Tag: anime

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [4/15/24]

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

We move into our second week of the new season, and things are mostly going steady with only a couple of comparative curveballs. Plus; an interesting manga and a pretty cool OVA series a friend showed me. Forgive me if I’m a little brief, here. I don’t feel like doing much extra typing today; yours truly is recovering from a doctor’s appointment where I had to get bloodwork done. (Nothing serious! Just regular HRT checkup stuff.)

Anime

Bucchigiri?! – Episode 12 (Series Finale)

A good finale to a good show! That was one hell of a final battle. I loved how by the end, Arajin and Senya’s roles have almost reversed in their respective duos. (Conversely, Matakara and Ichiya’s fundamental insecurities were close enough that they were able to merge permanently.)

I’m glad that Arajin and Matakara both end this series with a sense of what’s really important. I won’t lie and say this show was perfect, it has a couple issues to be sure, mostly boring structural stuff like pacing problems, but overall I quite enjoyed it and I’m really happy with how neatly everything wraps up in this last episode. The story of life goes on. Perhaps we must all bucchi our giri in our own way.

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 1

Ah, this is one hell of a mixed bag.

Here’s the thing, I like Mysterious Disappearances. As in, I like the manga this is based on. At its best, I actually like it quite a bit. But I also like it with many caveats, the biggest of which is that it is a pretty shameless ecchi thing on top of being a horror-mystery series in that “Japanese urban legends all connected by an overarching metaplot” genre. (Think of it as Otherside Picnic‘s heterosexual, fanservicey cousin and you’re in the right ballpark.) I won’t pretend I’m immune to this kind of material, and one of the reasons I started reading the source at all is that the main character, Sumireko, is absolutely gorgeous in her normal form (we’ll circle back to that specificity in a second), but a lot of these scenes, translated to the anime, just don’t do anything for me. Not to mention, I think a lot of people who might be interested in the mystery half of the premise are going to be put off by the ecchi material. Not that the series has any obligation to capitulate to those people, but it is at least worth thinking about. The simple facts of the format shift makes the tonal clash a lot more obvious than it might be on the written page.

I think the smart thing to do might honestly have been to minimize this stuff, but they were never going to do that. That in mind, going in the other direction and getting a team who could really amp up the raunchiness would’ve been an approach that at least engages with the source material, too. (If nothing else, original mangaka Nujima clearly really loves drawing Sumireko.) Unfortunately, and to be probably too blunt, the team from Zero-G working on this just aren’t capable of making normal Sumireko as hot as Nujima draws her in the manga. Sorry, but it’s true! A lot of the more egregious cheesecake shots in here, especially the ones we get while Sumireko is thinking about the state of her life, don’t really do anything except remind me of the “everyone is so mean to me :(” meme. Funnily enough, I’ve also seen the exact opposite complaint; people who are more all-in on what the manga’s doing than I am complaining because the show isn’t as explicit and crying censorship. I think this is an unfortunate case where the necessary compromises of an anime adaptation have left no one particularly happy.

And as for Sumireko’s other form, her childhood self which she reverts to by reading a magic poem, well, I’m not into that kind of thing. Is the show into that kind of thing? Honestly, in the manga it was an unequivocal “yeah I’d say so,” given how it was presented, but here, I’m not entirely sure. There’s definitely some camera angles in here that I did Not Enjoy, and I can’t imagine putting that in a series where that’s not at least part of the intent. On the other hand, Sumireko’s actual transformation is evidently painful, and by the episode’s end she’s bleeding out of her eyes, which seems to indicate to me like we are perhaps meant to find this gross and offputting. This was an equally strange thing, in terms of tone and presentation, in the manga, so I can’t really blame the anime itself here, but it’s pretty unpleasant all around and I’m not a fan, and the anime definitely makes all these shortcomings more obvious. Also, there’s a ton of crude humor directed at Sumireko by our other protagonist, Ren. To my recollection, this eventually becomes more tolerable as Sumireko starts to give as good as she gets, but I forgot how much of a snot he was in the first couple chapters, and he just comes off really badly here for all sorts of reasons. Cool eyes, though. I’m glad those survived the transition to the anime.

As for the actual horror / mystery / urban legend / whatever elements, those survive more or less intact and I think are what works best here. The nighttime city shots are suitably liminal and creepy, and as weird as the execution is, in terms of characterization, we get a good sense of the kind of person Sumireko is from her abuse of the poem book’s age regression spell in order to feel like a child prodigy again. Also, Fairouz Ai absolutely kills it as Sumireko, and I think the decision to cast her here was a smart one. So despite everything I just said, I do intend to keep up with this. I think every season needs its C-tier Decent anime, and that is the role this looks to fill for me.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 15

A good episode, and a return to what probably qualifies as the series’ “formula”, even if I wouldn’t say that’s a bad thing.

This is one of the visually wilder episode’s of the series, which surprised me a little. I haven’t looked up the staff credits but just from watching this it’s obvious that a lot of animators with strong individual styles were brought in here. (Sakugabooru identifies at least part of the very stylish fight scene against the dryads as being the work of Kanno Ichigo, and I’m inclined to trust them on this.)

Some other points; Marcille is just great up and down this entire episode in all sorts of ways, and I love how absolutely done she is with everyone else. A lot of the animation for the dryad flowers was incredibly horny (not a complaint, just an observation). The cockatrice being introduced with boss subtitles is the funniest thing ever. Even when it’s preparing a familiar course, Dungeon Meshi continues to be just really great.

Go! Go! Loser Ranger! – Episode 2

Good episode this week, definitely a bit speedy, but I think the key points were done very well, mainly Soldier F’s untimely demise. I will also confess that a huge chunk of the reason I was fond of this episode was the extremely obvious; Suzukiri first makes her role in this story known here and the entire scene where this happens is just really, really good. Arguably, it’s even better in the anime than it was in the manga. Speaking of which; Suzukiri is, as far as I can tell, the first role of any real note played by Yano Yumika. Whoever found her and decided to cast her here needs a raise, because she is an absolute delight as this character. If you’re not watching this show, and women with ambiguous morals and crazy eyes are a thing you’re interested in, I would recommend at least checking it out.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 2

This show is weird! I did not like basically the entire first half of this episode, but it brought me back in the second. (They’re basically different stories entirely, and I assume they were separate in the original light novel.) All told, I’d say I don’t really understand its sense of humor super well, but sometimes it gets a chuckle out of me, and I guess for something I’m watching with friends that’s all you can really ask for.

Train to The End of the World – Episode 3

This was an interesting, and very fun-gal episode. I think it illuminates some of the show’s main concerns. But I have to admit my first reaction was “poor Akira!”

This show has a very unique way of structuring its dialogue that I struggle to put into words. The characters talk over each other a lot? This, combined with the fact that the rest of the main four just dismiss Akira’s concerns out of hand even before the mushrooms start influencing their thoughts when they eat dinner gives me the feeling that learning to listen to each other is going to be a running theme going forward. (It makes sense; the 7G incident was caused by a communication network gone haywire, after all.) I’d kind of had this thought as early as the first episode, so it’s nice to see it reinforced here. The girls are each others’ only real peers, and they’re friends in a loose sense, but they don’t seem to really respect each other very much.

We also get our first straightforward spook of the whole series with Akira’s “dream” of being pursued by the mushrooms. But the episode doesn’t let up there, and I’d call the entire thing fairly unsettling, especially toward the end where Shizuru, mushroom-bearing, is questioning if she was ever even really friends with Yoka at all and all three of the non-Akira girls seem pretty ready to give up. Although I think it’s interesting that the mushroom cult’s way of life is ultimately not immediately dismissed by the series, a lesser show would just write these people off entirely. Train to the End of the World doesn’t do that, it’s at least open to the idea that their sort of pseudo-carefree doomerism might be a valid, if flawed, approach to life, even if it’s not the one the show wants to take.

Also, that cliffhanger. My thought in the original version of this writeup was that Akira had a mushroom growing on her in an inconvenient place, but a person replying to me on tumblr (specifically a user named dream-about-dancing) pointed out that she might actually be turning into an animal instead, and also postulated that the next town seems to have a kitsune theme going by the doodles on the map from episode two. So who knows what’s going on there! I remain extremely invested in this show, and I’m glad it’s kept up the intrigue.

Pokémon Horizons – Episode 46

Pokémon Horizons opting to establish its characters over its first major arc, and then going into a loose adaptation of the recent games for its second, is, in my opinion, kind of brilliant. It allows them to eventually move the same characters to the next games’ setting when the time comes, and it makes sure we already care about the core cast before introducing a number of game characters here, also making it a good way to ensure Liko and friends aren’t overshadowed.

That fun little narrative trick aside, this was just a really great episode overall. The Floragato / Dewott battle was really exciting, and the episode as a whole was a fun way to get any new viewers up to speed but also get all of us into the swing of things going forward. I’m really excited to see where all this is gonna go, since the Explorers are clearly going to still factor in somehow.

Also, I will wholly admit that a good chunk of me watching this episode was just pointing at various characters from the game I like and then kicking my feet like a schoolgirl because they’re on the silver screen. Many such cases.

Himitsu no AiPri – Episode 1

Himitsu no AiPri is my second total Pretty Series show, and a lot like the previous, Waccha Primagi, it’s very zany and goofy, with the idol stuff as an outlet for the main character being a ball of anxiety trying to express herself. (As a sidebar, I ended up watching the premiere a week late and will probably be a week behind the JP airings for most of this series’ run, but it’s hard to say for sure, this being another fansubs-only release.)

There are just tons of strange little elements crammed in here that give the premiere a ton of charm; a “good luck charm” between two characters that consists of tapping one’s heads together, the inevitable titular idol competition taking place in some weird cyberverse, a principal who disrespects the show’s entire premise and is also so old-school that she’s an ojou character named Victoria, a background character whose hair looks chimera-fused right down the middle. The fact that we’re introduced to over a dozen characters here (albeit most of them only briefly) is pretty crazy, too, and signals that this is a show that’s going to be on the lighthearted and goofy end for the most part. Our main character literally falls into the technomagic bracelet that turns her into an idol. We’re in for a good time.

