Tag: im@s

Posted on in anime, Reviews

Review: THE IDOLMASTER (2011)

“I believe in everyone!”

In the grand scheme of things, the 2010s are only just over. In every artform, at every level of discourse, there are discussions to be had and evaluations to be made. What defined the New ’10s, now that they’re in the rear view? Perhaps more importantly, what deserves to be taken into the future? 2011’s The Idolm@ster turns ten next year, but it remains the gold standard by which nearly every other idol anime since has been judged. If it’s not the best idol anime, it can feel, especially at its heights, like the only one that truly matters.

The first interesting thing about Idolm@ster is how unselfconsciously normal it is. This is an idol anime with zero gimmicks, perhaps simply due to being from a time where you just didn’t need one. (Being adapted from an already-popular IP probably helped too.) Instead you have a large cast of characters, a shared dream of stardom among them, and some snappy sugary J-pop to soundtrack it all.

Despite these simple and few ingredients (and the aforementioned size of the cast), Idolm@ster never really feels like a marketing tool, even though on some level it is. The earnest, unfiltered look into the lives of twelve girls who are, at the start of the show, working-class entertainers conveys a kind of honesty more associated with rock documentaries than it is the idol industry.

This is not to say that The Idolm@ster is realistic–that would be absurd. Rather, it has a kind of focused idealism. The Idolm@ster does not depict so much the realities of becoming an idol (though they’re an influence on it), but rather the dream of becoming one. The series imagines a world where the truism that hard work and dedication can lead even the most humble of person to fame and fortune is not just true, but provable. This is an important distinction, because for all the mundanities it does depict, especially in its forehalf, The Idolm@ster is interested less in being about idols than it is being about people who want to become idols. It is a series, at its best moments, of character study, which elevates it above idol anime that come off as simply trying to sell something.

In an impressive feat of economy, over its 24 episodes nearly every member of its cast (including a few who aren’t members of the core 765 Pro group) gets at least one focus episode, a few get full-blown arcs. Chihaya’s, where she comes to terms with the death of her brother and learns to sing for herself, is probably the best, but several others are also very strong. This includes Haruka’s, also something of a broad-reaching arc for the group itself, which concludes the series. Not all of them quite get the screentime–or the consideration–they deserve, and The Idolm@ster‘s few flaws are always somehow tied to this. Makoto’s abbreviated story never reaches any satisfying conclusion; the gap between the masculine way she is sold to her audience and the feminine way she wants to actually present herself is never properly addressed, and it is the series’ sole serious misstep.

Importantly though not a single character feels like anything less than a fully-fledged person. Even those with somewhat silly personalities (such as Hibiki and her affinity for animals) have layers to them, and the show is keen to show off its writing in this regard. Haruka’s aforementioned show-concluding arc takes a sledgehammer to her surface personality as a hardworking ‘good girl’, only to build it back up with a healthy dose of magical realism (present in a few of the show’s strongest moments) in the penultimate episode.

But of course, as with everything, technique is only as valuable as the resonance it creates. The thing with The Idolm@ster is that even though, statistically speaking, most people watching it are not, and will never be, idols, it is shockingly easy to relate to what these girls go through. I suspect what connects with whom varies somewhat, but, going back to that character writing; every character’s motivation is simple, concrete, and dead-easy to get your head around. That means that when you see them struggle, you can put yourself in their shoes.

I love, for instance, Zombieland Saga, but most people are not (say) undead biker-delinquents, and struggles that stem from being one require a lot more levels of abstraction to really hit the audience in the heart. By contrast, and to return to my earlier examples, things like Haruka’s fear that her friend group is drifting apart, Mikki’s simple desire to be the center of attention, and Chihaya’s near-compulsive need to keep singing are all things that will touch different kinds of people in a very immediate and personal way. I write about anime because I love doing it, and I often find myself internally debating whether or not doing it just because of that is okay. Chihaya sings, as she eventually comes to terms with, because she loves doing it, and struggles with whether or not that’s okay. We are, by any reasonable metric, vastly different people, but The Idolm@ster‘s strength of craft is such that I can see myself in someone who is fundamentally very little like me because when she bares her soul at the climax of her focus arc, belting out “Nemuri Hime” acapella, I feel it in mine. What is art even for, if not that?

And that, ultimately, is what I intend to reflect here. This is a show that gets it. The appeal of a lot of anime is that everyone, fundamentally, can sometimes use a glimpse of a world where pop music or some other silly thing really can save your soul, and getting there requires a deft touch and a subtle command of high emotion. And Idolm@ster is very emotional indeed.

