Tag: Love Live! Sunshine!!

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Radiant Magic of YOHANE THE PARHELION -SUNSHINE IN THE MIRROR-

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.

As I type this, a thunderstorm is passing over Chicago, where I live. I can hear the wind battering at my window and the rain tap tap tapping against it. In this way, there could perhaps be no environment less suited for Yohane the Parhelion -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR-, an interesting project that, as its title implies, is nothing but a warm column of sunrays on a breezy summer day.

I have to confess, I wasn’t going to originally cover Sunshine in the Mirror. It’s a decidedly peculiar spinoff of Love Live!! Sunshine, perhaps the franchise’s most well-regarded entry, which reimagines its characters by placing them in a fantasy setting wholly divorced from our own world. I have, plainly put, never seen Sunshine, so I was worried I’d be missing some context here. But, a few words of encouragement from a friend1 that it’s amenable to franchise neophytes (which, having seen only the two seasons of Nijigasaki High School Idol Club and Love Live!! Superstar! I would say I might still count as one) and, moreover, actually watching the episode itself, convinced me otherwise. This is just a mercilessly pleasant anime, going by its first episode. It also interacts with its immediate predecessors—mostly Nijigasaki—in some interesting ways that we’ll get to. But really, the main thing here is just that it is such a ray of sunshine. I haven’t felt this relaxed and refreshed while watching an anime since Healer Girl premiered over a year ago.

There’s something else, too, which I’m not sure will be obvious to non-genre fans. This is the third out-and-out fantasy idol anime2 in just four years. (We’re here counting this, Healer Girl, and 2020’s Lapis Re:Lights, which might just end up going down in history as being ahead of a trend.) A certain strain of idol anime, of which the Love Live franchise is a huge part, basically already is fantasy. “School idols” and whatnot are not real things. They have about as much to do with the actual idol industry as Fist of the North Star does with actual martial arts. If they are already presenting a notion of idol music that is so unconnected to reality, why not embrace that? This is the question these shows are, intentionally or not, asking. They have other themes too of course (I could go on about Healer Girl‘s various layers for hours), but by inheriting a textually fantastic bent from the idol anime genre’s contemporaries (say, Symphogear) and its ancestors (most famously Macross), it frees itself from the leftover trappings of the idol genre proper. Frankly, I think this is wonderful. Leave that to anime that are actually interested in dealing with the ins and outs of the industry. If you want to be fantastical, be fantastical. And that, in a nutshell, is what Sunlight in the Mirror is aiming for. It’s easily the most high-profile of these, and it’s definitely at least trying to be one of the best.

Even so! In the beginning you could be forgiven for thinking the whole fantasy world conceit is a little odd. The core story here, where our protagonist Yohane [Aika Kobayashi] reluctantly returns home after an unsuccessful two-year journey in the big city to get signed as a singer, could easily fit in a more conventional idol anime. If you’re not paying attention to the sumptuous backgrounds, you could conceivably even miss that this is an original setting at all. I have to admit that in the episode’s first third or so, I had some difficulty connecting with it. “Love for your hometown” is not exactly a theme that deeply resonates with me, personally, as someone who also left a podunk town to live in the big city, albeit not for entertainment career-related reasons. Still, Yohane herself, as an incredibly overconfident failgirl in a ridiculously flashy outfit, is an immensely likable protagonist. Even moreso when she’s teamed up with her talking dog(!!!!!!!!) / surrogate sibling Laelaps [Yoko Hikasa], who tolerates absolutely none of her bad attitude and forms a very fun dynamic with her.

Really, as far as actual plot, not a ton happens in this first episode. Yohane returns to her hometown, mopes around a bit while Laelaps needles her about it, tries (unsuccessfully) to avoid reconnecting with her childhood friend Hanamaru [Kanako Tanatsuki], who works at a local bakery. But there are two big things that point the way forward for Sunshine in the Mirror. One is a total question mark, and the other, where the show really leans into its strengths, is absolutely beautiful.

Firstly, while Yohane is making awkward small talk with Hanamaru, a bizarre psychic shockwave of some sort resonates across the entire town, and we’re shown the puzzling image of some kind of shadowy portal opening between the branches of a tree in a nearby forest. It’s hard to say what’s going on there, exactly, but I will just put forward now that if the climax of this anime involves our girls defeating some kind of demonic invasion by singing at them, I will be entirely here for that.

Secondly, late in the episode Yohane revisits a childhood landmark; a massive tree stump that, as a kid, she used as a personal stage. She would sing and wave around a stick like a conductor’s baton, it’s all very cute. What’s much better though is that, when a concerned Hanamaru joins her near the stump, she convinces Yohane to sing for her, and it’s here where Sunshine in the Mirror cashes in its most brilliant, yet, in hindsight, totally obvious idea.

