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.
I’ve ended up covering a lot of romcoms in the first impressions column over the years here on Magic Planet Anime. I do not say lightly that this one might be the simplest I’ve ever written about at any length, The Klutzy Class Monitor & The Girl With The Short Skirt is a dead-simple romantic comedy with a zany flair, a retro sensibility, and a knack for comedic timing. The whole premise is in the title: there’s a class monitor at a high school who is kind of a klutz despite his position, there is also a girl at that same high school who wears her skirts short and dyes her hair. They clash in the episode’s opening minutes, a very old-school banter volley where the klutz (Sakuradaimon Togo, played by Enoki Junya) and the girl (Kohinata Poem, Akechi Riko) argue about if her skirt length is actually inappropriate or not. Togo, perhaps not the most feminist young man in Japan, argues that it’s too revealing. Too sexy, even! This promptly gets him punched in the gut.
This kind of yelled insult -> girl punches boy comedy is, by this point in the medium’s history, so ancient that seeing it in something that started airing a mere three days ago (and based on a manga from 2019, when this was already well out of fashion), is novel in of itself. You could pretty easily argue that by parroting the points that he does, Togo is upholding sexist double standards about how women are allowed to dress. He honestly is doing that, and if we were supposed to think Togo was right, as opposed to merely well-intentioned but stupid, I don’t think this show would be very good at all. But what makes the series really tick, assuming this first episode is a good indicator, is its timing and sense of style. The whole pervert slap trope has been largely excised from modern romcoms in place of something more subtle and reflective of how relationships actually work. The visual stylings of the show, so willfully retro that the bright colors and sharp lines are complete with printer dots on the backgrounds, make it clear that this is an intentional pastiche. (Were it not for the presence of smartphones, it’d be easy to assume this was set in the 90s or something.) Togo, who despite being a complete tightwad is also sort of a dumbass who isn’t much for academics, makes an active effort to get to know Poem when they both end up in remedial math lessons. Predictably, she starts falling for him. And again, while there’s obviously an element of turbo-hetero wish fulfillment here, the intentionally stiff and simple emotional beats make for a series that’s….oddly refreshing? Togo and Poem might be polar opposites, but you’d never mistake this show for that one, despite the broadly similar premises and some visual language in common. (Not to mention excellent music.)
If Klutz & Skirt calls back to anything in particular, it feels mostly of a piece with the anime comedies of the mid-2000s. These were usually loosely school life-based, too, but they tended toward the absurd or simply the zany as opposed to harboring any deep storylines or thoughts on life. (They even do that thing I love, once common but now rather rare, where the episode is divided in half by a midcard where a character says the name of the show out loud. A favorite little bauble of mine, I miss it!) A useful synecdoche here is the sheer number of times Poem clobbers Togo—about six, if I counted right in these 20-some minutes alone—that kind of physical abuse just isn’t that common in this genre anymore.
Frankly, if the series has accomplished anything of note here, it’s been making me wonder if I don’t kind of miss this stuff. At the end of the day the subtler emotional currents available to the genre that essentially replaced this one are great, and they’re probably my preference, but there is something to be said for the old-school tsundere category that Poem falls into. This is particularly pronounced when they learn each other’s given names. Poem does not want Togo calling her that, since it’s an embarrassing sparkle name. When he makes a habit of doing so anyway, the predictably percussive occurs. The show just has a nice, snappy rhythm to it, even if it’s working in simple archetypes. The director, Iwanaga Daiji, deserves some real credit here for making the show feel so kinetic.
There’s a solid supporting cast here, too, by the looks of it. We haven’t gotten to know any of them deeply yet, but in the last segment of the episode Akina Motoko [Itou Yuina], one of Poem’s friends, develops a big, pervy crush on a hot health rep after he carries her to the infirmary.
She’s normal.
The other girl in Poem’s clique, Tasaki Rui [Fukuhara Ayaka], we haven’t really learned much about yet, but her very short hair makes her GNC AF. So hey, points.
She also seems to enjoy flustering Poem. Just pointing that out.
I think all I’ve said here will clue you in pretty thoroughly to whether you’d get anything out of Klutz & Skirt. There are different kinds of strong anime seasons, and this one in particular has proven to be the sort that absolutely floods the zone with sheer numbers, there are a lot of things airing right now that are good, a few that are great, and even the stuff that’s less essential is still interesting. It’s said that a rising tide lifts all boats, but I do hope that the slightly more niche stuff like Klutz, fellow oddball romcom Kirio Fan Club (which I’d like to write about at some point, stay tuned?), and so on, don’t get lost in the shuffle. Things like this deserve to find their audience just as much as your Witch Hat Ateliers and Akane-banashis, and I hope they do.
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is 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.
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.
“Magic is a miracle that makes the world vibrant.”
When she was a young girl, Coco [Motomura Rena] purchased a book at a festival. This book, sold by a mysterious magician in a mask, is the inciting object of Witch Hat Atelier‘s story, and Coco obtaining the book in the first place is, thus, where our story begins, at least in a chronological sense.
Witch Hat Atelier‘s first episode isn’t much of one, would be the problem. The practice of releasing double or even triple premieres is an increasingly common thing. It’s often rather exasperating, in fact, but in the case of Witch Hat Atelier specifically, I understand completely why they went this route. Because if you were to only see that first episode, you’d only get half of the picture. Nonetheless, we do have to start at that festival, with that book and the pictures within it, central as they are to this story and, perhaps more importantly, what I want to discuss about this story.
If you want to recap the first episode, that’s very easy. Coco, daughter of a fabric seller, is a young girl obsessed with magic due to her acquiring that book as a very young child. Magic is everywhere in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, lighting up cobblestones beneath one’s feet, purifying a spring so one can drink from it, but the how is a mystery. Coco—everyone, really—is led to believe that magic is a matter of blood. You are born able to use magic, or you aren’t. Those who are so born are witches, and everyone else is just a regular ol’ person.
This is how, just to name an (unfortunate) cultural touchstone, Harry Potter, for example, handles things, with its convoluted throngs of wizarding lineages. (Although the general concept is hardly unique to that series.) Related to its presence there, though, I have always, to my core, hated this approach to magic in fiction. Some of this has to do with my own real-world practice of eclectic neopagan witchcraft, some of it has to do with personal beliefs about the nature of life, the world, talent, and skill. Some of it is just pure preference, in that I think it’s lazy worldbuilding. I also think it often leads to worlds rife with unfortunate, unconsidered implications about what the existence of inborn gifts of that nature might lead to or imply. It is something I have many problems with, to put it mildly.
However, I don’t bring all this up to criticize Witch Hat Atelier. Because what Coco and most others believe is not necessarily what is actually true. One day, a witch named Qifrey [Hanae Natsuki] visits her mother’s shop. While there, he takes a noted interest in her picture book, but mostly, he offers to fix a broken-down carriage—a carriage pulled by flying horses—when some neighborhood kids break it. (Being a handyman is, too, the job of a witch in this world.) Qifrey asks that he be left to the repair alone, he doesn’t want any prying eyes on him. Coco, precocious child that she is, outwardly agrees, but cannot resist the temptation to see magic performed. Sneaking into a crawlspace above him, she watches him work, and she learns the truth as he slowly sketches out a series of magic circles. Magic, in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, is not cast, but drawn. Anyone with a fountain pen, a bottle of special ink, and the proper knowledge can work miracles.
The knowledge of this fact is a secret, of course. Witches are sworn to keep this fact from the public, and this immediately, drastically changes both what magic literally is in the context of the events of the story and also its broader use as a tool of metaphor. There is a reason we devote more or less the whole first episode to this revelation—that and Coco being cute, of course—and it’s because Witch Hat Atelier is very interested in laying out what magic means and can be in very plain terms before it does anything else. Magic can be done by anyone, which nominally makes it accessible and democratic. But the witches themselves keep this knowledge from everyone, so magic is controlled as well. This pulls us back to the “wizard lineage” issue to some extent, but makes it an intentional point of consideration as opposed to a thoughtless byproduct. With this, Witch Hat Atelier wants to get us thinking.
If magic can create great works of beauty and provide numerous benefits to the world—and from what we see here, it can—it can also be terrifying. These are the central tensions that the story returns to over and over, and that last point is the note the episode ends on. Coco, now knowing that magic can be done by anyone, practices copying the many seals depicted in her picture book. She does not actually know what they do, mind you. She’s just trying things out and, essentially, guessing. Her first several spells are minor; a tiny fireworks show, a sprouting flame, but when she realizes that larger circles are more powerful and well-drawn ones even moreso, she gets the idea to simply trace the seals in the book. Nearly as soon as she’s finished attempting this, Qifrey bursts through her window, just in time to save her from a spell gone horribly right. Her entire house, and the fabric shop within, bursts into erupting waves of crystal, turning everything inside into a blue, prismatic, frozen-solid glitter. Qifrey is in time to save Coco, but not Coco’s mother, who is caught in the petrification and turned to a crystal statue instantly.
That is the note that episode one ends on. Coco’s childhood in ruins beneath her as Qifrey holds her tight in the air. Initially, he’s quite set on erasing her memories—by implication, the standard procedure for people who find out about magic but aren’t supposed to—but after some pleading from Coco, and the realization that without her picture book he’s down a lead about “them” (how vague and scary!), he changes his mind. Instead, he will take her as an apprentice. And so the stage is set for our real story.
But, of course, we can’t get to that without all of this. It’s foundational, establishing the contradictions of magic in this world and giving us reasons to both find awe in it and to fear it. The visuals, it must be noted, are laser-focused on getting all of this across. Coco’s first fledgling attempt to draw a magic circle fills her—and us—with a genuine sense of wonder as the circle literally floats off the page and then explodes into a crackle of glittering fireworks.
At the same time, the sense of fear and panic at the cascading crystal waves of Coco’s unintentional petrification of her own home is overpowering, it’s enough to strike genuine terror into a person. We immediately, intuitively, get it. This is the joy magic can bring, this is the danger magic can bring. We understand from the very first episode both the limitless potential for magic and how that potential might be turned to destructive ends; why we might want it to be free and thrive, and why we might want it cordoned off and controlled. As I say, contradictions. (On a less literal level, these are all still true. To me, magic is art, in its infinite capacity to both hurt and heal. But no single one to one metaphor works entirely.)
