Tag: anime

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch LUCIFER AND THE BISCUIT HAMMER – Episode 4

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers! But you really shouldn’t care in this case. Seriously, don’t watch this.

Ugh.

Look, I’ll give it this much. In a way, the sheer lack of ambition in the Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer anime is almost comforting. Over the past week, I have been dealing with quite a lot of things, most of them relating to my mental health and mostly too complicated to go into here. And there is something strangely reassuring about the fact that, no matter what happens to me, the Biscuit Hammer anime will continue to run for its allotted cours, and it will continue to be totally superfluous the entire time, a general ball of Stay-Puft cotton that will ultimately mean very little to anyone. I could move to another city, I could buy a house, I could get isekai’d, I could become a magical girl in a far-distant fantasy kingdom. I could buy a house in that fantasy kingdom. I could get married to an elf woman and raise four kids in a cottage as some kind of ultimate lesbian power fantasy. None of it would matter; the Biscuit Hammer anime would still be here, and it would still be terrible, the kind of thing that is instantly agreed upon by fans of the source material to “not count” the moment it ends, inducted into those rarified halls of nonexistence next to the Umineko anime and whatever kids meme about “not having an anime” these days. There is, admittedly, a kind of strength in that sort of consistency. It’s an absolutely worthless kind of strength, but, hey, it’s something.

“God’s in her heaven….

On the other hand, its equally-consistent, crushing badness is also just depressing, because it renders actually watching the series an actively draining experience. I didn’t cover last week’s episode, which gave us the end of Yuuhi’s emotional arc with his grandfather, where he both refuses to forgive the man yet wishes for Neu to cure his illness (something that mostly survived intact from the manga), Yuuhi defeating his first golem (laughably bad, given how awful the anime uniformly looks), and the introduction of another main character, Hangetsu Shinonome (Shuuhei Iwase), a goofy self-styled “hero of justice” who appears to know more than he initially lets on (he was pretty obnoxious at this point in the manga, and it’s even worse here). Most of the episode was as ramshackle as anything else so far. Samidare, as seen in Yuuhi’s dream, pulling Yuuhi into a kiss is at least still kind of cute.

And that sentence, right up there, is the last unambiguously positive thing I am ever going to write about Biscuit Hammer on this blog.

This is your brain on Biscuit Hammer

Because other than that, the show still completely fails to sell anything more complex than “people standing in a room and talking,” and sometimes can’t even swing that much. This was true of episode 3. It is also true of episode 4. It will probably be true of every episode going forward. Have I yet mentioned that, because this thing going by BD listings, has the ball-shatteringly absurd temerity required to be this and be two cours long, we’re an eighth of the way through it? Simply by typing that, I feel like I’m trying to escape from a rabid monster in one of those nightmares where your feet feel really heavy and you can’t get proper traction on the floor. In this tortured analogy, the nightmare is Biscuit Hammer‘s deeply pointless, depressing, cynical existence. It is inside of you, just embrace it.

I have, and I have to confess that little of what you just read—and only slightly more of what you’re about to read—has much of anything to do with episode 4 in particular. But in my own defense; how possibly could it? With an anime production this soul-sucking, it manages to somehow sand down the manga’s many quirks and rough edges until the entire thing feels like a single slab of indistinguishable concrete. Frames, then seconds, then minutes tick by. Eventually, the episode ends, and we are closer to understanding nothing but the truest and deepest meaning of the word “tedium.” Biscuit Hammer is a final answer to the question posed in 2000’s Gladiator. No, we are not entertained. I am beginning to wonder if entertainment as a concept is even real.

Since it began, I have also asked myself repeatedly who the Biscuit Hammer anime is for, since it clearly isn’t for people who like anime. There is of course the obvious notion that it’s a cynical cash-grab, but even that makes little sense. This isn’t some huge smash hit we’re talking about here. Biscuit Hammer the manga is a cult classic even domestically, and it’s equally so abroad. Who, exactly, is being cheated out of their money by doing this? Perhaps Studio NAZ themselves, who have apparently subcontracted some or all of these episodes so far—to be honest I haven’t looked terribly hard for details, because who could possibly care?—including the fucking premiere. That’s probably why it looks like owl pellets pickled in fryer grease nine-tenths of the time.

It is clear by now that we have to start reaching for the really, really dramatic and hysterical words to describe this adaption; words like “butchery,” “desecration,” and “unwatchable piece of shit.” It is equally clear that it exists for no purpose beyond pleasing some nebulous cluster of bean counters. Episode 4 continues this pattern because this anime was made by people who want to hurt you. Lucifer and The Biscuit Hammer is trapped inside the content mill, and we along with it, as the mill is bleeding to death.

Even the one bright spot of the anime adaption, the one thing it could not totally snuff out, Samidare herself, a wildly compelling character, is mostly gone in this episode, because Samidare herself isn’t really in it. What do we get instead?

Oh boy.

I am so glad you asked, friend.

This, you see, is a comedy episode. It’s a ” ” “comedy” ” ” episode in that this is the one where the adaption does what it’s been doing since the premiere, taking the manga’s jokes—there, admittedly a weak point, but a necessary reprieve from the more intense moments—and stretches them out, grotesquely, like a serial killer binding a book in human skin. This episode is so dreary, so empty, so totally devoid of joy that the fact that it’s trying to be funny somehow makes the entire thing harrowing on an existential level.

You probably want me to actually, you know, recap the episode. But honestly? Why? What is worth covering here? Toward the end there is some of the talk about what it means to be an adult that would, eventually, form one of the manga’s main themes. But that’s a small portion of an episode that is mostly just the most flatlined shonen jokes you can possibly imagine trotted out like they’re somehow still fucking funny and executed in the driest, dullest, most visually depressing fashion possible. If there is a Hell for anime critics, it looks something like this episode; surreal and nightmarish in its mundanity, but not in a way that you could mistake for even a passing second for interesting. None of it is even remotely funny. Obviously it isn’t. You know what’s funny? @LyricalGarfield, a twitter bot that replaces Garfield dialogue with random song lyrics. That’s comedy. You want to have a good time? Go read that for 20 minutes, skip this show entirely, and thank me later.

Yes, you’re getting Family Guy-style cutaway gags mid-article right now. That’s how done I am with this fucking anime, if the swearing didn’t give it away.

At some point I feel like I’m either dipping into Seanbaby territory or just repeating myself. What is there to say? The show fucking sucks. The jokes are shit. It looks like shit. (Seriously, why the fuck does half this show have the color palette of an FPS game from 2005?) The pacing is shit. It’s conceptually shit. The only thing that’s not entirely shit is some of the character writing, which is of course a strength inherited from the manga. Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammer, the anime, is a rare TV anime that could be improved upon by animating it less. And we know this because the manga is, of course, completely static and yet manages to have more weight and motion to it than the thing that is, you know, made of moving drawings.

When the Biscuit Hammer anime premiered I unflatteringly compared it to a variety of my personal bottom-of-the-listers. Pride of Orange, Magical Girl Spec. Ops. Asuka, etc. I also did something very silly, which was say that this show is not as bad as those. This was, in hindsight, totally wrong. It’s absolutely as bad as those. It might be worse! Because while Puraore is constantly, actively unpleasant, at least it is not an adaption of a cult favorite beloved by many people. If Biscuit Hammer is not “worse” than Puraore (or other, similar anime), it is at least more insulting. Every single moment of the Biscuit Hammer anime feels like an act of deliberate malice on the show’s part. It feels as though it’s going out of its way to be the worst version of itself.

Above: for your consideration, one of the most error-prone episodes of the original Transformers cartoon, straight from Hasbro’s official Youtube channel. I have seen this episode, and I would watch it a million times before watching this episode of Biscuit Hammer again. Also, can you tell I’m just embedding random garbage at this point? You probably can.

And let’s be serious here; it will not improve. That just isn’t going to happen. Sometimes shows pick up after a weak premiere, but something like this, where it’s clearly just visual shovelware that exists for no real reason? Genuinely, literally zero chance. It would take divine intervention. It might get worse, mind you. But better? No, absolutely not. Biscuit Hammer has a shovel and a dream of digging to China, and friend, you and I will not be the people to stop it.

