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.
“Magic is a miracle that makes the world vibrant.”
When she was a young girl, Coco [Motomura Rena] purchased a book at a festival. This book, sold by a mysterious magician in a mask, is the inciting object of Witch Hat Atelier‘s story, and Coco obtaining the book in the first place is, thus, where our story begins, at least in a chronological sense.
Witch Hat Atelier‘s first episode isn’t much of one, would be the problem. The practice of releasing double or even triple premieres is an increasingly common thing. It’s often rather exasperating, in fact, but in the case of Witch Hat Atelier specifically, I understand completely why they went this route. Because if you were to only see that first episode, you’d only get half of the picture. Nonetheless, we do have to start at that festival, with that book and the pictures within it, central as they are to this story and, perhaps more importantly, what I want to discuss about this story.
If you want to recap the first episode, that’s very easy. Coco, daughter of a fabric seller, is a young girl obsessed with magic due to her acquiring that book as a very young child. Magic is everywhere in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, lighting up cobblestones beneath one’s feet, purifying a spring so one can drink from it, but the how is a mystery. Coco—everyone, really—is led to believe that magic is a matter of blood. You are born able to use magic, or you aren’t. Those who are so born are witches, and everyone else is just a regular ol’ person.
This is how, just to name an (unfortunate) cultural touchstone, Harry Potter, for example, handles things, with its convoluted throngs of wizarding lineages. (Although the general concept is hardly unique to that series.) Related to its presence there, though, I have always, to my core, hated this approach to magic in fiction. Some of this has to do with my own real-world practice of eclectic neopagan witchcraft, some of it has to do with personal beliefs about the nature of life, the world, talent, and skill. Some of it is just pure preference, in that I think it’s lazy worldbuilding. I also think it often leads to worlds rife with unfortunate, unconsidered implications about what the existence of inborn gifts of that nature might lead to or imply. It is something I have many problems with, to put it mildly.
However, I don’t bring all this up to criticize Witch Hat Atelier. Because what Coco and most others believe is not necessarily what is actually true. One day, a witch named Qifrey [Hanae Natsuki] visits her mother’s shop. While there, he takes a noted interest in her picture book, but mostly, he offers to fix a broken-down carriage—a carriage pulled by flying horses—when some neighborhood kids break it. (Being a handyman is, too, the job of a witch in this world.) Qifrey asks that he be left to the repair alone, he doesn’t want any prying eyes on him. Coco, precocious child that she is, outwardly agrees, but cannot resist the temptation to see magic performed. Sneaking into a crawlspace above him, she watches him work, and she learns the truth as he slowly sketches out a series of magic circles. Magic, in the world of Witch Hat Atelier, is not cast, but drawn. Anyone with a fountain pen, a bottle of special ink, and the proper knowledge can work miracles.
The knowledge of this fact is a secret, of course. Witches are sworn to keep this fact from the public, and this immediately, drastically changes both what magic literally is in the context of the events of the story and also its broader use as a tool of metaphor. There is a reason we devote more or less the whole first episode to this revelation—that and Coco being cute, of course—and it’s because Witch Hat Atelier is very interested in laying out what magic means and can be in very plain terms before it does anything else. Magic can be done by anyone, which nominally makes it accessible and democratic. But the witches themselves keep this knowledge from everyone, so magic is controlled as well. This pulls us back to the “wizard lineage” issue to some extent, but makes it an intentional point of consideration as opposed to a thoughtless byproduct. With this, Witch Hat Atelier wants to get us thinking.
If magic can create great works of beauty and provide numerous benefits to the world—and from what we see here, it can—it can also be terrifying. These are the central tensions that the story returns to over and over, and that last point is the note the episode ends on. Coco, now knowing that magic can be done by anyone, practices copying the many seals depicted in her picture book. She does not actually know what they do, mind you. She’s just trying things out and, essentially, guessing. Her first several spells are minor; a tiny fireworks show, a sprouting flame, but when she realizes that larger circles are more powerful and well-drawn ones even moreso, she gets the idea to simply trace the seals in the book. Nearly as soon as she’s finished attempting this, Qifrey bursts through her window, just in time to save her from a spell gone horribly right. Her entire house, and the fabric shop within, bursts into erupting waves of crystal, turning everything inside into a blue, prismatic, frozen-solid glitter. Qifrey is in time to save Coco, but not Coco’s mother, who is caught in the petrification and turned to a crystal statue instantly.
That is the note that episode one ends on. Coco’s childhood in ruins beneath her as Qifrey holds her tight in the air. Initially, he’s quite set on erasing her memories—by implication, the standard procedure for people who find out about magic but aren’t supposed to—but after some pleading from Coco, and the realization that without her picture book he’s down a lead about “them” (how vague and scary!), he changes his mind. Instead, he will take her as an apprentice. And so the stage is set for our real story.
But, of course, we can’t get to that without all of this. It’s foundational, establishing the contradictions of magic in this world and giving us reasons to both find awe in it and to fear it. The visuals, it must be noted, are laser-focused on getting all of this across. Coco’s first fledgling attempt to draw a magic circle fills her—and us—with a genuine sense of wonder as the circle literally floats off the page and then explodes into a crackle of glittering fireworks.
At the same time, the sense of fear and panic at the cascading crystal waves of Coco’s unintentional petrification of her own home is overpowering, it’s enough to strike genuine terror into a person. We immediately, intuitively, get it. This is the joy magic can bring, this is the danger magic can bring. We understand from the very first episode both the limitless potential for magic and how that potential might be turned to destructive ends; why we might want it to be free and thrive, and why we might want it cordoned off and controlled. As I say, contradictions. (On a less literal level, these are all still true. To me, magic is art, in its infinite capacity to both hurt and heal. But no single one to one metaphor works entirely.)
Something much more straightforward, it must be said, is that all of this is so effective that it should instantly dispel any worries over this adaptation. The Witch Hat Atelier anime was highly anticipated, and it comes to us from BUG FILMS, specifically a team headed by director Watanabe Ayumu (also simultaneously working on Akane-banashi, busy guy) and his assistant director Shinohara Shun. There was some understandable apprehension about BUG’s involvement with the project. Some of this simply stemmed from the long gap between the anime’s announcement and its premiere, but some stemmed from the unfortunate and severe broadcasting delays suffered by BUG’s last and only other TV anime project, Zom 100. (I don’t know if the Zom 100 premiere writeup is the article I’ve penned for this site that’s aged the most strangely. It must at least be up there, though.) Still, I think the fact that the Zom 100 debacle was an entire three years ago, the involvement of a different director here, and the quality of these first two episodes should allay these fears. In addition to the visual strengths I’ve already discussed, there’s also a truly charming use of pop-up storybook animations that mimics the use of similar in the manga without feeling quite one to one. Overall, I’d say this is the rare adaptation that is stridently faithful to the source material without feeling overly staid. That’s a very hard needle to thread, and the team working on the anime should be proud that they’ve accomplished it.
This all continues to be true in the second episode, the more subdued half of the premiere. One thing to know about Witch Hat is that it is a slow story for the most part, and accordingly this second episode is almost entirely about Coco getting settled in to the titular atelier, the small hillside school where she will be learning her new craft. Craft really is the word for it, too, as this episode also goes into more detail about how magic actually works, breaking down the different parts of the seals and how they affect the outcome of a given spell. It is as much science as art, like so many of its analogues in the real world, and getting to see Coco try—and fail!—to learn the basics of the craft is one of Witch Hat‘s little joys.
There’s also quite the primer on the history of magic here. Qifrey explains how, once upon a time, everyone simply knew how to use magic. This, of course, led to spells being developed so horrible that they defy description—the first application of any technology is warfare, after all—until one day, some banded together to put a stop to all this. Somehow—the details are left very vague—they cast a spell that wiped the memory of magic from all but a select few, leading to the current status quo. This is all told in a very broad-stroke way, but a way that’s believable within the series’ context. We are getting, more or less, the “official” version of things here, and we also detour into how Coco will have to pass a handful of trials before she’s considered a true witch and is permitted to enter the Tower of Tomes, the witches’ own Library of Alexandria, where she might perhaps discover the secret to rescuing her mother.
Qifrey also explains what separates permitted from forbidden magic. The short version? Anything cast on the body, other than the spell to erase memories to keep the secret, is forbidden. This means nothing that can harm another person, certainly, but it also means no teleportation, no direct flight, not even healing magic like we might find in so many other fantasy settings. Again, we come to contradictions. It is immediately obvious why anyone would want to keep things this strict and this simple, but it’s also obvious why some might object to this. So far in this narrative, no one does, but the very fact that this magic is “forbidden” as opposed to simply “lost” all but tells us outright that some do.
Whatever that may eventually entail, this is also a rather domestic episode. We also meet Qifrey’s three other students here, carefree and energetic Tetia [Haruki Kurumi], who is the first to greet Coco and does so with open arms, the coolheaded and somewhat detached Richeh [Tsukishiro Hika], who we learn perhaps the least about here, and finally, most importantly, there’s Agott [Yamamura Hibiku].
Agott, serious, disciplined, with inkstained fingers, makes herself immediately known as Coco’s foil. Coco, despite the harrowing experience of accidentally petrifying her home and mother, is still bright-eyed about the prospect of learning magic and is, in some sense, perhaps even naively optimistic about her own ability to reverse her mother’s fate. Agott, like all of Qifrey’s other students, has heard rumors of an Outsider who enacted a forbidden spell and is now being taken in as a witch. Unlike Tetia and Richeh, she is very blunt about how this has colored her perception of Coco; she thinks there’s essentially no chance that she’ll ever see her mother again, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be a proper peer of Agott herself or the other girls in the atelier.
Whether or not that’s true remains to be seen. The very day after taking in his new apprentice, Qifrey heads off to attend to business at the ‘Great Hall’—whatever that may be the domain of knowledge of manga readers alone, for the time being—and Agott promptly challenges Coco to a test, presumably of her own design. Whatever awaits Coco, it is unlikely that Agott’s skepticism is the last, or most dangerous, thing she will have to face.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
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.
It’s been a while since I did a good roundup post! You know how these go, so let’s get on with it.
Akane-banashi: The widely-acclaimed Shonen Jump rakugo manga gets its anime adaptation this season. Depsite the trailers looking rather dull, I was actually quite impressed with this episode itself. However, as much as Akane-banashi at large is the story of its title character Akane [Nagase Anna], this first episode mostly isn’t. Instead, it’s mostly about her father, Osaki Tohru [Fukuyama Jun], stage name Arakawa Shinta. This episode takes place in Akane’s childhood, and it is clear throughout the episode that she loves and admires her father immensely. (And, well, if my dad was voiced by Lelouch Lamperouge I’d probably feel the same way.) She gets into a fight at school over a classmate disrespecting Tohru by calling him a deadbeat with no real job, and, when the kid’s mother wants to know what happened, she responds by acting out the entire scenario herself, in a very rakugo-esque manner, overtly gesturing to the talent she’s already fostering at a young age.
