Hello folks. It’s been another solid week of the ongoing anime season, but the vast majority of this column is going to be taken up by something a little different. Read on, past the seasonals, to see what I mean.

Anime

Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 3

I am still kind of astounded by how much less this story works as an anime.

Granted, the particular choice of adapter definitely has something to do with it, but the resolution of the whole Dribblers arc here—I still hate typing that—just feels way less satisfying on screen than it did on the page. Also, why the hell was this episode so yellow? Everything was absolutely drenched in the color. I get that the flashback scenes were, you know, flashbacks, but the sepia look they were going for did not come across at all. The present-day scenes in the hallway look that way because of the time of day, but it kills all the visual dynamism giving us easily the worst-looking episode of the show so far.

The one thing that survives is the series’ very goofy sense of humor. A particularly memorable moment tonight as I watched this with some friends was when one of them (Alice, who I may have mentioned elsewhere on this site before? I don’t remember) remarked on how uncomfortable Sumireko’s tracksuit must’ve been right before it popped open in the most elbow-jabby we’re-playing-this-as-a-joke-but-it’s-mostly-here-so-you-can-ogle-this-girl’s-tits sequence I’ve seen in anything in a hot minute. I guess Studio Passione know their strengths. All told, I’d still rather they be doing this than Ishura. (A well after-the-fact correction from me here. I completely got the studio wrong! This is actually a Zero-G production. I have no idea how I got that wrong. Whoops!)

All of this stuff is in the manga, too, so it may seem unfair to criticize the anime for just adapting what’s already there. But again, the simple facts of the format make it stand out way more in motion than it does in a manga, this adaptation has thusfar largely been rote and workmanlike. It’s technically fine, I guess, if you’ve not experienced this story before, but the format change strips a lot of its moodiness, which is the main thing that makes Mysterious Disappearances work at all, to the extent that it works as a story in the first place.

A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 4

For the most part, Salad Bowl delivered a solid and straightforward episode this past week, about stopping a middle school girl from being bullied. That said, the final few minutes of episode four are worth mentioning. Here, the show swerves into a solid three minutes of casually-insane worldbuilding, where it’s revealed that Sara’s original world is actually a parallel Japan where Oda Nobunaga became a literal demon king by acquiring magic powers. This sort of ridiculousness is more than enough to remind me why I like this show.

Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 17

SHE! IS! HERE!

The menace, the power, the unease, and yes, the beauty. These are all traits present in Chimera-Falin, who makes her grand debut this episode. It is probably the most hype I’ve been for a character introduction in a TRIGGER show in a decade.

No anime could reasonably match the absolutely radioactive presence that Chimera-Falin has in ink, on paper. So instead, this episode’s team bring an impressive arsenal of tricks of motion to convey her narrative (and literal!) weight. Chimera-Falin as a character literally bends the story around her, and from her introduction onwards, things change fairly sharply. The show displays this by showing in gruesome detail just how thoroughly she absolutely annhiliates all opposition. To dredge up the tired Dungeons & Dragons metaphor oft used for Dungeon Meshi once again, she’s one of those really high CR, thoroughly unfair monsters. She’s huge, incredibly robust and durable, can claw her foes—characters we’ve gotten to know over the past several episodes, mind you!—to shreds, and on top of all that, enough of her human mind remains that she can still cast spells. Can you imagine how absolutely defeated that mage must feel when Falin simply dispels his summoned undine? I’d be somewhere between furious and suicidal. In general, Falin is drawn and animated in a way that emphasizes her strength and presence. I’d also say she’s drawn with just about the right level of frightening allure. We are supposed to find this as enthralling as we do scary. (This is sort of how Laios seems to see it, in fact, albeit along a different axis than, say, many of the lesbians watching the anime.) Also, she gets a number of really fantastic facial expressions here, some of which are cribbed from the manga but many of which aren’t! I wish more online discussion of the Dungeon Meshi anime focused on what TRIGGER brought to the table in details like this rather than on what can’t be replicated from the original manga, but alas.

