Tag: fantasy

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Magic Never Went Away – The Sorcerous Beginnings of WITCH HAT ATELIER

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.

“Magic is a miracle that makes the world vibrant.”

When she was a young girl, Coco [Motomura Rena] purchased a book at a festival. This book, sold by a mysterious magician in a mask, is the inciting object of Witch Hat Atelier‘s story, and Coco obtaining the book in the first place is, thus, where our story begins, at least in a chronological sense.

Witch Hat Atelier‘s first episode isn’t much of one, would be the problem. The practice of releasing double or even triple premieres is an increasingly common thing. It’s often rather exasperating, in fact, but in the case of Witch Hat Atelier specifically, I understand completely why they went this route. Because if you were to only see that first episode, you’d only get half of the picture. Nonetheless, we do have to start at that festival, with that book and the pictures within it, central as they are to this story and, perhaps more importantly, what I want to discuss about this story.

If you want to recap the first episode, that’s very easy. Coco, daughter of a fabric seller, is a young girl obsessed with magic due to her acquiring that book as a very young child. Magic is everywhere in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, lighting up cobblestones beneath one’s feet, purifying a spring so one can drink from it, but the how is a mystery. Coco—everyone, really—is led to believe that magic is a matter of blood. You are born able to use magic, or you aren’t. Those who are so born are witches, and everyone else is just a regular ol’ person.

This is how, just to name an (unfortunate) cultural touchstone, Harry Potter, for example, handles things, with its convoluted throngs of wizarding lineages. (Although the general concept is hardly unique to that series.) Related to its presence there, though, I have always, to my core, hated this approach to magic in fiction. Some of this has to do with my own real-world practice of eclectic neopagan witchcraft, some of it has to do with personal beliefs about the nature of life, the world, talent, and skill. Some of it is just pure preference, in that I think it’s lazy worldbuilding. I also think it often leads to worlds rife with unfortunate, unconsidered implications about what the existence of inborn gifts of that nature might lead to or imply. It is something I have many problems with, to put it mildly.

However, I don’t bring all this up to criticize Witch Hat Atelier. Because what Coco and most others believe is not necessarily what is actually true. One day, a witch named Qifrey [Hanae Natsuki] visits her mother’s shop. While there, he takes a noted interest in her picture book, but mostly, he offers to fix a broken-down carriage—a carriage pulled by flying horses—when some neighborhood kids break it. (Being a handyman is, too, the job of a witch in this world.) Qifrey asks that he be left to the repair alone, he doesn’t want any prying eyes on him. Coco, precocious child that she is, outwardly agrees, but cannot resist the temptation to see magic performed. Sneaking into a crawlspace above him, she watches him work, and she learns the truth as he slowly sketches out a series of magic circles. Magic, in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, is not cast, but drawn. Anyone with a fountain pen, a bottle of special ink, and the proper knowledge can work miracles.

The knowledge of this fact is a secret, of course. Witches are sworn to keep this fact from the public, and this immediately, drastically changes both what magic literally is in the context of the events of the story and also its broader use as a tool of metaphor. There is a reason we devote more or less the whole first episode to this revelation—that and Coco being cute, of course—and it’s because Witch Hat Atelier is very interested in laying out what magic means and can be in very plain terms before it does anything else. Magic can be done by anyone, which nominally makes it accessible and democratic. But the witches themselves keep this knowledge from everyone, so magic is controlled as well. This pulls us back to the “wizard lineage” issue to some extent, but makes it an intentional point of consideration as opposed to a thoughtless byproduct. With this, Witch Hat Atelier wants to get us thinking.

If magic can create great works of beauty and provide numerous benefits to the world—and from what we see here, it can—it can also be terrifying. These are the central tensions that the story returns to over and over, and that last point is the note the episode ends on. Coco, now knowing that magic can be done by anyone, practices copying the many seals depicted in her picture book. She does not actually know what they do, mind you. She’s just trying things out and, essentially, guessing. Her first several spells are minor; a tiny fireworks show, a sprouting flame, but when she realizes that larger circles are more powerful and well-drawn ones even moreso, she gets the idea to simply trace the seals in the book. Nearly as soon as she’s finished attempting this, Qifrey bursts through her window, just in time to save her from a spell gone horribly right. Her entire house, and the fabric shop within, bursts into erupting waves of crystal, turning everything inside into a blue, prismatic, frozen-solid glitter. Qifrey is in time to save Coco, but not Coco’s mother, who is caught in the petrification and turned to a crystal statue instantly.

That is the note that episode one ends on. Coco’s childhood in ruins beneath her as Qifrey holds her tight in the air. Initially, he’s quite set on erasing her memories—by implication, the standard procedure for people who find out about magic but aren’t supposed to—but after some pleading from Coco, and the realization that without her picture book he’s down a lead about “them” (how vague and scary!), he changes his mind. Instead, he will take her as an apprentice. And so the stage is set for our real story.

But, of course, we can’t get to that without all of this. It’s foundational, establishing the contradictions of magic in this world and giving us reasons to both find awe in it and to fear it. The visuals, it must be noted, are laser-focused on getting all of this across. Coco’s first fledgling attempt to draw a magic circle fills her—and us—with a genuine sense of wonder as the circle literally floats off the page and then explodes into a crackle of glittering fireworks.

At the same time, the sense of fear and panic at the cascading crystal waves of Coco’s unintentional petrification of her own home is overpowering, it’s enough to strike genuine terror into a person. We immediately, intuitively, get it. This is the joy magic can bring, this is the danger magic can bring. We understand from the very first episode both the limitless potential for magic and how that potential might be turned to destructive ends; why we might want it to be free and thrive, and why we might want it cordoned off and controlled. As I say, contradictions. (On a less literal level, these are all still true. To me, magic is art, in its infinite capacity to both hurt and heal. But no single one to one metaphor works entirely.)

Something much more straightforward, it must be said, is that all of this is so effective that it should instantly dispel any worries over this adaptation. The Witch Hat Atelier anime was highly anticipated, and it comes to us from BUG FILMS, specifically a team headed by director Watanabe Ayumu (also simultaneously working on Akane-banashi, busy guy) and his assistant director Shinohara Shun. There was some understandable apprehension about BUG’s involvement with the project. Some of this simply stemmed from the long gap between the anime’s announcement and its premiere, but some stemmed from the unfortunate and severe broadcasting delays suffered by BUG’s last and only other TV anime project, Zom 100. (I don’t know if the Zom 100 premiere writeup is the article I’ve penned for this site that’s aged the most strangely. It must at least be up there, though.) Still, I think the fact that the Zom 100 debacle was an entire three years ago, the involvement of a different director here, and the quality of these first two episodes should allay these fears. In addition to the visual strengths I’ve already discussed, there’s also a truly charming use of pop-up storybook animations that mimics the use of similar in the manga without feeling quite one to one. Overall, I’d say this is the rare adaptation that is stridently faithful to the source material without feeling overly staid. That’s a very hard needle to thread, and the team working on the anime should be proud that they’ve accomplished it.

This all continues to be true in the second episode, the more subdued half of the premiere. One thing to know about Witch Hat is that it is a slow story for the most part, and accordingly this second episode is almost entirely about Coco getting settled in to the titular atelier, the small hillside school where she will be learning her new craft. Craft really is the word for it, too, as this episode also goes into more detail about how magic actually works, breaking down the different parts of the seals and how they affect the outcome of a given spell. It is as much science as art, like so many of its analogues in the real world, and getting to see Coco try—and fail!—to learn the basics of the craft is one of Witch Hat‘s little joys.

There’s also quite the primer on the history of magic here. Qifrey explains how, once upon a time, everyone simply knew how to use magic. This, of course, led to spells being developed so horrible that they defy description—the first application of any technology is warfare, after all—until one day, some banded together to put a stop to all this. Somehow—the details are left very vague—they cast a spell that wiped the memory of magic from all but a select few, leading to the current status quo. This is all told in a very broad-stroke way, but a way that’s believable within the series’ context. We are getting, more or less, the “official” version of things here, and we also detour into how Coco will have to pass a handful of trials before she’s considered a true witch and is permitted to enter the Tower of Tomes, the witches’ own Library of Alexandria, where she might perhaps discover the secret to rescuing her mother.

Qifrey also explains what separates permitted from forbidden magic. The short version? Anything cast on the body, other than the spell to erase memories to keep the secret, is forbidden. This means nothing that can harm another person, certainly, but it also means no teleportation, no direct flight, not even healing magic like we might find in so many other fantasy settings. Again, we come to contradictions. It is immediately obvious why anyone would want to keep things this strict and this simple, but it’s also obvious why some might object to this. So far in this narrative, no one does, but the very fact that this magic is “forbidden” as opposed to simply “lost” all but tells us outright that some do.

Whatever that may eventually entail, this is also a rather domestic episode. We also meet Qifrey’s three other students here, carefree and energetic Tetia [Haruki Kurumi], who is the first to greet Coco and does so with open arms, the coolheaded and somewhat detached Richeh [Tsukishiro Hika], who we learn perhaps the least about here, and finally, most importantly, there’s Agott [Yamamura Hibiku].

Agott, serious, disciplined, with inkstained fingers, makes herself immediately known as Coco’s foil. Coco, despite the harrowing experience of accidentally petrifying her home and mother, is still bright-eyed about the prospect of learning magic and is, in some sense, perhaps even naively optimistic about her own ability to reverse her mother’s fate. Agott, like all of Qifrey’s other students, has heard rumors of an Outsider who enacted a forbidden spell and is now being taken in as a witch. Unlike Tetia and Richeh, she is very blunt about how this has colored her perception of Coco; she thinks there’s essentially no chance that she’ll ever see her mother again, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be a proper peer of Agott herself or the other girls in the atelier.

Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. The very day after taking in his new apprentice, Qifrey heads off to attend to business at the ‘Great Hall’—whatever that may be the domain of knowledge of manga readers alone, for the time being—and Agott promptly challenges Coco to a test, presumably of her own design. Whatever awaits Coco, it is unlikely that Agott’s skepticism is the last, or most dangerous, thing she will have to face.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Winter’s End in AGENTS OF THE FOUR SEASONS: DANCE OF SPRING

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.

