Tag: CUE

Posted on in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [2/6/22]

The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

I’ve been a bit sick over the past week. Not enough to impact my blogging, thankfully. I was originally going to have just three shows for you this week, but, what the heck, why don’t we start with a new face?

Seasonal Anime

Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure

If you write about a chosen medium, it’s generally good to know what your Geek Buttons are. A Geek Button is a thing–and it can really be anything, a series, a whole genre, a visual style, a specific actor, whatever–where the more “objective” part of your critical toolkit just fails to work, and you are reduced to a blubbering fangirl (or fanboy, or fanby, as the case may be). For me, magical girls in general, and especially Pretty Cure, are a Geek Button. I cannot pretend to be remotely reasonable about them. I love almost all of them like they’re my children and the few exceptions are girls who I just wish were in better shows. I will die on the hill that the magical girl warrior archetype is one of anime’s best and most important contributions to general popular culture.

So with that in mind, please say hello to the newest Pretty Cure series. And indeed, the newest Pretty Cure; Yui Nagomi, AKA Cure Precious (Hana Hishikawa in what is, astoundingly, her first named character role in an anime.)

She is adorable. Dare I say precious?

The first episode of a given Precure series has a lot of beats to hit; introducing the protagonist, introducing her mentor / helper characters, if any, establishing the broad strokes of the plot for the season, nailing down the basic thematic overtone it’s going for, and of course, introducing the bad guys and their particular version of the monsters of the week. It’s a lot of stops to have to hit in a 22-minute episode, but DePaPre swings it admirably. The general direction in this first episode is really just fantastic, and notably, it’s helmed by animation director Akira Inagami, who had a role as a character designer all the way back on the original Futari wa Pretty Cure. (A hearty shout out to my good friend Pike, curator of Dual Aurora Wave, for that information. I’d have never known!)

The whole thing is bouncy and joyous and just alive in a way that really defines the best kids’ anime. The episode is great looking from start to finish, though obviously the real Peak TV moment is Cure Precious’ first henshin sequence.

Also scattered throughout are the traditional “Precure Leap,” a fun nod to an episode of Futari wa, and some truly ludicrous attack names (a 500 Kilocalorie punch, huh?)

I’m also fond of Yui’s “mentor” character here, the lavender haired gnc king Rosemary. He’s delightfully camp in a way that doesn’t feel overbearing or like it’s making fun of anyone.

Her fairy is adorable too, of course.

And I must make a nod toward Gentle (or “Gentlu” as Crunchyroll’s official subs hilariously render her name), who both puts in a supremely cool showing as the anime’s starter villain and is also the smart pick for Character Most Likely To Undergo A Face Turn And Possibly Become a Precure Herself. It wouldn’t be the first time the series has done that. (My favorite example being from Fresh. Which, fun fact; was the first Precure series that Hana Hishikawa watched as a young child in nursery school, going off an interview she gave a few weeks ago.)

Gentle wouldn’t even be the first villain with this specific hair color to eventually become a Precure. Will history repeat itself? Time alone will tell.

The only “bad thing”, really, about DePaPre, is that it won’t appear in this column much. I’ll try to make exceptions for particularly great episodes but given that I watch it with friends on its premiere night, much like Tropical Rouge Precure before it, it can be difficult to find the time, given that these Reports go up on Sunday.

Still, I’ll absolutely be watching every single week. And if my opinion is worth anything to you, I think you should be too.

CUE!

I don’t really know what to think about CUE! Any time I feel like I should just write it off and stop following it entirely, it does this.

“This,” for reference, is another subtly great episode about the inside of the voice acting profession. It doesn’t start out that way; the first third or so of this episode is actually mostly about Haruna’s pet turtle, about whom she says increasingly ridiculous things. (To wit; it’s not a turtle because he has a name, she asks him for advice, and he looks like “an old man” and “a philosopher. It’s all pretty funny.)

But the episode gets serious at around its 1/3rd mark, honing in on the art of injecting emotion into even very short exchanges of words. Haruna’s role, remember, is just “additional voices.” So in her first scene in Bloom Ball, which the girls record here, she only swaps a single sentence with Maika’s character, who only replies with one of her own. And we hear those two sentences some four or five times over the episode’s duration.