Something much more straightforward, it must be said, is that all of this is so effective that it should instantly dispel any worries over this adaptation. The Witch Hat Atelier anime was highly anticipated, and it comes to us from BUG FILMS, specifically a team headed by director Watanabe Ayumu (also simultaneously working on Akane-banashi, busy guy) and his assistant director Shinohara Shun. There was some understandable apprehension about BUG’s involvement with the project. Some of this simply stemmed from the long gap between the anime’s announcement and its premiere, but some stemmed from the unfortunate and severe broadcasting delays suffered by BUG’s last and only other TV anime project, Zom 100. (I don’t know if the Zom 100 premiere writeup is the article I’ve penned for this site that’s aged the most strangely. It must at least be up there, though.) Still, I think the fact that the Zom 100 debacle was an entire three years ago, the involvement of a different director here, and the quality of these first two episodes should allay these fears. In addition to the visual strengths I’ve already discussed, there’s also a truly charming use of pop-up storybook animations that mimics the use of similar in the manga without feeling quite one to one. Overall, I’d say this is the rare adaptation that is stridently faithful to the source material without feeling overly staid. That’s a very hard needle to thread, and the team working on the anime should be proud that they’ve accomplished it.
This all continues to be true in the second episode, the more subdued half of the premiere. One thing to know about Witch Hat is that it is a slow story for the most part, and accordingly this second episode is almost entirely about Coco getting settled in to the titular atelier, the small hillside school where she will be learning her new craft. Craft really is the word for it, too, as this episode also goes into more detail about how magic actually works, breaking down the different parts of the seals and how they affect the outcome of a given spell. It is as much science as art, like so many of its analogues in the real world, and getting to see Coco try—and fail!—to learn the basics of the craft is one of Witch Hat‘s little joys.
There’s also quite the primer on the history of magic here. Qifrey explains how, once upon a time, everyone simply knew how to use magic. This, of course, led to spells being developed so horrible that they defy description—the first application of any technology is warfare, after all—until one day, some banded together to put a stop to all this. Somehow—the details are left very vague—they cast a spell that wiped the memory of magic from all but a select few, leading to the current status quo. This is all told in a very broad-stroke way, but a way that’s believable within the series’ context. We are getting, more or less, the “official” version of things here, and we also detour into how Coco will have to pass a handful of trials before she’s considered a true witch and is permitted to enter the Tower of Tomes, the witches’ own Library of Alexandria, where she might perhaps discover the secret to rescuing her mother.
Qifrey also explains what separates permitted from forbidden magic. The short version? Anything cast on the body, other than the spell to erase memories to keep the secret, is forbidden. This means nothing that can harm another person, certainly, but it also means no teleportation, no direct flight, not even healing magic like we might find in so many other fantasy settings. Again, we come to contradictions. It is immediately obvious why anyone would want to keep things this strict and this simple, but it’s also obvious why some might object to this. So far in this narrative, no one does, but the very fact that this magic is “forbidden” as opposed to simply “lost” all but tells us outright that some do.
Whatever that may eventually entail, this is also a rather domestic episode. We also meet Qifrey’s three other students here, carefree and energetic Tetia [Haruki Kurumi], who is the first to greet Coco and does so with open arms, the coolheaded and somewhat detached Richeh [Tsukishiro Hika], who we learn perhaps the least about here, and finally, most importantly, there’s Agott [Yamamura Hibiku].
Agott, serious, disciplined, with inkstained fingers, makes herself immediately known as Coco’s foil. Coco, despite the harrowing experience of accidentally petrifying her home and mother, is still bright-eyed about the prospect of learning magic and is, in some sense, perhaps even naively optimistic about her own ability to reverse her mother’s fate. Agott, like all of Qifrey’s other students, has heard rumors of an Outsider who enacted a forbidden spell and is now being taken in as a witch. Unlike Tetia and Richeh, she is very blunt about how this has colored her perception of Coco; she thinks there’s essentially no chance that she’ll ever see her mother again, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be a proper peer of Agott herself or the other girls in the atelier.
Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. The very day after taking in his new apprentice, Qifrey heads off to attend to business at the ‘Great Hall’—whatever that may be the domain of knowledge of manga readers alone, for the time being—and Agott promptly challenges Coco to a test, presumably of her own design. Whatever awaits Coco, it is unlikely that Agott’s skepticism is the last, or most dangerous, thing she will have to face.
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is 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.
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.
It’s been a while since I did a good roundup post! You know how these go, so let’s get on with it.
Akane-banashi: The widely-acclaimed Shonen Jump rakugo manga gets its anime adaptation this season. Depsite the trailers looking rather dull, I was actually quite impressed with this episode itself. However, as much as Akane-banashi at large is the story of its title character Akane [Nagase Anna], this first episode mostly isn’t. Instead, it’s mostly about her father, Osaki Tohru [Fukuyama Jun], stage name Arakawa Shinta. This episode takes place in Akane’s childhood, and it is clear throughout the episode that she loves and admires her father immensely. (And, well, if my dad was voiced by Lelouch Lamperouge I’d probably feel the same way.) She gets into a fight at school over a classmate disrespecting Tohru by calling him a deadbeat with no real job, and, when the kid’s mother wants to know what happened, she responds by acting out the entire scenario herself, in a very rakugo-esque manner, overtly gesturing to the talent she’s already fostering at a young age.
She might, in fact, be a better rakugoka than her father someday. Watanabe Ayumu (a man who is set to have a very busy spring, between directing this and the Witch Hat Atelier anime) and his team take great pains to depict Tohru as someone who is talented but who has to try quite a lot to really tap into that talent. The predominant mood of the episode is not of a preternatural talent here to blow you out of your seat like you’d get in an anime about rock music or such (or indeed like we might get later in this very series), but of effort. The very animation itself has a weathered, almost sepia look to it. A look that also gently implies that money might be an issue for the family. Certainly, it would explain Tohru’s desperation to become a shin’uchi. Rakugo’s third and highest rank, a shin’uchi. That level of accreditation would presumably open some doors for him, certainly.
The sweaty and nervous atmosphere of this guy absolutely bombing his promotion test is perhaps the emotional crux of the episode. Uncomfortable and unenviable, hotter than the spotlight directly on him. Even when things turn around there’s an air of inevitable personal tragedy over the whole thing and, yeah, he fails and gets expelled from the profession. So set is the stage for our true heroine, who we will be meeting in earnest next week. Incidentally, like last year’s Cinderella Gray, you can watch Akane-banashi legally and for free on Youtube. So that’s nice!
Daemons of The Shadow Realm:Fullmetal Alchemist author Arakawa Hiromu‘s latest ongoing, now in anime form! This first episode was, well, it was a fuck of a lot honestly! We start out with a very traditional and straightforward-seeming setup, two siblings born as night turns to day leads to an adolescence where the brother, Yuru [Ono Kenshou], protects his sister Asa [Miyamoto Yume] who lives in some kind of sanctuary inside the mountaintop village they call home. This is a bit odd in its own right, but it’s absolutely blown to pieces when planes and helicopters carrying armed soldiers invade, dropping both conventional modern military fighters and a pair of individuals who command supernatural agents called Daemons into the village to kill Asa and capture Yuru for unspecified purposes. One of these individuals, a woman, succeeds in killing Asa, only for her to inform a shocked Yuru that she is Asa (which Yuru, obviously, does not believe).
We don’t get any answers as to how or even whether that might be true here, though. He flees along with his village’s medicine seller (seemingly someone who’s tapped in about the existence of the modern world outside the village) and the episode ends on an interesting note. The medicine seller gives Yuru a key to a socket in front of the twin statues guarding the village. These, promptly, are brought to life as Yuru’s own Daemons, simply named Left and Right but taking the form of a buff demon man and woman.
There’s a lot to unpack here. The atmosphere of sudden, intense violence when the soldiers invade is classic Arakawa. They are downright ruthless, and the Daemon-wielder they have with them, Gabby, is honestly even worse, commanding her inky Pac-Man monster to chomp most of the village to death. All together I was a little surprised by how much I liked this since I”ve never been a huge Arakawa stan (I liked Fullmetal Alchemist just fine as a teenager, but not so much that I felt the need to seek out her other work, and I liked other things a lot better around that same time).
This show is slated for two consecutive cours and the pacing and plotting here is snappy enough that I’m really interested to see if I can keep it up for 24 whole episodes.
GHOST CONCERT : missing songs: An impressively incoherent full-speed trainwreck from the brain of Symphogear creator Agematsu Noriyasu. Agematsu has a lot of post-Symphogear stuff that is vaguely like this, in that they, like Ghost Concert, are concerned with the intersection of music (and artistic expression more generally) and technology. Ghost Concert piles a near-future sci fi setting where non-AI music is illegal on top of that, and then further adds a Fate-esque twist where the main character is a medium who can see and be possessed by the spirits of famous historical figures.
There is, suffice to say, a lot going on here, and if any of it made any kind of sense it might be great. As it is, well, I did already call it a trainwreck but honestly that’s underselling it a little. I have almost no idea what the different parts of this show have to do with each other, which given that we’re only a single episode in leaves me a bit flabbergasted.
What I will give the series is that it has pretty impressive action animation and direction—the directing here handled by Jinbou Masato and animated by a team at the infamous Studio ENGI—but aside from the fact that I don’t really expect that to last, it’s hard to latch on to empty calorie goodies like cool explosions, aspect ratio-changing AMV sequences, and glowing VFX during the fight scenes when you have no real idea of what’s happening or why. The episode’s actual plot is bizarrely vague, something about our main girl Aiba Seria being possessed by the ghost of Cleopatra and turned into an….evil slut, I guess? (As a side note it drives me crazy when stuff characterizes Cleopatra this way, but that’s more of a pet peeve than anything.) Possessed by Cleopatra and summoning the phantoms of Caesar and Mark Antony for help, she fights a blue-haired girl and a priest for vague reasons. There is singing. After the fight she has a massive row with her friends who I guess did not know she was some kind of medium? It’s all so hurried and haphazard that it barely registers as a story at all.
If nothing else, this at least seems to make the argument that the Symphogear guy doesn’t like genAI. I guess that’s nice, but it’s agreeable in the same way a Macklemore song is. Sure, the general sentiment is nice and some of the technical aspects are impressive. It’s still not anything you’d really ever listen to of your own volition.
SNOWBALL EARTH: I think even just a couple of years ago, I would’ve talked myself into watching a few more episodes of this on the basis that it “has potential” or something, but to be honest, an interesting premise alone a show does not make. We spend this whole first episode getting to that premise in the first place, so even if it did, I have not exactly been rewarded for my 20 minutes here.
