode, “Wanna Hurry Up, and Do It?”, would be, in a series that were even slightly more connected to the real world, appalling. Marin completes her strong-arming of Gojo into becoming her cosplay outfitter. Along the way, she both rambles at him about eroge games and eventually shows up at his house unannounced to make him take her measurements. (That’s what the episode title is referring to. What did you think it meant?) But the presentation sells it as a good time, at least in a comedy anime sort of way. Dress-Up Darling‘s second episode is almost all comedic, and it leans heavily into the series’ ecchi side. (If I’m giving every episode an Egregiously Horny Score out of 5, we can call this a solid 4.) Which isn’t to say it’s devoid of more substantial character moments, as there are a few, but let’s just say this is an episode where I had to be judicious about what to take a screencap of.
But let’s talk about our actual characters for a moment here, because it’s Marin who launches this whole sequence of events to begin with. One of the things that makes Marin seem like a real character as opposed to a cardboard cut-out is that she’s extremely assertive. Honestly a little too assertive, to the point of obliviousness, which is where a lot of the comedy here comes from. The episode opens immediately after the closing scene of last week’s, and it’s in the very same room where the two have basically just met that Marin goes into a bit more detail about this character she’s trying to cosplay. For one, her name is Shizuku-tan. She’s the gothic type.
At one point Marin refers to the chest area of Shizuka’s outfit as a “boob bag,” which gives My Dress-Up Darling the dubious honor of being the first anime I’ve ever seen use the term in-fiction.
For two, she’s from an erotic dating sim. Called…this.
(The title is immediately drawn attention to, of course.)
Gojo takes all this in with a disbelief that is pretty common among those who have just had their head dunked into the far side of otakudom. (I’m actually kinda with him here, I’ve never really understood the appeal of eroge either. Not out of any moral objection, I just can’t fathom being horny while gaming. They are mutually exclusive activities in my mind.)
Marin also repeatedly calls the series “epic,” which I’d say is only a bad pick because someone her age nowadays would probably say it’s “based” instead.
There’s also a pretty funny style cut where Gojo brings up that stuff like this tends to be 18+ and Marin, we’ll say, selectively declines to hear him.
It sounds–and is–simple, but a huge part of what makes this come across as funny instead of just weird is Gojo’s reactions. Over the course of the episode, they slowly ramp up from “in vague disbelief as to what he’s hearing” to “looks like he’s just survived a war.” I will cop to finding his increasing distress amusing.
That second reaction doesn’t come until the latter half of the episode. While Gojo does agree to help Marin with her outfits, he reasonably proposes that they should wait to do measurements until Monday, since by the time this episode starts it’s already quite late on a Friday evening.
Naturally, Marin shows up unannounced at his house the next day while his grandfather happens to be off running an errand. (She notes that she googled his last name and “doll shop” to find the address. That’s honestly kind of creepy! But hey, comedy anime.)
Sidenote: the fit is insane.
She barges in and shows herself around. This alone makes Gojo nervous, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the fact that–as Marin correctly points out–measurements are generally taken while the measure-ee is undressed. Of course, Marin is very cognizant of the fact that she can’t well strip down to her underwear in the house of a boy she only met a few days ago. That would be nuts!
A bikini though. That’s fine. Obviously.
There is going to be a whole section here where there are very few pictures of Marin and a whole lot of pictures of Gojo’s absolutely devastated facial expressions. You may thank / curse me for my modesty in the comments.
Maybe I’m a simpleton for still finding stuff like this funny over a decade into being an anime fan. I think I actually appreciate naked stupidity like this a bit more than I did when I was actually in the target audience for this series. But can you blame me, here? Look at Gojo, guy’s about to die.
Na na na na na na.
This particular visual dynamic–Marin doing something teasing and sexy and then Gojo reacting like he’s been stabbed in the gut–makes up most of the rest of the episode. It’ll wear thin if this is what the whole rest of the show is going to be like (I want the cosplay dates alluded to in the OP sequence, damn it!), but as a single episode thing? It’s pretty fun.
In spite of his own raging hormones, Gojo does successfully take Marin’s measurements. Marin herself even gets flustered at one point, in an amusing but also genuine and human moment. This episode was fine–if one has a high tolerance for H comedy, that is–but those moments of real connection between our two leads are where I think Dress-Up Darling is at its strongest. I hope we get more of them as the series rolls on.
But if not, hey, the sight of Gojo studying Slippery Girls 2 like he’s prepping for exams so he can get outfit references is pretty goddamn funny.
Godspeed, Gojo.
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.
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