Tag: first impression

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: TURKEY! TIME TO STRIKE

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.

There is a real, delicate art to the bait-and-switch premiere. You basically have to sell the audience on two different premises, and you have to sell them on the second one hard enough that they don’t mind that you’re not really doing the first (or at least aren’t doing it the way they thought you would). Also, if you’re really committed to the bit, most or all of your pre-release marketing is going to be about the first premise. So you’re trying to catch fish with the wrong type of worm, essentially, and making it that much harder on yourself in the process.

Accordingly, anime that take this kind of swing are a bit rare. The most recent example I can think of is last year’s Bang Bravern, and its two conceits are closely enough related that I can’t imagine too many people were majorly disappointed when it turned out to be a super robot show instead of a gritty real robot show.

Turkey! Time to Strike was presented in its early marketing materials as a simple show about bowling. This is a valid niche within the “girls doing stuff” supergenre of anime, for sure, and it comes to us from Bakken Record, a studio whose main prior credit of note is Ippon! Again, also a show about a girls’ sport club—judo in the case of that series—so this seemed like a perfectly logical next step. No one had any real reason to believe this was anything but a straightforward drama (or comedy, or maybe both) about a girls’ bowling league.

In its opening minutes, that’s exactly what it is. We open on our heroines flubbing the opening match of a tournament, as our lead Otonashi Mai [Hishikawa Hana] gets a snake-eye split on her final ball and washes her team out of the match. Tensions run high afterward, with the serious and competitive Godai Rina [Ichinose Kana] accusing her of throwing the match deliberately. Rina has quite a lot to say to her other teammates, too, pointing the finger at Mitaka Nozomi [Tenma Yuuki] for doing her makeup and not taking the game seriously while it went on, Ichinose Sayuri [Iwata Haruki] for constantly throwing gutter balls because she tenses up so bad, and the nerdy Nikaidou Nanase [Itou Ayasa] she simply calls a benchwarmer.

As this argument drags on, it comes out that Nozomi and Sayuri only joined in the first place because Mai asked them to, and Nanase only joined because she thought the experience might “help her in the future” in some way. Upset with all of this, Rina quits the club. Mai reassures the others that she’ll talk to Rina at school the following day, since she doesn’t want the club to be disbanded for lack of membership. There’s some nice camera work here where Mai takes her ramune—this entire dispute started in the first place because the club bought a round of “celebratory” sodas despite losing—and drinks from it, the marble inside rolling around like a bowling ball as the camera fixes on it. So far, so sports drama.

On their way home, the remains of the bowling club spot a construction site where a pit is being dug. They remark that there was a secondhand book shop there just two days prior, and one of the girls muses that it takes only an instant to lose something. For whatever reason, this really gets to Mai, and she decides she has to reconcile with Rina right now. Thus invigorated, she and the rest of the bowling club make their way to the alley again to try to patch things up with her. Rina’s not terribly impressed by Mai’s pleas, but she offers a simple ultimatum: if Mai can beat her in a bowling match, she’ll at least think about coming back.

Thus, we get a nice setpiece of the two going head to head, one on one, the bowling balls thundering down the lane as a downpour breaks out outside. It’s honestly pretty solid, and you can see the kind of show that Turkey could easily have decided to be on display here. This sort of thing, the idea that the best way to understand someone, to get through to them, is to take them on in your shared field of competition, is very common in sports anime and fiction about athletics in general. It’s good stuff, and Turkey sells it well.

On the last frame, Mai throws a split again, and Rina storms off, assuming she’s doing this on purpose and that Rina’s being mocked. But Mai won’t give up, and she throws her second ball right as a bolt of lightning strikes a mysterious artefact dug up from the construction site outside. At that very moment, Turkey stops being a sports anime, and becomes something else entirely.

And that’s the end of the episode!

Seriously!

What utter goofball shit! What chutzpah! Why would you make a show like this?! Turkey, whose English-market subtitle Time to Strike suddenly makes a lot more sense, opens itself up to both barrels here. If you’re here for the sports drama stuff, the ending is going to throw you for a complete loop. If you heard about the twist beforehand and wanted the show to get to that, you have to get through a whole episode of teenagers arguing about fucking bowling first. So on the surface, this seems like a terrible idea. And yet, to me at least, this speaks to an unshakeable confidence in this story. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Turkey is going to turn out to be some kind of masterpiece, or even be particularly good overall, but come on! How can you not love that?

