Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Just because of the sheer number of people on the planet, there must be someone, somewhere, who tuned into Astro Note‘s premiere while knowing literally nothing about it. This person, I must imagine, was faintly confused. Not as much as they’d’ve been by Train to The End of The World‘s premiere earlier this week, but still pretty puzzled. Fakeout openings are nothing new in shows like this, but the disconnect between Astro Note‘s first minute or so—a retro sci-fi pastiche complete with space suits and ray guns—and the rest of its premiere episode, is pretty funny. Unfortunately, there’s a good chance that this is the funniest thing about it, which when the actual main aim of your show is to be a romcom, is kind of a problem. On the other hand, as is always the case, I tend to not want to judge shows that are clearly Doing Something too harshly.
Let’s set the question of quality aside for right now. Astro Note‘s actual premise is thus; Goutokuji Mira [Uchida Maaya], an alien from the planet Wido, escapes a firefight and takes refuge on Earth, of course in Japan, sometime in the 21st century. There, she bumbles her way into ownership of a share house, the Astro Lodge, which has, as a living perk, free daily breakfasts. (Is this a real thing? I have no idea, probably!) The building’s tenants, a cast of colorful archetypes rendered with varying levels of success and clarity, demand she find them a new cook, since Mira’s own cooking is more or less inedible. Yes, a good chunk of this episode’s setup is based around one of the oldest jokes in the format. At the very least, said inedible food is not literally just rendered as purple gloop this time around.
She puts out a for-hire ad, which as it turns out is completely full of lies and other made-up things. (She’s an alien, which her housemates of course do not know, so she doesn’t know how job listings work. Obviously.) Nonetheless, they attract an applicant, our male lead Miyasaki Takumi [Saitou Souma], who first encounters Mira when she nearly falls off the Astro Lounge’s roof. He catches her, giving us our obligatory Meet Cute moment, and only then does he find out that she’s more or less in charge of this place.
Since the job posting was full of lies, Takumi cannot actually get the position, but he stays at Astro Lounge anyway, serving as the house’s daily breakfast chef regardless. Why? Because Mira is pretty, and he’s talked into it by two of the other tenants.
Fair enough, I suppose, but it seems like a lot of convulsion to get us to Step 1 of our romcom setup. The remainder of the episode is spent on Takumi settling in, interacting with the various other tenants, and getting a good idea of just how strange Mira is.
If the non-sci-fi portions of this premise seem familiar, and you’re someone with a decent command of 80s anime, that’s because this series appears to be heavily riffing on Takahashi Rumiko‘s Maison Ikkoku, which had a TV anime that ran for nearly a hundred episodes back in the Cold War era. I will admit that I’m not really familiar with that series beyond its basic premise, but I am assured that there are a number of references in this series to that one, despite the fact that they’re not officially “related” in any way. (You can draw a loose analogue here to how last season’s Brave Bang Bravern was heavily drawing from the Brave series of mecha anime despite not actually being part of it.) The most obvious of these is the name of Mira’s species itself; “Wido”, as in, a homophone for “widow,” which the female lead of Maison Ikkoku actually was, a mistake that Takumi makes when he overhears Mira talking to her dog—actually her superior from Wido—late at night.
Building on previous texts is all well and good, but this show still has to stand on its own two legs, and this is where I start to doubt Astro Note. A romcom needs to succeed at either the rom or the com to be tolerable, and ideally it should be good at both. So far, most of the humor in Astro Note is fairly rote and will be familiar to anyone who’s seen any character-driven comedy anime of the past several decades. This is hardly the worst I’ve ever seen some of these jokes done, but I have nonetheless seen them before; the hapless woman who can’t cook, the fish out of water who doesn’t know what these ‘Smart Phones’ and ‘Films’ you speak of are, the precocious kid who’s too smart for his own good, the scumbag cheapskate salaryman (who in this case is actually just unemployed full stop), the vicious little dog whose anger seems too big for its small body, the idol who’s a real piece of work in person. And so on, and so forth.
Now, is an anime (or any piece of art or entertainment) necessarily obligated to reinvent the wheel? Well, no, of course not, it just has to succeed at what it’s trying to do. Some of Astro Note‘s gags work better than others; it’s almost certainly just because I’m a sucker for the archetype, but I do find Matsubara Teruko, the aforementioned jackass idol, pretty amusing. (She’s voiced by Furihata Ai, AKA Ruby from Love Live!, which may help sell the joke for some.)
To my own surprise, I also liked Wakabayashi Tomihiro, the salaryman character [Sugita Tomokazu], whose blatant dickbaggery is so audacious that it can wrap back around to funny, given the right circumstance. These things are all matters of taste, though, and I imagine how willing you are to watch characters that you’ve almost certainly seen versions of before interact is going to drive how much slack you’re willing to give Astro Note.
And really, the question of how much slack to give the show is hounding me a bit, here. I feel like I’m being too mean and too lenient at the same time. On the one hand, no one wants to ever be accused of Not Getting It, so I am going out of my way to establish that I am aware that the show is deliberately working within a restrained, older format, and I think it does sometimes succeed within that format. On the other hand, this is a pretty busy season already, and it’s only going to get busier. Should anyone really be setting aside an extra 20 minutes of their own time each week to watch a show whose first episode could be charitably described as “decent”? I’m honestly not sure!
The show’s visuals are worth checking in on here, since that’s about the only thing I’ve not addressed. I suspect that these, too, will be divisive. Astro Note is definitely colorful and solidly-composed, which puts it a cut above anything actually bad (and feels like an oasis in the desert after a full season of watching Ishura and the like), but where we get into odder territory are the character designs. Some are pretty good; Mira is cute, and her curling hair is a nice visual touch that nods to the show’s inspirations. Our male lead is inoffensive but also visually a bit bland in a way that’s unfortunately inescapable with almost any male romcom lead. I actually quite like Teruko’s design both in and out of her idol getup, and the other designs range from decent to a bit offputting. I would’ve liked to see the retro influence come through a bit stronger in this area, and maybe they still will in characters we’ve not met yet, as the ED seems to allude to, but still. Also, at two distinct points, Mira is bowing and the camera is angled such that we’re staring at her ass. This is the kind of thing that would be excusable if the mood the show was going for was “horny,” but it seems to be aiming much more for cute and funny, so it’s just kind of offputting.
All told, and for me personally, I turn to the old post-2000s anime fan standby of the three-episode rule, which despite its name is more of a tentative suggestion. It’s good for anime of a couple different kinds, one of which is something like this, where it’s not clear whether its disparate elements are going to cohere in any substantial way, and how good at paying off its setups it’s going to be. Even then; this is a comedy anime, not Madoka Magica, so if someone were inclined to just write it off right here, I’d get that too. Certainly, I know people who I’m quite sure are going to like this a lot less than I did, and that’s even accounting for the fact that I’m only lukewarm on it. I’ve seen some other reviewers call it “dated” and I don’t think that’s entirely fair, it’s clearly attempting to be a deliberate throwback. But being retro can only get you so far.
Will Astro Note appear in the pages of Magic Planet Anime again? Certainly, that would be nice, but unless it does more with its central romance, or really picks up the pace with regard to its comedy, I don’t see myself finishing the series. On the other hand, who knows? The closing shots of this episode promise to lean more into the sci-fi elements, which could help build Astro Note a distinct identity apart from the show it’s riffing on, and would be one way to paper over some of the elements of the series so far that don’t work.
Birds aren’t real. They’re tools of the bourgeoise.
So who can say? Maybe next week it will really blast off. Stranger things have happened, on this planet and on many others.
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