I’ve said this before, but running the same scene back-to-back, for any reason, is challenging. You risk boring your audience, and when the scene in question is this short you risk it even more. But, somehow, CUE! pulls it off again.

The mechanics are very simple; the girls learn a little bit about how voice acting works. They record their lines, Haruna and Maika’s get held because the author (present at the recording) remembers that the bit character Haruna is playing comes up again way later in the story. Once again, this is supposed to sell Haruna as someone with an immense amount of untapped voice acting talent. It doesn’t work quite as well as the showstopper she drops in episode 2, but it’s still pretty good, and it proves that when CUE! is on, it’s on.

For something that should be super dry, it manages to stay quite interesting, employing its favorite trick, jumping in and out of the world of the show-within-a-show. Here, since all present are actually recording, things are further embellished by the show being mid-production. No full-color cuts here; it’s all monochrome and pre-correction. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate the nightmare that making a finished cut that looks convincingly unfinished must be.)

Flummoxing as it sometimes is, if CUE! keeps making episodes like this I will continue to watch them. Just, please, I’m begging you, either focus on the idol girls less or make them more interesting.

Princess Connect! Re:Dive

One of the reasons I declined to give Princess Connect! Re:Dive its own dedicated column is that I know my limits. A picture truly can be worth a thousand words, and a gif from a show like this can be worth a short novel. What am I supposed to say about this?

Okay, fine. If you wanted to, if you were some kind of joyless miser, you could be mad that this episode is all set up and no resolution. Frankly I think that’s an absurd criticism, and the idea that everything must be resolved within the space of a single episode just because this show started out as a “slice of life series” is so far removed from how I experience art that I have a difficult time even comprehending it. Nonetheless it is what some people think, and I’ll give those people their moment of acknowledgement here.

For the rest of us; holy shit.

Princess Connect season 2’s fourth episode is the sort of absurd instant-classic that demands rewinds, screencapping, and a visit to Sakugabooru. And it’s the fourth episode of a twelve-episode season. That’s nuts. That’s the kind of comically overconfident flex that usually presages some great disaster. But why would that be the case here? CygamesPictures aren’t working on anything else this year. It’s amazing what a well-equipped studio can do when actually giving its workers proper time to do so.

The actual plot here is cartwheeling fantasy screwiness that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the many, many books with dragons and swords on the cover that I read in middle school. That sounds like an insult, but this sort of high-stakes epic-in-the-old-sense-of-the-word plot is what’s missing from a lot of modern fantasy anime. It’s spectacle; even down to details like Karyl still playing both sides, the guild of animal girls we meet here, and the giant golem fight that caps the episode.

I feel legitimately bad for the other fantasy anime airing right now. It’s not like In The Land of Leadale or Reincarnated as a Fantasy Knockout don’t have their merits, but they aren’t this. The only competition Priconne really has in this regard is Demon Slayer, but while that show definitely looks great, it’s always had issues with making its flashy animation feel like it entirely fit with the rest of the world. Priconne never even sniffs that problem; the compositing is as excellent here as anything else. Even moments where characters are literally just standing around look incredible.

The only real issue is that Priconne’s plot is so mile-a-minute I could see it getting hard to keep up. (I’m already a bit lost myself. Having not played the game probably doesn’t help.) But even so; at least for me, that feeling actually adds to the exhilaration of watching this thing in motion. The Proper Noun Machine Gun has rarely been put to such good use.

Tokyo 24th Ward

Unfortunately we must end this section of the week’s writeup on something of a sour note.

If I had known I was going to be covering Tokyo 24th Ward this frequently, I’d have just made it another weekly column. Maybe that would’ve been a bad idea, though, given how the show’s shortcomings are generally more compelling to me than its strengths, which I increasingly think are actually rather modest.

Fundamentally, the problem is this; if your anime (or movie or book or album or whatever) invokes political themes, you are inviting all comers to scrutinize it from their own political point of view. Everyone on Earth has such a point of view, whether or not they’re cognizant of it. In of itself, that’s fine, but if your work’s political themes are, say, shallow and inadequate, it raises a problem. Are Tokyo 24th‘s shallow and inadequate? I don’t really know. The signals are, shall we say, mixed.