The real death knell for the show is just its tone. We want this to be a serious thing about a lonely boy and his obligation to save the world with the help of his giant robot friend and we want it to be sad when the giant robot sacrifices himself at the end of the episode on some Iron Giant shit. But we also want this to be a goofy parody with a lot of knee-slapping corny humor that’s basically just a string of jokes that people made about Shinji in the early 2000s. It commits to neither so the two halves work against each other and the result is a show that mostly just pissed me off. This thing has the audacity to reference the original Gundam in its opening episode which if you’re going to do that, you better have more to show for it than this.
Petals of Reincarnation: Well this was really stupid! I’d say I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way but, honestly, here I sort of do. It’s about half and half, I guess.
With the constant deluge of narou-kei bullshit I honestly welcome something that’s an edgelord revenge fantasy in a more direct and honestly more imaginative way. Granted, the bar is in the ground so “imaginative” means we’re doing the “powers borrowed from great figures of history” shtick. Fate is usually held to have invented this, but in terms of competence and general responsibility with its historical characters I am expecting something more along the lines of Nobuna-Gun. (This show is where the “Hitler as a little anime boy with a sharingan” image that’s been kicking around the internet lately is from, for reference, if you’ve seen that.)
I won’t go into the events of the narrative because they’re not important, or, honestly, even interesting. But the fights in this first episode were pretty cool, especially for a new studio (BENTEN Film, supposedly mostly ex-Gainax of Fukushima staff) and a team helmed by a not particularly acclaimed director (the Grendizer U guy is doing this). The show has what is for better or wores an extremely distinctive visual style, with some very, very, very bold color choices. Downright garish ones at times. Add in some SHAFT-y dialogue screens and such and you get a series that has the air of being distinctly the budget version of a couple other shows. There are way worse things to be, even if that’s hardly high praise. And the female lead, herself named Haito le Buffett [Maruoka Wakana], proves that if you make Miyamoto Musashi a girl she will always be the coolest character in the room. (Although this version doesn’t hold a candle to Fate‘s, obviously.)
The main thing holding me back here is that the main character is a vacuous edgelord and I kinda hate him in the wrong way. We’ll see how much juice he can get out of Mega Man’ing everyone else’s powers, but honestly how much more of this I watch is going to be down to how cool the action scenes are vs. how annoying I find him and the other characters. Other than Haito, none have left a particularly positive impression so far. Between this, Ghost Concert, and Killed Again, Mr. Detective (which I did not write about here, because I frankly had very little to say), it’s at least proving to be an interesting season for shows that are just very odd above all else. If you like those, you may get some enjoyment out of these. Otherwise, well, there’s always this option:
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is 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.
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.
I don’t know, off the top of my head, how many mangaka over the years have been in a position where anime based on their work has aired in consecutive anime seasons. I don’t imagine it’s many, though, and as of yesterday, that exclusive club has gained a new member in Agasawa Koucha. Agasawa’s work was first brought to the silver screen this past season with You and I Are Polar Opposites. This Spring, her other manga of note joins it on TV screens worldwide; The Ramparts of Ice. This occasion was rare enough that there was a little piece of commemorative art done for it, a charming detail that nicely accompanies the charm of Polar Opposites itself.
Of course, we’re not here to talk about Polar Opposites again, even if the common sell for Ramparts to Polar Opposites fans is that it’s “like if Azuma was the main character.” At the end of the day, these are two separate works and, indeed, Ramparts is actually the older of the two, having run from 2018 to 2022 in its original serialization, first as an independent webcomic and then through LINE’s LineManga service, and then finally in print through Shueisha. That’s a long and complex history for something like this, but it’s worth remembering. Because it also, importantly, makes Ramparts a case of true grassroots success. So it’s worth going into it with an open mind, to try to see what early readers saw when they were first introduced to this story back in 2018.
We start immediately with a montage of memories from the perspective of our main character, Hikawa Koyuki [Nagase Anna]. She’s being teased—prodded and made fun of for her appearance and demeanor, mainly—by a variety of classmates over some number of years. She asks herself, the world, and us, why it’s fine for these things to happen if they’re meant “as a joke.” This is a solid piece of tone-setting, and immediately, with the visuals showing us Koyuki’s frosted-over point of view, and a glowing blue circle that she establishes in her mind’s eye, a cold barrier between herself and others.
As we return to the present, Koyuki in the second semester of her first year of high school, we see how this icy demeanor has put up a very real wall between her and others. When she has to give a pair of boys a class handout, they freeze up, and one remarks upon her departure that Koyuki doesn’t hang out with anyone in class at all, and that this was in fact her first interaction with her. Similarly, when she walks past a trio of other girls in the hall, the girl at the center of the group, Azumi Miki [Izumi Fuuka] throws a gaze in her direction, clearly affected by her frigid aura. Miki and Koyuki are actually friends, we later learn. (When she brings this incident up the next day, she wonders why Koyuki didn’t say anything to her!) Koyuki’s become so adept at projecting this “don’t come near me” vibe that she’s earned a reputation for it, and some even call her the “Queen.” The “ice” prefix there is left out, for our own imaginations to fill in.
There are a few immediate observations you can make here. While the show does not seem outright dour, it does definitely have an appropriately frosty atmosphere. One could criticize director Mankyuu and his team at Studio KAI for not bringing the same verve to the material that Lapin Track brought to Polar Opposites, but that would be to ignore that this material does not really call for bounciness or liveliness. It needs to feel frozen-over, and it does. Rare moments of warmth feel more like the first thaw of Spring, a herald of a more thorough melting to come, for sure, but not the main event just yet. Koyuki’s own view? Well, being so distant from everyone isn’t great, but it’s at least better than middle school. Ouch.
The first crack in the glacier comes when Amamiya Minato [Chiba Shouya] bumps into her in the hallway as she’s making faces in a mirror, wondering why everyone finds her so scary. He gently says that he’d thought she was scary, but sees now that she can make some funny faces, too. More important perhaps: he knows her name. This sticks with her, and we’ll come back to it in a moment.
Now, I did say the show is a romantic comedy, which may read as a mischaracterization if you’re this far into the article. “Dramedy” might be a closer fit, but it wasn’t a mistake. The show does have comedic material as well. So far, this mostly consists of people being wicked intimidated by Koyuki’s vibe. It’s nailed pretty well, and the stylistic shifts into a chibi art style are very cute. Expect to see some number of introverted otaku girls in your social circle changing their icons to a chibi Koyuki sometime in the near future, if you’ve got a lot of friends fitting that description on social media.
Koyuki’s rep is particularly sad when we see her text a friend (Miki, in fact) and realize she’s the sort of person to send someone a frog sticker in an IM and say “okey froggy” in response to a question. That goofy side is something she doesn’t really get to show people, and I think it’s very possible the whole thawing process will eventually leave it more visible to others. She and Miki have a conversation in the rough middle of the episode that is mostly a casual study sesh, but does also pretty directly lay out that this gap between who Koyuki is on the inside and what she presents to the world is going to be a big concern of the series. The same is true for Miki, whose rep as “the class idol” presents her with almost precisely the opposite problem. Everyone likes her already and puts her on a pedestal. Being treated like a saint, she’s afraid to goof around. The gap between the social mask and the true self, and how one might “know who they really are”—or if that’s even possible—really seems like it’s going to be a big theme here. Koyuki directly points out that she’s surprised that even Miki thinks about this stuff.
It occupies Koyuki’s mind elsewhere in the episode too. Here we should rewind to that scene with the mirror in the school hall. This is where we meet the two main guys of the cast. First, as mentioned, there’s Minato.
Minato is a jokester, and takes an interest in Koyuki after seeing her do all this stuff in the mirror. He doesn’t get very long to actually chat her up, as his friend Hino Youta [Inomata Satoshi] is close behind him and is worried that he might be picking on the poor girl. (It’s also Youta who offers Koyuki his hand after Minato accidentally knocks her over.) Both of these guys seem like they’ll be important in the long run, and it’s pretty clear, just from the genre that this show is in, that one of them will be Koyuki’s long term love interest. (Although I honestly couldn’t tell you which at this early stage.) A later encounter in the hallway sees Youta reminding Koyuki of a giraffe at the zoo she was frightened by as a child, as he is both extremely tall and has really bad eyesight. So any time he forgets his contacts (which seems to be pretty often), he has to really squint and get in peoples’ faces to tell it’s them. It’s a pretty good bit, all told.
Minato gets more development between the two here, however. He runs into Koyuki again after spotting her across the school courtyard. He definitely comes off as a little pushy in this premiere, as he tries to make friends with Koyuki while she’s getting herself a drink from the school vending machines. This must be on purpose, however. It’s important to consider that we’re seeing these things in part through Koyuki’s eyes, which means that her coating of permafrost tints every event in the story. She says herself that she can’t help but be wary when someone this different from her tries to strike up a conversation.
Minato’s attempts to get to know Koyuki better are foiled by two of his other friends trying to join in. This is entirely too much for Koyuki, and she bows out. One of his friends is creeped out, but Minato himself correctly observes that she seems like she’s putting up a wall, more than anything, and this seems to only renew his determination to chip away at the icy barrier around her.
As the episode proper ends, we’re shown another series of flashbacks, as Koyuki walks away, distressed. This time, we are clearly missing context. There’s a broken classroom window, whispered threats, and the old shoujo manga bullying technique of garbage stuffed into shoes. We don’t know what exactly happened to Koyuki in middle school, but it’s clear something did.
After the ED (soundtracked by an intense, bass-driven tune by J-rock legends Polkadot Stingray), there is a rather alarming scene where Koyuki is harassed by a pair of randos while walking to a community center to meet Miki. Her attempts to flag down a nearby Youta are to no avail, since he can’t actually make her or what’s going on out from across the street. There’s a real raw frustration and loneliness here, and if this is the kind of thing Koyuki has to put up with all the time—not something that would be hard to believe at all, she is a girl in a patriarchal world, unfortunately—it’s easy to see how those frozen ramparts could grow so tall and so thick. She is angry, and terrified that these two might do something if she expresses that anger and fear in the wrong way. It’s honestly pretty harrowing!
As an anime-only, I don’t know what precisely the rest of her story is going to look like, but the genuine emotion on display here in this first episode ensures I’ll be coming back next week and, if I’m being straightforward? I’d advise you to do the same. There’s something special brewing here, and I think those readers back nearly a decade ago who first fell in love with this story were really on to something.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
I watched the English dub for a majority of this series, but the last two episodes in Japanese. Because of that, I’ll be crediting both sets of voice actors here.
