Tag: Healer Girl

Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly, Misc. Anime

Ranking Every 2022 Anime I Actually Finished from Worst to Best – Part 4: The Top 5 Anime of 2022

Here it is, the top 5.

I have to be honest, for whatever reason, much more than the past two years, I feel actively nervous about posting this. I’m not sure why? It’s not like my picks for last year were uncontroversial. Regardless, after a very extensive regime of writing, re-writing, editing, and re-re-writing(!), I have settled on a form for this list that I am mostly happy with. Hopefully you enjoy it, as well.

#5. SHINEPOST

Yeah, I like SHINEPOST more than BOCCHI THE ROCK. I almost feel the need to apologize for that opinion, but I can’t lie to y’all. Between the two, I liked this one just the slightest bit more, despite it being arguably the more conventional of the two. It is what it is, I could’ve gone either way. (And as mentioned yesterday, I did. SHINEPOST and BOCCHI switched places on this list several times.)

But enough handwringing, why’s it actually good? Well, SHINEPOST is rather unlike its genre-fellows on this list. It’s not utopian and relentlessly pleasant like Love Live, and it’s not a candy-surreal kids’ anime dream sequence like Waccha Primagi. Instead, SHINEPOST‘s best and most defining moments chronicle the stomach-flipping knots of anxiety that come from being a performing artist, the demons that can eat a performer’s psyche alive if left unchecked, and the very real camaraderie to be found in those fields anyway, in spite of all that. (In that sense, it’s actually slightly more of a piece with BOCCHI, although they, too, are fairly different.) SHINEPOST, in its brisk single cour, manages to touch on the pressure to succeed, how even modest fame can both weld new friendships together and cleave old ones apart, the fear of never being good enough and the burden of being too good, plus the ticking clockwork of the industry itself. The goal is simple and straightforward from episode 1; TINGS, the protagonists, must fill Nakano Sunplaza to its pleasantly symmetrical 2,222-person capacity for their first anniversary concert. If they can’t, their time with their agency, and as an idol group, is over.

I’m loathe to even float the word “deconstruction” in my writing, especially in its latter-day TVTropes-y usage. But it’s worth pulling up here, not because it describes SHINEPOST but because it neatly defines what it isn’t. All of this, frankly, pretty heavy shit, comes not from some desire to criticize or pull away from the girl group idol anime genre, but from a real love of it. Something that was trying to put distance between itself and its genre’s foundational texts would not be mythologizing something as mundane as a venue in the way SHINEPOST does. 

More than that, though, the series’ real strength is that by laying its characters bare; showing their insecurities, their weaknesses, the complexes that gnaw away at their very psyches, it can really make you root for them in a way that something comparatively fluffy (such as again, Love Live) can’t manage to the same degree. If anything, SHINEPOST reminds me a lot more of that series’ perennial rival, Idolmaster, whose 2011 TV series remains the definitive golden standard for this genre. SHINEPOST is a true underdog; a scrappy series about a scrappy idol group from a still relatively-young studio (Studio KAI. Their second entry on this list after Fuuto PI), and all of those hardships, no matter how serious or melodramatic, are buildup to the absolutely electric immediacy of its finale. Even the absolute corniest plot details, like the etymology of the show’s very title (it’s a portmanteau of “shining guidepost”), hit like pure bolts of lightning.

And that kind of momentary transcendence, where you forget that you’re watching a silly cartoon and feel the energy? That is why it’s the best idol anime of 2022. TINGS kill it; accept no substitutes.

#4. CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS

Few anime come with this mixed a pedigree. Sure, Cyberpunk Edgerunners is a TRIGGER series directed by Hiroyuki Imaishi, a fact that comes with a hell of a lot of goodwill, but pretty much everything else about this thing would give anyone good reason to be skeptical; start with the fact that it’s a tie-in to the rightly-polarizing open world game Cyberpunk 2077, skip over to the fact that it’s got a Franz Ferdinand song as its OP theme, and roll on from there. I won’t lie, there’s a part of me—and it’s not a small part!—that wanted to boot Edgerunners from the list entirely. I considered deliberately putting off watching it until next year so I wouldn’t have to rank it, and even now that I have seen it, there remains a temptation to dock points less for what it is and more for where it came from. I’m not sure I want many anime to be globally-released tie-in promos for broken-on-release AAA video games. Certainly, the fact that you still, months after the anime’s been out on streaming platforms worldwide, can’t reasonably watch the Japanese audio track with English subtitles (well, you can try, but the sloppy dubtitle track doesn’t really work with the JP audio at all. Thankfully the dub is excellent; this is the only release on the list I watched dubbed, in fact!) is case enough that this probably isn’t how anime should be made.

All this in mind, it’s almost painful how fucking good this thing is. Edgerunners burns so bright that it leaves scorch marks: black as melted plastic and twice as toxic, pure neon, grime and dirt.

David, our protagonist, is a person stripped of his humanity both systemically, and, eventually, with violence. He loses his mother, his home, his status as a citizen, his sanity, his humanity, and, eventually, his life. In one sense, Edgerunners is a gradual sanding-down of his personhood until nothing is left.

Lucy, his co-lead, is an unscrupulous hacker who runs with a mercenary crew. Secretly, she harbors a dream of visiting the moon. It’s a poetic hyperbole; the stars we hang in the sky to keep ourselves going made very literal.

To home in on one specific example, no single moment in anime this year conveys the sheer amount of blasted-out trauma as episode six, which sees the character Maine completely lose his mind as a side-effect of his cybernetic implants. The result is harrowing; all gunfire and blood on the floor. That point is where I realized that putting this anywhere outside the top five would’ve required me to do some major mental gymnastics.

On the whole, the series is deeply discomforting and utterly visceral to watch in action. If this isn’t how anime should be made from a production pipeline point of view, it definitely is how they should be made in terms of having a strong creative vision and following it through to the end as thoroughly as you possibly can. RIP David Martinez; reduced to a tale for the next dreamer.

#3: Chainsaw Man

Forget, for a moment, everything else. Forget the rest of this list, forget that there ever was a Chainsaw Man manga, forget the very notion of ranking and reviewing and processing, debating, analyzing. Focus on one image; a chainsaw, covered in rust, and in blood – which itself will be rust soon enough. Now focus on the boy holding it, the boy who became it. And think, for a moment, about what it takes to travel the vast canyon between those two images.

I have called Chainsaw Man many things on this site, but if you strip everything away; the need to intellectualize the art we love, the fanbase, even the original material itself, you are left with those two images and the gap between them. A boy and his dog; a boy and his instrument of bloody fucking murder. Love twisted up and turned violent in the name of protection, in the name of needing to escape, in the name of trading bad for worse because you don’t know what better looks like. A frizzy-haired punk kid with a drawn knife; that, essentially, is Chainsaw Man.

