Tag: anime review

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: TAKOPI’S ORIGINAL SIN

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.

Content Warning: This article contains discussion of suicide, child abuse, bullying, and other heavy topics. Please use your discretion before reading.

I’m open to the idea that this is a real “these three points make a line” sort of statement, but in my experience, it seems to me that when a show premieres before the bulk of its season, it’s usually lightweight and lighthearted. Something like Fluffy Paradise, or what have you. Why that is, I couldn’t tell you, but maybe there’s a sentiment that if you’re going to put yourself out there ahead of the pack, it doesn’t make sense to demand too much from viewers. That’s a guess, but it’s the best one I’ve got.

In any case, Takopi’s Original Sin—an ONA adaptation, slated for six episodes, of Taizen 5‘s Jump+ manga—does not follow this pattern. At all. In fact, before I say anything else, let me hit you with the same exact warnings that the show itself does.

Those two content warnings, one from the anime’s production committee and the other, as far as I can tell, inserted by distributors, are not a joke. Takopi is in the running for the heaviest anime I’ve ever covered on this site, and I’m saying that as a statement of fact, not some kind of tasteless “you won’t believe how dark this show is!” clickbait sort of thing. So please, if reading about anything described abvove is distressing to you, or if watching it is distressing, please exercise your judgment. Take care of yourself, alright?

Beyond that, it’s actually the visual element of this show I’d like to discuss first. (Coming to us from director Iino Shinya, previously best known for the Dr. Stone adaptation, and his team at Studio ENISHIYA. As far as I can tell, this is their first work that’s not a music video or something of that nature.) Despite this being an anime blog, I usually save notes on production polish and such for the last few paragraphs, mostly because the ins and outs of how an anime actually gets made are not my specialty, and there are only so many ways for a comparative layman to say something looks good. Takopi is different: its human character designs have a distinctive feel, I’d almost say a weathered appearance, that sets them apart from the norm. They’re not “realistic” per se, but they’re expressive and feel like stories unto themselves, most notably with Kuze Shizuka [Ueda Reina], a fourth-grader and one of our leads; rail-thin, with a stringy mop of black hair, dressed in a battered white t-shirt, and a face that conveys an exhaustion beyond her years. Deliberately cutting against all of that is our non-human lead, Takopi himself [Mamiya Kurumi]. Takopi is a round alien, essentially a pink sphere with some stumpy legs, a mouth, eyes, and two tentacles. He looks like something out of a children’s storybook, and he thinks like one too, most scenes that depict something he imagines do so in this painted, storybook style, and it adds an incredible amount of depth to the show.

As for the alien himself, Takopi comes from The Happy Planet. His mission? To spread joy far and wide across the galaxy.

To that end, he has a bag full of gadgets—Happy Gadgets—that can do just about anything; a wrist band that lets you fly, an instant camera / time machine, a talking moai-like head that gives advice, an infinitely-long ribbon that can make any two people who are fighting resolve their differences. You know, the basic stuff. Takopi is, textually speaking, a literal extraterrestrial. But from the moment he’s introduced to Shizuka’s life, it’s clear that he’s also meant to come off as rather childlike. He’s immensely naïve about how the world works, and his gizmos do little to solve Shizuka’s problems. Still, Shizuka, at least initially, seems to be grateful to have someone to talk to at the very least. Over the course of a few days, she feeds Takopi bread and the little alien offers her various widgets to improve her life. It should be pointed out that she declines to use any of them, other than allowing Takopi to take a picture with the aforementioned camera, for the stated reason that even something like being able to fly through the sky “wouldn’t change anything.”

One gets a sense of what she means when we’re first introduced to Kirarazaka Marina [Kohara Konomi]. Marina, a classmate of Shizuka’s and, it quickly becomes clear to us if not Takopi, her bully. From the very moment she’s introduced, Marina is so awful to Shizuka that it’s almost impressive. One of her first lines is her and an underling talking about how they’ve broken Shizuka’s writing board, about which Marina sneers that she can use her “welfare money” to buy another. Further details like insults scribbled on Shizuka’s bookbag and simply how insistent she is about hiding from Marina paint Shizuka’s school life as a living hell even before we get to actually see it in the episode’s second half.

There’s a sense of suffocation here, and the environment reflects it; a relatively small town where everyone knows everyone else but doesn’t necessarily like them. Shizuka’s home life paints an equally-bleak picture; her only real companion is her dog Chappy, a giant ball of fur and affection that truly seems to be the one light in her life. Her mother, an “escort”, doesn’t really seem to ever be home, and an innocent question about Takopi regarding where her father is is met with “I don’t have a dad.”

Even so. All of this is contrasted with Shizuka’s moments with Takopi, which she does seem to genuinely appreciate. After seeing Shizuka’s home for the first time, Takopi tries to cheer her up by offering to take her to his home planet. He’s rebuffed, but Shizuka, Takopi, and Chappy end that night by walking together under the star-woven night sky. Shizuka smiles, Takopi is overjoyed.

If Takopi’s Original Sin is ever “misleading” in any way—and I really don’t think it is, this is not a show that’s coy about what kind of story it’s trying to tell, but for the sake of argument—it’s probably here. For a few seconds, it seems like things are looking up.

And then tomorrow comes.

Shizuka, badly beaten and clutching an empty dog leash—did Chappy run away? What happened? We aren’t told—meets up with Takopi again. For neither the first nor the last time, Takopi tragically doesn’t really understand what he’s looking at, interpreting her bloody mouth and black eye as “decoration.” Shizuka can only mumble out that she had a “fight” with her “friend,” at which point Takopi likens the way Shizuka’s face has changed to how he blushes when he gets embarrassed. (Moments of this nature, where Takopi just fundamentally misunderstands something about how humanity works, are excellent in how thoroughly they can sink your heart in just a few lines of his cheery delivery, and they’re scattered all up and down the episode.)

He latches on to the “fight with a friend” description, though. Offering Shizuka a “Reconciliation Ribbon” that can make any two people reconcile so long as they each tie it around their fingers. For me at least, this is around where the feelings of unease cultivated by the opening minutes of the episode blossomed into full-blown dread.

Takopi somewhat reluctantly lets Shizuka borrow the ribbon, despite the rules of his mission (as dictated in a flashback by a large, white specimen of his species) saying that the gadgets should never be used without direct supervision. Time passes, and Takopi gets worried.

He eventually makes his way back to Shizuka’s home, only to find it empty. Empty except for the Ribbon, fashioned into a makeshift noose, and except for Shizuka, having hung herself. The scene is harrowing, an explosion of pure, black dread. (I think one can make the case that Takopi’s lending the Ribbon to Shizuka is the titular “original sin,” though given that we’re only one-sixth of the way through this story, I’m sure other interpretations will make themselves known.)

Understandably, the little pink alien panics. He wonders how this happened, blaming himself and lamenting that death is the one constant across the vast universe. He can’t bring back the dead, but there is one thing he can do with his extraordinary gadgetry. The camera’s hidden function as a time machine is revealed here, allowing Takopi to travel back to the moment the photo was taken. (This seems to require him to have the photo on-hand, and it’s said outright that the camera can only store one picture at a time. Both of these facts seem like they’ll eventually be relevant.)

Thus, the second part of this episode revolves around Takopi trying his damnedest to avert Shizuka’s tragic fate, to find a world where she lives. To do this, he feels the need to learn more about her. Traveling back to the past, he accompanies her to school, trying to solve various minor problems he incorrectly pegs as the source of her pain (forgetting her homework, being unable to finish her school lunch, etc.), and one of the episode’s most visually interesting moments consists of a montage juxtaposing these problems and Takopi’s stopgap solutions to them, splitting the video down the middle and showing both at the same time.

But what Takopi still doesn’t entirely get until the episode’s final act is that all of these things are symptoms of a bigger problem that Shizuka is dealing with. Namely, Marina. Everything else that happens to her in school is a direct result of Marina’s bullying; she didn’t forget her homework, Marina stole it. She might be able to actually finish her lunch were it not for Marina and her fellow bullies mocking Shizuka to her face while she’s trying to eat. And so on and so forth.

Takopi, heartbreakingly, doesn’t really understand this either. He assumes that Marina and Shizuka are former friends who’ve had some kind of falling out, and that if he can just get them to talk, things will be fine. The problems with this approach are left unsaid, but are obvious. What if someone just fucking hates you for no obvious reason? What if someone is abusing you because they themselves are abused and you’re just an outlet for their anger? What if someone is mad at some other specific person and you’re just a proxy for their rage? Takopi can’t consider these angles, and when he naively tries to use another of his gizmos (a palette that lets him take the appearance of anyone he wants) to take Shizuka’s place when Marina wants to “talk to her,” it predictably goes very poorly.

I have to confess, as awful and stomach-churning as Shizuka’s suicide was, this was actually the scene that made me pause the episode and necessitated me taking some time to collect myself before resuming. Marina just absolutely beats Takopi-as-Shizuka black and blue, ranting at him about how “she” is the daughter of a “parasite” who’s preying on her father, and concludes her assault by jamming a mechanical pencil in Takopi-Shizuka’s eye. The narrative revelation—that Shizuka’s mother is sleeping with Marina’s father, and this is one of the sources of Marina’s anger—is crammed into the margins by the visceral pummeling she’s giving Takopi-Shizuka, a clouding of cause-and-effect that is all too reflective of how these things can play out in real life. Marina, a child herself, is of course wholly unable to strike back against a grown woman who she thinks is ruining her family. Shizuka, comparatively defenseless, is an easy target.

Takopi simply has no frame of reference for any of this; nothing of this nature happens on his planet, and this single beating is enough to traumatize him. The next time loop around, he can’t make himself move to go help Shizuka, even as he knows exactly what’s happening to her. The best he can eventually think to do is to run and grab a teacher while still disguised as Shizuka. Even this doesn’t really work long term, it just gets Marina off of her for the time being.

The episode’s closing minutes see Takopi pledge to stay with Shizuka, even though he feels like a failure for not being able to truly protect her. They also follow Marina, further contextualizing her anger as the result of her mother, who is sitting at their dining room table and seething over her husband spending so much time with another woman. The episode ends on two distinct epilogues. Shizuka goes home and falls asleep in her living room with Takopi and Chappy, the closest to being happy we’ve yet seen her. Marina, on the other hand, exits the episode as her mother creepily puts her hand on her face, all about the scene implying that Marina is about to be the target of abuse herself, for nowhere near the first time. She begins crying, headlight-yellow eyes darting away from her mother and, full of fear and resentment, burning holes in the camera.

This show is….a difficult one to discuss productively, for lack of a better term. To be honest, I have felt a touch out of my depth writing this, most anime—including most anime I deeply love—has some escapist element that can make even quite dark storylines go down more easily. There’s a little of that here, and Takopi’s presence provides a dose of pitch-black humor when he’s not just making things worse with his childlike naiveite, but, like I said at the top, this is one of the bleakest things I’ve ever written about on this site. Still, I do hope I’ve made it clear that none of this is a problem. The series is outstanding at what it’s setting out to do, and I think if you can weather the storm Takopi’s Original Sin is putting down, you’ll find easily one of the year’s best premieres. I would not at all be surprised, if it keeps up the quality—and I imagine it will—to find Takopi making a lot of year-end best-of lists come December or so. This story may be dark, but it’s one worth telling.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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: UMA MUSUME – CINDERELLA GRAY Episode 9 – “The Japanese Derby”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

In real life, I can only imagine that whatever led to the actual Oguri Cap being allowed to compete in G1 races was some mixture of backroom politicking, the very real fan support behind the horse (as reflected in this show’s petition, based on a real one), and money changing hands. On its own, that’s not terribly compelling stuff, and similar bending of the rules is common throughout the entirety of sport, across the globe, up and down all levels of competition.