I don’t know how it happened, exactly. How I ended up in a place where, at the ancient and creaking vintage of 32, I still watch romcom anime about high schoolers instead of going to chick flicks like a responsible woman of my age, but it did happen! And you know what? These are my shows, OK? The soap operas and the sitcoms alike, this stuff still speaks to me. This one is really good. Uncomplicatedly good, even! And I think that very simplicity is why I was so drawn to it. I wasn’t planning to write about this, but its charms are so direct that it called out to me in a way. I think this is a case of the public just plain getting it right, an instance where basically everybody is on the same page, and the book is damn good. Written on that page, in beautifully girly cursive, with the heart loops and all, is one sentence. One sentiment: You & I Are Polar Opposites.
The basics: Suzuki Miyu [Suzushiro Sayumi/Celeste Perez] is a hyperactive gyaru with a mile-a-minute motormouth and a goofy personality. Sitting next to her in her high school class is Tani Yuusuke [Sakata Shougo/Brandon Acosta], a stoic fellow of few words with a dry wit and perpetually low energy levels. The “opposites attract” principle is so bold-script here that it’s literally in the name of the series, and just in case you miss that, Suzuki drops that title in the first episode when describing herself and Tani.
Mixing things up slightly from the usual “will they or won’t they” shenanigans is the fact that Polar Opposites actually starts as the relationship proper begins. Our first episode does hit these beats, but it climaxes with Suzuki realizing that she very much does have a thing for Tani, and she needs to act on it now. The ensuing confession scene is bombastic as hell, all shouting and stammering and candy colors. Tani, who feels the same way, is moved. And she and Tani start going out basically right then and there. The remainder of the series is thus about their relationship developing, as opposed to coming into existence in the first place. This puts it in a pretty distinct category from a lot of romcoms I talk about on this site, which tend to fall more into the whole “girl with a gimmick” space, where the female lead, in even the best case, is defined by some kind of specific trait that acts as a bit of wish fulfillment. (Think Marin from My Dress-Up Darling and her cosplay hobby, for example, to pull a character from a show that, mind you, I like a good deal.) Polar Opposites largely avoids this, not just with Suzuki herself—who is a total screwball, but in the way that real hyperactive teens often are—but with her entire friend group and, thus, its entire cast. There’s not a single flat character here, everyone is dynamic and bursting with personality. That said, since this is a show about couples at the end of the day—even those that aren’t actually dating yet—it makes the most sense to bracket the characters off into pairs. (Of course, they all have plenty of interactions outside these pairs, too.)
Suzuki and Tani themselves have a classic nerd x outgoing girl thing going on, and the interlock between the two of them is by far the simplest of those in the anime, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean it’s not excellent. Suzuki and Tani both have a tendency to get stuck in their own head a bit, a shared insecurity that leads to a very realistic foible in their relationship: they’re not great at communicating! Ouch! Been there! That stuff is hard! Still, their main arc through this first season is one of learning to trust each other. The stakes are largely quite small—we’ll get to the one semi-exception—so this mostly relates to learning to not overthink things on dates and the like. It is relentlessly cute, and to paraphrase a conversation in the third episode of the dub, adorable. The definition Suzuki gives there of the word, which she applies to Tani but also many other things, is an equally good fit for their own relationship and, in fact, the show itself. Endearing. Something that squeezes your heart a little. They also meet each others’ families about halfway into the season, marking that things are indeed getting serious. Ish.
Meeting your boyfriend’s cat is an important part of het culture, I’m told.
Nishi Natsumi [Oomori Cocoro/Rebecca Danae] and Yamada Kentarou [Iwata Anji/Van Barr Jr.] , the second couple the show follows, take a bit more legwork to get on the same page. Nishi isn’t actually in the same classroom as most of the rest of the cast, and she spends the earliest parts of this story wishing she could be involved in their friendly banter and the like. She comes off as a bit Bocchi-ish, in fact, so shy that she can’t really even function in social spaces at all. Some doing from both her only friend Honda Rikako [Kusunoki Tomori/Cheyenne Haynes] eventually pushes her into the orbit of Yamada, the class clown of the class that Suzuki, Tani, and the rest are based on. Yamada isn’t your run of the mill class goofball, however (that title more goes to his female counterpart, the also-blonde Watanabe Manami [Taniguchi Yuna/Hannah Alyeah], a supporting character), he takes special pride in getting laughs out of those who don’t laugh that often. This alone is enough to make him interested in Nishi, and circumstances—and Yamada’s own taking of the initiative—push the two of them closer together. By the end of the season they were probably my pick for cutest couple overall. (Although, that’s a close race of course.) The last episode of the first season is in part about the two going on a date to a Chinatown and it’s just, like, heartburn-inducingly cute. They get meat buns, it’s lovely.
This brings us to the last pair, and the one presently furthest from “officially” being a couple, and the least “cute” of the three. Azuma Shino [Shimabukuro Miyuri/Sarah Roach] and Taira Shuji [Katou Wataru/Mauricio Ortiz-Segura]. Azuma and Taira, to put it bluntly, are the sourpusses of the friend group. Azuma has a longer dating history than most of the cast, and she’s world-weary and cynical, something she masks (just barely) with a wry, dry wit. Taira meanwhile is an example of ye olde “self-lacerating jealous guy who gets mad at himself about his jealousy” shtick. Both of them have rougher personalities than the rest of the cast and, despite everything, they’re probably my favorite pair overall. Taira’s bristly cynicism plays nicely off of Azuma’s “been there, done that” attitude and both of them are kind of putting up a front about things. Azuma in particular has noticeably low self-esteem, often just putting up with it when people, such as her former friend group at her old school, take advantage of her and pressure her into things. This makes it all the better when those masks start to break down as we get further into the series, Taira encourages Azuma, in his own way, to value herself more. That more serious aspect of their relationship—whether it ends up being romantic in the long term or not—is what makes these two so interesting to me. It shows that the series can operate in different emotional registers. (Which also leads me to look forward to The Ramparts of Ice, an anime adapted from another mangaka by this same author that, if you’re reading this article on the day it goes up, will have premiered today. Apparently it is a bit more focused on this side of things.)
I don’t want to make Taira and Azuma’s relatioship sound overly serious of course. At the end of the day, Taira is the sort of person who catches himself thinking poorly of people and then goes “oh god, I’m such a chud.” That’s not me editorializing! He says that in the English dub!
That’s as good a place as any to springboard to talking about the dub, in fact. I watched most of this series with the English voice track after checking it out on a whim. It is fantastic, one of the best dubs in recent memory, remixing and reconfiguring the presumably a bit more direct sub track’s translations into something with a lot of zing and flavor. In practice this means a fair bit of localization—including a use of the old “they were talking about English class in the Japanese track, so we switched them to be talking about Spanish here” trick that I more associate with the long-gone days of the Azumanga Daioh dub and the like. That particular example might strike some as a bridge too far, but overall the dub is really excellent at assigning believable patterns of speech to individual characters. Suzuki in particular must be heard to be believed, some of her lines are so intensely inflected that they sound like they were written in tumblr-ese in the script (at one point she calls Tani her “boy” and I swear she says it in such a way that you can practically hear the I on the end instead of the Y.) My favorite performance by far though, is Sarah Roach as Azuma, who brings a really impressive sense of deadpan humor to the character, making her feel like your most love-cynical mutual. (I in particular really love how she drags herself for “not finding good people attractive” in an early episode. We all have our vices, girl!) Do real teenagers talk anything like this at all? I have no idea! But it conveys the feeling of that just-hangin’-with-the-gang atmosphere extremely well, and verisimilitude is more important than strict realism. Sources credit the dub’s script and voice directing respectively to Macy Anne Johnson and Emily J. Fajardo, to whom I can only say: well done, you really nailed it. The only real problem with the dub is that it isn’t finished! At the time of this writing, delays have meant that the last two episodes are JP-audio only, which is a real shame given how good the dub is. Obviously, that’s not the fault of anyone who worked on it (it’s mostly just more evidence that the dubs for these things really need more lead time), but it does put Polar Opposites in the frustrating camp of “shows where I had to take time away from talking about the anime itself to discuss the release situation.” At least Nokotan has company.
In any case, outside the more comedic moments, the dub handles the more serious stuff well, too. I’ve already gone over Azuma and Taira’s whole thing, but there’s also an interesting plot that springs up a ways’ into Suzuki and Tani’s relationship where the former runs into her ex. That character, Oka Rihito [Ishiya Haruki/Trey Michael Upton], is at least on the surface a lot more similar to Suzuki than Tani is. We get a flashback, even, showing that in middle school they were very much two peas in a pod who loved to banter back and forth in class. Unfortunately, people at that school took that to be not just friendship but romantic chemistry, and the two ended up dating more or less out of social pressure. This got awkward very quickly, and the two are still awkward around each other now. There are two interesting aspects here, one being that this doesn’t actually get cleanly resolved by season’s end (thus perhaps implying Rihito is going to come back) and that Tani actually gets a bit jealous. Tani is a fairly level-headed guy, so this is a bit surprising and it certainly surprises Suzuki. They work things out just fine, but it’s nice to see the show grapple with one of the common foibles of young relationships, emotions that we don’t necessarily have full control over.
(You could, if you really wanted to, nail Polar Opposites here for being a bit basic. It’s not like “learning to deal with jealousy” is a groundbreaking concept for a plot beat in a romcom. All the self-respect stuff is fairly straightforward, including a similar plot point about Azuma. Still, at some point you’re just ragging on a show about teenagers for having teenage characters. At some point that kind of “criticism” feels more like nitpicking. Yes, You & I Are Polar Opposites does not account for literally every possible life situation, but pointing that out is pedantic, not insightful. Especially when you remember that this is a Shonen Jump title and is at least ostensibly aimed at readers about as young as its characters.)
All of these writing merits would be harder to get to if the show didn’t look and sound so good, but it does! While not quite as stylistically daring as some of say Dress-Up Darling or Love Is War!‘s more experimental excursions, Polar Opposites‘ anime is a tight and direct translation of the manga art’s charms into its new medium. It’s easy to give a series guff for being slavishly over-faithful to the source material, so I want to be very clear that I’m praising the show here. Nagatomo Takakazu (on his first-ever series directorial credit here) and his team at Lapin Track seem to really understand the characterful nature of Agasawa Koucha‘s art for the manga, and they make it work in anime format more or less directly. Stylistic flourishes are strong but smartly-deployed, so we’ll get Suzuki shrinking into a pink, gremlinoid blob when she’s overly excited for example. As with so much of the show on the whole, it sticks to the fundamentals but it absolutely nails them, an expression of a decidedly 2020s neo-retro aesthetic that’s come to define the medium’s highlights over the last few years.