A lot of other things are Chainsaw Man too, of course. Everyone Denji meets during his journey is or becomes part of him. In some cases, in ways the anime itself has yet to reveal. Death is ever-present, and any insinuation otherwise is a facade.

So, what form does this take? Well, young Denji is a devil-hunter, a professional mower-down of wicked monsters that spawn from humanity’s own fears, from the trivial to the deep-seated. He’s raised by a coldhearted yakuza, only to end up in the care of Public Safety, Japan’s own government-controlled devil-killer force. Along the way he strives for any kind of human connection, gleefully oblivious to his own desires. A recurring refrain from the character is that all he really needs or wants is a roof over his head, three meals a day, and maybe, ambitiously, to touch a girl’s chest before he dies.

Consciously, he probably does think that’s true, but it’s obvious from very early on that he’s looking for something deeper, and that un-articulated desire for true human connection lands him squarely in the palm of Public Safety’s obviously sinister head, Makima. This plot goes unresolved in the first season, but it is already obvious that she doesn’t have his best interests in mind. In this way, Denji is all of us, a hardworking guy being ruthlessly exploited by the system that provides him the few things that he can truly call his own. He makes and then loses his very first friend over the course of just these twelve episodes; how much more is in store for our boy, and how much more can he take?

That’s without even getting into the tangible specifics of the CSM anime as an adaptation. It is a markedly different experience from the manga; slick and polished but never sterile, engaged wholeheartedly in a deep emulation of the live action film that informs so much of original mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto‘s work. It also probably has the best soundtrack of anything on this list, with a truly ridiculous twelve separate ending themes—one for each episode!—all of which go ridiculously hard in their own way. On the whole, we can easily say that, yes, this is the best-case scenario for adapting this material. Season 2 cannot come soon enough.

So yeah, all that poetic nonsense and it’s still only at #3. Look! I hate feeling like I have to justify every placement on this list, but this one does warrant at least a little explanation, I think. Part of it is that the show does have a tiny amount of minor flaws—a handful of very minor production gripes in a few specific scenes in a few specific episodes. On a narrative level you could also maybe make the case that Himeno dies a little too soon—but mostly, it’s just that incredibly, the Chainsaw Man anime has not actually gotten to the truly unhinged parts of its source material quite yet, and I’d feel a little bad for putting the cart before the horse. What point is there in giving out a gold medal to a rookie athlete? Even the very best have room for improvement. If I’m going to rank Chainsaw Man as the best anime in a given year, I want it to be a season where it is at the absolute fucking apex of its powers, something I can’t deny. Until then, it can settle for the bronze.

So, on that admittedly shaky logic. Yeah, still just third place. I could have put it at #1, and I would’ve felt just fine about doing so. To be honest, I like this, my #2 and my #1 pick about equally (I could maybe even argue for Edgerunners back in the last entry). But the following two anime are a little more undersung, and they’re also more self-contained, two things that do matter to me. I have to confess a certain irrational fondness for the underdog, too. So just wait, Chainsaw Man. Your day has yet to truly come.

#2. Vampire in The Garden

To be honest, I so badly want to just tell you to read my review of this, where I was reduced to clumsy poetry in an attempt to convey, if not necessarily describe, what this series means to me. But for one thing that’s lazy, for another thing, would it really help? I am still not done processing Vampire in The Garden, an achingly beautiful piece of fiction, and perhaps an important one as well.

The real truth of the matter is that queer stories that treat queer characters as people are still far rarer than you might assume. There are plenty that are cute, or that use us as tear-jerking props in a cynical way, but there aren’t really that many that feel lived-in, studied, like they were made to resonate with an audience of proper fucking queers first and foremost, with anyone else as a secondary concern. Vampire in the Garden really does feel that way. Is it intentional or just a staggering coincidence? If it is intentional, as far as I’m aware, no one’s ever said as much, so ultimately, I can’t really say so. What I can say is that Vampire feels important, if not to “queer people” as a group, then at least to me, personally. Somewhat frustratingly, though, it is such a shining, glistening thing that it falls apart like gossamer if you try to grasp it too tightly. You can describe its plot, but describing why it’s great is much harder.

In basic terms, Vampire is a story about two people who fill a void in each other’s lives. Both protagonists, the human factory worker Momo and the vampire queen-on-the-run Fine, have lost someone close to them. Through the struggle of eventually connecting with each other and healing through this shared loss, they are beaten down again by the world around them; both the vampires that seek to return Fine to her throne and the humans who hunt Momo down as a traitor, to be returned to her dreary existence in the city-tower-prison that much of humankind now resides in. Along the way, they seek an ineffable “paradise”, somewhere they can coexist in peace. Will it surprise you to learn they never find it? Not really, anyway. They pass through Fine’s own dilapidated manor, a segregated town where vampires and humans live side by side in only the most literal of senses, a village run on blood sacrifice, and so on. Fine ends up dead long before they find this mystical paradise, and there is more than a little suggestion that it doesn’t really exist.

But does that render Fine and Momo’s time together moot? Absolutely not. And that is what makes Vampire feel so vital (and so vitally queer) to me; the world sucks, and it often conspires to rip us apart whenever it can. It is absolutely crucial that we appreciate our time together, while it lasts.

So! That’s most of the list. There’s only one entry left. As with last year, I put up a tweet about a month before this went up, where I asked people to guess what they thought my number 1 pick would be.

This year, two people got it right.

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What can I say? Congratulations to Blue Dash. And hell, I’ll throw in a shout out to my good friend Josh, too, since he mentioned it out loud while were talking at one point.

#1. Healer Girl

I am keenly aware of just how transient what I do here at Magic Planet Anime truly is. Anime criticism as a medium is still essentially in its infancy—most of us aren’t much more than consumer advocates, telling you to either spend or not spend your precious leisure time watching some particular series or another—and it would be very, very naive to assume that anything I write here will ever persist throughout the ages. If anyone writing in this field now makes anything that endures, it’s unlikely to be me.

I write anyway because when something really does touch me on a deep, personal level, I end up feeling like I have to scream it from the mountaintops. This doesn’t happen often—I like most anime, but the amount that I truly love, in the way where I know I will come back to them five, ten years from now, is much smaller, and rarely does a given year produce more than one or two such pieces—but when it does, I really feel like little else in the world matters to me, in those moments. 2022, astoundingly, produced four, and we’ve just met three of them. This is the fourth. Healer Girl, my favorite anime of 2022.

It is a font of genuine, deep light and warmth. It’s really all in the name; Healing. The iyashikei genre rarely gets the credit it’s due over here in the anglosphere, but in Healer Girl, the genre has found its best representative in many years. 

