Tag: Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club

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

Ranking Every 2022 Anime I Actually Finished from Worst to Best – Part 3

“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly, multi-part column where I rank every single anime I finished from a given year, from the very worst to the absolute best. Expect spoilers for all anime covered.

In some ways, this is the hardest part of the list to write. The stuff I liked pretty much without reservation, but which I still felt didn’t quite make the very top. But honestly, what else is there to say? At this point, you all know what you’re in for. Let’s get to the “solidly good to great” part of the list.

#17. The Case Study of Vanitas: Part 2

Remember 2022 as a banner year for the anime vampire. Two of the three shows on this list that involve them come primarily from the same hand, Tomoyuki Itamura, yet, they couldn’t be more different. 

The Case Study of Vanitas, which entered its second season back in January, is fundamentally a dark fantasy series. It’s tinged with romance, drama, and sly humor, but everything is filtered through the church glass that composes its specific brand of vampiric fantasia. 

Of course, the actual reason, so far as I can gather, that most people like Vanitas, is its shameless sensuality. Yes, this is probably the only thing on the list I’m going to outright praise for being horny, even as it ranks higher on the Problematic-o-Meter than most things I watch. Do you like men? Women? Both? Vanitas has a character or six for you to mercilessly simp for, and I do consider that something of a positive, if done in a way that makes emotional sense, as it does here. The vast reservoirs of easily-flustered bisexuals in the world are an untapped resource, some might say.

But on top of that, Vanitas’ second season also has a pretty compelling actual plot, featuring closed-off secluded worlds of snow, haunted by a twisted take on the already-spooky tale of the Beast of Gevaudan. The series’ gothic sensibility serves it well, here, as the sweetness that lightened up much of the first season turns decidedly sickly. (And even so, there’s still quite a lot of steaminess in the second season. Seriously, if you’re into that kind of thing you owe it to yourself to watch this.)

#16. ESTAB LIFE: Great Escape

If there’s a unifying thread for the anime of 2022, it might just be that a lot of them were really fucking weird. Novelty of premise is pretty easy to come by in anime, a medium that, moreso than many others, is pretty unashamed of its inherently pulp nature and will often race to the bottom to come up with the most bizarre thing possible to get more eyeballs on a project. Even so, Estab Life stands out for strangeness not just of premise but of execution. How many anime this year were both all-CG affairs and had an episode about the Penguin Stasi? As far as I know, Estab Life is the only one.

Sporting some strange mix of the traveler story genre, a droll-as-hell sense of humor, and decent action anime fundamentals, Estab Life surely stands out as one of the year’s most singular offerings, revolving as it does around a group of “extractors” whose job is to spirit away those unhappy with their lot in a bizarro future dystopia to one of the many other future dystopias—a collection of them now makes up what was once Japan. Even the stylistics and actual narrative aside, there simply aren’t too many anime with transgender yakuza magical girls and giant Facebook Like thumbs in them. But maybe you’re the sort who prioritizes character writing, in which case, I would point you to the fact that resident slime girl Martese is a curiously-compelling lesbian slime girl tomboy, team lead Equa is a quietly commanding presence, and even many of the show’s one-off characters are pretty interesting.

Estab Life is certainly not perfect (I am not huge on how Feres, my favorite of the main trio, is the one with by a fair shake the least amount of character development), but it’s compellingly weird and worth a watch. Incredibly, this strange little train hasn’t stopped rolling. We’re allegedly waiting on a mobile game, as well as a film with the tentative title Revenger’s Road. See you again soon, extractors?

#15. Do It Yourself!!

If the adage holds true that to build a city, one must start with a brick, surely the same is true for homes and the furniture that decorates them.

Thus, very broadly, is the premise of Do It Yourself!!, a gentle iyashikei—one of a few this year—about do-it-yourself crafts, mostly woodworking. The series is packed with enough goofy-pun character names that it might give you the impression that this is a slapstick of some sort. (The lead is named Yua Serufu, and her okay-they-don’t-say-they’re-in-love-but-they-pretty-obviously-are-at-least-crushing-on-each-other crush is a girl named Suride “Purin”, who attends a techy academy where she learns how to….3D print things. Goodness.) 

There is an element of that; Serufu herself is pretty dang clumsy, and her pratfalls are treated as amusing slipups more often than not, but DIY!!’s real core is about how making things for yourself is irreplaceable, not just as a skill but as a passion. It’d be easy for the show to swerve from there into a rote “technology bad” message, but it never really even approaches doing so, and there are even a few scenes that showcase synthesis of cutting-edge technology and traditional crafts.

Indeed, the focus is on that spirit of craftsmanship itself, apropos from another visual treat from the studio Pine Jam, whose strong central staff seem to have developed a habit of putting out a show that simply looks amazing about once a year. (Whether that show is any good otherwise is another question, see Gleipnir near the bottom of the 2020 list.) This is apropos too for the year that brought machine art to the public sphere of discourse. It’s a topic that is probably not going away any time soon, but DIY neatly sidesteps any similar question with its own answer; isn’t there plenty of joy to be found in the process of creation itself?

#14. My Master Has No Tail

Is Rakugo having a bit of a moment? Probably not, but My Master Has No Tail airing in the same year that brought us the unexpected Jump hit Akane-banashi made me think. The two aren’t really terribly similar, but they share a key piece of subject matter in the traditional Japanese comedic storytelling art.

Our protagonist, Mameda, is a tanuki infatuated with the art form, since inspiring strong emotions via telling tales is a form of “tricking” people. But what begins as a fairly straightforward comedy / niche interest manga reveals itself to have a beating heart focused on Mameda’s own place in the world, and that of other beings like herself. (Her master Bunko is a kitsune, for example.) In the process, it places not just specifically these stories but, in a broader way, all popular stories, in a specific cultural context. Specific episodes deal with the process of passing artistic traditions on from master to pupil, and with Japan’s transitional Taisho period as a time when old things—both old ways and creatures like Bunko and Mameda themselves—are being lost to the tide of modernism. In this sense, there’s a surprising edge of slight melancholy to My Master Has No Tail.

Even so, this is primarily a comedy, and it’s a pretty good one. Both the rakugo itself and Mameda’s own antics are a light brand of amusing that never feels like it’s overstaying its welcome, even with the series’ absolute dumbest jokes. (One of the character’s nicknames being “Butt”, anyone?)

#13. Princess Connect! Re:Dive Season 2

It often comes across as a backhanded compliment to say that an anime’s best trait is that it just looks really good. It feels like you’re implying a deficiency in some other area. But if that’s ever the case, it certainly isn’t so for the second season of Princess Connect! Re:Dive, which thundered back after a year’s absence way back in Winter to blow basically every other isekai anime that aired this year out of the water. (It’s the last example of the genre you’ll find on this list, in fact.)

That said; this doesn’t mean that the story isn’t also worthwhile—it’s actually quite interesting, a novel take on the genre that manages to make it feel meaningful and substantive again in a year that was absolutely swamped with mediocre isekai. But, of course, the visuals and the writing go hand in hand. Princess Connect’s sideways spin on the genre means nothing without its phenomenal visuals; in particular, the fight scenes give a real weight to its fantasy heroics in the series’ latter half. What you have with Princess Connect is the Proper Noun Machine Gun on full autofire; the series builds on so many classic tropes, both from isekai and from fantasy adventure in general, that it risks drowning in them. But that never happens, it just builds and builds and builds, until its final stretch lights up into a blazing, spectacular show of fireworks. More than anything, this one is a treat for the chuunis out there. All spectacle, but pure killer, a whirling show of pyrotechnics that is never less than a total blast.

#12. Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club Season 2

The dream lives on! While its younger sister Superstar floundered in the season that followed, Nijigasaki High School Idol Club made a strong return this year. Its second season wasn’t the blow-the-doors-open affair that its first was back in 2020, but the anime’s personable sense of purehearted sincerity remained even as it dipped into ever so slightly more dramatic territory. Old characters paired up into duos while new ones took the spotlight as solo stars, in a turn that somehow managed to do what Superstar failed to despite the higher character count overall. Most notably, two equally-fun polar opposites; the queen diva / secret idol otaku Lanzhu, and the introverted Shioriko, who has to be convinced to not prematurely give up on her fledgling dream of being an idol. Smaller character arcs like “Nana” finally giving up the facade and revealing to the whole school that yes, she is Setsuna, provide a nice cherry on the sundae, tinged with a slight bitterness not rooted in the series itself, but in the news that her voice actor won’t be returning to the role. If she had to leave, this was a good note to end on.

Nijigasaki’s remains a world where anyone can be an idol. There’s a kind of beauty in that, and the show’s strength comes from playing it very well. Even still, 2022 was home to more than one legitimately great idol anime, and I hope you do like idols and other girls who make music, because these aren’t the last ones on the list by a long shot. But first, something a little more….violent.

#11. Akiba Maid War

Is it a yakuza series? A deeply ridiculous comedy? Why not both? In a year of anime making the most out of completely absurd premises, Akiba Maid War might’ve gotten the most blood from its particular stone. On the surface there’s not anything terribly special about something deciding to subvert the old moe’ tropes by making the girls that embody them engage in mob war violence, and if that’s all AMW were doing it would be way farther back on the list. 

On top of that, this is also another entry that feels unstuck in time. People don’t really remember this whole trend anymore, but there was a wave of these anti-moe comedies around the turn of the new millennium, where much of the joke was simply that the characters enacting the absurd hyper-violence were cute girls. Most of them weren’t really particularly funny and have accordingly lost their charge now that the thing they were parodying is simply the norm. Fortunately, because Maid War clearly loves all of its influences, it manages to paradoxically pull off being that kind of slapstick-with-firearms comedy, a fairly played-straight yakuza series, and even sometimes genuinely cute, all without really even breaking a sweat. 

The sheer amount of small touches in this thing helps, too. My favorite example being the fact that most of the one-off maid characters who (spoiler alert, here) tend to get killed at the end of their episode are voiced by famous seiyuu. The crowning example being Aya motherfucking Hirano in the show’s penultimate arc. You don’t get anime that are this singularly their own thing super often. Despite its fairly obvious influences, and the several other interestingly retro anime that aired this year, Akiba Maid War stood in 2022 as an army of one, and accordingly, and this might just be the most underrated anime on the whole list.

#10. Waccha Primagi

The language barrier does strange things to relative popularity between Japan and the anglosphere. For the most part, the anime that are popular over there are popular over here, and vice versa. But there are exceptions, and kids’ shows are a wealth of them. Pretty Cure is the most obvious example, but one of that series’ main competitors, the Pretty Series—no relation—is up there, too. Waccha Primagi, like the other anime in the series before it, is ostensibly a promotional tool for an arcade game. Does this matter at all when evaluating the series? I’d say not really. I’ve never even seen the game in action, but despite that, I love this anime to pieces.

It’s fair to ask why. The fact of the matter is that Waccha Primagi is not the most polished anime on this list by any means, and its nature as a promotional tool means that it can at times feel repetitive. But there is really just something about it. The strange magic-filled world it conjures, where humanity and the animal “magic users” live in parallel to each other but come together to put on magical “waccha” idol concerts? That’s step one. Step two is the sheer amount of heart this thing has; its characters are candy-colored archetypes, but most pop with a rare amount of personality, be they the smug Miyuki, the anxiety-riddled gamer / idol otaku (yes, another one!) Lemon, the sporty Hina, or the princely Amane. Even Matsuri, the comparatively ‘generic’ lead, has an important role to play both as the audience proxy and as the lead for her partner, Myamu, yet another of the show’s most endearing characters.