You don’t get a nice piece of serendipity like this too often. The first anime to premiere in this anime season is also about the changing of the literal seasons. That’s pure poetry, right there, and it helps that Agents of The Four Seasons: Dance of Spring leads with an absolutely excellent premiere. It’s big, bold, and deals in broad emotions. None of these are bad things, and they mark the series as supremely self-confident.

It is worth noting, though, that the first thing we see and hear isn’t anything like that at all. Instead, it’s a barrage of smoke and gunfire, screamed names and something, somewhere, going wrong. This first impression colors the rest of the story. It does not paint a happy picture, but the first episode doesn’t return to it directly.

We open on the sight of two girls on a train. Going somewhere that, we eventually learn, will be the site of a ritual to break an unnaturally long Winter season. One of these girls is a warrior, the other is a season. There is an immediate, obvious, and directly-highlighted conflict between the apparent divine inner nature of the “agents” of the title and their obvious, human exteriors. When our heroines arrive at their destination, they are greeted by a crowd of curious faces. “They say she’s the Goddess of Spring” says one. “But she’s just a person”, replies another.

The official-sounding Agency of The Seasons, the group that meets our protagonists at their destination and clears the tourists from a nearby mountain for them, makes this all seem like an organized and formal affair. The lack of a Spring in a solid decade, mentioned here offhandedly, makes it seem very much otherwise. There is clearly something wrong with Hinagiku [Nukui Yuka], Spring’s agent, and her retainer Sakura [Aoyama Yoshino] seems to be doing a lot to keep her mind off of it. The Spring Goddess, if indeed that’s what she is, speaks in clipped, halting sentences, and is unsure of herself. As the show begins in earnest she and Sakura make their way to the mountaintop to perform the sacred rite to usher in Spring.

On the otherwise-abandoned mountain, they find Nazuna [Touyama Nao], a little girl shoveling snow, who has heard of only three seasons and has to be prompted at great length to remember that this “Spring” thing exists at all. This raises questions: with only three seasons remaining, do Winter and Summer simply crash into each other unceremoniously? Does the fact that describing it that way makes it sound like I’m describing global warming give this show an environmentalist undertone? We don’t know the answers to these questions just yet, but Hinagiku does answer a different one.

Referred to as Spring’s goddess, Hinagiku is keen to offer a correction. Demonstrating the divine power she’s been given by pulling a seed from her robe and growing it into a rose in an instant, Hinagiku explains that this power is not hers, only borrowed. Can we trust the self-deprecating Spring shaman’s own words on the matter? I’m unsure, although details at the end of the episode suggest so. In practical terms though, it means that like so many superhumans in fiction, the agents of the seasons are neither wholly divine nor wholly human. They are, at least narratively, both. The demigods of our modern age.

There is here a stunning display of mutual childish insensitivity, as Nazuna lashes out about the effects the long winter has had on her father’s tourism job and presses Hinagiku for an explanation of where precisely she—and Spring—have been. Sakura shoots back, and Nazuna crumples, crying that all adults are bullies who do nothing but yell. Hinagiku asks if she is yelled at by adults often. She does not answer. But, when the trio reach the mountaintop, she begins shoveling her snow again.

No mere character tic, Nazuna’s goal is to clear the snow from her mother’s grave. As a child who’s lived for ten long years never knowing the melting warmth of Spring, she is one of the people that Hinagiku and Sakura need to help most. This understood, the rite begins, and the episode reaches its climax.

People, we are told, are not really supposed to see this. Or at least not people who aren’t agents of the seasons themselves. Nazuna gets to, though, and so do we, as Hinagiku takes pity on her and on the snow that’s piled upon her mother’s grave, she calls the Spring right then and there. It is a sight.

She begins to sing, and as she sings, she dances. Her foot taps the ground and an explosion of clovers erupts from the Earth. As she spins, singing a song of forlorn love, grass races to the surface from under the soil, bubbles of water fill the air, Spring showers suspended in the dance. Flowers bloom as the sky drizzles, and then, the centerpiece: the world bursts into a carpet of Cherry blossoms and running water. Tearfully, Sakura exsplains to Nazuna that it is for the sake of people like her that Hinagiku has been pushing herself so hard. What goes unspoken directly is that here, in this moment, it is worth it. Here is what is spoken: Spring is here, and you are happy.

The episode ends with narration. A creation myth: how Winter came first, alone in the world, and then created Spring. The two were happy together, and Winter then created Summer and Autumn. No longer able to spend so much time with beloved Spring, Winter bestows the power of itself and its fellow seasons on humans of the land. Our story, on the whole, is about them. We do not know yet the full breadth of this story, but the narration gives us some hints: love, murder, the lives people carve for themselves. All of that is in the future, and as this is another recent anime to have a rather unusual episode count (fourteen as opposed to the usual twelve), we have even longer with Agents of The Four Seasons than usual. We will have plenty of time to learn all the ins and outs of the story being told here. For now, all we know is one very important thing: Spring has arrived, safe and sound.

Due to the ongoing urgent health matters I posted about earlier today. I am not sure if I will be able to cover any more premieres this season. But, if this is the only one I get to write about, I’m glad it was such a lovely thing.

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Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Let's Watch, The Weekly Orbit

Let’s Watch: OSHI NO KO – Season 3, Episode 11

I have lost any semblance of consistency when it comes to labelling these columns. I promise I’ll go back and fix them all eventually. Eventually.

This past Tuesday, Chainsaw Man ended. The wildly popular shonen manga had been going on in its second part for quite a long time, and I think to some extent no ending could’ve really satisfied the fanbase at large. Nonetheless, the ending we actually got seems to have really pissed a lot of people off. You can find reams of posts complaining about it of all shapes and sizes, and your standard suite of video essays and the like as well.

Someone who did not hate the Chainsaw Man ending was yours truly. I want to re-read the whole series before making any big proclamations, but I think it wrapped up the emotional arc of the story in a way that felt both hard-fought and worthwhile. It stung, but it meant something.

Now, will I still think that after having re-read the series? I don’t know. But! It did get me thinking about the array of popular anime and manga widely considered to have “a bad ending” and the various things they may have in common.

Oshi no Ko, anyone who is even tangentially aware of manga discourse at large already knows, is widely put in that category. (I myself have been exposed, just yesterday, to a Youtube thumbnail that loudly proclaims CSM’s finale “worse than Oshi no Ko, THE END!” Such dramatic proclamations not even a week out from the last chapter, my goodness!) And the reception to CSM honestly made me want to reevaluate my own opinion on this series, despite their otherwise lacking really anything in common, because I never want to be the sort of person who just declares that something is ruined forever because it didn’t head in the exact direction I wanted it to.

This in mind, and being honest with myself, I actually think the final episode of Oshi no Ko‘s third season is mostly pretty good.

A lot of the episode’s forehalf is devoted to Ruby trying to come to terms with the absence of both her former mother from her previous life, Tendouji Marina [the legendary Inoue Kikuko], who made a somewhat unexpected return to the narrative last week, as well as that of her current later mother, Ai. And honestly? It mostly works. We get to see Ruby repeatedly stumble over a bit in the 15 Year Lie script where it dictates that her character let her mother, who, in the fiction of the film never loved her, go. Predictably this absolutely tears Ruby apart, and she can’t get through the read, despite Kana’s attempts to coach her.

Name a time a friend gave you advice that made you look at them like this.

In a general sense, we probably should’ve gotten to this earlier—maybe toward the start of this season, rather than the cosplay episodes? Just a thought—but it does matter that it’s here at all. I was beginning to worry we’d never get to see Ruby’s side of things at all. By consequence, if there’s a standout star of the third season it is unquestionably Igoma Yurie, Ruby’s voice actress, who delivers some of the best work of her entire career here. Most of her dialogue, especially the strained rants about how her former mother must have loved her (until of course she finds out that that wasn’t really the case), is delivered in a pained, strangled yelp that really sells the character’s sheer despair at her situation. And once the episode hits its first big bombshell, where Aqua reveals himself as the former Dr. Amemiya Gorou, she starts full-on blubbering/ugly-crying in the best way possible. (You can literally hear her sniffling through the line-reads. That’s called commitment where I’m from.) Igoma doesn’t have a ton of other credits to her name, so if nothing else, I hope her performance here opens some doors for her even more than being Ruby in the first place likely already has. I would love to hear her in things more often.

As for Aqua finally revealing himself as the former Dr. What’s-his-name? I think around now makes sense, if he was going to hold onto it this long in the first place. (Narratively, that is. From a What Would You Do? sort of viewpoint he should’ve done this ages ago, but that’s not a terribly insightful statement.) So does the way their relationship entirely turns on a dime when he drops that piece of info, as she immediately lets go of her hatred of the brother that she thought had selfishly sold their mother out. Arguably, this stuff is way more manipulative of him than any of the more overt cases with Kana or Akane. (And the series knows this, too, because it makes sure to have the death goddess crow girl character who’s been present up and down this season wink and nudge at us about it. Keep her in mind, in fact, we’ll be coming back to her.) Still, it’s a solid beat, and while the flashback montage about time that Aqua and Ruby spent together as Gorou and Sarina is definitely pretty cloying, it’s still sweet enough to mostly work.

(There’s also this brilliant piece of comedy buried in the montage. I’m not a medical professional, so maybe I’m missing something here but you’re not supposed to do that, right? You’re definitely not.)

Now does all of this make this whole bit, this whole sequence, automatically a good piece of storytelling? No, an emotional beat working on a craftsmanship level is different from it being the right choice for the story. And honestly, I think the episode’s structure works against it here. A cut after the scene where Aqua reveals his past identity, and us being left to sit with Ruby’s bounceback for a week, would’ve done wonders. Especially when she drops this little line after reminiscing about Gorou’s “promise” to marry her when she came of age:

A black screen blinking the words “THEY FUCKED” in all capital letters would be more subtle.