So that’s where we are. Four episodes into Biscuit Hammer‘s anime adaption and that is how I feel about it. I often say that I hate writing things this negative, and I usually do, but honestly? This is one of a vanishingly few cases where I’m actually rather satisfied with myself for doing so. Because it deserves this! It really does! It deserves much worse, frankly! I hope Studio NAZ‘s employees all quit en masse because they found some better place to work and the show has to be cancelled. I think that would be the only fitting end to this utter fucking travesty.

Do you guys remember that episode of Steven Universe where the Crystal Gems fused into Alexandrite so they could fight Malachite, and also there were a bunch of little watermelon guys? That episode was dope.

Yet, perhaps the most damning thing I can say about the show is this. Six months ago, we knew roughly what was going to air in the 2022 Summer season, and the Biscuit Hammer anime was perhaps the thing I was most excited for. I am not the kind of person who is afraid to hype myself up for things, and the way that that initial optimism has been, nearly methodically, shredded to ribbons by this production is just astounding. I am deeply, deeply sad for every single person involved with this project, from Satoshi Mizukami himself all the way down to individual in-betweeners. Let me be polished-glass clear; even if this were an original production, it would still be a very bad show. But the fact that it is an adaption of a pre-existing property, one that many people love, makes the entire thing stink of true tragedy.

A final observation; I mean no disrespect to that franchise in spite of how I’m sure this will come off, but there is no real reason that between the two, the anime based on RWBY should be, at this moment in time, more visually interesting and more compelling on a moment-to-moment basis than the one based on The Lucifer & Biscuit Hammer. (And I do feel that it’s fair to compare these two things in an at least loose sense, given that they are airing in the same season and thus directly compete with each other.) Yet, that is where we are.

Oh wow, look at that, an actually-relevant image embed! In this article? Who’d’ve thought.

And it is for that reason that coverage of RWBY: Ice Queendom will be replacing Biscuit Hammer as my third seasonal weekly for the 2022 Summer season. Don’t get me wrong; I have a fair few problems with Ice Queendom, some of them fairly serious. But I am, without exaggeration, 100% confident that it will be a better experience to watch, to enjoy with my community—that is to say, you all—and to write about than Biscuit Hammer has been. If literally nothing else, it has a color palette beyond “grey, brown, and occasionally red.”

For the few of you who enjoyed these couple recaps for their ranty qualities, I do apologize for any disappointment. I know I promised during the premiere that I’d stick with the show until the end, but in my defense, that was before we knew we were getting two cours, and I’ve also gone through a fairly major life event since then. I just don’t have the energy to keep doing this week after week.

As for Biscuit Hammer itself, I don’t intend to continue watching it. If you do, I’d suggest petitioning a higher power to extend their cosmic reach into the production process. But if that’s the route you’d take, I’d say you should pray to the devil. I don’t think God will be listening for this one.

….and all is right with the world.”

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Seasonal Check-in: What the Hell Happened to RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM?

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.

I really did not think I’d ever be writing about this show again. I didn’t make a secret of the fact that I wasn’t super impressed by RWBY: ICE QUEENDOM‘s premiere. When discussing that first episode, I called the show a mess. In that context, I meant it negatively; a slapdash, hacky story given a wildly uneven production that felt like it was being carried on the backs of individual boarders and animators rather than being directed with any strong sense of purpose. I stand by those statements as they hold to episodes 1-3, which together made up the series premiere on Crunchyroll, and they might still hold true going forward, but we’re not here to talk about any past or future episodes of this show. Not today. Today, here, in the very first of the new Anime Orbit columns, I’d like to talk about episode 4, the first new episode since the series began its normal weekly airing schedule.

Because 4 is something else entirely. To really just lay the matter on the table; it’s really good. In a way that feels a whole universe removed from what Ice Queendom had been doing up until this point. The actual plot here is very simple—one of the ‘Nightmare Grimms’ introduced in episode 3 gets its hooks into Weiss, and it’s up to Ruby to rescue her from the confines of the resulting dream-prison—but the way its presented is another beast entirely. If nothing else, Ice Queendom deserves some sort of “most improved” award here. This is lightyears ahead of what the first three episodes were doing, both in terms of visuals and, to an admittedly lesser extent, writing.

When we were introduced to the Nightmare Grimms concept (not a name explicitly given to them in-dialogue, but I can think of nothing else to call them), the first person they afflicted was Jaune. Who is, just speaking honestly, not a character who particularly endeared himself to me when he first showed up a few episodes ago. Jaune’s mental world was also not terribly interesting, to my recollection.

No one could make the same criticism of Weiss’. Her inner world is an absurdist dystopia monitored by living propaganda posters of her father Jacques and robots that greet each other with a bizarre salute of “Big Nicholas!”. It’s a massive walled factory town surrounded by blizzard-stricken bluffs, allegedly part of a wider “Empire”, where it always snows. Huge trains made of ice run unknowable cargo in and out of the city, only to be set upon by White Fang-affiliated bandits. Everything here seems jumbled up in guilt, insecurity, paranoia, and inherited prejudice. It doesn’t make Weiss seem like a particularly great person—and it’s not like the show needed help in that regard—but for the first time, it makes her sympathetic.

This entire thing is still mess-y, mind you, and I doubt Ice Queendom is going to really reckon with the inherent problems at the core of the whole “Faunus” analogy, but you can consider episode 4 a study on the difference that the addition of a single Y can make. For certain, it holds your attention in a very immediate way; one more comparable to all those other great SHAFT shows than anything in the first three episodes.

Helping to build the dreamy atmosphere are lots of little details, like Ruby’s scythe-gun not working the same way it does in the real world because Weiss is mistaken about how it’s put together. (Weiss seems to be under the impression that the gun is on the handle, which isn’t true. The first time Ruby goes to fire it in the dreamworld, she hits one of the robots behind her because of this, accidentally firing it backwards.) The little dream-gadgets Ruby can use via a payment of magic coins connected to the mysterious witch-exorcist (Shion Zaiden, played by Hiroki Nanami. We met her in episode 3 as well) helping them try to pull Weiss out of this thing are great, too. Using the coins, she can conjure up phone booths to talk to Shion for advice, she can summon decoy “chibi” Rubies who run around and repeat various things she’s said, etc. It’s strange and fun in a way that’s just an absolute joy to watch.

This is RWBY Chibi, right?

It’s not all fun and games though. As mentioned, there’s a distinctly dystopian / authoritarian bent to Weiss’ dreamscape. Winter City is a cold, hostile place.

A place where Ruby learns about the horrors of capitalism.

Even the few seemingly-friendly faces that Ruby meets turn on her the instant she’s declared a “dummy” (which Weiss’ subconscious seems to use as a catchall for people who can’t be trusted) by the regime, and she’s spied on for much of her stay by Weiss’ brother Whitley….who is also a bat here. (It’s a dream, just roll with it.)

Perhaps the most revealing scenes are the ones from Weiss’ own perspective. She is the city’s dictator, and sure enough, her outfit here has her rocking a militaristic overcoat and shades, making her look like some cross between Douglas MacArthur and Esdeath from Akame ga Kill!

I couldn’t get any good stills of her with the sunglasses actually on. So, in order to preserve the hilarious reference above, I’m going to need you to just imagine them. Picture an old-school smoking pipe in her mouth while you’re at it, really complete the look.

But she’s as trapped by the long shadow of her father—and the ancestor to the both of them, the ‘Nicholas’ referred to in the robots’ salute—as anyone else. When she reads reports off of a giant computer screen in her castle at the center of the city, a massive hologram of her father appears on the ceiling to berate her for her many perceived failures. Most especially, of course, letting this “Ruby” girl run free. This is what leads to Ruby’s branding as a “dummy,” and sets up their actual confrontation at the end of the episode, which builds both on what’s established here and the friction we already know exists between the two of them. Their battle starts here, but doesn’t end, implying this intriguing arc will have at least one more episode.

It’s worth looking forward to. In addition to the many things about Weiss herself we learn, there’s no denying the sheer mood of this thing. Perhaps my favorite moment actually comes not from either Weiss or Ruby, but from Shion, who offers this very true and absolutely fascinating piece of advice when Ruby calls to ask for help, concerned that Weiss secretly hates her.

