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.
The Magical Girl and the Evil Lieutenant Used to be Archenemies: Bit of an unusual story with this one, as it’s an adaptation of a manga, the author of whom, Fujiwara Cocoa, passed away a good nine years ago. My initial understanding is that they signed off on the project before then, so there’s nothing scummy going on here, but having since looked around I can’t actually find a source for that, so I have no idea! I like to think she’d be happy about this but it’s hard to know. It’s always a complex thing when a work is an adaptation by a creator who’s no longer with us.
Anyway, this is an entry in two separate but related anime genres. Firstly, it’s a romcom with a heavy speculative fiction element—this time, as you’d probably guess, derived from magical girl anime—and secondly, related to that conceit, it’s also a show purporting to show the “behind the scenes” workings of a Saturday morning kids’ action cartoon genre. If you think of it as Demon Girl Next Door meets Miss Kuroitsu From The Monster Development Department you’re not ridiculously far off.
I quite liked this! The jokes are very simple, mostly they consist of the Evil Lieutenant [Ono Yuuki] seeing the Magical Girl [Nakahara Mai] (neither character is actually named in this first episode) be cute, and then having a crisis of conscience when he finds this endearing or attractive instead of wanting to blast her off the face of the Earth. But I think this works for the show’s half-length episode format, any longer and it’d be a slog, any shorter and we’d be left wanting. 12 minutes is just about exactly enough to get the point across without it feeling like it’s overextending itself.
Visually the series is very pastel in a way I like (there’s an argument to be made that this is the better-looking between the two Bones shows I’ve seen this year. It might end up being the stronger one overall as well), and while the Magical Girl’s design is a little cheesecakey for my tastes it’s still pretty cute overall, and I love her hair. The Lieutenant has to settle for merely being passably handsome, so it goes! We also get lots of nice aesthetic touches indebted to the show’s latter parent genre; the Magical Girl has a henshin sequence (a very nice one, in fact), and the Lieutenant has faceless monster-person goons akin to the little ninja guys from Heartcatch Precure.
All around this is pretty fun and I enjoyed it a lot, it’s definitely filling that ‘Tis Time For Torture Princess niche of a character comedy with a nice warmth to it that I’ve been missing since that series ended a few months back.
Plus-Sized Elf: This is a fetish show for a fetish I don’t have, so, you know, I don’t really know what I expected here. I only watched this because a friend (who I will leave unnamed)1 roped me into it.
Some people might try to reach and say oh well it’s good to have any representation of different body types in anime, but that would require this to be representation and not a fetishizing joke, so I’m not really inclined to take that claim seriously. (Never has an anime made me so self-conscious about the thing I was going to drink while watching it.)
Also it looks bad and is paced like shit. This just makes me think of when Eiken got a TV anime back in the day. Even if you’re into this, what does it being on TV accomplish for you or anyone? I don’t get it.
SHOSHIMIN: How to Become Ordinary: This is….interesting. Specifically because it isn’t interesting.
The story, such that it is, is a pileup of artfully-arranged images. Images of normal, everyday things. Strawberry tarts, cakes, hallways, lost purses, street signs, bikes, grain, rivers.
Such that when things explode at the end, it’s by something as simple as someone stealing one of those images. (The bike.) There’s a strange elliptical quality to the whole thing, as though none of this really matters in any major sense, but of course, the case is always that if nothing in a situation matters, then everything does. This, I suspect, is some part of the point of SHOSHIMIN. Compelling stuff, in its own quiet way. I feel like I only half understand it at the moment, though.
Oshi no Ko – Season 2: I kind of wish I had never pledged to stop writing about this show on my site. It’s true that I have a lot of issues with the worst parts of the fanbase but the series itself is fucking brilliant and the anime is a compelling elevation of already-fantastic source material. Copying this entry over from my tumblr is a kind of half-compromise, since I’m still not giving it its own article. You can all feel free to tell me if you think this counts or not.
In any case, this Doga Kobo team should never be making anything but adaptations of excellent psychological dramas, I swear to god. If you had told me four years ago that Hiramaki Daisuke would be an easy A-List director, I would’ve laughed at you. (Which to be VERY clear, is an indictment of me, not him.) I have no idea how this guy went from directing the anime adaptation of fucking Koisuru Asteroid to this in just four years. (I have a friend2 who really likes that anime, maybe they saw something in his work back then that I did not. Who knows.)