I have to confess; I spent much of 2022 so, so, so tired, and so, so, so sick. I have gone through more than one total emotional breakdown, caused at least in part by a ten-car pileup of illnesses I have been battling and continue to battle. I won’t go into details because to be honest it’s not anyone’s business but my own, but know that it has sucked. Many days, I have gotten up and wondered if I’d really be able to continue writing like I have been, even though this site, for better or worse, is the project I’ve started in my life that means the most to me, by an order of magnitude. Without embellishment, 2022 was a profoundly shitty year for me. Probably the worst I’ve had since moving to Chicago in 2018.

Through it all, Healer Girl, perhaps improbably, has remained a source of genuine comfort. In a year where I had been having less of a bad time overall, maybe I would’ve been more comfortable putting something darker at #1. But I didn’t, and I can’t truly see into those possible parallel presents. So Healer Girl it is, because I need it—because we need it.

Part of it is the music; the opening notes of “Feel You, Heal You”, tap into some deep, rarely-touched part of my psyche, perhaps it’s the part that used to fall asleep listening to Wilson-Philipps and Faith Hill on a grainy radio when I was very young, perhaps it’s the same part that, when I was a younger anime watcher, cemented Kamichu!, which I saw on a bootleg streaming site that no longer exists, as one of my very first favorite anime. Whatever it is, and no matter how corny I’m sure it may seem to anyone who isn’t me, that connection is real, and extends not just to the music, but to the series built around it.

Healer Girl’s premise promises a cross between a “magical girl“ series of a variety unknown ’til now, a medical drama, and a slice of life anime. In practice, it’s all of these and none of them. It has all of the magical girl genre’s storms of massive feeling and emotion, a medical drama’s focus on literal lifesaving, and the school life genre’s easygoing warmth, but even as it feels born of these genres, it stands apart from them. Its great visual trick is the “image song;” literal conjurings of the magic music that the series’ world runs on. This is not something that would exist in a lesser series, and I’ve seen similar things only a handful of times. Almost on its own, this is what elevates Healer Girl into a truly rare artistic achievement. (The show is so good that while it has probably the year’s single best episode, its fifth, the Night on the Galactic Railroad-referencing “Blue Skies, Green Mountains, River Battles and the Galactic Station“, this is almost an afterthought compared to its more general brilliancies.)

Healer Girl’s magnetism is difficult to explain in this way, because the series was not—is not—an event. There is no “Healer Girl fandom”, or at least, not a particularly large one. The show inspired no complicated thinkpieces or vigorous debates on its nature and true meaning. The impression I get is that the show was mostly liked, but just liked, by those who saw it, and I am something of an outlier for loving it as much as I do. Fundamentally, it’s a very simple anime, and whether or not it resonates with a given person is, I imagine, largely down to the old intangibles of feeling and mood. In this sense, I can imagine picking it as my #1, putting it in The Top Spot, might be contentious. (I doubt nearly as much as my #1 pick for 2021, admitttedly, but that’s another conversation.)

To me, Healer Girl doesn’t even really feel like a contemporary anime. It feels at once like a relic from a lost past and a transmission from some far-off, idyllic, solar future. A broadcast from a different universe; a softer world, one where the soothing tones of gentle music really can heal the sick. It is the endless everyday implicitly promised by all slice of life anime warmed with a gentle heat and decorated with floral blooms; an outstretched hand, whenever you need it. That, to me, is 2022’s best anime. If you feel it, it’ll heal you, a panacea in the darkness and the sickness.

Thus, the list—and the year here at Magic Planet Anime, although by the time you read this it’ll already be the first day of 2023—comes to a close.

I am very curious to hear your thoughts. Did you love it? Did you hate it? Were your picks similar or wildly different? I’m interested to know, so don’t be afraid to drop a comment or hit me up on any of my many social media locations below, I recently re-did my article footer with links to basically every site I maintain a presence for this blog on. Feel free to look around!

Let me take a moment here to also thank everyone who’s read this list—or any of my articles here over the past year—it really, truly means the world to me. While I’m at it, let me thank my good friends on the following Discord servers with funny names; The Magic Planet Anime server, the original The Magic Planet server, the Satellite Night Anime Block server, the Secret Scrunkly Server, Mugcord, and the Lesbian Radiohead Fans server. All of you have made ’22 so much better than it would’ve been alone, and I appreciate y’all a lot. I need to also give a shout out to my repeat commenters: you guys are the best, and make this blog feel so much more alive than it would if it were just me writing with no responses.

And lastly, just before I go, and as mentioned back in Part 1 of the list. If you can do so, and found the list worthwhile, please do contribute (either on Ko-Fi or Patreon), it was extremely effort-intensive. For your reference, I am writing this at about 8PM on the 30th. Crunch in writing is real, friends! Be careful out there! I’ve certainly learned some lessons about how I’m going to handle this for next year, now that I know there’s a real audience for the end-to-end breakdown rather than just a simple top 5. And for those who have already recently contributed, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Again, it’s hard to articulate how much that means to me.

As for the site itself, I don’t plan to do regular seasonal coverage for the upcoming season, but I may drop occasional articles here and there on the more interesting stuff and will probably do at least a small few first impressions. (I’m very interested to see what’s up with the Nier: Automata anime, for example.) More than that, I have a lot of commissions to get cracking on! Hopefully you’ll enjoy those reviews when they go live.

Until next year (which is already this year for you) Magic Planet Anime fans!

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter, Mastodon, Cohost, Anilist, 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.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) To Heaven & Back on a Song: The Soothing World of HEALER GIRL

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

“These are the beautiful miracles sung by humanity.”

The first thing to know is that Healer Girl was inspired by Symphogear. Comparisons between anime rarely do either work any favors, but for Healer Girl, knowing the name of its stylistic ancestors puts some things into perspective. The Symphogear comparison is merely the most recent in a list that also included Macross and, less centrally, G Gundam.

Ostensibly, these are strange bedfellows for what is at its heart an iyashikei series / sometimes-musical. In practice, it makes perfect sense. Like in Symphogear, the music in Healer Girl is not a background element; it’s diegetic, and the very source of the protagonists’ abilities itself. I’ve taken to calling this sort of thing the “dynamic music” genre, perhaps you have some other pet neologism. In either case, understanding that the music is not just a plot element but what the entire work is built around is key to understanding Healer Girl at all. It’s not a complex series, but there is stuff going on here beyond pretty songs.

Take our protagonists. Three young girls; Kana (Carin Isobe), Hibiki (Akane Kumada), and Reimi (Marina Horiuchi). For the majority of the series, they serve as interns at a clinic run by their teacher, Hibiki’s cousin Ria (Ayahi Takagaki).