What makes Cinderella Gray interesting is its ability to translate minutiae of that nature into compelling art. You don’t need to know a damn thing about the actual horse to root for Oguri Cap as she appears in the show, you just need to be fired up, incensed that they won’t let her compete at the highest level possible because of irritating technicalities, rendered in the sharp and sickly-relatable language of stupid paperwork. Cindy Gray needs you to sympathize with three characters, in fact. One of whom is of course Oguri Cap herself. The other two, the sports tabloid reporter Sensuke and Symboli Rudolf’s right hand horse girl Maruzensky, are the kind of characters who’d have minor, barely-touched-upon roles in an anime that cared less about getting this stuff right. Their roles are arguably still minor in scope, but certainly not in impact. The former’s petition, and the latters personal connection to Oguri’s story—she too, we learn in the opening minutes of this episode, was disbarred from the Classics for the exact same reason—is enough to nudge the Emperor’s position.

On its own, that’s pretty remarkable. Symboli Rudolf sticks her neck out for Oguri Cap to quite an extent over the course of this episode, which is a huge 180 from her initial opinion on this whole situation. (Remember that back in episode 7, Rudolf was actively angry that Oguri just assumed the rules would be changed for her sake. Yet here she is, only two episodes later, actively advocating that same exact change of rules. It’s quite amazing what some perspective can accomplish.) Unfortunately, Symboli Rudolf, despite her prestigious position, does not actually make these rules. I think what Cinderella Gray has cottoned onto is that what it really needed to cap off this arc was a villain, even if only a short-term one, someone to sell that this big change is a big change.

Of course, the obvious thing about this sport is that if there’s ever a “bad guy,” it’s never going to be any of the horses.

Thus, Rudolf’s main obstacle in her change of heart is the URA Chairman, a blonde, bespectacled woman who puts in her one and if I had to guess, only appearance in this episode, Gendo Posing all the while. Taken in absolute terms, the scene isn’t much. Rudolf simply explains her position, the board takes it under advisement, and, in suitably dramatic fashion, it is eventually revealed that they acquiesced. Rudolf’s little speech is the real centerpiece of this scene; she actively denies that any of the obvious qualities is what makes a racer a star. It’s not strength, pedigree, or even race record, it’s how the crowd can pin their hopes and dreams on her. This is what Oguri Cap means to people, and implicitly, Rudolf sees herself in Oguri for this reason.

Fittingly, when Oguri Cap is introduced at the Japanese Derby, finally revealing that yes, she was allowed entry, to run alongside the storied competition we’ve gotten to know over the past few episodes (Yaeno Muteki, Dicta Striker, Mejiro Arden….), she’s introduced as “The Cinderella of Kasamatsu.” She’s there to carry her hometown’s dreams on her back, win or lose.

And she does win. Stomping past Sakura Chiyono O, who’s given a lovingly-rendered “power up” sequence in the fashion of many previous champions, past Dicta Striker who unfortunately hurts herself on the track, and so on. Oguri Cap storms the finish line, conquering all in her path and winning the Japan Derby by an astounding seven lengths. Insane, right? A shocking but—given her previous record—unsurprising capstone on an illustrious career.

Unfortunately, I’m lying to you. None of this ever happened.

No, you read that right. And if you’ve already seen the episode and were reading up to this point quite confused, well, now you know why. That did not happen. Neither Oguri Cap the character nor her real life counterpart were allowed to run in the Japanese Derby. The winner of that race was the aforementioned Sakura Chiyono O. This is a happy and straightforward triumph. For her, anyway.

It’s a testament to how well Cinderella Gray, and Uma Musume in general, is put together that I could easily imagine this being a genuinely triumphant moment if Chiyono O was our main character. In fact, she pulls double duty as a supporting character in both this series and the Star Blossom manga, so maybe we will see something like that someday.

In what I can only describe as one of the meanest gut punches of its type I’ve seen in years, the entire second two-thirds of this episode are revealed to be the daydream of Symboli Rudolf. There’s some subtle foreshadowing of this; note that Oguri Cap does not have G1-style racing silks unlike the competition. Note also that while lost deep in thought, Symboli Rudolf repeats the series-favorite chestnut that the Japanese Derby victory tends to go not to the strongest or fastest racer but to the luckiest. Oguri Cap is many things, but I’m not sure I’d say ‘lucky’ is one of them.

The irony of course is that to anyone who knows their real-life horse racing, or indeed anyone who’s just read the manga, this wasn’t a twist at all. But, well, as an anime-only it definitely caught me off guard. What I did not lie about is that part of what makes Cinderella Gray so interesting is its ability to transmute this kind of thing into compelling art. In a less ambitious narrative, there’d be no story at this point. Oguri didn’t win The Biggest Thing Possible, so what story is there left to tell? (Never mind that by its very nature Uma Musume largely avoids the spectre of international horse racing; the few times Uma Musume characters have gone abroad in past seasons they’ve mostly been completely stomped, and it makes for some pretty depressing character exits.)

Cinderella Gray‘s answer can be found both before and after this episode’s credits, bookending the OP and ED. Tamamo Cross, who we were introduced to quite a while ago at this point, reappears for the first time since Oguri’s transfer to Tracen, also effortlessly laying flat her opponents in a race before the opening credits, crackling with blue lightning like an equine Sonic the Hedgehog. This, the series tells us, is Oguri Cap’s real challenge. It does so directly, placing Oguri Cap’s hypothetical win in a dream-version of the Japanese Derby in context as the end of the “National Debut Arc,” and promising a “White Lightning Arc” beginning from episode 10. The named arcs, I must assume, are just in case anyone needs further proof that Cinderella Gray is essentially a battle shonen anime.

As for Oguri’s disbarment from the classics, I can imagine a certain kind of person being bummed. Oguri herself seems pretty let down, as the race she actually does win—the G2 New Zealand Trophy—she conquers so easily that she seems like she’s dissociating the entire time.

She picks herself back up again shortly thereafter, and it seems like Tamamo Cross will once again give her a much-needed peak to summit. But even setting that aside, there is a silver lining. Fitting, given Oguri’s ashen hair.

Symboli Rudolf was not able to convince the URA to change their policies on such short notice, but they do take her concerns under advisement, and it’s implied that this, combined with the public outcry paves the way for other racers in the future. Making a vanishingly brief cameo here is fan favorite—honestly, to just lay my biases on the table, my own personal favorite Uma Musume character, period—T. M. Opera O, The Overlord at Century’s End [normally voiced by Tokui Sora, though she doesn’t speak in her appearance here]. If we assume that the Uma Musume universe at least vaguely maps in some fashion to real-world timelines, Opera’s career won’t begin for quite a while, so this is clearly a flash-forward to sometime around the Road to the Top OVAs. Said largely without words here is that Oguri Cap’s career, and the outcry over her not being able to compete in G1s, eventually led to the changes that would allow Opera, and other racers like her, to be such an explosive presence years down the line.

It’s a consolation prize at best, and I imagine it’s a bit lost on anyone who’s not already tapped in to Uma Musume‘s broader lore. What saves it for me at least is that it ties neatly into the idea of Oguri Cap being someone people can pin their hopes and dreams on. Not being able to run at all is Oguri Cap’s first big defeat, but by setting the gears in motion to change the URA’s rules, she elevates a whole generation of racers well beyond her own career. The episode points this out directly; Rudolf’s final musing this week is that in spite of everything, Oguri Cap did trample all the existing rules and regulations, exactly like she said she would. That’s Oguri Cap for you, even when she’s down, she’s still an inspiration.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Black Thread of Fate: Death, Past and Present, in NOIR

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

Note: this is a review of the English dub.

In the shadows, nameless assassins load their pistols. The bullets in the chamber end the lives of the rich, the powerful, the damned. It happens everywhere; abandoned construction sites in Japan, the coasts of South America, the heart of Paris, just outside the Arc de Triomphe, the glittering skyscrapers of New York City, the cold landscape of Russia, just before winter’s first snowfall. It happens by the hands of two women, hitmen without equal, twin goddesses of death. The result? Something between an action movie and a slow-burn nightmare, filled with pinging gunshots, glinting dagger blades, and poisonous incense. Enter this dreamy vein and you find Noir; a haunting, gauzy series whose emotional and literal palette is dark and thick as tar pitch. Fitting enough for something whose title is just the French word for “black.”

The reference point here is of course film noir, the genre of black and white movies. But Noir‘s inspiration is less a direct aping of tropes and more a signal that it intends to replicate that movement’s sense of mood and place. Indeed, even as Noir‘s marriage of action movie tropes and dramatic, philosophical dialogue spins out into a storyline of rival assassins and inherited codenames spanning the globe and across time, it never loses that sense of dreaminess, underscored by the lack of blood despite all the violence. This is the aspirational case for highly stylish death-dealing as compelling psychodrama. Firefights are frequent enough to be something you can set your watch to, but every one punctuates big-question themes of loss, fate, memory, revenge, and of course, death.

Our twin deathbirds are Yuumura Kirika [Monica Rial] and Mireille Bouquet [Shelley Calene-Black]. Kirika is an amnesiac Japanese high schooler whose almost supernatural abilities as a hitman seem impossible for someone her age. Mireille, the older of the two by a good five years, is the only remaining member of a powerful Corsican crime family. Together, the two work under the codename Noir, the moniker of a legendary assassin who’s stalked Europe for a thousand years, and take on various hit jobs to make ends meet while pursuing their deeper goals. All the while, their alliance is an uneasy one; sometimes friends, sometimes more than friends, and yet other times keeping each other at arm’s length, they are united by a sworn pact and, as eventually becomes clear, a shared history.

Kirika is introduced to us when she sends Mireille an e-mail, containing a cryptic comment about taking a pilgrimmage to their respective pasts and an audio file, recorded from a silver pocket watch, that plays a haunting melody from Mireille’s own. When they meet, they’re almost immediately attacked by throngs of faceless assailants. This opening action piece sets the tone in many ways, as all of the elements Noir will follow are here; Kirika being so good at killing that she can hang a man by his necktie without a second thought, Mireille holding her own but being equal parts stunned and unnerved by Kirika’s abilities. All this while the two exchange gunfire with the nameless men pursuing them in a construction site that serves as a murderous, surreal jungle gym. Even the use of light and shadow, the look of Noir itself, is laid out in these first fifteen or so minutes. Eventually, the gunsmoke clears, and Mireille offers Kirika her terms: the two will help each other discover who the amnesiac Kirika really is and why she has a pocket watch once owned by Mireille’s late parents. Then, when the truth is clearer than light, Mireille will kill Kirika. The schoolgirl accepts, and our story begins.

Thus set is the stage for a heavy, dramatic narrative. Both of our leads are seeking answers from their pasts. Kirika wants to know who she is, the ordinary self she’s convinced lies underneath all of the murderous conditioning. Mireille has a more concrete goal; she wants to know who killed her parents and brother, and why they did it. These two seemingly parallel roads meet under the sinister gaze of Les Soldats, the show’s assassin-death cult-Illuminati, a powerful force that veils the entire world in a suffocating black shroud, and the main antagonists of the series.

Early episodes, though, touch on the Soldats only briefly, or not at all. They aren’t introduced until several episodes in, and they’re more of a background presence throughout the first half of the series. These earlier, episodic adventures are more defined by the locales the main duo visit and who they take out while they’re there, emphasizing action and mood-setting as opposed to the strong central through-line that soon develops.

Even still, there’s a streak of profound melancholy that runs through Noir from its very first episode. Despite its excellent action, this is not a show that boils down to a mindless exchange of bullets. Kirika’s quest for identity in particular is central to the series from its very beginning. An early episode sees her befriend a lost cat, first comparing herself to it and then remarking that since the cat is only lost physically, they aren’t truly that similar at all.