Getting a big head over this kind of thing is nothing new to mainstream TV anime. Turn of the decade classic Code Geass, for example, managed to be good largely by trading away any actual meaningful political commentary for sheer camp value. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to nail more specific and well-thought-out political messages. Akudama Drive did it only two years ago. (Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Akudama Drive myself, at least not yet, but I trust Inkie’s judgment on the series utterly.) It’s also possible–although both less rare and not as impactful–to make broader statements without rendering them entirely meaningless. Something as goofy as Rumble Garanndoll managed that much just last season.

The gist of the plot forming over Tokyo 24th‘s last two episodes has been this; the graffiti artist / hacker Kunai (Souma Saitou, who has been in many support roles like this) is going to blow up a cruise ship full of the ultra-wealthy.

Normally I’d here provide his motivations, and just from what little we’ve learned about him–his upbringing in the ridiculously named Shantytown ghetto in the poorest part of the Ward, his grandmother’s illness, the fact that Ran has eclipsed him artistically–one could come up with a good half dozen motivations for why this poor man might feel motivated to extreme action.

Kunai’s actual motives are different, and much more personal. He’s been tricked into selling an app he developed by the owner of an enormous corporate megalopoly, a fellow named Taki. Taki rewires the program to turn it into that mysterious “Drug D” we’ve been hearing so much about over the past couple of episodes. Kunai’s resentment, then, is borne not from his situation but from something very specific. He feels as though he’s been used. And he’s right about that! He has been used. Ran correctly points out, when the two meet at the episode’s climax, that Kunai is not the “criminal” he self-laceratingly claims to be. He’s a victim of circumstance. On one level, Tokyo 24th humanizing an actual terrorist to this degree is admirable. On another, it seems like an easy out to give Kunai a single grudge motive rather than anything more circumstantial and messy. Plus, there is what actually happens to Kunai.

At the episode’s end, Kouki–that’s Cop Boy, if you’ve forgotten–bypasses the advice of his friends and orders Kunai shot dead by a police sniper. Kunai bleeds out in Ran’s arms, begging his friend to continue to be the one thing he couldn’t: an artist.

It is difficult to know how to take this.

Is it a shocking display–and condemnation–of police brutality? Does the show think he’s in the right to have done that? (I don’t want to think so, but I’ve gone broke overestimating anime before.) Or is this another thing where Shuuta’s enlightened centrist fence-sitting is going to somehow turn out to be the solution? Tokyo 24th has given me very little reason to believe the former might be what it’s going for, but I suppose it’s not impossible. A number of details about Tokyo 24th‘s worldbuilding lead me to believe that won’t be the case (it’s insane that an anime that uses so much graffiti aesthetic has perhaps two Black characters and zero major ones), but I’ve been wrong before. Honestly in this specific situation I’d be happy to be. But for the record, I’m not alone here. Some critics have been far harsher than me. And I’m split between feeling like I’m giving the anime way too much slack and coming down on it way too hard.

It’s unfair, in a way. An anime that tries to be a Statement opens itself up to all kinds of nitpicking from audiences both domestic and abroad that other anime could easily dismiss out of hand. Should I not be giving it some points for even trying? Maybe, but “some points” might add up to a 3 or 4 out of 10 depending on how badly it fucks up the landing, and I’m not at all confident it won’t. Wanting to be a critique of the state of the world isn’t the same as actually being one. All of Tokyo 24th‘s effort will be meaningless if it cannot find some way to intelligently apply it.

We will see Tokyo 24th here again, maybe as soon as next week. For good or for ill I cannot yet say.

Elsewhere on MPA

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 4 – “Ride the Crab” – For an episode that features absolutely zero Pawoo, this was still quite a good 30 minutes of Sabikui Bisco. There must be a solid Milo / Bisco shipping community out there, right?

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 5 – “It’s Probably Because…” – I think people are starting to get sick of My Dress-Up Darling‘s over-the-top horniness. Last week I would’ve disagreed, but this past episode was….a lot. And not really in a good way.

That’s most of what I’ve got for you this week, anime fans. But before I go, a small recommendation! A new manga was picked up by Jump recently, and is available officially in English on the MangaPlus website. It’s called Magilumiere Co. Ltd., a magical girl-action-office comedy whatsit that poses the question; “what if being a magical girl was, you know, a full-on career? And what if an ordinary college grad seeking to enter the workforce suddenly found herself basically dropped into a small Magical Girl Company’s employ?” That’s kind of a long question, admittedly, but Magilumiere does have answers.