There’s also the show’s bizarre cyberworld, which provides a distinct feeling from the already-zany main setting. It must be noted that, of course, our main girl passes the cyber-idol entrance exam she’s subjected to without any prior warning here with flying colors. (Personally, I wasn’t that won over by the song itself, maybe it will grow on me?)

Also there is a truly overwhelming amount of pink in this episode. And it’s pretty gay, to boot.

Giant Robo the Animation: The Day The Earth Stood Still

A non-seasonal bringing up the rear, here. I watched this with a friend (who tends to go by zhagu on the internet), and I have to say, it was quite interesting overall, and I enjoyed it a lot.

In terms of scale, it plays out something like a cross between an old-school sci fi anime and a Greek Tragedy. Everything is huge, stylish, and feels inevitable. It doesn’t really fall into a single genre, something representative is that the enormous final battle, otherwise a contest between two enormous mechanical beings, is interrupted with a fight straight out of a samurai series and it doesn’t feel strange or out of place at all. I’ve been told that some of this is an attempt to make the series feel like an incomplete adaptation of a nonexistent original work; this is the alleged “second to last arc,” of which the rest of the show, obviously, does not exist. This structure gives the series a surreal and sometimes even hallucinatory feeling, even as it remains distinctly grounded in its 70s sci fi anime / raygun gothic visual style.

Also found within: interesting ruminations on what a sacrifice truly means and is, familial legacy, and cycles of vengeance. I’m going to be thinking about this one for a while, and I would not be surprised if I rewatched it at some point and think even more highly of it. Good show, and I broadly recommend it.

Manga

A Story About A Hallucinatory Girl

Let nobody ever tell you that there’s no interesting stuff on Mangadex.

This is a very short Pixiv comic (split into nine chapters but they’re each very brief. I think this totals to 30 pages or so?) about a guy who gets in a car crash and starts hallucinating that a girl is following him everywhere. It’s….odd. I kind of like it a lot.

I’m not necessarily sure I’d call it the most sensitive handling of this material, but it turns out a lot better than what I think many would be inclined to assume from its oddball premise, especially around the halfway point when the girl starts interfering with his love life. It goes some places in a way I think is actually pretty arresting, I wouldn’t mind reading a full series of this and I think the author is talented enough that my first reaction upon finishing it was that I hope they continue pursuing art. (More on that in a second.)

I’m going to spoil the ending now, which I think is best experienced for oneself, so if you’d prefer to get the authentic experience, go read it quick, and then read the next paragraph.

OK, so!

The case turns out to be this: there actually was no guy at all, the girl is the real protagonist, and what she’s been experiencing is some kind of syndrome, brought on by brain damage, where she doesn’t recognize herself as herself, and thinks she’s a man. By the end of the comic, she’s been hit by a car again (!!) and improbably, this seems to return her to her normal condition, and she can recognize herself again.

This is quite an interesting place to take a story like this and I have to be honest in that, perhaps naively, I did not see it coming at all. Like I said previously, this isn’t a terribly sensitive handling of this material (I don’t think the solution to receiving brain trauma is to get more of it, if I had to guess), but it being….sort of a metaphor for self-acceptance in the end? Is pretty cool. Even moreso because you can choose to read some trans subtext in there if you’d like, which is always a bonus. It’s far from a perfect comic, but as a rough draft from someone who clearly has a lot of ideas (and a knack for character design, shout out to the absolutely gorgeous polyamorous queen in chapter 6), I think it’s a solid hit from a wild swing.

As for the mangaka making more comics, well, it turns out that Hamita, the mangaka in question, actually has quite a deep back catalog of mostly-independent manga of this nature, which I’m excited to dive into this coming week. (They also have a few manga that have been published, it seems, in actual magazines, but the majority of their work seems to be doujin in the broad sense.) Finding a new rabbit hole to explore like this is always fun, and I have to give a shout out to my friend zersk for alerting me to the fact that this manga existed in the first place. Evidently, I need to snoop around scanlation sites a bit more often.

And that’s all for the week from this past week. I think after this article goes live, your favorite anime blogger is going to take a nice, long nap. But before I do, please contemplate this week’s bonus thought.

Note: Magic Planet Anime is not responsible for any legal actions that may occur as the result of hiring a child wearing a tiny hat as your lawyer.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime

Seasonal First Impressions: Flipping The Haters Off in GIRLS BAND CRY

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.

There are two immediately noteworthy things about Girls Band Cry, one fairly frustrating, and the other very much a selling point for a series that is going to need it. Point one; you cannot legally watch Girls Band Cry anywhere in the anglosphere as of the time of this writing. There’s just no way to do it. For whatever reason, none of the major streaming services have picked this thing up, and it’s only because of a fansubbing team going by SobsPlease that this article exists at all, since I don’t speak Japanese and would otherwise have written the show off as beyond my reach. If we were talking about a show that was fairly uninteresting, this would still be a little sad, but mostly of no major consequence. However, in the case of Girls Band Cry it is very annoying because of point two. This series has an extremely distinctive visual style. I would go so far as arguing it doesn’t really look like any other TV anime. At the very least, it certainly doesn’t look like any that I’ve ever seen.

All-3D CGI is not new anymore, it’s been an accepted approach to creating TV anime—if a contentious one—for over a decade by now. What separates Girls Band Cry from even its most immediate peers like Bang Dream! It’s MyGO!!! is a stark juxtaposition between its fairly grounded environments and incredibly fluid, almost cartoony character animation. These twin approaches, combined with a flair for directly incorporating visualizations of pure feeling into the series, create a world that feels simultaneously very physical and very stylized. It’s a very interesting contrast, and I imagine some will be turned off of it just because it’s so different from even other 3D CG anime, but it works very well for what the show is trying to do, and I would not be at all surprised if Girls Band Cry ends up influencing other anime to attempt a similar style.

So, you may ask, what is the show trying to do? A fairly simple underdog story about rock bands, so far, but it’s doing it with a real, competitive vigor that’s all the more important because of where and when this is airing.

Our main character is Iseri Nina [Uchiyama Rina], newly arrived in Tokyo*, and apparently fleeing a somewhat difficult home situation, although the details are vague. Following the compass of some online hearsay, she, after a series of minor mishaps, catches a street performance by her favorite musician, Kawaragi Momoka [Yuuri]. Momoka is a former member of and songwriter for a group called Diamond Dust. They’re broken up now, and Momoka and Nina happen to meet after the latter awkwardly introduces herself to and professes her fandom of the former. Hijinks ensue, wherein Momoka is chased from her spot by a pair of punk-looking people, who she promptly flips off as Momoka and Nina, who finds herself caught up in all this, flee together. Momoka also happens to flip the double birdies to their pursuers, beginning both a running gag and an honest-to-god visual motif that I really hope the series keeps coming back to, because it’s funny and earnest in a way that centers the entire narrative.

Nina and Momoka develop a fast friendship, and as they learn about each others’ woes (Nina’s buttoned-up home life, Momoka’s falling out with her bandmates over a song ownership dispute), Momoka lets it slip that she’s moving away the very next day. Obviously, this doesn’t really happen. Nina, who is left Momoka’s guitar, pursues her, and with the unlikely help of the same punks that chased Momoka off earlier, convinces her to stay, and they put on an impromptu street performance that ends the episode. The real lingering message is the one Nina shouts into the crowd while trying to get Momoka’s attention in the show’s closing minutes;

What helps sell this whole unlikely, delightfully cartoony story, is that the motivation for Nina moving to Tokyo in the first place isn’t some grand ambition, it’s just a feeling that she doesn’t belong. As somebody who also moved halfway across the country to get away from family who just Kind of Don’t Get It, I am immediately and immensely sympathetic to her plight. This is admittedly a stretch, but given her reaction to learning that Momoka’s roommate is a gay man, I think she might be queer and closeted, possibly even to herself. I’ll admit that present textual evidence is minimal, but the situation makes the shoe fit. More generally, and even if that turns out to not be the case, there’s a real sense of earnest sincerity to the show’s pop-tough-guy fuck-the-world attitude. “Punk” is a meaningless descriptor in 2024, but the show is genuinely doing something pretty different here, and I think that counts for a lot on its own.

Because while its story is straightforward the way in which it’s delivered sets Girls Band Cry apart from its peers. When Nina is upset, she literally seethes prickly red particles. When she first hears Momoka’s song on the street, the first chord becomes a physical smear of pure blue that wafts over to her ears. When she hears Momoka sing, it’s with such force that an explosion of rock glass erupts behind her. None of these things physically happen, but the show’s willingness to illustrate feelings as though they were literal events is very striking. It also puts it in direct conversation with that other rule-bending underdog story about the power of music airing right now, Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. In a battle of the bands setup, I still think Jellyfish might win, but it’s not really a competition in that way. (And both shows are still very early on in terms of episode count, so who knows where things will eventually end up.)

It might sort of be a competition in another sense, though. Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article about the state of the then-omnipresent idol girl group genre. In the nineteen months since then, that entire format of anime, quite contrary to my prediction in that article, has virtually disappeared. The only idol anime airing right now is THE IDOLM@STER: SHINY COLORS, and of the type that we normally think of when the term “idol anime” comes up, it’s the only one slated to air this year at all, every other example being a movie, a spinoff, or shows which fall outside of the traditional format (like Oshi no Ko‘s second season or, on the other end of things, kids’ anime Himitsu no AiPri). I bring this up not to make the claim that idol anime are dead necessarily, but to underline that there does seem to be some kind of shift occurring, as we move back to the similar but markedly less formulaic girls band genre. Once (BOCCHI THE ROCK!) is a fluke. Twice (the aforementioned MyGO) is coincidence. Three times is a trend. What’s remarkable is that despite these shows all being very different, there’s a running thread of visual experimentation that makes them exciting. If these two facts really are connected, then it’s a damn good time to think girls playing guitars are pretty cool. The rocker girls are back, and if this wave continues, they just might be the future.