The stunning trick they introduce here, okay. This arc revolves around Aqua, Kanna, and Akane participating in a 2.5D stage play for a popular manga. Whether or not a character is invested in their acting, whether or not they’ve actively got stage presence, is telegraphed by splattering paint around the environment, except instead of being a single color, the paint changes their entire character design, changing them from their mundane selves—the actors—to their transformed selves—their characters—it’s beautiful. I have no idea how hard this must’ve been to board and animate but it was completely worth it.
Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin: I was surprised that I did not like this that much? It doesn’t seem bad by any means, visually it’s very strong and there’s tons of atmosphere, but it’s also extremely exposition-heavy and the subtitles are very stilted, which hurts both my understanding of what’s going on and my ability to immerse myself in the world of the show. I’ll give it another episode or two, but unless the subtitles improve (or I can find a better translation) I’m not optimistic.
Wistoria: Wand and Sword: Another not-quite-isekai thing, yay.
This one is notable in that a lot of it is very clearly riffing on Harry Potter, down to character archetypes and even designs. Will [Amasaki Kouhei], our hero, is Harry (he even kind of looks like Harry) and other characters include a rude Draco-ish noble named Sion [Mizunaka Masaaki], a pretty clear Hermione stand-in, and an even clearer Professor Snape stand-in. Although the general premise, that our main character is the lone, magic-less swordsman in a world of sorcerors, actually borrows a fair bit more from Black Clover. No “boy who lived” stuff here, thankfully.
Most of this is fairly standard, but there’s a whole Wizard / Angel war in the backstory that comes up which is notionally interesting, as is the fact that the setting is basically a magic habitat dome. Will’s core motivation thus is to eventually become a Mage (I’m not using the show’s over-wrought titles) so he can see his childhood friend / love interest Elfaria [Sekine Akira] again. There’s some interesting visual symbolism in the flashback with Will’s arm literally dissolving to sand as he ponders that he’s “talentless” and can’t use magic.
The school he’s attending uses a numerical credits system. Which is of course solely a convenient plot device to get the ball rolling so we can get to our under-school dungeon and have a big ol’ fight break out. The fight in question is quite the spectacle. In content, it’s very basic, simply Will saving Sion, who’d stuck his nose at him earlier (and bullied him a long time before that) from a vicious, minotaur-looking thing, but the style is important here, there’s a lot of impressive action animation. It doesn’t have the most cohesiveness in the world, but conversely that means the individual cuts are compellingly expressive and if you’re a real sakuga-head type you’ll probably have a lot of fun with this one.
From that, you might think I was basically describing a shonen anime, and that’s because that’s actually exactly what this is. Unlike most examples of this genre-space which originate as amateur webfiction, Wistoria here started life as a manga, and the slightly higher barrier to entry of that format really does make all the difference here. Every single piece of this story has been done a hundred times before, from its xeroxed walled city setting, to the tsundere-ish girl who’s clearly crushing on Will, to Will himself, clearly based on the “has some innocuous skill that allows him to out-power his ostensible betters” sort of isekai protagonist, but the simple presence of flash and professionalism on the visual side, and basic storytelling competence on the other (Will has an actual motive beyond a vague desire for power, for example) make all the difference. I actually had a fair amount of fun with this overall, and I might keep up with it.
Bye Bye, Earth: This was an interesting one, it really grew on me over the course of the premiere and sitting with it after the fact, I think I kind of love it?
The decision to have the show’s very first scene of any length be our hero, Belle [Fairouz Ai], fighting and killing a majestic but destructive sea creature / plant animal called a fish flower is certainly something. If I could criticize it for anything here, the animation looks very nice and the show is solidly boarded and all, but backgrounds are a bit of an up and down thing. The first area we see is fairly nonspecific, but the forest we see later on is nice, and the interior of our protagonist’s house, where she lives with her mentor / surrogate father Sian [Suwabe Junichi] is cozy and meaningfully cluttered with esoterica.
At one point Sian and Belle talk about Belle’s “condition.” ie. she’s the only normal human in a world filled with anthros and kemonomimi. Somewhere in there, Sian drops the extremely Earth Maiden Arjuna-ass quote “Everything in this world tries to intermingle with everything else”, and this turns out to be basically the key to the whole episode. There’s a real running theme of interconnection (and our protagonist’s corresponding solitude) here. Sian describes Belle’s isolation as “homesickness”—for wherever she belongs, something she’s never really known—and advises her to go wandering in search of people like herself to cure it. She takes him up on that offer at the end of the episode.
I really like Belle, something about a powerful warrior who’s very philosophically-inclined and thoughtful is an automatic +1 from me in terms of protagonists. I had the thought in the middle of writing this that, oh my god, this is why they went with making everyone but the main girl an anthro, they all have ears, tails, something that marks them as being part of one animal tribe or another. very literally, they all have something she lacks. I’m an easy mark for obvious visual symbolism, what can I say?