The action is excellent, too, almost so much so that saying anything other than that feels like underselling it somehow. Sakugabooru identifies many of the best individual moments as coming from mononymous animators Yooto and Sushio, but really, the entire episode is fantastic from top to bottom.

After Falin clambers offstage, we of course get the long heart-to-fist-to-face-to-heart between Shuro and Laios. I actually think this works slightly better here than in the manga, as it’s a case where stripping some of the ambiguity inherent to that format actually sharpens the show’s emotional impact.

We end with some comedy to take the edge off as our heroes venture ever-deeper into the dungeon, with their objective changed to explicitly defeating the Lunatic Magician. This, at roughly the story’s 1/3rd point, is a real rounding-the-corner moment for Dungeon Meshi, and to my recollection is where we shift from it being a very good story to it being a great one. I cannot wait to see TRIGGER adapt the rest of it.

Some stray additional observations:

1. Not to be this person, but I am surprised they were allowed to draw the harpies’ nipples.
2. There is blood everywhere. Several other commenters have pointed this out, but the difference between how striking the visual contrast is in the anime vs. the manga is pretty interesting, it’s amazing what just adding more red than a Playboi Carti album can do. This was an extremely gory episode all around!
3. Marcille looks absolutely miserable throughout this entire episode. Not without reason! But still, my poor girl.
4. To completely shoot myself in the foot vis-à-vis what I said in the first bullet point, I think Chimera Falin might be even more beautiful in motion than she was in the manga. Where’s the HRT I can take to get that body, huh, medical science?

Revolutionary Girl Utena – Episode 4

Entering the firmly non-seasonal part of the Anime writeups, hey, did you know I’m currently in the middle of a Revolutionary Girl Utena rewatch? Specifically, as part of a group effort by the Empty Movement folks wherein we watch one episode per week to replicate its original air schedule. I bring all this up because I think I’ve somehow forgotten to mention it on the site before now. I’m going to try to avoid giving anything away regarding episodes of the anime after the point I’m covering on a given week (and will also not be writing a ton in general, most likely, given that I often feel underqualified to discuss Utena), but given that I’ve seen this show before—and how heavily Utena rewards rewatching—it may prove a bit of a challenge, just as an honest heads’ up. I encourage everyone to get in on this, if they’re interested in the idea. We watch an episode every Tuesday.

In any case, Episode 4 is the first of several revolving around Miki [Hisakawa Aya]. Perhaps even more importantly, though, is an on-its-face comedic scene that takes up the middle third of the episode. Here, where local school mean girl Nanami [Shiratori Yuri] attempts to bully Anthy [Fuchizaki Yuriko], we get a sense that Nanami may be able to notice that things are strange even when others do not. The rest of the cast, including Utena [Kawakami Tomoko] herself, write Anthy’s strangeness off as quirky at most. Nanami, our proverbial canary, seems to be the only one distressed by it.

Air – Episodes 1-8

Oh, this is just going to be incomprehensible.

Okay, so, this is a problem I have not run into yet when writing these columns. I generally only watch an episode or two of something at a time, and because most of what I cover here is actively airing, I only have one episode at a time to cover. That’s not the case with older anime, where something like this can happen, where I get very sucked into it and end up making, say, several tumblr posts in a row—the raw material for this column, recall—in a way that defies easily merging them into a single snappy writeup. What I’ve presented below are lightly edited versions of my original posts in roughly chronological order. Bear with me, here, I’m aware that this is kind of a mess to read, but I couldn’t think of an easier way to do this. (I may very well also just review the series outright when I’m done watching it, but I’m loathe to outright promise such a thing.) I am also going to spoil the hell out of it, including some pretty important stuff. So if you just want a straight “is this good or not?” recommendation, I’d tentatively say yeah, it’s pretty great, but probably skip this big long section here and go down to the Manga writeup for this week if you’re spoiler-shy.