1: Technically the place she moves in to is just outside of Tokyo, but even in-text, this is acknowledged as splitting hairs. A bit like the Chicago / Chicagoland distinction where I live.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [4/7/24]

One season ends, another begins, and it’s time to revive one of the longest-dormant Magic Planet Anime columns. Yes! You may or may not remember Anime Orbit Weekly, an “everything else” column where I’d write my opinions on the various anime and manga—and occasionally even other things!—I’d experienced throughout the week, sometimes at considerable length but usually only a few paragraphs. Generally, these will assume that you have also watched the episode(s) in question, and will have spoilers up to and including said episode(s).

This, essentially, is the same as that column, but with one key difference. Most of what you’re about to read is not technically original writing. Instead, these small writeups are largely cribbed from my tumblr blog, with minor edits to bring them in line with this site’s writing standards. Why am I doing this? Well, because there is a subset of people who are interested in my anime writing but don’t follow me on tumblr, and because even for some of those that do, sometimes it’s just more convenient to have things in one place. Oh, and I’ll actually be archiving these, quite unlike the original Anime Orbit Weekly column. So that’s a good thing for those of you who like to be able to find things.

Without further ado, let’s get into this past week in anime.

Anime

The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic – Episode 13 (Season Finale)

A solid end to a solid series. I don’t have a ton to say, here. I liked the little teasers for upcoming story arcs at the end, although given the state of the industry who knows if they’ll ever actually make more of this as an anime. I tend to call these “go read the books stupid” endings because I do feel a little like that’s what they’re going for, but the emotional beats worked well here so I think this was a good end to the series overall. Also, Rose [Tanaka Atsuko] is still ridiculously good-looking and I would watch an entire show about her without a second thought. Sorry!

Brave Bang Bravern – Episode 12 (Series Finale)

Oh, this was a really fun finale. I think shows like this are a very good argument for the idea that some kinds of storytelling just never go out of style.

Obviously, Smith/Bravern’s love for Isami, and his respect for him, burns from beyond the grave. Hot enough to resurrect him first as Bravern and then in the final scene of the episode, as himself. I was also so so so fucking happy that Lulu [Aizawa Saya] got to contribute to the final final final battle, I was worried she’d get left out.

Speaking of! Verum Vita [Kugimiya Rie] makes a lot of her brief screentime and I love how she goes from this cool, calm, collected ultimate final threat to psychotically planning to massacre the entire planet to incredibly annoyed at Bravern continually just being able to overpower her attacks. I liked how literally everyone came back for the finale, even if just to contribute to Bravern’s spirit bomb, I think that’s a good way of showing where the show’s priorities lie. I get that Smith has that whole little bit at the end about how “oh everyone who was there that day was a hero”, but if I can disagree with the show for a second, that’s really not true. Bravern and Lulu are the heroes because they’re the super robots. Everyone else is support

I do feel the need to concede that this was not a perfect series, at least not for me personally; some of the humor goes a little over the line for me (although not much of it to be honest), and while I’m mostly over the hoo-rah undertones present in spots, I do still have that little bit of an icky feeling that I get from anything involving the military. Also, hey, damn, Superbia [Sugita Tomokazu] sure got the short end of the stick, huh? Everyone else gets to come back to life but he stays dead, what’s up with that? Maybe the idea is that he lives on within Lulu, but if so, the anime doesn’t really make that clear.

Anyway, that’s all pretty minor stuff, honestly? Other than maybe the Superbia thing. And that’s the thing, this wasn’t a perfect series, but it was quite a good one, and I liked it a lot. If someone said it was an all-timer for them, I would understand completely.

Also, I am NEVER going to get the theme song out of my head.

Pokemon Horizons: The Series – Episode 45

So, there are two main themes of this anime, one is that experiences and adventures inherently change you and having a goal to strive for is more important than the actual act of reaching that goal. The other is that Pokémon are fucking awesome, which they really, really, really are in this episode. The team-up against Rayquaza? Sprigatito evolving? The Amethio assist? Are you kidding me, man? I’m just really glad this show exists.

Sengoku Youko – Episode 13 (Season Finale)

What a fucking way to end Part 1.

As is often the case in Mizukami Satoshi‘s stories, what we thought our initial goal was is no longer reachable, because the entire status quo has been turned on its head. As of the end of this episode, most of our characters are in some sense destroyed; physically, spiritually, mentally, or in terms of position. This is the barren wasteland that the mountain goddess refers to, in a sense.

I have no idea how this story will end when Part 2 picks up in the Summer. And you know what? That’s a good thing.

Metallic Rouge – Episode 13 (Series Finale)

If anime were appraised solely on their last episodes, Metallic Rouge might squeak by as pretty decent, but they aren’t, so it isn’t.

I’m not going to recap all the various little revelations and plot twists here because honestly, who could possibly care? The gist is that the events of the preceding twelve episodes don’t truly matter because everything was really just building up to this, a showdown between Rouge and her father figure Dr. Junghardt [Shimoyama Yoshimitsu], a character who is barely in the show before this point (even in his hooded guise as The Puppetmaster), and who feels ancillary to much of what the series was trying to do. In as much as “what Metallic Rouge was trying to do” is even a coherent set of ideas.

The actual events of this episode feel very random. I’d almost say fanfic-y? In isolation it’s not a terrible finale but finales of course do not occur in isolation. When taken against the backdrop of everything Metallic Rouge could’ve been, and indeed actively tried to be, the episode simply makes no sense. The Neans’ plight doesn’t matter because the entire thing was orchestrated by Doc Jung, which he demonstrates in a long monologue that comes off as trying way too hard to make this boring cutout of a Super Intelligent Chessmaster type character seem interesting. If the show had just focused on this from the start instead of interpolating four or five unrelated plots along the way, it might’ve worked a lot better, but it’s impossible to know.

It would certainly feel less distasteful, at least. I cannot get over the fact that this series treated “serious examination of discrimination and a moral question over the ethics of armed struggle,” regardless of its (deeply shitty and unbelievably milquetoast) conclusions, as just another hat it could put on and take off at will. None of it ends up mattering! At the last minute Rouge just decides to free the Neans, because now she thinks it’s the right thing to do. If we were going to build Rouge up as some kind of liberator and savior it would’ve had to start many episodes ago, and despite occasional toothless gestures in that direction, it really didn’t. (As an editorial note, bear with me here, in the original version of this post I screenshotted someone else’s points to agree with them, but they’ve since deleted their tumblr blog for reasons unknown, so I don’t want to reproduce them again here.)

As for everything else the show tries to do, the genre-hopping was occasionally fun when it remembered to not be stupid about it, but that was really only a handful of episodes in hindsight and if someone doesn’t feel that that’s enough to make up for the show’s many writing mistakes, I find it very hard to disagree with them.

And then there’s the last couple minutes of this episode which….reveal at the end that clown robot girl Opera [Ise Mariya] was secretly a Usurper all along and installed a virus turning all Neans into murder-bots, which completely threatens to saw the legs off what happened mere seconds before, except that then it turns out to completely not matter because Gene installed an antivirus beforehand because he knew this would happen, somehow? (Gene is a nothing of a character and is another reason this show’s writing sucks.) And thus Neans have freedom now, because of a completely un-foreshadowed, last-minute minor plot twist that occurred offscreen.

The final impression is of a show that is unintentionally funny and deeply unserious. My friend and sometimes-podcast cohost Julian M. also pointed out that apparently a bunch of this a wholesale bite of the end of RahXephon? I haven’t seen that show so I can’t comment, but it’s indicative of the fumes the show is running on at this point. (I later learned that RahXephon was created by the same person! So if anything, it’s self-plagiarism.)

Just so this entire heading doesn’t come off like an angry rant, there are a few things that work. Mainly the buildup of real, mutual trust between Rouge and Naomi. (Or maybe I just want it to work because otherwise this show truly does have nothing going for it on the writing side.) At the very least, it’s delightfully gay, I like the visual of the two of them together inside Rouge’s mindspace. Although even this comes with an icky side effect in that Naomi is now functionally dead as her own physical person. Any time I try to give this show credit for something, I find another way in which it could have so easily done better.

Hey, at least they brought the dedicated combat theme back, that’s good. And Cyan [Shiraishi Haruka], Rouge’s surrogate little sister, is right, Rouge’s new form does look really cool. (Why did they feel the need to kill Cyan, by the way? You can’t both have a shitty central narrative and kill all your best characters.)

I don’t want to come off as though I just completely hated the thing top to bottom. It was entertaining on a week to week basis, but in trying to do so many different things it just does nothing, and I find it really frustrating for that reason. The visual aspect of the show remains decently compelling (the Gladiator designs in particular), but I could never in good conscience recommend this to someone even if I don’t “regret watching it” per se.

What a mess! I’m glad it’s over.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 13

I think I’ve called the last five episodes of this show “the best episode so far” so, so I’ll stop doing that now but really, what a good episode. I was a bit behind when I watched and first wrote about this, so I’ve covered episodes 13 and 14 separately here.

This may be a hot take, but I actually think the show does an even better job of conveying Thistle’s [Kobayashi Yuu] menace in this part of the story than the manga does. That’s perhaps at the cost of sacrificing some nuance, but as I’ve said before, an anime adaptation definitionally cannot have everything.

There are so many good faces in this episode, especially from Falin, who spends a lot of the episode understandably looking absolutely haunted, and Marcille, who goes cackling mad while fighting off Thistle’s blood dragons.

I’ll admit, I sort of forgot about this whole second bit with the orcs. The orcs in general are not my favorite part of this story, but I like Chilchuck’s Character Moment here of having to confront the fact that he, you know, is worried about his friends, and I think Zon’s sister [Murase Michiyo] is very well-cast.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 14

Overall, not my favorite episode of this series, but still a very strong piece of character work, mostly for Kabru’s [Katou Wataru] party.

As for the big obvious change brought on by us moving into part 2; the visuals in OP 2 are great but I don’t like the song nearly as much. Many such cases! Hopefully it’ll grow on me.

The animation in this episode is not quite as good as in the previous episode, but it still looks very nice. Also, this part of the story does a very good job of establishing Kabru’s very extreme but principled in its own way personality. I also like the way they slowly reveal how good at memorizing details about people Kabru is, it’s a nice touch.