She was also born from a stone, and in general her flashback to her strange childhood feels very esoteric and mythological. As a child, she attempts to steal Runding, now her sword in the present day, from the palace it’s locked up in, and this all happens under the glow of a massive, blue moon, a piece of visual iconography that feels intentional considering the series’ title. Runding talks, incidentally, and Belle seems to be able to communicate with it, which makes me wonder what it exactly is. Erewhon is written on it, which Sian claims means ‘utopia.’
At the end of the episode, Belle begins the trial she needs to undertake to become a wanderer, and in doing so, Sian erases himself from her memories as the two of them spar and he bestows her with a “curse” that she will carry with her for the rest of her life. There’s something deeply sad about the idea that Belle doesn’t even get to keep her one genuine connection with the man who’s basically her father.
And the episode just….ends, on that note! I’m actually very invested in this. I suppose you could criticize its narrative and symbolism for being obvious, but I like the journey Belle’s being set up to take, and I like how the world feels thought-out to some degree as opposed to being Generic ISO Fantasy Setting #7 (still got the ringed cities, though). All told I really liked this, I would rank it fairly highly among seasonal premieres.
ATRI -My Dear Memories- This, too, is an interesting one. I kept going back and forth on it while watching the premiere but I think I’d say my overall impressions are positive? It’s complicated.
What we have here is a future setting where massive flooding has sunk a good chunk of humanity. The state of things is telegraphed via the small-seeming islands that our protagonists live on; lots of overgrown buildings, using oil lamps for light and heat, that kind of thing. In the midst of all this we’re introduced to our lead, Natsuki [Ono Kenshou], who’s being lent a submersible by his “friend”, the generally scummy Catherine [Hikasa Youko]. While diving for salvage into what used to be the city he grew up in, he finds an android sealed in a capsule. This is the titular Atri [Akao Hikaru], and the rest of the episode is about Natsuki, Catherine, and innocent schoolgirl(?) Minamo [Takahashi Minami] interacting with her.
Their interactions are a bit fraught and this is where I started getting a bit skeptical. Catherine’s first instinct is to sell Atri despite the fact that the robo-girl is clearly human in all but biology, and the idea is taken seriously throughout the episode. Our characters go so far as to head to an appraiser. My immediate first reaction to this was very negative, and it’s definitely still possible that Atri (the show) will faceplant here, but I think what we’re actually doing is drawing a parallel between Atri herself and Natsuki with regard to the commodification of bodies. Natsuki, you see, is disabled, and only gets around with a prosthetic leg (which is noted to be old and finnicky; it locks up on him a few times throughout the episode and he has to break out an extendable cane). Natsuki needs money for a replacement prosthetic, something that will just allow him to live a comparably normal life, and Atri is considered a faulty machine—the appraiser outright calls her a collector’s item. There’s a difference in what kind of struggles they’re facing, but the connection is there, or at least the show seems to think it is. At the episode’s conclusion, Atri offers “I’ll be your leg!” to Natsuki. It’s definitely meant to read as heartwarming, but it’s a touchy subject to be sure, and I’m not sure how well the show handles it.
In general this seems like it could be a recurring problem. The series is definitely treating Atri’s status as a trade good as a bad thing, but there’s still something weirdly patronizing about the way she’s immediately super grateful to Natsuki for, say, buying her shoes. (I would argue that if you’re responsible for another human being, keeping them clothed is a pretty basic thing.) I think I’ll want to give this a few more episodes, seeing how it handles this whole setup, before I come down firmly on one side of liking its writing or not.
The visuals are a much less complicated thing to enjoy, though. They’re honestly just pretty great! I’ve seen a few people say that they’re bad which really puzzled me, the character animation is excellent throughout this first episode and the environments are fantastic. It may just be the title and the fact that I’ve watched it recently, but some of the shoreside scenes actually reminded me a little bit of AIR, another A-title anime based on a visual novel, just in how well they convey the feeling of summer, even if the overall goals of these anime are clearly quite different. The CGI isn’t the best, but it’s kept to a minimum and restricted to places where it logically makes sense, such as the submersible itself, so I wasn’t bothered. Also there’s a visual trick early on where some of Natsuki’s memories of living on the surface play out through the port windows of the sub, and that’s just really a lovely thing.
Enjoyed this overall I’d say, looking forward to seeing how Natsuki deals with the legacy of his late marine geologist mean butch grandma over the next few episodes.
1: You know who you are.
2: Hi Josh.
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