That cat belongs to a former Soviet prison camp commander, one who used that position to further an ethnic conflict between his own people and another group, rounding up the latter and sending them to their deaths. When the duo, tasked with killing this man, actually meet him, what they find is an old man who devotes his every waking hour to feeding the poor and homeless.

Setting aside that these kind of complete moral 180s don’t really happen very often in the real world, Noir asks a very pointed question here, the first hint at a larger overall theme. Does this turnaround actually matter? It is certainly a good thing to be helping the needy, but it doesn’t revive the people he’s murdered. This one of the show’s more extreme extensions of one of its basic ideas, that of killers of all sorts are notably distinct from regular society in a way that isn’t reversible. The notion permeates Noir. So too does the dichotomy between this underworld and the “daylight” world of ordinary people, who are rarely ever particularly relevant in this series. When they are, it’s to draw attention to this painful contrast.

Take, for example, in episode 4 when Kirika and Mireille fly to South America. There, they assassinate the head of a private military company called Atride, who are aiding an ongoing coup d’etat. After killing the man, Kirika unknowingly crosses paths with his daughter, who doesn’t yet know that her father is dead. We never see her reaction at all, in fact. The emphasis is not put on the victims, or those they leave behind. The grieving families are left implied, and the pain permeates the series in only an indirect way. Instead, the focus is squarely on the staining of the killers’ hands, and, by implication, their souls.

This isn’t to say that Noir is moralizing. It really isn’t, certainly not in comparison to some other anime from this time period that I’ve reviewed on this site. It’s more of a question than a strong stance; are these methods worth it? Does it ever result in anything but violence begetting violence, down through the generations, again and again? Noir is much more an interrogative work than it is one that’s keen to offer up clear, simple solutions.

If you, personally, want to either exonerate or condemn the Noir duo, you’re certainly free to. As the series hands you more than enough evidence to do either. In the former column, the world is arguably better off without most of the people they kill; the aforementioned PMC CEO and prison camp commander, French right-wing extremists, Mafia dons, Triad elders, etc. In the latter column, there’s the obvious counter that they’re still killing people extrajudicially based on not even their own judgement but the judgement of those who hire them. But making moral calls like this, in either direction, risks getting lost in the weeds. It’s fair to raise the point that if Noir does not want to be seen as endorsing some form of real world politics, it should not have its main characters involve themselves with so many political conflicts, but the series’ focus on the question of violence as an acceptable tool (or not) of change is more general and philosophical than tied to any movement in particular. Again, it must be emphasized that this is a recurring idea throughout the series. The notion that violence begets itself. As one of the duo’s one-arc enemies—Silvana [Heather LeMaster], the scion of a Mafia family—puts it, only blood can wash out blood.

Noir thrives on contrasts such as these. Once again, this is most obvious with Kirika, whose dark talents are always juxtaposed against her desire for an ordinary life. Sometimes simply represented by her high school ID (a highly symbolic object, the lone remnant of a normal life she may have lived, however briefly), and other times personified by connections that she makes which are ripped away, such as when she learns to draw from tragic character-of-the-day Milosh [Jay Hickman], who naturally does not survive his debut episode. It’s present with Mireille too, however, as her comparative involvement with ordinary society is always cut against how profoundly the loss of her parents stung her, and how her past sometimes pops up in unexpected ways to fill her with dread. The largest of all of these contrasts however, is much bigger than any single character. Rather, it’s the twin notions of self-determination and fatalism. The opening spiel at the start of each episode tells us that Noir is “the name of an ancient fate”, and that’s a thought the anime takes very seriously.

In episode 11, around the show’s halfway point, we’re introduced to Chloe [Hilary Haag], our third main character.

Chloe, like Kirika, is a teenage girl who is also a ridiculously skilled hitman, possibly to an even greater extent than Kirika herself. Quite unlike Kirika, Chloe is a Soldat, under the thumb of one of the Soldat leaders, the mysterious priestess Altena [Tiffany Lynn Grant]. Chloe and Kirika are quite quickly established to have a mysterious connection that is only elaborated upon at length toward the very end of the series. They’re on a similar wavelength in general, a fact that clearly disturbs Mireille. All the more troubling is Chloe’s claim of being a “true Noir.” As we eventually learn, that name was originally given to the pairs of agents serving the Soldat high priestess. Our main duo are thus left to consider the idea that their meeting and adopting the Noir codename was determined from the very beginning, a suggestion that only becomes more likely as the show crams detail upon detail into the margins of the characters’ pasts, most especially Mireille’s backstory. I can imagine a certain kind of person finding this overbearing, even convoluted. I’m inclined to accept it for what it is; a further reinforcement of the dreamlike, haunted nature of this entire story.

It’s worth pointing out, too, how all of these characters—our leads of course, but also Chloe and her mysterious handler Altena—are weomen. Noir features a fairly intense homoeroticism, culminating in, when the main duo temporarily break up during the final arc, Kirika referring to Mireille as “my dear Mireille” in a tearful letter. I’ve seen it claimed that Noir has “yuri undertones,” but frankly this seems far too cautious, the show simply has romantic yearning as another thread of its emotional tapestry. This marriage of themes isn’t coincidental, either. Noir seems to suggest that its characters being queer reinforces their outcast nature within society. As queer people, we are present in society’s clockwork, but not truly a part of it, and that separation is only further reinforced by the girls’ occupations. It’d be easy to assume the contrary, that Noir was conflating homosexuality and the girls’ professions to condemn both of them, but this is at odds with the immense humanity that all of these relationships are written with. (And Noir‘s complicated views on violence.) Even the spiny, borderline-yandere obsession Silvana has with Mireille is well-considered, and it goes without saying that Mireille and Kirika’s relationship is the center of the series. Chloe, too, gets a lot of consideration, and when she dies in the final episode, seemingly as punishment for daring to kiss Kirika on the lips just fifteen or so realtime minutes before, it feels less like Noir spitting on a character’s grave and more simply a grim reflection that there are times and places where this sort of thing does, in fact, get you killed.

That last arc is where Noir tries to answer at least a few of the many questions it raised earlier in the story. To leave out a great many details (both for the sake of preserving some of the show’s tricks and to not bog this article down with any further length), Kirika is eventually revealed as being another of the Soldats’ trained-from-birth assassins. What’s more surprising is that this is also true of Mireille, and her parents’ murder stems directly from their refusal, when she was a child, to hand her over to Altena. Altena is revealed to be behind this program of “saplings” in the first place. This raises the obvious question of why she’s doing this, and what the Soldats are actually seeking to gain.

Just as our leads take jobs from whoever will pay for them, and pursue no coherent agenda but what they’re seeking from their own pasts, the Soldats, similarly, don’t seem to be shaping the world to anyone’s ends but their own. Power not only corrupts, Noir ventures, it blinds. The Soldats, despite their mystical trappings and Illuminati-coded global reach, are not really any different from any other group of soldiers or guerillas. Lethal violence to reinforce the power of the group is the order of the day, and all else is bloviating self-justification. Altena, despite the motherly countenance she puts on throughout the series, and her own claims that the Soldats were once champions of the oppressed, isn’t really doing much more than lying to herself.

Altena is only given a fairly subtle characterization, in fact. Without close viewing I imagine some might come away from Noir finding her actions nonsensical. The only direct look at Altena’s past we get is through a handful of un-narrated, brief flashbacks. Despite their brevity, they paint a bleak picture; a girl whose home was destroyed by invading soldiers, and whose innocence was stolen from her at gunpoint. How she fell in with the Soldats from there goes unsaid, but it’s easy to make the leap that learning this organization existed, and that they didn’t help her and her people despite their lofty ideals, simply broke her. In her role as a leader of the Soldats, she passes this pain onto her “saplings” in motherly guise. In the final episode, she outlines the real purpose of, at least, her version of the “true Noir.” To simply be a scapegoat for humanity’s worst impulses, to kill for no reason but to perpetuate the killing, again and again, across the globe, and through time.

That fatalistic outlook runs counter to the nihilism (in the neutral sense) of Noir itself, so it’s unsurprising that she doesn’t succeed. In the final episode, Altena’s grand plans come to little, and the final sacrificial victim of her “ritual” is the woman herself. Neither Mireille nor Kirika kill her directly, in doing so breaking Altena’s hold on their lives. Instead, cornered, Altena attempts to get Kirika to shoot her.

Kirika refuses this, choosing to shoulder her actions not under the codename Noir but as herself, attempting to sacrifice herself while saving Mireille and stopping Altena’s plans. In the end, Kirika is saved, and Altena dies without her intervention. The threat gone, our girls cast off the mantle of Noir, and declining any alliance with the remaining factions of the Soldats that remain, they strike out on their own. They may never know peace, but they have each other. In a sense, they are free.

It’s a very open ended conclusion to a show that asks many questions but offers few answers, only that we must all ultimately take responsibility for what we do (or indeed what we don’t), regardless of our choices.

Time has done curious things to the legacy of Noir, perhaps appropriately for an anime so concerned with the past. In its day, the series seems to have been both widely-liked and fairly widely-watched, but “its day” was more than 20 years ago, and unlike some other anime of roughly that vintage that prominently feature f/f pairings (say Revolutionary Girl Utena from a few years prior), Noir seems to have been largely written out of the history books, at least in the anglosphere.1 Despite this, its reputation was still such that as recently as 2012, Starz, the American network, hadn’t fully given up on trying to adapt the series to live action for American audiences, well before the “anime live action remake” became a trend and then a punchline. It was clearly a success for its studio, the late Bee Train, as well, as positive reception prompted the creation of two spiritual sequels in the form of Madlax and El Cazador de la Bruja. And from a fandom perspective, it’s historically important, as it indirectly led to the creation of Yuri Hime.2 So while it’s a shame that Noir doesn’t come up more in retrospectives of yuri as an umbrella term, or just in discussions of early aughts anime in general, it can’t really be said to have left no footprint. Stories that have aged this well will probably always be waiting to be rediscovered by each subsequent generation. I doubt Noir will truly fade from the collective awareness of the dedicated anime fan any time soon. Indeed, I only came across the show by total serendipity myself. It happened to be airing on one of PlutoTV’s anime channels, and I was instantly hooked off of the few episodes I saw there. (Maybe that’s the real magic planet of anime at work right there.)

There is, to be sure, also a lot I’ve left unsaid here. It’s nearly criminal that I haven’t mentioned Kajiura Yuki‘s soundtrack up to this point, as its ghostly choirs and mysterious melodies not only presage what she’d later do on Puella Magi Madoka Magica, they’re just as crucial to establishing the show’s atmosphere as the delicate visual work of, most especially, the painterly backgrounds. There’s also a few nitpicks I could make, but they’re minor enough that I’ve left them by the wayside here, because the series does so much right that they truly do feel like nitpicks as opposed to major complaints. That’s Noir, arresting, haunting, cool as hell, worth counting as among the standouts of its generation. It’s probably not going to truly go away anytime soon.

1: My hunch is that this is at least partly because of the noticeable age gap in the main pairing of Kirika/Mireille. It’s not the sort of thing that bothers me—and honestly I’d argue there are bigger obstacles to those two having a relationship you could truly call healthy—but I can imagine others minding it. Also maybe Chloe’s death? I am of the impression that my reading of that plot beat is not universal or necessarily even common. A cynical part of me wonders if Kirika seemingly crushing on Milosh in his one episode might be part of it, too. But I’d prefer not to think so.

2: See the translated portion of this article excerpted here in this tumblr post.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, Tumblr, or Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi. 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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 The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [7/1/24]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

Hello, anime fans! We have a quiet lineup this week, but that’s only because we’re in the between-season doldrums where last season’s shows have all ended and this season’s have mostly not yet premiered. We’re here to cover one of the few that already did and an ongoing annual that I’m fond of. (Also one last finale, but to be honest I had little to say about it.) There’s also a new section of the column, here. Keep scrolling and you’ll see what I mean.