She might, in fact, be a better rakugoka than her father someday. Watanabe Ayumu (a man who is set to have a very busy spring, between directing this and the Witch Hat Atelier anime) and his team take great pains to depict Tohru as someone who is talented but who has to try quite a lot to really tap into that talent. The predominant mood of the episode is not of a preternatural talent here to blow you out of your seat like you’d get in an anime about rock music or such (or indeed like we might get later in this very series), but of effort. The very animation itself has a weathered, almost sepia look to it. A look that also gently implies that money might be an issue for the family. Certainly, it would explain Tohru’s desperation to become a shin’uchi. Rakugo’s third and highest rank, a shin’uchi. That level of accreditation would presumably open some doors for him, certainly.
The sweaty and nervous atmosphere of this guy absolutely bombing his promotion test is perhaps the emotional crux of the episode. Uncomfortable and unenviable, hotter than the spotlight directly on him. Even when things turn around there’s an air of inevitable personal tragedy over the whole thing and, yeah, he fails and gets expelled from the profession. So set is the stage for our true heroine, who we will be meeting in earnest next week. Incidentally, like last year’s Cinderella Gray, you can watch Akane-banashi legally and for free on Youtube. So that’s nice!
Daemons of The Shadow Realm:Fullmetal Alchemist author Arakawa Hiromu‘s latest ongoing, now in anime form! This first episode was, well, it was a fuck of a lot honestly! We start out with a very traditional and straightforward-seeming setup, two siblings born as night turns to day leads to an adolescence where the brother, Yuru [Ono Kenshou], protects his sister Asa [Miyamoto Yume] who lives in some kind of sanctuary inside the mountaintop village they call home. This is a bit odd in its own right, but it’s absolutely blown to pieces when planes and helicopters carrying armed soldiers invade, dropping both conventional modern military fighters and a pair of individuals who command supernatural agents called Daemons into the village to kill Asa and capture Yuru for unspecified purposes. One of these individuals, a woman, succeeds in killing Asa, only for her to inform a shocked Yuru that she is Asa (which Yuru, obviously, does not believe).
We don’t get any answers as to how or even whether that might be true here, though. He flees along with his village’s medicine seller (seemingly someone who’s tapped in about the existence of the modern world outside the village) and the episode ends on an interesting note. The medicine seller gives Yuru a key to a socket in front of the twin statues guarding the village. These, promptly, are brought to life as Yuru’s own Daemons, simply named Left and Right but taking the form of a buff demon man and woman.
There’s a lot to unpack here. The atmosphere of sudden, intense violence when the soldiers invade is classic Arakawa. They are downright ruthless, and the Daemon-wielder they have with them, Gabby, is honestly even worse, commanding her inky Pac-Man monster to chomp most of the village to death. All together I was a little surprised by how much I liked this since I”ve never been a huge Arakawa stan (I liked Fullmetal Alchemist just fine as a teenager, but not so much that I felt the need to seek out her other work, and I liked other things a lot better around that same time).
This show is slated for two consecutive cours and the pacing and plotting here is snappy enough that I’m really interested to see if I can keep it up for 24 whole episodes.
GHOST CONCERT : missing songs: An impressively incoherent full-speed trainwreck from the brain of Symphogear creator Agematsu Noriyasu. Agematsu has a lot of post-Symphogear stuff that is vaguely like this, in that they, like Ghost Concert, are concerned with the intersection of music (and artistic expression more generally) and technology. Ghost Concert piles a near-future sci fi setting where non-AI music is illegal on top of that, and then further adds a Fate-esque twist where the main character is a medium who can see and be possessed by the spirits of famous historical figures.
There is, suffice to say, a lot going on here, and if any of it made any kind of sense it might be great. As it is, well, I did already call it a trainwreck but honestly that’s underselling it a little. I have almost no idea what the different parts of this show have to do with each other, which given that we’re only a single episode in leaves me a bit flabbergasted.
What I will give the series is that it has pretty impressive action animation and direction—the directing here handled by Jinbou Masato and animated by a team at the infamous Studio ENGI—but aside from the fact that I don’t really expect that to last, it’s hard to latch on to empty calorie goodies like cool explosions, aspect ratio-changing AMV sequences, and glowing VFX during the fight scenes when you have no real idea of what’s happening or why. The episode’s actual plot is bizarrely vague, something about our main girl Aiba Seria being possessed by the ghost of Cleopatra and turned into an….evil slut, I guess? (As a side note it drives me crazy when stuff characterizes Cleopatra this way, but that’s more of a pet peeve than anything.) Possessed by Cleopatra and summoning the phantoms of Caesar and Mark Antony for help, she fights a blue-haired girl and a priest for vague reasons. There is singing. After the fight she has a massive row with her friends who I guess did not know she was some kind of medium? It’s all so hurried and haphazard that it barely registers as a story at all.
If nothing else, this at least seems to make the argument that the Symphogear guy doesn’t like genAI. I guess that’s nice, but it’s agreeable in the same way a Macklemore song is. Sure, the general sentiment is nice and some of the technical aspects are impressive. It’s still not anything you’d really ever listen to of your own volition.
SNOWBALL EARTH: I think even just a couple of years ago, I would’ve talked myself into watching a few more episodes of this on the basis that it “has potential” or something, but to be honest, an interesting premise alone a show does not make. We spend this whole first episode getting to that premise in the first place, so even if it did, I have not exactly been rewarded for my 20 minutes here.
The real death knell for the show is just its tone. We want this to be a serious thing about a lonely boy and his obligation to save the world with the help of his giant robot friend and we want it to be sad when the giant robot sacrifices himself at the end of the episode on some Iron Giant shit. But we also want this to be a goofy parody with a lot of knee-slapping corny humor that’s basically just a string of jokes that people made about Shinji in the early 2000s. It commits to neither so the two halves work against each other and the result is a show that mostly just pissed me off. This thing has the audacity to reference the original Gundam in its opening episode which if you’re going to do that, you better have more to show for it than this.
Petals of Reincarnation: Well this was really stupid! I’d say I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way but, honestly, here I sort of do. It’s about half and half, I guess.
With the constant deluge of narou-kei bullshit I honestly welcome something that’s an edgelord revenge fantasy in a more direct and honestly more imaginative way. Granted, the bar is in the ground so “imaginative” means we’re doing the “powers borrowed from great figures of history” shtick. Fate is usually held to have invented this, but in terms of competence and general responsibility with its historical characters I am expecting something more along the lines of Nobuna-Gun. (This show is where the “Hitler as a little anime boy with a sharingan” image that’s been kicking around the internet lately is from, for reference, if you’ve seen that.)
I won’t go into the events of the narrative because they’re not important, or, honestly, even interesting. But the fights in this first episode were pretty cool, especially for a new studio (BENTEN Film, supposedly mostly ex-Gainax of Fukushima staff) and a team helmed by a not particularly acclaimed director (the Grendizer U guy is doing this). The show has what is for better or wores an extremely distinctive visual style, with some very, very, very bold color choices. Downright garish ones at times. Add in some SHAFT-y dialogue screens and such and you get a series that has the air of being distinctly the budget version of a couple other shows. There are way worse things to be, even if that’s hardly high praise. And the female lead, herself named Haito le Buffett [Maruoka Wakana], proves that if you make Miyamoto Musashi a girl she will always be the coolest character in the room. (Although this version doesn’t hold a candle to Fate‘s, obviously.)
The main thing holding me back here is that the main character is a vacuous edgelord and I kinda hate him in the wrong way. We’ll see how much juice he can get out of Mega Man’ing everyone else’s powers, but honestly how much more of this I watch is going to be down to how cool the action scenes are vs. how annoying I find him and the other characters. Other than Haito, none have left a particularly positive impression so far. Between this, Ghost Concert, and Killed Again, Mr. Detective (which I did not write about here, because I frankly had very little to say), it’s at least proving to be an interesting season for shows that are just very odd above all else. If you like those, you may get some enjoyment out of these. Otherwise, well, there’s always this option:
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
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.
I don’t know, off the top of my head, how many mangaka over the years have been in a position where anime based on their work has aired in consecutive anime seasons. I don’t imagine it’s many, though, and as of yesterday, that exclusive club has gained a new member in Agasawa Koucha. Agasawa’s work was first brought to the silver screen this past season with You and I Are Polar Opposites. This Spring, her other manga of note joins it on TV screens worldwide; The Ramparts of Ice. This occasion was rare enough that there was a little piece of commemorative art done for it, a charming detail that nicely accompanies the charm of Polar Opposites itself.
Of course, we’re not here to talk about Polar Opposites again, even if the common sell for Ramparts to Polar Opposites fans is that it’s “like if Azuma was the main character.” At the end of the day, these are two separate works and, indeed, Ramparts is actually the older of the two, having run from 2018 to 2022 in its original serialization, first as an independent webcomic and then through LINE’s LineManga service, and then finally in print through Shueisha. That’s a long and complex history for something like this, but it’s worth remembering. Because it also, importantly, makes Ramparts a case of true grassroots success. So it’s worth going into it with an open mind, to try to see what early readers saw when they were first introduced to this story back in 2018.
We start immediately with a montage of memories from the perspective of our main character, Hikawa Koyuki [Nagase Anna]. She’s being teased—prodded and made fun of for her appearance and demeanor, mainly—by a variety of classmates over some number of years. She asks herself, the world, and us, why it’s fine for these things to happen if they’re meant “as a joke.” This is a solid piece of tone-setting, and immediately, with the visuals showing us Koyuki’s frosted-over point of view, and a glowing blue circle that she establishes in her mind’s eye, a cold barrier between herself and others.
As we return to the present, Koyuki in the second semester of her first year of high school, we see how this icy demeanor has put up a very real wall between her and others. When she has to give a pair of boys a class handout, they freeze up, and one remarks upon her departure that Koyuki doesn’t hang out with anyone in class at all, and that this was in fact her first interaction with her. Similarly, when she walks past a trio of other girls in the hall, the girl at the center of the group, Azumi Miki [Izumi Fuuka] throws a gaze in her direction, clearly affected by her frigid aura. Miki and Koyuki are actually friends, we later learn. (When she brings this incident up the next day, she wonders why Koyuki didn’t say anything to her!) Koyuki’s become so adept at projecting this “don’t come near me” vibe that she’s earned a reputation for it, and some even call her the “Queen.” The “ice” prefix there is left out, for our own imaginations to fill in.
There are a few immediate observations you can make here. While the show does not seem outright dour, it does definitely have an appropriately frosty atmosphere. One could criticize director Mankyuu and his team at Studio KAI for not bringing the same verve to the material that Lapin Track brought to Polar Opposites, but that would be to ignore that this material does not really call for bounciness or liveliness. It needs to feel frozen-over, and it does. Rare moments of warmth feel more like the first thaw of Spring, a herald of a more thorough melting to come, for sure, but not the main event just yet. Koyuki’s own view? Well, being so distant from everyone isn’t great, but it’s at least better than middle school. Ouch.
The first crack in the glacier comes when Amamiya Minato [Chiba Shouya] bumps into her in the hallway as she’s making faces in a mirror, wondering why everyone finds her so scary. He gently says that he’d thought she was scary, but sees now that she can make some funny faces, too. More important perhaps: he knows her name. This sticks with her, and we’ll come back to it in a moment.