Maybe the length of this section is fine. Air has basically eaten my brain over the past week, and as I’ve entered what I believe is the second half of the show, I have only become more fascinated. It is a sticky series, and I think it might be kind of great, although we’ll see if I still think that by the time it ends.

Episode 1

“I had a dream. A strange dream about the sky.”

I started watching this today¹, because my buddy Josh² is watching it, and I am easily influenced by outside forces I suppose.

This is Air, a 2005 Kyoto Animation production from just before their legendary run that began with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. It’s adapted from a KEY visual novel, and my first impression is that it is very visibly “VN-y” indeed.

The main feeling I get is one of overwhelming “summer energy.” There are near constant cicada sounds in the backdrop, the skies are a clear crystal blue with huge, billowing white clouds which flip to creamy streaks of the Milky Way across an inky black at night. Everyone, especially our main character, is sweating all the time because it’s so goddamn hot, and the whole thing takes place by the shore. The vibes are absolutely on-point.

In addition to this impeccable sense of place—a deliberate artistic vision—there is also a decidedly non-intentional sense of time. This show absolutely radiates 2005, most obviously from the character designs, which are of a highly sexually dimorphic kind that was common in VNs and adjacent work at the time. The main guy is tall, lanky, and angular. Almost all of the women are comparatively short, round, and have the massive headlamp bug-eyes inextricably associated with the period.

The plot, such that it is, is simple but also rather odd. Essentially, our main character, Kunisaki Yukito [Ono Daisuke], who we are given no backstory for at this point, simply arrives in town one day, nebulously “looking for” something, and attempting to earn money by plying his trade as a puppeteer—it is very much worth noting that he appears to control his puppets with no strings or other tricks—but has little success. When he meets an odd, clumsy girl named Kamio Misuzu [Kawakami Tomoko], who trips a lot and says “gao!” when upset or frustrated. He ends up following her home, and improbably, the girl’s drunkard mother, Kamio Haruko [Hisakawa Aya] drafts him as a live-in babysitter.

Some of this is probably a remnant of the show’s origins as a VN—an eroge, at that, although this particular pipeline of H-game -> clean visual novel -> anime or manga adaptation was not rare back in the day—where a man randomly shoehorning himself into the lives of various women about town is the norm.

About the “gao” thing; Kamio’s mother disapproves, and this dynamic can’t help but remind me of Rosa’s disapproval of her own daughter Maria’s verbal tic from Umineko, itself a visual novel that later got a (particularly poorly-regarded in that case) anime adaptation. So far, the dynamic here seems far less fraught and abuse-laden, but it’s an interesting parallel, and given that Umineko postdates Air, I wonder if it was an intentional reference. (Ryukishi07 surely would’ve been aware of Key at the time?)

The second girl our protagonist meets, Kirishima Kano [Okamoto Asami], seems to style herself an alien, from a planet where everyone is “free.” Freedom. Air. ‘Free as a bird’? There’s something here, especially when she rebuffs the idea later and makes fun of Yukito for believing her in the first place. We later learn that Kano has an odd pseudo-sleepwalking condition, and that her older sister Hijiri [Touma Yumi] is the town doctor.

I cannot shake a strong feeling that this show is keeping its cards close to its chest. Given how crazy the visual novels of this period could get, I really have no idea what to expect. Although, to sell the show more on what it’s doing now than what it might do later, the comedic aspects are very well done. It’s a nice mix of slapstick and conversational comedy. Also, as mentioned, the show’s atmosphere is just absolutely immaculate; you can practically taste the salt of the sea on the wind as you’re watching this.

At the end of the episode, at around sunset, Misuzu gives a little speech as she’s standing, arms stretched out, with her head tilted toward the sky. I don’t normally just include a bunch of screencaps in these little writeups because I like to keep them short³, but what she says here just struck me as so…profoundly odd, strangely beautiful, a little reminiscent of my own experiences with mania and spiritual fervor, that I just kind of need to include it.