If it can keep delivering moments like that, and like the more openly bizarre turns in this episode, Ice Queendom will be worth keeping up with. It remains to be seen if this marks a new direction for the series or if this is merely an anomaly. But for the first time since the series premiered, I’m optimistic. You should be, too.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CALL OF THE NIGHT Episode 4 – Isn’t This a Tight Squeeze?

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

And we’re back, just like Akira walking to school.

I feel that, over the course of my coverage of Call of The Night so far, I’ve painted the show as a sort of choose-your-love interest dichotomy for protagonist Ko. Nazuna, the vampire, and a very literal child of the night on one hand. And Akira, who is comparatively normal, is more straightforward as a person, and is also, you know, actually Ko’s age, on the other.

This isn’t entirely wrong, I don’t think. But it’s also not the whole picture, and “Isn’t This a Tight Squeeze?” complicates that dynamic in some interesting ways. It’s also probably, by only just a hair, the show’s most suggestive episode so far. But as in the premiere, these plays as conventional sexiness don’t really scan as such. (To be fair, I’m not the target audience here. I feel the same about any number of romance-oriented pop songs.)

The episode opens on a short introductory scene, where we see Akira attending school. (Once again, the series adheres to its loose rule that she’s the only one who gets to spend any time in actual, full-on daylight.) There, a teacher lectures a student on the importance of a proper sleep schedule. Maybe a bit on the nose, but it does bring this episode’s central twisting of the dynamic to the forefront. Because the night after that schoolday ends, Akira finds herself unable to sleep, and joins Ko in hanging out with Nazuna after dark.

But we’ll get back to that. Ko himself is in a bit of tizzy given the events of last week’s episode. He spends the first third or so of “Tight Squeeze” replaying them in his mind. He and Nazuna kissed, and he can’t get that kiss out of his mind. Does this mean, he wonders, that he’s already in love with Nazuna? Is there really any way to be sure? There’s even a faintly ridiculous scene in here where he catches sight of a couple kissing on a small walking bridge and freaks out a bit, howling that it’s the first time he’s ever seen two people kiss before. (This seems very dubious to me. Not even his parents? Not even just….other random people while he’s been out and about before?)

One person, at least, is of the opinion that he’s overthinking it: Nazuna herself. She does bite him, of course—Nazuna rarely seems to pass up an opportunity for a sip—but nothing happens. When he spills the beans about what’s been on his mind, Nazuna suggests that he’s probably not in love, just horny. That much is probably correct, but her follow-up to that, where she says that thinking about love and lust seperately is “unhealthy”, is absolutely hilarious coming from her. Reflective, I think, less of any real assumption the show is working off of, and more of a truly stunning lack of self-awareness on Nazuna’s part, given her love of sex jokes but inability to handle actual romance talk without getting flustered. (In fact, Nazuna mentions that their kiss last week was her first kiss, too, despite waving it off as just something “friends do.”)

We meet back up with Akira the following night—which seems to make that introductory bit a flash-forward, you don’t see those too often—unable to sleep and deciding to hit the town at the bright and early hour of 11:30PM, with the rather silly notion in her head that she’ll just stay up and go to school when it opens. (There’s a very interesting, but extremely blink-and-you’ll-miss-it bit of environmental character building as we see her get out of bed. Namely, the space under it is tiled with those foam puzzle piece tiles you see in kindergartens sometimes. Indicative of an inner childishness, perhaps?)

Or perhaps she just likes the texture of foam. You decide!

In any case, she obviously meets up with Ko, who of course takes her to hang out with himself and Nazuna. There is an abrupt smash cut from his invitation to he and Nazuna raging at each other over actual, no-trademark-avoidance Street Fighter II. The sheer contrast is hilarious.

The remainder of the three’s little sleepover is interesting. The show again makes a not-great joke about how Ko doesn’t like to be, ahem, bitten in front of his other friend. They also play a dating sim, where, even in the confines of a very primitive virtual world, Nazuna can’t bring himself to go to school, which leads to the tsundere character getting testy with him. At another point in the game, a quiet busty girl shows up, to which Ko has a much more positive reaction. Nazuna rags on him for this, and it’s pretty funny.

The real telling moment near the end here, though, is when the three of them are all laying down together. A weird experience for Akira, to be sure. But the conversation the two have here is legitimately sweet, with Akira essentially accepting that Ko prefers hanging around with Nazuna at night to going to school during the day but promising to still try to get him to go now and again.

Somewhat amusingly, as the two talk about studying, the framing of the shot seems to really strongly imply that the only thing Ko is studying at the moment is Akira’s legs.

Someone on the show’s production put their entire soul into this sequence.

That note is probably the first time in a while that Akira has really felt like a viable romantic option for Ko. But, at the same time, they could also easily just stay friends, too. The question of who he’ll end up with seems less important than ever as the episode draws to a close. The real value here is in the little moments.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CALL OF THE NIGHT Episode 3 – A Lot Came Out

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

Literally speaking, Call of The Night is about a boy who’s down bad for a vampire. But more abstractly, and perhaps more importantly, its main theme, at least so far, seems to be otherness. I mentioned this a bit back in episode one, but “A Lot Came Out” really hones in on the concept, through a number of techniques both related to its actual narrative and more abstract material like its visuals.

To wit; this episode formally introduces Akira Asai (Yumiri Hanamori), Ko’s one actual human friend and, as one would expect from a pretty ordinary schoolgirl, she’s mostly active during the day. Despite that, Call of The Night never steps outside of its nocturnal purview; the only times we get to see actual daylight are during flashbacks.

Both ends of twilight are fine for present-set storytelling, but never broad day. That’s a forbidden zone that I doubt the show will ever breach unless it’s trying to one of a few very specific things.

What does that have to do with being an outcast? Well, as previously discussed in this column, a vampire can be a symbol for almost any kind of “other” in a narrative. In the creature’s roots as a being of the horror genre, this was used to stir up fear, but nowadays, as in Call of The Night, using vampires as a kinder (although not without some issues) metaphor for anyone who lives outside of one’s established frame of reference is fairly common. Ko, in his desire to become a vampire, has basically already committed to the choice of eventually joining that “other.” I imagine that much of the rest of the series is going to be testing that resolve. There are a lot of ways Call of The Night could do this (in future episodes look out for Ko running afoul of curfew laws or something of the sort, it almost seems too obvious not to do), but here it takes a fairly simple form. Akira, as a normal high schooler just like Ko himself, is representative of the kind of normal life that Ko is leaving behind.

Maybe that’s all fair enough but you’re wondering what actually happens in the episode. Thankfully, that’s pretty easy to explain; Ko and Akari reconnect after years of not talking to each other and start hanging out. Nazuna gets kind of jealous and she and Ko have a minor fight. They make up at the end, roll credits.

The devil (or vampire, as it were) is in the details, though. In flashback scenes that establish how Ko and Akira first met as young kids, Ko notably avoids playing with the other children on the playground. Instead, he studies a line of marching ants, finding their hurried resource-collecting amusing in its own way. (I’m not saying he’s definitely supposed to be neurodivergent, but when the shoe fits….) Akira, who converses with him and eventually joins him in his observation, comes across as a kind girl in this flashback, but they’re clearly coming from different places. This leads to some confusion when they meet again in the present day.

Which isn’t to say that she doesn’t like him, mind you….

When the two get back in touch (via the whole watch situation from episode 2), they start meeting up regularly. Akira gets up very early to go to school, you see, which conveniently lines up with Ko’s nocturnal schedule. In fact, between Akira and Nazuna, Ko is well on his way to building an entire nighttime social circle. But, there’s the small bit of trouble in paradise that, because Ko is now hanging out with two people, not just one, he has to cut into his time with Nazuna a bit. The episode doesn’t spell this out until the very end, but it’s obvious that this makes Nazuna a bit jealous. She ends up confronting the two, and any pretense at keeping the whole “vampire” thing a secret evaporates when she promptly sucks the blood out of Ko’s neck right in front of Akira. (If this entire dynamic sounds slightly uncomfortable to you, it’s that way in the show itself as well, although thankfully not to the extent that it ruins the scene or anything.)