It is absolutely hysterical, and probably inevitable, that we’ve ended up at incest. If the show simply ended here, the movie in production and Aqua and Ruby abandoning their revenge quest to be left to their presumably torrid reincarnation incestuous love affair, I would have nothing but respect for it. Sadly, we don’t live in a world where anime are allowed to end—or even end episodes—on heavy implications of incest. It does also very much feel rather rushed, like we’re getting this all out of the way so we can say that Ruby had a full character arc—something perhaps true but only on a technicality—so we can rush headlong to the show’s conclusion. Oshi no Ko has of course been announced for a fourth season, probably its last, so I will need to wait until then to evaluate how right I am about this. (I could of course also read the manga, but if I’ve held off for this long, what’s the sense in doing that now?) But I suspect I am. Akasaka has just never seemed terribly interested in Ruby as compared to Aqua, and while this episode has some of the best material the character’s ever been given, it really does seem like it’s supposed to put the bow on her development. Granted! There is still the unresolved business with her former mother, so maybe that will complicate things in some worthwhile way. I’d love to see more unhinged Ruby, it feels like we barely got to know her. I nonetheless remain skeptical.

That said, I can complain all day, but for what it sets out to do, I think the first half of the episode more works than doesn’t. The only real contention is how worthwhile what it’s trying to do actually is, and I remain undecided on that front. (As I’ve said, I really do just keep going back and forth on this show.) The second half of the episode is also good, and unlike the first, is so in pretty straightforward ways. In large part, it’s a character study of Miyako, the boss of Strawberry Productions, a constant background presence throughout most of the series but who never really got an episode of her own up to this point.

It is probably the only focus she’ll ever get, but the series makes the most of it, walking us through Miyako’s arrival in Tokyo, and her early career as a model. It’s very broad-stroke, but it’s solid stuff. Made all the stranger by how she chooses to express some of this.

Miyako latches onto an extended video game metaphor while explaining her life. Bluntly, in-context, this is one of the weirdest rambles of its kind I’ve ever heard a character go on. Aside from the central simile of “fame is like a video game” seeming like something a Republican-era Nicki Minaj would come up with, it’s kind of a stretch in the first place? For whatever reason, this whole rant gets the full visual metaphor treatment and we get to see Miyako fight the men she seduced in her youth as an RPG encounters and the like. This makes it no less bizarre, but it’s an admirable amount of committing to the bit.

This all concludes with her reuniting with Saitou Ichigo, Strawberry Productions’ former owner and her own ex, when “randomly” running into him at a bar. (This was, of course, orchestrated by Aqua, actually.) And leads to Miyako herself recommitting to her obligations to Aqua and Ruby. There’s a broad motherhood theme that runs through all this, an idea that Miyako is more of a mother to the twins, perhaps especially to Ruby, than either of her own mothers ever were. (And she outright calls herself their mom more than once.) There’s something there, but for a show whose premise is so entwined with family, Oshi no Ko‘s ideas about it have always been its weakest thematic expressions. Still, it’s a worthwhile thought and I hope the show does something with it in the long term. That Kana line from the rehearsal scene does feel an awful lot like foreshadowing.

Beyond these two main plots, this episode just also has a genuine sense of fun that’s been missing (or at least not as present as I’d like) in the show for a good while, now. The show’s main issues have always been its hypocrisy and the inescapable sense that it’s kind of didactic, the comedic leanings help take the edge off of both of those things. Aside from the usual bevy of Good Kana Faces, we also have, for example, Pirate Yuri??? Why not, right? That’s a good thing, even if it does still make me wish the show just leaned into its strengths more.

In-universe, this is a commercial for body wipes. Yes, really.

Aside from a brief post-credits scene, the very last thing to happen in this episode is actually, deliberately, quite funny! Gotanda, the film’s director, laments that the casting has been squared away with the exception of the child actors, to play a young Ruby and Aqua. This is where the character officially known as just Crow Girl [Kino Hina], who I’ve been calling the death goddess in my columns—since, you know, that’s what I thought she was—re-enters the picture. Crow Girl shows up in the closing minutes of this episode to do what she does best, be vague and portentous and deliberately needle Aqua. Aqua, in the rare bit of scheming from him this season to actually have an impact beyond being eyeroll-inducing, gets an idea. He asks her if she’s, you know, physically at least, a normal human with parents and a government ID and all that good stuff. She smugly responds yes, that her “vessel,” just like his, is on the surface a normal human. Aqua then drops his funniest line of the entire season by asking her a simple question.

The anime adaptation of hit narou-kei series Reborn As a Portentous Death God in Another World That’s Actually Just Modern Japan Again, I’m Forced to Become A Child Actress by The Teenage Boy I’ve Been Tormenting?! is coming to a TV station near you sooner than you think!

And from there we cut to credits! That’s literally how the season end! This is a good thing, of course. It’s entirely the kind of bold audacity that made me interested in this series in the first place. Does this episode alone being pretty good mean that all is forgiven and we are guaranteed a satisfying conclusion? Of course not, but it’s a good sign from a show that’s been short on those for a while.

In any case, any final judgment of Oshi no Ko as an anime will have to wait until after it’s complete. So I leave you with this: I’ll see you when I see you, B*Komachi fans. Because I’m me, it’ll probably be back under the Let’s Watch banner, 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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) A Tiny Little Life in The Woods with HAKUMEI AND MIKOCHI

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

“We could even catch the moon in our tiny hands.”

I’ve missed this.

I refer here to two things. One is the very act of writing about an anime itself. It has been, at this point, more than a year since my last actual anime review—of Noir back in late 2024, you may remember—everything since then has been much more thrown together. If you’re not a regular reader of this site, that probably means exceptionally little to you, but I promise that to me it is important (and wonderful), to be properly writing a review again. If you don’t care about that, though, you might have some affection for the other thing that I’ve missed. I refer, of course, to the sprawling woodland of Hakumei and Mikochi, today’s object of appreciation.

I grew up in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. I don’t miss much about PA, but one thing I do is its beautiful green mountains, wooded and teeming with life. The Poconos may seem like small potatoes to some, but they are where I lived and walked in my youth, and they remain in my heart. A distinction little else in the state can really claim.

When I made that nebulous transition from “person who sometimes watches anime” to “anime enthusiast”, one of the first genres I gravitated toward was iyashikei. Sometimes nicknamed “healing TV”, iyashikei is a kind of wading, immersive visual experience focused less on plot and strong conflict than characterization and immaculate worldbuilding, with a strong emphasis on lived-in environmental design. It’s all in the service of that vibe: immaculately pastoral in its best examples. Done right, you can practically feel the wind blowing through your hair and see the shimmer of the sparkling sunlight on the lake. One such iyashikei, Kamichu!, was among my first favorite anime, and when they pop up today (increasingly a rare occurrence, although last year’s mono is an example, if you want one that’s recent) I tend to at least check them out. The mountain greenery of such shows reminds me of that of my first home, and I love them for that.

Hakumei & Mikochi is maybe not quite recent enough to be called a product of “today.” It dates back from the tail end of the last decade, 2018. I was broadly aware of its pastoral reputation at the time, but my head was in a different place back then, and I was occupied with other things. I was perhaps too busy writing some of my first anime articles, singing the praises of the likes of SSSS.GRIDMAN, for example, to notice something this slow and cozy. I had perhaps fallen out of touch with this sort of thing.

And it wasn’t and isn’t just me! “Cozy”, “slow”, and “pastoral” are words that have fallen out of fashion as positive descriptors of art in recent years, at least in my circles. This is for good reason, as a lot of this aesthetic has been laid claim to by unpleasant sorts who seek to parley these ideas of pastoral peace into significantly less savory ones. But in our rush to push these people out—necessary work, make no mistake—we have perhaps been too quick to hand them this space wholesale. This I take issue with. An injection of the rustic life can, in fact, be a good remedy for the stresses of the soul. And I refuse to concede this genre to the bigoted. They do not deserve it.

In any case, Hakumei & Mikochi, while perhaps not entirely immune to such appropriation, is at least less likely to be a victim of it owing to part of its premise. Our leads here are a pair of tiny forestfolk who live and work among the trees, one of which is their home, forming a small part of a woodland society that absolutely oozes folksy charm. This place is called Makinata, and is the primary setting for our tale. These women, the titular Hakumei [Matsuda Risae] and Mikochi [Shimoji Shino], have a decidedly wife-and-wife dynamic. It’s beyond adorable, and makes Hakumei & Mikochi nicely amenable to a queer audience.

(Note however, before we get ahead of ourselves, that this does not extend quite so far as being an explicitly queer work. Somewhat frustratingly, our leads are only ever defined as “roommates” despite the obvious married-life framing. When Hakumei’s boss refers to Mikochi as her wife, the former is actually quite puzzled! Even odder is that a later episode sees someone make a similar joke to Mikochi, who accepts the framing without any protest. This kind of playing coy is not uncommon in this genre, but this is a fairly surprising place to find it. At least the “—and they were roommates!” jokes write themselves. And none of this will, in any case, stop me or anyone else from referring to Hakumei & Mikochi in shorthand as “that show about the tiny lesbians.”)

This is, perhaps, what’s found on the other end of the spectrum from that toxic yuri I’m always crowing about liking. I’ve always maintained you really want a little of both, anyway. Bitter flavors enhance sweet ones, after all. This desire, for something sweet, is what led to me deciding to watching Hakumei & Mikochi in the long term after stumbling on it during an anime roulette with some friends. (A fun activity, I recommend it.) Often, once I was committed to watching it on my own, I’d put an episode on before bed each night. On some occasions, pleasantly nuzzled between waking consciousness and the intoxicating pull of the dreamworld, I had to lazily slap the pause button on my computer, halting an episode in its tracks. Too soothed, in these moments, by the lullaby of the series to continue, and needing respite in the form of proper sleep. Asked what I think of Hakumei & Mikochi on the whole, “it put me to sleep, in a good way! :)” wouldn’t be a bad answer.

It would be an overly simple one, however.