In a much more serious sense than usual; what does she mean by this? This is the most taken I’ve been with the first episode of an older anime in quite a while, and I really feel like I need to know more.

Episodes 2 & 3

Something very interesting about how the “shocking”, overtly supernatural moments of the episodes are crammed into the margins, usually only truly laid bare in their final minute or so. That’s so far, of course, there are still ten more episodes of this thing left for me to watch.

The image of the girl in the sky that every character seems to be chasing in one way or another is a haunting one, one that burns with a pure white light that I can’t quite call clarity. It feels like something I have an intuitive understanding of, but can’t quite articulate. It means something different to everyone.

On another level, this series dearly loves its characters. You can tell, by the way it portrays them as whimsical little dolls when they roam around the scenery far from the ‘camera.’ Air is a beautiful show, so far, which makes the moment of outright violence at the end of this episode shocking and a little heartbreaking.

Episodes 4 & 5

“There was never such a thing as magic.”

In episode 4, we get what seems an awful lot like an after-the-fact rationalization of Kano’s condition. A clear-headed, scientific explanation. But the show itself seems almost as desperate as Hijiri is to explain away her younger sister’s “illness.”

Surely, there must be some rational explanation, it pleads, as the theory turns to DID and a feather in a shrine as a psychological trigger. It can’t truly be cursed, of course. No rational person, no doctor, could believe that.

“It was only a dream, it has nothing to do with you.”

Until this episode’s halfway point, this desperation feels like it might still point toward some kind of grounded explanation for all this, but that notion shatters into light when Yukito touches the shrine feather. In an instant, Air becomes a different story entirely; a history of persecution, of a mother and her child cursed from birth, fleeing wars, storms, and death to find refuge in the village that once stood on the same spot that Yukito and the others stand on now. Even here, there was no real refuge, and the scene morphs into some distant echo of the binding of Isaac; a mother sacrificing herself to save her child. No story, it is worth remembering, is ever just one story.

“You don’t have wings, be happy down there.”

In episode 5, we turn to dreams of the ocean. Yukito’s own, from when he was a child. Here, the show again takes a somewhat more grounded approach, but “grounded” is relative, and perhaps inappropriate, given that even the series’ episodes that are more “grounded”, “down-to-earth”, an other such terms that conflate mundanity with the soil beneath our feet, are themselves preoccupied with the heavens above, as we learn when we’re introduced to Tohno’s “Astronomy Club” here, consisting of more or less just herself and a large portable telescope. Despite briefly meeting her mother, Yukito returns the next day to find the woman claiming she has no daughter, and Tohno herself is missing.

Elsewhere, we learn that Misuzu suffers panic attacks when she gets close to people. This is a distinct yank back to reality from a show that has so far spent most of its time with its head in the clouds, but the loneliness Misuzu’s condition creates—typified by a quick cut to a shot of a lonesome cloud—works with what Air has previously done. A profound loneliness connects most of the show’s characters, although they largely don’t yet seem aware of this connection.

If there’s an emerging theme here, it’s that of lost or broken connections. Tohno is kicked out of her home because her mother has replaced one delusion with another and doesn’t recognize her, Misuzu feels unwelcome in her own house because her “mother” is actually her aunt whose care she was put in as a troubled, younger child, etc.

The cruel reality of the sky is that it can’t truly be reached from the ground, not without wings. The show’s color palette shifts drastically in the episode’s final moments to reflect this line of thought, running red and black like a gaping wound. A strange, stark turn from a strange, stark show.

Episode 6

More than a story in the usual sense, it might make more sense to compare Air to a composition.