Before that, I do just want to once again plug my reviews for Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night and Girls Band Cry, the twin music originals that aired this past season. Honestly, they started out fairly different and ended up miles away from each other in every important respect, but the sisters-by-circumstance will probably always be compared just because they happened to air at the same time. I feel a little bad for the former in that I can’t help but think it might have been a bit better received if it had aired back in Winter. Still, for my money, both have their strengths, and Girls Band Cry is basically an instant classic.

Anime

Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture – Episode 2

I have a lot of positive things to say about this episode, but before we get to any of them we have to address my one big criticism of it. The main sour note here is just, man, do we really have to call the prison that the Japanese resistance are being held in a “concentration camp?” I’m not sure if the use of that term is to be blamed on the subtitlers or the writers (a bit of on-screen text actually says *relocation* camp instead, although I think that’s just a euphemism for the other thing anyway). Usually, I make some effort to excuse Code Geass‘ generally reckless use of politically-charged imagery, but it very much is possible to push these things too far, and that is definitely the case here. (The original series sometimes did so as well, so it’s not like this is a sin unique to Rozé, but still.) It’s very much a down note in an otherwise pretty good episode, and it put a damper on my mood. Not mentioning it would also just feel irresponsible. So! There it is. I don’t know why they did that and I’m not going to attempt to excuse it.

Anyway, the actual prison liberation itself is pretty good and very action-packed. The show’s establishing a pattern here with Ash taking down arrogant Britannian knights that is admittedly a cheap thrill but one that I’m pretty into. I like his little speeches when he inevitably bests them.

There are two main things we learn in this episode. One; Sakuya and Sakura don’t seem to actually be related and instead have a royal body double situation going on. What does this open us up for? Why, Code Geass Yuri, of course. I’m not going to blow anyone’s mind by praising wlw romantic tension in a show when the blog that I pull these weekly posts from has the URL “yurisorcerer.tumblr.com”, but nonetheless, I am going to say; good job with that, Rozé of the Recapture. May your bounty of lilies be endless.

The other thing is that hey, it turns out that Sakuya-as-Rozé doesn’t have as straightforward a relationship with Ash as we were initially led to believe (who could’ve seen that coming?). Given the flashback we’re shown, the case seems to be that Ash is under a very complicated iteration of Sakuya’s geass, and in fact plans to kill him after she’s completed her tasks of rescuing Sakura and freeing Area 11 from the Neo-Britannian yoke, to “avenge her father.”

We’ll learn more about that in the weeks to come, I’d guess. It really feels like Sakuya is a very complex character that we’re only getting to look at one layer at a time. I like that, it makes her notably distinct from Lelouch whose whole deal we basically understood right away even if it later became more complicated.

So, yeah, in spite of my major complaint, this was a solid episode. (I could complain about the fanservice too if I wanted to, but honestly I’m disinclined to do so. That’s always been a thing Code Geass has gone over the top with, and I feel like anyone still onboard with the series has to know that by now. Code Geass Ass Shots make a proud return here after being absent in the first week, in fact.) I’d put it about on par with the first episode overall.

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 12 (Finale)

This sure was a final episode of a TV anime! I really don’t have a lot to say about this. The voice acting was good, Fairouz Ai and the cat boss youkai’s VA (who I can’t find for some reason) give their all here. This is a perfectly fine end to an extremely middling adaptation of a manga that is good but not like, that good, to begin with. Also it’s completely unrelated to any material in the actual manga! They just made a whole new ending up! This used to be a very common practice but it’s not anymore, and I’m surprised to see it brought back for an adaptation as underwhelming as this one.

Suffice to say, I’m glad to put this one in the books (har har har). Not the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and even this year I’ve seen much worse, but I’ve seen much better, too.

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 56

Normally when I write these, even the less serious ones for the weekly column, I try to keep in mind that my audience is not me and I am not my audience. Obviously, what you’re ultimately always getting is my opinion, but I normally attempt to give some consideration to how others might feel, too.

All this to say, I can’t do that here. This is an episode with a lot of Rika in it. I cannot be normal about Rika. I have tried in the past and failed.

It should’ve been me.

She’s beautiful, fantastic, gorgeous, amazing, dazzling, attractive, and her voice [provided by Saiga Mitsuki] makes my head spin. She speaks to a nervous Liko with empathy and humor, she lightly talks herself up during the (amazing) fight, but honestly she could be a lot more boastful and it still wouldn’t feel unjustified. I spent enough of the episode having a gay meltdown that I probably missed some of the finer details, but can you really blame me? She’s just electric to watch.

You guys have no idea how hard it is to not just post thirty examples of her winning smile in a row.

Right, the battle itself. Liko’s battle partner is Katy, the usual first gym leader in the Scarlet / Violet games. She puts in a good showing for the first half of the episode, with her Lokix really standing out in giving a Pokémon that isn’t particularly prominent in its home game some shine. The little guy comes off as every bit as cool as his Kamen Rider inspiration.

When the battle comes down to just Liko and Floragato against Rika and her Clodsire, things really fly off the rails, and we get the delightful experience of watching Liko undergo some character growth in real time when she (perhaps inevitably) loses. The Liko we see here, properly invested in the outcome of her battles because Floragato is, and she wants what’s best for her partner Pokémon, is a far cry from the shy little bean we met over a year ago in episode 1.

Over in the B-Part of the episode, Penny [Hirohashi Ryou] makes her on-screen debut, and she’s pretty great, too, terse and a little mysterious. What little drips we get of her backstory seem to vaguely imply that this anime actually takes place after some version of the game’s events? Which feels like it can’t possibly actually be what they’re going for, but it’s an interesting thought, regardless. (It would definitely explain the rather strange name of ‘The Explorers’ for our villain group. Thinking on this the day after I initially wrote it, maybe what’s being alluded to here is actually the earlier explorations of Area Zero.) Either way, we’re definitely getting into some interesting stuff here, Penny and Dot come across a mysterious “Scarlet Book” with what’s clearly Koraidon on its front cover. Mysteries upon mysteries! And really a good reminder that for all that’s happened over the past year or so, we’re still really just getting started with Pokémon Horizons. Not that I’m complaining! It’s quietly become one of my favorite ongoing anime.

Around The Internet

So! Here’s a new section of the columns that I haven’t figured out exactly how I’m going to handle in the archives. Essentially, I wanted to give a shout out to both to fellow anime bloggers and also just to various other critics I’ve been reading recently. Some of these people also write about anime, some of them write about other things entirely, but my hope is you’ll check some of them out if you like my own work.

Short Reflection: Spring 2024 Anime, by Anime Binge-Watcher – A tumblr post of decent length by fellow anime blogger (and Magic Planet Anime Discord Server member!), Anime Binge-Watcher. I don’t agree with all (or even most) of ABW’s ratings for the anime we both watched this past season, but I appreciate their perspective on things regardless, and it’s always interesting to read a well-thought-out opinion from someone who you don’t entirely align with. Even more interesting to me is their opening recommendation of the Dead Dead Demons’ Dededede Destruction anime (retrofitted from a film, not entirely unlike what’s happening with Rozé of the Recapture), that was just not on my radar at all but sounds (and looks, given their screencaps) pretty arresting. I’m also super happy to see another person really give it up for Girls Band Cry. And they even draw a connection between the traditional “rival group” in idol anime and that series that I hadn’t really considered before, but makes sense now that it’s been pointed out to me, especially when taken in context with eg. the rock-inflected stylings of a group like Saint Snow. In any case! It’s a good article, and I recommend it.

Aard Labor, by someone seemingly going by just “Tom”, at FreakyTrigger – Here’s something that’s both way out of my wheelhouse and could also easily eat up a whole afternoon. I’m not super familiar with UK-based pop culture criticism site FreakyTrigger, but it seems that earlier this year, a person there tasked themselves with the monumental and unenviable task of reading, and then reviewing, volume by volume, the entirety of Cerebus the Aardvark, the legendarily unhinged Canadian comic book epic that plots the evolution of its title character from a simple “funny animal” placed in a Conan the Barbarian parody up to frothing-at-the-mouth, ranting antifeminism and existential terror of its final volumes. Cerebus itself was (and I assume still is?) pretty infamous for many years as an early example of the kind of pure-id getting lost in the weeds that we now mostly associate with webcomics. I will cop to having never read the series myself, its massive length and reputation as moral bugspray have kept me away, but I’m more than happy to see someone else dive into it, especially if they’re as observant and thoughtful as article author Tom seems to be.

That’s all for this week, anime fans! The coming week proper is probably going to be pretty busy over here, although it’s hard to say for sure, so keep an eye on your inbox so you can know when any first impressions articles or such go up. Also! I will once again ask that if you like anything I’ve written in this column, or on the site in general recently, please consider dropping me a tip on Ko-Fi. Due to various life issues, I don’t have a regular job, so these donations help me afford basic necessities like food, medicine, clothes, yadda yadda. (And occasionally less essential things! I would really love to buy one of Togenashi Togeari’s albums, but I’m getting into Christmas Wishlist territory there.)

See you soon, 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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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, Reviews

(REVIEW) Pop Music is an Ocean: JELLYFISH CAN’T SWIM IN THE NIGHT and the Rough Waters of The Girl Band Genre

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

We aren’t there yet, so it’s an educated guess at most, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spring 2024 season is remembered in hindsight as that of the yuri-inflected girl band series. You had the return of Hibike Euphonium, you had Girls Band Cry, you had Whisper Me A Love Song, for what little it contributed, but Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night was, we’ll remember, there as well. For its first half dozen or so episodes, you could easily have argued that it was in fact the most beloved of all of the new entries here, as Girls Band Cry‘s anglosphere cult following had not yet reached fever pitch. In an even broader view, I wouldn’t be surprised if the long view of history lumps Jellyfish together with an even wider circle of anime; Bocchi the Rock!, It’s MyGO, whatever becomes of the Ave Mujica anime slated for next year, etc. Grouping all of these anime together is, of course, ultimately reductive, but something I’ve learned over the several years that I’ve been writing about anime is this; nothing escapes the context in which it is created.

This is particularly unfair to Jellyfish for a number of reasons, but one of them is that on a basic premise level, Jellyfish differs a bit from its contemporaries. JELEE, the “band” in Jellyfish, is really more of an arts collective centered around a pseudonymous vocalist. My immediate point of comparison was ZUTOMAYO, but really, any of the night scene bands that followed in their wake are a decent point of reference. Like some of those (but unlike ZTMY itself), JELEE’s membership is fairly small, consisting of vocalist Yamanouchi Kano [Takahashi Rie], composer and keyboardist Takanashi Kim Anouk Mei [Shimabukuro Miyuri], visual artist Kouzuki Mahiru, who also goes by Yoru [Itou Miku], and social media wizard Watase Kiui, who is also a VTuber under the name Nox Ryugasaki [Tomita Miyu].

The show is divided roughly into two parts, with the former half focused on JELEE coming together and then attempting to make a name for themselves, and the latter with the emotional fallout of Kano’s former career as an idol under the emotionally abusive management of her mother. Bluntly, the former works a lot better, and while there are a number of threads and subplots here, the ones that are successful share a certain verisimilitude. They focus more on things that seem like actual issues a contemporary pop group would encounter while trying to find a foothold in the uncaring ocean of the modern internet. These are generally simple. Some are pragmatic questions of how to get your music out there, others are more abstract and deal with things like finding artistic drive within yourself, being unashamed to express yourself for who you truly are, etc. The common element is pursuing your passions in a world that may be apathetic or even actively hostile to your doing so.