It’s to soon into the manga’s run for me to have any terribly detailed opinions on it, but I like it so far, and “magical girl + other stuff” is always a fun combination. Give it a read if you’re so inclined.

See you tomorrow for more Sabikui Bisco, friends!

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, Uncategorized

Let’s Watch CUE! Episode 2 – “Their Respective Colors”

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

The people behind CUE! likely don’t know–or care–about this, but the show’s very premise is a particular form of critic bait. That’s part of why I liked it so much last week, and that’s why I’m taking a very real risk by committing to covering its entire run week-by-week here. (24 episodes is a lot for this sort of column! Who knows what could happen!) But I have faith in the series, and that “critic bait” nature is some amount of why.

TV Anime is a pulp medium, and pulp media are inherently built on standard character archetypes and story beats. This is not a good or bad thing, it’s just a fact. CUE!, with its story centered around voice actors, highlights those tropes by its very nature. In our second episode, “Their Respective Colors”, the girls of the AiRBLUE Voice Talent Agency tackle their first real audition, putting their full weight into embodying those character archetypes. But what makes CUE! fascinating from a critical point of view is that the AiRBLUE girls, being anime characters themselves, also embody different character archetypes. The entire series, if sufficiently abstracted, can thus be thought of as these archetypes interpreting each other. Just on its own, that’s very interesting.

But of course, it’s also quite a lot of heady material to get into over CUE!, an anime series primarily about cute girls doing their best to voice other cute girls. The audition–which takes up the entirety of this episode–works on a lot of levels. On the one hand it is very much all that I said above, but it’s also just a lot of fun, which is arguably more important. Before I get into anything more specific, I should point out how absurd it is that CUE! is able to inject so much personality into a given episode despite its fairly workaday production. We don’t get nearly as many of the cut-asides where our characters imagine themselves as literally embodying the roles they play here, so the actual voice acting itself is left to pick up a lot of the slack. It manages it. And from my point of view, the second episode, even moreso than the first, proves that this anime has real legs.

So! The audition. Last week I mentioned that Bloom Ball–the show-within-a-show that’s the focus here–looked like a magical girl anime. It is…not that. (Although you maybe could argue it’s a battle girl series.) It’s some sort of hot-blooded sports anime shonen thing that frankly looks way better than most actual shonen anime. (Am I saying that because of its all-female cast? Maybe.)

As mentioned, the actual episode consists almost entirely of auditions. Enough care is taken to make sure that things do feel genuinely tense. AiRBLUE are the last agency auditioning, and in contrast to everyone else, they’re woefully inexperienced. The voice director (an everyman type in a pink polo) is very clearly a bit done with all of this. The author of the original Bloom Ball manga, a woman named Kei, has actually fallen asleep in her chair from consulting on so many auditions.

I have seen so many manga and anime depict mangaka exactly like this–dark-haired women who are visibly not getting enough sleep–that I have come to believe the entire manga industry is sustained by people of that specific description.

Nobody really expects AiRBLUE to make much of themselves here, and several members of the agency, including our protagonist Haruna, (Yurina Uchiyama, part of the idol group DIALOGUE+ in her first major VA role) aren’t actually familiar with the manga. (They’re given some time to read a bit of it and go over some reference sheets to pick a character to audition, but it doesn’t seem like the individual tryouts take very long. My impression is that Haruna, who eventually auditions last, got maybe an hour or two at most?)

The pressure is palpable, and CUE! really makes you feel that tension, here, with nothing more than some closeups and other clever “camera angle” tricks. This is an actual audition, none of these girls were prepared for it, and some of them don’t even know what Bloom Ball really is. It’s an unenviable position.

And yet, in the face of all this, our girls make a good show of it anyway. Most try out for the role of Bloom Ball‘s main character. We see most of these only in passing, with the most attention being given to Yuki Tendou’s (Ayaka Takamura, also a member of DIALOGUE+) take.