From the beginning, Hakumei & Mikochi makes no secret of the fact that life in the woodland is not strictly snacks of giant peanuts* and drinks of beer. The series is in fact best understood as not being solely about the title characters, but rather the entire society of Makinata. We explore this in a few ways, but primarily through the show’s decently large cast. In addition to the liliputian forestfolk like Hakumei and Mikochi themselves, there are a number of talking animal characters as well. Everything from the weasel Iwashi [Matsukaze Masaya], who serves as Hakumei’s mentor and immediate superior at her job, to various one-off characters like a tiny beetle aesthete who longs for the glamorous life, a rabbit cameraman, a helpful baboon who operates a gondola, and so on, the forest of Makinata and its surrounding environs are stuffed to the gills with animal characters. This is a contributing factor to one of the show’s greatest strengths: its sheer sense of whimsy. Even outside its animal cast, this folksy anything-goes energy is quite prevalent. In episode six we meet a hairdresser, Jada [Shintani Mayumi!], one of H&M’s fellow forest-people. She lives, and runs her business out of, a giant egg. It’s absolutely delightful! And why not, right? If you’re going to establish something as inherently fairy tale-esque as tiny people who live in the woods, there’s no reason to not go all the way with it.

You will get your hair cut at Big Egg and you will get a mohawk and you will say “thank you Jada for my mohawk” when she’s done giving it to you.

This is just one part of what serves to make the show extremely watchable. Its visual styling is a big factor as well. While discussions of anime visuals these days often boil down to talk of sakuga, Hakumei & Mikochi has a fairly restrained animation style. It more than makes up for that (if indeed we can call it a shortcoming at all) with its other visual elements, such as its color choices—uniformly vibrant—and overall mood-setting. One trick it leans on fairly heavily in the directorial department is the use of cordoned-off panels of animation to emphasize particular moments. In a lesser anime this would come off as tacky, and I’m sure it’s drawing from Kashiki Takuto‘s original manga quite heavily, but given Hakumei & Mikochi‘s general energy, it works quite nicely, contributing something of a pop-up storybook feel. Beyond the visual realm, the voice acting and music are uniformly excellent. The former collecting a strong pool of talent, largely veterans, and the latter consistently setting a rustic and homemade feel. This applies as well to the vocal music. Such as that contributed by the character Konju [Yuuki Aoi], an initially rather arrogant singer who Hakumei and Mikochi befriend over the course of a few episodes, and also to the ending theme, an absolutely excellent piece of music that I looked forward to every time, even when I was sad to see a great episode end.

(A same-day edit from me here. A commenter rightly pointed out that I probably should have made mention that the music is the work of Evan Call, who has a number of credits to his name in anime, virtually all of which that I’ve personally seen have a very strong sonic identity. That’s a good point! So consider that omission fixed. While we’re at belated accreditation, I’ll point out that the director is Andou Masaomi, who I really should have thought to shout out directly, since I’ve been very positive on his work previously on this very site.)

These of course are evaluations of the show’s (excellent across the board) craft. We should also pay attention however to what Hakumei & Mikochi is trying to say, or at least what aspects of it are part of the slow-life fantasy it offers and why they might be so. A consistent theme, perhaps surprisingly so, is the nature of labor! Something the series is actually supremely concerned with. No simple utopia, the world of Hakumei & Mikochi is one where work is exchanged for money just as in our own. And in fact, it demonstrates that this is no mere show economy, either. It’s shown to us via a few flashbacks that, at one point, Hakumei was even a homeless wanderer. This is a depiction of genuine poverty that’s quite rare in this sort of thing. One such flashback even sees her preyed upon by thieves and nearly left for dead! Of course, in the show’s present, she is very much fine, but it’s still quite a departure, even as the sad story that must have led to that condition in the first place is left merely implied instead of told to us in full. That she lives with Mikochi now and is gainfully employed as a carpenter, mason, and general handyman is treated as unequivocally a good thing, and from Hakumei’s own perspective it’s easy to see how that’d be so. (Mikochi, for her part, is a prepared foods wholesaler, which does strike me as a very specific profession for an anime character to have.)

About Hakumei’s many job titles, a uniting thread here is that Hakumei & Mikochi treats all types of labor similarly. This firstly means that, thankfully, there’s none of the odd job chauvinism you sometimes see in this sort of thing. But more interestingly it also means that, whether that work is what we’d consider mundane; catching fish, grinding coffee, bartending, construction, singing, etc., or what we’d consider fantastical, the series treats it with equal respect. Take for example Sen [Anzai Chika], the necromancer-of-sorts the lead pair meet in episode two. Her day to day life is defined by her research into her art. This involves tying magic lamps to cleaned skeletons, which reanimates them with a semblance of life by replicating the heartbeat of a living thing.

Science.

This is all treated as unusual, for certain, but not remotely sinister, being just another occupation that powers the woodland that Hakumei and Mikochi call home. When Sen reappears later in the series, she is again treated the same way as any other character. For another example, there is Ayune [Nabatame Hitomi], the last character of note introduced in the series proper. Mikochi’s elder sister, she’s a playwright in town due to a slump, and melancholic that she hasn’t seen Mikochi in so long. (Although she denies this at first.) A lesser series would come off as moralizing in writing a character like this, a writer with a fairly inconsiderate personality and no real life skills to speak of beyond her pen—a combination of traits that thankfully describes no one your reviewer here has ever met—but Hakumei & Mikochi is pretty amenable to her, warts and all. She’s a layabout, and when she does try to help Mikochi (with chopping an enormous daikon that she herself bought), she messes it up, but ultimately this is all played as eccentric as opposed to downright harmful. Maybe that’s cheating in its own way, but it makes the character endearing, and when we get to see a snippet of her work in the ending credits of that episode, it’s lovely. Hakumei & Mikochi respects the arts—mundane and fantastical—and physical labor equally.

In fact, I would say the main “fantasy” element of Hakumei & Mikochi in this regard is not an absence of work itself, as it is in some similar media, but the lack of alienation from that work. Hakumei, Mikochi, and their friends are able to make a living doing what they love, and there is a more or less direct correlation between the effort they put in and the rewards they reap. The fantasy here is not one of not having to work at all, it is one of working well out of passion rather than strict necessity, and of that passion being rewarded. This is not to say that Hakumei & Mikochi is remotely some sort of socialist parable, merely that it is able to imagine a world in which one’s aptitudes and passions are rewarded, rather than downplayed or deliberately worked out of them. It’s a nice idea, and it’s to the show’s immense credit that when we get a few episodes focusing on Hakumei’s work as a member of the Borestone Guild, a group of masons. In what is probably its most important articulation of this theme, it makes the whole process look about as rewarding as it must feel to Hakumei herself when all is said and done. A lovely thing to do for a character who is often defined by her desire to feel useful. Her formerly-dismissive boss, another forest-person named Narai [Tsuda Kenjirou], is even proud of her. Imagine that!

This fascination with labor extends into what work can be done for each other, as well, extending this idea into that of intra-community support. Sen, for instance, helps Hakumei and Mikochi when a lens fire destroys part of their house in episode three. Hakumei’s work with the Guild falls under this umbrella too, as the main project we see Hakumei help them with is restoring a causeway. While most such examples that dot the show are well-done, this community theme is also, unfortunately, where the show makes some of its relatively few missteps.

Despite this genre’s reputation for being laid-back, many iyashikei have a handful of zanier, more frantic episodes. Hakumei & Mikochi is no exception here, with episode eight in particular of interest to us here. In it, our girls have to help the denizens of a part of the nearby city called Honey House—a block inhabited by outcasts where “anything goes”—deal with a group of troublemakers. This is a more serious conflict than most Hakumei & Mikochi takes a look at, and in attempting to edge into this territory it does end up hitting a weird note. I think the disputes that arise between the old and new populations of a city and the like are a bit beyond H&M’s pay grade. Although the rather goofy tone keep it from feeling like too serious of a mistake. (Most notably, Konju is part of this storyline and serves as a damsel in distress when the troublemakers make off with her. Her extremely blasé attitude about being kidnapped does a lot to save the episode. She treats it more like a guided tour of the city, than anything.) The central idea of disputes rising in this sort of loose, almost anarchist space is neat, but the resolution feels off and just a bit too simplistic. Higaki [Takeuchi Ryouta]—Honey House’s nominal leader—makes up with the head of the troublemakers over a drink, and they bond over the memory of a departed friend. It’s a nice idea, but it also feels a bit like a hasty way to put the cork back on the bottle, so to speak.

In the series proper’s final episode, we touch on these ideas again. There we learn more about Hakumei’s backstory, how she once traveled with a caravan led by a great wolf named Emerald Tail [Sakakibara Yoshiko]. Hakumei herself describes Emerald’s caravan as both a trading group and a mutual protection force (the sub track in fact actually calls them “police”). Hakumei is quite open about thinking of them in positive terms. But interestingly, Emerald Tail herself doesn’t seem to entirely agree. It’s her who urges Hakumei to stay in Makinata, when the caravan arrives there. Stopped at the gate by—introduced to us suddenly here for the first time—the fact that Makinata actually excludes those over a certain size. When the caravan and Hakumei reunite, it’s extremely brief, limited to an exchange of greetings across a ravine. Hakumei, whomever she may have spent time with in the past, has found her home, and it’s with Mikochi. As with the Honey House story, this feels like a warm but perhaps rushed conclusion to a story that opens a lot of questions about the world of the series that it isn’t really equipped to answer.

For better or worse, Hakumei and Mikochi isn’t actually interested in these questions at all. These toe-dips into the wider geographical situation around Makinata are not a primary concern of the series, which is a bit bothersome to me! Since this definitely brushes closest to all of that hay I alluded to toward the beginning of this article. I would like to dismiss it out of hand, but cannot really do that. So while it doesn’t ruin the series for me, or even anything really at all close, it does remain as a qualm. I hate qualms, but to not acknowledge them is to render any praise of a series meaningless (and I hope I’ve made clear that I have quite a lot of praise to give), so acknowledged they must be. I have no simple explanation for these aspects of the show, but if I can offer one theory, it is perhaps an acknowledgement that, like our own, the world of Hakumei & Mikochi is vast and complex. That Hakumei has found her place within it does not necessarily make it less so.