A clinic, because as Healer Girl quickly establishes, in its world, the power of music is literal. Carefully-applied musical treatments can literally heal injuries, soothe sickness away entirely, and aid in surgery. This sort of there-is-power-in-the-song thing is something idol anime have been flirting with for years but never really commit to. (A personal frustration of mine.) Part of me enjoys Healer Girl just because it has the stones to actually dive into this idea. At twelve episodes, it doesn’t have the time to answer every question I had (I really want to know what healing music looks like around the world, but the show sadly doesn’t really go into it), but maybe it doesn’t need to.

From that central premise, Healer Girl builds a few strong, simple metaphors. Healing music as art is the easiest to understand, and effectively renders the series as a defense of itself. Taken through this lens, the anime is a series of iterative exercises; how much can art really help with? In the first episode, Kana sings a song to a boy who’s scraped his knee to take the pain away. Just three episodes later, the girls assist in a surgery where someone nearly dies on an operating table, and they face the truly harrowing experience of possibly failing to help someone. Much like conventional medicine, healing music definitely has its limits, but also like medicine, it certainly helps. Is this Healer Girl‘s argument, that art can heal the world, if not by itself, at least in a supporting role? It’s a strong reading, and I do think that’s at least partly what the series is going for.

Consider also the show’s actual music. A lot of people—including myself—initially assumed Healer Girl was going to be an idol series, and it is true that there is an associated idol unit, the Healer Girls themselves. But, if we consider it a part of this idol anime lineage, it’s a highly unconventional one, at least for 2022. In style, the Healer Girls are a lot closer to forgotten ’90s American soft-pop sensation Wilson-Phillips than anything presented in, say, its seasonal contemporary Nijigasaki High School Idol Club. More to the point is the presentation; the titular healer girls don’t really dance, and their songs are not performances. They’re tools. And learning how to use those tools forms the show’s other main theme; the passing of knowledge and love from one generation to the next.

Much is made of the girls’ relationship with their mentor Ria, a well-developed character in her own right. Reimi has a cute, one-sided crush on her, and much is made of her incredible skills. (Which we finally get to see in action in episode 9.) Over the course of the series, Ria guides the girls through simply being her pupils toward being healers in their own right. In the show’s finale, it implies via paralleling that Kana may herself one day take students of her own. It’s rare to see teaching and imparting wisdom treated as something beautiful and graceful, but that just makes appreciating it when a show can properly pull it off all the more important.

And look, all this writing about what the show means, and I’ve barely told you anything about why you might want to watch it! The simple truth is that, like most of Studio 3Hz‘s productions, the show is just damn good-looking. It’s beautiful, colorful, wonderfully vibrant, almost a living thing itself, in a way that is truly rare and all too easy to take for granted. That vibrancy makes Healer Girl something to be treasured. Naturally, it translates to the soundtrack as well; Healer Girl is at most half a musical, but enough of the show is sung—including incidental dialogue, in some episodes—that if you enjoy that medium, you’ll like Healer Girl as well.

And on top of that, it’s simply fun to watch. Rarely are anime fans starving for some classic slice-of-life antics, but Healer Girl‘s are a particularly well done set thereof. The show is very funny when it sets its mind to it, and not working in that mode 100% of the time only renders it more amusing when it does.

There’s even a pastiche of an old, old slice of life trope, the obligate “high school rock band” episode—episode 7, here—that’s been sorely lacking from most modern anime for a whole generation at this point. I have to admit, seeing one in this day and age made me nostalgic, so I suppose that’s another emotion that Healer Girl can effortlessly tap into.

Because of this kaleidoscopic emotional approach, Healer Girl‘s characters feel truly alive as well, even comparatively minor ones like the girls from the rival healing clinic (of course there’s a rival healing clinic), Sonia (Chihaya Yoshitake) and Shinobu (Miyu Takagi).

And, of course, we should discuss Healer Girl‘s visual ace in the hole. The girls don’t merely sing; the world changes around them as they do, a literalized, visualized version of the consensus fantasy-reality created by the most powerful music here in the real world. But in Healer Girl‘s universe, it can change the world in a truly direct and immediate way, and these bubbles of magic are called image songs. Episode 9 is the best showcase of them, where we see Ria greatly aid a surgery with hers; she influences literal events by manipulating abstract visual material within the image song. In doing so, she herself is a metaphor for the real impact of art in our own world. It’s a curious, but justified little thematic mobius strip, something that impressively never feels pretentious or self-impressed. Healer Girl knows what it’s doing, maybe that’s why there isn’t a weak episode in the whole thing.

The only real tragedy about Healer Girl is that its strongest moments are those where it instills pure awe in the audience. And that, unfortunately, is not something I’m truly able to replicate in text format. You will just have to take my word for it, that my jaw dropped more than once throughout the show, that I teared up a few times, and that several episodes—particularly episode 5 and the latter half of the finale—left me frustrated, although in a strangely positive way, over my inability to fully convey their emotional impact in mere words. You will just have to see it for yourself, and if you haven’t, I again strongly recommend that you do.

If there’s justice in the world, Healer Girl will be a watershed moment. But even if it inspires nothing, even if this artistic lineage ends here, I find it impossible to imagine that it will ever lose its potency as a work unto itself or, indeed, as a healing tool.

There is often a desire—spoken or not—in seasonal anime watching culture for something to get “another season.” Healer Girl, however, was clearly crafted with just these twelve episodes in mind. That renders the show small, certainly, but it does not rob it of its power. In a way Healer Girl is like the over-the-counter medical records mentioned in the first episode. It will soothe your sickness if you let it; simply rewind the tape and play it all back again. One more time; if you feel it, it’ll heal you.

If you’d like to read more about Healer Girl, consider checking out my Let’s Watch columns on the series.

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

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

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episodes 11 – 12

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

The time has come for measure-taking. Healer Girl ended today. I will not make a secret my feelings; I absolutely love this show. It’s a soft, glowing rainbow light that revitalizes the soul. If you don’t have the patience for unchecked fangirling, I suggest you turn back now.

A certain kind of studio hound will want to know where I rank Healer Girl among Studio 3Hz‘ other two well-known originals—Flip Flappers and Princess Principal—but in truth I find them so different that any comparison would be irrelevant. So instead, I will say this; Healer Girl, regardless of whether it’s the best or anyone’s personal favorite, is certainly the most healing and soul-soothing of the three. How appropriate, given its name.

We’ll spend much of this article talking about today’s episode, the finale, but it’s important to discuss last week’s as well (which I wasn’t able to cover on time). The gist is simple; our girls have found themselves in a rut with their C-Rank exams dangerously near on the horizon. When they try to sing, their image song breaks, and each of them is yanked out of it by a trio of biting orca-like creatures. Ria has the idea to send them to a training camp of sorts, spearheaded by Reimi’s former maid.

Over the course of the camp, they visit museums, take a pottery class, go bunging jumping, and hike in the mountains. None of it helps, because even as the diverse experiences temper and strengthen their songs, an underlying issue isn’t addressed: jealousy.