So, nearly ten years later, it feels safe to say that we can–and should–bring it with us into the ’20s and beyond. This is the one almost every idol anime since is still vigorously copying notes off of, and it’s easy to see why. Something this focused on looking forward could only age amazingly. “Onward to a sparkling future”, as one of the show’s many songs would put it. Are you ready?

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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 owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

to pick up the pen and sing again – Another Late Night “Idolm@ster” Ramble

A common, but under-examined aspect of the human experience is paralysis. The feeling of “I can’t do that.” The inability to move on, the shock of freshly re-opened trauma, the crushing mundanity and idleness of simple insecurity.

I recently lost part of my primary writing tool. This, coming off a rather difficult week of responses (sometimes disingenuous, sometimes genuine) to a certain piece and broken air conditioners in the midst of a heatwave, has not made for a productive, fun, or at times even tolerable writing environment, and I have felt quite drained.

As a counterbalance, I am trying to indulge my spur of the moment flashes of inspiration more. So I feel like it may be, if not productive perhaps, at least interesting and fun for me (and what should my writing be if not those things?) to look at something that has helped me overcome that drained-ness.

Which brings us to The Idolm@ster. The 2011 anime has been something of a constant background presence in my life over the past year. I have been working through it very slowly despite its short length. Not out of a lack of enjoyment but just as a mundane consequence of juggling other obligations. On some level though, perhaps I don’t want my time with these characters to end.

One of those characters is Chihaya Kisaragi, a personal favorite, and the focus of this piece. Chihaya has an interesting air about her that I’ve found fascinating since I started the show. I’ve talked recently about my love of outwardly-cool female characters who carry within them a deep, almost elemental sorrow. But I’ve struggled to articulate why I find the character archetype so compelling. I think episode 20, which is about Chihaya, has given me at least part of the answer. (Full disclosure! It’s actually as far as I’ve watched. I will feel a little silly if I post this and then episode 21 completely tops it, but hey, that’s the risk you run.)

The plot is fairly simple and I’ll summarize it here briefly for the benefit of the reader. The unscrupulous president of 765’s rival company 961 gets a hold of and leaks information about Chihaya’s past. Namely, that she had a younger brother who died when she was a child. The tabloid article’s writer near-explicitly blames Chihaya for her brother’s death, reopening an old rift between the idol and her parents and causing her to choke when she tries to sing. To greatly simplify (and rob the episode of its emotional impact, which is a borderline crime. The perils of criticism!) she is eventually coaxed back onto the stage by the pleas of her fellow idols, and by her own recognition that she sings as much for herself as she does for the spirit of her late brother or for anyone else. And furthermore, her realization that that is okay.

I do not, in any way, mean to compare the magnitude of my problems and Chihaya’s, but what this episode really drove home for me is that what I love about these characters is that they persevere. Our traumas change us, but what characters like this seem to say is “Yes, that may be so, but they do not destroy us.” As someone who is pretty deeply insecure about….well, everything, I admire that level of weathered strength. I do not envy it–those are two different things–but there is something genuinely inspiring about seeing someone who took such a rough, malicious public beating stand back up and continue her life’s work not because she has anything to prove to anyone but because she wants to.

There’s a deep confidence to it, but more importantly, a luminous joy. One hammered home by the wonderful magical realism present in the episode’s final moments. Her dignity and her passion are never in question. What Chihaya may realize is that ultimately; no struggle can keep a singer from her microphone forever. Her voice swells again, and the song plays on.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

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 owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Misc. Anime

765 Days Later: Late Night Idolm@ster Ramble

Finally, some actual original anime writing for my anime blog, eh? It’s nice to get into the swing of things of getting my ideas sorted without worrying too much about the formal aspect. So let’s cut to the chase.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been intermittently taking in turn-of-the-decade classic The Idolmaster in 2-4 episode chunks. I’m still only halfway through the series (I have episode 12, “Last Stop On A One-Way Road”, on pause as I write this, and will be finishing it before I write much of this post) but now felt like as good a time as any to jot down some thoughts on it.

For one thing, despite premiering only a year after Angel Beats! (a show that is on my mind solely because I recently watched it for the first time too), I’m struck by how sharply different they look. When I reviewed it in the waning days of last year, I was interested in how un-2010s AB! looked, and I remain convinced that, stylistically, it’s something of a capstone to the Haruhi Era. IM@S, by contrast, looks so 2010s that it seems like it could’ve come from almost any year of the decade. The main telltale sign that it’s an earlier, rather than later, period idol series is that the dance sequences are still hand-drawn, as opposed to defaulting to the CGI-aided approach that’d later become the norm. It does also occasionally suffer from spotty drawing quality, but, not everything can be perfect.