If Polar Opposites has a secret ingredient however, it might honestly be its soundtrack. I don’t even mean its OP and ED themes here—although those are fantastic, too, a pair of lovely numbers by singer-songwriter noa and hyperpop group PAS TASTA respectively—but rather the actual background music. It animates the show when characters are just hanging around together, bristling with an array of fizzy guitars, popping drums, blooping synthesizers, and the occasional acoustic guitar for flavor. All of which really helps the world of the show feel alive and bursting with activity. This decidedly electronic soundscape seems to be the work of tofubeats, a DJ and musician whose list of work of this nature is fairly short, although impressive in context. Consisting of theme song arrangements for Love Live and Hypnosis Mic, which are not small gigs by any means! (He also has a similar “music” credit for The Concierge, though having not seen that I can’t comment on its BGM). I hope him doing the Polar Opposites OST is the sign of his future involvement with the medium in specifically this capacity. He’s damn good at it.
All told, this is just a fantastic little romcom. As I said at the start of this article, sometimes the viewing public gets it right. We already know that more Polar Opposites is coming in summer, and I personally can’t wait, since this show’s beautiful bold colors and heart-eyes romantic tendencies will make even more sense in the July sun than they did here in the early part of the year. Until then!
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 Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is 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.
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.
You don’t get a nice piece of serendipity like this too often. The first anime to premiere in this anime season is also about the changing of the literal seasons. That’s pure poetry, right there, and it helps that Agents of The Four Seasons: Dance of Spring leads with an absolutely excellent premiere. It’s big, bold, and deals in broad emotions. None of these are bad things, and they mark the series as supremely self-confident.
It is worth noting, though, that the first thing we see and hear isn’t anything like that at all. Instead, it’s a barrage of smoke and gunfire, screamed names and something, somewhere, going wrong. This first impression colors the rest of the story. It does not paint a happy picture, but the first episode doesn’t return to it directly.
We open on the sight of two girls on a train. Going somewhere that, we eventually learn, will be the site of a ritual to break an unnaturally long Winter season. One of these girls is a warrior, the other is a season. There is an immediate, obvious, and directly-highlighted conflict between the apparent divine inner nature of the “agents” of the title and their obvious, human exteriors. When our heroines arrive at their destination, they are greeted by a crowd of curious faces. “They say she’s the Goddess of Spring” says one. “But she’s just a person”, replies another.
The official-sounding Agency of The Seasons, the group that meets our protagonists at their destination and clears the tourists from a nearby mountain for them, makes this all seem like an organized and formal affair. The lack of a Spring in a solid decade, mentioned here offhandedly, makes it seem very much otherwise. There is clearly something wrong with Hinagiku [Nukui Yuka], Spring’s agent, and her retainer Sakura [Aoyama Yoshino] seems to be doing a lot to keep her mind off of it. The Spring Goddess, if indeed that’s what she is, speaks in clipped, halting sentences, and is unsure of herself. As the show begins in earnest she and Sakura make their way to the mountaintop to perform the sacred rite to usher in Spring.
On the otherwise-abandoned mountain, they find Nazuna [Touyama Nao], a little girl shoveling snow, who has heard of only three seasons and has to be prompted at great length to remember that this “Spring” thing exists at all. This raises questions: with only three seasons remaining, do Winter and Summer simply crash into each other unceremoniously? Does the fact that describing it that way makes it sound like I’m describing global warming give this show an environmentalist undertone? We don’t know the answers to these questions just yet, but Hinagiku does answer a different one.
Referred to as Spring’s goddess, Hinagiku is keen to offer a correction. Demonstrating the divine power she’s been given by pulling a seed from her robe and growing it into a rose in an instant, Hinagiku explains that this power is not hers, only borrowed. Can we trust the self-deprecating Spring shaman’s own words on the matter? I’m unsure, although details at the end of the episode suggest so. In practical terms though, it means that like so many superhumans in fiction, the agents of the seasons are neither wholly divine nor wholly human. They are, at least narratively, both. The demigods of our modern age.
There is here a stunning display of mutual childish insensitivity, as Nazuna lashes out about the effects the long winter has had on her father’s tourism job and presses Hinagiku for an explanation of where precisely she—and Spring—have been. Sakura shoots back, and Nazuna crumples, crying that all adults are bullies who do nothing but yell. Hinagiku asks if she is yelled at by adults often. She does not answer. But, when the trio reach the mountaintop, she begins shoveling her snow again.
No mere character tic, Nazuna’s goal is to clear the snow from her mother’s grave. As a child who’s lived for ten long years never knowing the melting warmth of Spring, she is one of the people that Hinagiku and Sakura need to help most. This understood, the rite begins, and the episode reaches its climax.
People, we are told, are not really supposed to see this. Or at least not people who aren’t agents of the seasons themselves. Nazuna gets to, though, and so do we, as Hinagiku takes pity on her and on the snow that’s piled upon her mother’s grave, she calls the Spring right then and there. It is a sight.
She begins to sing, and as she sings, she dances. Her foot taps the ground and an explosion of clovers erupts from the Earth. As she spins, singing a song of forlorn love, grass races to the surface from under the soil, bubbles of water fill the air, Spring showers suspended in the dance. Flowers bloom as the sky drizzles, and then, the centerpiece: the world bursts into a carpet of Cherry blossoms and running water. Tearfully, Sakura exsplains to Nazuna that it is for the sake of people like her that Hinagiku has been pushing herself so hard. What goes unspoken directly is that here, in this moment, it is worth it. Here is what is spoken: Spring is here, and you are happy.
The episode ends with narration. A creation myth: how Winter came first, alone in the world, and then created Spring. The two were happy together, and Winter then created Summer and Autumn. No longer able to spend so much time with beloved Spring, Winter bestows the power of itself and its fellow seasons on humans of the land. Our story, on the whole, is about them. We do not know yet the full breadth of this story, but the narration gives us some hints: love, murder, the lives people carve for themselves. All of that is in the future, and as this is another recent anime to have a rather unusual episode count (fourteen as opposed to the usual twelve), we have even longer with Agents of The Four Seasons than usual. We will have plenty of time to learn all the ins and outs of the story being told here. For now, all we know is one very important thing: Spring has arrived, safe and sound.
Due to the ongoing urgent health matters I posted about earlier today. I am not sure if I will be able to cover any more premieres this season. But, if this is the only one I get to write about, I’m glad it was such a lovely thing.
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I have lost any semblance of consistency when it comes to labelling these columns. I promise I’ll go back and fix them all eventually. Eventually.
This past Tuesday, Chainsaw Man ended. The wildly popular shonen manga had been going on in its second part for quite a long time, and I think to some extent no ending could’ve really satisfied the fanbase at large. Nonetheless, the ending we actually got seems to have really pissed a lot of people off. You can find reams of posts complaining about it of all shapes and sizes, and your standard suite of video essays and the like as well.
Someone who did not hate the Chainsaw Man ending was yours truly. I want to re-read the whole series before making any big proclamations, but I think it wrapped up the emotional arc of the story in a way that felt both hard-fought and worthwhile. It stung, but it meant something.
Now, will I still think that after having re-read the series? I don’t know. But! It did get me thinking about the array of popular anime and manga widely considered to have “a bad ending” and the various things they may have in common.
Oshi no Ko, anyone who is even tangentially aware of manga discourse at large already knows, is widely put in that category. (I myself have been exposed, just yesterday, to a Youtube thumbnail that loudly proclaims CSM’s finale “worse than Oshi no Ko, THE END!” Such dramatic proclamations not even a week out from the last chapter, my goodness!) And the reception to CSM honestly made me want to reevaluate my own opinion on this series, despite their otherwise lacking really anything in common, because I never want to be the sort of person who just declares that something is ruined forever because it didn’t head in the exact direction I wanted it to.
This in mind, and being honest with myself, I actually think the final episode of Oshi no Ko‘s third season is mostly pretty good.
A lot of the episode’s forehalf is devoted to Ruby trying to come to terms with the absence of both her former mother from her previous life, Tendouji Marina [the legendary Inoue Kikuko], who made a somewhat unexpected return to the narrative last week, as well as that of her current later mother, Ai. And honestly? It mostly works. We get to see Ruby repeatedly stumble over a bit in the 15 Year Lie script where it dictates that her character let her mother, who, in the fiction of the film never loved her, go. Predictably this absolutely tears Ruby apart, and she can’t get through the read, despite Kana’s attempts to coach her.
Name a time a friend gave you advice that made you look at them like this.
In a general sense, we probably should’ve gotten to this earlier—maybe toward the start of this season, rather than the cosplay episodes? Just a thought—but it does matter that it’s here at all. I was beginning to worry we’d never get to see Ruby’s side of things at all. By consequence, if there’s a standout star of the third season it is unquestionably Igoma Yurie, Ruby’s voice actress, who delivers some of the best work of her entire career here. Most of her dialogue, especially the strained rants about how her former mother must have loved her (until of course she finds out that that wasn’t really the case), is delivered in a pained, strangled yelp that really sells the character’s sheer despair at her situation. And once the episode hits its first big bombshell, where Aqua reveals himself as the former Dr. Amemiya Gorou, she starts full-on blubbering/ugly-crying in the best way possible. (You can literally hear her sniffling through the line-reads. That’s called commitment where I’m from.) Igoma doesn’t have a ton of other credits to her name, so if nothing else, I hope her performance here opens some doors for her even more than being Ruby in the first place likely already has. I would love to hear her in things more often.
As for Aqua finally revealing himself as the former Dr. What’s-his-name? I think around now makes sense, if he was going to hold onto it this long in the first place. (Narratively, that is. From a What Would You Do? sort of viewpoint he should’ve done this ages ago, but that’s not a terribly insightful statement.) So does the way their relationship entirely turns on a dime when he drops that piece of info, as she immediately lets go of her hatred of the brother that she thought had selfishly sold their mother out. Arguably, this stuff is way more manipulative of him than any of the more overt cases with Kana or Akane. (And the series knows this, too, because it makes sure to have the death goddess crow girl character who’s been present up and down this season wink and nudge at us about it. Keep her in mind, in fact, we’ll be coming back to her.) Still, it’s a solid beat, and while the flashback montage about time that Aqua and Ruby spent together as Gorou and Sarina is definitely pretty cloying, it’s still sweet enough to mostly work.