But a broader picture than all that is Primagi’s actual plot. Waccha Primagi goes to some truly buck-wild places over its four cour runtime. Individual episodes contain straight-up gay confessions, simmering tensions between the human and magic-user worlds that threaten to erupt into full-on war at any moment, light satire of reality TV, a big bad who’s an entertainment and social media mogul, and carefully studied pastiches of the ancient “Class-S” genre of yuri, something with which its young target audience is wholly unlikely to be familiar. By its final stretch, one hardly bats an eye when Jennifer, the local Beyonce analogue, ascends to vengeful Sun God-hood to try to free her girlfriend from a magic diamond prison. And yet, the last two episodes strip all of that back away in an instant, and are hearteningly sincere instead. Waccha Primagi truly can do it all.

There were better anime in 2022, perhaps, but none hit higher above its weight class.

Well, alright, that’s a lie. One did. But we’ll get to that.

In the meantime, in spite of all of its strengths—and more than one kickass OP—Waccha Primagi was still not quite the best idol anime of 2022 either, as we’ll get to. Like I said, it’s been a hell of a year for the genre.

#9. Kaguya-sama Love is War! -Ultra Romantic-

Shot through the heart, and who else could be to blame? Love is War! makes a swing for personal notability by being the only anime to rank in the top ten both of this year’s list and of the one I did back in 2020. Why? Because it’s never stopped being just really fucking good. 

The mind games that gave the series its title finally die down here in the last act of the first half of the series (the second, which goes in some pretty out-there directions, has already gotten off the ground via a theatrical film that we probably won’t get over here in the US for a while). But the show itself doesn’t really slow down for even a second. If anything, the third season is defined even more strongly by fun, stylish visual work, with all of its old tricks acquiring a heart motif that serves as the central symbol of the school festival arc. (In terms of filtering a fairly conventional story through delightfully out-there visual work, it really only had one competitor this year. We’ll get to that.)

And of course, capping it all off, is that scene. Spoiler alert, but not really, right? A first kiss raised to such ridiculous, whirlwind heights of idealized romance that it could get just about anybody’s heart pounding. In Kaguya‘s case, it was enough that it called for a really fucking funny Gundam homage. (Mute that video, just as a heads’ up.) Truly, the character there—Karen, a minor character in Kaguya-sama proper but the lead of one of its spinoffs—is all of us. The real question is what Kaguya and Shirogane are going to do now, with the entire direction of their lives solidly changed?

We’ll find out before too long, I’m sure. The first kiss never ends, you know.

#8. Call of The Night

If The Case Study of Vanitas was a little too gothic for you, and My Dress-Up Darling’s particular brand of steaminess didn’t really get you going, maybe this particular ode to nocturnality, originally from the pen of Dagashi Kashi author Kotoyama, would be up your alley, as an interesting and unexpected midpoint between the two.

In Call of The Night, we have a romance that doubles as an apply-as-you-please metaphor for the outsiders of society. Normal people do not walk around their city in the middle of the night and get entangled with vampires. This is your first clue that CoTN protagonist Kou Yamori is not, in fact, a normal person. What kind of “not normal” is a sort of grand, moving-target metaphor that resists any single easy interpretation; I’ve seen him described as neurodivergent, as a closeted queer person, and as several other things beside. The fact of the matter is that, as a living symbol, he’s all of these and none of these. His relationship with Nana is certainly charged, but charged how is kind of an open question until the series’ final act, where it turns on its head and reveals that, more than anything else, this is a simple “you and me against the world” sort of tale. The kind I’m a sucker for. The fact that it all takes place almost entirely at night—daylight is a rare intrusion reserved for flashbacks and a tiny handful of other moments—makes it look amazing. This is certainly the most visually impressive series LIDEN FILMS have ever made, and wouldn’t you know it, much of that is on director Tomoyuki Itamura, who not only also did The Case Study of Vanitas a number of spots back, but in years past has done an absolute ton of work on the storied Monogatari series. The guy loves his horny vampires; I can only respect the hustle.

And hey, Call of The Night is probably also the year’s only anime to make compelling use of Japanese hip-hop for its soundtrack, Teppen’s OP theme notwithstanding.

#7. Birdie Wing -Golf Girls Story-

SolidQuentin was a prophet, because Birdie Wing -Golf Girls Story- is some hitherto-unknown kind of genius. 2022 was stuffed with anime that leaned heavily on sheer WTF factor; Estab Life, Akiba Maid War, etc. None could swing as much iron as Birdie Wing. More than anything, the golf girls’ story just doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks, which in a lesser anime could be a weakness, but here, it makes the show’s many disparate elements—illegal underground golf tournaments with morphing golf courses, characters who want to be good at golf with an enthusiasm that would put the average shonen protagonist to shame, a huge amount of rich girl/working class girl yuri subtext between its two leads, an incongruous fixation on referencing Gundam—feel whole. Birdie Wing feels like a dimension-hopper from a timeline where “irony” as a concept was just never invented. Every single thing it does is completely sincere; it knows it’s funny, but it’s not a joke. It’s camp, in its purest form.

And truly, the only real point of reference for things that feel like this is stuff like Symphogear. The main difference is that by downsizing that genre’s enormously campy energy to be about something as deeply trivial as golf, Birdie Wing makes the argument that maybe everything is this trivial, and maybe we deserve to have huge feelings about it anyway! Maybe our world isn’t so different from one where people play ludicrously high-stakes golf games with lives and pride alike on the line!

Every time I’ve written about Birdie Birdie, I’ve brought up “Nightjar“, its utterly insane choice for an ED, which carries a full-throated, big-hearted sincerity that, juxtaposed with a show that were even the tiniest smidgen more self-aware, would scan as a deliberate joke. But no, that is the beauty of Birdie Wing; this shit is as serious as your life, do not make any mistake. The only reason Birdie Wing isn’t even higher on the list is that it’s not finished yet. Season 2 airs in Spring, are you ready to tee off again? I, personally, cannot fucking wait. If it hits as many holes-in-one as the first season did, there is a very real chance that it will top the list next year. That’s not a threat; it’s a promise.

#6. BOCCHI THE ROCK!

Here it is, the hardest cut from the Top 5. I did not labor over a single decision on this list more than whether to include this in the Top 5 or put it down here as the “highest honorable mention.” Fun fact; by the time you read this, I have swapped it with the show at #5, by my own count, four times. This was a hard decision. Not the last of those on the list, but probably the one I’ve thought about the most.

In general, there were a solid handful of really fucking good music anime in 2022, let’s just lay that on the table. We’ve already seen a couple, and this isn’t the last one we’ll see on this list, but BOCCHI THE ROCK! might be the most unexpectedly successful. Not in purely commercial terms—although it did well in that regard, too—but in terms of setting up an artistic vision and then following through expertly. Few anime this year not only had this much style but used it to such compelling ends; it might actually beat out the third season of Love is War! on that front. No mean feat, considering how easily that anime turns its own medium into putty in its hands, too.

I will be honest, BOCCHI placing this high on the list is something of an act of course-correction, as well. I liked BOCCHI throughout more or less its entire run, but I really only started appreciating what it was trying to do—and thus, really loving it—pretty late, episode 9 or 10 or so. By that point, the Fall 2022 season was on its way out and I felt that I hadn’t even remotely given the show its well-earned due. But if Kessoku Band are a fill-in act, they’re a pretty damn amazing one, so don’t make the mistake of assuming I don’t love them or that this is a pity award, nothing could be farther from the truth.

BOCCHI THE ROCK!’s main point is to watch the title character, Hitori, alias Bocchi, herself grow as a person. She begins as an anxious wreck in the vague shape of an internet-famous guitarist and, by the end of the season, she’s still that, but she has not just a band but friends now. The thing is, if BOCCHI had simply adapted its manga straight, we would not be talking about it very much at all. Instead, BOCCHI THE ROCK’s real strength comes from the utterly absurd stylistic tricks it pulls out to pave the road along Hitori’s emotional journey.

Essentially, BOCCHI THE ROCK is unafraid to treat its characters as props. It’ll stick them on popsicle sticks and wave them around like this is His & Her Circumstances. It’ll render Hitori in chunky 3D and hurl her at a wall of gray blocks. It’ll turn her into a slug because sometimes when you’re this wracked by anxiety you really do just feel like a slug. It’ll have her slip out the bounds of her character outline like Jimmy from Ed Edd N Eddy just so she can look how a panic attack feels. Incredibly, at no point does it feel like BOCCHI is mocking Hitori herself. This is a relatable, we’ve-all-been-there sort of humor, one for the true otaku. This emotional power chord resonated with so many people that BOCCHI eventually overtook even long-anticipated shonen manga adaptation Chainsaw Man on MyAnimeList, in a come-from-behind victory for the socially anxious everywhere. (It doesn’t beat that series out on this list. But what is my blog compared to the will of the people, really?)

At the end of it all, you realize that Hitori is nothing more than an ordinary teenage girl; nerdy, talented but incredibly anxious, in serious need of a shoulder to lean on. And the series’ biggest trick is the ability to roll all that wild craziness into a gentle push on her back; before you know it, she’s shredding onstage. They grow up so fast.

I stressed a lot over that BOCCHI cut in particular. Hopefully the cult of the box of oranges won’t be too upset.

Tomorrow; the best of the best, the top 5 proper.

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Posted on in anime, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Weekly [6/5/22]

Anime Orbit Weekly is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

Hi folks! I don’t have a ton to say up here today. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of things while still dealing with a bunch of life stuff, so happy as I am that this week’s been devoid of interruptions so far, I don’t want to make any promises about what the immediate future looks like. (Down to whether or not I’ll be able to finally cover Healer Girl on time for once tomorrow. That’s a big We’ll See.)

But in any case, I’ve gotten a lot of writing done this week, and if you’re a devoted enough fan of the site to be reading this, sincerely thank you for reading so much of it. I’m quite proud of the column this week, and I think you’ll see why as you read on. Also! I don’t want to promise anything (see previous paragraph), but I might have a special project starting up this week. We’ll see which way the winds blow.

Seasonal Anime

Birdie Wing

With episode 8, Birdie Wing closed the door on its “golf underground” storyline. The consequences were real and, in their own way, dire, despite the show’s absurdity. Eve has fled Nafrece and can’t ever go back, mob boss Rose Aleon is dead, shot in the face by a vengeful rival mob in a truly, utterly, indescribable pastiche of proper gangster cinema that Birdie Wing somehow managed to pull off flawlessly. The aftermath didn’t seem to bother Birdie Wing though, the very last shots of that episode were of Eve being goofy on a plane, literally flying away from the poverty she was adopted into, her and her family reaping the spoils of her improbable golf skill. The latter by being safe from that very poverty, the former by going to Japan to pursue her Golf Waifu.

So, in a way, this represents more the beginning of something than the end. An even slightly more ordinary anime would transpose the order here; introduce Eve as an ordinary high school girl and then eventually build up to the climactic confrontation with the, ahem, Golf Mafia. But Birdie Wing is not a remotely ordinary anime, and so, at the end of episode 9 we see that she’s enrolled in a Golf School in Golf Japan to pursue a Golf Romantically Charged Shonen Rivalry with fellow Golf Lesbian, Aoi, the aforementioned Golf Waifu. All this sets in as the sound of Tsukuyomi‘s “Nightjar”—the show’s needlessly beautiful ED theme—fills the sky and a shot of a golf ball dissolving into a full moon hangs overhead. It’s nuts.

It is still hard to know exactly how to reconcile Birdie Wing‘s ridiculousness with its sincerity. It’s been nine weeks and I’m still processing it; a show that transmutes the world’s most boring sport into high camp shouldn’t work as well as Birdie Wing does. Especially now that the series has seemingly abandoned the class element that made the first arc something worth chewing on thematically. By all rights Birdie Wing should fall apart here. But if it ever will, it’s not this week. From here, we golf sublime. If anything, I want to take Birdie Wing even more at face value than I already was. It somehow completely buys its own hype.

The first six or so minutes of episode 9 don’t even feature Eve at all. Instead, we focus on a new character who we’ve only briefly seen before. This is Ichina Saotome (Saki Fujita), an Ordinary Golf Schoolgirl whose greatest desire in life is, no shit, to be a professional golf caddy. She says things like this.