There were a few broad hints before, but episode 11 foregrounds the fact that all three of our leads are, in one way or another, jealous of each other. Once again, Ria actually notices this long beforehand. At the end of the episode, we’re given a quick peek at her notes, and they’re pretty revealing.

In a way this represents the first major interpersonal conflict these characters have ever had, but it’s entirely believable that a trio of teenagers, no matter how naturally talented, might develop inferiority complexes over that very same talent. All this leads to perhaps Healer Girl‘s single most unexpected scene; a full-on shouting match between the leads, each of them venting their jealousy. Even this, it’s to be expected, is sweet in its own way, given that the three are mostly yelling about how talented each of them thinks the other two are. (If you’re a certain sort of person, I could imagine finding this saccharine. But if you are that sort of person, I doubt you made it this far into Healer Girl unless you’re also a masochist.)

It will not surprise you to know that getting all of this out is exactly what they needed, and indeed if you read Ria’s notes up there, you’ll see that having the three of them grow closer together on their own, without her interference, was the plan all along. The camp completed; they return for exam day.

The image song, as sung during their exams, is a thing of beauty. They are more in harmony after their little fight, despite being physically apart and taking their exams in different rooms, than they were together, and the results are spectacular. Kana in particular, perhaps the one among them with the most raw talent, metamorphoses into a butterfly-winged fairy as she sings, the orca rendered nothing more than a blooming flower itself.

They all pass, because of course they do.

As the episode’s obligate heartwarming post-credits scene ends, Ria cheerily announces that all three of them are expelled. It’s a slammed door played like a punchline, but the underlying idea—that she’s taught them all she can, and they now have to stand on their own two feet—is sound. Ultimately though, any expectation that they move on permanently is to be ignored. Spoiler alert; at the end of the show they rejoin Ria’s clinic. Again as understudies, but also as proper healers in their own right. Still learning, but able to stand by themselves.

Still, episode 12 does deal with the girls out and about on their own for the first time. It splits into three parts for its first half, showing us the month-long internships that the girls enter. Reimi cuts her long blonde hair short and takes up residence at Sonia’s clinic. Hibiki interns at the newly founded audio medicine department at the hospital from episodes 4 and 9. Kana, who the episode returns the central spotlight to, interns abroad, at a hospital in what appears to be California.

This part of the episode is charming, especially in its depiction of how the girls remain in touch even when physically apart. Although Hibiki and Reimi in particular aren’t actually far from each other, and it seems like they occasionally hang out at the clinic. (Where Hibiki might still live? I’m not totally clear on this.) In what is easily the episode’s silliest scene, they embody every meaning of the term “moé blob.”

In general, episode 12 is concerned with legacy and the meaningful passage of knowledge and love from one generation to the next. Ria spends much of it with her own mentor, Sonia’s grandmother, but the real clincher takes the form of multiple callbacks to episode 1. Kana, in a land where she does not speak a lick of the local tongue, nonetheless soothes a crying, lost girl in the hospital’s lobby. Unlike her technically unauthorized use of healing from that first episode, this is exactly what she’s supposed to be doing, and it’s only through her study under Ria that she can accomplish it. Thus, here on her own, she draws on both her own life and the legacy of those who came before her. This is a difficult thematic balance to strike, but Healer Girl pulls it off.

There is an extremely funny comment made by Abigail, the woman with brown hair on the left, where she’s startled by “what Japan’s C-Ranks can do.” This would maybe come across as a little self-aggrandizing if this scene took place anywhere but the United States. As someone who lives here; yeah, that’s fair.

Later, when the threes’ internships end, Hibiki and Reimi get a cryptic email from Kana on the eve of her anticipated return to Japan. True friends and, apparently living in a world where commercial flight does not cost a small fortune, the two actually take a flight to California, where they find Kana helping out with the aftermath of a wildfire.

In any case, it’s on their return flight that Healer Girl makes this parallel between its first and final episodes most explicit. One of the passengers, a young girl, has an asthma attack. Our girls, of course, volunteer to help, directly referring back to the very incident that made Kana want to become a healer in the first place. I honestly cannot do this scene justice with words alone; the soothing song itself is one thing, but the imagery of Kana spiritually duetting with the younger incarnation of her master got to me in a way that I struggle to properly describe. The parallel invites you to imagine that the young girl they sing to might one day become a healer herself; wouldn’t that be a beautiful thing?

Amazingly, Healer Girl has another trick up its sleeve, its last, as the finale comes to a close. When the girls return home to Japan, they’re formally “given investiture” as healers (another of the series’ many strange and mystical religious parallels). And as they depart the graduating ceremony, they sing the song from the OP. The long version, with more verses.

Healer Girl—the very show itself—dissolves into magical dream sequence; their song fills the air like the light of drifting stars. Their friends and teachers come to join them. Is this all literally happening? Is it artistic license? A better question for you; who cares? In an interview, Director Yasuhiro Irie cited the Symphogear series as an influence on Healer Girl. These anime are, on many fundamental levels, very different. But they are alike in that both have a deep, intuitive understanding of the fact that with enough raw emotion, you can transmute literal events into symbols and back again.1 So the question of whether this is “really happening” is irrelevant, what it is, is Healer Girl‘s case for itself. A definitive answer to the question of whether these twelve weeks have been worth it.

During this fantastical, mesmerizing ending sequence, any lingering doubt vanishes like shadows against the morning Sun. Healer Girl takes its final showman’s bow, and it exits, as suddenly as it arrived.

If you feel it, it’ll heal you. That’s all there is to it.

Song Count: In episode 11, just one, but they sing it four times, only completing it on the fourth. In episode 12, three in total, all of which are wonderful in their own way. If you’ve liked the show’s songs and have more money than I do, consider buying the soundtrack or official vocal album.

1: Incidentally, Hibiki Tachibana would make a great healer. And the girls from this show would probably be pretty good Gear-wielders as well. There’s a free idea for the four of you who read this site but also write fanfiction.

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

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

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Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 10 – Halloween • Masquerade • Butterfly!

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

This week, Healer Girl goes Halloween. Yes, it’s time for the fall festival at the clinic, and must of this episode’s real estate is taken up by charming slice-of-life scenes. The girls planning a Halloween event for the clinic, shopping for treats to give away, etc. But it’s also an episode about Hibiki, the first to center on the white-haired healer since episode five.

We also get the very important sight of Baby Hibiki.

This episode paints her as someone plagued with chronic self-doubt, something that’s been broadly alluded to a handful of times but hasn’t really been explored until now. The episode is fairly nonlinear; we cut back and forth several times to Hibiki’s childhood as well as her first day leaving for Tokyo to study to be a Healer. The episode also dives into her own bad habit of comparing herself to Ria, whom she often feels as though she falls short in comparison to.