Now, I did say the show is a romantic comedy, which may read as a mischaracterization if you’re this far into the article. “Dramedy” might be a closer fit, but it wasn’t a mistake. The show does have comedic material as well. So far, this mostly consists of people being wicked intimidated by Koyuki’s vibe. It’s nailed pretty well, and the stylistic shifts into a chibi art style are very cute. Expect to see some number of introverted otaku girls in your social circle changing their icons to a chibi Koyuki sometime in the near future, if you’ve got a lot of friends fitting that description on social media.
Koyuki’s rep is particularly sad when we see her text a friend (Miki, in fact) and realize she’s the sort of person to send someone a frog sticker in an IM and say “okey froggy” in response to a question. That goofy side is something she doesn’t really get to show people, and I think it’s very possible the whole thawing process will eventually leave it more visible to others. She and Miki have a conversation in the rough middle of the episode that is mostly a casual study sesh, but does also pretty directly lay out that this gap between who Koyuki is on the inside and what she presents to the world is going to be a big concern of the series. The same is true for Miki, whose rep as “the class idol” presents her with almost precisely the opposite problem. Everyone likes her already and puts her on a pedestal. Being treated like a saint, she’s afraid to goof around. The gap between the social mask and the true self, and how one might “know who they really are”—or if that’s even possible—really seems like it’s going to be a big theme here. Koyuki directly points out that she’s surprised that even Miki thinks about this stuff.
It occupies Koyuki’s mind elsewhere in the episode too. Here we should rewind to that scene with the mirror in the school hall. This is where we meet the two main guys of the cast. First, as mentioned, there’s Minato.
Minato is a jokester, and takes an interest in Koyuki after seeing her do all this stuff in the mirror. He doesn’t get very long to actually chat her up, as his friend Hino Youta [Inomata Satoshi] is close behind him and is worried that he might be picking on the poor girl. (It’s also Youta who offers Koyuki his hand after Minato accidentally knocks her over.) Both of these guys seem like they’ll be important in the long run, and it’s pretty clear, just from the genre that this show is in, that one of them will be Koyuki’s long term love interest. (Although I honestly couldn’t tell you which at this early stage.) A later encounter in the hallway sees Youta reminding Koyuki of a giraffe at the zoo she was frightened by as a child, as he is both extremely tall and has really bad eyesight. So any time he forgets his contacts (which seems to be pretty often), he has to really squint and get in peoples’ faces to tell it’s them. It’s a pretty good bit, all told.
Minato gets more development between the two here, however. He runs into Koyuki again after spotting her across the school courtyard. He definitely comes off as a little pushy in this premiere, as he tries to make friends with Koyuki while she’s getting herself a drink from the school vending machines. This must be on purpose, however. It’s important to consider that we’re seeing these things in part through Koyuki’s eyes, which means that her coating of permafrost tints every event in the story. She says herself that she can’t help but be wary when someone this different from her tries to strike up a conversation.
Minato’s attempts to get to know Koyuki better are foiled by two of his other friends trying to join in. This is entirely too much for Koyuki, and she bows out. One of his friends is creeped out, but Minato himself correctly observes that she seems like she’s putting up a wall, more than anything, and this seems to only renew his determination to chip away at the icy barrier around her.
As the episode proper ends, we’re shown another series of flashbacks, as Koyuki walks away, distressed. This time, we are clearly missing context. There’s a broken classroom window, whispered threats, and the old shoujo manga bullying technique of garbage stuffed into shoes. We don’t know what exactly happened to Koyuki in middle school, but it’s clear something did.
After the ED (soundtracked by an intense, bass-driven tune by J-rock legends Polkadot Stingray), there is a rather alarming scene where Koyuki is harassed by a pair of randos while walking to a community center to meet Miki. Her attempts to flag down a nearby Youta are to no avail, since he can’t actually make her or what’s going on out from across the street. There’s a real raw frustration and loneliness here, and if this is the kind of thing Koyuki has to put up with all the time—not something that would be hard to believe at all, she is a girl in a patriarchal world, unfortunately—it’s easy to see how those frozen ramparts could grow so tall and so thick. She is angry, and terrified that these two might do something if she expresses that anger and fear in the wrong way. It’s honestly pretty harrowing!
As an anime-only, I don’t know what precisely the rest of her story is going to look like, but the genuine emotion on display here in this first episode ensures I’ll be coming back next week and, if I’m being straightforward? I’d advise you to do the same. There’s something special brewing here, and I think those readers back nearly a decade ago who first fell in love with this story were really on to something.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
I watched the English dub for a majority of this series, but the last two episodes in Japanese. Because of that, I’ll be crediting both sets of voice actors here.
I don’t know how it happened, exactly. How I ended up in a place where, at the ancient and creaking vintage of 32, I still watch romcom anime about high schoolers instead of going to chick flicks like a responsible woman of my age, but it did happen! And you know what? These are my shows, OK? The soap operas and the sitcoms alike, this stuff still speaks to me. This one is really good. Uncomplicatedly good, even! And I think that very simplicity is why I was so drawn to it. I wasn’t planning to write about this, but its charms are so direct that it called out to me in a way. I think this is a case of the public just plain getting it right, an instance where basically everybody is on the same page, and the book is damn good. Written on that page, in beautifully girly cursive, with the heart loops and all, is one sentence. One sentiment: You & I Are Polar Opposites.
The basics: Suzuki Miyu [Suzushiro Sayumi/Celeste Perez] is a hyperactive gyaru with a mile-a-minute motormouth and a goofy personality. Sitting next to her in her high school class is Tani Yuusuke [Sakata Shougo/Brandon Acosta], a stoic fellow of few words with a dry wit and perpetually low energy levels. The “opposites attract” principle is so bold-script here that it’s literally in the name of the series, and just in case you miss that, Suzuki drops that title in the first episode when describing herself and Tani.
Mixing things up slightly from the usual “will they or won’t they” shenanigans is the fact that Polar Opposites actually starts as the relationship proper begins. Our first episode does hit these beats, but it climaxes with Suzuki realizing that she very much does have a thing for Tani, and she needs to act on it now. The ensuing confession scene is bombastic as hell, all shouting and stammering and candy colors. Tani, who feels the same way, is moved. And she and Tani start going out basically right then and there. The remainder of the series is thus about their relationship developing, as opposed to coming into existence in the first place. This puts it in a pretty distinct category from a lot of romcoms I talk about on this site, which tend to fall more into the whole “girl with a gimmick” space, where the female lead, in even the best case, is defined by some kind of specific trait that acts as a bit of wish fulfillment. (Think Marin from My Dress-Up Darling and her cosplay hobby, for example, to pull a character from a show that, mind you, I like a good deal.) Polar Opposites largely avoids this, not just with Suzuki herself—who is a total screwball, but in the way that real hyperactive teens often are—but with her entire friend group and, thus, its entire cast. There’s not a single flat character here, everyone is dynamic and bursting with personality. That said, since this is a show about couples at the end of the day—even those that aren’t actually dating yet—it makes the most sense to bracket the characters off into pairs. (Of course, they all have plenty of interactions outside these pairs, too.)
Suzuki and Tani themselves have a classic nerd x outgoing girl thing going on, and the interlock between the two of them is by far the simplest of those in the anime, but that shouldn’t be taken to mean it’s not excellent. Suzuki and Tani both have a tendency to get stuck in their own head a bit, a shared insecurity that leads to a very realistic foible in their relationship: they’re not great at communicating! Ouch! Been there! That stuff is hard! Still, their main arc through this first season is one of learning to trust each other. The stakes are largely quite small—we’ll get to the one semi-exception—so this mostly relates to learning to not overthink things on dates and the like. It is relentlessly cute, and to paraphrase a conversation in the third episode of the dub, adorable. The definition Suzuki gives there of the word, which she applies to Tani but also many other things, is an equally good fit for their own relationship and, in fact, the show itself. Endearing. Something that squeezes your heart a little. They also meet each others’ families about halfway into the season, marking that things are indeed getting serious. Ish.
Meeting your boyfriend’s cat is an important part of het culture, I’m told.
Nishi Natsumi [Oomori Cocoro/Rebecca Danae] and Yamada Kentarou [Iwata Anji/Van Barr Jr.] , the second couple the show follows, take a bit more legwork to get on the same page. Nishi isn’t actually in the same classroom as most of the rest of the cast, and she spends the earliest parts of this story wishing she could be involved in their friendly banter and the like. She comes off as a bit Bocchi-ish, in fact, so shy that she can’t really even function in social spaces at all. Some doing from both her only friend Honda Rikako [Kusunoki Tomori/Cheyenne Haynes] eventually pushes her into the orbit of Yamada, the class clown of the class that Suzuki, Tani, and the rest are based on. Yamada isn’t your run of the mill class goofball, however (that title more goes to his female counterpart, the also-blonde Watanabe Manami [Taniguchi Yuna/Hannah Alyeah], a supporting character), he takes special pride in getting laughs out of those who don’t laugh that often. This alone is enough to make him interested in Nishi, and circumstances—and Yamada’s own taking of the initiative—push the two of them closer together. By the end of the season they were probably my pick for cutest couple overall. (Although, that’s a close race of course.) The last episode of the first season is in part about the two going on a date to a Chinatown and it’s just, like, heartburn-inducingly cute. They get meat buns, it’s lovely.
This brings us to the last pair, and the one presently furthest from “officially” being a couple, and the least “cute” of the three. Azuma Shino [Shimabukuro Miyuri/Sarah Roach] and Taira Shuji [Katou Wataru/Mauricio Ortiz-Segura]. Azuma and Taira, to put it bluntly, are the sourpusses of the friend group. Azuma has a longer dating history than most of the cast, and she’s world-weary and cynical, something she masks (just barely) with a wry, dry wit. Taira meanwhile is an example of ye olde “self-lacerating jealous guy who gets mad at himself about his jealousy” shtick. Both of them have rougher personalities than the rest of the cast and, despite everything, they’re probably my favorite pair overall. Taira’s bristly cynicism plays nicely off of Azuma’s “been there, done that” attitude and both of them are kind of putting up a front about things. Azuma in particular has noticeably low self-esteem, often just putting up with it when people, such as her former friend group at her old school, take advantage of her and pressure her into things. This makes it all the better when those masks start to break down as we get further into the series, Taira encourages Azuma, in his own way, to value herself more. That more serious aspect of their relationship—whether it ends up being romantic in the long term or not—is what makes these two so interesting to me. It shows that the series can operate in different emotional registers. (Which also leads me to look forward to The Ramparts of Ice, an anime adapted from another mangaka by this same author that, if you’re reading this article on the day it goes up, will have premiered today. Apparently it is a bit more focused on this side of things.)
I don’t want to make Taira and Azuma’s relatioship sound overly serious of course. At the end of the day, Taira is the sort of person who catches himself thinking poorly of people and then goes “oh god, I’m such a chud.” That’s not me editorializing! He says that in the English dub!