Yuki’s read is hyperactive and energetic, but it’s notable that she doesn’t get one of those fancy cut-asides. We also see Haruna’s fast friend Maika (Nene Hieda, whose most recent role I’m familiar with was Miyako in Warlords of Sigrdrifa) give her take on Ball Bloom’s secondary protagonist. A fun nod to her own status as Haruna’s best bud in this series, but not one that necessarily indicates she’s great for the role. Maika’s read is boisterous and hot-blooded, an ill fit for a blue-color-schemed deuteragonist whose role in her home series is clearly “the logical one.” This is yet another example of how CUE! toys around with character tropes, and the interesting mismatch here highlights the differences between Maika and the role she’s chosen to play. Although it’s worth noting that the mangaka seems to find her take on the character interesting, at the very least.

And then we get to Haruna’s tryout. Haruna initially auditions for, again, the lead role. She’s pretty good at it too, only fumbling once when she knocks her script into the microphone (illustrated by a very funny cut-aside where she is Bloom Ball‘s lead…and then falls over with a loud conk sound. It’s very shonen slapstick.)

If her audition ended here this would be something of an anti-climax. So, CUE! employs another clever trick here. Haruna’s performance as her initial choice is solid, but the mangaka hears something else in her read, and asks if she can record lines for a different character. One who–in the very brief time we get to know her–seems even more boisterous and hot-blooded than Bloom Ball‘s lead. (Bloom Ball seems like a very good series. Were it real, I would probably love Kuwai here.)

She then does it again, having Haruna read lines for a third role as well. The other AiRBLUE girls in the casting room are a bit shocked to see this all happen, and it’s even directly called out as rare. (In fact, I was a bit worried it’d be milked for cheap melodrama, but there’s no sign of that so far. AiRBLUE’s girls are professionals!)

This all has the effect of making Haruna seem like a voice acting wunderkind. To be fair, her own VA is pretty damn good (and again, I just love the fact that Haruna is voiced by someone in her own first major VA role. That’s just perfect.) But this would not work nearly as well without the mangaka seizing upon Haruna’s first performance. It’s a trick to convince us that Haruna’s an amazing talent just waiting to be discovered, and it works. That kind of thing is why CUE! is so entertaining, and it’s a general presentational technique I hope the show keeps up as it rolls on.

Haruna and Makai end the episode by hitting a cafe to relax and reflect. Two of the other girls from AiRBLUE, Honoka Tsukii (Yuuna Ogata, who previously played Gloria in the Pokemon: Twilight Wings ONA) and Shiho “just Shiho, please” Kano (Kyouka Moriya, whose sole other role was as Hemo Midori in 2020’s Dropout Idol Fruit Tart), chat them up as the four unwind and discuss a first day’s work well done. It’s a low-key ending to a fairly exciting episode. I look forward to many more like it in the weeks ahead as we get to better know not just Haruna and Makai, but Honoka, Shiho, and the other girls of AiRBLUE as well.

Wanna 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

Seasonal First Impressions: Everything is Right on CUE!

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

I went into CUE! extremely skeptical.

The opening three or so minutes of the series are–quite literally–another show entirely. This is a cold open. Mid-genre pastiche, as an unnamed green haired heroine and her male companion flee a flying fortress aboard a speedboat. It’s a legitimately really cool throwback to a bygone era of science fantasy shoujo action anime that counted classics like The Vision of Escaflowne among its number. It’s an opening unlike anything the season has offered so far.

This isn’t what CUE! is actually about, though.

CUE!, you see, is an anime about anime. Its cast are voice actors, and that opening scene is a series our protagonist–Haruna Mutsuishi–is working on. In series like these, I am always immediately led to wonder about the actual women voicing these characters. Is it surreal to voice a protagonist whose ambitions are an exaggerated, cartoon take on your own? Maybe it’s oddly reassuring, knowing that people care about, at least, some version of your story? I can only speculate. Regardless, that is our actual starting line with CUE!

In the minutes immediately following that cold open, things don’t look terribly promising. No longer needing to be a convincing pastiche, the animation stiffens. More pertinently, as Haruna arrives to her new job at a voice acting agency (named AiRBLUE, which is vaguely obnoxious in a true to life way), we are introduced to a truly silly number of other girls. Fifteen actresses in all, with the agency’s actual staff bringing the character total up to 18. Each gets only a vanishingly small few seconds to introduce themselves. Most prove themselves to fit into various archetypes; there’s a chuuni who says she’s from Hell, a nervous girl, an overly brash girl who doesn’t quite seem to get what’s going on, etc. etc. You get the picture; we’ve been here before.