This takes different forms depending on the character. For Mahiru, who is perhaps the show’s “main protagonist” in as much as it really has one, it’s as simple as a lack of self-esteem and a tall order of impostor syndrome. For Kano, it’s significantly more complicated; she struggles to be noticed as an utaite1, making cover songs in the aftermath of her failed idol career, there with a group called the Sunflower Dolls that she left under decidedly acrimonious terms after slugging one of the other members in the face. Mei and Kiui2 have it hard, too. We meet the former after years of burying herself in fandom for “Nonoka,” Kano’s old idol persona, as a coping method for dealing with the bullying she endured in school for being “weird” (read: neurodivergent) and for being biracial. We meet the latter, Mahiru’s childhood friend, constantly lying their ass off through the other side of a computer screen. Kiui spends most of the early show immersed in their VTuber persona and telling tall tales about how popular they are at school and such. (They aren’t.)

Jellyfish splits its time unevenly between these characters—not inherently an issue—with most of the early show focusing on Mahiru and most of the latter half of the series focusing on Kano. It’s not a clean split, as episodes primarily about Kiui are sprinkled throughout. Mei gets the short end of the stick, with only her introductory episode and a handful of stray scenes later on really focusing on her as a person.

For the first part of the show, the main thrust of the plot is the formation of JELEE itself, the arts collective that the girls create as a vehicle for Kano’s singing, Mei’s composition, and Mahiru’s visual art. JELEE finds a fair amount of early success, and this early phase of the show hits its peak during one of Mahiru’s bouts of self-doubt. Admitting that she resents that other artists can draw JELEE-chan—the jellyfish-themed mascot she created for the group—better than she can, she and Kano have a heart to heart in the snow, and Kano kisses Mahiru on the cheek. (Followups to that particular development are indirect, manifesting in such forms as Mahiru gently teasing her about it an episode or two later.)

Throughout all of this, the traumatic fallout from Kano’s previous career as an idol remains a lurking background element, but it’s only when her mother, Yukine [Kaida Yuuko], is properly introduced as a character, a fair ways into the anime, that it really becomes a central focus, and the anime shifts gears to reorient around this. It’s hard to call this change in direction a mistake, exactly, since it leads to some of the anime’s best scenes, and probably its overall best episode in its ninth, but it’s definitely a stark change, and the show handles it unevenly.

Throughout the ninth episode, we get flashbacks of how Kano came to be the original center for the Sunflower Dolls and how she was eventually kicked out of the group. Here, Kano becomes “Nonoka.” Her mother controls her style and manipulates her talents for her own ends in a plainly vile way that paints a very clear picture of her as an old-school slimeball record exec. Really, the moment that seals the deal in hindsight is when she lays out her goals to Kano. “I want to one day nurture an artist who sings to 50,000 people.” (Jellyfish floats a lot of numbers around over the course of its runtime, but that one, the 50,000 associated with the maximum seating capacity of the Tokyo Dome, is the one it runs back most frequently.) Unfortunately, Kano’s time with the Sunflower Dolls comes to an unceremonious end when she discovers that Mero, one of the other girls in the group, has been running a Youtube page that spreads gossip and inflames scandals about rival acts. Enraged, Kano punches her—the incident we’ve known about for the whole show, but only then get the full context for—and her career in the traditional idol industry ends in an instant. She’s so overcome with shame and emotion that the show actually switches art styles. In a compelling, lightly experimental touch, the visuals seem to turn into something like a burning oil painting, as though Kano is physically igniting under the harsh, dispassionate glare of her mother.

All of this portrays Kano as a victim in an industry that is certainly no stranger to victimizing even its youngest performers, and paints Yukine as, at best, deeply callous about her daughter’s suffering, and at worst, an outright abusive figure, a gender-flipped version of the archetypal sinister record executive-patriarch. It’ll make you want to scream “leave Kano alone!” at your TV, if you’re anything like me.

It’s worth noting that all of these flashbacks are broadly from Kano’s own point of view, but there’s relatively little evidence of some kind of unreliable narrator thing going on, and the trauma Kano endures from all of these events is obviously very real. This is unfortunate in its own way, because it feeling so raw and so emotionally resonant means that when the show tries to tie Kano and Yukine’s relationship up with minimal fuss in the last episode it really doesn’t work, as we’ll come back to. And as a further side note; we have no reason to directly suspect that Yukine was encouraging Mero’s little side activity in running the Youtube channel, but it so clearly seems like the kind of thing she’d do, given what little we have to go on, that I have a hard time imagining at least some of the story here isn’t trying to imply that.

Back in the show’s present, Yukine approaches Mahiru with an offer to do some visual work for the current incarnation of the Sunflower Dolls. (One with Mero as the center, mind you.) Yukine certainly seems to have ulterior motives for doing this, and when Mahiru tells Kano about her plans to take the job offer—pushing back a release of one of JELEE’s own songs in the process—Kano absolutely blows up at her, calling Mahiru a liar and ranting about how she’s the only reason anyone knows Mahiru’s art in the first place. It is legitimately hard to watch, and in the moment, it made quite the strong impression on me. (Especially when coupled with the absolutely diabolical editing decision to have that episode’s outro mostly be a montage of the two calling each other’s names.) With hindsight though, I actually think this is where Jellyfish starts to fall apart. Kano and Mahiru don’t really get many scenes together in the episodes after this, and those that do are brief and feel unsatisfying. Is that realistic? Sure, maybe, and if the series wanted to lean in to the emotional hurt there, and make it seem like these two would never be close again, that would also be a valid artistic decision. The problem is that it doesn’t really do either of these things, as we’ll circle back to.

Not every plot the show tries is derailed in this manner, of course. Kiui gets a great arc wherein they manage to overcome some of their severe social anxiety. The work with JELEE brings them out of their shell somewhat, but they really begin to undergo some proper character development during a small arc where they’re attempting to get a motorcycle license, staying at a driving school for a time, with Kano, in pursuit of that goal. There, they meet an older woman named Koharu [Seto Asami]. Koharu is an interesting, if minor figure in Jellyfish, an all-but-outright-stated-to-be-trans woman who’s an implied former yakuza and who hits on Kiui basically as soon as they show up. The two hit it off, and their budding romance is a very small but legitimately sweet part of the show, and the few conversations they have over the course of the series feel very lived-in, especially when they get into nerdy areas of discussion like denpa visual novels and the like. (Even this isn’t perfect and I might rewrite some of Koharu’s dialogue, to put it mildly, but you take what you can get with these things.)

Kiui even gets what is probably the last great moment in the series. In episode 11, they and Mahiru are at an arcade and run into some former classmates of theirs. Jellyfish takes a moment to get extremely real here, as the kids hate Kiui not just for how they’re generally “weird” but also for their apparent lack of conforming to the gender binary.

Kiui, in a minor moment of triumph, gathers the inner conviction to tell them off by tapping into her own VTuber persona, which, they seem to realize in doing so, is in some ways more “real” than their outward physical self. That kind of thing, with a constructed persona that feels more in tune with “who you really are” than your actual body does, is extremely common among a certain kind of internet-native queer person. I’m speaking from experience here, and I think this plot is probably the best single thing that Jellyfish pulls off. Making people feel seen is valuable.

Mahiru and Kano’s ongoing tension, meanwhile, goes largely unaddressed during all of this, and they appear to forgive each other in the final episode—after the big, emotional finale, which, with a few days of hindsight behind me, feels quite flat—based on….vibes, I suppose? They don’t really talk anything out! And I’m not the sort of person to demand lengthy on-screen Healthy Emotional Communication, but something a bit more substantial than the little we get here would be nice, and that really is my central problem with Jellyfish. It has all of these moments that are good to great, but they don’t cohere, because the show either can’t make them fit together in a way that feels holistic or it simply drops them entirely.

If I had to guess, what Jellyfish wants to do is use this act of simply stopping at a certain point as a statement unto itself. In the last moments of the show there are clearly still some unaddressed problems. Kano, for instance, obsesses over her performance in the finale being seen by over 50,000 people—that magic number her mom planted in her head as a kid—and the rest of JELEE are rightly weirded out by the whole thing. But we’re clearly also supposed to feel that this is essentially a happy ending for them, as the show’s last real scene is JELEE banding together to paint over the jellyfish mural—an old piece of Mahiru’s art—that inspired their endeavor to begin with. It’s beautifully drawn and composed, and it tries so hard to sell these big emotions, but it feels almost perfunctory, regardless. As though Jellyfish is doing this because it can’t stomach showing us an actual unhappy ending, or because it thinks we’d be angry if it did so.

Whether one wants to see Jellyfish as an anime that is sabotaged by this flaw or one that manages to work in spite of it is largely a matter of perspective. Can you ignore Yukine’s abuse going unaddressed? Can you ignore that the show never circles back around to Mero torpedo’ing the careers of the Rainbow Girls? Can you ignore the unshakeable feeling that this whole thing really needed another six episodes or so to really breathe? That it really clearly does not have the space to do everything it wants to do? All of that is going to depend on the person. For some, this is going to come off as extreme nitpicking and I will seem very shrill. I must again stress however that I’m fine with these things not being solved on-screen, I just want the show to follow up on them, any of them, in some form.

For me, the clearly stitched-together nature of the writing in the show’s latter half kills much of the emotional resonance I felt in its best moments. Some anime are camp enough, strange enough, or challenging enough to get away with ending on what’s essentially a shrug. If it clicked enough with you, you can say “well, the show is messy” and declare its flaws ignorable. Unfortunately, the emotional math involved here just doesn’t work for me. The fact that the Rainbow Girls are not characters in this narrative because we’re just supposed to write them off after their single appearance does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mero never even really directly talk, but that we’re clearly supposed to assume they’ve somehow reconciled does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mahiru are, in fact, entirely kept apart for most of the show’s final third does not work for me. The fact that Kano’s lack of forgiveness to her mother is signified by nothing more than playfully brushing her off in the show’s closing minutes after she sends a goddamn limo to Kano’s school does not work for me. None of this works for me! That’s really frustrating!

Let’s circle back to the term “messy”, in fact. “Messy” is often used, as a descriptor, to smooth over the rough edges of art we love. A way to excuse conflict and problematica because the art resonates hard enough with us that we have cause to explain its uncomfortable aspects away. You could call Jellyfish “messy,” for certain, and there are parts of it I’d apply that label to (Koharu and Kiui’s relationship, perhaps), but for the most part there’s not a lot of what I’d call messiness in Jellyfish. All of these aspects that don’t work are not messy, they’re just some shit that happens that the show gets in over its head in trying to address. This is why it feels unsatisfying on the whole despite a number of strong moments. The actual tone the show is going for gets lost somewhere in the shuffle.

The show attempts to do right by its queer audience in spite of all this; mostly in terms of Kiui’s subplot, but I think people have been a little unfair in labeling the show ‘queerbaity’ in the fairly subtle way it handles Mahiru and Kano’s relationship, as well. This, and the other more general ways the series fails to come together, creates a situation that practically begs for baseless, conspiratorial thinking. Did some suit decide the show was Too Gay, prompting a last-minute rewrite? Was there some kind of cut in episode number that impacted the narrative? Did network censors object? There’s no actual reason to believe these things, but they are the sort of theorizing that tends to pop up in the wake of an anime ending like this, because it’s an explanation. An explanation, no matter how convoluted, seems to make more sense than what appears to be the actual case; the show just faceplanted in its final stretch without a single specific cause. It happens. My personal theory is that primary scriptwriter Yaku Yuki, best known as the novelist behind Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki, had trouble adapting to the switch in format. There’s not really any more evidence for this than any of these other theories, but it would make sense, and would account for the show’s sometimes cramped and overstuffed writing. (In fact, I have somehow gone this entire review without mentioning the weird little side plot of Miiko [Uesaka Sumire], the 30-something idol that JELEE butt heads with a few times and eventually become friends with. The whole plot is actually pretty much fine, if not necessarily a highlight of the show. But a longer anime could have things like that without it feeling so incongruous with the rest of the series.)