Saotome makes a hell of a first impression; among other things she’s late for Golf School because she missed the Golf Bus. Readers who aren’t watching this series may wonder if me appending “golf” to the front of random nouns is some kind of running joke or if the show is actually like that, and I am delighted to tell those readers that it is, in fact, both. Saotome’s school has a prominent Golf Club (haha. golf club), it is very serious business, and one of its members is the other character we properly meet here, Haruka Misono (Rina Satou).

Any fear that all this might make Birdie Wing even marginally more normal is dashed by the fact that Eve greets the both of these girls by deliberately driving a ball between them as they talk in order to get their attention.

Her blunt attempts to get a meeting with Aoi are pretty funny, but not as funny as the fact that Eve can somehow speak Japanese, and even she doesn’t know how. In a show that bought in less to its ludicrousness, this would be an obvious joke. Here, I almost wonder if it’s not some kind of foreshadowing about things we’ll eventually learn about Eve’s pre-amnesia life. (It can be both, of course.)

Her ability to meet with Aoi is eventually staked on a golf game (of course) by the Golf Club’s president. She gets an obvious victory over Haruka, although it’s closer than one might assume, and I suspect the now-shattered first year might serve as yet another rival to Eve.

Meanwhile, Aoi’s reaction to meeting Eve again is this.

Golfing!

Ultimately, the episode ends as aforementioned. Eve enrolls in Aoi’s school—obvious fake name and all—to the admiring gay screams of literally her entire classroom. And, well, god knows where the plot goes from here. I half expect Birdie Wing to turn into Revolutionary Golf Utena. It wouldn’t be out of character.

One thing is certain, Birdie Wing‘s total commitment to itself, an almost defiant attitude of “yeah, this is the Symphogear of golf, what are you going to do about it?” It’s hard to imagine Birdie Wing ever falling off in a serious way if it keeps that attitude up. Personally, I’ve joined the camp who strongly hope that this thing has two cours (no episode count was ever announced). Mostly just because I want to see what other total nonsense the show can come up with, but also because in spite of my general loathing of golf as a sport and everything it represents, I do care about these characters! I’m not afraid to say so, either. Much like some of its spiritual predecessors, Birdie Wing wrings emotional resonance from high absurdity, and it does a damn good job of it, too. It takes flight against all odds, a fighter jet of pure self-confidence.

Oh, and also; there’s a scene in here where Aoi gets all embarrassed because Eve stepped out of one of the locker room showers without a towel on but is also obviously checking her out. That’s pretty fun, too.

Ah, the classic “peeking through the gaps in your fingers” technique.

ESTAB LIFE: Great Escape

Ten weeks after its premiere, it’s still kind of hard to believe that Estab Life exists. Watching it, the threat that it will just disappear like a mirage on the horizon if you blink too hard feels ever-present. Yet, here we are, episode 12 is finally available in the Anglosphere, and the show is officially over. Its finale provides a suitably action-packed, pulpy, dramatic, and just plain weird exit for a show whose very existence feels vaguely like a taunt against all pop-artistic norms, a trait it shares with some, but perhaps not enough anime. (The Rolling Girls, and Estab Life‘s own contemporary, the above-discussed Birdie Wing, are a few that are on my mind lately.)

In a way, though, Estab Life‘s finale is a logical conclusion. How does a show about helping people escape their life situations end? By evac’ing the guy behind the whole system in the first place. For their grand finale, the Extractors extract Mr. M himself, their mysterious benefactor who turned out to also be the equally-mysterious Manager running the cluster system to begin with. Along the way, we get some pretty cool action scenes, some character model reuse that is too neat for me to call out how obvious a time- and cost-saving measure it is, an explanation-of-sorts for how the world of Estab Life came to exist in the first place. It’s a lot!

The high-tech castle facility that the Extractors infiltrate here is probably the best environ the series has ever shown off at all. It fits the high tech aesthetic inherent to an all-3DCG series to a tee. All three of the main Extractors get good turns here, and it’s interesting to note that Feles and Equa spend most of the climax by themselves; Martes seemingly sacrifices herself by exploding into many mini-Marteses (Martesi?) to fend off a swarm of angry drones.

When they finally encounter The Manager, Equa and Feles get hit with a truckload of exposition, perhaps the only part of the episode that doesn’t entirely work. (Something about how his builders created him, a nigh-omniscient supercomputer, to develop a utopia, but this is an impossible task because the natures of different people conflict too much. Sure, fair enough I suppose.) What does work is that “Mr. M” wants out of his situation as much as anyone else the Extractors have ever spirited away. He reformats himself, becoming the second character in as many episodes to change their gender presentation; this time on screen.

I will not pretend to know what this says about the people who made Estab Life, but I will take the representation—intentional or not—regardless. Before that, The Manager turns into a giant Facebook like symbol in order to thumbprint the extraction document. This is art, folks; the world’s first CTTTF (Computer to Thumb to Female) transition.

Her new body and name in tow (now it’s just “M.” No “Mr.”), she helps the Extractors escape from the facility, and in the process, we get to see her mind control a bunch of drones. Also, Martes has a huge hammer now.

The post-credits scene shows the Extractors back at their usual job, getting ready to rescue a cameoing Hachiro, who is finally ready to leave his own situation. M, now with a new look, supports the team over smartphone, and the series ends on an open, exciting note.

Incredibly, this isn’t the end for Estab Life on the whole. A mobile game is in development—though god knows if we’ll ever see it over here, see the still-in-limbo takt op. Destiny game for an example of that whole mess—and a film called Revengers’ Road. But until we meet the Extractors again, this is an excellent farewell.

Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club – Season 2

“Don’t hide your brightness.”

At its core, Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is an extremely simple anime. Almost everything it does is in service of its gleaming, utopian vision; a world where truly anyone can be a superstar, if only they wish to be. This is, I think, the Nijigasaki sub-franchise’s entire appeal, but it does leave only a fairly limited tract of ground on which to grow actual conflicts. One of the few that have come up over the second season is the friction between Lanzhu and the Idol Club themselves. Lanzhu’s solo performances have been a running background thread throughout the whole season, and her unwillingness to play ball with the Idol Club is one of the show’s few actual “unsolved problems,” as it were. In episode 9, the issue is laid to rest, in a decidedly Nijigasaki fashion.

We should talk at least briefly about Mia Taylor (Shuu Uchida), the American-born idol who serves as Lanzhu’s songwriter. The two are clearly close but exactly what their relationship is has been a little fuzzy, at least to me, up until this point. Likewise, I’ve personally had a little trouble connecting to Mia as a character. She’s rather arrogant, which is fine, but given that she herself doesn’t hasn’t sung up until this point (spoiler), it’s felt a little hollow to me, as opposed to Lanzhu’s very well-earned cockiness (which is itself a defense mechanism, but we’ll get to that).

Mia’s character is actually explored in detail for the first time here, and we learn that she feels the crushing weight of expectations from being in a legacy music family. The reason she doesn’t sing herself is that she’s afraid of not living up to those expectations, and in a flashback, a young Mia is literally drowned out by applause as she steps on stage to debut as a pianist before she can play even a single note. It’s effective stuff! And her dealing with her own issues helps Lanzhu deal with hers.

A line that comes up here is “as long as you desire to be a school idol, everyone will accept you.” This is, if generalized out, basically the entire thrust of the series. It’s a little awkward—at best—if applied to the real world, but within Nijigasaki‘s own unpoppable bubble universe, it makes perfect sense. All feelings spring from music, so there is no problem that music cannot solve.

So, when Mia performs her insert song, the entirely-in-English “stars we chase”, and it breaks down Lanzhu’s defenses and she is revealed as, at her core, a very lonely girl who struggles to empathize with or even understand other people, it makes an internal sense. Lanzhu is convinced not to leave Japan (which, yeah, that was her reaction to being shown up at the idol festival, to leave the country. Girl’s a bit dramatic!) and it’s strongly hinted at that this season, possibly even next episode, will see the debut of Lanzhu, Mia, and Shioriko’s unit. Personally, I cannot wait.

She said the line!

Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie

Until now, I’ve largely considered Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie a pretty good show. If I’d had to pick an operative adjective, “pleasant” would be it. Like a summer breeze or a sweet flower. Not something one is inclined to think about terribly deeply, but definitely a positive presence in one’s life.

But sometimes shows that are “just pretty good” get episodes that are much better than that. (Highlighting these was the original M.O. behind Twenty Perfect Minutes, although I abandoned that narrow premise fairly quickly.) Singling things out like this does always feel a little unfair to me, because it’s not like what Shikimori has been doing up to now has been at all bad, but it’s been fairly straightforward. Other than a certain sweetness and sentimentality, Shikimori-san has lacked terribly much emotional resonance. That’s not a flaw per se, but it’s notable absence.

This week’s episode, the show’s eighth, is a different story.

Last week we were introduced to supporting character Kamiya (Ayaka Fukuhara), a friend of Izumi’s from some time ago, and, as we then learned, also someone who harbors feelings for him. Kamiya, honestly, sort of seems like she’s in the wrong show, or maybe the wrong genre entirely. Reflecting on romantic feelings she now knows are hopeless, she imagines herself as an impostor Cinderella, with unfitting glass slipers and who never finds her Prince Charming. Near the episode’s midpoint, she says that some girls are inclined to wait for a savior on a white horse, and it’s pretty obvious that she’s talking about herself.

During these parts of the episode, the visuals take an overcast turn. Washed out and grey, reflective of Kamiya’s own feelings, and complimented by rain of a sort when she breaks down in Shikimori’s arms in the episode’s climax. It’s extremely dramatic, and even more notably so because this is still Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie that we’re talking about. You know, the silly gimmick romance anime where the whole plot is supposed to be that the girl with pink hair is “cool”? That one? Maybe it’s tragic, Doylistic destiny that she could never be the lead in this particular love story; her hair is a rainwater blue, after all. And the show isn’t called Kamiya Isn’t Just a Cutie.

There are solutions to this that could please all three people. Mostly those solutions involve the sort of honest communication that teenagers are unlikely to engage in, and concepts like polyamory that they are unlikely to know much about. Failed teenage romance is hardly the end of the world, but then again, when you are that age it certainly feels like it is. This episode resurrected in me feelings I have not properly contemplated in a long time; and I think everyone has those moments. What-could’ve-been’s that haunt the less-accessed corners of our mind like lonely ghosts.

As an icon of them, Kamiya slips through the school’s doors and between its classrooms, a tragic figure in a story that isn’t her own. There is warmth and humor and all of Shikimori‘s usual strengths throughout this episode too—this isn’t She, The Ultimate Weapon or anything—but in a way their presence just makes Kamiya’s story stand out all the more, a lone storm cloud in an otherwise blue sky.

The episode’s remainder focuses on Shikimori’s own dealing with these events. She gives Kamiya what comfort she can, and Kamiya makes a sort of peace with her situation. That, at least, is good, but even through all this, it’s never in question who the main character is, here.

It’s an impossibility, but I wish Kamiya happiness in life somewhere far removed from Izumi and somewhere far removed from both Shikimori and Shikimori. She deserves to be in a series that can accommodate her massive heart and her strength of emotion. She deserves an Utena or a Revue Starlight or at least a show that’s willing to do this sort of thing more often. But, of course, that’s silly. You can rerun the tape a thousand and one times, the footage on them will never change. She is Rosencranz or Guildenstern in a play that, as much positive as I’ve said about it, is certainly no Hamlet.

Watching this episode, I was made truly, presently aware of Shikimori‘s shortcomings—or at least what is absent from it—for the first time. Paradoxically, I think that’s only made me like it more. But even so, I am not sure if I’d be more hurt if the show never returned to Kamiya’s issues or if it did so again. I suppose I will find out eventually.

Elsewhere on MPA

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

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 9

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 9 – Show Off How in Love You Are

And that’s about all. See you around, folks!