That’s as good a place as any to springboard to talking about the dub, in fact. I watched most of this series with the English voice track after checking it out on a whim. It is fantastic, one of the best dubs in recent memory, remixing and reconfiguring the presumably a bit more direct sub track’s translations into something with a lot of zing and flavor. In practice this means a fair bit of localization—including a use of the old “they were talking about English class in the Japanese track, so we switched them to be talking about Spanish here” trick that I more associate with the long-gone days of the Azumanga Daioh dub and the like. That particular example might strike some as a bridge too far, but overall the dub is really excellent at assigning believable patterns of speech to individual characters. Suzuki in particular must be heard to be believed, some of her lines are so intensely inflected that they sound like they were written in tumblr-ese in the script (at one point she calls Tani her “boy” and I swear she says it in such a way that you can practically hear the I on the end instead of the Y.) My favorite performance by far though, is Sarah Roach as Azuma, who brings a really impressive sense of deadpan humor to the character, making her feel like your most love-cynical mutual. (I in particular really love how she drags herself for “not finding good people attractive” in an early episode. We all have our vices, girl!) Do real teenagers talk anything like this at all? I have no idea! But it conveys the feeling of that just-hangin’-with-the-gang atmosphere extremely well, and verisimilitude is more important than strict realism. Sources credit the dub’s script and voice directing respectively to Macy Anne Johnson and Emily J. Fajardo, to whom I can only say: well done, you really nailed it. The only real problem with the dub is that it isn’t finished! At the time of this writing, delays have meant that the last two episodes are JP-audio only, which is a real shame given how good the dub is. Obviously, that’s not the fault of anyone who worked on it (it’s mostly just more evidence that the dubs for these things really need more lead time), but it does put Polar Opposites in the frustrating camp of “shows where I had to take time away from talking about the anime itself to discuss the release situation.” At least Nokotan has company.
In any case, outside the more comedic moments, the dub handles the more serious stuff well, too. I’ve already gone over Azuma and Taira’s whole thing, but there’s also an interesting plot that springs up a ways’ into Suzuki and Tani’s relationship where the former runs into her ex. That character, Oka Rihito [Ishiya Haruki/Trey Michael Upton], is at least on the surface a lot more similar to Suzuki than Tani is. We get a flashback, even, showing that in middle school they were very much two peas in a pod who loved to banter back and forth in class. Unfortunately, people at that school took that to be not just friendship but romantic chemistry, and the two ended up dating more or less out of social pressure. This got awkward very quickly, and the two are still awkward around each other now. There are two interesting aspects here, one being that this doesn’t actually get cleanly resolved by season’s end (thus perhaps implying Rihito is going to come back) and that Tani actually gets a bit jealous. Tani is a fairly level-headed guy, so this is a bit surprising and it certainly surprises Suzuki. They work things out just fine, but it’s nice to see the show grapple with one of the common foibles of young relationships, emotions that we don’t necessarily have full control over.
(You could, if you really wanted to, nail Polar Opposites here for being a bit basic. It’s not like “learning to deal with jealousy” is a groundbreaking concept for a plot beat in a romcom. All the self-respect stuff is fairly straightforward, including a similar plot point about Azuma. Still, at some point you’re just ragging on a show about teenagers for having teenage characters. At some point that kind of “criticism” feels more like nitpicking. Yes, You & I Are Polar Opposites does not account for literally every possible life situation, but pointing that out is pedantic, not insightful. Especially when you remember that this is a Shonen Jump title and is at least ostensibly aimed at readers about as young as its characters.)
All of these writing merits would be harder to get to if the show didn’t look and sound so good, but it does! While not quite as stylistically daring as some of say Dress-Up Darling or Love Is War!‘s more experimental excursions, Polar Opposites‘ anime is a tight and direct translation of the manga art’s charms into its new medium. It’s easy to give a series guff for being slavishly over-faithful to the source material, so I want to be very clear that I’m praising the show here. Nagatomo Takakazu (on his first-ever series directorial credit here) and his team at Lapin Track seem to really understand the characterful nature of Agasawa Koucha‘s art for the manga, and they make it work in anime format more or less directly. Stylistic flourishes are strong but smartly-deployed, so we’ll get Suzuki shrinking into a pink, gremlinoid blob when she’s overly excited for example. As with so much of the show on the whole, it sticks to the fundamentals but it absolutely nails them, an expression of a decidedly 2020s neo-retro aesthetic that’s come to define the medium’s highlights over the last few years.
If Polar Opposites has a secret ingredient however, it might honestly be its soundtrack. I don’t even mean its OP and ED themes here—although those are fantastic, too, a pair of lovely numbers by singer-songwriter noa and hyperpop group PAS TASTA respectively—but rather the actual background music. It animates the show when characters are just hanging around together, bristling with an array of fizzy guitars, popping drums, blooping synthesizers, and the occasional acoustic guitar for flavor. All of which really helps the world of the show feel alive and bursting with activity. This decidedly electronic soundscape seems to be the work of tofubeats, a DJ and musician whose list of work of this nature is fairly short, although impressive in context. Consisting of theme song arrangements for Love Live and Hypnosis Mic, which are not small gigs by any means! (He also has a similar “music” credit for The Concierge, though having not seen that I can’t comment on its BGM). I hope him doing the Polar Opposites OST is the sign of his future involvement with the medium in specifically this capacity. He’s damn good at it.
All told, this is just a fantastic little romcom. As I said at the start of this article, sometimes the viewing public gets it right. We already know that more Polar Opposites is coming in summer, and I personally can’t wait, since this show’s beautiful bold colors and heart-eyes romantic tendencies will make even more sense in the July sun than they did here in the early part of the year. Until then!
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
“We could even catch the moon in our tiny hands.”
I’ve missed this.
I refer here to two things. One is the very act of writing about an anime itself. It has been, at this point, more than a year since my last actual anime review—of Noir back in late 2024, you may remember—everything since then has been much more thrown together. If you’re not a regular reader of this site, that probably means exceptionally little to you, but I promise that to me it is important (and wonderful), to be properly writing a review again. If you don’t care about that, though, you might have some affection for the other thing that I’ve missed. I refer, of course, to the sprawling woodland of Hakumei and Mikochi, today’s object of appreciation.
I grew up in the Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. I don’t miss much about PA, but one thing I do is its beautiful green mountains, wooded and teeming with life. The Poconos may seem like small potatoes to some, but they are where I lived and walked in my youth, and they remain in my heart. A distinction little else in the state can really claim.
When I made that nebulous transition from “person who sometimes watches anime” to “anime enthusiast”, one of the first genres I gravitated toward was iyashikei. Sometimes nicknamed “healing TV”, iyashikei is a kind of wading, immersive visual experience focused less on plot and strong conflict than characterization and immaculate worldbuilding, with a strong emphasis on lived-in environmental design. It’s all in the service of that vibe: immaculately pastoral in its best examples. Done right, you can practically feel the wind blowing through your hair and see the shimmer of the sparkling sunlight on the lake. One such iyashikei, Kamichu!, was among my first favorite anime, and when they pop up today (increasingly a rare occurrence, although last year’s mono is an example, if you want one that’s recent) I tend to at least check them out. The mountain greenery of such shows reminds me of that of my first home, and I love them for that.
Hakumei & Mikochi is maybe not quite recent enough to be called a product of “today.” It dates back from the tail end of the last decade, 2018. I was broadly aware of its pastoral reputation at the time, but my head was in a different place back then, and I was occupied with other things. I was perhaps too busy writing some of my first anime articles, singing the praises of the likes of SSSS.GRIDMAN, for example, to notice something this slow and cozy. I had perhaps fallen out of touch with this sort of thing.
And it wasn’t and isn’t just me! “Cozy”, “slow”, and “pastoral” are words that have fallen out of fashion as positive descriptors of art in recent years, at least in my circles. This is for good reason, as a lot of this aesthetic has been laid claim to by unpleasant sorts who seek to parley these ideas of pastoral peace into significantly less savory ones. But in our rush to push these people out—necessary work, make no mistake—we have perhaps been too quick to hand them this space wholesale. This I take issue with. An injection of the rustic life can, in fact, be a good remedy for the stresses of the soul. And I refuse to concede this genre to the bigoted. They do not deserve it.
In any case, Hakumei & Mikochi, while perhaps not entirely immune to such appropriation, is at least less likely to be a victim of it owing to part of its premise. Our leads here are a pair of tiny forestfolk who live and work among the trees, one of which is their home, forming a small part of a woodland society that absolutely oozes folksy charm. This place is called Makinata, and is the primary setting for our tale. These women, the titular Hakumei [Matsuda Risae] and Mikochi [Shimoji Shino], have a decidedly wife-and-wife dynamic. It’s beyond adorable, and makes Hakumei & Mikochi nicely amenable to a queer audience.
(Note however, before we get ahead of ourselves, that this does not extend quite so far as being an explicitly queer work. Somewhat frustratingly, our leads are only ever defined as “roommates” despite the obvious married-life framing. When Hakumei’s boss refers to Mikochi as her wife, the former is actually quite puzzled! Even odder is that a later episode sees someone make a similar joke to Mikochi, who accepts the framing without any protest. This kind of playing coy is not uncommon in this genre, but this is a fairly surprising place to find it. At least the “—and they were roommates!” jokes write themselves. And none of this will, in any case, stop me or anyone else from referring to Hakumei & Mikochi in shorthand as “that show about the tiny lesbians.”)
This is, perhaps, what’s found on the other end of the spectrum from that toxic yuri I’m always crowing about liking. I’ve always maintained you really want a little of both, anyway. Bitter flavors enhance sweet ones, after all. This desire, for something sweet, is what led to me deciding to watching Hakumei & Mikochi in the long term after stumbling on it during an anime roulette with some friends. (A fun activity, I recommend it.) Often, once I was committed to watching it on my own, I’d put an episode on before bed each night. On some occasions, pleasantly nuzzled between waking consciousness and the intoxicating pull of the dreamworld, I had to lazily slap the pause button on my computer, halting an episode in its tracks. Too soothed, in these moments, by the lullaby of the series to continue, and needing respite in the form of proper sleep. Asked what I think of Hakumei & Mikochi on the whole, “it put me to sleep, in a good way! :)” wouldn’t be a bad answer.
It would be an overly simple one, however.
From the beginning, Hakumei & Mikochi makes no secret of the fact that life in the woodland is not strictly snacks of giant peanuts* and drinks of beer. The series is in fact best understood as not being solely about the title characters, but rather the entire society of Makinata. We explore this in a few ways, but primarily through the show’s decently large cast. In addition to the liliputian forestfolk like Hakumei and Mikochi themselves, there are a number of talking animal characters as well. Everything from the weasel Iwashi [Matsukaze Masaya], who serves as Hakumei’s mentor and immediate superior at her job, to various one-off characters like a tiny beetle aesthete who longs for the glamorous life, a rabbit cameraman, a helpful baboon who operates a gondola, and so on, the forest of Makinata and its surrounding environs are stuffed to the gills with animal characters. This is a contributing factor to one of the show’s greatest strengths: its sheer sense of whimsy. Even outside its animal cast, this folksy anything-goes energy is quite prevalent. In episode six we meet a hairdresser, Jada [Shintani Mayumi!], one of H&M’s fellow forest-people. She lives, and runs her business out of, a giant egg. It’s absolutely delightful! And why not, right? If you’re going to establish something as inherently fairy tale-esque as tiny people who live in the woods, there’s no reason to not go all the way with it.
You will get your hair cut at Big Egg and you will get a mohawk and you will say “thank you Jada for my mohawk” when she’s done giving it to you.