It is, in any case, better at exploring the feeling of belonging so central to its characterization of Hakumei. This is typified by the show’s third and final major thematic concern, a uniting artistic impulse behind iyashikei in general; the wonder of the natural world. This is where Hakumei and Mikochi not only shines but sparkles. Every single episode breathes a wonderful, picture-book landscape naturality, and it is absolutely lovely stuff. Everything from the lake that Sen sets out to venture into in her submarine to the mountains outside Makinata itself, to the bamboo forests near Hakumei and Mikochi’s own home. Even when, in a late episode, Hakumei and Mikochi are caught in a rainstorm on a fishing trip, even something as mundane as a downpour is treated as a little miracle.

These too will be important memories, whether you like it or not!

This translates to to how the show treats even the most distant and fantastical aspect of the natural world, the night sky itself. When, in episode four, Hakumei and Mikochi’s house is damaged by a freak lens fire, the time they spend camping while it’s repaired is largely comedic, with Mikochi suffering a bit due to her indoorsy nature meshing poorly with the open wild. Crucially though, the segment is capped with Hakumei showing her the beauty of the stars at night. “This—” Hakumei says, “—is our roof. All of it.” Hakumei & Mikochi understands an old maxim very well: home is where the heart is, and if the heart is under the sky, well, so be it.

Not that nature is inherently kind, of course! In that same episode, our heroines are respectively rattled and injured by a great horned owl by the name of Oroshi. Hakumei is only able to get it to leave by offering it a bounty of dried meats. There’s an implicit respect for the natural here, one that contrasts with the claiming it as domain elsewhere. There are still wild things in the world, and not all of them play nicely with the tiny folk of the wood. Of course, at the end of the episode Oroshi reveals that it, too, is more or less benevolent. Still, the uncertainty is striking, and it remains as strong an image as the reached-for Moon.

That duality, I think, is a good synecdoche for the heart of this series. Outdoors or indoors, working hard or the lazy life, it’s the little things that Hakumei & Mikochi truly excels at, the subtle warmth of home. That has been enough for the anime to amass something of a cult following in the years since its release—as I mention near the top of this piece, it’s still well-liked in yuri fan circles—and it’s clearly appealed to enough people such that the manga has continued on to this very day. I haven’t actually read the manga, myself! But having enjoyed my time with the anime so thoroughly, I may very well do so. Not right away though, I don’t think. Hakumei & Mikochi is best saved for when you’re missing the slow life. There is truly no rush, it’ll wait for you, as familiar as your own front door.

*: Strictly speaking, they are regular-sized peanuts, and it is our protagonists who are small. Still, the effect is the same.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Brief Thoughts on: IKOKU NIKKI – Episode 10

Something I greatly appreciate about Ikoku Nikki is its intentionally screwy chronology. Asa walks home disappointed when one of her friends suggests they all try out for a lead vocalist position. We then get to see why she’s upset. All of those friends pledged at some point to write a song together, a promise treated as sacred in some genres here dissolves into nothing in the span of just a few months. As she walks, melancholy, a piano melody drifts her way, and it’s suddenly years and years ago, when she was much younger and singing in a choir competition, something her biological parents seem to have encouraged. Later, when she loses, her father stutteringly tells her that her singing “stood out.” In this way, there is a through-line. The immense weight of that reaction, likely not even intentional, is something that can utterly sledgehammer a child’s sense of self. This isn’t the thing that sets Asa a-wandering, but it is one such thing.

This methodology pairs well with the collage-like approach that Asa takes to her notebook itself, the central object of Ikoku Nikki on the whole. Her writing in it is, like her memories, patchwork, a scrawled quilt of quotations from the adults in her life, doodles of UFOs, short exclamations of feeling and so on. In this way, Ikoku Nikki is very good at marrying form to function; we are living inside of a notebook not unlike Asa’s as we watch it, because everyone’s life is like this.

And indeed, Asa’s not actually the only character to have this privilege. We follow Emiri for some time here, time spent waiting for her friends, fixed on a length of telescoping pencil lead, washes away into a daydream of the seaside.

When one of those friends arrives, she vents about feeling like she could never stop being friends with Asa even if she wanted to ever since the accident. That feeling, tense and heavy, melts away. The person Emiri is venting to is a gentle newcomer to the narrative, one Shouko [Hanazawa Kana], who wraps her pinky finger around hers, the implicitly romantic nature of the gesture made explicit when Emiri blushingly says that she likes this girl. Without this insight into Emiri’s own point of view, it would be easy for the viewer to condemn her at arm’s length. Walking alongside her, we can see that her feeling of burden isn’t borne of cruelty. It’s the shifting unease of someone who feels she is rapidly growing apart from her childhood friend, in ways she’s not sure how to confront. This sort of tempering is what drives Ikoku Nikki’s emotional logic, it’s what makes it feel “real.” The emotional verisimilitude holds up a mirror to every similar selfish decision we’ve ever made for ourselves. It doesn’t judge, but it does reflect.

These aren’t the only lives this show has explored, but all those it has are considered similarly. (Makio, most notably. Both here and elsewhere.) Notebooks, connected by only the whims of their writers, emotions and events blending together with no regard for time or space, are the perfect metaphor. We are, perpetually, searching for the unifying thread at the center of it all, the reason we write in the first place, no matter what form our stories take.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, The Weekly Orbit

Your Anime Orbit: OSHI NO KO – Season 3, Episode 6

There are a variety of ways to interpret any story. This is something that’s obviously true, but I think is more often deployed as a cliché than really understood. For example, I have spoken a few different ways about Oshi no Ko over the past few years, I’ve praised it for its strong cast and bold storytelling, and I’ve criticized it for its relatively shallow understanding of the systems it seeks to critique and its reliance on elbow-jabbing shock value. Those aren’t contradictory opinions, my frustrations with the story stem from thinking it’s otherwise very good.

Out of habit, I’ve kept a lot of my more negative opinions on the series off-site to my tumblr or the like (with a few exceptions), while posting the more positive ones here. This has served to perhaps obscure that I think so far that season three is a pretty noticeable downgrade from season two. Not in terms of visuals—Hiramaki Daisuke’s team at Doga Kobo know what the fuck they’re doing if nothing else—but in terms of its actual story. I like this show best when it succeeds, but just as often, it lapses into Akasaka Aka bothsidesing some issue he clearly doesn’t understand very well, or gets caught in the muck of his addiction to wallowing in drama. (Often both at once.) Not to say “called it”, but I essentially knew this would happen, purely from Oshi no Ko‘s reputation as a manga that has a strong beginning and middle but a weak ending. Nothing gets a reputation that specific and that widespread without there being some kernel of truth to it. “No higher to climb” is specifically how I put it.

But, if I’m honest with myself, there are two things that make me want to be wrong about that assessment. One is simple contrarianism—you did remember that I’m the Wonder Egg Priority Defender, right? I love liking things that other people don’t. I never assume the role without a reason, but it’s one I like playing. Two is that when Oshi no Ko is good, it’s still very good. I think this episode is probably Oshi no Ko at its very best. It’s mostly about its best character, and it allows the show to actually explore its central ideas in an interesting way.

Last week’s episode saw Kana trying to schmooze with a director, Masanori Shima [Seiichiro Yamashita], to potentially be cast in one of his films. Shima, a young upstart who’s apparently responsible for some really good flicks, seemed nice enough at first, but once arriving at Shima’s home office, Kana found all of his staff gone for the evening. What followed was an awkward and uncomfortable scene of her being pretty ruthlessly hit on. Nothing Shima did crossed a clear line into violating consent, but this was one of those sickly situations where it’s clear that the power dynamics at play were influencing things in a way they really shouldn’t be. In finding a way out of this, Kana thought of Aqua, and tearfully explained that she has someone she already has feelings for.

This whole scene was, in of itself, a display of one of the obvious downsides of being an actress. The whole “casting couch” thing is a supremely gross mindset. Seeing someone in a position of power over an actress actually act on it is even more so. To his very limited credit, Shima backs off after Kana explicitly rejects his advances. But it’s still just all-around slimy, and despite the two parting on relatively okay terms, given everything, one can’t help but feel that Kana dodged a bullet. And however Kana herself may feel about it doesn’t end up mattering, because she happens to be spotted by a tabloid photographer while leaving Shima’s house. He snaps a few burst-shots of the two of them together and knows he has a scandal story in the making.

To be a little critical here, it feels like the show goes out of its way to exonerate Shima himself from any direct blame. A worse show would do this explicitly. Instead, he simply largely goes unmentioned while the episode places the blame on Mako Azami [Haruka Shiraishi], the girl who introduced Kana and Shima in the first place.

Now, it is true to life that scandals are often leaked from within a celebrity’s inner circle—this is even explicitly mentioned in this episode itself, albeit in a different context, because Oshi no Ko cares not for your subtlety—but a better show would just cut this entirely. It feels like a symptom of Akasaka Aka’s general tendency to try to complicate things for the sake of it, even when doing so doesn’t actually serve the narrative. It hardens into an overly-eager “no, you guys aren’t getting it, it’s not just the systems that are the problem! It’s the people in them!” that feels at times downright defensive. This trait is probably Oshi no Ko‘s biggest flaw in general, the kink in the armor that keeps holding it back. In its first season, Oshi no Ko really seemed like it wanted to turn the entertainment industry over and examine it rather than simply condemning it. That this tendency is present here—albeit only just so—in the show’s best episode in a season is thus a bit worrying. (And of course, if we circle back around to examining Shima’s role in all this at a later date, I’ll happily eat my words here, but I don’t think I’ll have to.)

Nonetheless, while this is all worth talking about, what I loved about this episode, and what makes it so great in spite of this flaw, was its study of Kana herself. Kana’s reaction to the specter of a probable scandal is one of profound panic. Confronted by the tabloid reporter, she freezes up in the face of his questions and eventually dashes off into the night in a fearful blur. Because episode director Uchinomiya Koki is a fucking pro, the show’s entire color palette changes moods along with her, trading in its usual bright and bold colors for a frozen world of grays, dark reds, and coffee-stain sepia browns.