(There’s also this brilliant piece of comedy buried in the montage. I’m not a medical professional, so maybe I’m missing something here but you’re not supposed to do that, right? You’re definitely not.)
Now does all of this make this whole bit, this whole sequence, automatically a good piece of storytelling? No, an emotional beat working on a craftsmanship level is different from it being the right choice for the story. And honestly, I think the episode’s structure works against it here. A cut after the scene where Aqua reveals his past identity, and us being left to sit with Ruby’s bounceback for a week, would’ve done wonders. Especially when she drops this little line after reminiscing about Gorou’s “promise” to marry her when she came of age:
A black screen blinking the words “THEY FUCKED” in all capital letters would be more subtle.
It is absolutely hysterical, and probably inevitable, that we’ve ended up at incest. If the show simply ended here, the movie in production and Aqua and Ruby abandoning their revenge quest to be left to their presumably torrid reincarnation incestuous love affair, I would have nothing but respect for it. Sadly, we don’t live in a world where anime are allowed to end—or even end episodes—on heavy implications of incest. It does also very much feel rather rushed, like we’re getting this all out of the way so we can say that Ruby had a full character arc—something perhaps true but only on a technicality—so we can rush headlong to the show’s conclusion. Oshi no Ko has of course been announced for a fourth season, probably its last, so I will need to wait until then to evaluate how right I am about this. (I could of course also read the manga, but if I’ve held off for this long, what’s the sense in doing that now?) But I suspect I am. Akasaka has just never seemed terribly interested in Ruby as compared to Aqua, and while this episode has some of the best material the character’s ever been given, it really does seem like it’s supposed to put the bow on her development. Granted! There is still the unresolved business with her former mother, so maybe that will complicate things in some worthwhile way. I’d love to see more unhinged Ruby, it feels like we barely got to know her. I nonetheless remain skeptical.
That said, I can complain all day, but for what it sets out to do, I think the first half of the episode more works than doesn’t. The only real contention is how worthwhile what it’s trying to do actually is, and I remain undecided on that front. (As I’ve said, I really do just keep going back and forth on this show.) The second half of the episode is also good, and unlike the first, is so in pretty straightforward ways. In large part, it’s a character study of Miyako, the boss of Strawberry Productions, a constant background presence throughout most of the series but who never really got an episode of her own up to this point.
It is probably the only focus she’ll ever get, but the series makes the most of it, walking us through Miyako’s arrival in Tokyo, and her early career as a model. It’s very broad-stroke, but it’s solid stuff. Made all the stranger by how she chooses to express some of this.
Miyako latches onto an extended video game metaphor while explaining her life. Bluntly, in-context, this is one of the weirdest rambles of its kind I’ve ever heard a character go on. Aside from the central simile of “fame is like a video game” seeming like something a Republican-era Nicki Minaj would come up with, it’s kind of a stretch in the first place? For whatever reason, this whole rant gets the full visual metaphor treatment and we get to see Miyako fight the men she seduced in her youth as an RPG encounters and the like. This makes it no less bizarre, but it’s an admirable amount of committing to the bit.
This all concludes with her reuniting with Saitou Ichigo, Strawberry Productions’ former owner and her own ex, when “randomly” running into him at a bar. (This was, of course, orchestrated by Aqua, actually.) And leads to Miyako herself recommitting to her obligations to Aqua and Ruby. There’s a broad motherhood theme that runs through all this, an idea that Miyako is more of a mother to the twins, perhaps especially to Ruby, than either of her own mothers ever were. (And she outright calls herself their mom more than once.) There’s something there, but for a show whose premise is so entwined with family, Oshi no Ko‘s ideas about it have always been its weakest thematic expressions. Still, it’s a worthwhile thought and I hope the show does something with it in the long term. That Kana line from the rehearsal scene does feel an awful lot like foreshadowing.
Beyond these two main plots, this episode just also has a genuine sense of fun that’s been missing (or at least not as present as I’d like) in the show for a good while, now. The show’s main issues have always been its hypocrisy and the inescapable sense that it’s kind of didactic, the comedic leanings help take the edge off of both of those things. Aside from the usual bevy of Good Kana Faces, we also have, for example, Pirate Yuri??? Why not, right? That’s a good thing, even if it does still make me wish the show just leaned into its strengths more.
In-universe, this is a commercial for body wipes. Yes, really.
Aside from a brief post-credits scene, the very last thing to happen in this episode is actually, deliberately, quite funny! Gotanda, the film’s director, laments that the casting has been squared away with the exception of the child actors, to play a young Ruby and Aqua. This is where the character officially known as just Crow Girl [Kino Hina], who I’ve been calling the death goddess in my columns—since, you know, that’s what I thought she was—re-enters the picture. Crow Girl shows up in the closing minutes of this episode to do what she does best, be vague and portentous and deliberately needle Aqua. Aqua, in the rare bit of scheming from him this season to actually have an impact beyond being eyeroll-inducing, gets an idea. He asks her if she’s, you know, physically at least, a normal human with parents and a government ID and all that good stuff. She smugly responds yes, that her “vessel,” just like his, is on the surface a normal human. Aqua then drops his funniest line of the entire season by asking her a simple question.
The anime adaptation of hit narou-kei series Reborn As a Portentous Death God in Another World That’s Actually Just Modern Japan Again, I’m Forced to Become A Child Actress by The Teenage Boy I’ve Been Tormenting?! is coming to a TV station near you sooner than you think!
And from there we cut to credits! That’s literally how the season end! This is a good thing, of course. It’s entirely the kind of bold audacity that made me interested in this series in the first place. Does this episode alone being pretty good mean that all is forgiven and we are guaranteed a satisfying conclusion? Of course not, but it’s a good sign from a show that’s been short on those for a while.
In any case, any final judgment of Oshi no Ko as an anime will have to wait until after it’s complete. So I leave you with this: I’ll see you when I see you, B*Komachi fans. Because I’m me, it’ll probably be back under the Let’s Watch banner, too.
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This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
“We could even catch the moon in our tiny hands.”
I’ve missed this.
I refer here to two things. One is the very act of writing about an anime itself. It has been, at this point, more than a year since my last actual anime review—of Noir back in late 2024, you may remember—everything since then has been much more thrown together. If you’re not a regular reader of this site, that probably means exceptionally little to you, but I promise that to me it is important (and wonderful), to be properly writing a review again. If you don’t care about that, though, you might have some affection for the other thing that I’ve missed. I refer, of course, to the sprawling woodland of Hakumei and Mikochi, today’s object of appreciation.
I grew up in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. I don’t miss much about PA, but one thing I do is its beautiful green mountains, wooded and teeming with life. The Poconos may seem like small potatoes to some, but they are where I lived and walked in my youth, and they remain in my heart. A distinction little else in the state can really claim.
When I made that nebulous transition from “person who sometimes watches anime” to “anime enthusiast”, one of the first genres I gravitated toward was iyashikei. Sometimes nicknamed “healing TV”, iyashikei is a kind of wading, immersive visual experience focused less on plot and strong conflict than characterization and immaculate worldbuilding, with a strong emphasis on lived-in environmental design. It’s all in the service of that vibe: immaculately pastoral in its best examples. Done right, you can practically feel the wind blowing through your hair and see the shimmer of the sparkling sunlight on the lake. One such iyashikei, Kamichu!, was among my first favorite anime, and when they pop up today (increasingly a rare occurrence, although last year’s mono is an example, if you want one that’s recent) I tend to at least check them out. The mountain greenery of such shows reminds me of that of my first home, and I love them for that.
Hakumei & Mikochi is maybe not quite recent enough to be called a product of “today.” It dates back from the tail end of the last decade, 2018. I was broadly aware of its pastoral reputation at the time, but my head was in a different place back then, and I was occupied with other things. I was perhaps too busy writing some of my first anime articles, singing the praises of the likes of SSSS.GRIDMAN, for example, to notice something this slow and cozy. I had perhaps fallen out of touch with this sort of thing.
And it wasn’t and isn’t just me! “Cozy”, “slow”, and “pastoral” are words that have fallen out of fashion as positive descriptors of art in recent years, at least in my circles. This is for good reason, as a lot of this aesthetic has been laid claim to by unpleasant sorts who seek to parley these ideas of pastoral peace into significantly less savory ones. But in our rush to push these people out—necessary work, make no mistake—we have perhaps been too quick to hand them this space wholesale. This I take issue with. An injection of the rustic life can, in fact, be a good remedy for the stresses of the soul. And I refuse to concede this genre to the bigoted. They do not deserve it.
In any case, Hakumei & Mikochi, while perhaps not entirely immune to such appropriation, is at least less likely to be a victim of it owing to part of its premise. Our leads here are a pair of tiny forestfolk who live and work among the trees, one of which is their home, forming a small part of a woodland society that absolutely oozes folksy charm. This place is called Makinata, and is the primary setting for our tale. These women, the titular Hakumei [Matsuda Risae] and Mikochi [Shimoji Shino], have a decidedly wife-and-wife dynamic. It’s beyond adorable, and makes Hakumei & Mikochi nicely amenable to a queer audience.
(Note however, before we get ahead of ourselves, that this does not extend quite so far as being an explicitly queer work. Somewhat frustratingly, our leads are only ever defined as “roommates” despite the obvious married-life framing. When Hakumei’s boss refers to Mikochi as her wife, the former is actually quite puzzled! Even odder is that a later episode sees someone make a similar joke to Mikochi, who accepts the framing without any protest. This kind of playing coy is not uncommon in this genre, but this is a fairly surprising place to find it. At least the “—and they were roommates!” jokes write themselves. And none of this will, in any case, stop me or anyone else from referring to Hakumei & Mikochi in shorthand as “that show about the tiny lesbians.”)
This is, perhaps, what’s found on the other end of the spectrum from that toxic yuri I’m always crowing about liking. I’ve always maintained you really want a little of both, anyway. Bitter flavors enhance sweet ones, after all. This desire, for something sweet, is what led to me deciding to watching Hakumei & Mikochi in the long term after stumbling on it during an anime roulette with some friends. (A fun activity, I recommend it.) Often, once I was committed to watching it on my own, I’d put an episode on before bed each night. On some occasions, pleasantly nuzzled between waking consciousness and the intoxicating pull of the dreamworld, I had to lazily slap the pause button on my computer, halting an episode in its tracks. Too soothed, in these moments, by the lullaby of the series to continue, and needing respite in the form of proper sleep. Asked what I think of Hakumei & Mikochi on the whole, “it put me to sleep, in a good way! :)” wouldn’t be a bad answer.