Everything about the introduction of Shuro’s [Kawada Shinji] party, meanwhile, is incredibly good and makes up for any deficiencies the episode could be said to have. Plus, Tage [Furuya Yoshino, in what appears to be her debut role?] is here! And I loved the samurai moves Shuro pulled on the sea serpent.

There’s a fun cliffhanger at the end here. Also! In contrast to the OP, I might like this second ED song even better than the first; it’s got a soft-focus indie rock sound of a sort I’m very fond of.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 1

This was alright?

First, an actual case of literal “portal fantasy” in contemporary isekai. You don’t see that super often, although I feel like it’s slightly becoming more in vogue again. At the very least, I’ve seen it a few times over the past couple of years.

There are some elements of the visual presentation in the early moments of the show, with what seemed to be real photos with a filter slapped on them, that were pretty weird.

The main thing Salad Bowl of Eccentrics does well is small-scale gags; I liked the bit where Sousuke [Furukawa Makoto], our lead, literally picked the bratty princess Sara [Yano Hinaki] up and ran away with her. Sara’s Detective Conan fixation, the “job” popup introducing supporting character Livia [Ichimichi “M.A.O” Mao] flipping from “Lady-Knight” to “Homeless”, etc., are similar examples of little moments that work pretty well. The actual premise I’m not entirely sold on yet, and I feel like the show may be inclined to abandon it if it gets in the way of the humor, but it’s hard to say for sure.

Also said Lady-Knight being the hapless fanservice character is….a little annoying. I’d rather it be her than the 13 year old, I suppose, but it’s a bit of a tired cliché at this point isn’t it?

As I said, I like the general character interactions, and it’s got a pretty good command of quick little gags, but I’m not sure if I’ll keep up with this or not. Time will tell.

Go! Go! Loser Ranger! – Episode 1

I really wanted to do a full writeup on this, but my hands are not happy with me after all the writing I’ve done over the past week, so my thoughts are here, instead.

Overall; fucking fantastic first episode. There are not a ton of situations where I’ve gotten into a somewhat lesser-known (in the Anglosphere at least) manga and had it then get a big splashy anime adaptation, so I’ll admit a part of me was a little worried, but the Yostar Pictures team working on this honestly just knocked it completely out of the park. Go! Go! Loser Ranger! deserved a full-force adaptation and they seem equipped to give it one.

The action is really well-done. There’s an interesting bit in the first fight where CGI and flat animation are blended, but in an inverse way of how you’d expect; the rangers get the CG, since they’re not the actual protagonists of this story, and the Duster footsoldiers get the traditional animation. Clearly a deliberate stylistic decision for this first fight and I think it pays off really well when the episode does its pivot at its halfway point. The comedy is really on-point, too. Our lead, Footsoldier D [Kobayashi Yuusuke] is fantastically cast and I love how he’s the focus from the second he’s introduced onward, and I love the fun riffs like him shoving his own introductory text out of the way. Our scrimblo has made it, Loser Ranger fans.

Lastly, even though her role in this episode is firmly secondary, I have to note Suzukiri. [Yano Yumika] My beloved. I have no idea whose idea it was to cast Yano Yumika, since this marks only her second role of any real note, but it was a great decision. I will also admit that If this show doesn’t absolutely take off in popularity I will be a little sad. Because it’s very good, yes. But also, admittedly, because I want way more Suzukiri fanart than there currently is in the world. She’s just very pretty, OK?

Train to the End of the World – Episode 2

In a sense, the real litmus test of any anime is usually not its first episode, but its second. Thankfully, Train to the End of the World‘s is quite good.

With this episode Shuumatsu Train establishes what I imagine will be a template it works off of for much of the rest of the season. The episode’s first half is largely dialogue-driven, focusing on the characters playing off of each other in both dramatic and serious ways.

We get a lot of goofy stuff here, for sure, since Shuumatsu Train clearly wants to be a funny anime in addition to all the other stuff it’s doing, but we also get a surprising amount of genuine tension; it’s implied that these girls have been each other’s only friends for years, and because of that they can easily poke at each other’s insecurities if they get angry with each other, which Reimi and Akira in particular absolutely seem perfectly willing to do. Which, honestly, who can blame them given the situation they now find themselves in? Far from home with minimal food, money, etc. It’s a tough spot!

The first Weird Thing the girls come across is relatively harmless. This guy paddling his duck boat up and down the river seems, briefly, like an indication that the girls’ journey will perhaps not actually be that dangerous. Despite this, he gives a genuine and serious warning to the girls about what’s left of the world outside of the train line along which they live. (Akira promptly shoots him down, claiming his warning is a poor imitation of a monologue from “absurdist theater.” This appears to be Shuumatsu Train smacking itself in the face to make you laugh again, said theatrical tradition is a big influence, directly or indirectly via other anime, on a lot of the anime this series is taking cues from.)

The real capital-M Moment is toward the end of the episode though, when a tsunami threatens to overtake the train and drowns the railway behind them. Their tentative plan of going back to Agano to more properly prepare is thus fully rendered impossible, and it’s made clear that there is no way but forward. I think this is Shuumatsu Train again signaling its themes of pushing forward an growing up in a world that is indifferent or actively hostile toward you. Also! I like the symbolism of the plant that Nadeshiko brought along growing into their emergency food supply. She definitely seems to be the “mom friend” of the group despite perhaps lacking the strong convictions of the other three, it’s cool to see that play out directly in the show’s worl.

Also also! Someone on reddit pointed out that the map the girls get from the hermit appears to foreshadow the nature of each of the train stops, given that we immediately meet people with mushrooms growing out of their heads for the closing scene here. I’m really interested to see where that goes. Great episode, great show.

Manga

Magical Girl Tsubame: I Will (Not) Save The World! – Chapters 20-23

This was the only substantial bit of manga I read this week! Tsubame remains one of the most fascinating and odd contemporary magical girl stories to me. I love the dual expression of Tsubame’s naivete in particular, how it both prevents her from fully understanding the gravity of the situation she’s in but also lets her reject the boxes that Kokoro has been placed in by the Center. If that’s gibberish to you because you haven’t read the manga, I highly recommend it. It’s quite good.

And that’s all for this week, I hope you enjoyed the somewhat more off-the-cuff writing style of these posts. If you want to see them before they go up each Monday, you can of course follow me on Tumblr, but do be aware I post about a lot of things there in addition to what I cover on this site.

Here’s a weekly bonus thought for you all. “Wherever you happen to be, if you look around you, that’s where you are.”

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: JELLYFISH CAN’T SWIM IN THE NIGHT, But With The Moon on Them, They Can Shine

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 think most people know that jellyfish aren’t fish. They’re cnidarians, part of an ancient order of primitive animals that date back to the earliest days of multicellular life on earth. Perhaps because of their ancient origins, or simply because they’ve never been pressured otherwise, jellyfish do not actually swim per se. They have no muscles with which to do so. Instead, jellyfish are carried along by the ocean’s currents. Clearly, this has worked out just fine for them, but what any one person might make of that situation is going to vary. When you see the jellyfish, do you see something hapless, or something that just needs a little help to get going?

This question, of course as a metaphor, is central to Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night, which, over the course of one of the year’s strongest premieres, establishes itself as a fairly unique take on an old, old story in the TV anime format. Jellyfish is not technically an idol show—indeed, the industry seems to be moving away from those over the past year or so, and Jellyfish here premiered on the same day as another non-idol music anime, Girls Band Cry—but it shares much of the DNA of one. Specifically, a kind of starry-eyed, emotionally-driven resonance, which it spins into an underdog story about the difficulty of pursuing your passions against the backdrop of a world that may be apathetic or actively hostile to your attempts to do so, not to mention the specter of self-doubt, a force that should not be underestimated.

Jellyfish‘s visual techniques are varied and are all applied very well. Chiefly, the show seems focused on cementing a solid sense of place early on, nighttime Shibuya rendered as a concrete but also almost supernatural nexus of nocturnal vibe, where anything seems possible if you reach out to touch it, and you can truly be yourself. The directing on this thing, courtesy of Takeshita Ryouhei (recently also known for the Paldean Winds ONAs), is nothing short of incredible. Our protagonist, Kouzuki Mahiru [Itou Miku], is an uncomplicated but fully-realized character, she is near-literally haunted by flashbacks throughout the opening episode, as they manifest in front of her as glowing apparitions of her former self and her friends. She has involved daydreams that interrupt the flow of the episode, only to be waved off or rewound back like a video tape; daydreams where she worries about a future as a “nobody”, or emotional outbursts she’s too self-conscious to actually have. (As a fellow serial imaginer, and hell, a fellow nobody, I sympathize.)

Mahiru used to be an artist. She isn’t anymore, but as we learn throughout the course of the first episode, after arguments with her sister about makeup, funny socks and TikTok influencers, and in-between hashing out tentative Halloween plans with her friends, she used to be an artist. Once, when she was a child, a drawing of hers was even selected to be made into a mural, a mural that still stands in the show’s version of Shibuya up to the present day; a sprawling tangle of bold lines and colors that, of course, form a jellyfish. Her friends, as kids often do, saw the mural and made fun of it, not knowing it was hers. This single act was enough to completely uproot her self-esteem, and eventually she takes a marker and scribbles over her own “Original Concept by:” credit on the mural. Thus rendered anonymous, it clings to a city wall, disowned but not disappearing.

As part of the landscape, it becomes a backdrop for—we must assume—many things, but the most relevant is a street performance by a random indie idol named Miiko [Uesaka Sumire]. Mahiru doesn’t much appreciate said performance using her mural as a backdrop, but can’t muster up the nerve to say anything. After all, it would, in her own words, take a real “hot-blooded weirdo” to speak up in the middle of a concert.

So of course, one does.

Yamanouchi Kano [Takahashi Rie] is, in terms of attitude, everything Mahiru is not. But she used to be something, too; an idol herself, part of a group called the Sunflower Dolls, in her case. We later learn that her departure from her chosen field was, unlike Mahiru’s, involuntary. (These things tend to happen when you deck another girl in your group, a murky incident we’re not given many details on here and which I’m willing to bet will form a strong running B-plot throughout the whole show.)