All of these are, frankly, pretty bad signs. Sometimes an anime can handle a cast this large even on a fairly tight time budget, but it’s rare. Most things are not The Idolmaster. Last season, the atrociously dull Pride of Orange couldn’t manage to properly characterize a comparatively modest six. What hope, then, does CUE! have, even at twice that show’s length?

Well, here’s the thing. Sometimes the only thing you actually need to make a series tick, at least for its first few episodes, is a single good trick up your sleeve. And CUE! has a great one.

Our characters’ time at AiRBLUE kicks off with an unexpected, on-the-spot script read. The script? Hamlet, specifically a conversation between Hamlet himself and Ophelia, rendered in the sub track back into period-accurate Elizabethan English. Having your characters read a Shakespeare play is an absurd idea. When last year’s Kageki Shoujo!! did it in its last few episodes, it was a flex, a demonstration that all these characters had become so known to the audience that they could each deliver convincingly distinct takes on a literary classic. (Romeo & Juliet, there.) CUE! deciding to do it in its first episode is an act of monumental hubris. But this is where the aforementioned trick up CUE!‘s sleeve comes into play; the series cheats a little bit.

When we get our first Hamlet/Ophelia pair–the spacey ex-child actress Mahoro Miyaji as Ophelia, and AiRBLUE’s talent coach as Hamlet–the reality of the recording room falls away. In its place, an expansive medieval castle.

CUE!’s opening fakeout was no fakeout at all. It is a recurring technique the show seems to plan to use going forward, literally transporting its characters into the stories they’re acting out as they do, cutting back and forth between those fantasy-worlds and the tense, actual line reads they’re doing in the real world, with other characters observing and commenting as transparent ghosts within the “play.” It is a blast to watch. It’s probably the quickest a series has ever won me over.

Mahoro and the talent coach’s take on Hamlet is fairly traditional. What really kicks the episode past “solid” and into “arguably brilliant” is what happens after. In an incredible bit of economic character-building, we see very brief excerpts from other Hamlet/Ophelia pairs. (One girl reads Hamlet like a snotty shonen protagonist, which is hilarious. Sadly, we don’t get visual aids for these shorter reads.)

And then there’s the pair that Haruna herself is involved in. alongside the ponytailed tomboy Maika Takatori. (The two seem to hit it off really well, to say the least.)

The easy thing to do here would be for Haruna and Maika to do essentially what Mahoro did, to transport herself mentally to a sprawling medieval castle and give a fairly traditional line read.

Haruna and Maika do not do that. Instead, we get this.

Another shoujo fantasy daydream. I’ll give you this, okay? Maybe I’m just easily impressed, but I love shit like this. In the moment that Haruna and Maika act out their scene, they are not themselves, they are an epaulette-adorned girl-prince and her heartbroken sorceress(?) princess. It’s gay as hell. It’s theatrical in a way that completely transcends its production. It’s amazing.

There isn’t actually much more to the episode after this scene, but does there need to be? This is a point made and taken; this is what CUE! is about. The act of performance itself transports us to whole other worlds, and truly inspiring performers can bring these worlds to life for their audiences. That is a hell of an opening statement for a gacha game adaption that, as far as I can tell, rather few people had any serious expectations for, to make. Almost impossibly, CUE! earns the right to make it, in this scene alone if nowhere else. Obviously, CUE! did not invent this particular trick, but it uses it damn well, and it makes for a knockout finish to its first episode.

Also: Shippers eat your heart out.

The episode ends with the promise that next week our girls are going to be auditioning for something called Bloom Ball, which looks an awful lot like a magical girl anime. I can’t wait.

Also: out of lack of anywhere else that mentioning this little tidbit fits, I will do so here. It’s interesting that the comparative inexperience of the characters is mirrored in at least some of the voice cast. As far as I can tell, this is the first major role Haruna’s VA– Yurina Uchiyama–has ever had.

In any case, keep an eye on this one.

Grade: A
The Takeaway: I am hesitant to call anything a truly essential watch this early in the season. What I will say is that CUE!’s first episode is a genuinely impressive piece of showmanship that I think nothing so far has really matched. I would recommend almost anyone reading this at least check said episode out.

Wanna 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.