It would be an overly simple one, however.
From the beginning, Hakumei & Mikochi makes no secret of the fact that life in the woodland is not strictly snacks of giant peanuts* and drinks of beer. The series is in fact best understood as not being solely about the title characters, but rather the entire society of Makinata. We explore this in a few ways, but primarily through the show’s decently large cast. In addition to the liliputian forestfolk like Hakumei and Mikochi themselves, there are a number of talking animal characters as well. Everything from the weasel Iwashi [Matsukaze Masaya], who serves as Hakumei’s mentor and immediate superior at her job, to various one-off characters like a tiny beetle aesthete who longs for the glamorous life, a rabbit cameraman, a helpful baboon who operates a gondola, and so on, the forest of Makinata and its surrounding environs are stuffed to the gills with animal characters. This is a contributing factor to one of the show’s greatest strengths: its sheer sense of whimsy. Even outside its animal cast, this folksy anything-goes energy is quite prevalent. In episode six we meet a hairdresser, Jada [Shintani Mayumi!], one of H&M’s fellow forest-people. She lives, and runs her business out of, a giant egg. It’s absolutely delightful! And why not, right? If you’re going to establish something as inherently fairy tale-esque as tiny people who live in the woods, there’s no reason to not go all the way with it.
You will get your hair cut at Big Egg and you will get a mohawk and you will say “thank you Jada for my mohawk” when she’s done giving it to you.
This is just one part of what serves to make the show extremely watchable. Its visual styling is a big factor as well. While discussions of anime visuals these days often boil down to talk of sakuga, Hakumei & Mikochi has a fairly restrained animation style. It more than makes up for that (if indeed we can call it a shortcoming at all) with its other visual elements, such as its color choices—uniformly vibrant—and overall mood-setting. One trick it leans on fairly heavily in the directorial department is the use of cordoned-off panels of animation to emphasize particular moments. In a lesser anime this would come off as tacky, and I’m sure it’s drawing from Kashiki Takuto‘s original manga quite heavily, but given Hakumei & Mikochi‘s general energy, it works quite nicely, contributing something of a pop-up storybook feel. Beyond the visual realm, the voice acting and music are uniformly excellent. The former collecting a strong pool of talent, largely veterans, and the latter consistently setting a rustic and homemade feel. This applies as well to the vocal music. Such as that contributed by the character Konju [Yuuki Aoi], an initially rather arrogant singer who Hakumei and Mikochi befriend over the course of a few episodes, and also to the ending theme, an absolutely excellent piece of music that I looked forward to every time, even when I was sad to see a great episode end.
(A same-day edit from me here. A commenter rightly pointed out that I probably should have made mention that the music is the work of Evan Call, who has a number of credits to his name in anime, virtually all of which that I’ve personally seen have a very strong sonic identity. That’s a good point! So consider that omission fixed. While we’re at belated accreditation, I’ll point out that the director is Andou Masaomi, who I really should have thought to shout out directly, since I’ve been very positive on his work previously on this very site.)
These of course are evaluations of the show’s (excellent across the board) craft. We should also pay attention however to what Hakumei & Mikochi is trying to say, or at least what aspects of it are part of the slow-life fantasy it offers and why they might be so. A consistent theme, perhaps surprisingly so, is the nature of labor! Something the series is actually supremely concerned with. No simple utopia, the world of Hakumei & Mikochi is one where work is exchanged for money just as in our own. And in fact, it demonstrates that this is no mere show economy, either. It’s shown to us via a few flashbacks that, at one point, Hakumei was even a homeless wanderer. This is a depiction of genuine poverty that’s quite rare in this sort of thing. One such flashback even sees her preyed upon by thieves and nearly left for dead! Of course, in the show’s present, she is very much fine, but it’s still quite a departure, even as the sad story that must have led to that condition in the first place is left merely implied instead of told to us in full. That she lives with Mikochi now and is gainfully employed as a carpenter, mason, and general handyman is treated as unequivocally a good thing, and from Hakumei’s own perspective it’s easy to see how that’d be so. (Mikochi, for her part, is a prepared foods wholesaler, which does strike me as a very specific profession for an anime character to have.)
About Hakumei’s many job titles, a uniting thread here is that Hakumei & Mikochi treats all types of labor similarly. This firstly means that, thankfully, there’s none of the odd job chauvinism you sometimes see in this sort of thing. But more interestingly it also means that, whether that work is what we’d consider mundane; catching fish, grinding coffee, bartending, construction, singing, etc., or what we’d consider fantastical, the series treats it with equal respect. Take for example Sen [Anzai Chika], the necromancer-of-sorts the lead pair meet in episode two. Her day to day life is defined by her research into her art. This involves tying magic lamps to cleaned skeletons, which reanimates them with a semblance of life by replicating the heartbeat of a living thing.
Science.
This is all treated as unusual, for certain, but not remotely sinister, being just another occupation that powers the woodland that Hakumei and Mikochi call home. When Sen reappears later in the series, she is again treated the same way as any other character. For another example, there is Ayune [Nabatame Hitomi], the last character of note introduced in the series proper. Mikochi’s elder sister, she’s a playwright in town due to a slump, and melancholic that she hasn’t seen Mikochi in so long. (Although she denies this at first.) A lesser series would come off as moralizing in writing a character like this, a writer with a fairly inconsiderate personality and no real life skills to speak of beyond her pen—a combination of traits that thankfully describes no one your reviewer here has ever met—but Hakumei & Mikochi is pretty amenable to her, warts and all. She’s a layabout, and when she does try to help Mikochi (with chopping an enormous daikon that she herself bought), she messes it up, but ultimately this is all played as eccentric as opposed to downright harmful. Maybe that’s cheating in its own way, but it makes the character endearing, and when we get to see a snippet of her work in the ending credits of that episode, it’s lovely. Hakumei & Mikochi respects the arts—mundane and fantastical—and physical labor equally.
In fact, I would say the main “fantasy” element of Hakumei & Mikochi in this regard is not an absence of work itself, as it is in some similar media, but the lack of alienation from that work. Hakumei, Mikochi, and their friends are able to make a living doing what they love, and there is a more or less direct correlation between the effort they put in and the rewards they reap. The fantasy here is not one of not having to work at all, it is one of working well out of passion rather than strict necessity, and of that passion being rewarded. This is not to say that Hakumei & Mikochi is remotely some sort of socialist parable, merely that it is able to imagine a world in which one’s aptitudes and passions are rewarded, rather than downplayed or deliberately worked out of them. It’s a nice idea, and it’s to the show’s immense credit that when we get a few episodes focusing on Hakumei’s work as a member of the Borestone Guild, a group of masons. In what is probably its most important articulation of this theme, it makes the whole process look about as rewarding as it must feel to Hakumei herself when all is said and done. A lovely thing to do for a character who is often defined by her desire to feel useful. Her formerly-dismissive boss, another forest-person named Narai [Tsuda Kenjirou], is even proud of her. Imagine that!
This fascination with labor extends into what work can be done for each other, as well, extending this idea into that of intra-community support. Sen, for instance, helps Hakumei and Mikochi when a lens fire destroys part of their house in episode three. Hakumei’s work with the Guild falls under this umbrella too, as the main project we see Hakumei help them with is restoring a causeway. While most such examples that dot the show are well-done, this community theme is also, unfortunately, where the show makes some of its relatively few missteps.
Despite this genre’s reputation for being laid-back, many iyashikei have a handful of zanier, more frantic episodes. Hakumei & Mikochi is no exception here, with episode eight in particular of interest to us here. In it, our girls have to help the denizens of a part of the nearby city called Honey House—a block inhabited by outcasts where “anything goes”—deal with a group of troublemakers. This is a more serious conflict than most Hakumei & Mikochi takes a look at, and in attempting to edge into this territory it does end up hitting a weird note. I think the disputes that arise between the old and new populations of a city and the like are a bit beyond H&M’s pay grade. Although the rather goofy tone keep it from feeling like too serious of a mistake. (Most notably, Konju is part of this storyline and serves as a damsel in distress when the troublemakers make off with her. Her extremely blasé attitude about being kidnapped does a lot to save the episode. She treats it more like a guided tour of the city, than anything.) The central idea of disputes rising in this sort of loose, almost anarchist space is neat, but the resolution feels off and just a bit too simplistic. Higaki [Takeuchi Ryouta]—Honey House’s nominal leader—makes up with the head of the troublemakers over a drink, and they bond over the memory of a departed friend. It’s a nice idea, but it also feels a bit like a hasty way to put the cork back on the bottle, so to speak.
In the series proper’s final episode, we touch on these ideas again. There we learn more about Hakumei’s backstory, how she once traveled with a caravan led by a great wolf named Emerald Tail [Sakakibara Yoshiko]. Hakumei herself describes Emerald’s caravan as both a trading group and a mutual protection force (the sub track in fact actually calls them “police”). Hakumei is quite open about thinking of them in positive terms. But interestingly, Emerald Tail herself doesn’t seem to entirely agree. It’s her who urges Hakumei to stay in Makinata, when the caravan arrives there. Stopped at the gate by—introduced to us suddenly here for the first time—the fact that Makinata actually excludes those over a certain size. When the caravan and Hakumei reunite, it’s extremely brief, limited to an exchange of greetings across a ravine. Hakumei, whomever she may have spent time with in the past, has found her home, and it’s with Mikochi. As with the Honey House story, this feels like a warm but perhaps rushed conclusion to a story that opens a lot of questions about the world of the series that it isn’t really equipped to answer.
For better or worse, Hakumei and Mikochi isn’t actually interested in these questions at all. These toe-dips into the wider geographical situation around Makinata are not a primary concern of the series, which is a bit bothersome to me! Since this definitely brushes closest to all of that hay I alluded to toward the beginning of this article. I would like to dismiss it out of hand, but cannot really do that. So while it doesn’t ruin the series for me, or even anything really at all close, it does remain as a qualm. I hate qualms, but to not acknowledge them is to render any praise of a series meaningless (and I hope I’ve made clear that I have quite a lot of praise to give), so acknowledged they must be. I have no simple explanation for these aspects of the show, but if I can offer one theory, it is perhaps an acknowledgement that, like our own, the world of Hakumei & Mikochi is vast and complex. That Hakumei has found her place within it does not necessarily make it less so.