It’s a little funny to see a show frame street heckling as a powerful, heroic act, but in-context and in the moment, it really is. Mahiru comes off as a little mystified by Kano, but she’s clearly taken by her, and it’s very easy to read the relationship that almost immediately takes hold here as something more intense than simple admiration if you’re so inclined, but what’s truly important is that this provides a seed for Mahiru to realize that she wants to pursue art again.

She’s not the only one; Kano has a thing going on as an utaite1 despite being blackballed by the idol industry proper. She does this under the name JELEE, providing another, marginally more literal meaning to the show’s title. Naturally the end of the episode sees the two combining their powers, but this takes some doing.

It’s clear that Mahiru’s insecurity, while it might stem from a single obvious cause, has since grown beyond it, and when Kano initially tries to get Mahiru to join her, she literally runs away, spouting a fountain of excuses and retreating to the relative anonymity of the evening train. Encountering Kano again, during Halloween night, while once again in Shibuya, gives Mahiru the final push. Once again, the pair encounter Miiko. Once again, she’s performing in front of the mural, this time covering “Colorful Moonlight”, a song Kano wrote during her days in the Sunflower Dolls. Once again, Kano tells her off. This time, though, things go a step further. Borrowing an acoustic guitar and stepping into the performer’s spotlight herself, Kano begins singing her version of the song, here stripped down to just guitar and vocals.

This marks the first time we hear the song unobscured, and this is where Mahiru finally frees herself of her own anxieties, even if only temporarily. She draws behind Kano, making huge, swooping lines with a stick of lipstick, she marks up her own mural with googly eyes; making it look like the jellyfish from the logo of Kano’s youtube channel. This whole thing is being livestreamed, and thus, JELEE ceases to be one person, and becomes a collective; what Mahiru cannot accomplish on her own, she finds is possible in the company of Kano, someone who stokes her creative fires and inspires her. On that beautifully-executed note, the episode ends.

Not long after this incredibly important shot.

I’ve glossed over and simplified much in the recapping of this episode’s actual plot, because in some ways the literal events take a distant backseat to the emotional beats. I haven’t had space to mention the brilliant little scene near the beginning where Mahiru hesitantly chooses between an angel or devil costume, only for Kano—who we haven’t met yet—to snatch up the devil without a second thought. I haven’t talked about the series’ use of symbols; jellyfish obviously, but also lipstick as a signifier for all things simultaneously “adult” and ruthlessly constraining, a sort of deliberate inversion of how a lot of anime for young girls use that same symbol, the use of video effects to emphasize the artificiality (and thus lack of consequence) of Mahiru’s daydreams. Ultimately, the thing is that these are details, and while there is a lot going on in Jellyfish and such details greatly enhance it, it is very clearly a big-picture show. That’s why it feels like there really is something special about the idea of not an idol anime or a girls’ band anime but an artist collective anime. Something too to the idea that the lead is not even the singer, but the visual artist. (Our eventual other two members of this troupe are a VTuber and a pianist, who knows how that’s going to work? I’m excited to find out!)

This is not a perfect premiere—what is?—some of the dialogue is a little strained, and I would really like to see the camera be a bit less leery going forward, but these feel like such minor complaints compared to the pure pulse of breathtaking energy that is the rest of the premiere.

Jellyfish, in a word, is hyperactive. Eager to make you look at its murals and songs, its nighttime Shibuya, the strong, instantly-formed shock-of-destiny relationship between its two leads, its flashy camera tricks and video effects, its characters, its idea that everyone has a song inside of them. This is a show that wants to impress you. “Isn’t all this beautiful?” It asks, and the wonderful thing is that it’s completely right; it is.

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

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: ASTRO NOTE Isn’t Quite Out of This World

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.

Just because of the sheer number of people on the planet, there must be someone, somewhere, who tuned into Astro Note‘s premiere while knowing literally nothing about it. This person, I must imagine, was faintly confused. Not as much as they’d’ve been by Train to The End of The World‘s premiere earlier this week, but still pretty puzzled. Fakeout openings are nothing new in shows like this, but the disconnect between Astro Note‘s first minute or so—a retro sci-fi pastiche complete with space suits and ray guns—and the rest of its premiere episode, is pretty funny. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that this is the funniest thing about it, which when the actual main aim of your show is to be a romcom, is kind of a problem. On the other hand, as is always the case, I tend to not want to judge shows that are clearly Doing Something too harshly.

Let’s set the question of quality aside for right now. Astro Note‘s actual premise is thus; Goutokuji Mira [Uchida Maaya], an alien from the planet Wido, escapes a firefight and takes refuge on Earth, of course in Japan, sometime in the 21st century. There, she bumbles her way into ownership of a share house, the Astro Lodge, which has, as a living perk, free daily breakfasts. (Is this a real thing? I have no idea, probably!) The building’s tenants, a cast of colorful archetypes rendered with varying levels of success and clarity, demand she find them a new cook, since Mira’s own cooking is more or less inedible. Yes, a good chunk of this episode’s setup is based around one of the oldest jokes in the format. At the very least, said inedible food is not literally just rendered as purple gloop this time around.

She puts out a for-hire ad, which as it turns out is completely full of lies and other made-up things. (She’s an alien, which her housemates of course do not know, so she doesn’t know how job listings work. Obviously.) Nonetheless, they attract an applicant, our male lead Miyasaki Takumi [Saitou Souma], who first encounters Mira when she nearly falls off the Astro Lounge’s roof. He catches her, giving us our obligatory Meet Cute moment, and only then does he find out that she’s more or less in charge of this place.

Since the job posting was full of lies, Takumi cannot actually get the position, but he stays at Astro Lounge anyway, serving as the house’s daily breakfast chef regardless. Why? Because Mira is pretty, and he’s talked into it by two of the other tenants.

Fair enough, I suppose, but it seems like a lot of convulsion to get us to Step 1 of our romcom setup. The remainder of the episode is spent on Takumi settling in, interacting with the various other tenants, and getting a good idea of just how strange Mira is.

If the non-sci-fi portions of this premise seem familiar, and you’re someone with a decent command of 80s anime, that’s because this series appears to be heavily riffing on Takahashi Rumiko‘s Maison Ikkoku, which had a TV anime that ran for nearly a hundred episodes back in the Cold War era. I will admit that I’m not really familiar with that series beyond its basic premise, but I am assured that there are a number of references in this series to that one, despite the fact that they’re not officially “related” in any way. (You can draw a loose analogue here to how last season’s Brave Bang Bravern was heavily drawing from the Brave series of mecha anime despite not actually being part of it.) The most obvious of these is the name of Mira’s species itself; “Wido”, as in, a homophone for “widow,” which the female lead of Maison Ikkoku actually was, a mistake that Takumi makes when he overhears Mira talking to her dog—actually her superior from Wido—late at night.

Building on previous texts is all well and good, but this show still has to stand on its own two legs, and this is where I start to doubt Astro Note. A romcom needs to succeed at either the rom or the com to be tolerable, and ideally it should be good at both. So far, most of the humor in Astro Note is fairly rote and will be familiar to anyone who’s seen any character-driven comedy anime of the past several decades. This is hardly the worst I’ve ever seen some of these jokes done, but I have nonetheless seen them before; the hapless woman who can’t cook, the fish out of water who doesn’t know what these ‘Smart Phones’ and ‘Films’ you speak of are, the precocious kid who’s too smart for his own good, the scumbag cheapskate salaryman (who in this case is actually just unemployed full stop), the vicious little dog whose anger seems too big for its small body, the idol who’s a real piece of work in person. And so on, and so forth.

Now, is an anime (or any piece of art or entertainment) necessarily obligated to reinvent the wheel? Well, no, of course not, it just has to succeed at what it’s trying to do. Some of Astro Note‘s gags work better than others; it’s almost certainly just because I’m a sucker for the archetype, but I do find Matsubara Teruko, the aforementioned jackass idol, pretty amusing. (She’s voiced by Furihata Ai, AKA Ruby from Love Live!, which may help sell the joke for some.)

To my own surprise, I also liked Wakabayashi Tomihiro, the salaryman character [Sugita Tomokazu], whose blatant dickbaggery is so audacious that it can wrap back around to funny, given the right circumstance. These things are all matters of taste, though, and I imagine how willing you are to watch characters that you’ve almost certainly seen versions of before interact is going to drive how much slack you’re willing to give Astro Note.

And really, the question of how much slack to give the show is hounding me a bit, here. I feel like I’m being too mean and too lenient at the same time. On the one hand, no one wants to ever be accused of Not Getting It, so I am going out of my way to establish that I am aware that the show is deliberately working within a restrained, older format, and I think it does sometimes succeed within that format. On the other hand, this is a pretty busy season already, and it’s only going to get busier. Should anyone really be setting aside an extra 20 minutes of their own time each week to watch a show whose first episode could be charitably described as “decent”? I’m honestly not sure!

The show’s visuals are worth checking in on here, since that’s about the only thing I’ve not addressed. I suspect that these, too, will be divisive. Astro Note is definitely colorful and solidly-composed, which puts it a cut above anything actually bad (and feels like an oasis in the desert after a full season of watching Ishura and the like), but where we get into odder territory are the character designs. Some are pretty good; Mira is cute, and her curling hair is a nice visual touch that nods to the show’s inspirations. Our male lead is inoffensive but also visually a bit bland in a way that’s unfortunately inescapable with almost any male romcom lead. I actually quite like Teruko’s design both in and out of her idol getup, and the other designs range from decent to a bit offputting. I would’ve liked to see the retro influence come through a bit stronger in this area, and maybe they still will in characters we’ve not met yet, as the ED seems to allude to, but still. Also, at two distinct points, Mira is bowing and the camera is angled such that we’re staring at her ass. This is the kind of thing that would be excusable if the mood the show was going for was “horny,” but it seems to be aiming much more for cute and funny, so it’s just kind of offputting.

