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.
If you’re out of the Virtual Youtuber loop, it is probably difficult to comprehend what went on with Kizuna AI. I am, myself, only marginally invested in the medium these days, so I will disclose right off the top that I’m no expert. But I am something of a fiend for entertainment industry stories, and AI has a pretty great one. By most counts, she was the person who actually coined the term “Virtual Youtuber,” and later its abbreviation VTuber.
So you can thank / blame her, in at least some sense, for all those 3D-rigged anime girls taking over your Twitter timeline over the past half-decade. She is, in a way, her medium’s Elvis Presley. She didn’t invent the whole thing by any means, but she was among the first to take it mainstream, and that popularity has endured globally even as she’s gained real competition in the form of later arrivals, like the vast rosters of the Hololive or Nijisanji agencies. (She was, to provide some sense of numerical scale, the second VTuber to reach the 3,000,000 subscribers milestone. The only VTuber who beat her to that mark was Hololive EN’s sharkgirl star Gawr Gura. Gura has quite the story in her own right, but that’s a shark tale for another time.)
The history of her actual presence on Youtube (and the internet more generally) is odd and full of twists; from her channel relaunching with multiple Kizuna AIs all voiced by different people, her rig-actress Kasuga Nozomi becoming one of the few people of her stature to ever publicly admit to voicing their associated VTuber and gaining some creative control over the character, and so on, she’s had quite the ride, culminating in a semi-retirement—an “indefinite hiatus”—early last year.
All of that context is important because without knowing who Kizuna AI is and what she did, you can’t really know what Kizuna no Allele is trying to do. She’s the first character we see on-screen, not traditionally animated but in a reality show-esque confession cam segment where she enthuses about the fictional Lapin d’Or award, which she’s just won, and the series opens with a full-on music video by her. She is not the main character of this story, but she is an important, looming background presence. She is also, we find out from another confession cam segment from a different character, missing. Virtual Youtubing’s first great star has vanished.
At first, all of this seems like it might be only marginally relevant. The real star of our story here is Miracle (Ayumi Hinohara), herself an aspiring Virtual Youtuber, attending an academy(!) for the same, and with big dreams of one day measuring up to her idol—I’m sure you can guess who that is—despite being, at present, a total unknown. It is, basically, a pretty standard idol anime plot with the word “idol” swapped out for “VTuber.” Some of the specifics are a little unusual, but for a minute, this seems to be walking a tried-and-true route. Hell, the protagonists even do a variant on the Liella “throwing a star shape with their hands” thing in the OP.
It quickly becomes clear though that if this is trying to be a “normal” idol anime with just some different seasoning than the norm, it’s only doing a so-so job of it. Throughout the first episode, the entire series demonstrates a spacey, loopy energy that doesn’t really mesh well with those sorts of narrative goals. Miracle is a decent protagonist in theory, but she seems to spend more time talking about Kizuna AI than she does about herself, and it makes her feel more like a fan of VTubers than an aspiring one. Speaking from personal experience; there is a huge difference, and because so much of an idol anime’s success hinges on we, the audience, being able to “buy in” to these characters and their ambitions, the fact that I found myself bouncing pretty hard off of Miracle this early on is a bad sign. There is also a particularly odd aside where she gets lost in a greenhouse on her way to class and has tea with a character we haven’t really been properly introduced to yet. What that is about is anyone’s guess.
And then there’s the class itself; a dry, all-talking affair where we’re yet again doled out exposition about Kizuna AI as she lived her life in this fictional setting. (She won the Lapin d’Or award five years in a row, which is certainly impressive in-context, but feels so much less interesting than the actual story of the real person. The series also goes with the conceit that Kizuna actually is an artificial intelligence, which has always been her character gimmick as a VTuber, but for some reason not even making a token acknowledgement that there was a real person involved irks me. But, to be fair, this might become a plot point later on.) We’re also told about (but not introduced to) her counterpart Ada, who has won several years since AI disappeared, and who several of the students in this VTubing class vocally express a preference for. Clearly, this is our heel, although the fact that it’s directly pointed out that she only appeared in the years following AI’s disappearance makes me wonder if she isn’t just Kizuna AI herself under a new name and rig. (Consequently, I wouldn’t be too shocked if the entire anime was a promotional vehicle for exactly that.)
The real disappointment here though is Miracle’s performance for the class. The notion of shooting these performances in a similar rigged 3D CGI fashion as the one in the opening is solid, but they do need to actually be good. Unfortunately, despite the show attempting to sell it as a big moment, Miracle’s performance in this episode is incredibly lackluster, with passable but dispassionate singing and weak choreography. The song itself is fine, but she has no real charisma with which to sell it, and compared to Kizuna AI’s performance at the top of the episode, it’s just a colossal letdown. Bizarrely, when Miracle reappears in a post-credits sequence to wave us off for the week, she seems much more chipper, and consequently, much more interesting to watch, if only for those 30 or so seconds. It’s strange that she has a kind of upbeat charm there that’s missing from the actual show. Perhaps it can be pinned on the fact that this is Ayumi Hinohara’s first anime role, but the writing doesn’t give her much to work with either. If she could somehow bridge the gap between who she is in the actual anime and who she is in that closing segment, the series might become properly worth watching.
Even then, there are a few more interesting moments before the first episode closes. After her performance, which most of the class hails as Super Impressive, Miracle gets overconfident and shoots a collab request to one of her classmates that she admires, only to get turned down near-instantly with a literal big fat “NO.” There isn’t a ton of humor in Kizuna no Allele, but what little there is is effectively deployed.
Then there’s the utterly confounding final scene, where Miracle comforts herself by watching the Kizuna AI video from the start of the episode, only to have a voice in her head—who might actually be AI? It’s not clear—speak to her and deploy a shining portal, which she then steps through to find….a mostly empty grassy field with a little virtual avatar of a green baby taking a nap. It’s very odd, the kind of oddness that it’s hard to do on purpose. That sense of lackadaisical WTF-ery might be what saves Kizuna no Allele, since the chops to be engaging as an idol series just aren’t there yet. Who can say? This is a strange one.
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