The Halloween party itself ends up being a huge hit, of course, but there’s a notable bit where Ria seemingly has to intervene because the song the girls are singing is just that powerful. It’s not spelled out explicitly, but it does seem to imply that the whole “image song” technique can potentially be deleterious somehow. That this is snuck into an otherwise pretty unassuming episode is fascinating and is another example of Healer Girl‘s clever repurposing of typical slice-of-life tropes. (Alternately; I’m reading too far into it and it’s just a nice episode in which not a ton of importance happens. That’s fine too.)

But! After the credits roll, we get an interesting little conversation between Ria and her assistant / probably-wife. It’s cryptic; full of mention that the girls need to learn proper “control,” and that “time is limited,” and that soon Ria’s own “time will come.” What any of this means is deliberately left opaque; we’re an outside party looking in for this conversation, and these are simply mysteries to be solved in the two weeks that remain of the show’s run.

Until then, anime fans.

Song Count: 3, making this one of Healer Girl‘s more musically dense episodes. I’m particularly fond of the third song.

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

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

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Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 9 – The Best Guarantee • Buy the CD

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

As I continue to struggle with getting things sorted out in my life (and consequently, on this blog as well), I’m blessed with an episode of Healer Girl built around a central visual showpiece, which makes writing about it pretty straightforward. Hooray for small miracles! Even if you’re probably still only seeing this at least a few days after the episode airs.

Episode 9 is, in a way, what the whole main “plot” of the series—in as much as Healer Girl has such a thing—has been building toward. The girls and their mentor aiding in a successful, full operation. You might note that this is in some ways an echo of episode 4’s central conceit. You’re right about that, but the tones and focuses could not be more different. Episode 4 established the limits of vocal medicine, and we nearly saw someone die. Episode 9 is more or less its total opposite; this is what the technique can accomplish at its best. (And of course, it further cements Healer Girl‘s central themes of connection, and music as a balm for the world’s woes.)

The patient is Ria’s onetime mentor, since we here learn that she was a traditional medical student before switching track to vocal medicine. The surgeon in question, interestingly, also has a connection to Kana; he prescribed her an inhaler for her asthma when she was very young, leading to her wanting to be involved with medicine in the first place. In this way, the episode neatly ties together three generations of medical professional. It also helps the episode feel a bit more meaningful than if it were just Some Guy.

The operation itself forms the episode’s centerpiece. Here, we get to see Ria work her magic for the first time, and it’s pretty damn impressive. Lasting for a solid six minutes, it is the longest “image sequence” in the show so far, and serves as a fitting launchpad as Healer Girl transitions into its final stretch.

More than that though, it’s fascinating how the sequence manages to convey so much without ever using actual dialogue. We know from earlier in the episode that the patient has some pretty serious problems; polyps on his intestines, chiefly, a very real and very unpleasant medical issue. Thus, when we see Ria flying her students down into a massive valley and removing alien-looking growths from the stone with the power of song, we know what those are and what’s going on. Nothing is said because nothing needs to be.

The images, it’s clear by now, allow the healers to enact physical change by manipulating visual metaphor, which is itself born from their songs. This is, in a less literal sense, exactly what music does to us in the real world; it can cause real, present changes in our mood and even our outlook on life by working with abstract, non-real material. Healer Girl‘s image sequences are, thus, a longform metaphor for the impact of music (and more broadly, all art) itself, a neat little thematic mobius strip that suits the series’ ambitious but low-key nature perfectly. Art that contemplates the nature and impact of art itself can seem indulgent or even pretentious, but Healer Girl never gets anywhere close to that. If it’s self-impressed, it’s only minorly so, and with good reason.

On a more literal level it is also worth noting the character development on display here. While they’re worried before the procedure starts, none of the girls freak out or lose confidence in the middle of the operation like they did back in episode 4. They’ve gone from total novices to having some real experience under their belt, and indeed this episode is iyashikei-esque in its lack of any real danger. Most everybody thinks everything will go fine, and it does, in lovely-soothing technicolor splendor.

There are also a few jokes scattered throughout, which is key to keeping the episode from feeling self-serious. At one point early on the patient jokes that he only got sick so he could hear Ria sing, to which she rebuts that he should just buy one of her CDs. (This exchange raises SO many questions about the world of Healer Girl that I’m well aware the anime has zero interest in answering.) And another early scene where Ria assures all of her students that they’ll do fine while giving them big, gentle hugs. Yes, including Reimi. She damn near dies in the process.

There’s also an absolutely adorable Zoom call between our main characters in the episode’s post-credits, where among other things, the girls discuss Hibiki’s collection of wrestling manga. This all puts a very cute bow on what is overall one of the show’s strongest episodes.

Song Count: Just one, but at a full six minutes, saying that feels unfair. There are also a few pieces of non-diegetic vocal music throughout, so you can raise the count a few if you want to include those.

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

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

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Some Very Brief Thoughts on Episode 8 of HEALER GIRL

Spoilers Below

I would love to talk at length about today’s Healer Girl episode, but frankly, I simply don’t have the time or mental energy. I encourage you to watch the episode, it’s great. I mostly just wanted to take a brief moment to reflect on the melancholic nature of the story here, where Reimi has to part with her maid / surrogate older sister / only person who believed in her dream of becoming a healer, Aoi (Yumiri Hanamori), as she leaves Japan to pursue a career as a pianist.

I could talk about the imagery for this week’s song. How Aoi’s piano becomes a cage, a brick road for her to walk on, and film strips replaying happy memories all at once until eventually, the piano prodigy-maid sprouts fucking angel wings.

I could talk about Reimi’s heavy emotional reaction when Aoi finally does leave; how both she and her now-former maid are crying as the episode smashes to its end credits. There’s also the, admittedly, a little contrived, but also genuinely sweet post-credits scene where circumstances make themselves such that Aoi can resume living with Reimi and continue to pursue her piano playing.

But ultimately all of these are variations on a simple core point; the reason people love Healer Girl—or really any anime for that matter—is because they see part of themselves in it. I doubt many people reading this have ever had a maid, but almost everyone has experienced someone leaving their lives for one reason or another, simply because of circumstance. Two paths diverge in a wood. It’s classic stuff. I’m not totally settled how I feel about the ending yet. As I said, I find it a little contrived, but it’s also heartwarming. It’s hard to be too upset when something ends ‘too perfectly’ in this sort of show, I feel. In the end, “dreams” are the theme the show returns to here, and it’s always something I’ve found fascinating about popular art. I never really had “dreams” growing up, or if I did I, do not remember them. Did you? Did you have an Aoi in your life?

In any case, I’ve probably said too much already. I must be going. Until the next revolution of the record we call life, friends.

Song Count: 2.

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

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

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Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 7 – A Culture Festival Full of Surprises

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

And we’re back. Let’s celebrate with Cat Maid Kana.

Lovely.

