Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
This article’s header image comes from Insomniacs after school.
One consequence of a season being so packed is that I didn’t actually get to do a full writeup on everything I would’ve liked to cover. At this point, it’s impractical to do full columns on the eight other anime I started watching this season, so instead, here are some short mini-writeups, to give you at least a general idea of what I thought of them. Mostly, I think this season is pretty good! There are a couple exceptions, as you’ll see.
KONOSUBA: An Explosion on This Wonderful World! – I’ll be honest, 99% of the reason I didn’t cover this in full was because I don’t really know much of anything about the series it’s a spinoff of. Sure, I’m vaguely aware of KonoSuba, mostly in the form of heavily compressed meme images that kick around reddit, but that’s not exactly a fair impression of the show itself I’m guessing. In any case it doesn’t really matter, since Explosion is a prequel; the origin story of one Megumin the Witch, who seeks to become the master of the ill-regarded explosion magic. This is mostly a comedy, all told, and it’s one that’s more intermittently amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but if you dig fantasy settings and nicely-animated explosions (and who doesn’t?) this seems like a solid pickup to me.
Insomniacs after school – Now this is really just a lovely thing. A soft-hued midnight friendship between two actual chronic insomniacs who hit it off at school one day after running into each other while taking a nap in their school’s old observatory. As both a fellow person with a pretty serious sleeping disorder and someone who absolutely lives for lavish nocturnal scenery in my anime, this is an easy highlight of the season so far. (Honestly, there’s a touch of And Yet The Town Moves in here to me. A surprisingly relevant reference point this season, given that Heavenly Delusion is also airing.) Plus, the leads are really cute together. Enough so that when this takes its inevitable turn for the romantic, I’ll be cheering them on. Sidebar: between this and last year’s Call of The Night, the revamped Liden Films seem to be developing an incredibly specific niche for themselves. But if the shows keep looking this good, they have absolutely no reason to stop any time soon.
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury – I’ve been pretty open about why I don’t cover Gundam in more detail on this site. Somehow, I just feel underqualified. But the cold fog of betrayal that lingers over Witch From Mercury‘s first episode since its hiatus doesn’t need intellectualizing. More than anything, it demonstrates the space that’s grown between Suletta and Miorine. Hence the latter’s almost total absence from this episode until its epilogue. The two new characters—who aren’t really new at all, we met them at the end of the last cour—are steering things in a distinctly darker direction, and it’s not clear how long the façade that the school and its dueling system provides will last. It’s already creaking under the pressure; in Witch From Mercury‘s second season, we get to watch the cracks form.
Otaku Elf – Going by this first episode, this is a cute—if maybe a bit slight—magical realist goofball comedy anime, of a kind that used to be very common, went away for a while, and is now making something of a comeback. It’s a solid first showing, even if the core concept of a JRPG-style blonde elf taking up residence in a Shinto shrine (because she used to be friends with Tokugawa, even!) might strike some as a little strange. References to assorted geekery abound, bolstered by honest-to-god product placement in the form of a Redbull plug. In addition to all of the Otaku Humor™, there are some nice emotional beats, too. Enough to at least suggest that Otaku Elf has legs and isn’t purely a procession of gags with no further point. A decent one to keep an eye on, if you want a more lighthearted pickup this season.
THE MARGINAL SERVICE– Well, they can’t all be winners. We have here an almost impressively shitty action anime from the usually good to great Studio 3Hz. I don’t mean that in terms of its production values, which range from fine to exceptional over the course of its first episode. I’m talking about the writing, a hateful, vitriolic ouroboros of xenophobic rhetoric smeared twice over with two incongruous sets of storytelling tropes. One from American police procedurals and the other from tokusatsu team shows (and the latter really only shows up in the episode’s final few minutes). There’s the seed of a marginally (ha) interesting idea here, but it’s wrapped in so much “what if the phrase ‘illegal aliens’ referred to like actual space aliens” garbage that it’s impossible to disentangle from the problems. When we get into some primo anti-Semitic dogwhistles like our utter prick of a protagonist calling the episode’s villain of the week a “lizard bastard”, we’re well removed from my ability to evaluate anything “on its own terms.” I just can’t do that when the terms in question are clearly so awful. Oh, and it manages the impressively awful trick of introducing a named Black character and then killing him within its first sixty seconds. In some seasons, the “boring” is worse than the “bad.” This is not one of those cases, as this easily limbos below Kizuna no Allele for the season’s worst premiere by a massive lead.
Tokyo Mew Mew New, Season 2 – The kids’ magical girl pastiche that isn’t actually a kids’ show returns for round two. Honestly, there’s not a ton to say here. It’s more Tokyo Mew Mew New, following roughly the same contours as both its first season and (presumably) the original. New to its triumphant return are some minor plot twists and yet another potential love interest for Ichigo. That and some updated environmental talk make it at least worth watching if you’re a fan, but if you’re not already onboard the Tokyo Train, this is probably a skip for you. You’re not missing nothing, but you’re not missing too much, either.
TOO CUTE CRISIS – Picture the headlines! An alien assault on our planet stalled indefinitely, not by heroics or diplomacy but by the sheer overwhelming adorability of our planet’s animals. Yes, TOO CUTE CRISIS imagines a world where Earth’s cats and dogs are impossible, irresistibly adorable by intergalactic standards. For the most part, this is a zany comedy without much further thought to be gleaned from it, but not only are the protagonist’s gleeful freakouts over the cuteness of dogs and cats pretty relatable, they also give way to a few moments of actual sweetness. (Punctuated by more gags of course. Dig the orbital malnutrition beam she calls down to punish a jackass ex-cat owner that left his little guy in a box on the street.) Comedies like this tend to be overlooked, but for my money this is one of the season’s stronger premieres. It knows exactly what it wants to do, and it does it well.
World Dai Star – Contemporary ‘actor girl’ anime are barely plentiful enough to be called a genre. Yet, when I used that phrase, you almost certainly knew what I meant, given the existence of the likes of Kageki Shoujo (not to be confused with Revue Starlight) or, on the other end of the quality spectrum, CUE. There aren’t a ton of these things, but they’re distinctive. To most, what will jump out about World Dai Star isn’t its premise or writing but its hyper-detailed, almost uncanny character animations. This is a series that truly puts the “acting” in “character acting,” as it were. And that’s important, because after a very dry setup, the show abruptly springs to life as soon as we get to an actual stage. A glowering veteran actor plays a wicked witch and frightens most of the young auditioning aspirants off the stage, and our lead unexpectedly blossoms into competence by capturing and perfectly recreating her best friend’s take on the prince from The Little Mermaid. (Somehow, “can effortlessly copy anyone else’s performance but struggles to come up with her own takes on things” is a plot point that both this and Kageki Shoujo from a few years ago came up with independently. Unless this is simply copying that, which would be so outrageously meta that I almost hope it is true.) Props for having a lead that’s not a total amateur (even if she is annoyingly self-deprecative) and for the bizarre “Sense” talk that reminds me weirdly strongly of Revue Starlight‘s conceptualization of star power. Unfortunately, this and Kizuna no Allele form a duo that’s not unlikely to get totally buried by Oshi no Ko, which touches on some of this same subject matter in a very different way. For Allele, I couldn’t really care less, but Dai Star surely deserves at least a supporting role in the season.
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