The three hit up a restaurant to hopefully hash out their differences. (Which, frankly you could boil down how far removed Nazuna is from Akira or even Ko, yet, by pointing out that while Akira gets a full breakfast and Ko just gets a coffee, she gets a cartoonish-looking stein of beer.) Nazuna and Akira have a brief but fairly tense conversation, during which Akira also makes the mistake of inviting Ko back to school. This ends with Nazuna abruptly leaving after asking Akira why, if she’s really such a good friend of his, she hasn’t reached out to him in the past few years at all. (Akira, it’s worth noting, does not respond. Although arguably she doesn’t really get a chance to. My assumption is we’ll circle back to her side of things again next week.)

It’s telling that after Ko picks up her bill (classic vampire dick move, that, leaving a restaurant without paying), he rushes after her. We can think of Akira and Nazuna as representing two, roughly, different approaches to life. Whether we should boil that down to something as simple as “straight and narrow” vs. “dangerous but wild” or look at it in a more nuanced fashion will hinge on where the show goes from here, but when he sprints out the restaurant door, it’s very clear that Ko has already made his choice.

Ko and Nazuna’s little fight ends when the two meet up on a random rooftop—this show loves random rooftops—and the two have this exchange, which is worth reproducing in its entirety, if you’ll forgive the avalanche of image embeds.

And that really is the thing. No matter what else happens, Ko has already committed to going “over to the other side.” Despite what anyone else might think, and despite his own reservations. Nazuna likes to tease, but her and Ko’s relationship, while they definitely are also friends, is also much more involved than a simple biter / bite-ee thing, whatever you choose to map that to. (Although her constantly cracking jokes about how their relationship is ‘purely physical’ certainly pushes the viewer in a….certain direction.) As they resolve their differences, Nazuna notices that Ko’s bloodied his lip from tripping up the stairs to the roof. And then, in defiance of contemporary romance anime and manga structure, and in what I genuinely think is a pretty bold move, this happens.

A make up turns to a makeout, Nazuna flies off as the dawn breaks behind her, telling her “friend” that she’ll see him again tomorrow. A stunned Ko can only retort that “friends” don’t normally, you know, kiss and such.

Now to be fair, maybe—and it’s a huge maybe—vampires and humans have different ideas of what constitutes ‘romance’, and it is definitely not impossible that the show will try to walk this back. But I rather doubt it will try to do so with any substantial force. As mentioned, Ko has already made his choice. The show is called Call of The Night, after all, and only one of the two girls he spoke to in today’s episode is nocturnal.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

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Let’s Watch LYCORIS RECOIL Episode 3 – More Haste, Less Speed

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

Before I begin today, I want to clarify that I tried to do something a little different with this writeup. Since its premiere, the main opinion I’ve expressed on this blog about Lycoris Recoil is that I think it’s really cool. I stand by that. It’s hard on a fundamental, entertainment level, to fuck up “girls with guns.” This is a style of story that, in anime, dates back to at least Dirty Pair. 2000s-era cult studio Bee Train also built their entire reputation on that kind of thing, and that legacy went on to inform the present day school of what I call battle girl anime, a tradition that Lycoris Recoil is very much part of. (It stands off in the comparatively more ‘realistic’—heavy scare quotes there—quadrant with other ‘spy girl’ anime like Princess Principal, RELEASE THE SPYCE, and so on.)

But today I want to get into the weeds just a bit, to the question of what Lycoris Recoil is actually about on a level beyond its literal plot. What it is trying to say, what assumptions it’s working off of, etc. As I say all this, I want to remain perfectly clear; I do really like this show quite a lot, and it would have to fuck up pretty badly for that opinion to change. Nothing I am about to say is meant to disparage the show, just to explore it in a slightly different way.

We’ll come back to that; for now, let’s start with the obvious, no-qualifiers positives. For the third week in a row, Lycoris Recoil delivers a knockout showcase of style. Throughout “More Haste, Less Speed” it is consistently entertaining as hell, and the production values are top-shelf in a way that is very hard to come by this consistently these days. Even scenes where characters are doing little more than talking to each other are absolutely chockablock with little physical tics—what the Sakurabooru crowd generally call character acting—and the action scenes toward the end of the episode remain, really, without much competition.

The actual plot is decent fun, too. The episode’s core premise is fairly simple; Chisato has to return to DA headquarters to get a physical exam so she can continue operating as a Lycoris, Takina tags along under the misguided belief that, since she’s been performing well, if she can get the commander’s ear she might be able to convince her to let her rejoin the force.

This does not happen, obviously, since then there would be no more show. Instead, we learn a few more interesting things about the incident that lead to her suspension; talk of radio interference and a possible hacking of Radiata, the DA’s ‘AI’ system that also handles its communications, absolves Takina of some actual responsibility in said incident. (Not that the DA commander knows, or, indeed, would care, as Chisato points out. That the higher-ups absolutely would feign ignorance in this kind of situation is one of the better observations LycoReco pulls out, here.)

Much of the actual conflict of this episode is more interpersonal though. It’s clear that however well she has or hasn’t been getting along with Chisato, Takina has been treating her assignment to the cafe’ group as a temporary thing, very much under the impression that she will be allowed back into what seems to be the main force of Lycorii, who are based out of the dorms in DA headquarters, eventually. Her hardnosed, by-the-book nature again comes into conflict with Chisato’s here. (There’s a fun bit early on where she refuses an offer of candy from Chisato. When the episode ends, after all that happens here, she accepts it instead, a cute visual metaphor for their increased trust in each other.)

Takina’s notion that she’ll be allowed back is, as she discovers here, itself wrong. The DA commander tells her to her face that she has no intention of bringing her back, and the other Lycorii, including her own former partner Fuki, are openly antagonistic toward her. (Honestly, Fuki is quite the baby authoritarian in general.)

This starts with verbal sparring, and by the episode’s end, culminates in a mock gunfight between Chisato and Takina’s team and Fuki, alongside her new partner Sakura.

Here, though, we should circle back around to that question of what Lycoris Recoil is actually trying to say. Because this is the first episode that’s really gone into any detail about how all this Lycoris stuff actually works, and what it shows us—and what it does not show us—is illuminating.

There is a lot of talk of “independence” and “leaving things behind” and such in this episode. To me, this is a strange bit of framing on Lycoris Recoil‘s part. Most of its important characters are orphans drafted into some kind of shadowy supersoldier program that, the more we learn about it, the less ethical it seems (and keep in mind we started with “orphan child cops”). The various Lycorii—for instance, Fuki, Takina’s former partner—talking about the DA as their “parents” is weird. It’s probably supposed to be weird, but I’m not totally clear on why Lycoris Recoil thinks it’s weird.

I will not disparage Fuki in the regard of her obvious crush on Mika, though. He’s a handsome guy if you’re into older dudes.

To me, that notion reeks of straight-up brainwashing, and the obvious best conclusion for this series is for Chisato, Takina, and ideally everyone else, to simply break away from this system entirely. (If they can dismantle it in the process, hey, bonus points.) Lycoris Recoil‘s actual qualms with this system, though, are hard to identify, seeming to equate them as it does to overprotective parents in a way that belies a paternal-authoritarian worldview. (Pro tip: if you’re equating anything to parents that’s not like a close friend or mentor, something has gone terribly wrong. The state is not your parents. Some kind of secret supercop department of the government is definitely not your parents.) If that’s so, it’s a disappointing failure of imagination. There is no reason a TV series for adults should be lapped in the “protagonist entirely rejects abusive system” department by, say, Fresh Precure.

But on the other hand, that is me making a lot of assumptions, and there is plenty of sign that Lycoris Recoil might have more ambitious plans in mind. As Takina continues to struggle with being so thoroughly rejected by the DA and by her former peers, Chisato says this, hugging Takina tight in a delightfully queer public display of affection. (Shortly after this she straight up lifts her off the ground and twirls her around in order to mock some homophobic onlookers. This is all very great.)