When Kana’s panic is at its worst, she imagines the people she passes in the city crowd saying terrible things about her, the imagined slander clawing its way into her field of vision, like a blown-up, massive version of the tweet that ruined one of Ai’s days back in the very first episode of this series. It’s one of the best visual moments in a season that has hardly been short on those, and for that alone, this would be a great episode.

What’s really interesting, though, is how she eventually breaks herself out of this panic. Huddling by herself in the dark, Kana thinks that she should just quit. She thinks she wasn’t built to handle all this pressure. She cries about the mask she’s had to put on for the public her entire life, and somewhere in here she says something pretty heartbreaking: “Nobody wants the real Arima Kana.” Alone and frustrated, she cries for Aqua, who just so happens to be searching for her nearby. As a soft insert song kicks in, it briefly looks like Aqua might go to comfort her, which, just to lay it on the table, would’ve been super lame. The tension between Kana’s ambitions as an artist and her feelings for Aqua has been a central part of the character since the beginning, but it only works as a tension because Kana is so strong-willed. Having Aqua swoop in like an angel here would’ve robbed her of some of her agency and made her look weak.

Thankfully, this does not happen.

Crying out for Aqua causes her to pause, she’s shocked at her own neediness for someone who, at least from her point of view, isn’t actually interested in her like that. (Remember, Kana is not privy to Aqua’s inner thoughts like we are.) She chastises herself for playing the damsel in distress, and abruptly screams to the fucking sky that she’s not going to back down. She’s going to take the scandal, no matter how it breaks, on the chin, and she’s going to survive in the industry as she is. She—rightly!—reassures herself that she’s put up with this kind of thing since she was a preschooler. Something like this is not enough to stop her.

It’s absolutely fascinating that Kana seems to realize in real time that these things she’s always thought of as flaws about herself, her bitchy personality, her competitive streak, her lack of tolerance for the facades and handshaking of showbiz, her distance from the classical “pure and sweet-hearted” idol archetype, are actually why people like her. That’s definitely true out of universe, and in spite of her being a total professional, it’s hard to imagine that all this isn’t at least a little visible to her in-universe fans as well. You can’t really completely hide who you are, not wholly and not forever. It’s that old self-explaining magic trick maneuver Oshi no Ko really perfected last season, telling you exactly why you like this character right as it’s using that fondness to tug at your heartstrings. It’s brilliant stuff.

So, for the first time in a long time, Kana chooses herself. She’s will not bend or break, not for this. If I can be real here, I think this was also something I needed to hear as someone who’s long connected with the character. It’s really easy at times to dissociate from your own role in your life, to turn yourself into a damsel in distress or a completely helpless victim of circumstance. Sometimes people are victims, of course, but just as often, you really do have to rely on your own grit to get back out there, no matter what stands in your way. This is the kind of situation where Akasaka’s penchant for old school “just build up your confidence and do the damn thing”-type writing really shines. It helps that she handles things with a sense of humor, dryly realizing that this is going to lead to throngs of angry Twitter comments accusing her of being a slut who sleeps her way to the top and maybe worse. That’d be a hard thing for anyone to deal with, but Kana? Well, she puts it best.

The Doja Cat approach.

Taking the broader view, it’s interesting to contrast this development, how Kana frames it as something she’s doing to be true to herself, with the fate of Suzuhiro Mana. We briefly met her for the first and only time way, way back when Oshi no Ko was still a relatively new phenomenon, before it even had an anime. Back then, it seemed like Oshi no Ko would treat leaving the business, one way or another, as the only real possible “happy ending” for a life in the entertainment industry. That’s what Mana did, and that is what that little aside, buried next to the debut of the new B*Komachi, seemed to imply. This episode raises the possibility that just maybe, that isn’t the case. Maybe for a lucky and strong-willed few, the white hot light of fame doesn’t have to actually burn you to cinders. Of course, fire still hurts whether it kills you or not, but that’s just the cost of playing with it.

Then again, maybe even that much is just wishful thinking. Oshi no Ko is hardly the sort of story that would shy away from setting all this up only to pull it out from under the audience. It is totally possible that despite her confidence here, this scandal will destroy Kana’s career. I certainly hope it doesn’t, but it’s not off the table! If that happens, we’ll talk about it when the time comes. No matter how her story ends, I will be watching—and probably writing about—the saga of Arima Kana until it reaches its conclusion. She’s simply the best.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 20 – “The Answer”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

A recurring tension in the Umamusume series is the fact that all racing careers eventually end. This only makes sense, most athletes retire eventually. You can’t push your body like that forever, and even the best will have to pack it in someday, as the alternative is usually much worse.

In the context of Umamusume, retirement is a peculiar thing. It’s almost never addressed directly. When it is, it’s sometimes accompanied by mention of the Dream Trophy League, a wholly fictional second racing league that we know little about, which existed as a background detail in some of the earlier, no-subtitle Umamusume anime seasons. Whether the Dream Trophy League even exists at this point in Umamusume‘s vague, shifting, and sometimes self-contradictory timeline isn’t clear—if it’s ever mentioned in Cinderella Gray at all, I must’ve missed it, and honestly even asserting that Cinderella Gray and those other seasons take place in the same continuity at all requires some squinting—but I bring this odd relic of the earlier Umamusume anime seasons up here to point out one thing in particular. It doesn’t actually come up in this episode even once, which feels notable.

Why? Because this is the episode where we finally learn what, exactly, has been hanging over Tamamo Cross’s head for the last while. You may recall that she seemed oddly hesitant to commit to racing in the Japan Cup again next year back when Obey Your Master asked. Here, we learn why. The Arima Kinen is going to be her last race.

This episode actually opens on a bit of backstory for Tamtam, showing us how she met her trainer Komiyama Masami. That “old man” whose sake she’s run some of her races was in fact her landlord, implicitly a former umamusume trainer himself, and introducing Tama to Komi was an act of kindness where it’s easy to understand why she’d hold him in such high regard. We aren’t directly told precisely why Tama is retiring, but with the juxtaposition here, we can infer any number of reasons.

Regardless of the “why,” when the two of them meet at a press conference, Tamamo breaks the news privately to Oguri Cap, who does not take it well. Whatever reason Tamamo might have, this means that she and Oguri will only have one more race together, the Arima Kinen itself. Oguri is actually in a fairly good mood up until this point in the episode, and her sharp downturn in demeanor here is quite startling. Moreso when she realizes, as she tries to argue with Tama, that she is now essentially in the same position Fujimasa March was way back in episode six. Tamamo Cross’s ultimatum to Oguri is the same as Oguri’s was to March; if she really wants to settle things, she has to beat her here. There will be no do-overs.

When the actual press conference starts and Tamamo Cross breaks the news to the press that the Arima Kinen will be her final race. We actually get a rare bit of narration from Oguri here, where she admits to not even remembering what she tells the press when they turn their mics to her. We don’t hear it, either, all of her thoughts have been blotted out by the specter of Tamamo Cross’s retirement.

Between the prospect of her greatest rival retiring and her own failure to reach the Zone, Oguri’s in a pretty tough position here, mentally. Some time after the conference, we see Oguri training at night to blow off some steam, and it feels like an open question as to whether the self-doubt, anger, and disappointment might actually snuff out her competitive fire forever. This is a real danger to someone like Oguri Cap, and she’d hardly be the first Umamusume protagonist to let her own hangups psyche her out of a victory.

Enter Dicta Striker, the Chestnut Bullet.

Dicta, based on one of the real Oguri Cap’s contemporaries, the horse Soccer Boy, has been a background presence in the anime since Oguri relocated to Tracen, but this episode is the first time we really get a good handle on her as a character. We get some of her backstory, including how her early career as a young prodigy gave way to a streak of losses that broke her confidence. She rebounded, though, at one point partly inspired by Oguri herself. By the time she calls out to Oguri for a late-night practice race, she’s long since reached the elusive Zone herself.

The training race, then, is as much a direct conversation between these two as it is actual practice. Dicta lightly needles Oguri as they run, saying that as she is now, she’ll never reach it. Privately though, Dicta thinks that Oguri is actually on the verge of breaking through this mental barrier. Dicta pushes her further; what compels her to race? Who does she want to beat? What, at the end of the day, is driving her?

This seesawing tension, between the joy and the fire Oguri Cap feels from running itself, from surpassing her rivals—once Fujimasa March, now Tamamo Cross, perhaps someone else in the not-too-distant future—from surpassing her own limits, and the persistent fear that she won’t be able to, will remain an underlying current for the remainder of the series. Cinderella Gray really leans into the Beast part of Oguri’s nickname in scenes like these, illustrating an underlying, boiling primality at the heart of her character, something fiercer and deeper than just competitiveness.

In a way, it’s unsurprising to see the anime render her in these terms—at the end of the day, this is a sports anime, after all—but the elemental distillation of it here is still a pretty rare thing, and it’s one Umamusume has made an art of over the years. Perhaps because of this, the nighttime practice race between Oguri and Dicta is the episode’s best scene, with most of its best shots being moody, windy cuts of Oguri’s running figure against the night sky.

Oguri comes close to making the breakthrough she needs to—very close, we get that visual effect of gray smoke leaking out of her eyes again, and a shot of a wall of glass cracking but not yet breaking—before Dicta abruptly calls the race off just as Oguri is about to pull ahead of her. Whether her explanation that she doesn’t want to push either herself or Oguri so much before the real race that they hurt themselves is what she really believes or a small bit of saving face is hard to say for sure. Either way, it’s clear that this run helps Oguri a lot.

Directly helping her rival out, even in such an oblique way, may seem contradictory with the goal of actually winning the Arima Kinen for Dicta. But, afterward, when her trainer, a hulking oak tree of a man, lightly chastises her for it, Dicta just wryly replies that she doesn’t want anyone to say that Oguri wasn’t at her best when she beats her.

Dicta isn’t the only one helping her, either. As all of this is going on, Belno Light, who by this point is essentially Oguri’s co-trainer, has been handling the more technical and strategic aspects of planning the race. An early scene at the press conference sees her inspired by how well Komi takes care of Tamamo Cross, and she gets a particularly great showcase here where, as an umamusume herself, she’s actually able to imitate Oguri’s running gait and analyze the specific ways in which the Arima Kinen’s track will affect her.