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, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Weekly [5/15/22]

Anime Orbit Weekly is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

I’ll be frank with you all, anime fans. This week’s AOW is heavy on discussing the actual shows I watched and light on intro’s and outro’s. Hopefully that’s how you like it! Enjoy.

Birdie Wing

Is it completely wack to say that Birdie Wing clearly cares a lot about class? I was hesitant in making that claim strongly when the series started, but as it’s gone on, it’s become very clear that that coding is intentional. God bless it, Birdie Wing thinks it has things to say. Even wilder; it actually might?

Consider this; this episode features absolutely zero golf at all. Instead, it’s about the fact that the shop Eve and her, basically, family are living out of is getting bulldozed. The slum—the show’s word, not mine—is being forcibly redeveloped by a construction company with mob ties. Our protagonists can’t simply move, either, because the three orphans they’re looking after are illegal immigrants. They’d get deported.

There’s also the implication that Klein (the woman who owns said shop, if you’ve forgotten) and Lily might have to resort to prostitution to get by, something the episode also later implies that they’ve done before. It is an ugly, ugly thing for a show as high camp as Birdie Wing to get into, and by all rights the series should absolutely fall flat on its face here. Maybe if it had brought this up earlier, it would have, but Birdie Wing so clearly believes its own hype that it somehow works. Because of course, the only hope they have of getting out of this awful, awful situation is for Eve to golf them out of it.

This involves pitting Eve against Rose, the lesbian golf mob boss who served as her employer a scant two episodes back. What wasn’t obvious at the time is that the casino deed on-bet there included the land that Klein’s shop is built on. Effectively, this entire mess is Eve’s own fault, even if she couldn’t have known that at the time. She confronts Rose about this and the latter simply blows her off, I suspect this will prove to be a mistake for the golf capo, but time will tell.

Eve spends the rest of the episode training, with the help of none other than Viper, who also lost all her money on that same match two episodes back.

I have to admit, I didn’t really expect to see Viper again at all, but being demoted to comedy relief serves her well. (And even then, she’s able to seduce a rival mobster’s henchman into putting a good word in for Eve.) And somewhere in here we also learn that Eve has amnesia and doesn’t remember anything from before about four years ago. Also that her name is short for “Evangeline”, which, knowing this show, will be relevant somehow.

The whole casino situation will, of course, be eventually settled with ball chess, the sport of queens, with insanely high stakes. How else does anyone solve anything in the world of Birdie Wing?

I wonder how Aoi will eventually factor in here. She has plenty of time to show up, as we are, somehow, only six episodes into Birdie Wing. There is an entire second side of the mountain we haven’t seen here yet, and I cannot wait to take a tour of it.

Estab-Life

By their ninth episode, most single-cour anime are setting up their finale. That might be true of Estab-Life, but as always, the show is so deadpan that it’s a bit hard to tell. Nonetheless, this episode does give us probably the most information we’ve ever directly gotten about how the show’s weird world actually works.

The gist here is simple; the Extractors have to bust out the inmates of a cluster that serves as a massive super-prison. (In fact, it seems to be where all the criminals from all the clusters go, which is curious.)

The main obstacle their goal? The prison’s vastly unpleasant warden, a hulking cyborg-woman who is obsessed with using her inmates to build up power to confront “The Manager,” allegedly the name of the being who controls the Moderators and, thus, indirectly, all of the clusters themselves. She’s no match for the Extractors, though. Equa and co. undo her systemic oppression in the span of what seems like a single afternoon, in a scheme that involves Equa entering the horse race(?!) the cluster hosts and Martes swiping the warden’s key. When they finally break all the inmates out, the warden seemingly outright dies, a very literal case of an oppressor not outliving the system they’ve made.

In lieu of much closure, we get the notion that the Extractors are going to be “busy” from now on—fair, given the sheer amount of inmates our girls now have to escort to new clusters—and also this.

Your guess is as good as mine. I cannot wait to see where this goes.

The Executioner & Her Way of Life

It’s been a while since we last checked in on Executioner, and in that time the show has gotten very weird. Here’s the very short Cliff’s Notes version: Akari has, as we’ve long suspected, used her time travel powers to rewind time to the start of her and Menou’s journey at least a few times, possibly quite a few. A side effect of this is that there are now, essentially, two Akaris. There’s our Akari, who we’ve been following for the bulk of the show so far, and there’s Future Akari, a distant version of herself with immense accumulated knowledge from the repeated time loops and all sorts of traps and contingencies set up in case things go pear-shaped for her “normal” self (who we’ll here call Present Akari for simplicity’s sake.) She is entirely on board for having Menou kill her, but it has to be Menou specifically, and it has to be done properly. In however many loops she’s been through, that hasn’t happened.

Last week, Menou took down Archbishop Orwell, whose corrupt machinations form an entire subplot that the series has since largely left behind. What’s important to know is that she’s dead, and will (presumably) not be coming back.

In the two in-show weeks since then, Menou and Akari have set out on a pilgrimage to somewhere called The Sanctuary. Akari is under the impression that this place will take her in. It’s probably more likely that they’ll try to kill her in some inventive fashion, given that Menou is the one taking her there.

Along the way to this place, they stop at the Mediterranean-esque town of Libelle, which rests on the coast of a massive ocean dominated by one of the frequently-alluded-to Human Errors, a huge magical fogbank called The Pandemonium. The Pandemonium, we’re told, is a place you can easily enter but only leave with immense difficulty. If you’re here thinking that there must be something pretty deadly in there, and that this would be an ideal place for Menou to try killing Akari, you’re more on the ball than Menou herself is, as the idea doesn’t occur to her until Momo explicitly points it out. In general, this episode circles back several times to the idea that Menou isn’t as focused on killing Akari as she “should” be, and she herself starts to question if she’s hesitating or not.

But hold that thought, we’ll come back to it momentarily.

It is also worth explaining that Libelle is the home of a resistance movement of sorts called the Fourth, who at some point a few years ago openly rebelled against the three-caste system that defines much of Executioner’s world. They were beaten (by none other than Flare, of course), but the town remains a hotbed of these particular folks. Their acting leader, Manon (Manaka Iwami), is the daughter of the Count who originally led this movement in the first place, but its current leaders don’t really think of her as much but a naive child. She’s only about Akari and Menou’s own age, after all.

At the end of the episode, she’s shown luring a mute girl into an iron maiden and closing it. I frankly have no idea what that’s about, and it’s more than a little tasteless, but it does at least serve as a pretty stark demonstration that, yeah, this girl is scary in her own way.

As for Menou and Akari? Well, Menou does try ditching her in the Pandemonium—not before a fairly long, relaxed sequence where they go about town and take a bath together, but, you know, eventually. Perhaps predictably, it doesn’t work, and despite Future Akari’s cryptic comments during our brief time following her as she’s within the Pandemonium, something kills her (we don’t see what) and she immediately resurrects next to Menou like nothing ever happened.

I think it is fair to ask where exactly Executioner is going from here, and whether the show’s remaining 6 episodes are enough space to make the journey it wants to. But, Executioner has already changed quite a lot from its showstopping debut, so who’s really to say. The series itself seems dissatisfied with the natural conclusion of its storyline—Menou somehow successfully killing Akari—and I have the feeling that things are only going to get thornier from here on out.

Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club – Season 2

This will already be officially “last week’s episode” by the time you’re reading this, but I wanted to talk about the brilliant little conclusion to Setsuna’s arc in episode six of this season. One of the things I really like about what I’ve seen of Love Live—and especially Nijigasaki—is that it imagines a world where ordinary high schoolers are actually rewarded for pursuing their interests. (I’ve made this observation in pithy tweet form before.) Real high school clubs are mostly things of dry obligation. There are people who enjoy them, but that’s not really the point of them. They’re extensions of a school system that is designed to create good workers, not reward students for the things they love that are not “practical.” In the utopian Love Live universe, they’re the result of pure creative drive and passion. It is very much a fantasy, but it’s one that exists for a reason, and it’s not hard to figure out why it has such broad appeal. (Love Live of course is also popular for a plethora of other reasons, but we’re not talking about those here today.)

Setsuna has always been interesting to me within this context, because her central character conflict is that she feels caught between her love for the school idol club and her responsibility to the student council. Both of these are very important to her, and there have been several times throughout the series where the stress of having a full-on secret identity wears on her. Setsuna, the idol, has never been anything less than a magnetic presence. Nana Nakagawa, her “civilian” identity, is a different story. Nana the straightlaced student council president and Setsuna the school idol come into conflict here, as part of the ongoing storyline about setting up Nijigasaki’s cultural festival.

The short version is that scheduling conflicts lead to the possibility of having to push back the idol club’s activities, and this obviously causes her no small amount of distress. She blames herself, even when no one else does, and is fully willing to just cancel the whole thing. It takes some encouragement from the rest of the Idol Club for her to reconsider. (A solution is eventually found, and it involves teaming up with the school idol clubs of several other nearby schools, but no one said any of this would be simple.)

All this leads to the episode’s linchpin moment; Setsuna’s abandonment of her dual identity entirely. On-screen, in front of the whole school, she ditches her glasses and puts her hair up, a full Clark Kent-to-Superman transformation taking place in front of their very eyes. The shockwave of astonishment that reverberates throughout the school is palpable, and contagious. I have to give a special nod to Nana’s vice president here, who I like to think has a gay awakening in between her reaction to the reveal of Setsuna’s identity….

….and the end of the episode’s insert song a few minutes later, where the camera cuts to her again and she’s crying happy tears.

This week’s episode, on the other hand, centers around Shioriko Mifune. You probably know her as “the one with the little fang.”

Shioriko’s story is simpler than Setsuna’s but also a lot more grounded. Her older sister—Kaoruko Mifune, the very same ‘Mifune-sensei’ who’s now a student teacher in Yu’s music program—was part of her own school’s idol club. But, when the time came to aim for the Love Live that gives the franchise its name, her group couldn’t cut it. This has given Shioriko a pretty limited view of her own capabilities. The broad implication here is that Shioriko wants to be an idol, but doesn’t think she’d be any good at it, and thus limits herself to supporting roles.

To be honest, as someone who maintains a blog where I write about anime as an, oh, third or fourth passion in life following giving up on music and several other things, this actually cuts a little too close to home. So, I certainly sympathize with her, including her mild annoyance when the members of the idol club continue to push the issue.

Scroll down to find out how long this particular statement holds true.

But the fact remains that, throughout the episode, they do eventually manage to convince her to give this whole idol thing an earnest try. It would come across as a little hollow were it not for the fact that one of the people pushing her is her own older sister. Failing at something, she explains, is not the same as regretting it. Kaoruko was sad, certainly, to not be able to make it to the Love Live itself, but she doesn’t regret her time with the idol club. To be honest, and at the risk of embarrassing myself, it is the kind of thing that always hits me right in the heart. Simple, shining emotional messages like that are why Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is good in the first place.

More importantly for our heroines, it seems to be that revelation that gets Shioriko to swing the proverbial bat. The episode climaxes with her stepping alone onto a quiet stage and singing for an audience of no more than a dozen of her fellow idols. Nijigasaki, as always, takes the opportunity to bring her performance to life, her insert song “EMOTION” is a shining pop jewel of whirligig synth-flutes and reverbed finger snaps, the video a hushed collection of library rooms and clock motifs. (The latter may recall, for some viewers, Moeka Koizumi‘s other most famous role; Revue Starlight‘s Daiba Nana.)

The episode ends with her confirmation that after the festival, she’ll join the school idol club. But that feels almost like a formality, more than anything. For the few minutes she fills that empty stage with light, she’s as much an idol as anyone’s ever been.

The final shots of the episode are the rest of the idol club giving her a massive group hug as they welcome her aboard…while a certain someone looks on with what looks an awful lot to me like envy.

But I suppose that is a topic to be discussed next week.