This week’s episode of Healer Girl is a straightforward one. The high school festival episode is a classic format for anime like this, and it’s no real surprise that Healer Girl can knock one out of the park with minimal effort. We open with the class cafe` that prompts Cat Maid Kana up there, and some cute little gags about how the class spent so much time on the costumes that they had to go with pre-bought stuff for the food and drinks. But hey, no one goes to these things expecting 5-star dining. (If you do, you’re a monster, just FYI.)

The real focus point of the episode picks up about halfway through, where the student council president informs our leads—all of whom are accompanying an overfed Sonia to the nurse’s office—that there’s a gap in the festival schedule. You see, usually the school calls in a surprise performance by a band or something of the like. This year, the band actually got in a car accident, and while the band themselves are fine, their equipment is busted. The student council president is in a tizzy about this, but gets the bright idea that since the girls are all healer apprentices, they should perform as a rock band instead. Sonia, ever self-aggrandizing, agrees to it even in her hobbled, ate-too-much state. (Despite having to cede lead vocals to Kana because of this, which to be fair, she does willingly and of her own accord.)

The “high school rock band performance” is an old anime trope. To me, nothing will ever top the way it was done in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, with J-Rock band ZONE knocking out otaku classic “God Knows” in the process. (And in 2010, Angel Beats! seemed to have doused that particular fire for good with its showstopping third episode, “My Song,” where such a performance marks the first major emotional moment of the series.) Healer Girl‘s take doesn’t match either of those, but those are all-time great anime episodes, so that’s not really a serious knock. Frankly, I’m just happy to see one again.

The lead-up here is a pretty hilarious scene where Kana just conks out after practicing the song for the first time. Exhaustion is no joke, but her bandmates letting her sleep until nearly the very moment they have to go on stage very much is, and it provides an amusing lead-in to the episode’s emotional climax.

The girls’ performance, even all I’ve said aside, gives us another of the series’ trademark free-flowing image-spaces. I will never be unhappy to get one of these, and they are almost always the high points of the show’s episodes. The music here is a lot slower and dreamier than “God Knows”, but it accordingly fits with the Healer Girls’ style in a way that a more uptempo track might not. It’s heavier than their normal material but not in a way that seems out of their ability, and the vocal trade-offs here are pretty astounding.

(This is the first episode since the one where somebody almost died that we’ve gotten to hear the girls sing all at once, I believe. And it’s definitely the first time Sonia has joined them.) There’s also a cute trick at the end where they perform an “encore,” the opening percussion of which immediately smash cuts into the ED.

“A Culture Festival Full of Surprises” may stand as one of Healer Girl‘s less essential episodes. Certainly it’s not as much so as episode 4 or episode 5. But if that’s so, it’s certainly not a bad thing. Sometimes it’s just nice to see the band play.

Song Count: Just one, but as in episode 4, quality makes up for lack of quantity.

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

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

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Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 6 – Become My Servant! Russian Food and Sweet Dreams

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

This week, Healer Girl returns to a marginally more mundane setting. Specifically; Sonia’s clinic. Much of the episode serves as a small spotlight shone upon the hitherto minor character. I’ve never disliked Sonia—her “antagonism” is extremely minor and cartoony—but it’s nice that she gets an episode to shine regardless. Haughtiness is fun, in the right hands, and Sonia’s are well-equipped to handle it.

The episode’s forehalf showcases Ria’s apprentices helping out around Sonia’s grandmother’s clinic. You may recall that Sonia has something of a self-proclaimed rivalry with Ria, but their help is at her grandmother’s insistence. (She’s bedridden dealing with backpain, you see. Which also serves as yet another small reminder that even in this world, there are limits to what medicine can do.)

Sonia is extremely haughty throughout, even as Kana tries to help despite her palpable exasperation with the white-haired healer’s antics and Reimi nerds out over the clinic’s massive archive of vintage sheet music. The entire opening half here is very charming, and caps with Sonia showing off her healer chops by singing away a burn on a young boy’s arm with almost no prep time beforehand. (That second thing being impressive is new information to us, I think, but given that the only other healer we’ve seen do much work is Kana, who is also a prodigy, it makes some sense that we didn’t know before now.)

The second half of the episode sees Sonia rope Kana into all kinds of silly bullshit. First, she drafts her into the “executive committee” of her high school’s culture festival. Then, she abuses the power she has in that position to create a “Russian Cooking Club” out of thin air and fill out the paper work letting them set up a stand at said festival. Why do this? Because she met some random little kids who wanted to eat Borscht and she promised she’d make them some sometime. It’s exceedingly random, but it mostly works as far as goofy school life antics go.

We meet a few of Kana’s classmates here too, although none get much characterization beyond their constituting the Local Kana Fanklub (which she deserves. She’s a good protagonist.)

It also manages to sneak the ancient “people who are incompetent at cooking accidentally create the weird purple muck that Grimace from McDonald’s is made out of” gag in there. It’s old hat by now but this is at least a well-executed take on the joke.

Kana manages to run herself pretty ragged while doing all this, so the episode’s last major scene is also its insert song. Sonia, adorably, soothes Kana as she sleeps. My personal guess is that the right song-medicine can make sleep more restful, turning even short naps into a viable way to recharge your batteries? It’s not spelled out to us here, but the general idea is clear. It’s also illustrative of the fact that just below her somewhat arrogant surface, Sonia is a real sweetheart, too.

At the end of the episode we’re treated to a small post-credits scene. There, a nondescript fellow (one of the very few on-screen boys in Healer Girl at all) rushes into what is presumably the high school’s student council. He declares an emergency; a huge gap in the culture festival’s schedule! And on that fun little cliffhanger, the episode comes to a close. Perhaps hinting at a full-on concert next week? I wouldn’t put it past Healer Girl. The show remains, even in minor moments, as pleasant as lemonade in July.

Song Count: Two, both sung by Sonia. There are a few ditties consisting of a couple bars each throughout, as well, although in general this is one of the least musically-dense Healer Girl episodes.

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

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

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Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 5 – Blue Skies, Green Mountains, River Battles and the Galactic Station

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

“The light of drifting stars fills the sky.”

The fact is, it’s actually pretty easy to review something bad. Reviewing something that’s mediocre isn’t that hard either; line up its strengths and weaknesses, weigh them and determine if, at least for you, the former outweigh the latter. The real challenge is writing about something great.

And that is part of why this particular Healer Girl recap comes to you a day (possibly multiple days) late. That and a combination of truly fearsome writer’s block. If this column seems a bit less coherent than usual, I do apologize. It’s not in my general nature to “break the fourth wall” during these columns, but sometimes explanations are in order.

In any case, the actual plot of this episode is so simple that it almost doesn’t bear summarizing. Our main trio visit Hibiki’s family in the countryside. There, we learn a bit about her and her family, and a bit about Kana as well. One of Hibiki’s many younger brothers develops a precocious crush on Reimi, which is cute.