All told, and for me personally, I turn to the old post-2000s anime fan standby of the three-episode rule, which despite its name is more of a tentative suggestion. It’s good for anime of a couple different kinds, one of which is something like this, where it’s not clear whether its disparate elements are going to cohere in any substantial way, and how good at paying off its setups it’s going to be. Even then; this is a comedy anime, not Madoka Magica, so if someone were inclined to just write it off right here, I’d get that too. Certainly, I know people who I’m quite sure are going to like this a lot less than I did, and that’s even accounting for the fact that I’m only lukewarm on it. I’ve seen some other reviewers call it “dated” and I don’t think that’s entirely fair, it’s clearly attempting to be a deliberate throwback. But being retro can only get you so far.

Will Astro Note appear in the pages of Magic Planet Anime again? Certainly, that would be nice, but unless it does more with its central romance, or really picks up the pace with regard to its comedy, I don’t see myself finishing the series. On the other hand, who knows? The closing shots of this episode promise to lean more into the sci-fi elements, which could help build Astro Note a distinct identity apart from the show it’s riffing on, and would be one way to paper over some of the elements of the series so far that don’t work.

Birds aren’t real. They’re tools of the bourgeoise.

So who can say? Maybe next week it will really blast off. Stranger things have happened, on this planet and on many others.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: 30 Stops to Ikebukuro – What Even is TRAIN TO THE END OF THE WORLD?

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.

Consider the train. Trains connect places, and therefore people. They shorten distances, enabling the average person to travel far and wide with relatively little of the immense pain that travel was in pre-industrial times. Nonetheless, trains aren’t cars. You can’t pick where you’re going to go; if it’s not somewhere on the line, you’re never going to get there. In this way, trains are both freeing and restrictive. They will get you where you want to go, but only if where you want to go is along a predetermined path. You know, like college.

I can’t prove it, but I have an inkling that this dichotomy was the genesis of Train to The End of The World (more snappily known as just Shuumatsu Train in some corners), or at least a small part of that genesis. Shuumatsu Train kicks the spring season off1, notably, as an original production. So we’re all on the same page, equally travelling blind to wherever this railcar happens to take us, which is an inarguable positive for something that’s as out-there as this series is already shaping up to be. It comes to us from EMT Squared, who have been around for a while, and in fact, they also made Fluffy Paradise, the first anime I covered here on Magic Planet Anime last season, but are certainly not a household name. More immediately interesting to your average anime viewer may be the resume of director Mizushima Tsutomu, an industry lifer with a truly odd body of work. What sweeping statements can you make about the guy who directed Squid Girl, ANOTHER, Witchcraft Works, most of Girls und Panzer, Shirobako, and Joshiraku, among other things? If nothing else, you can’t pigeonhole the man. For reasons like its eclectic staff, and also its rather bizarre first key visual, it was hard to know what to expect from Shuumatsu Train. In a way, that’s exciting; some of last season’s best anime were originals (I am here thinking mainly of super robot pastiche / self-effacing yaoibait comedy Brave Bang Bravern! and superpowered delinquent punch-up Bucchigiri?!), so it would be great to see things continue in that direction.

However, the main question Shuumatsu Train wants to answer, as it begins, is “what would happen if a spam pop-up ad could abduct you in real life?” This is just one part of what I can wholeheartedly call one of the absolute goddamn weirdest pre-OP introductory scenes I’ve ever seen. A girl enters a train station, en route to it’s-not-really-important, and is promptly met with cheers, because she’s the 77,777th person to enter the train station that day. This, of course, means that she is immediately snatched up by a mobile owl statue and deposited at the top of a building. There, a black-and-silver-haired huckster named Pontaro Poison implores her to push a huge shiny button labeled “7G.” 7G, as you can surely intuit, is the successor to 6G, the successor to 5G, the communication standard. 7G, the huckster explains, allows us to “instantly broadcast” our thoughts and “make visions real.” After some chiding, the girl presses the button, an the world promptly dissolves into a surreal hell of abstract buildings, psychedelic colors, and warped faces. Cut to opening credits!

When we return from the admittedly very nice title sequence, two years have passed and the world has fallen into an incredible state of disrepair, and in the city of Agano, almost everyone has turned into animals. If Shuumatsu Train makes a mistake in its opening episode, it might be that the entire rest of it takes place here, in a setting that is certainly weird but doesn’t measure up to the sheer WTF factor of those first couple of minutes. It’s actually a bit tempting to say that the series overexplains itself a bit, because, courtesy of our narrator and main character Shizuru [Anzai Chika], we get a clean rundown of what actually happened. As one might guess, the present state of the world was indeed caused by the launch of this mysterious 7G Network. Here, it happens that folks from the area turn into animals at the age of 21 and 3 months. The town’s populace thus consists of a few relatively ordinary high school girls and a whole bunch of talking animals, at least a few of whom are struggling to hang on to the mental faculties they still have, and one of them, a sun bear, briefly leaps at one of the girls in a short but fairly uncomfortable scene.

It should be noted that this is said to be a state of affairs unique to Agano. Other regions have different, and, it’s implied, more overtly dangerous problems to deal with. Also, one guy has inexplicably remained physically human but can only run around making choo-choo noises, keep him in mind.

Now, it might be tempting to claim that Shuumatsu Train has scuttled its own mysteries right out of the gate here. But given how this information is presented to us, it doesn’t seem like the series is terribly bent on building up that sort of mystery. As becomes clear over its first episode, Shuumatsu Train is an adventure series first and foremost. Despite its bizarre premise, the series makes legible gestures toward themes of growing up in an indifferent world that is spiraling into chaos, a core that resonates not in spite of being buried under layers of surreality, but because of those layers.

For example; Shizuru and her friends, Reimi [Erisa Kuon], Akira [Kino Hina], and Nadeshiko [Waki Azumi], each take a different approach to coping with the strange state of the world they live in, exemplified by the goods they ask for from a caravan of armored trucks that visits the town once a month (apparently the last remaining of what was once several such caravans). This is most obvious with Reimi, who Akira not-entirely-incorrectly accuses of being an escapist, who dresses herself in gyaru fashion and wants cute manga and anime magazines to peruse. Akira, meanwhile, is cynical and often makes rude remarks, coming off as more than a little self-important. Accordingly, the book she asks for is an occult treatise by Japanese writer Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (I can’t quite figure out if it’s a real occult treatise or not. I’ll confess to not having been familiar with the man before now). Nadeshiko, meanwhile, seems adrift and aimless, and can’t even recall why she wanted the item she receives from the delivery company, a potted sweet myrtle plant, in the first place.2

Shizuru, meanwhile, has spent the past two years searching for her missing friend Youka [Touyama Nao]. If you’d hazard a guess that Youka is probably the girl from the pre-credits scene, you’d be completely correct, and nothing so innocuous as a random scrap of newspaper used as package stuffing for Nadeshiko’s plant gives Shizuru her first lead as to where Youka might be in years. The newspaper contains a photo on its front page, and Youka is in that photo. The problem? The photo was taken in Ikebukuro, far enough away that one would need to take a fairly lengthy train ride to get there. Running to show Youka’s grandmother, now an elderly guinea pig, this photo of her only granddaughter, Shizuru narrates; the distance between train stops has gotten much, much larger since the world went haywire.

Nonetheless, Shizuru is determined, because the last time she and Youka spoke, they had the kind of friendship-obliterating argument that can haunt you for the rest of your life. Her determination only grows when she discovers an unused train resting on the tracks while having her dog sniff out a cap lost by Zenjirou [Okitsu Kazuyuki], the aforementioned train noises guy. (He manages to just barely strain the word “cap” out, the only time in the whole episode he actually talks in this form.) By putting the conductor’s cap on his head, Zenjirou temporarily reverts to a youthful, vigorous appearance, during which time he mostly rages at “Pontaro,” from which we can conclude he’s a colleague of the huckster from the opening. Or a former colleague, given how angry he seems to be at the guy. And how Pontaro gave him a lobotomy. Such things have a way of destroying friendships.

With a lead on her friend’s location and her mind made up, and now possessing the means and approximate knowledge of how to operate this metal chariot, she promptly drops out of “school” (a tiny class consisting of herself and her friends, taught by an iguana), and attempts to make for Ikebukuro solo. Of course, her friends, for all their differences, won’t stand for that, and they all end up following her as the train’s sign flips over with its destination. Suddenly, the show’s English title makes a perfect sense; Ikebukuro is not the physical edge of the planet, but it is certainly the end of the world in another sense.

I’ve said a lot about Shuumatsu Train here, but honestly there’s also a ton I didn’t mention. The visuals are largely good, although the directing is a bit strange in a way that’s difficult to precisely place my finger on. More pertinently, they’re packed with subtle details that aren’t directly pointed out. When the caravan arrives, the handler who distributes the packages to the girls has an eyepatch, and the heavily-armored trucks are covered in bloody handprints, some of which are quite clearly not human.

There are also many bits and bobs crammed into the worldbuilding; the fact that the 7G Network delivers something that may or may not be electricity, but not enough of it to reconstruct life as it was before the disaster, exemplified by the fact that the Internet and traditional phone networks can no longer be powered, but the low-power, short-distance PHS System, a delightfully obscure piece of real-world communication tech, still works. Sharpening the already-present theme of coming of age in defiance of a world going to hell, there’s a detail early on where Shizuru gets a lecture from her iguana teacher about how she can’t just fill out all of her “plans for the future” worksheets with “I Want To Look For Her,” a heartbreaking bit of miniature characterization that only hurts more as the episode goes on.

Also, the show’s character comedy is mostly pretty funny; Reimi and Akira are introduced having a conversation that feels ripped from a manzai routine. As the series goes on, and likely gets heavier, bright spots like that will become more and more essential.

All of this to say; this is clearly a show with a ton of ideas, and while it’s always a gamble as to whether or not any given work will actually stick the landing, just having so much to chew on from the first episode alone is a great sign. Wherever this train is going, I’m confident the ride will be worthwhile.