Idolmaster kind of gets sold by its diehards as “the one idol anime you have to see”, even if you don’t really like the genre (and speaking personally it’s kind of in the lower half for me, as far as anime genres that tend to have all- or mostly-female casts). I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect when I started it. I was confident it would at least be well-made, but that doesn’t of course guarantee that it’d vibe with me specifically. Especially since I’m not huge on the genre in general (though with Zombie Land Saga a few years ago and 22/7 this season I suppose that’s changing).

What genuinely surprised me, first and foremost, was how committed the show is to selling itself as an underdog story. 765 are not perfect queens who can do no wrong. There is no Beyonce and this is not Destiny’s Child. Both in the actual plot, and, to my surprise, the character writing especially, the series takes great pains to demonstrate that these are people. People who have their own hopes, dreams, and fears. And that “getting to the top”, glamorous as the idea might be, is both hard and sometimes kind of banal. One of the first episodes of this thing has our girls guest on a kind-of-demeaning local TV spot that is a cooking-themed gameshow hosted by a frog puppet. It’s not exactly glitzy.

I haven’t counted, but I’m reasonably certain that at least at the point of the show that I’m at, there are more scenes of our characters at practices and rehearsals than there are of them actually performing.

None of this is new ground for idol shows now, of course. I’m not sure how innovative the idea was in 2011, either. But it’s really the character writing aspect that makes all of this connect so well. Even the characters that at first seem like goofy one-note moe` archetypes eventually come into their own. Miki is the big example that comes to mind here. She’s introduced to us with no particular fanfare and for a while basically all we know about her is that she likes taking naps. If you’re the deep-reading type you might (correctly) intuit that she’s rather fickle, but not anything beyond that.

Episode 12 is mostly about Miki, after a misunderstanding where she mistakenly thought she’d be able to join sub-unit Ryuuguu Komachi, she skips out on practice for an upcoming concert and goes MIA. We learn more about Miki here than we have in the prior 11 episodes, and it’s a really strong example of how to do a lot of character-building in a very short time. We see what she does when she’s upset, things like spending time wandering around the city and ducking into and out of all sorts of shops.

Let she who has not stared longingly into a fish tank, wishing for the simple life of a betta, cast the first stone.

We see her reveling in attention she gets from what appears to be a group of model scouts, who she then briefly sings for.

Without explicitly spelling anything out, these sequences (which last maybe 15 minutes in total), convey that she’s a sort of “free spirit longing for an anchor” type. The show does cheat exactly once by explicitly giving us the cause of all this (parents who encourage her to do whatever she wants), but it’s still an impressively detailed character study to squeeze into a single half-hour episode. All the while, her fellow idols have to, in another case of the show being unexpectedly down to earth, seriously contemplate what might happen if she simply doesn’t return.

The Producer (who is himself surprisingly well-written given his role in the cast) does manage to convince her to come back, and the episode ends with a neat little bow of dialogue here:

Miki realizing what she really wants and acting on it is great, but it’d be meaningless without the buildup earlier in the episode. It’s quite a lot of heavy lifting done in just a short amount of time.

And all this is just for Miki, mind you. The show has slowly been building up similar stories with almost every other member of the cast.

I’ve found myself drawn to several different characters, honestly. Which is a great sign for something with this many. Some I expected to like–Takane’s weird sideways charisma and Chihaya’s stoicism, incredible singing voice (not to knock any of our other girls, but both in fiction and out, you do not really have to have an amazing voice to be a pop singer, you just have to know your instrument) and obvious, though so far largely unexplored, troubled past make them easy favorites. I also love Makoto despite her “cool girl who desperately wants to be seen as cute” card being a bit rote. Others, I was quite surprised by. I’ve really come to appreciate Haruka, who the OP seems to frame as the “main character” even if that’s kind of a silly concept with a cast this large. She has what is probably the simplest personality–she’s hardworking, kindhearted, and has always wanted to be an idol–but it’s just sold so well! Any time she’s upset or struggling I find it impossible not to root for her, I hope the show explores her character a bit more in its latter half.

There’s some other random details I really like too. On the obvious end, the fact that there’s so much music in each episode is just great. It’s not all entirely my thing (I like J-pop well enough but some of the songs in this series specifically lean a little too over on the twee side) but it does really make it feel at times like you’re watching some kind of narrative documentary about the group. On the more minor side, there’s lots of stuff big and small that goes in to making 765 feel like a bit of a ragtag operation, especially near the start of the show. Everything from long blocks of no gigs to the idols’ ages ranging pretty widely (the youngest two are 13, the oldest, 21). It’s not quite the indie idol anime I would love to watch some day–I find that particular subculture endlessly fascinating–but it feels earnest.

So yeah, that’s where I’m at with Idolmaster right now. I’m liking the show so far, I’m not sure if I’ll write about it again before I do my proper review, but either way, I hope you enjoyed this little ramble.

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