As with the Tenno Sho, the Arima Kinen features an inclined section, something that can’t be overcome with brute force alone and requires actual strategy to handle. Belno’s scenes in the episode, devoted to tackling this problem, are less dramatic than those with Tamamo Cross or Dicta Striker, but they’re no less important, and I think the story does a great job of making her seem just as important to Oguri’s growth as Oguri’s rivals are. By the time she’s finally come up with a good solution, she’s effectively run a version of the race herself. She may not be a preternatural talent like some of her contemporaries, but Belno’s tenacity here can stand up against that of any other umamusume in the series.

Of course, whether that growth equals success is another question. The episode ends on Christmas Day, at the Arima Kinen, a bright and sunny winter day as the runners take the field….

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – EPISODE 17 – “THE JAPAN CUP”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.

We open with Oguri on the practice track, remembering the sting of defeat at the Tenno Sho. Today, she swears to herself, is the day she closes that distance. Is it really? Can our ash-haired champion make a comeback?

One of the lovely things about the relatively curt episode titles that Cinderella Gray has used so far is that they point out certain reflections and repetitions within the story. Each of the episodes we’ve had which are directly named after a race—of which this is the third—have marked major inflection points in the series. “The Japanese Derby” showed us Oguri at her most dominant, a competitor so good that her absence overshadowed the race that was actually run. “The Fall Tenno Sho” focused on Tamamo Cross, Oguri’s strongest rival thus far and the first since her transfer to actually defeat her. This episode, then, seems to promise at least the possibility of a comeback story for Oguri.

In typical Oguri fashion, she’s not content to simply run. She wants to try something new and a bit daring. Specifically, she asks Musaka if she can run in the pace chaser style as opposed to staying farther back as she usually does. Her idea here being that Tamamo Cross mainly won due to being able to spurt farther ahead on the last leg of the Tenno Sho. If she’s in a better position, Oguri reasons, she’ll have a better shot at actually outpacing her. It’s a pretty sizable switchup, but Roppei agrees. Again, the elements for a comeback are all here.

Except, of course, the fact that Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap are not the only two people running in this race. A walkout sequence quickly brings in all the competitors we met or met again last week, saving two in particular for last: Tamamo Cross herself, and Obey Your Master, who meet for the first time on their way out to the field.

Obey, apparently not above taking the low road, makes a psychological play. We know from earlier in the series that Tamtam is normally pretty nervous before a race, but, as with the Tenno Sho, she seems calm here. (We don’t know who exactly, but Tamamo Cross was on the phone with someone, evidently someone important to her, earlier in the episode. Perhaps these two things are related.) So it certainly seems like she’s in great shape both physically and mentally, until Obey tries getting under her skin. It’s not hard to conclude, following on from last week, that Obey is deliberately attempting to psyche her biggest competitor out. She’s surprisingly good at it, too, initially leading with a bit of fake buddy-buddy talk that Tama immediately catches on to, only to hit her with this.

Mood down?

This doesn’t seem to properly rattle Tamamo Cross, but it definitely at least ticks her off. A more stabilizing presence though is, unsurprisingly, Oguri Cap herself, and it’s cute to see the two of them do the whole “I won’t lose to you!” rival bit.

Once the race starts, Oguri actually seems to be doing rather well right up until she finds herself next to Michelle My Baby. Michelle, being American, does not have the sense of decorum most of the Japanese racers—Oguri included—are necessarily used to. What I mean by this is that when Oguri finds herself in a spot Michelle wants, Michelle has no problem attempting to take it by literally elbowing her out of the way. (Similar things play out up and down the pack, including between Ellerslie Pride and Gold City towards its back half. Noteworthy, as the two got a bit of banter in before the start of the race.)

Aside from being pretty borderline in terms of whether or not it’s actually allowed, this is also terrible news for Oguri in general. Already lower on stamina than she’d like to be given that she’s pace chasing (and thus having to run harder to stay near the top of the pack), Michelle’s rough tactics sap her of most of her strength entirely, and she falls back to the second half of the pack in the last few minutes of the episode.

It’s a pretty disheartening showing for our protagonist, and it’s hard to imagine her coming back from it. Though, as Musaka points out, the race isn’t over ’til it’s over.

At around this point, Toni Bianca, the favorite of the overseas racers and, as we established last week, really the smart money to win this thing in general, stops playing around. Bianca has up to this point been biding her time in the dead middle of the pack, so this is her going for the win. As she does so, she remarks that Tamamo Cross—coming in from the outside to avoid the physical contact stuff from the foreign racers—must be very arrogant to think that that kind of recklessness is going to help her against someone like Toni.

Here’s the thing though, it absolutely does help her against Toni. For the second time, we see lightning strike the racecourse.

About “the Zone” (almost always written in quotation marks, from what I’ve seen): it’s a natural question to ask whether what we’re seeing is “real” within the context of the fiction—regardless of whether anyone who’s not an elite racer can actually see it—or if this is visual metaphor presented for the sake of us, the audience. I think, though, it’s an imperfect and incorrect question. Umamusume likes to play coy with whether or not “magic” (or at least something sufficiently close to it) exists in its universe beyond the obvious conceit of the horsegirls themselves. I think the honest answer is that leaving it open to interpretation actually makes these scenes more compelling. Is this merely Tamamo Cross breathing rarified air, giving it 110% with whatever powerful but still mundane techniques she’s learned, or is there actually some kind of Horsegirl Domain Expansion thing that she has access to? I personally lean more toward the former, since I think it’s largely more interesting. But I also admit that there’s part of me that practically vibrates in my seat at the thought of umamusume with superpowers, so it’s not a clear-cut case of one being better than the other. Hitting both sides of that internal divide is one more stylistic thing that makes Cinderella Gray so great.

Everything, then, seems primed for Tamamo Cross to take another G1, which would put her at a ridiculous seven such wins in a row. Here’s a question though, about the “Zone” and about Cinderella Gray in general; is there any reason at all to believe Tamamo Cross is the only umamusume who can do that?

And that’s the note we end the episode on! Tamamo Cross a streak of lightning across the track, suddenly staked to the ground by a sinister, all-seeing eye. What the finale of the race holds, we can only guess. See you next week, umadacchi.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY – Episode 15 – “Our Story”

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

For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!

Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience.

Let’s talk about Super Creek [Yuuki Kana].

Actually, before we talk about Super Creek, let’s talk about characters, and how Umamusume handles them. Full disclosure, I’m going to be pulling extensively here—both in this column specifically and, honestly, probably whenever I talk about Umamusume going forward—from IronicLark’s excellent Umadacchi Densetsu blog, a fantastic resource for all things Umamusume and, so far as I am aware, easily the most thorough exploration of the series and its various components available in English. I highly recommend diving into it yourself sometime if what I am doing in these columns interests you even a little bit. Frankly, Lark is significantly more knowledgeable on the subject than I am.

So, characters. Most things I cover on this blog are either standalone anime projects, or they’re anime adapted from some single specific source, a manga, a light novel, etc. Umamusume belongs to the other category of things I cover here, and has more in common structurally with, say, Love Live, than most other anime I write about. What I mean by this is that it’s a media mix1 franchise. Without getting too into it (because that distinction alone is worth having a long conversation about) what this essentially means is that rather than one component of the franchise being the “primary” unit that all other adaptations pull from, there are many distinct components given roughly equal weight. Now, this isn’t strictly the case with all or even most media mix properties, as in the case of Umamusume and many others, there is a “central” project—the game—but the distribution of influence is much more horizontal than it is in something like, say, the Yano-kun anime airing this season, which is a straight one-to-one adaptation of a single specific story.

This approach changes how a series handles many things, but most relevant here is how it handles characterization. Because, if you primarily know Super Creek from the Umamusume game—and I’m betting that describes at least some of you—you might wonder how that character and her doting, motherly personality fit in to the generally fairly serious ‘sports anime’ tone that Cinderella Gray has going on. The answer is that Umamusume, as with many media mix properties, tends to emphasize or scale back different character traits depending on the needs of the story. As such, different iterations of the same character can feel pretty distinct, even if the “core” remains the same. (As a complete tangent, the most extreme example of this approach I can think of is actually Transformers, a series in which this guy, this guy, and this guy all have the same name, at least some of the time, despite being nothing alike.) Nothing so extreme as that example is present in Umamusume, but I bring all this up just to say: when we see Creek here, she is somewhat different from the Super Creek you’ve seen people make all those googoo babies jokes about on the internet. (Although, elements of that doting characterization do remain, I don’t want to overstate the differences.)

Creek is formally introduced here after having kicked around in the background of Part 1, and—not to spoil anything—we are going to be following her, at least intermittently, for quite a while. Her introduction is actually relatively low-key at first, though. We see her training. We see her trainer, Fumino Nase [Yū Shimamura2] apparently a prodigy who’s brought her trainees pretty significant success even early on in her career, beset by reporters. Nase seems to find all the media attention annoying at best (and particularly bristles at an offhand mention of her father, evidently also a trainer), but she’s willing to throw them a bone by telling them that she intends to have Super Creek compete in the Kikuka Sho, one third of Japan’s Triple Crown and, importantly, the longest race of the three. This comes as a surprise to the reporter interviewing her as, to hear that reporter tell it, Creek’s race results haven’t been that impressive, and she’s actually not even a sure thing to so much as run in the race, as someone would have to drop out first. Nase is of course aware of all this, though, and explains that as a trainer, she considers it part of her job to believe in miracles, no matter how unlikely they might be.

Naturally, just then, word comes down the line that one of the other competitors has had to drop out. Super Creek has an in.

The actual Kikuka Sho race follows both Creek and one of her main competitors. Yaeno Muteki, whose name you probably remember. It’s hard not to feel a bit bad for Muteki, who keeps getting put in these situations where she’s trained so hard and has good prospects only to end up facing a rare, generational talent.