She sings; the song is great, the visuals are great, a triumphantly lonely number set to rolling shots of a brilliant blue sea and vibrant green grass, where Yohane faces herself in the mirror, awakes from a long sleep on a giant black flower, and bursts away cottony shadows with a bright flash of lilies. In fact, Sunshine in the Mirror here uses the same “image stage” technique that fellow Love Live entry Nijigasaki High School Idol Club created and perfected. But the biggest moment here is actually when this little mini music video ends, and reveals that, actually, no it doesn’t.

We see Yohane’s costume glitter and glow as it changes from what she wore in the image stage back to its usual, very extra self. The strongly implied is made textual mere moments later; this is real, actual magic. Everything we just saw is what Yohane’s audience of two saw as well. Perhaps the most dramatic change is what happens to the little stick she’s again using as a conductor’s baton. It transmogrifies, evidently from the pure, literally spellbinding force of Yohane’s song, into a fox-headed magic wand. It’s an absolutely wonderful touch, and it makes complete sense as a further evolution of Love Live‘s visual splendor.

The only bad thing is that you only get a chance to do this particular reveal once. It’s a hell of a flourish, but it’s a one-off by its very nature. It can’t carry the whole show. The good news is that, of course, it won’t have to. If its first episode is any indication, Sunshine in the Mirror can get by just fine on emotional honesty, gorgeous production values, and simply by being an irrepressible blast of sunny magic. What a lovely way to start the summer season. What else could you ask for?

1: hi Josh

2: While this is the obvious name for this particular genre fusion, I’ve never heard anyone else call them this. Did I just coin a term? I’ll happily take credit for doing so, if I did.

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

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) What Actually is The LOVE LIVE! SUNSHINE!! LIVE-ACTION FILM SPECIAL MOVIE?

This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by @Yousorojisan. Thank you for your support.

“I guess if you have the full power of an anime studio behind you, you can shitpost as hard as you want.”

-Julian M., KeyFrames Forgotten cohost and personal friend.

What is it with short-form idol fiction, man? Last year, I briefly reviewed Idolmaster Spin-Off, which, like the subject of today’s review, is a completely incomprehensible piece of brain-zapping surrealism. Just yesterday I happened to read the deeply fucked up weird sci-fi high concept shock fiction body horror idol novella The Last & First Idol. Given the competition, the Love Live! Sunshine!! Special Movie is only the third or so craziest idol thing I’ve ever mentioned on this site, but it’s still pretty goddamn weird in a way that’s only really explicable by its origin as an April Fools’ prank.

What little premise there is goes like this; our sort-of protagonist Riko (Rikako Aida) falls asleep, and there, she dreams of herself and the rest of Love Live! Sunshine!! group Aquors as cute little puppets. They mime through a sequence of fairytales, beginning with The Three Little Pigs, the one among these that will be most recognizable to Anglophone audiences. The plot, such as it is, progresses in an economical but chaotic fashion. But of course, the actual narrative (itself fairly scant) is not the point here, this whole ordeal has more in common with [adult swim] shorts than it does anything else related to the Love Live! franchise, which is why we get things like a recurring antagonist in the form of a coelacanth puppet.

Things like this are, essentially, novelties. As such, it’s hard to grade them on a scale as is usually expected when writing some sort of review. I can tell you that the visuals are charmingly lo-fi even if the puppetry itself is rather amateurish, but that doesn’t really tell you much about the Special Movie itself, does it? Instead, I’d argue there are two angles to approach this short from.

The obvious tack is the aforementioned, where we view Special Movie as a piece of nonsense comedy. As far as such things go, it’s a solid execution of the idea, and you can find fellows for Special Movie among a particular strain of absurd, mostly half-length anime that have been a recurring fixture in TV anime for the better part of two decades (if you ever want to truly question your life I highly recommend the cranium-destroyingly insane Ai Mai Mi). It’s pretty fun in its own way, so full marks there.

The second and arguably more interesting angle, however, is to view this not as a primarily comedic endeavor but as one that performs a crucial function for an idol group. It conveys the personalities of its involved members extremely well; enough so that, despite not having seen the original Love Live! Sunshine!! (it wasn’t part of this commission, and as is often the case, I was assured I did not need to see it to understand this), I immediately clocked the personalities of all of this short’s major players. Granted, idol anime characters tend to be written in archetype, but this kind of thing, where characters get one or at most two short scenes to establish their personality before the plot moves on, are harder to pull off than one might think. With almost no prior knowledge of this particular part of the Love Live franchise, I nonetheless gleaned right away that Riko is the self-conscious straightman of the group, that Chika (Anju Inami) is the lovable goofball protagonist, and so on, and so forth. If we pretend for a moment that the Love Live characters are real people—and there is little reason not to when engaging in this sort of thought exercise—the short makes a lot of sense as an act of brand extension. You, if you’re reading this, presumably love these characters already. Why not watch them do something stupid for 15 minutes? What do you have to lose?

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

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