It has motifs, themes, imagery, and core ideas, but the anime’s orbiting, circular structure makes it feel like any traditional forward plot motion is an impossibility. The world of Air is suspended in its namesake; a bubble riding a wind current, sealed off from the outside world. And yet, as soon as I had this realization, that sealed-off world was disrupted in this, its sixth episode, making me question it. Air is, if nothing else, great at getting you to think about its characters and its world, and how those aspects interact.

Air‘s two characters named Michiru are, as heavily implied in the last episode, revealed to be one in the same. “Our” Michiru [Tamura Yukari], a character with red twintails previously mostly confined to comedic scenes, confesses her status as a living dream of Minagi, a waking fantasy that must be, in her own mind, discarded for her dreamer to be happy. Still, she is given a good sendoff, and in a beautiful and understated scene, is allowed to try “her” mother’s cooking. It’s a wonderful sendoff for a very memorable character, and the moment in the closing minutes of the episode where Minagi, visiting her father, meets the ‘real’ Michuru are also exceptional.

Michiru’s departure marks a rare change in the otherwise hermetic world of Air. Maybe more are to come? After all, there is still talk of that girl who dreams in the sky, and there are the episode’s final moments, which seem to signal a major shakeup indeed….

Episode 7

I really thought I’d had this show figured out.

Everyone gradually leaves Misuzu’s life as she slowly dies, suffocated to death by her physical inability to be close with other people. Her mother leaves her, and, eventually, so does Yukito, despite how angry he is at her mother for doing the same thing. But then he comes back, only to vanish himself. We have no sense of time here; how long of a timescale is this taking place over? Days? Weeks? Months? It’s hard to say. But at the end, it seems like we’re about to reach some big revelation as to what this all means, only for Yukito himself to vanish, and for a time-and-place card to drop that absolutely slapped me upside the head.

What?!

What do you mean AD 994?!

And yet! It does this! It goes through with it, even, given the next episode preview! We’re just watching a different show now, being shown a completely different story, in a different time period entirely!

And yet again, I have a hunch that this has more to do with the present-day story of the prior six and a half episodes than it would seem.

Episode 8

“We don’t have many days left.”

Clearly, a parallel is being drawn between this new story and the one we were previously following. The situation that our new protagonist, Kanna [Nishimura Chinami], finds herself in and that of our previous protagonist, Misuzu. Indeed, it’s decently strongly implied that they are in fact the same person reincarnated across the centuries. So too, Ryuuya [Kanna Nobutoshi], Kanna’s retainer, is similar to Yukio (although more of a stock anime lech and consequently less likable until he and she grow closer over the course of the episode).

This is basically an entirely different show, albeit one with the same core thematic elements and visual vocabulary as the previous, so it’s a little hard to know just what to make of it as yet. But once he drops his “funny” pervert act, Ryuuya becomes every bit the companion to Kanna that Yukio was to Misuzu. Running away together to flee her sad, isolated fate in the palace is noble, but where is this all going? As of the time of this writing, I still don’t really know. But I’m hoping to finish Air this week, and maybe then I will have more of an understanding of its ambitions.

A side note: the music in this portion of the show, at least the new music, is notably different. Skewing traditional, with lots of flutes and the like.

So! Yeah! Air! It’s a lot! Hopefully I will still like it this much in a week’s time. I intend to keep you posted, anime fans.

Manga

Lily System

Now this is yuri. Gorgeous-as-hell sci-fi yuri, at that.

Once again! I’m gonna spoil the whole thing. So if you just want your basic read/don’t read recommendation I’d say this is quite good, maybe even great.

Lily System‘s premise is really simple. Two girls find an abandoned machine in a shed, and it turns out to be some kind of hyper-futuristic VR device that transports them to a virtual world, an abandoned cityscape overgrown with plants and populated by animals and the occasional strange being. On its own, “two girls wander around an abandoned place together” is inherently yuri, but Lily System doesn’t stick to the subtextual.