And make no mistake, Super Creek is one of those. For a race as long as the Kikuka Sho both physical stamina and clarity of mind are important, so while Muteki holds the most promising position for a majority of the race, Creek is eventually able to angle her way from the middle of the pack straight to the front, and she ends up not only winning but winning by a pretty large margin. (A quick reference check on the real race that this episode is based on shows that the real Super Creek overtook the second-place horse, Gakuten to Beat, by five lengths. I am choosing to assume a similar margin here, in the absence of any other evidence. I suppose he really did beat Gakuten.)

Creek’s strength, as emphasized here, lies in her incredible endurance. Something she and Nase have evidently been working on for some time. A brief flashback between the two invokes the Cinderella metaphor once again.

Apropos of nothing, it is worth pointing out that Creek and her trainer seem very close.

It’s worth going over again, the term “Cinderella story” refers to, in sports, a longshot victory by an underdog. Usually several such victories over the course of a tournament or the like. In the context of Cinderella Gray, well, the second part of the title spoils that this mostly refers to Oguri Cap. But it can, just as easily, be taken to refer to many of Oguri’s contemporaries, including Tamamo Cross and, yes, Super Creek as well. (Given her chestnut brown hair, she’s an almost-literal dark horse.) Her victory here is clearly hard-fought, and the fire in her eyes on the final spurt is really something to behold. I’m probably not going to surprise anyone by saying I absolutely love Creek, especially this incarnation of the character. I am hoping this episode might turn at least a few more people in the world into Super Creek fans. Fingers crossed.

(On the note of “beholding”, it’s worth addressing the elephant in the room at least briefly. There has been some amount of discourse about the show’s somewhat reduced animation prowess from the first part of the first season, the Kasamatsu arc. There’s some truth to this, probably related to staff being shuffled around, but the highlights of this race stack up to anything else in the series so far. We’ll see how the rest of the season plays out in this regard. I feel the need to give a good amount of credit to the show continually paying attention to how the racers run, though. Even in the weakest moments of the race, Creek is consistently drawn as taking long, comparatively slow strides. Right up until that final spurt, where she starts really putting the pedal to the metal.)

In any case, while Yaeno Muteki takes her loss hard, she and her master keep up their training. Muteki has an endurance of her own, in this regard, and as I’ve gone through this story she’s become one of my favorite supporting pieces of Cinderella Gray‘s cast, which is not exactly lacking for strong characters.

And as for the Ashen Beast? Well, this arc does mark the point at which Cinderella Gray goes from being largely about Oguri Cap to being something of an ensemble piece, and I suspect we’ll get a lot more of these focus episodes in the weeks (and hopefully, years) ahead. But, she is here. The entire time Super Creek is making history on the racetrack, a pair of distant eyes are on her, and they are those of none other than our very own Gray Monster. She, Belno, and Musaka make a number of comments during the race, in fact, but what sticks out to me most are the ice-blue bullets Oguri stares into the screen when she senses she has gained yet another rival. Truly, our girl is a monster.

Super Creek will not be the last girl to give Oguri a hard time this arc, by a long shot. A brief post credits scene introduces us to Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko], the Italian umamusume who stands as one of many international racers Oguri and all other Japanese racers competing in the Japan Cup will have to face. Toni is wildly dismissive of them, time will tell if she can back up that talk.

Oh, and there’s another umamusume from abroad who arrives as well. Some blonde girl with tacky stars-and-stripes leggings. Probably no one important, in any case.

Famously a thing us Americans say a lot.

But! We’ll get to find out together. See you next week, Umamusume fans.

1: While the Japanese term “media mix” is quite similar to the English phrase “mixed media”, I’m rendering it as-is here, because “mixed media” has a different connotation in English, whereas a “media mix” is something a fair bit more specific.

2: As with the Sirius Symboli case in Part 1 of the anime, my usual sources are not helping me here, but I found a few stray references indicating that she’s voiced by Yu Shimamura, and am taking those at their word.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The All-Consuming Love of THIS MONSTER WANTS TO EAT ME

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.

“Until the day that beautiful monster grants my wish with her own two hands….”

The first thing is the pacing, and the second is the sound design. I’m late to this one, I know, but upon watching the first two episodes of This Monster Wants To Eat Me, the latest in a growing number of decent-to-great yuri adaptations from up and down this year, those were the two elements that stuck out to me the most. Normally, when one brings up an anime’s pacing, it’s to complain. It is all too easy to fuck up the sequencing of events when adapting a manga to animation; by rearranging them illogically, by sticking so close to the source material that you sap the life out of the thing (the more common of those two scenarios these days), or simply by pacing them wrong. Events that are snappy on paper aren’t necessarily so in motion, timing is a key consideration when it comes to picking an approach for adapting this material.

Keep all this in mind as I say, usually, when an anime feels slow, that’s said as a bad thing. Especially if it was based on a manga. Watatabe—as This Monster is more commonly known—proves that it’s not necessarily so. This is an anime that creeps, lurches, and crawls. What it lacks in traditional production polish it more than compensates with in deploying its sense of timing and its audio to create atmosphere. Despite being set in the dead of summer, this is an anime that most makes sense as a Fall series. Mermaids should get to trick or treat, too.

As for what this is all actually about? Well, our main character, Hinako [Ueda Reina], is depressed. We don’t have the details yet, but it seems that she lost her family to some tragic accident some time ago. She wants to die, but she either doesn’t want to or can’t bring herself to end her own life, so she spends a lot of time gazing into the sea and waiting for her time to come. Early in the first episode she runs into a mysterious girl, Shiori [Ishikawa Yui], who warns her that leaning over the railing by the coast isn’t safe. She could fall in, after all! Nonetheless, when she returns to the same spot to do more or less exactly that later that day, strands of thick, dark hair creep out of the water like animate seaweed. Our heroine is thus attacked by an iso-onna, who drags her into the water to consume her.

In its way, this isn’t so bad, Hinako thinks. Sure, it was out of the blue, but this is what she’s been looking for, isn’t it? And nothing, not even the attempts of her best friend (the rowdy Yashiro Miko, played by Fairouz Ai), has really helped. But, in an even more surprising turn of events, the girl from earlier intervenes, sprouting fishscales and a long, sickle-wicked claw to drive the water ghost away.

This isn’t anything as simple as a rescue, though. Shiori wants to eat Hinako, too. She’s just not quite tender enough, yet. So begins a particular flavor of twisted love story.

These first two episodes, especially the second, largely take us through the paces of Hinako’s daily life, and how it changes in the presence of Shiori. Hinako technically never straight up says she’s infatuated with Shiori, but lines like the one quoted at the top of this article make it pretty clear how she feels. The dynamic Watatabe is building here is an interesting one. Hinako wants Shiori to kill and eat her. Shiori is explicitly interested in keeping Hinako alive until her flavor reaches its peak. She explicitly compares Hinako to livestock, in fact.

The important bit here is that Shiori is going to eat her eventually, but not right now. This actually bothers Hinako, not because she’s afraid or repulsed, but because if she’s going to be eaten she’d really rather it be soon. Despite the grim tone and the slow, creaking nature of the storytelling, there’s also an almost bratty overtone to the whole thing, as though Hinako is a needy submissive and Shiori, her domme, is teasingly avoiding giving her what she wants most.

This is, of course, the point. Watatabe’s premise is a take on the whole “domestic girlfriend” fantasy—found more often in heteroromantic romance manga, but it can be seen in yuri as well—wherein a depressed character is lifted to life and warmth by someone who insists on taking care of them. (There is in fact an entire style of romance manga and light novels built on this premise. If you’ve ever seen anything tagged “Rehabilitation” on Anilist or MyAnimeList, that’s what that means.) The roles of the nurturer and romantic partner are rolled into one in these scenarios, and Watatabe‘s playful skewering of them involves giving the caretaker/partner character an explicitly malicious overtone. Remember, within the world of the story itself this isn’t actually a metaphor: Shiori literally wants to kill Hinako and eat her, head to toe. But Hinako, depressed and longing to be reunited with her family, either figuratively in death or literally in the hereafter, is fine with that, and in fact wants that. In its way, Watatabe‘s story is quite a wicked little thing.

I don’t think it would work nearly so well without the audio component. The music here is straightforward but devastatingly effective, an arsenal of simple piano and string pieces that hammer home the oppressive summer that Hinako has been living for so long, and remind us that there is a final, sharp end to her relationship with Shiori. The voice acting here is excellent, too. Ishikawa Yui lends a breathy, ethereal tone to Shiori that really sells the idea of her as some otherworldly creature. She can also make Shiori sound forceful, which is helpful when the character needs to project ferocity (as at the end of the first episode), or make clear to Hinako that she doesn’t get to make all of her own decisions anymore (as at the end of the second). Ueda Reina makes Hinako sound exactly the right amount of withdrawn and closed-off. For an example, visually speaking, her daydreams about ocean life intruding into her everyday existence are reasonably effective but hardly flashy. It’s really the flat, deep-sighing tone of voice Ueda brings to the role that ties it all together.

Having the aural advantage is good. The elephant in the room here is that the show doesn’t look fantastic. It doesn’t look bad, I wouldn’t say—although its frequent use of frame-blending pushes things—but it’s definitely a shoestring production and looks the part, and doesn’t hit the visual heights of, say, the best episodes of the similarly-abbreviated Watanare. (Although that had its lesser moments, too.) Similarly, the actual shot composition is effective but largely unspectacular except for a few particularly striking moments. None of this is all that surprising for a low-resource anime at this stage in the medium’s history, but it is at least worth knowing going into it, and if it pushes people toward the manga instead, I don’t think that’s necessarily such a bad thing, even if they are missing out on the lovely sound design here. It is, in any case, a minor weakness. Or at least it is if I’m the one being asked.

The second episode ends set against the interesting love triangle building between Hinako, Shiori, and Miko, who spends much of the episode being jealous of the mysterious relationship that Hinako and Shiori seem to have suddenly developed.

She, in fact, asks Hinako to a festival. Hinako turns her down—it would seem that the accident that caused the deaths of her family is somehow related to this very same festival—but Shiori, not content to let her prized pig simply sit and girlrot, forces her to go. We don’t know how that’s going to work out for either of them, yet. (Or for Miko, for that matter.) But I certainly plan on tuning in to find out.

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

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.