1: Technically, the season started yesterday with the premiere of Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included. But I didn’t cover that! So we’re not counting it. 🙂

2: There is almost certainly some layer of additional symbolism here with the choice of this plant specifically, as Akira directly calls attention to it before being cut off. A quick sojourn to Wikipedia tells me that there are two plants known by this common name, one of which is psychoactive and the other of which is used in chemotherapy, among other things. I think this particular shrub is the latter. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from that, but the fact that the show made me want to go look this up is a good thing in of itself.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Manga, Misc. Anime, Other Posts

Remembering Akira Toriyama

Header image from IMDB

“The future of the planet is in your hands, may you fight with honor.”

When it comes to one’s personal journey through the world of anime and manga, every story is different. But, for many of my generation, those stories have a very similar start. It’s something like this; huddled in front of a slightly too-small CRT every weekday afternoon, you are transported to craggy canyons or alien worlds. Punches and kicks with planet-shattering force are thrown. Kiai yelled with immense force. Beams and blasts streak through the sky. If you’re lucky, you might get to hear a classic “ka-me-ha-me ha!” or see a character literally glow with power as they go Super Saiyan. This was, is, and will always be Dragon Ball Z. For many, many children, it was their first introduction to anime as a concept; if not the literal first—Pokémon beat it to the punch for me personally by a few months—it was definitely one of the first. That matters, and it’s the reason Dragon Ball, and Akira Toriyama‘s work in general, continues to hold such a strong grip on the popular imagination.

As you likely already know, Toriyama himself, the man responsible for that gateway into this wonderful world, passed away earlier this month, as per this announcement yesterday. This is the part of growing up that’s often danced around; as you get older, your childhood heroes will pass away. The paradigm-shifting shonen mangaka responsible for Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and a number of other works (perhaps most prominently, character art for classic JRPGs Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger, gag manga Dr. Slump, and latter-day work Sand Land, which is receiving an anime in just a few weeks), is not the first such icon to pass on, and he won’t be the last, but that doesn’t make it hurt less. Not when the man contributed something so important to so many of us.

Toriyama’s work is of such impact that terms like “iconic” are rendered cheap in their usage. The man designed and drew Goku, perhaps the single most recognizable superhero figure on the planet after Superman himself, and to an extent, that is the kind of achievement that speaks for itself. Shonen manga before and after the success of Dragon Ball Z are notably different things, and the man’s influence can be felt when reading basically any contemporary action-shonen to this very day, either directly, or indirectly via the generation of mangaka that Toriyama influenced, the most prominent of whom are likely One Piece‘s Eiichiro Oda and Naruto‘s Masashi Kishimoto.

His work in video games should not be neglected either; as many have pointed out, much of the modern Japanese “western fantasy” aesthetic can be traced, either directly or indirectly, to Toriyama1, via his work on Dragon Quest. Because of this, his influence extends to almost the entire modern genre of fantasy anime and manga. That this fact could be considered his secondary legacy speaks to the enormity of Toriyama’s contributions to Japanese, and indeed, global popular culture (just ask anyone from Latin America). This is without even getting into more marginal but still important stuff; the legions of Linkin Park / Dragon Ball Z AMVs that dotted early video-sharing websites, Dragon Ball Z Abridged as a foundational piece of internet humor, the very fact that “it’s over 9000!” was one of the first internet memes, a proudly irreverent tradition that continues to the present day (and one I like to imagine that Toriyama, originally known for Dr. Slump, appreciated on some level if he knew about it). The man was a legend, plain and simple; if you’re a nerd of a certain age, his work was inescapable.

I do feel that I’m perhaps getting away from why I wrote this column in the first place, which was to share my personal experience. Without getting so into it that it’s inappropriate, watching Dragon Ball Z with my stepfather is one of relatively few happy memories I have of the man; he’s still around, but we are, fair to say, estranged, and haven’t spoken in years. Of Toonami‘s main lineup, DBZ was the one show he didn’t find either too kiddish or faintly baffling, and I remember watching the earlier parts of the series with him on his VHS set with the bold, cheddar-y orange covers. (Later, he got a separate set with the “uncut” versions and we watched those as well, much to the displeasure of my mom.) Even as the show itself progressed on Toonami, we would occasionally watch episodes together, and I remember in particular enjoying the later parts of the Cell Saga with him. My experience is not, in any way, unique. It is the experience of literally thousands and thousands of people across the planet, all united by the cultural current that was Dragon Ball. That is why Toriyama, and his work, are special, and why the world is just that much darker without him in it.

I am cognizant of the fact that anything I have written or could write here is not going to be “enough,” just like any one person’s words are not going to be “enough.” My hope is that by telling you this and by sharing my own experiences, I can be part of a chorus of tributes and outpourings, a veritable Spirit Bomb of remembrance. I think Oda, who, in an obituary post, compared Toriyama to a great tree, said it best. Trees, when they finally fall to the forest floor, continue to nourish the communities around them even after they’re gone. In the same way, Toriyama is not truly dead, because the spirit of his work lives on.

1: I must admit with some embarrassment—but also with proper credit!—that this hadn’t immediately occurred to me, and it took being mentioned in this tumblr post for the idea to fully sink in. Still, this shuttershocky person is absolutely correct.

Rest in peace Akira Toriyama, 1955-2024

Posted on in Manga

The Manga Shelf: Year of the Dragon – RURIDRAGON’s Triumphant Return

The Manga Shelf is a column where I go over whatever I’ve been reading recently in the world of manga. Ongoing or complete, good or bad. These articles contain spoilers.

Time flies. Try to adjust your frame of mind back to whatever it was in the summer of 2022. That’s when RuriDragon, debut work from mangaka Shindou Masaoki, first appeared in the pages of Jump. RuriDragon is a great story, but it also has a great story.

It is difficult to overstate just how big an out-of-nowhere success this manga was. It is equally difficult to overstate how sudden and shocking its lengthy, unplanned hiatus was. The details remain somewhat cloudy even two years later—“health issues” is the bulk of what we know—and for a while, many people, myself included, assumed that Jump’s official stance that the series was ‘on hiatus’ was a polite way of saying it would not be returning. Given the gap, it’s hard to call anyone who didn’t think it would come back “pessimistic.” And it really must be emphasized that entire other Jump manga have lived and died since Ruri last published a chapter, and an equal number of major world events have taken place. The world in which RuriDragon returns is distinct from the one it left, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for some amount of skepticism about the manga picking up where it left off. (After all, even Jesus only kept his followers waiting a couple days. Ruri has kept us on the edge of our seats for almost 600.) But, by whatever provenance, and however unlikely it’s seemed, today, March 3rd 2024, saw the manga return. The dragon, like the phoenix, has risen.

Perhaps the strangest thing about RuriDragon‘s seventh chapter is how un-strange it feels; the manga essentially picks up right where it left off. There are no sly attempts to wink at the gap or rush any character development to “make up for lost time” or anything of that nature. Things settle back into the groove the manga had just gotten into when it went on hiatus; Ruri continues developing strange new dragon powers, furthering the manga’s central growing up-as-growing monstrous metaphor. Here, it’s electrical buildup, revealed in the chapter’s last few panels as the ability of dragons to call lightning.

As previously alluded to, and more directly foreshadowed back in the Starbucks chapter, Ruri’s developing abilities put distance between herself and her classmates, in particular the standoffish light-haired girl, Maeda, first introduced then. The two share a decidedly awkward moment as Ruri’s schoolday comes to a close, with Maeda pretty bluntly rejecting Ruri’s (admittedly slapdash) attempts to get her to open up. This clearly weighs on Ruri’s mind as the chapter ends, which is where we get the aforementioned lightning reveal.

All this said, while it’s definitely great that RuriDragon is getting back into the swing of things, what’s in the new chapter is almost less important than the fact that there even is a new chapter. It’s true that we probably won’t know the full extent of what the “new RuriDragon” will look like until it switches to biweekly publishing on Jump Digital and Jump+ in a month or so, but for now, it is enough that the blade-horned high school girl is back. (Personally, I’m interested in the other person in Ruri’s class who’s been absent for most chapters of the manga so far. Another demihuman? Who can say!) For the first time in a long time, the future looks good for RuriDragon; brighter than a gout of fire, or a flash of lightning.

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 or Tumblr to get even more anime and manga thoughts, and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Under Cover of Darkness, Enters NINJA KAMUI

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.

There are a handful of interesting cultural currents running through Ninja Kamui. The most obvious has to do with its status as a Toonami co-fund—this is why it premiered so late in the season—and a likely-deliberate invocation of nostalgia for a bygone era of [adult swim]’s action programming. This might be the shallowest of these currents, however; despite the fact that it really would fit right in with [as]’ late-night action programming in the pre-Toonami revival days, and despite the fact that Main Toonami Guy Jason DeMarco has his name on it, I think Ninja Kamui would exist in some form regardless of Toonami’s involvement, and that’s because of the two other currents running through the anime.

The first is the recent spurt in ninja anime again. Not enough to be called a revival, but perhaps the tip of a trend is starting to show up. Over the past couple years we’ve had the straightforward, shonen-y Shinobi no Ittoki and the, apparently, deeply strange Under Ninja (I haven’t seen it), and now, with Ninja Kamui, we have an invocation of the grittier, bloodier ninja anime of the past. I’m probably not the first person to compare this series to ’93 sleaze classic Ninja Scroll, even if it’s only a distant resemblance. This, too, is only a loose thread, probably more indicative of something in the air than anything else. Again, I think Ninja Kamui would exist with or without those other anime. It would very much not exist, however, without Sunghoo Park, the series’ director and main creative brain.

You don’t come to this blog for in-depth production talk, most likely, (and if you do, you’re in the wrong place. I’m not the Sakugablog guy), but Park is a name that’s been well-known and in the air for a few years now. He is probably best-known as the guy who made a good chunk of the first season of Jujutsu Kaisen look as engaging and kinetic as it did. He’s since left MAPPA (I would also leave MAPPA if I were made to direct God of High School, so I get it), and founded his own studio, E&H Productions. Ninja Kamui is not the first thing E&H have done, but it is the first TV series, and thus, in a sense, their big coming-out party. Ninja Kamui isn’t based on anything, so it’s clear that this series’ story is one that somebody at E&H has had in their back pocket for a minute (I imagine Park himself, though I can’t prove that). So with that creative freedom, what did they deliver?