We also get an elaboration on the event that made Kana want to become a healer in the first place. When she was young, she had an asthma attack on a plane, and without an inhaler on hand, was in serious trouble. A mysterious healer, who she has been looking for since then, soothed her, thus setting her on the path to becoming a healer.

We find out almost immediately that this mysterious healer is, in fact, the girls’ teacher, Ria, who has just apparently not heard this story before. There’re a few details that don’t entirely line up about this, and I’m not sure if that’s the show trying to deliberately evoke the faulty memory of young children or if they’ll come back to that later. Either way, the reveal is humorously anticlimactic.

After all that, the episode’s real point makes itself known. It’s always been fascinating to me that so much human art is dedicated to depicting the natural world. By all rights, it’s something almost all of us are at least passingly familiar with; it’s the world out our window, or at most, a drive away. Why is it then that we spend so much time writing about waterfalls, so to speak? Why are we so fascinated with the motion of water and the little skipping and wriggling things that live in it? The girls swim in a small river, and I am reminded of my own times doing the same, visiting my father’s parents in the Pocono Mountains. These were not the happiest times for me, but they were simple, maybe that is why a tug that is something like nostalgia pulls at my heartstrings even so.

After the river scene, the girls trek toward a split-apart stone monument that reaches into the sky like the hand of a lost god. By the time they arrive, singing all the while, day’s become night.

The episode’s visual and emotional crux is a pair of landscape shots; the Milky Way rising into the sky like a plume of neon smoke. Later, the constellations that the fireflies within a cave play out on its ceiling and hovering in its air serve as a reprise. They are sights simultaneously familiar and obscure to me; even in my years living in rural Pennsylvania, there was simply too much light pollution for me to ever see that many stars. The night has always been black for me. Not so for Healer Girl, whose devotion to the natural world ranks up there with among the all-time best of its medium; Ghibli films, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou, Kamichu!

But the sky’s vastness and beauty shouldn’t obfuscate something else important. The Night on the Galactic Railroad namecheck, brought up explicitly in conversation, is what gives this episode its title. And it is casual, but not careless. Galactic Railroad, one of the seminal works of modern Japanese literature—which was, in 1985, transmuted into one of the most stunningly beautiful films ever made—is ultimately a story about death. Recall that only a week ago we saw a man nearly die on the operating table. This week Kana relays her own brush with ill health. Are these allusions a gesture toward the flip side of the show’s very premise—those whom medicine, no matter how fantastical, cannot save—or something else? Or “just” a reminder of the circle of being? All that begins ends, and dust begets dust, and the big wheel keeps on turning?

All this from a pseudo-beach episode that is also very much about how pleasant a trip to the countryside can be may seem like a stretch, but Healer Girl can juggle all these thoughts and emotions effortlessly. Healer Girl feels a lot like Kana herself, able to pull others into its own little world with a prodigal effortlessness. (Another thing we learn this episode, but one which is only dwelt on briefly.)

For precisely these reasons, it is one of the best things airing right now. Nothing else right now makes me feel this strongly or feel this much. I am happy that it exists.

Song Count: Just one for this episode, as the girls and Hibiki’s family are hiking up the mountain.

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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, 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 HEALER GIRL Episode 4 – First Steps, Horror, and a First Job!

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

Today on Healer Girl: someone almost dies on an operating table!

Yes, really!

I can’t pretend this is an entirely unexpected turn for the show. It’s been fairly clear from the jump that the practices of “vocal medicine” and, you know, normal medicine are well entwined. On its own, then, it’s not strange that Healer Girl would eventually involve someone doing Actual Serious Surgery in an Actual Hospital Setting. But I am surprised that the show went there this early. The girls have just acquired their assistant’s licenses, as they remind us at the top of this episode with Kana’s amusing bragging.

Putting them in a medical setting this dire seems like skipping a step. Especially, since, as the first part of the episode hilariously demonstrates, none of them are even really used to seeing blood. (They end up “training” by watching a bunch of splatter horror flicks, an idea that strains credulity. It’s very funny to watch them freak out, though, so I’ll let the show have this one.)

Plus, on the other hand, the girls are not doing the surgery. (Thankfully.) Instead, our heroes’ assignment here is to provide live music during a surgery, with the idea being that it calms down the surgeon and assistants and helps them focus. Healer Girl has mostly been pretty good about not pitting its own fantastical branch of medicine against the mundane thing so far, so this arrangement is smart on that front, as well.

Not that everyone feels that way. Ria is fine with it. Shouko, her assistant, is fine with it. And of course, our protagonists Kana, Reimi, and Hibiki are all (eventually) fine with it. But one person who isn’t is the actual operating surgeon. Not because of any “this isn’t real medicine” ideological conflict—something I have to admit I became worried about when the character was introduced—but simply because this is his first surgery, too, and he thinks his skills are being belittled.

Despite his distaste, he goes along with it. (The person in charge of his department favors experimenting with live music in a surgical setting and is an old college classmate of Ria and Shouko’s, so really, he’s outnumbered and outranked.) And for a while, it seems like everything is basically fine. The girls sing in shifts, with each of them ducking out and letting the other carry the tune for a while to rest their voices and get some water at set intervals.

Then, just as he’s about to finish up, the surgeon notices that the issue with the patient is far more widespread than initially realized, and they need to do more than they initially planned. This goes badly. As in, “shots of the heart rate monitor going down and one of the nurses yelling ‘he’s critical!'” badly. In keeping with how we’ve seen this work before, the girls’ song-environment promptly falls to pieces under the stress, all three of them are shaken. But crucially they don’t actually panic. Instead, Reimi pulls Kana back in to the song with what might be my favorite two-line exchange of the whole season so far.

Healer Girl really loves imagery of ground and earth being knit back together after a cataclysm, this is the second of these “song spaces” to invoke that particular visual trope, and it looks even better here than it did two episodes ago when Ria comforted a pregnant woman. Angels fly from the skies and return everything to a serene—and slightly surreal—calm.

In terms of the actual surgery, a more experienced doctor intervenes and fixes the patient up. Crisis averted; everything is fine.

The girls take the well-earned time to bask in a job well done, and Ria is relieved that she didn’t actually have to intervene, praising the girls for their good judgment and level heads. The grumpy doctor, if you were wondering, does eventually thank the girls for their services, though only in a rather brusque and abrupt way. (You ever stepped in front of someone’s car while they’re pulling out of a parking lot? Not the best idea, usually.)

More importantly, back home, the girls text each other in the episode’s epilogue. Kana thanks Reimi for encouraging her. It’s a cute, warm end to another casually dazzling episode. How does Healer Girl make it look so easy?

Song Count: Just one, technically, this time around, but what a song it is.

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

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