The question that springs from Chisato’s comment is a natural one; what kind of things can you gain by losing something? What can Takina gain from losing her membership in the DA? I would say all sorts of things. There’s what LycoReco itself implies; Chisato’s friendship1, her other friends at the cafe’ which she will perhaps come to regard as a found family, a sense of purpose, etc. But I would also add to that, freedom in the truest sense, a true unshackling from the system that is still very much invisibly stepping on both her neck and Chisato’s. It’s a fool’s game to try to predict where a piece of serial fiction will eventually end up thematically, but I want Lycoris Recoil to go there. That would take it from a very good show to a great one.

But as it is, we must look at the show we have and not the one we build up in our minds. LycoReco isn’t there yet, and it may never get there. Indeed, there are any number of minor nitpicks I could add on to this; why is Fuki’s new partner, the openly antagonistic Sakura, the one with the shortest hair and the somewhat boyish voice? Strange choice for a series with a massive periphery gay fanbase. Why does the DA commander (whose name I’ve not written down, because she’s awful and doesn’t deserve one) suddenly act all proud behind the scenes after Chisato and Takina leave? Of course, even as I write these things I’m cognizant that they are, again, nitpicks. One could easily wave them off as a byproduct of the many-hands approach that almost all modern serial television is made with, and I am largely inclined to do so.

So, do any of these, not even faults exactly, but potential future faults ruin the episode or make it bad or anything like that? No. Lycoris Recoil remains a masterclass of stylish and engaging animation and direction. The question for me is more whether or not the themes will prove themselves worthy of that style. To put it in an admittedly very dumb way; Lycoris Recoil probably has a spot on my end-of-year writeups on its looks and fun-to-untangle twisty-turny plot alone. And there are lots of little bits about this episode that I didn’t even get the chance to mention, alongside the aforementioned nitpicks; a few hints about Chisato’s past as “the hero of the radio tower,” the daily board game tournaments that apparently go on at the cafe’, etc.

Whether it comes out the other side of these twelve weeks saying something meaningful or interesting is what will decide if it ranks high on that list or ends up in the honorable mentions next to, say, Princess Connect Re:Dive. Neither is anything to remotely be ashamed of, and I would find it hard to actually slam Lycoris for the aforementioned potential failures of imagination unless it colossally dropped the ball in a downright offensive way—I don’t get my politics from cartoons and you shouldn’t either, go read Capitalist Realism or something—it’s just a question of its placement on the proverbial podium.

Put plain; I still really like Lycoris Recoil, but I am interested to see if it can raise the ceiling even more.

1: As strong and well-worn as my shipping goggles are, I don’t think you can really argue the two are actually going out, based on what we see. Yet. We’ll see what the rest of the show looks like. (And, hey, I’m not going to tell fanartists they can’t mine that little pick-up-and-spin-around bit for weeks. Are you? What are you, some kind of killjoy?)

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch LUCIFER AND THE BISCUIT HAMMER – Episode 2

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

Special Notice: As I established in the very first entry of this particular Let’s Watch column, I maintain a belief that this anime is very bad. I strongly encourage you to read the Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammer manga instead.

This week, we see an arguable improvement from Lucifer and the Biscuit Hammer‘s slipshod anime adaption, in that it is mostly bad in ways that are simply unflattering as opposed to ways that are out-and-out depressing.

The story of this episode is basically a miniature training arc, but I’m not going to condescend to anyone reading this by pretending you need me to recap that. Yuuhi gets it in his head that he should be more manueverable. Sure. The real question is whether or not Biscuit Hammer has meaningfully picked up at all from last week. The answer is just barely “yes,” but not in a way that inspires terribly much confidence going forward.

The truly maddening thing is that there are moments where it mostly works. But they’re so fleeting and scattershot that their presence more highlights how woefully deficient every other part of this adaption is than it does say anything truly positive. Unsurprisingly, most of these pinpricks of light revolve again around Samidare.

Near the front end of the episode, she works out as part of her apparent training regiment by doing pushups while Yuuhi sits on her back. It’s cute. Granted, it was cute in the manga, but it’s worth pointing out when something actually manages to come through mostly-unscathed. (Strap in, that’s what a lot of this column—both today’s entry in particular and in general—are going to be going forward.)

I tried to come up with some pun about how this is a visual metaphor for Samidare carrying the whole show on her back, but I couldn’t quite get there. Maybe you can.

Another instance comes when Yuuhi asks her a very reasonable question: why does she want to destroy the world? That is, after all, a ferociously violent thing, if you really think about it. Her response here—as in the source material—is cryptic, but illuminating, painting her as selfish and egomaniacal to a rare degree. (Do remember, this is our heroine, here.)

But that selfishness is exactly what makes her so interesting as a character. Again, this largely being a writing-side decision, it’s something the anime can’t entirely squash, even if this entire scene is a lot flatter and less impressive than in the manga. A lot of these shots actually look better as stills than in motion. (Which is saying a lot, because they’re not exactly painterly in this format either.) As with last episode—and I imagine, many to come—there are a few moments like this where you can squint and see the echoes of a much better version of this story in there. But that one has to work so hard to do so speaks to the problem.

I want to highlight this shot in particular. Whoever keeps deciding to juxtapose Samidare and Yuuhi against the vast, ominous shadow of the Biscuit Hammer itself should be working somewhere else, because they at least have an idea of what they’re doing. Even with the somewhat “starfield on the side of a van”-y quality to the backdrop, it’s way more visually striking than anything else in the show.

Samidare also gets probably the only half-decent bit of action in the show so far, where she chucks a fucking car at this week’s golem. (Yes, there’s one in this episode too, get used to them.) It’s not choreographed terribly well but, hey, it’s hard to completely mess up someone tossing a car.

Elsewhere, the series’ decisions are sometimes simply confusing. For instance, in the image below, Yuuhi is contemplating his grandfather’s ill health, and also on his own weakness. We can deduce from what we already know that Yuuhi’s grandpa is not a great guy, and we get the details not long after this scene, so he’s probably pretty conflicted in this shot. Why, then, is the soundtrack a full battery of chuga-chuga-chaw heavy metal guitars? Was the audio editor just taking the piss?

The annoying thing is that the last leg of this episode largely works pretty well. The dread Yuuhi feels toward his grandfather is explained as largely the result of said grandfather being a genuine abusive shithead. Those chains we keep seeing as imagery aren’t metaphorical, they’re trauma flashbacks literally intruding into the reality of the show, as Yuuhi was once literally chained up and locked in a closet for a few days by his grandfather. It’s really no wonder that when he gets news of his grandpa’s bad health here he’s very reluctant to go see him.

The impact of that abuse is something Biscuit Hammer handles with a surprising amount of nuance, given even more detail here as Yuuhi himself falls sick from trying to leap across the local river (it’s complicated), and has to have Samidare tend to him. But the entire time I watched this, even feeling as I do that it’s the part of the episode that works best, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of that feeling is holdover from the manga.

I largely think the print pacing works better here, because cramming both Samidare’s little speech a bit farther up this page and this whole thing about Yuuhi’s grandfather into the same 22 minute space just feels unpleasantly jumbled. I obviously cannot say this for certain, but I feel like this episode probably does not hit nearly as convincingly for someone who isn’t already familiar with these characters.

Thus we settle into what I think will be the story of the Biscuit Hammer anime’s entire run (which might well be two cours, going by the BD listings). Moments of brightness left over from the manga’s original structure intercut with an awful lot of unimpressive-to-outright-awful visual production.

I am, then, judging Biscuit Hammer as much on what it represents as what it actually is. I remain unconvinced that there is any reason for this anime to exist beyond someone trying to do a quick IP flip to raise some money. The open question is whether it will eventually succeed even as something that nakedly unambitious, whether it will at least be a competent obvious cash grab. So far, the answer to that question feels like a flat “no.” Even the scenes in this episode that mostly work only do so by inheriting the manga’s existing strengths. There is not a single thing here that enhances or even meaningfully changes the source material. In the weeks to come, we will see if it remains so thoroughly pointless.

Biscuit Hammer Scorecard for This Week:

Times Samidare Literally Carried the Show: 2
Bad Perv Jokes I Didn’t Bring Up in The Main Body of The Text Because There’s Already So Much to Complain About: 1
Scenes that Actually Kind of Work for a Period of More Than a Few Seconds: 1
Lizard Moments: 3
Samidare Cuteness: 10/10

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CALL OF THE NIGHT Episode 2 – Do You Do LINE?