Well, a pretty good action series, so far.

Ninja Kamui‘s premise is very simple; an ex-ninja, our protagonist Higan [Kenjirou Tsuda] has fled to the United States to live with his wife and kid, using Cyber Ninja DisguisesTM to hide their true identities and live in relative peace. Things are great, until one day, Higan’s past catches up to him, and his wife and son are killed as part of his enemies’ ploy to ruin his life. All told, this is a pretty straightforward revenge tale of a kind that dots the whole history of the medium. While there’s something to be said for the baked-in sexism of having your handsome gruff guy protagonist survive while his family are murdered in cold blood, for the most part this is an effective setup. I don’t love Higan, but I like him, and any excuse to hear Kenjirou Tsuda do his thing for 20 minutes is a welcome one, the guy’s a fantastic voice actor.

The supporting cast is solid as well. The case of Higan’s family being murdered is taken up by the local PD, who are of course very much unequipped to handle secret ninja revenge killings. The one cop we spend any amount of time with is Mike Morris [Atsushi Ono], who, despite the obvious caveat that, you know, ACAB, I actually do kind of like as a character. He’s essentially a pretty basic genre stereotype who voices pretty frequent disbelief with the hyper-violent absurdity around him, and of course he’s the token One Good Cop (along with his assistant) in the force, the rest of which is all too willing to ignore a case they have no hope of solving and are ordered to do so by their mysterious higher-ups. He’s hardly revelatory or anything, but he’s fun.

The second episode sets up a further wrinkle in the plot, implying that the CEO of a virtual reality company is somehow tied to both the deaths of Higan’s family and goings-on in the ninja world more generally. This is a nice little twist that helps the show feel a little more distinct, and it’s not like there’s ever been a better time to make a douchebag tech guy your villain; the world is not exactly overflowing with love for Elon Musk and the like right now.

As for style, the series has what you’d expect from Park; lots of absolutely crazy action, with everything else being a little bit secondary. There are a lot of great “what, he can just do that?” moments, like Higan exhaling some kind of magic smoke that makes him grow extra arms (?!) in the second episode so he can more effectively fight off an assailant. Said assailant is disguised as an off-brand UberEats driver, because Ninja Kamui is also a little bit funny with it. The series is also not afraid to invoke truly ridiculous levels of violence and gore, which again makes it feel very much of a piece with [adult swim]’s late ’00s anime offerings. There is a very memorable bit in episode two where Higan, still recovering from the same attack that killed his family, takes out his anger and frustration by leaving one of the offending enemy ninjas tied, hanging upside-down, from the ceiling of a warehouse. Each day he spends recovering, he stabs the guy with a different knife, which he leaves inside of him after he’s done. Then, on the fifth day, when he’s fully recovered, he just lights the guy on fire! It would be downright Jack Bauer-y if he was doing this as an interrogation thing, but he’s not! It’s strictly a revenge play.

Which gets at the one problem I do have with Ninja Kamui which is that even with everything I just said in mind, it just feels a little….basic? So for all the praise I’ve given it here, I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily super invested. I think it’s being beaten out even in the fairly narrow category of “anime I’m not crazy into but which I enjoy watching for their fight scenes” by Bucchigiri?! Still, if you like by-the-book revenge thrillers, you could probably do a lot worse than this.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: No, Seriously, What The Hell is Going on in ISHURA?

Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.

Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.

Bad anime are fascinating things.

I would argue that there are two pretty distinct types of bad anime. There are anime that are trashy—which have an open disregard for artistic aims beyond “be cool”, a mentality that can lead to shows that are the anime equivalent of empty calories—and there are anime that are boring, which may aim to be Serious Art but profoundly fail at it. ISHURA, an isekai battle royale political intrigue fantasy thing that aired its seventh episode this week, asks; need this be a dichotomy at all? What if, for example, it was possible to be both trashy and sometimes fun, but also tedious and dull? Not at the same time, obviously, but in alteration?

We’ll get into the specifics of that, but in a lot of ways, my main thought about ISHURA, a show I would say I have decidedly mixed feelings on, is just that it is an extremely ’20s anime. Ten years ago, it was not entirely clear how vast the endless appetite for isekai light novel adaptations truly was, so I can’t see it getting made then. Ten years from now, I imagine this market—maybe the entire industry—will have collapsed. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s just my call on things. ISHURA‘s defenders, however, of which there are a surprising amount, will point to a few merits that make them hold the show in more regard than your run-of-the-mill narou-kei adaptation, and argue these are reasons that ISHURA not only got an adaptation, but deserved to get one. Let’s run those down.

1: the action scenes – ISHURA has, in the rare occasion it’s actually gone full-tilt with them, admittedly had some cool fights. These are, though, uniformly sloppy despite the surface-level wow factor. The direction is there, but it struggles against wonky CGI and inconsistent animation quality. In the most recent episode there was a moment where there was very visibly and obviously a cut missing. If I, a random viewer with no formal animation training whatsoever, can notice that kind of thing, there are issues with your pipeline. In spite of these imperfections, I’ll concede that these are easily the show’s best moments, because they’re fun in spite of all that.

2: the worldbuilding – Frankly, I understand this argument the least. ISHURA‘s plot is a confusing, dull tangle of lore dumps, proper nouns, fantasy geopolitics (complete with our old friend, Ye Olde Fantasy Racisme, although it’s not as major a factor here as it is in many competing isekai), and silly character names that I am not going to do the show the favor of trying to summarize here. The world they take place in is an obvious step up from the infinitely-xeroxed settings of many fantasy isekai, but there is a difference between worldbuilding being interesting and there simply being a lot of it, and I place ISHURA firmly in the latter category, despite a few cool details like the presence of a faction of talking wyverns. I will admit the magic system seems neat, but it’s not interesting enough to devote most of an episode to explaining it at length, which ISHURA of course, does. That particular expository scene takes place in a hot spring, which takes us to our third point.

3: the babes – Many people probably think of themselves as being above watching something because it has attractive women in it. I am not “many people,” and, from what I gather, neither are most ISHURA fans. That said, with one exception, I don’t find ISHURA‘s cast to be a standout in this regard. (Which is kind of weird, because the studio behind this series are longtime ecchi peddlers Studio Passione.) None of the men really do it for me either, sadly.

Let’s talk about that exception, though, because she’s indicative of both ISHURA‘s obvious weaknesses and, conversely, its strengths. I think by looking at her, we see the show itself in microcosm.

This is Nihilo [Rie Takahashi]. Full name Nihilo the Vertical Stampede (no relation to Vash). She has short purple hair, a smug streak a mile wide, and has wires that look like old iPod earbud cords coming out of her back. I think she’s basically the perfect woman and I love her more than every other character in this show put together.

I felt the need to include two screenshots because the first one is so dark that it’s honestly kind of hard to see her. I’m not sure why anime have started taking lighting cues from Game of Thrones, but I hate it.

I will not sit here and pretend that Nihilo is a terribly well-written character. She has an easy to understand motivation (she wants to be treated like a person instead of a living weapon, to very much boil it down), which is nice, but we’re not exactly breaking new ground there, and this is the case for most of the show’s characters. What’s more important than all that is that in the most recent episode, she climbs, naked, into a giant spider mecha that somewhat inexplicably has its own name and title. As she did this, and as she sped off cackling about how she felt free and had her “body” back, it occurred to me that maybe I was just watching ISHURA in the wrong way.

This isn’t a get-out-of-jail free card, to be clear. Episodes 3, 4, 5, and 6—a good chunk of the show—are mostly just unforgivably dull. But, there is a certain “smacking action figures together” appeal to the show’s stronger moments, particularly when any of the shuras (as its various Powered Individuals are called) fight each other. Perhaps that’s all you’re really supposed to get out of ISHURA. Pick a favorite character—or a couple favorite characters, I’m also partial to the in-way-over-his-head, wyvern hating general Harghent [Akio Ootsuka] and the skeletal Shalk [Kouichi Yamadera], who also has a nice turn in this episode as he fights the show’s alleged protagonist—cheer when they’re onscreen, and sit through the rest of the show while just barely paying attention.

That’s not really an endorsement on its own, and I would still describe ISHURA as easily the least essential of the anime I’m watching this season. Plus, if it ever slows down so much that we get back to episodes 3-6 levels of tedium, I will be very sad. But episode 7 is at least, you know, fun? Fun is worth something. The show’s massive ensemble cast also makes it so that you never really know quite what you’re getting with each subsequent episode, and I do get why that appeals to people in a landscape where every isekai feels interchangeable.

ISHURA‘s appeal is, in many ways, the appeal of seasonal anime in general; you really never do know for sure what you’re going to get! Sometimes you get excellent adaptations of great source material (Delicious in Dungeon, Sengoku Youko), solid genre work (The Wrong Way To Use Healing Magic), fun surprises (Brave Bang Bravern!, Bucchigiri?!), or things that are just totally inscrutable (Metallic Rouge). And, sometimes, you get one of these. If I had to compare ISHURA to anything, it would be Big Order, another light novel adaptation, and one that has found cult “so bad it’s good” status in the near decade since it aired. I’m not sure if ISHURA is committed to the bit enough that it could ever get there, but it seems to be making a run for it.

And yet, at the same time, I’m left wondering if that’s really enough to make up for its many obvious deficiencies.

From its instantly-polarizing opening episode, wherein ostensible female lead Yuno [Reina Ueda, in one of the weirdest miscasts in recent memory] sees her girlfriend brutally murdered in front of her by giant, hulking magitek robots, I knew I would have complicated feelings on ISHURA. I’ve wanted to like it in spite of that, because I think people are often too hard on stories that open on a down note. But it’s become clear that ISHURA is really just interested in shock value and spectacle. That first episode really is quite visually impressive, and the most recent follows suit.

Those are fine things to aim for, but is it really so much to ask that the series have decent pacing and just a little more thought put into it, in addition to that? I’m content to classify ISHURA as a guilty sometimes-pleasure, but it would really be nice if it could be more than that. That it’s not just makes me wonder about what could’ve been.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.