I’ve spent a lot of time wracking my brain about what exactly my takeaway from Jellyfish has been without simply turning in basic qualitative assessments. It’s true that it’s probably always going to be considered in the broader “girl band anime” context, and that it isn’t the best series in that subgenre by any means. (I will also quickly make the point that, on the other hand, this is not a Metallic Rouge situation where hindsight makes it clear that the show never had any idea of what it was doing.) But putting it in those terms feels incredibly reductive! I’ve said a lot that’s negative about the show, but there is a lot to like as well! Visually, it’s pretty damn incredible! I’ve already mentioned its shift into a moving oil painting during one of Kano’s flashbacks, but it uses quite a few interesting tricks throughout, from video effects like a simulated VHS tape in the first episode, being drawn as though shot on a smartphone in the last, to rapid animation cuts to signify time passing quickly (often because Mei is enthusing over something), there’s a good amount to enjoy here in the visual dimension. The soundtrack is great, too! While I wasn’t enthused about JELEE’s music for the most part, the actual BGM is a weird, synth-heavy, analog-sounding thing that burbles and strains and hums expressively throughout essentially the whole show.

Generally speaking, the show is very stylish! The first episode in particular is a masterclass in visual storytelling! And even back on the writing end, the series’ portrayal of the suffocating smoke of having a controlling parent be absolutely furious with you is spot on! Kano pecking Mahiru on the cheek seriously does matter even if the followup isn’t as strong as we may have wanted it to be! Kiui’s complex gender identity is some of the best representation of its type I’ve ever seen in an anime! All of this is just as true as the show’s more frustrating aspects, and I think if the series develops a cult following in the years to come (and I would be unsurprised to see that happen) it will be off of these strengths. Those people will watch Jellyfish in a different way than I did. It’s true that nothing really escapes the context it’s created in, but we often only have a clear picture of that context in hindsight. Maybe, somewhere between all the aspects that frustrated me so much, is a better show that is only visible with some remove.

So that’s where we’re at. I wanted to like Jellyfish more than I did, and that’s admittedly an annoying position to be in. Because I simultaneously feel like I’m giving the show more of a pass than I should be and also being way too hard on it. But that’s the way things go sometimes! If any part of Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is truly encapsulated by the term ‘messy,’ it might be that very relationship that I, and many other viewers, have to the series in of itself. It’s obvious, but, sometimes art is not strictly good or bad! Sometimes it gets in your head in a way that causes you to spout a gushing torrent of thoughts that only barely cohere and sometimes outright contradict each other. I have said things of this nature many times on this blog, and I’ll probably say them many times more. Maybe, if all Jellyfish wanted to do was leave an impression—to shine a little, to borrow Mahiru’s own words—then my big judgy opinion about whether it’s peak or mid, man, matters less than the fact that it made me think this much about it at all. Jellyfish can’t swim, night or day. But sometimes it’s nice to just drift in the currents of the ocean and let them take you where they will; you can’t complain too much about choppy waters.

1: A kind of internet-based singer, originally associated with NicoNicoDouga, now common on Youtube as well. Perhaps the most famous utaite-turned-professional in contemporary J-pop is Ado, apparently a deliberate influence, in the case of this anime.

2: I’ve mostly spelled it “Kiwi” up until this point on this site, but “Kiui” with a U is apparently the official romanization. As for my use of they/them pronouns for the character throughout this piece, it’s clear to me that Kiui is some sort of genderqueer or nonconforming. Since it is impossible to ask a fictional character their preferred pronouns, and we’re unlikely to get official word on the subject for a variety of reasons, I am being as general as possible.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

..

.

.

.

“Goodbye, sekai!“

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Revolution Never Ended for CODE GEASS: ROZÉ OF THE RECAPTURE

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.

They fucking got me again.

Let me explain. Nearly 20 years ago, a little anime called Code Geass (subtitled Lelouch of The Rebellion) premiered, and it barged into the hearts and minds of myself and so many other impressionable young teens with reckless abandon. Short of perhaps Death Note, no anime was more synonymous with a certain kind of mid-aughts I’m 14 And This Is Deep chuuni shit. Quite unlike its former chief contender, Code Geass has remained an active franchise in the years since.1 I haven’t seen them myself, but the Akito the Exiled spinoff films have their following, and the series has kept chugging along with various ancillary media too, some available in English and some not. In 2019, the Lelouch of the Re;surrection film staked out an alternate continuity where Lelouch comes back to life. That movie was a bit of an up-and-down experience, and mostly succeeded off the strength of being a movie full of Lelouch doing Lelouch Shit, but its best moments were classic Code Geass camp and proved that the franchise still had some life left in it. Code Geass has been around, so the existence of Rozé of the Recapture, a new series of theatrical OVAs that are also being streamed week to week as a regular TV series (don’t ask me how this works, I don’t know), is not too surprising.

It’s also probably not too surprising to any longtime readers of this blog that I, the Magia Record defender, think that the first episode of what some would deride as a pointless spinoff project is actually really fucking good. In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever doubted the project. I am still the same person I was in 8th grade in one very important way; I love campy goofball shit, and Code Geass is and always has been some Grade-A campy goofball shit.

Rozé of The Recapture takes place many years after some version of the original series’ events—I’m not totally clear on how many, but it’s been long enough to let some additional light sci-fi elements seep into the setting—but rehashes the same fundamental premise. A resurgent “Neo-Britannian”2 empire has once again conquered and subjugated Japan (or at least Hokkaido), once again rebranding the region itself as Area 11 and its citizens as second-class Elevens. Once again, an underground cadre of resistance fighters struggle against their imperial overlords. There are some extra elements this time around (such as a gigantic energy barrier called the Situmpe Wall that surrounds Area 11), but the fundamental premise is the same. And once again, it’s up to a Britannian outsider to help the resistance win the day. More or less. We’ll come back to that part.

The main difference is the most obvious one. There’s no Lelouch, here. He’s gone. The emperor is dead.

In his place we have a mysterious pair of Britannian siblings named Rozé [Amasaki Kouhei] and Ash [Furukawa Makoto]. Ash has yet to make much of an impression on me, but his brother is a different story. Rozé is not Lelouch—nobody could be Lelouch, that’s an impossible pair of shoes to fill—but he’s a pretty fun protagonist so far, with a whimsical and playful personality that belies the brain of a serious tactician. Rozé, however, commands a battlefield that is significantly weathered from his predecessor’s day. In general, Rozé of the Recapture has a marginally more grim aesthetic sensibility than the original series. It’s as though the order was to make it just as camp but twice as dark. Everyone still dresses like a lunatic, and the show has that same love of cutting from battlefield to command room shenanigans to domestic scene and back at a wild pace that the original did, and it even also has its love of bold—perhaps reckless—incorporation of very bleak imagery into something that’s otherwise so fun, but it does feel a bit less bright, even literally, than the original Code Geass did. It’s as though Code Geass knows it is returning to a world that is, if you can believe it, even bleaker than the one it left in 2008. Having not seen them, I can’t comment on how directly this follows from the sensibilities of the Akito the Exiled side series, but I wouldn’t be shocked if those have been quietly building a bridge from the original series’ point of view to that of this anime.

As for the actual events of this episode, despite the slightly updated setting they’ll be very familiar to any returning Code Geass heads. We open with some exposition, and after the OP, a pretty grim scene of Britannian noble siblings—both of a class of knight called Einbergs, something that seems like it will be a recurring thing over the course of this show—Greede and Gran Kirkwayne [Nojima Hirofumi and Ono Yuuki, respectively] being absolutely horrible to a group of random Japanese citizens. This culminates with Gran, the more hotheaded of the two, shooting a man he’s holding hostage in the head. When his wife cries out in grief, Greede makes a token effort to perfunctorily apologize, only to then shoot her when she understandably spits on him. The scene ends with Greede ordering his men to unceremoniously massacre the rest of the gathered group. The message is pretty clear; the Kirkwaynes are bad people, power-drunk authoritarians and bigots with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Fair enough.

So of course, our protagonists are tasked by the fabulously-named Seven Shining Stars resistance group with taking them out. Their infiltration into the Britannian base, to the extent that it even counts as infiltration, is classic Code Geass. Ash’s knightmare frame emerges from a wrapped-up present box and Rozé spends much of the scene dressed like a clown; you can’t ask for much better than that. Rozé does eventually actually properly infiltrate the base, confronting Greede, the brains of the operation, directly.

The two have a very classically Geassian back and forth. The series’ famous chess motifs return here, as absolutely ridiculously goofball as they were in 2006. Rozé and Greede strategize while poking at some kind of holographic tabletop chess display. When the moment is right, Rozé orders his brother to go all out, and back in the actual battlefield we get some genuinely riveting mecha action, complete with Ash skewering Gran and his knightmare frame with a pair of its own swords after laying down some pretty fantastic shit-talk about how Gran’s a worthless coward.

The robot is pretty cool too. We don’t get a name for it here, but look at it!

Back in the base, we get a fantastic twist here as Rozé, with Greede at gunpoint, offers the Britannian noble a choice. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that he doesn’t give him a choice per se. Because Rozé doesn’t do anything per se. There is no Rozé.

Meet Sumeragi Sakuya [Ueda Reina], the actual protagonist of Rozé of the Recapture.

I am almost never at a loss for words when writing these columns. There’s a lot to say about even fairly uninteresting anime, and Rozé of the Recapture is anything but that so far. But seriously, what the hell does anyone want me to say? They made a character who looks like Lelouch a woman and had her crossdress for most of the first episode. I’m in love, sue me. I’ve seen the phrase “Lelouch of the Transition” drift around the Internet in regards to this twist and, I mean, what can I possibly say that’s better than that? (It does say a lot that this random tweet showcasing the scene immediately following this has done more marketing for Rozé of The Recapture than Disney+, who are distributing it in North America, have, but that is perhaps unsurprising, given their track record.) This scene is what made it truly obvious to me that the show is dedicated to recapturing that spirit of the original as much as possible, hopefully without too-directly rehashing many of its plot points. Rozé of The Recapture does basically nothing at all here to endear itself to any new audiences, and it definitely isn’t going to change the opinion of anyone in the “Code Geass sucks, actually” crowd, but I honestly think that is fine. Code Geass is so entirely itself that trying to “adapt to the times” would’ve been doomed to fail. Call this the rare Millennial nostalgia play that I’m fully onboard for.

In any case, Sakuya shows off her Geass. We don’t know how she got it or precisely how it works—my reverse-engineering attempt here is that it somehow forces the target to choose between two options if they hear her give a command—but she offers Greede the choice of saving a hundred times more Japanese people than he’s ordered dead or killing himself. Suffice to say, Mr. Kirkwayne does not survive to the end of the episode.

We close on Sakuya—back in-character as Rozé—talking to the Stars. She says that she and Ash knew from the jump that this entire mission was more of a test than anything else, and asks what the real objective they’re being hired for is. The answer? To liberate an Alcatraz-like offshore prison to free some of the Stars’ comrades. It just so happens that someone that Sakuya euphemistically calls a ‘friend’—someone named Sakura, who looks so similar to Sakuya that they could be mistaken for each other—is also being held there, under the pretense that she’s Sakuya. The amount of hilarious shenanigans this is setting up is truly dizzying to consider, but the main takeaway is one very important thing; if Code Geass isn’t back per se, that’s only because it never really left.

1: Technically, there actually have been a few short story collections and one-shots and things. But I think there’s a reason that there’s no Death Note spinoff airing right now. Lelouch would whip Light’s ass in any serious battle of wits, by the way. Just saying.

2: I will be using the series’ ridiculous alternate history terminology religiously while discussing it as it airs, thank you.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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: The Puzzle of PON NO MICHI

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.