This is just one part of what serves to make the show extremely watchable. Its visual styling is a big factor as well. While discussions of anime visuals these days often boil down to talk of sakuga, Hakumei & Mikochi has a fairly restrained animation style. It more than makes up for that (if indeed we can call it a shortcoming at all) with its other visual elements, such as its color choices—uniformly vibrant—and overall mood-setting. One trick it leans on fairly heavily in the directorial department is the use of cordoned-off panels of animation to emphasize particular moments. In a lesser anime this would come off as tacky, and I’m sure it’s drawing from Kashiki Takuto‘s original manga quite heavily, but given Hakumei & Mikochi‘s general energy, it works quite nicely, contributing something of a pop-up storybook feel. Beyond the visual realm, the voice acting and music are uniformly excellent. The former collecting a strong pool of talent, largely veterans, and the latter consistently setting a rustic and homemade feel. This applies as well to the vocal music. Such as that contributed by the character Konju [Yuuki Aoi], an initially rather arrogant singer who Hakumei and Mikochi befriend over the course of a few episodes, and also to the ending theme, an absolutely excellent piece of music that I looked forward to every time, even when I was sad to see a great episode end.
(A same-day edit from me here. A commenter rightly pointed out that I probably should have made mention that the music is the work of Evan Call, who has a number of credits to his name in anime, virtually all of which that I’ve personally seen have a very strong sonic identity. That’s a good point! So consider that omission fixed. While we’re at belated accreditation, I’ll point out that the director is Andou Masaomi, who I really should have thought to shout out directly, since I’ve been very positive on his work previously on this very site.)
These of course are evaluations of the show’s (excellent across the board) craft. We should also pay attention however to what Hakumei & Mikochi is trying to say, or at least what aspects of it are part of the slow-life fantasy it offers and why they might be so. A consistent theme, perhaps surprisingly so, is the nature of labor! Something the series is actually supremely concerned with. No simple utopia, the world of Hakumei & Mikochi is one where work is exchanged for money just as in our own. And in fact, it demonstrates that this is no mere show economy, either. It’s shown to us via a few flashbacks that, at one point, Hakumei was even a homeless wanderer. This is a depiction of genuine poverty that’s quite rare in this sort of thing. One such flashback even sees her preyed upon by thieves and nearly left for dead! Of course, in the show’s present, she is very much fine, but it’s still quite a departure, even as the sad story that must have led to that condition in the first place is left merely implied instead of told to us in full. That she lives with Mikochi now and is gainfully employed as a carpenter, mason, and general handyman is treated as unequivocally a good thing, and from Hakumei’s own perspective it’s easy to see how that’d be so. (Mikochi, for her part, is a prepared foods wholesaler, which does strike me as a very specific profession for an anime character to have.)
About Hakumei’s many job titles, a uniting thread here is that Hakumei & Mikochi treats all types of labor similarly. This firstly means that, thankfully, there’s none of the odd job chauvinism you sometimes see in this sort of thing. But more interestingly it also means that, whether that work is what we’d consider mundane; catching fish, grinding coffee, bartending, construction, singing, etc., or what we’d consider fantastical, the series treats it with equal respect. Take for example Sen [Anzai Chika], the necromancer-of-sorts the lead pair meet in episode two. Her day to day life is defined by her research into her art. This involves tying magic lamps to cleaned skeletons, which reanimates them with a semblance of life by replicating the heartbeat of a living thing.
Science.
This is all treated as unusual, for certain, but not remotely sinister, being just another occupation that powers the woodland that Hakumei and Mikochi call home. When Sen reappears later in the series, she is again treated the same way as any other character. For another example, there is Ayune [Nabatame Hitomi], the last character of note introduced in the series proper. Mikochi’s elder sister, she’s a playwright in town due to a slump, and melancholic that she hasn’t seen Mikochi in so long. (Although she denies this at first.) A lesser series would come off as moralizing in writing a character like this, a writer with a fairly inconsiderate personality and no real life skills to speak of beyond her pen—a combination of traits that thankfully describes no one your reviewer here has ever met—but Hakumei & Mikochi is pretty amenable to her, warts and all. She’s a layabout, and when she does try to help Mikochi (with chopping an enormous daikon that she herself bought), she messes it up, but ultimately this is all played as eccentric as opposed to downright harmful. Maybe that’s cheating in its own way, but it makes the character endearing, and when we get to see a snippet of her work in the ending credits of that episode, it’s lovely. Hakumei & Mikochi respects the arts—mundane and fantastical—and physical labor equally.
In fact, I would say the main “fantasy” element of Hakumei & Mikochi in this regard is not an absence of work itself, as it is in some similar media, but the lack of alienation from that work. Hakumei, Mikochi, and their friends are able to make a living doing what they love, and there is a more or less direct correlation between the effort they put in and the rewards they reap. The fantasy here is not one of not having to work at all, it is one of working well out of passion rather than strict necessity, and of that passion being rewarded. This is not to say that Hakumei & Mikochi is remotely some sort of socialist parable, merely that it is able to imagine a world in which one’s aptitudes and passions are rewarded, rather than downplayed or deliberately worked out of them. It’s a nice idea, and it’s to the show’s immense credit that when we get a few episodes focusing on Hakumei’s work as a member of the Borestone Guild, a group of masons. In what is probably its most important articulation of this theme, it makes the whole process look about as rewarding as it must feel to Hakumei herself when all is said and done. A lovely thing to do for a character who is often defined by her desire to feel useful. Her formerly-dismissive boss, another forest-person named Narai [Tsuda Kenjirou], is even proud of her. Imagine that!
This fascination with labor extends into what work can be done for each other, as well, extending this idea into that of intra-community support. Sen, for instance, helps Hakumei and Mikochi when a lens fire destroys part of their house in episode three. Hakumei’s work with the Guild falls under this umbrella too, as the main project we see Hakumei help them with is restoring a causeway. While most such examples that dot the show are well-done, this community theme is also, unfortunately, where the show makes some of its relatively few missteps.
Despite this genre’s reputation for being laid-back, many iyashikei have a handful of zanier, more frantic episodes. Hakumei & Mikochi is no exception here, with episode eight in particular of interest to us here. In it, our girls have to help the denizens of a part of the nearby city called Honey House—a block inhabited by outcasts where “anything goes”—deal with a group of troublemakers. This is a more serious conflict than most Hakumei & Mikochi takes a look at, and in attempting to edge into this territory it does end up hitting a weird note. I think the disputes that arise between the old and new populations of a city and the like are a bit beyond H&M’s pay grade. Although the rather goofy tone keep it from feeling like too serious of a mistake. (Most notably, Konju is part of this storyline and serves as a damsel in distress when the troublemakers make off with her. Her extremely blasé attitude about being kidnapped does a lot to save the episode. She treats it more like a guided tour of the city, than anything.) The central idea of disputes rising in this sort of loose, almost anarchist space is neat, but the resolution feels off and just a bit too simplistic. Higaki [Takeuchi Ryouta]—Honey House’s nominal leader—makes up with the head of the troublemakers over a drink, and they bond over the memory of a departed friend. It’s a nice idea, but it also feels a bit like a hasty way to put the cork back on the bottle, so to speak.
In the series proper’s final episode, we touch on these ideas again. There we learn more about Hakumei’s backstory, how she once traveled with a caravan led by a great wolf named Emerald Tail [Sakakibara Yoshiko]. Hakumei herself describes Emerald’s caravan as both a trading group and a mutual protection force (the sub track in fact actually calls them “police”). Hakumei is quite open about thinking of them in positive terms. But interestingly, Emerald Tail herself doesn’t seem to entirely agree. It’s her who urges Hakumei to stay in Makinata, when the caravan arrives there. Stopped at the gate by—introduced to us suddenly here for the first time—the fact that Makinata actually excludes those over a certain size. When the caravan and Hakumei reunite, it’s extremely brief, limited to an exchange of greetings across a ravine. Hakumei, whomever she may have spent time with in the past, has found her home, and it’s with Mikochi. As with the Honey House story, this feels like a warm but perhaps rushed conclusion to a story that opens a lot of questions about the world of the series that it isn’t really equipped to answer.
For better or worse, Hakumei and Mikochi isn’t actually interested in these questions at all. These toe-dips into the wider geographical situation around Makinata are not a primary concern of the series, which is a bit bothersome to me! Since this definitely brushes closest to all of that hay I alluded to toward the beginning of this article. I would like to dismiss it out of hand, but cannot really do that. So while it doesn’t ruin the series for me, or even anything really at all close, it does remain as a qualm. I hate qualms, but to not acknowledge them is to render any praise of a series meaningless (and I hope I’ve made clear that I have quite a lot of praise to give), so acknowledged they must be. I have no simple explanation for these aspects of the show, but if I can offer one theory, it is perhaps an acknowledgement that, like our own, the world of Hakumei & Mikochi is vast and complex. That Hakumei has found her place within it does not necessarily make it less so.
It is, in any case, better at exploring the feeling of belonging so central to its characterization of Hakumei. This is typified by the show’s third and final major thematic concern, a uniting artistic impulse behind iyashikei in general; the wonder of the natural world. This is where Hakumei and Mikochi not only shines but sparkles. Every single episode breathes a wonderful, picture-book landscape naturality, and it is absolutely lovely stuff. Everything from the lake that Sen sets out to venture into in her submarine to the mountains outside Makinata itself, to the bamboo forests near Hakumei and Mikochi’s own home. Even when, in a late episode, Hakumei and Mikochi are caught in a rainstorm on a fishing trip, even something as mundane as a downpour is treated as a little miracle.
These too will be important memories, whether you like it or not!
This translates to to how the show treats even the most distant and fantastical aspect of the natural world, the night sky itself. When, in episode four, Hakumei and Mikochi’s house is damaged by a freak lens fire, the time they spend camping while it’s repaired is largely comedic, with Mikochi suffering a bit due to her indoorsy nature meshing poorly with the open wild. Crucially though, the segment is capped with Hakumei showing her the beauty of the stars at night. “This—” Hakumei says, “—is our roof. All of it.” Hakumei & Mikochi understands an old maxim very well: home is where the heart is, and if the heart is under the sky, well, so be it.
Not that nature is inherently kind, of course! In that same episode, our heroines are respectively rattled and injured by a great horned owl by the name of Oroshi. Hakumei is only able to get it to leave by offering it a bounty of dried meats. There’s an implicit respect for the natural here, one that contrasts with the claiming it as domain elsewhere. There are still wild things in the world, and not all of them play nicely with the tiny folk of the wood. Of course, at the end of the episode Oroshi reveals that it, too, is more or less benevolent. Still, the uncertainty is striking, and it remains as strong an image as the reached-for Moon.
That duality, I think, is a good synecdoche for the heart of this series. Outdoors or indoors, working hard or the lazy life, it’s the little things that Hakumei & Mikochi truly excels at, the subtle warmth of home. That has been enough for the anime to amass something of a cult following in the years since its release—as I mention near the top of this piece, it’s still well-liked in yuri fan circles—and it’s clearly appealed to enough people such that the manga has continued on to this very day. I haven’t actually read the manga, myself! But having enjoyed my time with the anime so thoroughly, I may very well do so. Not right away though, I don’t think. Hakumei & Mikochi is best saved for when you’re missing the slow life. There is truly no rush, it’ll wait for you, as familiar as your own front door.