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

Last week, while covering Call of the Night‘s debut episode, I made mention that Nazuna is, in a way dangerous. Or at least, representative of dangerous things, in a way that’s fairly inherent to her being a vampire. I stand by that, because last episode still, you know, happened. But what was also evident even then, and is far moreso this week, is that she’s also a bit of a doofus.

What this episode really cements is that Nazuna and Ko have a great dynamic. They’re a pair of verbal pinball flippers. It’s always hard to convey banter as a positive quality in writing, but the fact that the back-and-forth of sex jokes and general endearing dumbassery doesn’t get old mostly speaks for itself. For instance, there is Ko’s attempt to get Nazuna to give him her phone number, which runs into some of the usual problems one might expect when trying to hook up with a vampire.

Using this specific term places Nazuna in the same realm of dorkdom as Pearl from Steven Universe. Truly, no mean feat.

Perhaps more relevant to the show’s actual plot, Ko here reaffirms that, yes, he is actively trying to fall in love with Nazuna so that when she bites him he will become a vampire. Given that he’s a teenager one would think this would be easy, but hey, some hearts are pickier than others. On the third hand, though, it’s not like Call of the Night is shy about pairing these two up pretty hard already. They spend the first third or so of the episode looking for each other (which eventually leads to the phone exchange above, since neither of them have any easy way to contact the other).

When they do eventually meet up, Nazuna again invites Ko over, and the framing is still less than subtle.

The episode’s second plot revolves around the two trying to find some way to keep in touch, given Nazuna’s lack of anything that can use a modern cellular network. Ko eventually hits on the idea of using….toy “transceiver” watches with walky-talkies in them.

This odd little detour has more underlying implication than one might expect. Sure, they spend a while fiddling with them—playing hide and seek, basically, an apt display that they’re both immature in their own ways—but then Ko reveals that when he bought them as a kid he hid one away as part of a longwinded ploy to be able to talk to someone new, only for one of them to simply go missing. That’s honestly kinda depressing! Which Nazuna actually points out (with a signature lack of tact).

Perhaps the most revealing moment though comes when the two take a short flight to Ko’s school, where Ko manages to do some pretty amazing deduction about his new friend. Noticing that she makes a ton of sex jokes but gets flustered at discussion of actual romance, he has this thought.

It’s a little too early to say if he’s right (although, I think so), but if he is; that’s a pretty impressive target to hit considering his own lack of experience. It’s also maybe a smidgen unrealistic, although, then again, teenagers can be awfully perceptive in their own way.

As the episode ends, Ko heads home, and shockingly, his toy watch goes off. Before he can fully process the question of who could possibly have the missing watch and why, someone who seems to know him spooks him from behind. (Not unlike what Nazuna did last week.)

The introduction of another person into the show’s core dynamic this early is an interesting thing. But, really, you could see it coming even if there weren’t other people asides from Ko and Nazuna in the OP animation. The Sun always comes up eventually.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) I Would’ve Written a Review, But SHIKIMORI’S NOT JUST A CUTIE

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

Sometimes I open these reviews by calling something unusual, weird, or peculiar. This is not one of those times; Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, a romcom from this already romcom-saturated year, is pretty normal. It’s about a pretty normal pair of high school sweethearts, who attend a pretty normal (by anime standards) high school, and have a relationship that is, all around, pretty normal. This is neither a strength nor a weakness, on its own, but it’s worth keeping in mind what we’re actually looking at here.

Even compared to, say, the also fairly conventional My Dress-Up Darling from just a season prior, much about Shikimori is very much standard for its genre. There are really only two axes along which it will catch any interest; for one, the couple are actually dating even from the very start of the story, admittedly a bit of a rarity for the genre. For two; Shikimori herself (Saori Oonishi) is….well, cool. Princely, as more than one character puts it. The series goes out of its way to suggest that, between her and her boyfriend, the easily-flustered shortstop Izumi (Shuichirou Umeda), she’s actually the more masculine of the two. (This despite being shorter and having pastel pink hair. It’s mostly a vibe thing, and it’s usually sold pretty well.)

An important thing to note is that Shikimori began life as a series of Twitter comics. In their original form, Shikimori’s “coolness” was essentially the punchline to a joke. A very simple subversion of expectations that works well in that format.

As such, while Shikimori and Izumi, as well as their supporting cast, are definitely decently-written, both they individually and the anime on the whole feel underdeveloped. The main pair are cute together and I buy that they’re in love—I get why she likes him and why he likes her, which is important—but there is just a little something missing. And over the course of the anime adaption, that absence becomes more and more pronounced, even in the show’s best episodes.

But, let’s focus on the positives first. As mentioned, while most of the characters fall into broad archetypes they are at least competent executions on them. Shikimori genuinely does come across as pretty cool, and maybe even a little intimidating. Izumi seems nice, and is a total softie in an endearing way. Their main group of three friends includes a chummy hothead (Shuu Inuzuka; played by Nobuhiko Okamoto), a feisty wildcat who’s good at sports and also herself seems to have something of a thing for Shikimori (Kyou Nekozaki; Misato Matsuoka), and a stoic, somewhat snarky lovable weirdo (Yui Hachimitsu; Rina Hidaka). All are solid, and it’s fun to watch them interact.

Magic Planet Anime understands the glory of Hachimitsu.

Visually, the series is excellent, directed by a team that includes many staff who will eventually be making the Oshi No Ko anime. They breathe a sense of vibrancy into the school life setting that really does make it feel like a real, present place, and the set design in particular contributes a lot to that. Watching it, you can practically feel the Sun illuminating your face as you walk through the school courtyard. It takes talent to do that, and that talent is worth pointing out and respecting. And at times, it does manage to be genuinely romantic, with relative mundanities like theater and theme park dates blown up big enough that you can really immerse yourself in the emotions they convey. In these moments, when Shikimori is essentially at its peak, it does a good job of that.

And I really wish I could say those moments defined the whole show, that Shikimori lived up to such strong visual work, but mostly they don’t and it doesn’t. It’s pleasant, it’s decent fun, but it is rarely anything more than that, despite these highlights.

Fundamentally, it’s unfair to say any of Shikimori‘s strengths are in some way insufficient because it fails to measure up to some imagined version of what it could be. Things like that are pat and they’re rarely particularly substantial. Yes, Shikimori would be a bit more interesting if, say, Izumi was a girl (he wouldn’t need much of a design change to pass), but a criticism that basic misses the fact that Shikimori is routinely unwilling to commit to even its fairly tame level of gender non-conformance. The entire premise of the anime is that Shikimori is a cool, princely type, but just as often, it’s Izumi who is the assertive one in their relationship’s key moments. A trend that continues up until the last episode, where it’s Izumi who plants the couple’s first kiss on….Shikimori’s cheek.

And this would itself be fine if the show had a bit more fire to it. Comparing almost anything to Kaguya-sama: Love is War! is going to make that thing look bad, but it and Shikimori aired in the same season, and (spoilers here) they both have a kiss in the finale. It is telling that Kaguya‘s finale is a heart-pounding hurricane of grand romantic gestures that defy all common sense and reason, and the kiss that caps that episode is a full-on makeout. Shikimori just can’t compete with that kind of thing, even with all the visual panache in the world. It can’t even really compete with the aforementioned Dress-Up Darling, a series that is in many respects much less consistent, but by simply having the running plot of two crazy kids who aren’t dating yet but clearly eventually will be, it feels much more urgent. And, frankly, that show’s unabashed horniness—tasteless as it could often get—feels more reflective of a lived-in teenage experience than Shikimori is. (So does Kaguya, despite its absurd premise and in-theory unrelatable rich kid cast, for that matter.)

As it is, Shikimori is clearly is aiming for a laid-back, iyashikei-esque easy pace. It achieves that, so it’s perhaps even more unfair to complain that that’s “all” it does. But at the same time, this absence of any more substantial emotional weight is highlighted by the show itself, because when it can find a piece of the original story that it can make something truly wild out of, it does so with gusto.

Take, for example, the side character Kamiya (Ayaka Fukuhara).