Even so, I do think the show has a good command of its own strengths. There’s a strong web of character dynamics underpinning this episode that works equally well for both the “sports drama” premise and the “stranded in the past” premise, and I think that’s going to be the secret sauce that ties the whole thing together. Even if it doesn’t, when you pivot from a bowling club to time travel in your first episode, I can only wonder what the hell else you have in store. Thus, Turkey is a representation of probably my single favorite thing about anime, its endless capacity for surprise. None of us know where this is going, but the second trailer for the series, released after the premiere dropped, provides a hint.

Where we’re going, we don’t need lanes to bowl.

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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: SENGOKU YOUKO is Good, Thank God

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 who lament this barbarous age; rejoice! Sengoku Youko is pretty good, the work of cult mangaka Satoshi Mizukami will not all be turned into anime sludge in the vein of the previous project to bear his name, the absolutely tragic anime adaptation of The Lucifer & Biscuit Hammer.

To be realistic for a moment, after that debacle, the bar is basically on the floor. Sengoku Youko is playing with a stacked deck, with both the greatly hedged expectations coming off of the last Mizukami adaptation and the fact that Sengoku Youko the manga is probably the least-read of Mizukami’s major works. (It’s the only one that I haven’t read, in fact.) As with Biscuit Hammer, it’s also on the old side to be getting an anime adaptation now, having started back in 2007 and wrapped up almost a decade later, but historical fantasy is a timeless genre on this medium, so this is not really any kind of issue. Given all this, it has a much better chance at making a favorable first impression than its ill-fated sibling. Still, even that in mind, Sengoku Youko’s premiere is just a solid slice of historical fantasy, featuring a great dynamic between its three leads, a couple funky monster designs, and some really nice action animation.

As for what it’s actually about, our setup here is pretty simple. Set in the mid-1500s, during the massively unstable sengoku period (hence the name), Sengoku Youko follows a pair of spirits, the short fox girl Tama Youko [Yuuki Takada] and her ‘little brother’ Jinka Yamato [Souma Saitou], as they fight evil.

Tama is the one with the adorable fox ears.

No, literally, that’s their whole thing, per Tama’s instruction. (Jinka, who is bigoted against the humans they often end up saving, only seems to go along with it with great reluctance.) They’re also joined by a cowardly ronin, Shinsuke Hyoudou [Ryouhei Kimura], who is transfixed by the vast strength that Tama and Jinka display, and hopes to somehow get stronger by going along with them.

The first episode sees Tama break up a bandit ring that turns out to be led by….ah, this.

This leads to some of the episode’s best visuals, in particular a very striking sequence where Tama and Jinka combine their powers, turning Jinka into a white-haired fox warrior that trounces his opposition fairly easily.

A later confrontation with a strange monster menacing some Buddhist monks ends on a cliffhanger, providing a nice hook to get folks coming back next week. That said, I have a suspicion that all is not as it appears in Sengoku Youko. Even if it stays episodic like this, it will probably be a fun time. However, given Mizukami’s usual M.O.—a desire to take genres apart and then stitch them back together in a different shape, exhibited with battle shonen in the Biscuit Hammer manga, reincarnation fantasy in Spirit Circle, and mecha anime in Planet With—I really doubt that it’ll be content to stick to any kind of formula. Time will tell, but I’m interested in finding out, and I can give this first episode no better endorsement than that.

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 or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text 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: Dragons, Tigers, and Isekai in FLUFFY PARADISE

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.

A new year means a new anime season; a fresh turn of the calendar page for a medium that, at least as far as TV anime goes, often feels defined by a chase for the next big cultural touchstone. 2024 does, in fact, have plenty of upcoming anime that look pretty promising, from the battle girl android action-yuri of Metallic Rouge to highly anticipated manga adaptations like Delicious in Dungeon, to whatever Jellyfish Don’t Swim in the Night is going to be. But today, January 1st, the very first anime to make its TV debut in 2024 is this; Fluffy Paradise. It’s an isekai, of course.

It’s hard to even feign shock at the sheer deluge of isekai series anymore, and to be honest talking about the genre’s saturation has started to feel pat. (Plus, there actually aren’t that many this season, compared to some seasons still fresh in memory where we’ve had up to ten airing at once.) So let’s just skip all that and get to the actual meat of this thing, or what meat of it there is anyway. For one thing, yes, this anime starts with the obligate scene of the protagonist dying in the ‘real world.’ I have to admit I’ve always found the fact that they seem to feel the need to show this directly kind of morbid and I’ve never totally gotten over that. For another, the protagonist, in her previous mundane life, kind of looks like Kobeni from Chainsaw Man, so hey, that’s something. (And this seems like something that would happen to Beni, given her rotten luck.)