Until then, that’s all for this one. This article is already running well late, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I just drop the embeds in the Elsewhere on MPA section below with no real elaboration.

Elsewhere on MPA

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

5 Underrated Magical Girls I Think Would Be Fun Hangouts, Based on Nothing but Their Vibes

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 6

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 6 – The Friendship Scheme

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, Anime Orbit Weekly

Anime Orbit Weekly [5/1/22]

Anime Orbit Weekly is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

Hello, anime fans. I don’t have much to say to you this week. I hope you enjoy the writeups below. I had a lot of fun writing about Birdie Wing this week in particular.

Seasonal Anime

Birdie Wing -Golf Girls Story-

If you’re anything like me, you started watching Birdie Wing not because it’s particularly good, but because it’s fucking ridiculous. I am pleased to report that, after a somewhat disappointingly tame (but admirably lesbian) past two episodes, Birdie Wing not only gotten its groove back, it’s also reached utterly stunning new heights of absurdity.

The episode begins with Aoi’s tournament-winning putt being interrupted by a laser pointer to the eye from one of Rose’s lackies. On its own, this is a mildly amusing Dick Dastardly-esque turn. To say things escalate does not do justice to what eventually transpires here.

Post-tournament, Rose immediately calls in the favor she used to get Eve into the tournament in the first place. That favor? She has to win another underground golf game. But not just any underground golf game. Oh no, not just any by a long shot.

This episode’s plot goes so far into pure ridiculousness that I feel tired just typing about it. Things start at, for Birdie Wing at least, normal. The job Eve is called into handle is merely the way that a brewing mob war between Rose’s “patron” Catherine and one of her rivals is being resolved. When one realizes that the term “underground golf” is here meant literally—as in, the golf course is subterranean—they might think “wow, this is pretty absurd. Definitely more so than anything that’s happened in Birdie Wing so far.”

They might have a few seconds to hold on to that thought before Catherine pushes a button and the entire course begins transforming like Autobot City into Metroplex.

They have a “randomize golf course” button! A button to randomize the physical golf course! Like it’s Pokémon and they’re loading in a ROMHack! The terrain is ripped apart, a random little lake is drained, and it reconfigures into a new and novel shape. I am so utterly thrilled to live on the same planet as the person who dreamed up this beautiful spot of true-blue total nonsense. It’s awesome.

And we haven’t even gotten to discuss Eve’s actual opponent yet. Meet Viper, or “Vipère” (Kaori Nazuka) as I will not be calling her because I don’t feel like pasting that accented E every time. Now, every important character in Birdie Wing is two things; one, obsessed with golf, and two, a lesbian. Viper adds a twist on the formula by being an evil golf lesbian, meaning that she’s uncomfortably pushy, wears a ton of perfume, and has a skimpy outfit. In any other show, I’d probably find this character, and her relentless advances on Eve (down to a wager wherein whoever loses has to do what the winner says for a whole day. Yikes.) rather off-putting.

Golfing!

I still kind of do, but it’s hard to entertain any thought of reality when the character in question is named Viper the Reaper. (Yes, she needs two menacing nicknames apparently.) And that she’s playing against our hero on a mighty morphin’ golf course that can bend into any shape its owner wants. I’m not a big advocate of the “turn your brain off” philosophy for campy bullshit—it’s not hard for something to be both entertainingly silly and meaningful—but in this particular case, it might help. If only to save yourself from psychic damage.

Oh, and I should also show you all her golf ball.

Of course there’s a two-headed snake stamped on it. Did you think there wouldn’t be? Have a little faith.

Viper cheats, of course. She’s the villain! Obviously, she cheats! But Eve is able to sniff out her strategy pretty quickly. Literally, because she cheats by having a perfume-scented tattoo that throws people off-balance just enough to disrupt their swings. She gets the perfume to diffuse by unzipping her top, which “explains” why she does that several times over the course of the episode. I want to really, really strongly stress that I am not making a word of this up. This happens. This is real. This is the actual plot of Birdie Wing.

The truly absurd thing is that there actually is a trickle of a genuine theme in here. Eve’s distaste for the bourgeois, despite playing perhaps the most rich-folk-only sport in the world, has become consistent enough that I’m convinced it’s part of the central point of the show. I sincerely hope that the series finale somehow involves Eve destroying golf as a concept and replacing it with something far better, more egalitarian, radical, and lesbian.

In any case, Eve wins after figuring Viper’s trick out, naturally, and her one order to Viper is for the evil snake golf lesbian to drive her to Nafrece Golf Course by 5am. So that she can meet Aoi for a final game before the latter goes back to Japan. (I neglected to mention that that’s a running B-plot throughout this episode. Can you blame me? There’s a lot going on.) She just barely misses Aoi, who is straight-up heartbroken. How do we know that? Well, Eve finds something on the golf course. I’ll let the series speak for itself here.

Golfing!

Even when Eve tries to prove that she got there by shooting golf balls at Aoi’s plane as it takes off, Aoi still screams and cries that she’s a liar. End episode, roll credits.

I’m tired of beating around the bush. There’s a lot of good to great stuff airing this season, but Birdie Wing might be the best. If it’s not, it’s at least in the conversation. What else is going this hard for so little reason right now? Nothing, and that’s why Birdie Wing can’t be beat.

The Executioner and Her Way of Life

Some anime’s strengths are subtle; their merits only become obvious either upon repeat viewings or prolonged contemplation. And then, on the other end of the scale, are those where just watching them can feel like repeated kicks to the ribs. Guess where The Executioner and Her Way of Life falls?

That breath-snatching immediacy is a very subjective thing, of course. But I feel it in a real and present way with Executioner. The most recent episode is, from start to finish, a slow-churning nausea in the stomach, the knowledge that something is about to go very awry, and then a chop to the throat when it finally does. Menou loses everything she’s held important, both new and old, in an instant, and the episode stops dead at the end of its run on what might be one of the most evil cliffhangers I’ve ever seen.

I don’t actually feel comfortable detailing the episode at length. I intend to cover the fallout of all this in more detail next week. For now, take this fiery impression as yet another recommendation to watch Executioner if you aren’t already.

Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club – Season 2

In which Karin and Ai try in vain to comfort a depressed girl.

I’m being flippant, but that really is what the plot of last week’s Nijigaskai High School Idol Club boils down to. One of Ai’s friends, recently recovered from some nonspecific long-term illness, is out and enjoying her freedom again. But oh, she’s sad because Ai’s become a successful singer while she was gone, and she feels left behind. Look: I’m sympathetic, I’m a blogger, I do not have an exciting life and I sometimes envy people who do more outwardly interesting things. That’s a valid feeling, and as a base for creating an interesting character, you could do some strong things with it.

The question is whether it works in the context of this show, as a mostly self-contained story that takes up the better part of its fourth episode. And the answer is no, because what this plays out as is everybody involved—Karin, Ai, Ai’s friend, whose name I have already forgotten—just kind of being a downer to each other for about 12 minutes. I could recap the specifics for you, but there’s really no point. None of this seems like it’s going to have a big impact on the series, none of it reveals anything new about Karin or Ai, and the girl in question is certainly not an interesting character on her own.

You have depression.

There’s also a bizarre B-plot wherein Ai tries to get Karin to form a group with her, which Karin initially doesn’t want to do. That seems like it might have lasting implications, and perhaps draws a parallel between Karin and Lanzhu. But it’s made a moot point at the end of the episode when they decide to group up anyway, under the pretense that they’re “rivals” on-stage, “competing with the same song.” That does not make any sense. You don’t need me to tell you that. It’s also totally unimpactful, since we only have known Karin feels this way for about half an episode by the time she changes her tune. Also; at one point, Karin tries to comfort Ai when her friend’s being down makes her consider quitting being an idol at all. Her approach here is hilariously dickish, and completely whiffs as an intended emotional moment.

Immediately after this scene Karin says that if Ai quits being an idol, she’ll steal all her fans, including her friend. This, somehow, is what gets Ai out of her funk. In a better context this could actually work. Here it mostly just seems like someone remembered they had to get these two on stage together by the end of the episode.

The good news is that the music itself is still there. The duo of Ai and Karin (yes, they team up anyway, despite all the talk. They even get some very sharp matching outfits) perform the insert song “Eternal Light” for the music video portion of the episode, under the name DiverDiva, and instantly it becomes pretty easy to forgive any missteps the show might be making. These, at least, are still consistent highlights, even if none have quite reached the highs of Setsuna’s total fucking barn-burner from season one yet.

For my money, if we want to indulge their “idol duo who are rivals” bit, Karin absolutely smokes Ai on the song. She just has the more powerful voice by a good margin and Ai’s admittedly dexterous rapping doesn’t really make up for that. But hey, I may be biased.

Eventually it all turns out fine, and Ai’s friend officially declares herself to be Ai’s fan also (which is a fucking weird thing to do, but whatever, it’s an idol series.) She redoubles her commitment to working overseas (in what capacity, we never learn), and says something about how Ai inspires her. That’s all fair enough, but we again run up against the problem of none of this seeming to much mean anything. Are we ever going to see this girl again? The last thing this show needs is more characters, especially if they’re totally extraneous.

After the credits roll, we’re quickly introduced to another new character who will presumably make her proper debut next week. She, though, is an actual idol—that’s not pointed out explicitly and, frankly, it doesn’t need to be, you can just tell from her two-tone hair and cocky attitude—and I feel like her contribution to the show will, by its end, massively dwarf that of Ai’s little friend here. (This is without mentioning other far more interesting running plot threads. Lanzhu’s inevitable upcoming face turn, Shioriko Mifune (Moeka Koizumi)’s likely eventually becoming an idol. ETC.)

Plot detours are normal for seasonal anime, so none of this spells the end for Nijigasaki as a series or even for this season of it specifically. I intend to find out today if this is merely a rough patch or the start of a recurring problem. (Nijigasaki actually airs on Saturdays, but, because of my schedule, I can rarely get to it earlier than Sunday evenings.)

Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie!

I won’t pretend I have a ton of value to say about Shikimori Isn’t Just a Cutie!, my obligatory after-the-season-starts pickup. It’s an entrant into the growing “romcom about a valid straight couple” genre, and one I like. It is, admittedly, a series of extremely limited ambitions. (Which only makes sense, given that it got its start as four-panel gimmick strips on Twitter.) But that actually works in Shikimori‘s favor, a lot of the time. The series is relentlessly pleasant enough that it almost operates on the same wavelength as an iyashikei anime. You turn it on, you enjoy the lovey-dovey vibes between main characters Izumi (Shuichirou Umeda) and the titular Shikimori (Saori Oonishi) for about 22 minutes, including whatever particular antics they get into this week (and there are certainly antics to be had), and then you turn it off. It’s not a particularly complicated show.

I mostly wanted to shout it out here for the most recent episode, which showcases two things I really like. One, and the more low-key of the two, is the show’s smart eye for set design. All of the places about town that our cast end up in feel tangible, yet nostalgic. The mall in particular is sure to trigger nostalgia for a lot of people.

Secondly, I really like the fact that every member of the cast seems to be casually bi. Izumi himself has mulled over the idea of his girlfriend as a boyfriend before, but this episode spotlights said bi vibes more directly with Nekozaki (Misato Matsuoka), who spends much of the flashback sequence she stars in freaking out over how hot she thinks Shikimori is.

And there’s a post-credits scene where Shikimori herself gets flustered by Izumi’s mom. (They take a cooking class together. It’s a long story.)

It’s very easy to be unkind to a romcom, as a queer critic. Especially one where the main couple are straight. And I have definitely seen my fair share that just make me want to puke. (An impression you could be forgiven for not getting from this blog, given that I don’t tend to write about anime I dislike and never finish.) But I do think that for what it’s trying to do—which is admittedly not much!—Shikimori is pretty good. My hope is that I can provide a bit of a counterbalance to the show’s small but definitely present antifandom. And if you’re not watching Shikimori, well, it’s a busy season so I certainly understand, but consider penciling it in if you want something to help you unwind.