Kamiya once fell hard for Izumi, too, but no longer pursues him because she knows he’s taken, and she has no chance. Over the course of the episode-ish’s worth of material that focuses on her, she imagines herself as a counterfeit Cinderella, her glass slippers and Prince Charming alike missing.

The series itself bends around her, bringing a rainy overcast to the serene high school rooftop, threatening a Biblical flood. Hers is a deep, dramatic, and messy love. And it demands a story louder, wilder, and more complicated than Shikimori, one that could accommodate the drama that inherently comes along with this kind of thing. But Shikimori is not that story, and her feelings prove too much of a challenge for it to wholly untangle. It’s not coincidental that when her short arc reaches its conclusion, she essentially disappears from the show entirely.

It still feels wrong to judge a series based on what it isn’t, rather than what it is. But the pieces of the show that focus on Kamiya—and other, smaller shards of something that is simply bigger than the rest of the series, always out of shot or between the frames—almost demand you to imagine a world beyond Shikimori‘s fairly limited notion of teenage romance. There is a lot else out there, and on some level, Shikimori knows this. In a few places, it almost seems frustrated with itself, that it cannot truly cut loose from the bounds of its own genre. The most obvious of these is perhaps the OP animation, which depicts a dimension- and genre-hopping pair of micro-vignettes for our lead couple, far removed from the series itself. Including even, perhaps most tellingly, one where there is a token acknowledgement of that same basic criticism I mentioned earlier; a version of the series in which Izumi and Shikimori are both girls.1

These two shots are literally all of Fem!Izumi we ever see, but they raise the question of why she looks so sad and troubled. In this tiny bit of non-verbal characterization, the OP animation establishes that she and Shikimori must have a rather different relationship than that between regular Izumi and Shikimori. The fact that I’m able to write this much about it is ample evidence both that this team is quite talented and that there’s a lack of stuff like this to chew on in the main series.

What you get, then, is a series that is a warm, personable elevation of what is ultimately very thin material. This isn’t to say that the Shikimori is a bad show—if I thought that I’d say so outright—but its origins as a gimmick strip on Twitter never really stop casting a long shadow over it. And in the end, it comes across as an elaborate expression of a very basic thought; “wouldn’t it be great if I had a tall, cool girlfriend?” Sure, it would be. Lots of people would love that. But you need something beyond that to push it past the realm of the merely cute, and Shikimori can only manage that in frustratingly short bursts. I find it almost impossible to imagine actively disliking Shikimori, but at the end of the day, you are basically watching six hours of fluffy Pixiv fanart.

The ongoing new romcom boom will do weird things to this particular period of anime in the long view of history. It’s hard to say if this show—or My Dress-Up Darling, Komi Can’t Communicate, etc. etc.—will persist particularly long in the public memory. In the case of Shikimori specifically, I rather doubt it. If it picks up a long-term fanbase, it will be a cult one, made up of people for whom the show offered some measure of comfort during difficult situations or simply helped them get through a day. To those people, Shikimori will be a cup of tea during an illness or a cool breeze on a summer day. To everyone else, it will be a pleasant, but half-remembered memory that pops up like a firework into the sky; brilliant for a fleeting moment, and then gone.

1: A correction: A commenter pointed out that this is actually Kamiya, which comparing the screenshots is obvious and I feel a little silly for thinking otherwise. Still, given its juxtaposition with all the alternate universe stuff I think my confusion is a bit more understandable, and my larger point still stands.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch LYCORIS RECOIL Episode 2 – The More The Merrier

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

I know on some level that I can’t just spend every one of these columns gushing about how goddamn entertaining Lycoris Recoil is, but I really, really want to. If anyone had any lingering doubts, “The More The Merrier” proves that Lycoris Recoil’s spy movie chops are no fluke. It’s stylish and intriguing with a fun little left turn at the end. Basically, the perfect second episode for something like this.

We open on a delightfully Lain-y scene of two hackers meeting in the confines of cyberspace. One is Walnut, who we met last week, and the other is a new face (or mask, anyway), Roboto.

The two’s relationship can perhaps best be described as tense, and we learn early on here that it was Roboto who told the mysterious billionaire Allen Adams where Walnut’s apartment was. You may remember said apartment getting blown up via car touchpad toward the end of the premiere. Walnut, perhaps out of options, hires the LycoReco cafe girls to get him out of the country. This seems like a fairly straightforward premise, and it mostly is, but many small details shade the entire journey.

To start with, before the mission even begins, we learn Takina and Chisato have been paired up for about a month now. And we learn that Adams, under the alias “Mr. Yoshi,” has become an occasional customer of the cafe. (He tries very hard to play the role of the nice, well-intentioned wealthy customer. Maybe a little too hard, even bringing Chisato a souvenir from a trip abroad to Russia in the form of a small toy.)

The mission itself is a study in contrasts. Chisato and Takina have very different personalities that happen to work pretty excellently together, and almost every single facet of the job they pull off here sees the two’s approaches deliberately juxtaposed. Chisato evidently spaces out during much of the briefing and doesn’t note down most of the minute transit details about where she’s going or how to get there, Takina has them memorized. Takina drinks a “jelly drink”—Soylent or something?—to quickly and utilitarianly get a boost of energy before anything actually dangerous happens, Chisato on the other hand chows down on a bento box.

The actual spy work part of the mission consists of escorting Walnut while a group of mercenaries in the employ of Roboto—who we eventually learn is himself working for Allen—pursue him. There’s some fun stuff in here, too. When the two meet up with Walnut (who spends the entire episode dressed in a squirrel suit, in a truly inspired bit of costume design), for example, Chisato is disappointed that the flashy Lambo-like supercar she’d spotted in the parking lot isn’t their ride for the mission.

When things inevitably get hairy, culminating in an office building shootout with Robot’s mercs, Chisato’s still using her rubber bullets while Takina has made only the minor compromise of aiming for shoulders instead of heads. Even here, the two are very different. Chisato’s approach, tellingly, seems to be the more effective of the two. In an impossibly cool moment that I really hope has some eventual sci-fi hokum explanation, Chisato is able to calmly sidestep her way out of point-blank rifle fire, literally waltzing between shots like it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

Minutes later, in what’s becoming a recurring pattern, she tend the wounds of one of their enemies so he doesn’t bleed out.

This seems like a mistake; as she’s doing that, Takina and Walnut leave the building, only for the squirrel-suited hacker to be riddled with bullets from across the rooftop. The ensuing bloody mess is the first time we’ve seen Chisato even remotely rattled at all in the entire first two episodes, and she and Takina grimly escort his dead body in the back of an ambulance.

But then, just as the episode seems like it’s going to end on a down note, Walnut rises from the ambulance bed, and takes off his helmet, revealing himself to be….

Mizuki??

Yes, it turns out that the entire time, it was Mizuki in the suit, and this entire episode’s plot was a blind op. The Lycorii handled the hard part while, simultaneously, Mizuki and Mika handled the fakeout, which included the stupid squirrel costume; itself both bulletproof and stuffed with exploding blood packs.

This kind of borderline-corny twist is the sort of thing you can only get away with if you’re completely un-selfconscious about your genre. And thankfully, Lycoris Recoil seems to be. The episode ends with the real Walnut, a young girl who promptly switches to the also-fake name Kurumi (Misaki Kuno, thankfully operating in her lower, more naturalistic register rather than what she used for Chisato recently over in Prima Doll), moving into the cafe as payment for helping them out with future missions.

Spot the squirrel.

And we close on Mr. Adams once again patronizing the cafe, before asking Mika point-blank what sort of work he and Chisato actually do. Perhaps a lead-in for next week’s episode?

I realize I’ve leaned really heavily on the “recap” aspect of this column for this one. To be honest, so far almost all of Lycoris Recoil‘s strengths are in intangibles like style, tight pacing, and just generally being fun as hell to watch. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing thematic here; it really is worth noting how hard that contrast button between Takina and Chisato is being slammed, and who knows what the addition of Kurumi to the cast is going to do to that. This is to say nothing with the further hints at some larger overarching web of conspiracy, here, including the DA still hunting for the man in the blurry background of that photo from last episode and, of course, Allan Adams’ recurring appearances.