*: Strictly speaking, they are regular-sized peanuts, and it is our protagonists who are small. Still, the effect is the same.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
There are a variety of ways to interpret any story. This is something that’s obviously true, but I think is more often deployed as a cliché than really understood. For example, I have spoken a few different ways about Oshi no Ko over the past few years, I’ve praised it for its strong cast and bold storytelling, and I’ve criticized it for its relatively shallow understanding of the systems it seeks to critique and its reliance on elbow-jabbing shock value. Those aren’t contradictory opinions, my frustrations with the story stem from thinking it’s otherwise very good.
Out of habit, I’ve kept a lot of my more negative opinions on the series off-site to my tumblr or the like (with a few exceptions), while posting the more positive ones here. This has served to perhaps obscure that I think so far that season three is a pretty noticeable downgrade from season two. Not in terms of visuals—Hiramaki Daisuke’s team at Doga Kobo know what the fuck they’re doing if nothing else—but in terms of its actual story. I like this show best when it succeeds, but just as often, it lapses into Akasaka Aka bothsidesing some issue he clearly doesn’t understand very well, or gets caught in the muck of his addiction to wallowing in drama. (Often both at once.) Not to say “called it”, but I essentially knew this would happen, purely from Oshi no Ko‘s reputation as a manga that has a strong beginning and middle but a weak ending. Nothing gets a reputation that specific and that widespread without there being some kernel of truth to it. “No higher to climb” is specifically how I put it.
But, if I’m honest with myself, there are two things that make me want to be wrong about that assessment. One is simple contrarianism—you did remember that I’m the Wonder Egg Priority Defender, right? I love liking things that other people don’t. I never assume the role without a reason, but it’s one I like playing. Two is that when Oshi no Ko is good, it’s still very good. I think this episode is probably Oshi no Ko at its very best. It’s mostly about its best character, and it allows the show to actually explore its central ideas in an interesting way.
Last week’s episode saw Kana trying to schmooze with a director, Masanori Shima [Seiichiro Yamashita], to potentially be cast in one of his films. Shima, a young upstart who’s apparently responsible for some really good flicks, seemed nice enough at first, but once arriving at Shima’s home office, Kana found all of his staff gone for the evening. What followed was an awkward and uncomfortable scene of her being pretty ruthlessly hit on. Nothing Shima did crossed a clear line into violating consent, but this was one of those sickly situations where it’s clear that the power dynamics at play were influencing things in a way they really shouldn’t be. In finding a way out of this, Kana thought of Aqua, and tearfully explained that she has someone she already has feelings for.
This whole scene was, in of itself, a display of one of the obvious downsides of being an actress. The whole “casting couch” thing is a supremely gross mindset. Seeing someone in a position of power over an actress actually act on it is even more so. To his very limited credit, Shima backs off after Kana explicitly rejects his advances. But it’s still just all-around slimy, and despite the two parting on relatively okay terms, given everything, one can’t help but feel that Kana dodged a bullet. And however Kana herself may feel about it doesn’t end up mattering, because she happens to be spotted by a tabloid photographer while leaving Shima’s house. He snaps a few burst-shots of the two of them together and knows he has a scandal story in the making.
To be a little critical here, it feels like the show goes out of its way to exonerate Shima himself from any direct blame. A worse show would do this explicitly. Instead, he simply largely goes unmentioned while the episode places the blame on Mako Azami [Haruka Shiraishi], the girl who introduced Kana and Shima in the first place.
Now, it is true to life that scandals are often leaked from within a celebrity’s inner circle—this is even explicitly mentioned in this episode itself, albeit in a different context, because Oshi no Ko cares not for your subtlety—but a better show would just cut this entirely. It feels like a symptom of Akasaka Aka’s general tendency to try to complicate things for the sake of it, even when doing so doesn’t actually serve the narrative. It hardens into an overly-eager “no, you guys aren’t getting it, it’s not just the systems that are the problem! It’s the people in them!” that feels at times downright defensive. This trait is probably Oshi no Ko‘s biggest flaw in general, the kink in the armor that keeps holding it back. In its first season, Oshi no Ko really seemed like it wanted to turn the entertainment industry over and examine it rather than simply condemning it. That this tendency is present here—albeit only just so—in the show’s best episode in a season is thus a bit worrying. (And of course, if we circle back around to examining Shima’s role in all this at a later date, I’ll happily eat my words here, but I don’t think I’ll have to.)
Nonetheless, while this is all worth talking about, what I loved about this episode, and what makes it so great in spite of this flaw, was its study of Kana herself. Kana’s reaction to the specter of a probable scandal is one of profound panic. Confronted by the tabloid reporter, she freezes up in the face of his questions and eventually dashes off into the night in a fearful blur. Because episode director Uchinomiya Koki is a fucking pro, the show’s entire color palette changes moods along with her, trading in its usual bright and bold colors for a frozen world of grays, dark reds, and coffee-stain sepia browns.
When Kana’s panic is at its worst, she imagines the people she passes in the city crowd saying terrible things about her, the imagined slander clawing its way into her field of vision, like a blown-up, massive version of the tweet that ruined one of Ai’s days back in the very first episode of this series. It’s one of the best visual moments in a season that has hardly been short on those, and for that alone, this would be a great episode.
What’s really interesting, though, is how she eventually breaks herself out of this panic. Huddling by herself in the dark, Kana thinks that she should just quit. She thinks she wasn’t built to handle all this pressure. She cries about the mask she’s had to put on for the public her entire life, and somewhere in here she says something pretty heartbreaking: “Nobody wants the real Arima Kana.” Alone and frustrated, she cries for Aqua, who just so happens to be searching for her nearby. As a soft insert song kicks in, it briefly looks like Aqua might go to comfort her, which, just to lay it on the table, would’ve been super lame. The tension between Kana’s ambitions as an artist and her feelings for Aqua has been a central part of the character since the beginning, but it only works as a tension because Kana is so strong-willed. Having Aqua swoop in like an angel here would’ve robbed her of some of her agency and made her look weak.
Thankfully, this does not happen.
Crying out for Aqua causes her to pause, she’s shocked at her own neediness for someone who, at least from her point of view, isn’t actually interested in her like that. (Remember, Kana is not privy to Aqua’s inner thoughts like we are.) She chastises herself for playing the damsel in distress, and abruptly screams to the fucking sky that she’s not going to back down. She’s going to take the scandal, no matter how it breaks, on the chin, and she’s going to survive in the industry as she is. She—rightly!—reassures herself that she’s put up with this kind of thing since she was a preschooler. Something like this is not enough to stop her.
It’s absolutely fascinating that Kana seems to realize in real time that these things she’s always thought of as flaws about herself, her bitchy personality, her competitive streak, her lack of tolerance for the facades and handshaking of showbiz, her distance from the classical “pure and sweet-hearted” idol archetype, are actually why people like her. That’s definitely true out of universe, and in spite of her being a total professional, it’s hard to imagine that all this isn’t at least a little visible to her in-universe fans as well. You can’t really completely hide who you are, not wholly and not forever. It’s that old self-explaining magic trick maneuver Oshi no Ko really perfected last season, telling you exactly why you like this character right as it’s using that fondness to tug at your heartstrings. It’s brilliant stuff.
So, for the first time in a long time, Kana chooses herself. She’s will not bend or break, not for this. If I can be real here, I think this was also something I needed to hear as someone who’s long connected with the character. It’s really easy at times to dissociate from your own role in your life, to turn yourself into a damsel in distress or a completely helpless victim of circumstance. Sometimes people are victims, of course, but just as often, you really do have to rely on your own grit to get back out there, no matter what stands in your way. This is the kind of situation where Akasaka’s penchant for old school “just build up your confidence and do the damn thing”-type writing really shines. It helps that she handles things with a sense of humor, dryly realizing that this is going to lead to throngs of angry Twitter comments accusing her of being a slut who sleeps her way to the top and maybe worse. That’d be a hard thing for anyone to deal with, but Kana? Well, she puts it best.
The Doja Cat approach.
Taking the broader view, it’s interesting to contrast this development, how Kana frames it as something she’s doing to be true to herself, with the fate of Suzuhiro Mana. We briefly met her for the first and only time way, way back when Oshi no Ko was still a relatively new phenomenon, before it even had an anime. Back then, it seemed like Oshi no Ko would treat leaving the business, one way or another, as the only real possible “happy ending” for a life in the entertainment industry. That’s what Mana did, and that is what that little aside, buried next to the debut of the new B*Komachi, seemed to imply. This episode raises the possibility that just maybe, that isn’t the case. Maybe for a lucky and strong-willed few, the white hot light of fame doesn’t have to actually burn you to cinders. Of course, fire still hurts whether it kills you or not, but that’s just the cost of playing with it.
Then again, maybe even that much is just wishful thinking. Oshi no Ko is hardly the sort of story that would shy away from setting all this up only to pull it out from under the audience. It is totally possible that despite her confidence here, this scandal will destroy Kana’s career. I certainly hope it doesn’t, but it’s not off the table! If that happens, we’ll talk about it when the time comes. No matter how her story ends, I will be watching—and probably writing about—the saga of Arima Kana until it reaches its conclusion. She’s simply the best.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
“Ranking Every Anime” is a yearly 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.
It’s that time of year again, folks. Namely, it’s the end of the year. Or rather, by the time you’re reading this, the start of a new one. Now, the past couple of times I’ve done these, I’ve given the article a big long prelude where I talk about my year and the state of mind I went into the article with and so on and so forth. I haven’t really done that this year. My year sucked! Everyone’s year sucked! My year sucking is not remarkable! Right up to the end, it kind of sucked! Because unlike most years where I give myself a lot of breathing room to do these lists, this time I crammed all of my work into the last three days of the year, a brilliant decision that I am absolutely fucking never going to make again. Seriously, I’m writing this at 9PM on New Year’s Eve! This and the bit at the end are the last thing I’m writing, but still!
Anyway, let’s just move on, and talk about the anime. Despite my struggles with writing this list, they were consistently a high point of my experiences this year, and I do value that.
I completed a good bit fewer than my average in 2025—only an even 20 this time—and spent a lot of time I would’ve spent on watching seasonals I wasn’t really feeling watching older anime instead. I don’t particularly like the idea that I might be slowly turning into one of those “no one makes good anime anymore” people, but I do have to admit that this seems to largely be a better use of my time. As such, a lot of the anime on this list are sequels this time around. I admit that’s a little boring! But it’s not like I actively planned to only follow stuff like that, it’s just how things shook out. The counterweight to that though, is that I didn’t really finish any anime this year I’d call outright terrible. That’s right, for the first time ever, a full list has absolutely zero shows on it I’d say are just straightforwardly don’t-watch-this bad.
There is one I’d call disappointing, though.
And, as you know, this list goes from worst to best. So let’s start there.
#20: MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM GQUUUUUUX
God help me, even with barely any of the series under my belt, I’ve become one of those people who complains about modern Gundam. Thankfully, the problems with GQuuuuuuX (which I’ll be typing with just one U from here on out) don’t require any deep knowledge of the Gundam back catalog to explain and are instead very modern issues with what is at its core a very modern anime. GQuX, very simply, is one of those anime that was clearly initially conceived of with the expectation that it would have many more episodes than it actually got, and when the word came down that they would only be getting a standard single cour, whatever attempts were made to edit this thing down to that format failed. The alternative explanation is just that no episode count would’ve made this story work, which is not exactly a great consolation prize.