Subarashii

Elsewhere on MPA

https://magicplanetanime.design.blog/2022/04/25/lets-watch-healer-girl-episode-4-first-steps-horror-and-a-first-job/

Healer Girl really went into overdrive this week, huh? Not that I’m complaining, it’s a good series and it remains such.

https://magicplanetanime.design.blog/2022/04/30/lets-watch-kaguya-sama-love-is-war-ultra-romantic-episode-4/

Poor Ishigami can never seem to catch a break. I feel bad for the guy a lot of the time. Oh yeah; and the last part of the episode with Chika sleeping over at Kaguya’s place is great, too.

https://magicplanetanime.design.blog/2022/05/01/lets-watch-spy-x-family-episode-4-the-prestigious-schools-interview/

You’re a louse, Mr. Swan! I hope Anya gets into Eden Academy. (Oh who am I kidding, we all know she will, right?)

https://magicplanetanime.design.blog/2022/04/26/the-manga-shelf-the-magical-revolution-of-the-reincarnated-princess-and-the-genius-young-lady/

Fun fact: I believe this is the longest article title anything on this site has ever had. It’ll probably be a long while until something else breaks that record. Anyway, yeah, this manga is great. It’s got lesbians, cool fantasy nonsense, and swords. What else do you need?

And that’s all for this week, folks. See you tomorrow for the Healer Girl recap.

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, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [4/2/22]

The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

Hi folks! I’ve been crazy busy this week with impressions articles (a trend that will likely continue at least somewhat into next week and possibly even the week after), so I haven’t had a ton of time to write much else. (Especially considering that for administrative reasons, it’s arriving a day early.) Still, I hope you appreciate the Priconne writeup below.

Before that, though! The Community Choice Poll has concluded, and in hindsight the victor was perhaps a bit obvious. Still, I didn’t expect it to absolutely crush its competition in the way that it did.

So! Our previous community choice winner–My Dress-Up Darling–was a CloverWorks-animated romcom. Congratulations to our new community choice winner. SPY X FAMILY, a CloverWorks-animated romcom.

Jokes aside, I hope you look forward to my covering the series. I’m sure you’re all as excited to see Yor animated on the silver screen as I am. And I’m sure the rest of the show will be pretty good, too. Best of luck next time to the runners-up Nijigasaki High School Idol Club Season 2, The Demon Girl Next Door Season 2, and BIRDIE WING.

Wait, really, BIRDIE WING? Huh.

In any case, you can look forward to seeing those shows covered here on MPA as well to at least some extent.

Not on the Frontline Report though, because this is the last edition of this column.

By which I mean, I am changing the name. The column will be on hiatus next week, since I have more premieres to cover and some real-life stuff to get done. (Taxes, ahoy!) When it returns, it will be under the name Anime Orbit Weekly, a name that better fits my site’s loose “planet” theming and….frankly is just better in every way. I’ve never really liked “Frontline Report” and have largely stuck with it out of inertia. The new name is catchier and also easier to Google.

Anyway, on with the column!

Weekly Anime

Princess Connect! Re:Dive

They really didn’t have to go this hard. That’s what I kept thinking as I finished up the second season of Princess Connect! Re:Dive. This episode is a finale, so it should look good, but the fact that they were able to do this without visibly sapping resources from elsewhere in the production–aside from maybe a single filler episode near the middle?–is astounding. Shows just being produced this cleanly is a rarity in of itself. Add to that the following; Princess Connect‘s season finale is a symphony of magic fireworks; magical-digital floating spell circles, fuckoff-huge sword beams, gloopy swarms of shadowy darkness, CGI metallic projectiles, pick a favorite visual trope that a fantasy-action anime of the past 10 years has come up with, it’s in here somewhere.

But I fear that in my coverage of Priconne I’ve maybe over-emphasized the production merits and made it seem like that’s the show’s only strength. So, all I’ll say further on this front is that I wouldn’t be shocked if this whole damn episode was on Sakugabooru.

Fundamentally, the finale is a huge tug-of-war between the Gourmet Guild and Omniscient Kaiser. It is, in a lot of ways, super basic. The heroes triumph over the big evil villain via (spoiler) the power of friendship. But if, in a meta sense, Princess Connect has any core thesis, it’s that you can build a perfect machine from imperfect parts. There is not a wasted moment in the whole episode; every line sharpens the show’s emotional core just a little bit more. You’d have to be a real stone-face to not grin while watching this, its sheer enthusiasm for its own genre, its strength of belief that this is an impactful story that will light a fire in your heart, is infectious.

Kaiser even gets a somewhat sympathetic backstory squeezed in here, where the sheer ennui of being a tyrant in the name of a failed utopia quite literally consumes her alive; she’s eaten by the mostly-dead shadow clone we thought died last episode, in an honestly pretty damn gruesome bit of body horror for something that’s generally been pretty conservative with even showing blood.

In the last raising-of-stakes available to a VRMMO series, it’s made clear that if Kaiser dies while under the Shadows’ influence that she’ll be gone for good. And that’s just not allowed, of course. So the show’s big final act is our heroes venturing inside this giant End of Eva shadow lady to bust Kaiser’s soul out like this was the world’s most high-stakes heist movie. Karyl does most of the actual convincing Kaiser not totally give in to nihilistic solipsism, but Pecorine performs well throughout the episode, too. Throughout the whole series, Pecorine has felt like the “real” hero, and it’s cool that she mostly gets to ride that status out here as her kingdom is finally restored to her at episode’s end.

Yuuki gets a great showing here as well, and honestly, this is probably the most he’s ever felt like the protagonist he ostensibly is. But even with all he gets done over the course of the finale, he still only gets eight total lines–I counted–and two of them are just “Go!” and “Nice.”

Still, it’s worth noting that the final battle does technically ride on him–he refuses another pass through the time loop from Ameth, choosing to live or die by the bonds he’s formed with his friends. That faith in them pays off, and all present are, in fact, able to defeat Omniscient Kaiser, who is returned to her normal state.

It’s Labyrista who sums up the episode’s–and really, whole show’s–theme best.

It’s simple, but simple works for Princess Connect, a series that–despite its ostensibly complicated “lore”–is very much focused on the fundamentals. The show’s very few problems; Said lore’s complexity, Kokkoro not getting much of a role in the finale, and arguably the oddly showy outfits, do not really ding it at all. At the end of the day, Princess Connect is just a really damn good fantasy anime. When the Gourmet Guild officially reforms and the World is Once Again Saved, it feels like the most logical ending possible for such a pure, warm series. Even here, there’s one last fun little character detail; Karyl is the one who cooks the Gourmet Guild’s first meal back home after their big adventure, and we see the scrapes and burns on her hands from prepping the food.

Everyone settles in for some good, hearty food, and the credits roll. Will we meet the Gourmet Guild again? It’s not impossible, but if this truly is the last episode ever of Princess Connect, it’d be hard to complain. What else could you ask for? Everyone lives happily ever after.

This section is pretty long this week.

Seasonal First Impressions: Get Away from It All with ESTAB-LIFE: GREAT ESCAPE

ESTAB-LIFE isn’t the best thing airing right now, but it might be the weirdest, as the two episodes since that have involved a mob boss who wants to be a magical girl and KGB penguins have proven.

Seasonal First Impressions: Conquering the Pop World with YA BOY KONGMING!

Ya Boy Kongming! is a weird one, a solo-focus idol series with the bizarre high premise of said idol’s manager being Chinese military genius Zhuge Kongming, who was brought to the present….eh, somehow. It doesn’t really matter. The first episode of this was surprisingly affecting, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes from here.

Seasonal First Impressions: THE EXECUTIONER AND HER WAY OF LIFE is a Knife in Isekai’s Heart

The Executioner and Her Way of Life is what we call a “banger,” friends. God knows if it’ll keep up the impressive visual quality and interesting–if a bit edgy!–storytelling throughout this whole season, but I certainly hope it will.

Seasonal First Impressions: AHAREN-SAN WA HAKARENAI is a Sleep Aid in Anime Form

I don’t get it.

Seasonal First Impressions: The Dream Lives On in LOVE LIVE! NIJIGASAKI HIGH SCHOOL IDOL CLUB SEASON 2

The first season of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club was one of my favorites when it aired back in 2020. This first episode of the second season doesn’t quite match up to some of season one’s highs, but I have confidence that it’ll get there. Plus; the new girl introduced in this episode is just a deliciously excellent heel. Girlboss fans everywhere, eat your heart out.

(REVIEW) The Lost Legacy of FLOWER PRINCESS BLAZE!!: How a Forgotten Toei Series Shaped 15 Years of Magical Girl Anime [April Fools’]

Finally, there’s this. As I’ve now indicated in the article name, this was just an April Fools’ prank. One I inexplicably decided to spend like 2 months working on. It’s a review of the fake magical girl anime from My Dress-Up Darling. Except, given that that show doesn’t exist, most of it is just made up. This was a fun creative writing exercise but also a huge amount of work, surprisingly. So, I doubt I’ll be doing it again. Enjoy this odd-man-out of my website; file it next to the Mao Mao review and the ENA writeup. Huge thank you to commenter momomanamu for playing along in the comments, it made my day.

And that’s about all for this week. There may or may not be articles tomorrow and Monday (my schedule is a little off, right now, as I’m sure you’ve noticed by the fact that I put up three articles today. Something I almost never do.) But articles should resume on Tuesday at the latest, where I plan to cover the BIRDIE WING premiere.

Until then, 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 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, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Dream Lives On in LOVE LIVE! NIJIGASAKI HIGH SCHOOL IDOL CLUB SEASON 2

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.

In its own way, the daylit parallel present-day of Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is a utopia. In the show’s first season, from back in 2020, there were few if any conflicts that could not be solved with a song. It was a fairly far cry from the franchise’s stereotypical portrayal as being obsessed with school-in-danger plots and melodrama. Its highlights, uniformly, were livewire “music videos” that disregarded any pretense of realism for pure visual splendor. What it may have lacked in minute detail–although it could do that too, at times–it more than made up for in a truly rare dedication to pure spectacle.

Nijigasaki High School Idol Club‘s second season continues that devotion; opening as it does with a delightfully bonkers promotional video shot by the titular Idol Club. We get reacquainted with most of the first season’s highlight characters here, although the actual narrative, in as much as there is one, stays firmly centered on club behind-the-scenes-er / sort-of manager Yuu Takasaki (Hinaki Yano), and new girl Lanzhu Zhong (Akina Homoto).

Before we discuss what that narrative actually is, though, we should take the broad view for a moment. Nijigasaki is in an interesting place in 2022. The first season’s only real competitors in the idol anime format were Hypnosis Mic, which targets a different audience and has vastly different aims, the already-forgotten Dropout Idol Fruit Tart and Lapis Re:LiGHTS, and the utter train-crash that was 22/7. In the present day, though, Nijigasaki is no longer the only smart kid in the class, and there are other, equally-bright pupils of the genre present. Mostly in the form of the admittedly yet-to-premiere wildcards Healer Girl and next season’s SHINE POST, but even this season has Ya Boy Kongming!, which despite its absurd premise and smaller focus on just one singer, is very much in at least a broadly similar tonal space. There’s even a fellow Love Live season, also premiering in Summer; the followup to last year’s Love Live! Superstar. In other words; there is an actual level playing field for the first time in a while. Nijigasaki‘s status as Idol Anime of The Year is no longer a given.

In a way, the increased competition is mirrored in the first episode’s own story. What we have here is pretty simple, Lanzhu near-literally steals the show during the Idol Club’s promotional time at a school event. Her songwriter Mia Taylor (Shuu Uchida) makes a bit of an impression earlier on in the episode, but Nijigasaki is Lanzhu’s show, this week. And tellingly, it’s she, not any of our returning characters from season one, who gets the premiere’s music video. It’s a thing of beauty, and also as pompous and grandiose as any real pop diva’s videos, which, as we soon find out, fits her character pretty damn well.