Until the answers make themselves known, see you next week anime fans.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Let’s Watch LUCIFER AND THE BISCUIT HAMMER – Episode 1

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

Oh god.

Do we really have to?

If you had told me a year ago, when we didn’t know anything about this, that this was how I’d be reacting to its first episode, I’d have never believed you.

The thing that sucks most is that I am not this person. I am not the person who goes into every anime season looking more for what I can drop and complain about than what I can watch and enjoy. I have met people like that, and they’re annoying. I certainly have never wanted to give that impression from my website, which by and large I try to devote mostly to positive anime criticism. The series I’ve disliked enough to review them negatively are few and far between. Enough so that it’s a tag on my review archive, specifically so people can avoid it if they want to.

But sometimes, unfortunately, for many of the same reasons that art can be an essential balm to the soul, art can be bad. The anime adaption of Lucifer and The Biscuit Hammer is bad.

Guys. It is so bad.

How did this happen? Why did so many of you vote for it in the poll? Did I do something wrong?

Okay, no, to be fair. To be so fair that it is physically painful, this is not the worst-produced anime I’ve ever seen. Barely. I’ve seen a couple that look worse. Magical Girl Spec Ops. Asuka was down there. Pride of Orange was down there (how the fuck have I had to reach for that thing as a comparison point twice in one day?). Modern Magic Made Simple, a tragic conflux of rancid taste and animated-at-gunpoint production values that I have blessedly only ever seen one episode of, is worse.

But this is bad. Make no mistake. Not mediocre, not so-so. Bad. The kind of bad that really makes you say to yourself “holy fuck there is too much anime being made right now.” I invite you to look at any random 5-minute slice of this episode and then do the same for any other anime I’ve covered so far this season. Hell, any anime I’ve ever covered on this site. Lucifer and The Biscuit Hammer‘s anime looks worse than the vast majority of them. This is unacceptable on a basic level.

I really want to know what happened. Studio NAZ are not really a known quality, they assisted on Sabikui Bisco two seasons ago, and that show certainly did look pretty rough in spots, but the Sabikui Bisco anime was also not adapting one of the best manga ever written. (Even so, I don’t remember it being this bad.)

Maybe it’s a difference in expectations. In this sense, I am That Person. Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammer is one of my favorite manga of all time, a masterful pastiche of action shonen from the pen of the endlessly talented Satoshi Mizukami, one of his medium’s true modern auteurs alongside the likes of Dowman Sayman, Imitation Crystal, and in a more mainstream sphere, perhaps Tatsuki Fujimoto (I’ll get back to you on that last one once I finish Chainsaw Man). The man’s work is sprawling and spans a number of genres and almost 25 years of history. If you’re here for recommendations, go read—read, do you understand? Not watch—Biscuit Hammer. Then read Spirit Circle. Then watch Planet With. Even his minor stories are homeruns, but those are the big ones, the ones that truly are essential and some of the best manga penned in the last 20 years. (Or anime, in the case of Planet With.)

Biscuit Hammer, in its original form, is fun, riveting, full of interesting little twists and turns, and has a profound thematic core that cuts to the heart of the genre it so clearly admires and, more broadly, resonates emotionally with many, many readers. We will get into some of the specifics of that over the course of these twelve weeks—god, twelve fucking weeks of this—but that’s the short version. The Cliff’s Notes.

Adapting this thing to anime was probably always going to be really hard. But I must ask; would it have been too much to ask to at least try?

The main problem actually isn’t even the piss-dull production values, although they certainly don’t help. It’s the pacing. In the manga, main character Yuuhi Amamiya (Junya Enoki, completely phoning it in) comes across as a tedious, self-absorbed, petulant dick. He is those things, and that characterization is on purpose. But the first half or so of this first episode is an instructive exercise in the difference between manga pacing and anime pacing. Yuuhi being a jerk on the page is easy to breeze through because, in a comic book, you can read at your own pace. In an anime you are simply stuck there for however many minutes a scene lasts.

Over the course of the first half of this episode, Yuuhi gets roped into being a chosen one by a magic lizard (Noi Crescent, played here by Kenjirou Tsuda) and blows that off. Understandable, but we have to sit through his annoying dialogue about why he doesn’t want to be part of it. Less understandable, you could cut that down. Later, when he starts to develop the powers granted to him in service of this world-saving quest, namely a form of limited telekinesis, he uses it to get a peek at his teacher’s panties. At some point, choosing to preserve this—one of several such scenes from the early portion of the manga before it really found its footing—instead of cutting it in lieu of almost anything else feels like active taunting.

Yuuhi gets some much more granular characterization later on that helps me, as someone with prior knowledge, deal with all this. For a total outsider? I would blame no one for dropping the anime right then and there. Which would be tragic only because they’d be unlikely to give the much better manga a shot.

Eventually, through a combination of a laughably middling action scene and some exposition, Yuuhi gets the gist; the world is being threatened by a, we’ll say sorcerer for now, who summons monsters called golems, and who threatens to crack the world asunder with the giant invisible-to-normals mallet that gives the series its English title. (It’s called Hoshi no Samidare domestically, if you were curious.)

It’s hard to muster up the enthusiasm to go into any of the specifics here. The fight scene is very short and scored by a wildly inappropriate EDM soundtrack that reminds me a lot of that of The God of High School. The golem here retains its charmingly doofy look from the original series, so that is a minor positive.

Indeed, I will say this much, buried under all this mediocrity is one single real bright spot. Something that the otherwise well below par anime adaption cannot smother. If you’re familiar with the manga, you can already probably guess what I mean.

For some people the term “tomboy” really just doesn’t cut it.

Samidare Asahina. Princess Samidare. Samidare of the Stars. Lucifer. Played here by Naomi Oozora, who, full credit, really seems to be trying, unlike almost the entire rest of the voice cast.

Samidare is the true focal character of Biscuit Hammer, and she is a fascinating individual, for reasons the show hints at here but won’t properly get to until later. (Assuming the pacing doesn’t also fall to shambles there, that is.)

I actually find describing Samidare’s character a little difficult, because there isn’t really much else like her. She’s a willfully authoritarian little brat who, for reasons as yet undisclosed to us, mostly wants to stop the Biscuit Hammer from falling so she can destroy the planet instead. Near the end of the episode, she jumps off of her own balcony to test both Yuuhi’s power and his loyalty. In its last minute, she demands he swear loyalty to him, and in an action that completely defies every single thing we’ve seen of the young man so far, he feels like he has to.

I would compare Samidare, specifically the anime’s Samidare, to Siesta from The Detective is Already Dead or Aika from Blast of Tempest. A young, strong-willed girl whose sheer force of personality and just sum competence are so much greater than everyone else’s that she warps the story around her. Unlike them and other “removed woman” characters, Samidare is very much alive and present, still able to actively wield that influence.

In the original manga, this had the fascinating effect of making it almost seem like Samidare was actively stealing the series’ protagonist spot from Yuuhi, only sharing it on her own terms. Here, because the adaption is simply not nearly as good as the original, it captures only a fraction of that essence. Still, no amount of incompetence can completely defang her. She’s a nugget of gold panned from muddy water. When she folds her arms, her back to the sky, with the Biscuit Hammer hanging ominously, obscured by the clouds behind her, you can see the spirit of the original Lucifer & The Biscuit Hammer in there, if you squint. Perhaps that sheer power of personality is why the manga is named after her in its original Japanese.

But those few feint echoes of the original manga are not enough to save this as an adaption, and trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who’d watch this knowing nothing about the original? Puh. I cannot imagine that this episode would make them at all interested in Lucifer. It does almost the exact opposite of what a good adaption is supposed to do, in that it magnifies every weakness of the original material and creates new ones while pruning off the areas where it excelled. Even purely as an ad for the manga, this first episode is an almost complete failure. Considered as its own standalone piece of work, it is perhaps even worse.

I will say, I am going to try to cover the remainder of the anime in the best faith possible. (What you are reading is the kindest version of this column that I can manage, and I mean that in total seriousness.) So whatever lies ahead, we will face it together. You all wanted me to cover this, for whatever reason, so I am going to cover it. If that means twelve weeks of scrounging for bright spots, then so be it.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.