The fact that she’s a woman in the first place shouldn’t go unnoticed, either. Isekai anime remains very lopsided in terms of protagonist gender, and it is nice to see one that’s not vaguely otome game-themed have a female lead.

Our girl is of course given the obligate talking-to by a deity who offers to compensate her for her short life by fixing things in her favor in the next. He does ask for her help with something rather specific in return, though. We’re told that in this world, humans are persecuting “non-human creatures,” complete with some silhouettes of what sure look like catgirls and doggirls and such. The show doesn’t really circle back around to this until the very end of this first episode, but it is the one point that sticks out.

I say this because much of Fluffy Paradise is frankly dull. It leaves no real impression for most of the length of its runtime. We could get into specifics about its plot and characters, but they feel so cursory in of themselves that there doesn’t seem like much a point. Our girl ends up in a very plain isekai setting, born (of course) to noble parents. There, she’s given the name Nefertima—Neema [Ai Kakuma] for short—and the show begins in earnest. The main focus here is that she wished to be able to “pet lots of fluffy things” as part of her reincarnation, so animals love her, and it’s from this that the series gets most of what flavor it does have.

Anywhere she goes, Neema is surrounded by a Disney Princess-esque parade of adorable animals. This extends even to befriending the divine “sky tiger” that she meets upon a visit to the royal palace. All of this is pretty cute, but it’s not really ever more than that, and even the few moments that seem like they’re trying to be vaguely transgressive (eg. a few mildly charged interactions between the three-year-old Neema and the teenage prince) don’t accomplish even that much. They’re too tame to even be tasteless.

Meh.

Arguably, the entire point of “cozy isekai” like this is that they never do too much. But by introducing that whole Man vs. Nature element at the start, the show inherently asks to be taken more seriously than as just another lazy Monday series. I’ll also admit, I tend to be a bit harsh on this subgenre in general. I’m a longtime iyashikei apologist, and even I tend to find that most of these “slow life” shows are boring rather than actually relaxing, usually owing to their iffy visuals and general lack of atmosphere.

The production values are decent, on that note, but come with their own set of caveats. The animation is just expressive and bouncy enough that Fluffy Paradise escapes the fate of its often-stiff isekai brethren. Even then, there are still a few spots that are disappointingly under-animated, such as a magical board game played in the episode’s middle portion. You could also be forgiven for not really noticing, because the actual art direction is very drab and generic. Pity any RinBot player with this and even just a few other isekai in their back catalogue, because they’d largely be indistinguishable. This is true of the setting as well; an ISO Standard vaguely European isekai setting with basically no characteristics to set it apart from its genre-fellows whatsoever. You can get away with this if your show is funny enough or has strong enough characterization (eg. in the case of In My Next Life as a Villainness! or such), but that’s not really the case here, and the nondescript visuals contribute to an overall feeling of interchangeability. This show could’ve aired at any point in the last decade and it wouldn’t seem out of place. That can be a good thing, but in Fluffy Paradise‘s case, it really isn’t.

But, there is a silver lining here, the one spot where the show seems willing to take a risk, and that’d be the dragon.

Bro thinks he’s Smaug.

In the episode’s closing minutes, Neema’s sister summons a dragon during a magic demonstration. We’re not told anything explicitly here but she sure seems intent on killing it, until Neema rushes out to get between her sister and the dragon. The episode ends on that note, providing a cliffhanger and a (theoretically at least) solid hook to bring people back next week. If Fluffy Paradise ever breaks out of the middling isekai box—and hey, it’s happened before—it’ll be there, with Neema as a defender of the world’s wild things against her fellow humans. Still, given everything else about the first episode, I don’t have a ton of faith it’ll actually follow through on this idea.

I could sit here and wax further about how there are just so many isekai and how it’s such an over-saturated genre and so on, but at some point you just have to let things be what they are. Fluffy Paradise seems basically fine as far as such things go, but it also seems solidly “safe.” There’s nothing in here that a hundred other anime haven’t done, and if I want to put on my Nostradamus hat and make big predictions, I kind of wonder if the lower amount of isekai this season means people aren’t maybe finally getting tired of this whole setup.* Who knows.

I won’t keep watching Fluffy Paradise, personally. But for the people who do, I legitimately hope it turns out to be better and more ambitious than I’m predicting here. In cases like this, I like to be proven wrong.

(Also, the ED is a cute thing with a lovely felt stop motion visual style. That counts for something, too.)

* A very rare after the fact edit from me, here. What was I talking about when I wrote this? This season is absolutely swamped with isekai.

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 or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

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