The music video, it must be said, carries on the tradition of total showstoppers from season one very well. These are the episode’s centerpieces and need to convey important information in addition to being visually compelling, and Lanzhu’s knocks it out of the park on both counts. The scene transitions have her doing all kinds of random but awesome-looking nonsense like posing in a bubblebath, standing on top of a bunch of aquariums, and dancing in an elevator while wearing what looks like a borrowed Revue Starlight costume.

By this, do I mean “it has epaulettes”? Yes.

Shot made and sunk; Lanzhu is immensely talented and also hugely egotistical.

That latter point is followed up on at the end of the episode in what is the only real development of conflict here. Lanzhu basically calls the Idol Club a bunch of posers and announces her intent to enter the Idol Festival by herself and to upstage all of them. She does, admittedly, come across as astoundingly bitchy here, but it says a lot that this is what passes for villainy in the Love Live universe.

This does raise the possibility that the second season of Nijigasaki might possibly be more in-line with the melodramatic Love Live baseline than season one was, which would, admittedly, bum me out ever so slightly. But on the other hand, the Idol Club end the episode resolute that their new rival simply means they all have to work harder, and that “where dreams come true” tagline rears its head again in the premiere’s closing moments. That in mind, even if Nijigasaki High School Idol Club isn’t the shoe-in for its genre’s nebulous AOTY award that its predecessor was, it’s hard to imagine the girls won’t be alright. These are school idols we’re talking about, after all, and if my decade-plus of anime watching has taught me anything, it’s that high school girls can do anything.

The Takeaway: Obviously, you should watch season one first, but unless you just hate pop music, you should, of course, check this out.

Special Thanks: Additional Idol Research for this article was provided by Josh the Setsuna Fan, thanks Josh.

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, Misc. Anime, Reviews

Ranking Every 2020 Anime (That I Actually Finished), From Worst to Best – Part 4

Before we get started, a brief reminder to check out the Introduction post and the previous 3 parts of the list before you read this one. Don’t wanna spoil yourself, y’know?

In any case; there were plenty of anime I liked in 2020, some of which I liked quite a lot. There were not nearly as many that I truly loved. But of those I did, they fall into one of two categories. Either they are sharp, questioning, and political. Or they are joyous reaffirmations of how art can affect us, and how it can carry us forward even through the darkest times of our lives. The two are dissimilar, but complimentary. The former is grounded in realism and the latter in escapism. They tend toward the pessimistic and optimistic, respectively. I think that reflects the character of the year–and I suppose, of myself–quite well. Hopefully you agree. On to the final five!

#5: DECA-DENCE

Not since Kill la Kill has a studio produced an original anime debut so immediately sharp and arresting. I have to admit, I turned that statement over in my head for literal days before committing to it, but it’s true. Nut Co. Ltd. have done TV anime before, but aside from an assist on the polarizing FLCL sequels, their most well-known work before Deca-Dence was The Saga of Tanya The Evil, which, whatever one may think about it, was a manga adaption that stuck fairly close to its origins.

Any flaws aside; Deca-Dence feels very much like a wholly-realized singular artistic vision, from start to finish. The sort that is fairly rare in commercial arts fields (which TV anime certainly is). What’s more, it is nakedly political, with a witheringly on-point cross-examination of the evils of capitalism and its dire endpoints as exemplified by its very setting; a post-apocalyptic world which is exploited as a “real life video game” by the ruling class. Which would maybe make it a slog if the show weren’t so damn fun. Visually, Deca-Dence pops with bright colors, steampunk-inspired machines, and a design sensibility for its robot characters that feels inherited from Kaiba, one of the all-time great anime of this sort. Narratively, there’s enough action and compelling character drama to keep things from getting stale or feeling preachy. Deca-Dence exists in solidarity, not on a pedestal.

The unified artistic vision that is largely a positive does, on the flipside, unfortunately mean that it has a few notable flaws. Its chief sin is a bait-and-switchy treatment of its two leads, which would be less of an issue if one were not a young girl and the other an older gruff man narratively empowered by her pain. It’s a mistake this kind of thing should be able to avoid, and that is primarily why it rounds out the bottom of the Top 5. So it goes.

Still, if Deca-Dence is any indication of what future Nut Co. productions, or those of director Yuzuru Tachikawa or writer Hiroshi Seko will be like, there’s a lot to look forward to.

#4: Kaguya-sama: Love is War?

For two years in a row; Kaguya-sama: Love is War! has been raising the bar for anime romcoms. What it may lack in innovation it more than makes up for in technique and heart, Love is War?, the confusingly-titled second season of the series, is top-to-bottom hilarious. Except of course, when it’s busy being surprisingly heavy instead.

It’s not entirely fair to put Love is War on a pedestal, but I really struggle to think of anything else in recent memory that works in this space so well. Original mangaka Aka Akasaka‘s technique of starting with a familiar archetype and then “filling them in” over the course of the story has kept Love is War‘s character writing consistently interesting. This holds true both when exploring the school-day trauma that Ishigami still suffers the aftershocks from and when breaking down the surprisingly complex character of the moralistic, blustery Miko.

But those are strengths equally attributable to the original manga. What puts Love is War the anime near the top of its bracket is the way the visuals elevate and enhance this storytelling. From a comedic perspective, the visuals breathe new life into jokes manga readers have heard before and really make them pop for newcomers. At times, new gags are even made up wholesale, often leaning on the visual element alone. Scenes like Kaguya randomly breaking into vogue, Hayasaka annoyedly bursting into Kaguya’s classroom, and even random visual asides referencing Dark Souls and Peanuts give the entire thing a wonderful, absurd edge.

On the more serious side, these techniques are instead turned toward invoking empathy. Faces have their visual features erased to signify disassociation, crowds coalesce into shadowy masses to project anxiety. Visual effect enthusiasts are given quite a bit to pour over in Love is War.

You might rightly ask why you should care about any of this, since at its core Love is War still is very much a “will they or won’t they” sort of love story. The sort that anime has seen many times before and will see many times again. To a point, that very question has kept it from an even higher spot on this list. But conversely, I would argue that resonant artistic depictions of the anxieties and absurdities of youth will never lose their place in the artistic canon. Not for anime, and not for anything.

#3: Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club

If this list were ranked solely by how much the anime on it made my heart sing, Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club would hold a comfortable #1 spot. Earlier this year I began an earnest dive into the girl group idol anime genre after only idly (haha) poking at it for most of my life. My opinion that 2011’s The Idolm@ster is the genre’s gold standard remains unchanged. But I did not expect it to receive an even close to worthy contender to the title this year. But here we are, and I do genuinely think that Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, the latest entry in the rival Love Live franchise, makes a damn good showing of it. Why? Because of the sheer effort the series go through to convey to you one simple fact; these girls are born entertainers, and they love it, through and through.

The ways in which they love it vary wildly, and if I had to pin a single weakness on Nijigasaki it would probably be that its gargantuan cast size (eleven main characters!) means that some of the girls do only get cursory development. The flipside though is that almost every single one who does get some focus is so magnetic that the passion they have for singing transfers almost directly to you. In its best moments, Nijigasaki feels like holding a live wire of artistic inspiration. Without a doubt; the anime is best experienced by checking any cynicism at the door and just throwing yourself in, arms wide open.

And part of the reason it succeeds is how easy it makes it to do that. Nijigasaki‘s great writing triumph is how quickly and snappily it establishes each character within each arc. Part of this is down to sharp visual design; things like Setsuna’s pyrotechnic stage setup, Rina’s iconic digital “faceboard”, Shizuku’s black and white dress, and so on. But the show’s laser focus when it comes to establishing why each girl wants to become an idol and how she goes about doing so is an incredibly convincing argument for this genre in this format, proving you don’t need two cours here. (Not to say an extra 13 episodes of this would’ve been in any way unwelcome.) The final arc, where group manager Yu and idol Ayumu have a near-falling out over the former’s desire to become a composer proves that the series can also work in more delicate emotional shades, which (as with many things this high on the list) makes me hope for a second season.

In a broader sense; from Setsuna’s matchstick strike of a guerrilla concert in episode three to the blazing monster of a festival that closes out the series, Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is a celebration of communal art and performance in a year where, to paraphrase music critic Todd Nathanson, the very idea may as well be science fiction. Being so fantastically escapist emphatically does not hurt Nijigasaki, it is the very core of its strength. What makes it wonderful is how it is borderline utopian; a vision of a place where everyone’s dreams come true.

#2: Tower of God

I try not to think about these kinds of things too much when I write, but I suspect if there’s a “controversial” pick this high up on the list, it’ll be this one. Tower of God stands as one of 2020’s most polarizing and, in my opinion, most misunderstood mainstream action anime. Tower of God is two primary things: for one, it is a kickass battle shonen set in a truly unique fantasy world inherited from its source material, a sprawling webcomic that effectively wrought the Webtoon movement from the ground with its bare hands. For another; it is an absolutely dialed critique of systems of arbitrary merit. If you’ve been waiting for me to bring up capitalism again, wait no longer. Frankly I don’t need to, Tower of God does it for me. It’s not like characters having to pay off their own medical expenses within the Tower is exactly a subtle analogy to real life.

Tower of God‘s attitude towards its source material–adapt the interesting or the relevant bits, skip everything else–can definitely leave it feeling a touch hard to follow at times. But Tower of God makes its intentions clear in its final few episodes, where deuteragonist Rachel does exactly as the Tower incentivizes her to, and betrays protagonist Twenty-fifth Bam. And why wouldn’t she? Every detail of the Tower’s worldbuilding portrays it as a ruthless meritocracy where only looking out for #1 at the expense of everyone else is rewarded. Bam never understands this because he never has to. His natural talents; his vast reservoirs of shinsu (mana, effectively) and propensity for making allies, are rewarded in a place he has been deposited into by what is more or less random chance. Essentially, he’s privileged. Rachel, who has no such talents, understands it intuitively, hence her betrayal.

But Tower of God‘s critique of these systems goes both wider and deeper. It’s foreshadowed much earlier by minor character Hoh betraying his team during the “Tag arc” that takes up the show’s middle third. Elsewhere, the series touches on misogyny (there is something truly–and intentionally!–offputting about how it’s spelled out to us that the King of Jahad ties the powers of his “princesses” to their virginity) and frame-ups (whatever happened with Khun and his sister). Through it all, its central point remains sharp; the Tower’s world is fantastical, but the principles it operates on are very much like our own.

It is true that the show’s setup basically begs for a second season, one that’s yet to be confirmed. But even if it were to end here, with Bam washed down to the bottom of the Tower, the show has made its point. All of us are climbing, and the Tower still waits.

So with how high my opinion of Tower of God clearly is, what could possibly be better than it? Well, if you know my tastes, or indeed if you’ve simply studied the banner closely, you can probably guess. Scroll down to find out, and raise a hand if you saw this one coming.

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#1: Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Fundamentally, my taste in anime hasn’t changed much since I first discovered the medium over ten years ago. I have a hazy, sun-blurred memory of watching the dub of foundational school life comedy Azumanga Daioh chopped up into pieces and uploaded on Youtube. Azumanga Daioh and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! are, very loosely, in the same genre, despite otherwise not being particularly similar. I bring the former up because I marvel at the many strange and wonderful shapes the school life comedy has taken over the past decade and a half. And Eizouken! certainly has the hallmarks of the genre. It is set primarily in a high school, centers around the activities of a small group of students, and uses the pitfalls of coming of age to set up relatable comedic skits. But it’s also more than that.