The seasonal anime churn is pretty accessible nowadays compared to where it was even 15 years ago. Most shows get officially brought over in some capacity and are available on some streaming site. Because of that, in the rare case where that’s not true, it’s worth seeking out the odd show with no official North American release just to see what it is that could be holding it back from an official pickup.

With Pon no Michi, there’s an obvious answer; the subject matter, a parody-heavy slice of life comedy about riichi mahjong, is very Japanese. But that said, this has never really stopped the importation of mahjong-themed anime and manga before, so it’s a bit of a mystery as to why this one specifically didn’t get picked up for the ol’ US of A, especially given that mahjong is probably having the closest thing to a Moment in recent years over here as it’ll ever have, given the recent popularity of games like Mahjong Soul. (You can try to watch it on BilliBilli’s English site, but doing so, at least in the US, gets you a “video unavailable due to the request of the copyright holder” notice. So who knows what’s going on there.)

It’s also a bit of a shame, because while Pon no Michi is probably not going to be anyone’s anime of the season, its premiere is a delightful and quirky little thing. This is the kind of low-stakes comedic fun that tends to get shows slapped with the “cute girls doing cute things” pseudo-genre label. I’ve never been fond of that term myself, but, if you wanted to apply it to Pon no Michi, it’d be hard to argue against. There are girls. They are cute. They do things (play mahjong poorly and also just generally dick around). The shoe fits. This is all also lightly inflected with Gay, as such anime tend to be. Not enough to earn it a yuri label, but enough that fans of yuri will probably have fun shipping this cast of wonderfully silly idiots. It’s a nice watch.

It’s also surprisingly odd. Elements like a magic, talking bird that claims to be a “mahjong spirit”, frequent style cuts that parody a plethora of other mahjong manga and anime, and a character who appears late in the episode to call our lead “ojou-sama” would seem incongruous in an even slightly more grounded show. But here, where the actual mahjong play is secondary to the gags, they fit just fine.

The actual plot is so barely-there that it only just counts as one. The gist is that Nashiko Jippensha [Kaori Maeda] is being too loud when hanging out at home with her friend, Pai Kawahigashi [Iori Saeki]. Nashiko’s mom kicks them out of the house and they’re forced to go be noisy elsewhere. Nashiko and Pai chill in a park for a while until Nashiko gets a convenient phone call from her conveniently off-screen father. He then tells her that he just so happens to have recently bought an old, unused mahjong parlor nearby. With her dad’s blessing, Nashiko and friends make their way there, call in a third friend—the sprightly redhead Izumi Tokutomi [Shion Wakayama]—and get to work straightening the place up so they can claim it as their own personal hangout spot.

While doing so, they stumble upon its mahjong-enabling accoutrements, including an electric shuffling table. In the process, Nashiko meets the aforementioned magic bird, who the girls name Chonbo [Akio Ootsuka], and the remainder of the episode is spent on silly nonsense.

The girls don’t actually know much about mahjong, is an important point. Nashiko knows by far the least, having apparently never even heard of it. As such, the girls’ first “mahjong game” quickly deteriorates into the lot of them being goofy, such as Nashiko declaring she’s using her “Red Dragon Beam” when slapping down a Red Dragon tile. This is also where most of the aforementioned parodies of other anime come into play (I’ll admit to most of them flying over my head, but even I know about Akagi, since it’s by the Kaiji mangaka.)

Did I mention that the rich-girl character who calls Nashiko “ojou-sama” in the episode’s closing minutes is named Riiche [Yui Kondou], after the mahjong term? Again, the show’s a bit silly.

All told, this seems like a solid pickup that one will unfortunately have to go a bit out of their way to experience. Still, for those among us who appreciate a nice slice of lighthearted comedy with a wildly catchy theme song, it might just be worth doing.

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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or similar technology is used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. 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, Reviews

(REVIEW) To Die Amidst the Azalea Bloom – VAMPIRE IN THE GARDEN and the Modern Queer Tragedy

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

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

“There must be a paradise waiting for us somewhere.”

The image of a vampire in a garden is a pleasant one. Consider it for a moment; the bloodsucking creature of folklore allowed to sit in peace, the Sun gently lighting her face in the way it does for the rest of us. Throughout Vampire in The Garden, we examine this visual metaphor, jewel-like as it is, from several angles. Some of these are surprisingly literal, others symbolic, but it’s clear from the outset, and throughout the miniseries, that the primary meaning is not that of a greenhouse or anything of the sort. It is of a garden of Eden. An imagined, perfect paradise beyond this world, in which there is no strife, violence, or hatred. In which two people who love each other can be together, even if they are from vastly different circumstances.

Even if the whole world is arrayed against them; arrows aimed at the throat.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Vampire in The Garden is yet another anime this year to focus on vampires and romance, following after the second part of The Case Study of Vanitas, but presaging summer seasonal hit Call of The Night. It has a bit in common with both of those, but its real roots lie much deeper; back in the era of 90-120 minute OVAs. Vampire is a little longer, the five-episode mini-series clocks in at about 2 hours, but it is very much a single, self-contained story. And what a story; this is easily one of the year’s best anime, no mean feat in 2022, which has been absolutely swamped with great shows. As for the production-side of things; it’s a Wit Studio project, helmed by director and series compositor Ryoutarou Makihara, his first time at the helm since the obscure Empire of Corpses.

There are two main things one must understand about Vampire in The Garden in order to properly appreciate it. 1: it is an intensely queer story. While it is true that the themes found within it could be generalized out to apply to other situations, there is a reason that both of its leads are women, and the story simply makes far less sense if you try to rationalize your way into believing that our protagonists, Fine (Yuu Kobayashi), and Momo (Megumi Han), aren’t in love. 2: it is a tragedy. Gay romances that end in heartbreak get a bad rep these days for understandable reasons, but such a thing should only truly be objectionable if it doesn’t have something to say, and Vampire in The Garden has plenty to say. Throughout, it demonstrates a keen eye for imagery and paints a very emotionally honest portrait of life as a queer person in a society that is not very accepting of those.

Consider our protagonists. On the one hand, we have

Momo; a hardworking factory girl with a talent for tinkering, who lives in a massive compound called the Tower, run by her authoritarian, abusive mother. She longs for an escape, and a flight of fancy—fixing a broken music box, forbidden, as all music and art are, in the Tower—spirals into a tragic adventure. Her close “friend” Milana is shot during a raid on the Tower by vampires, the eternal enemy of mankind in the bleak, frozen, post-apocalyptic world that Vampire takes place in. But, of course, if things were as simple as “humans vs. vampires”, we wouldn’t be here. In a combination of panic, confusion, and the urge to seize the chance to escape, she meets–

Fine; queen of the vampires. Flighty, constantly neglecting her duties by choice. She too longs for escape, and it’s a chance encounter with Momo that sets them off, together, on an adventure far from the Tower and far from Fine’s own ostensible demesne, ruled as it really is by her consort/vizier Allegro (Chiaki Kobayashi). Together, Momo and Fine are star-crossed lovers in the most classic mold possible; a Romeo & Juliet of the modern age. You already know how this story ends; amid a field of moon azaleas, somewhere deep within a cradle of earth, all graves, shed petals, and teardrops. But that doesn’t make it a journey not worth going on.

That journey sees Fine and Momo searching for that mythical paradise. Initially, they seek such a thing solely to escape the shackles of the human/vampire war itself, but before long, they’ve grown close enough that it’s clear that the promise of somewhere where humans and vampires can live together in peace, and thus where Fine and Momo can live together in peace, becomes their primary motivator. At the start of this story, Momo loses Milana, who she is clearly quite close to. We learn much later on that Fine lost someone she was quite close to, Aria, a long time ago. Momo and Fine’s relationship, as deeply upsetting as the circumstances it was born in are, is one that springs from mutual loss. They find comfort in each other in a way that feels truly human.

Their first stop is the catacomb-esque opulence of Fine’s manor, where Fine helps a wounded Momo recover. It’s here where they first start to trust each other and their relationship goes from something uncertain and tenuous to something very real and immediate. The good times are fleeting, of course, but they have meaning.

At one point, Momo stumbles into a cinema, and is so rattled by the film idly left playing—probably the first she’s ever seen, mind you—that Vampire itself dissolves into a nightmarish patchwork of loss and traumatic imagery, and it is Fine who must calm her down. For not the last time in the series, Vampire is astoundingly lyrical, a tapestry of images both in the forefront and background that imbue the world with tactility and meaning;

a bath,
a record player,
an opera singer
whose voice, spilling
out of the player
laments the loss of those
she loved

There’s a garden – a beautiful, green, lush, literal garden – where Fine grows all manner of plants, in defiance of the Sun itself. She teaches Momo to sing, to appreciate art and music. For this, she is rewarded by the pursuing humans of the Tower, and then, separately, the vampires, raiding her mansion. Both of our protagonists are pursued–

Momo by her mother’s forces.

Fine by her own subjects.

–and the mansion ends up in flames as they flee, starting a pattern that will repeat several times over the course of Vampire‘s five episodes. Momo and Fine arrive somewhere, settle there for a short time, and then are driven away by these twin forces independently pursuing them. It is worth noting that they never directly do anything we’d understand as wrong, it is simply that the very act of a human and a vampire living together is unconscionable to the people of this world.

Throughout, as these entwined swathes of fire pursue its protagonists, Vampire is able to capture a gripping, rare feeling. On the one hand, you can appreciate much of these more action-oriented scenes for what they are on a technical level, and say that Vampire, especially its first half, is a kickass action-post apoc-sci-fi-fantasy adventure. This is true, but on the other hand, it is also a near-hallucinatory torrent of love and loss; trauma, laughter, music, snow, iron, blood – mixed together, and adjoined end to uncomfortable end, a feeling evocative of memory itself. Much like the music box that serves as a leitmotif throughout the series.

Everywhere Fine and Momo go is a false promise, in a way. The manor, of stability. The segregated two-island vampire / human town they visit in episode three, of unity. The too-good-to-be-true village in the far north in episode four, of community. And finally, the blasted-out ruin of some long-forgotten metropolis in the final episode, an already-broken promise of civilization itself.

This extends somewhat to the supporting cast as well. Momo’s mother is portrayed as disturbingly, realistically abusive, swinging wildly from backhanding and berating her daughter and pleading for her forgiveness and asking for a hug. When Momo finally turns her away near the very end of the show, it’s hugely cathartic. Later in the story, we meet Elisha, the representative of the idyllic / winter horror village in episode four.

In addition to enabling the false promise of community and hospitality that the village itself represents, she’s also quick to attack Momo as a hypocrite when things go south. This is, of course, nonsense. There is a vast gulf between harming people accidentally, or in self-defense, and doing so as part of a convoluted scheme to live a life of privilege, which is what Elisha’s village is doing.

There’s also Momo’s uncle, who leads the human forces that seek to recapture her, and in the final episode it’s revealed that he too once fled from home with a vampire he loved in tow, only for that story to end on a harsh, bitter note. This recontextualizes his earlier actions; like Momo, he longed for an escape from the drudgery of a world defined by petty, pointless conflict. Unlike Momo, when that escape was ultimately denied to him, he turned his anger outward.

Which leads us to Vampire’s conclusion.

Just based on what kind of story this is, it will not surprise you that only one of our protagonists is fortunate enough to live through the ending. Fine’s death is a long, torturously slow process. At first, she seems to die rampaging amidst muzzle flash and rubble, but the truth of things isn’t that simple. A serum that turns vampires into berserk beasts—a plot point back from back in the first episode, and one which I should point out, basically causes them to transform into what humans think they are—can’t be countered so easily. She does save Momo, and her final confrontation with Momo’s uncle actually ends when she stops attacking him. What truly rattles the man is not the notion of vampires attacking him, it’s of them not doing so, because it means that there isn’t anything inherently stopping vampires and humans from living in harmony, it really is just all circumstance; grudges, old wounds, and unsolved problems.