The bizarre thing is that, taken moment by moment, GQuX is actually a lot of fun. The main characters have an interesting dynamic, between the relatively privileged dreamer Machu, the displaced and struggling Nyaan, and Shuji who…is a graffiti artist. The initial battle royale-type setup with the Clan Battles is a good time, as is Machu’s initially coming into possession of the titular Gundam in the first place. The series’ interplay with the older Gundam material is also interesting. As would be expected of something that’s working in the so-called Daicon lineage, (specifically helmed here by director Tsurumaki Kazuya), There are a lot of great action setpieces and interesting bits of character work (Nyaan joining up with Zeon makes everything very weird in a compelling way, for example) even when the story is hard to follow. This is good, because “when the story is hard to follow” is most of the time.
I’m not a big believer in a story having to be 100% legible to everyone at all times, but with GQuX there is a real sense of trying to keep way more plotlines than it can reasonably juggle in the air at once. Concepts, plot beats, and people are introduced in one episode and dropped the next. This can be a strength in this kind of series, but GQuX doesn’t really pull it off. The real issue, as it often is, is that none of this stuff comes together in a way that makes any sense, either thematically or just on a more basic level as a story. And while I do maintain that the textual interplay between this and the older Gundam stuff is interesting, it doesn’t exactly help make GQuX more coherent.
If you’re charitable, this makes GQuX a fun but messy watch, like so many anime in this particular tradition—say, Gurren Lagann or something—if you are much less charitable, and given a particularly indefensible decision in the final episode especially I’d blame no one if they were, it comes off as afraid of committing to anything in particular, or, even worse, being willfully regressive. All of this, even the worst of it, might be forgivable in a show that didn’t come with a name that carries a lot of weight and legacy. We all have our problematic faves after all, but GQuX was not lucky enough to be born so unburdened. If it reminds people of the more amateurish end of fanfiction—and I’ve seen that description thrown around a lot for this show—I can’t really blame them. A benefit of actual fanfiction is that if it’s bad, no one really cares, because it’s a medium with a very low bar to entry, and the standards are not particularly high. And at its best, fanfiction is adventurous and freewheeling. Actual anime can be the latter, but despite some honest efforts, GQuX mostly doesn’t manage it, which is a shame, because it clearly really wants to.
In another lifetime, I might’ve been nicer toward GQuX. I still don’t think it’s terrible or anything. It’s nowhere near as bad as the dreck that’s bottomed out the list in previous years, and if we compare it to, say, Love Flops, it’s a masterpiece. Still, I do feel let down by it.
The Daicon Lineage that stretches back to the original Daicon Film shorts, through GAINAX’s most influential work, and continued to permeate throughout the 2010s via that of Studio TRIGGER, was for a very long time one of my favorite schools of anime period. But increasingly, either as a function of the anime in that lineage genuinely getting less focused over time or, hell, maybe just me getting older, I increasingly feel like I’m being scammed out of an actual, meaningful story by pretty cuts of animation and cool directorial tricks. I enjoyed GQuX week to week while it was airing, but if it has a real legacy for me personally, it’s making me wonder just how much I’m willing to put up with for this kind of thing at all. Maybe blaming the anime itself for my own disillusionment is immature or lame, but I feel how I feel, and this is my list at the end of the day. That, more than anything, is why it’s bringing up the rear here.
#19: NECRONOMICO & THE COSMIC HORROR SHOW
When Necronomico premiered, I mentioned that if you can’t swing “good,” “weird” is a good second option to aim for. What I left unsaid there is that this does imply that the thing in question isn’t actually good. Or at least doesn’t start that way. And indeed, I’d say Necronomico was, by its end, more or less fine—and definitely still weird—but it’s no one’s idea of a masterpiece.
Still, that novelty is worth something. There are lots of death game anime, but the specificity of the “streamers as contestants subjected to the will of the Old Gods” setup is pretty unique. The show’s main strengths lie in its willingness to put its cast into wacky, bizarre life-or-death situations and tie those situations to the characters’ lives. This doesn’t make the writing particularly deep, but it does make it hit when we learn about, say, popular girl Kagurazaka Kanna’s abusive childhood, or the entire thing with the teacher character toward the end of the show. It also keeps main character Kurono “Necronomico” Miko consistent and engaging to follow. The best element of the anime, though, is Cthulu, depicted here not as a tentacle-faced octopus behemoth but as a haughty ojou with green skin and big hair. She’s inhabiting the body of Miko’s main squeeze, which gives the two a pretty incredible toxic yuri dynamic in a show that one would not really expect that from. (It isn’t even the only one of those, but I don’t want to spoil the whole series, you know?) Necronomico ends on a bit of a whimper—and hilariously teases a sequel that will almost certainly never happen—but it was a decent time while it lasted, and if someone liked the show a lot more than I do, I would understand.
Is it really better than GQuX? Honestly I’m not sure. I mostly put it above Machu & Friends on this list because while GQuX actively let me down, I never expected much from Necronomico in the first place, and it actually managed to surprise me a few times. Is that fair? Not really, but I’m the one making the list. Next!
#18: YANO-KUN’S ORDINARY DAYS
There are two no-frills het romcoms on the list this year. This is the worse of the two, but it’s still a solid showing for the genre. The premise here is pretty simple, our boy Yano Tsuyoshi frequently gets in cartoonish accidents and injures himself due to what is vaguely referred to by those around him as “a predisposition”. Yoshida Kiyoko, our female lead, sees this and is promptly injured herself. Though in her case, it’s by Cupid’s arrow.
So begins a show laser-targeted at the sort of person who gets the most joy out of a series when they can screencap its main characters and ask “are they stupid?” about them. I sometimes fit this description too, and accordingly I liked my time with Yano-kun. It has a charming and straightforward appeal that is welcome in pretty much any anime season, and I was happy to have it as a weekly series to close out the year. (I watched it with a friend, in fact. It’s good for that.) There really is not a ton to this show, if you vibe with the relatively direct character dynamics, you’ll like it, and if not, you probably won’t. I did, so I think it was pretty good. Simple stuff.
I do, however, deduct a few points for teasing the audience about Yano’s heterochromia and then never showing it to us. Boo!
#17: THIS MONSTER WANTS TO EAT ME
Despite taking place in the dead of summer, there is a bone-deep cold to Watatabe, chilly as a coastal winter on the other end of the year. I think of Watatabe as a sort of warped fairytale, our despondent princess, Hinako, is not saved from her survivor’s guilt and depression by a knight in shining armor. She isn’t saved at all, really. Instead, the wicked (well, “wicked”) mermaid Shiori seizes upon her sadness, and they proceed to make each other worse in some very interesting ways, as revelations about the incident that led to Hinako’s suicidal nature come to light and continually rearrange what we think we know about these characters. Add to the mix Miko, Hinako’s childhood friend who turns out to be holding more than a few secrets herself, and you’ve got a tightly-wound dramatic character dynamic that not much else this year matched. Impressive, especially when you consider how few moving parts there truly are to this story.
The main reason this isn’t higher on the list? Honestly, just that this was one of a number of anime this year that were visibly fighting against a threadbare production. More than anything else, it’s made me want to read the manga. But when the story at the core of this series is such a coldly compelling chunk of frozen unease, that’s hardly a bad thing.
16: A NINJA & AN ASSASSIN UNDER ONE ROOF
A throwback to the earlier days of the studio’s history in some ways, NinKoro is a modern example of one of SHAFT‘s older specialties, unhinged, no-rules comedies, typified by the likes of Pani Poni Dash or And Yet The Town Moves. It wouldn’t be entirely correct to call NinKoro straightforwardly retro, as many of its sensibilities are very modern (it’s very gay, for one thing), but the spirit of a bygone era of comedy anime is in there. Cold-blooded killer Konoha Koga and airhead ninja Satoko Kusagakure make for a classic odd couple. But I think the show’s actual style is best explained by its favorite running gag; whenever a situation needs an extra dash of chaos, a highly overdesigned ninja from Shirobako’s village will show up and attack our main characters, before promptly being subjected to Konoha’s ruthless efficency, landing somewhere between slapstick and black comedy. There’s a beating heart in this thing too, in that Konoha and Satoko’s relationship is genuinely sweet, which puts NinKoro above being a mere novelty.
In fact, it’s enough to make me wonder, at this point, is that spirit I mentioned really so bygone anymore? Recent examples, albeit mostly from other studios, seem to drop about once or twice a year. In fact, it isn’t even the last one on this list.
15: BAD GIRL
Less outright zany than NinKoro, and perhaps more properly a yuri series with a comedy bent, Bad Girl seemed to go rather overlooked when it premiered in July of this year. That’s a bit of a shame, because while it doesn’t have the production polish of some of the other comedies on this list, it’s another simple charmer driven by a straightforward but strong set of character dynamics.
The setup here is even simpler than some of the other comedies here, shy goody two-shoes Yuutani Yuu is tired of being nice, and wants to go apeshit. She tries to accomplish this by becoming “a delinquent”, which in her mind seems to consist mostly of wearing clip-on earrings and a jacket. At the same time, she’s crushing on Mizutori Atori, the class rep, which throws this whole delinquent thing into question. Add in a childhood friend, a streamer girl who craves attention more than anything, and a blue-haired menace who really seems like she’d rather be in Zenkowa or something, and you’ve got a pretty great set of characters that the show puts through their comedic paces. Often, this entails making Yuu the butt of some joke or another, and more than one character compares her to a small animal. The show is also surprisingly horny, and a recurring gag sees Yuu imagined in a sexy dog-girl outfit, but, given the general light goofing-around vibe and the series’ yuri bent, that’s not really a bad thing. It fits the tone.
Honestly, I like Bad Girl and NinKoro about equally. Why did I give this one a higher spot? Because I watched it with my girlfriend, and I think in a way that’s worth more than any tangible merit of the series itself.
14: TURKEY! TIME TO STRIKE
Every once in a while, an anime drops that just defies any easy categorization. If it seems pat to point out that this is true of Turkey! you’ll have to forgive me for stating the obvious. It is worth stating though, Turkey! spends most of its first episode setting the pins for a sort of MyGO!-for-bowling sports drama thing before making a hard swerve into a time travel historical fiction adventure, and I think it speaks to how well the show pulled it off that anyone stuck around after that. Bait-and-switch twists, even those that early, are devilishly hard to get right.
In its contrasts between past and present, Turkey! asks some interesting questions. As is common for time travel narratives, it draws distinction between the value systems of history and those we live with today, culminating in a really impressive turn around the show’s middle. In episode six for example, sweetheart Ichinose Sayuri helps her warrior friend Suguri defend her village from bandits. This, naturally, entails killing them, and there’s a rich vein of drama in how this kind of breaks Sayuri’s brain, as someone from a relatively privileged modern position, who simply isn’t equipped to reconcile that the kind person she’s grown to know over the show’s first third could do that to someone. The way the series attempts to reconcile this is extremely potent within the episode itself, involving the literal and symbolic image of a white flower stained red with blood.