I place Eizouken! firmly in an emerging movement of anime that increasingly combine this genre with more serious and reflective elements, a logical step from its origins. (It’s not like AzuDaioh couldn’t be reflective when it wanted to be, after all.) I would happily shuttle it right up next to the post-apocalyptic melancholia of Girls’ Last Tour, or the contemporary but more adventure-oriented A Place Further Than The Universe, my own favorite anime of the 2010s, or the funny, wrenching dramedy of O’ Maidens In Your Savage Season! But its place within that movement is interesting, because while many of its genrefellows seek to perhaps evolve past the school life descriptor entirely, Eizouken! reestablishes why it matters in the first place. How it does this is pretty simple; it has perhaps the most well-considered thematic core of any TV anime to air this year.

History will probably peg Eizouken! as an “anime about anime”, but that’s looking at it narrowly. Eizouken! is an anime about the creative process in general, about what it means to be passionate about something, about turning that passion into reality, how that can be very hard, but how it is almost always worth it.

Our three leads correspond to an aspect of the inner world of art. Midori Asakusa, short, behatted, and kappa-like, is the pure ambition and the font of ideas. She spends the series half-adrift in a sea of drawings and daydreams, in love with flying machines and walking logos. Tsubame Mizusaki, of average height and with a sharp haircut, is the strive toward the perfection of technique, the desire to capture One Perfect Movement as cleanly as possible. (This is why it is she who expresses that she cares about animation, not anime. Contrast Midori who cares very much about anime-the-medium.) Finally, there is the tall, tombstone-toothed Sayaka Kanamori. The brains of the operation, someone for whom practical knowledge and the pursuit of money is a means to her and her friends’ collective happiness, a sort of person vanishingly rare in the real world. Alone, they’re incomplete. Together, they’re unstoppable. I’ve seen many anime whose casts compliment each other well, but Eizouken! might have one of the most well-oiled character dynamic machines in recent memory.

Eizouken!‘s beauty is in how it does not need to really explain itself at length. The series is an argument for itself. The skeptical may be inclined to ask the question back at Eizouken!; “what can sticking to your passions really accomplish?” And, well, the answer is Eizouken! Admittedly, as someone who writes for a living, I am predisposed to like themes in this general realm. But by the same token, pretending that Eizouken!‘s deep understanding of how the creative process functions, the diversity of motivation as to why people want to make art, and its celebration of the two didn’t move me would be disingenuous. I would simply not be doing my job as a commentator on the medium.

The show celebrates many kinds of people in general, really. Sometimes this is even surprisingly literal; Eizouken! stands as a still-rare anime that has a fairly racially diverse cast even though its leads are still Japanese. The series’ near-future setting seems to imply both a Japan and a larger world that is more heterogeneous (in every sense) than today, but this optimism shouldn’t be taken to be naivety. There is conflict in Eizouken!, the optimism comes from the resolution of that conflict. Short films are premiered, audiences are blown away. “We are all different, but truly great art can bring us together” seems to be the final message of the series. It’s a thesis that is so optimistic, almost utopian, that it can, to some, scan as corny. Whether Eizouken! “earns it” or not is where people are split on the series, but I think I’ve made damn well my case that it does.

Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! premiered at the top of the year, in the Winter 2020 anime season that now feels a lifetime ago. Yet, throughout this long, dark, bizarre year, I found myself continually turning it over in my head. I think it’s likely that I will be for years to come. If I may make take back one thing from my original review that predates this blog, it’s this; Eizouken!, with the benefit of distance, feels like it’s not really from this, or any, specific year. It feels like it’s always been there. And from now on, it always will be.

And with that sign-off by way of what is in my estimation the first truly great anime of the ’20s, that concludes our little journey over these past few days. To both old friends and new readers, I wish you the best possible in the new year. Hold each other close, and in all things help one another. Magic Planet Anime will see you in 2021.

If you like my work, consider following me here on WordPress or 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, Twenty Perfect Minutes

Twenty Perfect Minutes: Searching For Setsuna in Episode 3 of LOVE LIVE NIJIGASAKI HIGH SCHOOL IDOL CLUB

Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column series where I take a look at single specific anime that shaped my experience with the medium, were important to me in some other way, or that I just really, really like.

Disclaimer & Thanks: I am new to Love Live as a property and enlisted my good friend Heinzes to help me Love Live Fact Check this column. Thank you very much!

“There are school idols and they have their fans. Isn’t that more than enough?“

Let me let you in on a small secret. As a medium commentator of any sort: critic, blogger, video essayist, whatever. You tend to set little arbitrary rules for yourself. “I won’t review this until a week after I’ve watched it.” “I won’t score anything 10/10 unless I’ve seen it more than once.” Things like that. But sometimes you come across something that just hits you in such a way that’s so specifically your thing that these rules suddenly seem like they don’t matter, and that’s about when it’s time to break them. When I started Twenty Perfect Minutes my intent was to do it fairly infrequently and to showcase episodes of older anime. A few years old, at minimum.

Yet, here I am. Writing in late 2020 about an anime airing in late 2020. Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is the voluminously-titled most recent entry in the storied and frankly massive Love Live franchise. It is also not finished, and as such by writing this I very much risk making myself look like a fool come the end of the season. But if that is a risk, it’s one worth taking, because Nijigasaki‘s third episode is not just the best episode of the young season, it’s one of the strongest this year period.

It’s been a solid year for a lot of different kinds of anime, but very little has made me cry, and as someone who values high melodrama I do unashamedly check for that when mulling over how good I find a series overall. Nijigasaki arguably tossed its hat into the Anime of The Year conversation from the word “go”, but if there was any doubt, it should be cleared up by this episode; “Shouting Your Love”.

Before we can discuss “Shouting Your Love” though, we have to backtrack a bit, to that word “go”, and explain how we got here. First of all, let’s meet Yu.

No not You. Yu.

Yu is interesting. She feels simultaneously pretty typical for the genre but just enough to the left that it’s fresh. Yu begins the series as someone with a lot of passion searching for an outlet. She does not start as an idol (or even an idol fan). We get to see her fall in love with idol music in real time, as the opening half of the first episode is devoted almost entirely to this. And it’s back in that first episode where Nijigasaki pulls out its artistic ace in the hole.

Yu (and her friend Ayumu) happen to catch a public performance by a local idol, Setsuna. The song itself (“Chase!”) is a great slice of upbeat J-Pop if you’re into that sort of thing, but what really sells the scene is twofold. One is a number of close shots of Yu’s face, letting us see her reaction change moment to moment. The other is that we see Setsuna’s performance gradually shift from a simple depiction of what she is actually physically doing, to–at the exact moment that her music hits Yu in the heart–a music video-within-a-show. The stage erupts into fire; figurative passion transformed into literal flame. My understanding is that these inset MVs are not entirely new to Love Live as a franchise, but Nijigasaki‘s use of them feels deeply woven into the narrative. The show wouldn’t entirely work without them.

Yu’s journey starts here, her passion is ignited and it’s her drive that leads the plot forward from this point on. What is left largely unsaid in that first episode–and what brings us back to the third–is Setsuna‘s journey. The very short version is that Nijigasaki pulls off an elegant piece of narrative symmetry here: in the first episode Setsuna lights a fire in Yu’s heart, and Yu, in the third episode, rekindles the dying embers in Setsuna’s.

As this early part of the series has gone on, it’s established that “Setsuna Yuki” isn’t a real person. She’s the alter ego of Nana Nagakawa, the student council president of the titular Nijigasaki High. The performance that Yu and Ayumu witnessed was, in fact, her last and only. Some attention is even paid to the fact that Yu can’t find any other songs by her. (And real life is rife with examples of low-output musicians, from The New Radicals to Mr. Fantastik, so it’s quite a relatable experience.)

What would otherwise be a very straightforward plot detour is spun into a miniature epic through “Shouting Your Love”‘s framing. Nana’s true identity was revealed an episode prior. Here, we get to see her most “normal” side first. Despite her own misgivings about her role in the former Idol Club, she has many traits of a good leader that shine through even here. She seems to know almost every student by both name and educational track, and isn’t above doing dirty work herself. After an introductory sequence where Nana mulls over her decision to quit before deciding it’s for the best, the first thing we see her do is chase down a stray cat. It’s charming and sets the rest of the episode up nicely.

But while this fleshes out her character a bit, the real revealing turn is her initial encounter with Yu, who is idly playing “Chase!” to herself on a piano. Yu initially mistakes Nana for a fellow Setsuna fan, but Nana quickly rebuffs her. But as she does so, it becomes clear before long that Nana is less talking to Yu and more trying to justify her decision post-hoc to herself.

In a vacuum this is a pretty simple development. In the context of the rest of “Shouting Your Love” it helps Nana feel like someone legitimately going through a serious crisis of the self. The actual argument that broke up the Idol Club–something about passion vs. cuteness–is perhaps a bit underexplored, but the conflict it represents feels real. It’s clear to us the audience that Nana doesn’t really want this to be where her time as an idol ends, and she’s trying to convince herself more than anyone else. At one point she even sits down to watch a Youtube upload of her own performance; only to scroll down and realize that all the comments are asking fundamentally the same question: why did Setsuna quit?

You can read a lot into her internal monologue in this episode. And there may be more than one answer. Personally, it seems to me that she’s someone with a tendency to put what others expect of her before what she wants herself. It would fit with her demanding position on the student council, an aside remark by her mother about “mock exams”, and her decision to disband the club once she felt like she was getting in everyone else’s way. She even seems to think that she was holding them back from competing in the Love Live, the school idol “tournament” after which the entire franchise is named. And indeed, her final comments in that very monologue seem to frame things that way, with her justifying her decision as a sacrifice for the benefit of her friends, the new members of the club, and so on.

In fact on my first viewing of this episode I actually thought it might end there, because I wasn’t paying particularly much attention to how far along the video was. In the best way possible; “Shouting Your Love” is the rare anime episode that feels twice its length. The second half of the episode sees the newly-reformed School Idol Club briefly hijack the school announcement system to call Nana and “Setsuna” to the roof. (After a heartfelt meeting where they decide they want to try to get Nana back in the club, of course.)

Here, she has another talk with Yu, who at this point in the series seems like someone whose wildfire passion may well be contagious. Yu asks Nana to rejoin the club. Nana replies that she’ll hold everyone back from being able to compete at the Love Live, to which Yu says this.

And the facade of Nana as the dutiful student council president who always puts others before herself promptly snaps like a twig.

It’s hard to not just post screencaps of the entire conversation, which is so heartfelt that in places it borders on a confession scene (not the first like this that Yu’s been responsible for in Nijigasaki and I doubt it’ll be the last).

Shippers eat your heart out.

The important thing is that Yu’s words reach Nana, much like Setsuna’s song first reached Yu. In a stylish hairflip, Nana’s braids come undone, and Setsuna is reborn in an instant. Because this is an idol series–because this is Love Live, perhaps–she of course bursts into song. “DIVE!”, the insert song here, is a fist-pumping rocker whose “music video” weds the earlier fire theme of “Chase!” to an underwater aesthetic, laying Nana/Setsuna’s personality out in symbolic language as she, in the MV, breaks through a reflective underwater wall of ice, perhaps a visual metaphor for this rediscovery of what is, in my estimation, her real self.

But we can talk about symbolism and other such concerns all we like. The biggest thing I can say in the favor of “Shouting Your Love!” is that I’ve now watched the ending scene three times. And while it’s true I cried the first time, I think it’s even more impressive that I couldn’t stop myself from grinning ear to ear every single time. “Yu” is kind of brilliant as a character name, because while she is a character in her own right, when you’re watching the idol performances, you’re seeing them, essentially, as Yu sees them. If you open yourself to it, the passion of the series–the same passion I’ve talked about at length, here–can easily light your heart on fire as well.

It’s impossible to know if we’ll still be talking about Nijigasaki in these same terms in a few weeks. A lot can change over the course of an anime’s run, after all. But it’s hard to imagine a world where this episode ever feels less wonderful. To tell the truth, as someone who recently set music as a creative outlet aside, I can’t help but relate to Nana. But even more, I can’t help but relate to Yu, who seems just as star-struck by the wonder of art that I am in moments like….well, like “Shouting Your Love”.

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.