Over the course of this story, we learn the precise contours of the relationship between our leads, Nana and Mizuki. Nana is the sensitive intellectual, whereas Mizuki is more forward (with her feelings, romantically, sexually, etc.) and is just a touch tomboyish. Together, they explore the surreal VR world while probing each other with questions about life. With Nana in particular, these tend to revolve around a novel she wrote—a novel whose plot, it gradually becomes clear, is a metaphor both in- and out-of-text for the plot of the manga itself—Mizuki is fond of accusing her book of being ‘a lie,’ and we only really get a sense of what that means at the end of the manga.

The girls eventually become lost, both literally and figuratively, within the VR world, encountering echoes of themselves who kiss in a bell tower, and haunted, animate school uniforms that seem determined to charge at them. When they begin appearing in the ‘real world,’ the girls realize they’ve been in the machine the entire time.

And yet, the conclusion they eventually reach is that maybe that’s not so bad. In the manga’s final act, we learn of Nana’s forgotten middle school love confession to Mizuki, of Mizuki’s regretted rejection of that confession, and how both of them seek to course correct now that they’re a little older. In reality, Nana is headed to a college in Tokyo. Like the fairies in the book she wrote, she and Mizuki will be torn apart. It seems, for a moment, that Lily System will be a bittersweet tale, but that’s not the direction things go in, and I think this decision to avoid the obvious take is what makes Lily System so memorable.

Instead of abandoning each other for the sake of a “realistic” reckoning with the outside world, Nana and Mizuki abandon the world. They retreat, somehow, into their virtual Eden. If they’re ever heard from again, we don’t hear about it.

The manga ends on this note, with Nana and Mizuki in each other’s arms, in a paradise hidden to everyone else. They create their own space. It’s a beautiful ending, and more than anything, it will absolutely fill you with yearning.

The art, it must be said, is gorgeous throughout, with mangaka Yoshitomi Akihito‘s landscapes conveying a real sense of a lost world. The character art is great, too, although fairly subtle. There are many little nods and expressions that give almost as much characterization of our lead girls as the dialogue does.

Notably! The manga also—ahem—climaxes with an actual intimate scene. It’s kept tasteful, and I thought it made a great inflection point for the story, emphasizing that these two really are meant for each other.

All told, beautiful stuff. I have a few stray observations as well.

There’s the curious existence of “Yuuko and Kousuke.” This is an unrelated one-shot that seems to be grouped with Lily System for….reasons I’m not entirely clear on? Maybe someone else will know. It has little in common with Lily System in most terms, and it’s not even a yuri, being about the budding relationship between a young boy and a girl and the former’s first steps toward sexual development. Frankly, I didn’t like it very much, but that might just be because of its odd juxtaposition with Lily System, which is just a much better and more interesting piece of work overall.

Secondly, Yoshitomi Akihito wrote this, as mentioned! If you recognize that name it might be from Eat-Man or Blue Drop, the two series he is, I think, best known for in the west. Certainly though, I had no idea that, from what I can tell from looking at his catalogue, at some point he pivoted to writing….well, stuff like this. Romance, or at least romantically-inflected, works about the relationships between people set in strange, detailed worlds. At least one of these (the “boy meets girl fantasy” of Hanako in the 24th Ward) appears to actually be a spinoff or distant sequel to Eat-Man. Interesting career this guy has had! Although upon looking all this up, I learned that Blue Drop was also a yuri series, at least in part? I somehow didn’t know that, how embarrassing.

---

That’ll be all for this week. Once again, I really need to find a way to streamline my process a bit.

Here’s today’s bonus thought. So far, these have all been either random musings or screencaps of A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics. Guess which one this week’s is?

---

^{1: Or rather, April 24th, when I originally wrote this.
2: This is the same Josh that I sometimes reference when talking about Love Live. Hi, Josh.
3: In their original context as Tumblr posts, that is. They’re….well, they’re obviously not short here.}

---

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.