Momo’s own last confrontation is the aforementioned rebuke of her mother, as she carries the still-dying Fine to her final resting place; a warm cave below the cold surface, where the queen of vampires finally dies, amidst a bed of porcelain-white flowers. The very last shot of the main body of the series is –

Momo,
kneeling in front of Fine’s body,
taking a sharp, deep breath;
preparing to sing.

She herself lives on, and Fine is gone, but not forgotten.

The main reason that Fine and Momo don’t both survive is that, unfortunately, that is rarely the case for real queer couples in these kinds of situations either. But we shouldn’t take this to mean that Fine and Momo’s entire journey was pointless. Instead, it is the very fact that Fine and Momo did journey, and journeyed together, that is, itself, the true paradise they sought, however fleeting it may have been. There is a real, resonant beauty in that notion, even if it is a very sad and tragic sort. Something like;

“If we don’t have each other forever, at least we had each other today.”

The series offers a single post-credits scene; a sunlit garden, where Momo cradles a young vampire child in her arms. This scene’s nature—real or metaphysical, future or afterlife—is left ambiguous. A ray of uncertain hope that pierces the gray skies of an even less certain present.

I have to confess, Vampire in The Garden has proven very challenging to “review”, in as much as this even is a “review” of anything. This is a work of uncommon grace and elegance, as even its ideas which sound, on paper, inadequate, or like they’re trying too hard, are executed absolutely perfectly in the miniseries itself. There are several other axes I’ve barely even touched on; the visual beauty of most of the show’s backgrounds, for example. Part of me does feel that I haven’t entirely done Vampire justice, but perhaps that is simply a limitation of my medium. Some things must be seen to be felt.

And of course, all criticism is, in the end, but a reflective prism of the original. Here, for the first time in a long time, I have felt honored to be that reflection; I am but a mirror to moonlight.

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, Reviews

(REVIEW) There’s Nothing to be Proud of About PRIDE OF ORANGE

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by The Mugcord Discord Server.

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. But you really shouldn’t care in this case. Seriously, don’t watch this.

If you close your eyes, you can almost picture it.

The time is early 2020. The place? An opulent office space somewhere in Tokyo, the residence of a chief CEO. A real big shot. His suit and his coke habit mark him as a survivor of the ’80s entertainment biz. He’s been places. He’s seen things. He’s helped stars rise and he’s made them fall.

Today is a day like any other, when a representative pitching a new series–an anime–strides into his office. The rep talks smooth as Crisco, and the boss doesn’t need much convincing. His pitch is simple; everyone’s got an idol show. Your company needs one too. The boss is hung up on only one point. He’s been around the block, he knows his stuff, and he knows that just blindly copying this hot new trend won’t cut it. They need a twist.

Idly, he taps a remote on his desk, and the jumbo flatscreen on the other wall lights up. It’s a sports channel, but they’re not broadcasting any of Japan’s typical national pastimes. Instead, he sees an ice rink, and a black puck zipping across it.

He smiles at the serendipity as the rep stands there confused. “Son.” The boss says, his tone cool and confident. “There’s our twist.”

This is probably not how Pride of Orange, a near-instantly forgotten entry in the “idol anime but also something else” subgenre from late last year, actually got greenlit. But it makes more sense to me than the alternative. Some washed-up suit OK’ing this is the only way it seems plausible that it was made at all. What’s the other explanation? That this was focus-tested? That multiple people sat down and assured themselves that yes, idols playing hockey is exactly what the youth of Japan want in their cartoons?

If the show had actually been good, it’s possible I’d be sitting here praising the ingenuity of conjoining these two things that absolutely do not go together at all. But we don’t live in a world where Pride of Orange is a good show, so that’s irrelevant. In the US, this is the kind of thing that gets mocked on VH1 by washed-up celebrities 20 years after it airs off the surreal premise alone. Some real Baywatch Nights shit. I don’t know if they have a similar pop culture backwash hall of shame practice in Japan, and if so, whether it includes anime, but Pride of Orange had better hope so on both counts, because there’s no way anyone’s remembering it otherwise.

You might take all this to mean Pride of Orange is bad. You’d be right to. It is bad! But every single bad anime I’ve ever covered on Magic Planet Anime before has had a saving grace that Puraore does not; they were bad in interesting ways. Pride of Orange is bad in the same way that Imagine Dragons, ugly logos, and direct-to-Netflix specials are bad. It is an obvious product of a pop cultural media machine completely failing to deliver the one thing that said machine should always be able to. In this case, a baseline watchable cartoon. Beyond its ridiculous premise, there just isn’t much to it. It’s audiovisual wallpaper. An active test of your patience that dares you, with its sheer brain-numbing mundanity, to blink first. This is anime-by-algorithm, a so-inoffensive-it’s-offensive patchwork of tropes, plotlines, and even character designs cribbed from other, better anime, kludged together by grey-suited executives without a single creative bone in their bodies. That’s before we get to its more serious flaws, mind you.

So, what is this horrible abomination unto mankind? Well, as mentioned, it’s theoretically an idol series where the idols are also a hockey team. In practice it’s more the other way around. The “idol” bit feels tacked-on enough (a grand total of two dance sequences, with almost no buildup, over its whole run) that I wonder if it wasn’t initially conceived as a straight sports series and then later altered. It does have the cast structure of an idol series, at least, and all characters present fall into broad archetypes that the genre popularized, but quite unlike some personal favorites in it (say, 2011’s The Idolmaster, 2018’s Zombie Land Saga, or 2020’s Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club),* none of them have much personality. Probably the best of the lot are Naomi and Riko, whose distinction mostly comes from the fact that they’re quite obviously dating each other. (Their brief arc, which culminates in episode 9, is unquestionably the highlight of the series.)

The remainder of the cast is fairly anonymous, including theoretical protagonist Manaka.

“My literal only personality trait is obnoxious cheerfulness.”

We should also talk about Youko, the team’s coach. Youko is an outlier here, because she’s not devoid of personality like most other characters. Instead, her combination of doofy catchphrases, manipulative, obnoxious personality, and general overbearing nature combine to make her come across as weirdly creepy.

In one of the show’s “arcs” (the term seems generous), she attempts to recruit the star player of a rival team, Yu, who’s recently left the life of a hockey prodigy behind to experience a normal teenagerhood. (God knows we can’t have that in our sports anime.) In her efforts, Youko resorts to tactics such as repeatedly, incessantly calling her phone, standing outside of her house and yelling(!), and engineering a situation where she deliberately leaves a pen behind when invited into Yu’s house by her grandmother. This, of course, means that Yu has to return said pen (I’d argue she doesn’t, really, but neither Yu herself nor her grandmother object to the idea). When Yu does so, Youko ropes her into a bizarre bet, which she loses, and essentially forces her to join the team. This is glossed over with the non-explanation that Yu actually enjoys being on the new team, so it doesn’t matter. Youko is similarly unpleasant to her other players, and even engages in gaslight-y emotional manipulation a few times, giving her an almost predatory vibe.

None of this is ever addressed, because Pride of Orange has neither the writing chops necessary to address it nor the forethought to simply not make the coach a skeevy weirdo in the first place. I would also argue that Youko having to quite literally trick the cast into becoming an “idol group” on top of being a hockey team feels like it betrays a broad disdain both for the show’s audience and its own genre.

“The fact that I’m allowed to be an influence in children’s lives is, on a moral level, horrific.”

But really, while Youko’s situation is the worst of the series’ many writing flaws, it’s far from the only one. Frequent issues like conflicts springing up and then being almost immediately resolved, or flashbacks grinding action scenes to a dead stop to repeat to us information we either already know or could easily infer, recur repeatedly throughout. Pride of Orange often feels like the first draft of an anime that, even were all these issues fixed, would still be merely just below average. All these little problems add up, and they make Pride of Orange an altogether miserable watching experience.

One could try to chalk all this up to Puraore’s length, but two of the anime I previously mentioned were also single cour. It is very possible, with economical character building, stylish animation, sharp writing that builds a solid triumph narrative, etc., to make your audience care about even a quite large cast in that amount of time. Pride of Orange never swings that, because it has none of those things. It doesn’t even manage to instill much of a base level thrill off the novelty of its premise, the one thing that objectively distinguishes this series from any other. In October, right around when Pride of Orange started airing, a pilot short called “SHAREDOL” managed to do that much in less than three minutes. Length is no excuse.

In the broadest sense, the problem is this. The best anime can, in the moment, feel monumental. I’ll again draw a comparison to The Idolmaster (you’ll have to forgive my lack of experience with sports anime, which would honestly be more appropriate here, but the general structures still apply). One got the sense, during the series’ climactic concert, that those girls had done everything to earn their moment. They would’ve bled and died on that stage if that’s what it took. It feels, as it’s happening, huge. All-important.

Pride of Orange manages the almost impressive feat of going in the other direction. Of making not just its parent genres, but its entire medium feel small, trivial, and trifling. While watching it, I felt transmogrified into a disapproving stepmother, finger-wagging at myself for watching these silly cartoons. And you can accuse me of projection, and say that no anime, no matter how bad, should make me feel this way. But the fact of the matter is that taken together, as a whole, Pride of Orange‘s cheez-whiz take on the sports and idol anime genres improbably transforms simple boredom into existential dread. It is such a yawning void of mediocrity that it’s somehow one of the worst anime I’ve ever seen. At the risk of repeating myself, it is distinguished from past Magic Planet Anime worst-of candidates like Speed Grapher, Big Order, The Day I Became a God, and fellow idol trainwreck 22/7 by the fact that those anime were bad in a way that still made it clear that the people behind them cared about them. They may have had any number of very serious qualitative flaws. They may have been downright offensive at times. But a certain kind of terribleness can only come from misplaced passion, which at least implies that there is passion.

Let me be very clear; this is not true of Pride of Orange. I do not get the sense that anyone who worked on this series cared about it at all. Whether because they did not want to or because circumstances made it so they could not I do not know, but the few tiny pinpricks of light that poke through–Naomi and Riko’s relationship, the vanishingly brief pair of dance numbers that comprise the entirety of the show’s “idol” element, the surprisingly solid soundtrack–make it clear that for the vast majority of this show, nobody involved gave a shit. It has all the artistry of a McDonald’s order and ends with a limp, nondescript hand gesture too lazy to be a middle finger. Make no mistake, all of this is tragic.

And perhaps the worst part is that I don’t think Puraore is unique in this way. Things like Pride of Orange are what you get when a zeitgeist is about to die. Most of my time as an active anime enthusiast has been spent in the midst of the idol anime boom. I have liked a decent amount of those shows, but I wouldn’t quite call myself an “idol anime fan.” Those who would should be wary; things like Puraore are not a good sign. The same is broadly true of the “all-female cast does stuff” supergenre in general, and for that matter, anime on the whole.

What else is there to say? Pride of Orange is symptomatic of an industry that is simply producing way, way too much content by sheer volume. Few people watched it. Fewer of those who did will remember it–fondly or otherwise–in a few years’ time. It is hypergeneric but endlessly replaceable, a combination ice skate / high heel stomping on all our faces forever. In this light, the name of the protagonists’ team sounds less like a quirky sports team name and more like a sneered command. Dream, monkeys. Dream hard. Because there has to be something better than this.

* I should make a note here to apologize to all involved with Selection Project, a different idol anime from the Fall 2021 season that I derided as unimpressive in my impressions post for the first episode. I foolishly assumed that because Pride of Orange has a stupid premise it might be more interesting than SelePro. I have heard through the grapevine that Selection Project apparently eventually got quite good, something Puraore cannot say. (And really it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly be worse.) If one of these two anime ever picks up a cult following, it will not be the one I reviewed for you today.

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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.