It is, in any case, better at exploring the feeling of belonging so central to its characterization of Hakumei. This is typified by the show’s third and final major thematic concern, a uniting artistic impulse behind iyashikei in general; the wonder of the natural world. This is where Hakumei and Mikochi not only shines but sparkles. Every single episode breathes a wonderful, picture-book landscape naturality, and it is absolutely lovely stuff. Everything from the lake that Sen sets out to venture into in her submarine to the mountains outside Makinata itself, to the bamboo forests near Hakumei and Mikochi’s own home. Even when, in a late episode, Hakumei and Mikochi are caught in a rainstorm on a fishing trip, even something as mundane as a downpour is treated as a little miracle.
These too will be important memories, whether you like it or not!
This translates to to how the show treats even the most distant and fantastical aspect of the natural world, the night sky itself. When, in episode four, Hakumei and Mikochi’s house is damaged by a freak lens fire, the time they spend camping while it’s repaired is largely comedic, with Mikochi suffering a bit due to her indoorsy nature meshing poorly with the open wild. Crucially though, the segment is capped with Hakumei showing her the beauty of the stars at night. “This—” Hakumei says, “—is our roof. All of it.” Hakumei & Mikochi understands an old maxim very well: home is where the heart is, and if the heart is under the sky, well, so be it.
Not that nature is inherently kind, of course! In that same episode, our heroines are respectively rattled and injured by a great horned owl by the name of Oroshi. Hakumei is only able to get it to leave by offering it a bounty of dried meats. There’s an implicit respect for the natural here, one that contrasts with the claiming it as domain elsewhere. There are still wild things in the world, and not all of them play nicely with the tiny folk of the wood. Of course, at the end of the episode Oroshi reveals that it, too, is more or less benevolent. Still, the uncertainty is striking, and it remains as strong an image as the reached-for Moon.
That duality, I think, is a good synecdoche for the heart of this series. Outdoors or indoors, working hard or the lazy life, it’s the little things that Hakumei & Mikochi truly excels at, the subtle warmth of home. That has been enough for the anime to amass something of a cult following in the years since its release—as I mention near the top of this piece, it’s still well-liked in yuri fan circles—and it’s clearly appealed to enough people such that the manga has continued on to this very day. I haven’t actually read the manga, myself! But having enjoyed my time with the anime so thoroughly, I may very well do so. Not right away though, I don’t think. Hakumei & Mikochi is best saved for when you’re missing the slow life. There is truly no rush, it’ll wait for you, as familiar as your own front door.
*: Strictly speaking, they are regular-sized peanuts, and it is our protagonists who are small. Still, the effect is the same.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.
The problem with finally formally introducing our main villain last week is that it makes all the showbiz stuff feel deeply trivial. If that was on purpose, I’d respect it. Unfortunately, it is still portrayed with the same monumental importance it’s always had in this show. Now more than ever, even, now that the movie about Ai is getting off the ground.
Speaking of which, hoo boy.
At what point does something cross the line from tragedy into comedy? How ridiculous does it have to get? How contrived must the situation be? Aqua has some kind of Epic Revenge Plan we are not presently privy to the details of that relies on this movie being a big success. Hence his acting in it as one of the leads—this is probably also a weird pyschosexual thing but the show is weirdly shy about actually saying that—and hence caring so much about how well it does. This much makes sense, but the arc it is trying to set up is short on anything actually worth watching so far.
What this setup means instead is that we get to do the stage play arc from season two warmed over, but with a movie this time and with less visual panache despite the higher stakes. (This might be the first episode of Oshi no Ko that I would say kind of looks so-so overall, in fact. It’s not horrible or anything, but there’s a noticeable lack of dazzle compared to most of its episodes.) You’d be forgiven for forgetting this, but there was a time not that long ago when Hoshino Aqua did in fact care about acting as something other than a means to an end. The fact that he doesn’t anymore isn’t inherently a problem, but as with everything else in this season the real issue is in the execution. There’s something to be said for the pure, granite cynicism of essentially having your lead seem like he’s going to walk into an open grave, but it’s absolutely no fun to watch at all, and it isn’t really that compelling as drama, either. The Aqua I cared about is already dead, so I don’t much care if this guy lives or dies. He says it himself in this episode, he’s given up on living a happy life. Why should I care if he lives one or not?
God bless MEM-cho. She is one of Oshi no Ko‘s vanishingly few characters who might be called “a normal person,” and as such she is totally unequipped to handle Aqua’s whole mess, but at least she’s trying.
Then there’s the whole blind acting contest thing that closes out the episode. Essentially, Frill—yes, more on that in a second—challenging Ruby and Akane to a pseudo-audition where they will vote among themselves for the best actress between them. In principle this is actually interesting, but in practice, it’s the same thing I’ve been saying about every problem I have with this season. It’s not that it’s bad on paper, it just isn’t handled well. Also, I don’t care how true to life it is, contriving the situation such that neither Akane nor Ruby have any idea what they’re actually auditioning for just makes the entire thing less interesting. I want to see Ruby torn the fuck apart by grappling with what she’s going to have to portray if she lands this role, and I want her to do it anyway. I’m sure we’ll get to that eventually but what point does holding off on it serve? Other than being yet another example of the show handling Ruby with kid gloves? (Because god forbid a girl be a tragic heroine while her brother is doing exactly the same thing.)
Right, it serves to reintroduce everyone’s favorite character, Shiranui Frill.
Yeah, you know, Frill. The living piece of trivia who was initially created solely to bridge this series and Love is War!, since she’s related to a character from that manga. That Frill. Are there a lot of Frill stans in the audience? Are the Frillnatics (presently my headcanon for what Frill’s stan army is called in-universe) popping for this? If you are out there and you are reading this, please reply to this post telling me why you like Frill. I’m genuinely curious. Before this episode she was barely a character at all, and hey, to her credit, she makes a solid showing here (it is never a bad idea to add more weirdos to the cast). But it all just seems like such cruft. The anime is apparently cutting quite a lot, and it still feels like it’s paced glacially and is just generally way too decompressed. I want some fucking urgency, man! There’s a killer on the loose! And frankly the contrivance just makes her look like a terrible person! Frill knows that Ruby is Ai’s daughter, surely? The idea that she’d not tip her off just for the sake of being professional strains credulity. Actors break the industry’s unspoken rules for much less in both real life and fiction all the fucking time. (It would be an entirely other matter if she was doing this on purpose in order to give herself an edge in the contest or to mess with Ruby for some other reason, but there’s no real indication that that’s the case.) All told it’s a surprisingly sloggish episode, despite there being, theoretically, quite a few things that happen here.
Also, the heavy-handed Ruby/Ai parallels are a bit much. But honestly if that was my only problem with this season we’d be doing alright. One thing they do genuinely have in common—a much bigger similarity than the contrived “they’re both liars” thing that the show keeps trying to set up—is that they’re dumbass goofballs. For example, we learn about a pair of video letters Ai had Gotanda hold on to (another contrived element), and when he asks her why have him do this, her response is this.
And back in the present, Ruby’s best guess as to what the audition will entail is…this whiteboard doodle.
(This is also something both of them have in common with Frill, who goes on a bizarre rant about her taxes and submits a comedy skit about the actual like from-the-fairytale Boy Who Cried Wolf as her audition, which includes her howling like a wolf. It’s one of the episode’s highlights.)
I’ve said this many times, but it’s so ridiculous to me that Akasaka Aka clearly wants to write Dark And Serious material, because he is so much better at simple comedy and relationship stuff. Kana is a bright spot in this episode when she shows up in its first third. She has a nice little exchange with Aqua and another with Ruby, and exits the episode early on with this line. I would not be surprised if she is the only major character who makes it out of Oshi no Ko with something resembling a happy ending. (Not inherently a better thing, but something Akasaka is far better at writing than whatever the fuck else he’s trying to do here.)
And honestly, that’s the main thing right? I didn’t hate this episode. It has its bright spots! But overall? In aggregate? It’s just a mess and a bore. I don’t respect what Oshi no Ko is doing anymore. Not because it shouldn’t try to have tragic elements or be serious, but because it is simply bad at both of those things.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.
Something I greatly appreciate about Ikoku Nikki is its intentionally screwy chronology. Asa walks home disappointed when one of her friends suggests they all try out for a lead vocalist position. We then get to see why she’s upset. All of those friends pledged at some point to write a song together, a promise treated as sacred in some genres here dissolves into nothing in the span of just a few months. As she walks, melancholy, a piano melody drifts her way, and it’s suddenly years and years ago, when she was much younger and singing in a choir competition, something her biological parents seem to have encouraged. Later, when she loses, her father stutteringly tells her that her singing “stood out.” In this way, there is a through-line. The immense weight of that reaction, likely not even intentional, is something that can utterly sledgehammer a child’s sense of self. This isn’t the thing that sets Asa a-wandering, but it is one such thing.
This methodology pairs well with the collage-like approach that Asa takes to her notebook itself, the central object of Ikoku Nikki on the whole. Her writing in it is, like her memories, patchwork, a scrawled quilt of quotations from the adults in her life, doodles of UFOs, short exclamations of feeling and so on. In this way, Ikoku Nikki is very good at marrying form to function; we are living inside of a notebook not unlike Asa’s as we watch it, because everyone’s life is like this.
And indeed, Asa’s not actually the only character to have this privilege. We follow Emiri for some time here, time spent waiting for her friends, fixed on a length of telescoping pencil lead, washes away into a daydream of the seaside.
When one of those friends arrives, she vents about feeling like she could never stop being friends with Asa even if she wanted to ever since the accident. That feeling, tense and heavy, melts away. The person Emiri is venting to is a gentle newcomer to the narrative, one Shouko [Hanazawa Kana], who wraps her pinky finger around hers, the implicitly romantic nature of the gesture made explicit when Emiri blushingly says that she likes this girl. Without this insight into Emiri’s own point of view, it would be easy for the viewer to condemn her at arm’s length. Walking alongside her, we can see that her feeling of burden isn’t borne of cruelty. It’s the shifting unease of someone who feels she is rapidly growing apart from her childhood friend, in ways she’s not sure how to confront. This sort of tempering is what drives Ikoku Nikki’s emotional logic, it’s what makes it feel “real.” The emotional verisimilitude holds up a mirror to every similar selfish decision we’ve ever made for ourselves. It doesn’t judge, but it does reflect.
These aren’t the only lives this show has explored, but all those it has are considered similarly. (Makio, most notably. Both here and elsewhere.) Notebooks, connected by only the whims of their writers, emotions and events blending together with no regard for time or space, are the perfect metaphor. We are, perpetually, searching for the unifying thread at the center of it all, the reason we write in the first place, no matter what form our stories take.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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.
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