That stretch of the series is probably the show’s peak, and if it never quite hits that high again—although it comes close—it makes up for any deficiencies with sheer over-the-top style. It also never actually stops being about bowling, incorporating the sport as both a peaceful recreation the girls bring with them to the past and as a serious, sometimes deadly serious synecdoche for its characters’ lives and priorities. Despite how different the events of the series are to most other emotionally-tense girls’ drama anime of this type, Turkey! is one of those, despite the time travel conceit and adventure elements. This leads to some great serious moments, but also a lot of delicious camp. Where else this year were you going to get a line like, from the finale, “I don’t care about your damn gods. I care about bowling.”? That’s all-timer material right there. That, as much as the more serious stuff, is the key to the show’s success.
For these reasons and more, Turkey! is a true army of one, and I would be unsurprised to see it become something of a cult classic in the years ahead.
13: RURI ROCKS
The first, but not the last, gorgeous slice of life series on the list, Ruri Rocks is a slow, contemplative anime about finding value in the natural world. The titular Tanigawa Ruri is interested in gemstones, first just because she thinks they’re pretty. Over the course of the series, however, she comes to appreciate minerals and the grasp processes of geologic deep time, guided by her older friend and mentor figure, Arato Nagi. Each episode focuses, by and large, on a mineral or similar material, moving from placer gold to pyrite, sapphires to sea glass, and so on, as both Ruri and by extension ourselves learn about them. After its first few episodes, the show’s world expands, slowly but surely, adding a few additional characters and broadening Ruri’s perspective.
Tellingly, the single best episode of the show is actually about actual mineralogy only in the loosest of terms, where Ruri finds an old crystal radio that once belonged to her late grandfather. This is another of the show’s main ideas; that what we do today can connect us, however fleetingly, to the endless yesterdays before us, whether that time scale is across human lifetimes or across eons. The result is a warm, gorgeous ballad about the forces that shape our world, and the beauty to be found in appreciating them.
I think some people will be surprised that Ruri Rocks isn’t even higher on the list. But honestly? This entry and onward, the list really becomes a total free-for-all. If someone said Ruri Rocks was their favorite anime of the whole year, I’d completely understand. That’s also true for everything above it on the list. (And honestly, if someone said their favorite anime of the year was Turkey! I’d respect the hell out of that, too.)
12: MONO
And hey, why not put both of the gorgeous iyashikei on the list right next to each other? Is it some contrarian impulse that causes me to rank mono as the slightly higher of the two? Maybe. But to be honest, this is another case where I like the shows about equally.
As Ruri Rocks is about time, we can, if we want to draw a contrast, say mono is about space. Nominally it’s actually about photography and video, but quite unlike the focused nature of its immediate listmate, mono is charmingly rambling in nature, and is content to devote entire episodes to things wholly unrelated to the hobby club that are technically its protagonists. Over the course of the series, we get individual episodes about ghosts (whose existence is just taken as a given in mono), the tribulations of both the mangaka that the main girls know and a few other ones that she knows, road trips gone awry, and much more. The real focus for much of this is on the beauty of the various landscapes mono gets to show off. I’ve described both Ruri Rocks and this series as iyashikei, but the love of rolling green hills and the like here feels of a piece with the spirit of the genre in an ephemeral, hard-to-place way. It’s pretty enough to double as a tourism ad, which makes some sense given that the original manga comes from the pen of Yuru Camp creator AFRO.
11: SHOSHIMIN: HOW TO BECOME ORDINARY, SEASON 2
Straight couples will literally do this rather than go to therapy.
There are a few returnees on the list this year, but this actually isn’t one of them. Shoshimin Series only made the honorable mentions last year, because I hadn’t actually finished the first season of the anime at the time, so this is its first appearance in a year-end list proper. This is maybe a good thing, if we’re going to pretend that these shows somehow care about their standings at all, because I actually thought the first season was kind of a mixed bag!
The anime’s initial setups of low-stakes mysteries, “solved” by our main duo of Kobato Jougorou and Osanai Yuki, didn’t entirely grab me. But, toward the end of that season, Osanai was fucking kidnapped, and the stakes started being appropriately raised. That largely continues into the second season, as Kobato and Osanai’s unusual relationship continues to evolve. Both of them have compulsive playing-detective-brain and struggle to get on with normal people, meaning that the only person who really understands either of them is the other, but they “break up” early into the season, and the bulk of it is done with them apart. This lets some other characters get a bit of focus, including Urino Takahiko, a member of the school newspaper club who makes a fool of himself trying to solve a local arson case, but largely the series’ main interest remains the psychodrama between and around Kobato and Osanai. Osanai, in fact, is a large part of the reason this series is so high in the first place. She is a treat of a character, a total weirdo with a sweet tooth who constantly feels the need to intellectually challenge other people. She’s a fascinating secondary protagonist, but honestly Kobato is a solid lead as well, and it’s probably to both’s benefit that they stick together at the end of the season. I’m not sure anyone else should be involved in the whole thing they have going on by series’ end.
The series’ direction plays a big part in selling all the mind games here, as well. Often, it takes a hallucinatory, bilocational approach, directly inserting the characters into scenes while they speak that aren’t literal representations of where they are but rather of what they’re discussing. This highly stylized approach to visual conversation is something that I feel anime has been missing a bit, lately, as the whole “Monogatari-esque” / Faust magazine-core genre has declined somewhat in the last decade. In that sense as much as anything else, Shoshimin Series was a breath of fresh air.
My understanding is that the two seasons of the anime form a nearly-complete adaptation of the original light novels. So if we ever get more Shoshimin, it probably won’t be for a while. Still, I am glad to have finished it, and glad to get to put it on the list.
10: TATSUKI FUJIMOTO 17-26
The Chainsaw Man movie is not on this list. I know, I specifically didn’t give Chainsaw Man the gold medal back in 2022 because I expected its eventual followup would be even better. And it was! So me not covering films in these lists is really biting me in the ass here. Nonetheless, Chainsaw Man mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto has found a way to sneak onto the list regardless, thanks to this anthology adapting some of his earlier oneshots.
I did think about excluding Tatsuki Fujimoto 17-26 from the list too. It’s not really a TV series as such, given that it’s an anthology of shorts, and the episodes are of varying lengths. But, it was close enough that I chose to include it. If it wasn’t one of the most original anime productions of the year, I might not have bothered, but by simple fact of being an anthology, with 8 different shorts by 8 different teams, it’s worth serious consideration. That structure did make ranking 17-26 on the whole kind of hard, since some episodes—the explosive romcom-action burst of “Shikaku”, the hormonal psychedelia of “Woke-Up-As-A-Girl Syndrome”, the grounded character drama of “Sisters”, probably the best of the lot—are fantastic, whereas others are just so-so, but even the least of these stories is interesting, and really reinforces Fujimoto’s status as a true original. I would love to see more mangaka anthologies like this get anime, or even just for more anime anthologies to exist in general. The format is severely underutilized in the medium, maybe the success of this one will spur some imitators? We can only hope.
9: DAN DA DAN, SEASON 2
Maybe it’s just me, but whenever I have to rate an actual battle shonen series on these lists, I always feel a little silly. Perhaps because the institution stands slightly apart from the rest of the seasonal churn. Nonetheless, there was more Dandadan this year, and like last year’s Dandadan? It was very good. Dandadan‘s strengths have not really changed, fun and novel character dynamics on top of a bed of intense, often outright surreal action pieces. Highlights from this season include a musical exorcism, the introduction of Evil Eye to the cast, and a huge, multi-part kaiju battle to round out the season. All of this is, genuinely, great stuff, but I think on some level, deeper analysis of the how’s and why’s of Dandadan might be best left to people with a lot more shonen head cred than I have. (The sort of people who have a better idea of what “newgen” means in this context than I do, maybe.) I find myself with a dearth of anything new to say about it compared to last year.
But honestly? Maybe that’s not a problem. There’s no issue with consistently hitting your strengths year after year, and if Dandadan wants to keep doing that, and going on and on, I’d welcome it with open arms.
8: TAKOPI’S ORIGINAL SIN
Most of the time, when I write these lists, I’m reaffirming the thoughts I already had on a work. Here, I’m actually going to do a slight bit of course-correction. When Takopi premiered, I, in hindsight foolishly, hemmed and hawed over actually covering it in any depth because it was so grim. This, with even just a few months of hindsight, is obviously stupid. So let me double down on what became my opinion of Takopi around when it ended. The situations portrayed in Takopi are extreme, and the titular space octopus / Doraemon-core kids’ anime escapee is simply not equipped to handle the tangle of abuse, social ostracization, depression, poverty, and tragedy he wanders into. His attempts to help largely make things worse, and the time loop that takes up the bulk of the show’s plot really takes great pains to express this. “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions” is a stone cliché, but it is so for a reason. You can’t just good vibes your way out of situations this dire.
As much for its affecting story, though, I rank Takopi highly on the basis of its direction. Iino Shinya was largely previously known for his work on the Dr. Stone anime which, no disrespect to that series, is just not playing the same game that this is at all. When Takopi needs to convey dissociation, the entire world of the show will wobble and waver. Overall, it’s just gorgeous, and that it is so in service to this kind of tragedy makes it hit all the harder.
The fact that Takopi isn’t even higher on this list is slightly an olive branch to those who instead find all this drama ridiculous instead of affecting. (I don’t agree, but I do get it. I think stuff like this requires a certain emotional temperament. ie. me being a huge sap, something that is not true of everyone.) But mostly, it’s just a testament to the fact that this year was absurdly stacked with good anime. I was genuinely moved by it, up to actually crying at the finale, and I think it’s going to stick with me for a long while. It makes perfect sense, but it is pretty stark that, faced with the overwhelmingly tragic situations of its protagonists, the only solution that finally works for Takopi is no solution at all. He simply removes himself from the equation, and only then do things begin to work out.
7: MILKY☆SUBWAY: THE GALACTIC LIMITED EXPRESS
Perhaps Takopi‘s polar opposite in terms of tone, Milky Subway is almost certainly the most obscure thing here. Milky Subway is a 3DCG youtube series about a group of convicts who have to figure out what’s going on when the space train that they’re on starts operating by itself. That premise, and the fact that the show takes place in a far off, gee-whiz kind of sci fi future you just don’t see very often anymore, would be enough on its own to set Milky Subway apart. Its real strength is in our main duo, though, the slightly airheaded and a bit whiny (in a cute way) Kujo Chiharu, and her we’ll just say girlfriend Kurusu Makina, a robot girl with a dry sense of humor and a lack of patience for anyone’s nonsense. They’re a blast to follow, and the bizarre situation they find themselves in aboard the train lends itself well to them playing off the rest of the cast as well.
If Milky Subway has a “flaw” (and I don’t really think it is one), it’s that it’s quite short. Each episode is only about three minutes long, and that’s with credits. Still, the result is one of the most unique experiences of the year, one that has as much in common with the broad world of web animation as it does with what I normally cover on this site. It’s also just straight up on Youtube, so if you haven’t seen it, fix that!
6: MY DRESS-UP DARLING, SEASON 2
We’re in the midst of a run of sequels here. You’ll have to pardon that, they’re not gonna let up as we keep climbing the list. Dress-Up Darling returns to us from 2022 and, perhaps surprisingly, is not the last Class of ’22 alum we’ll see here.
More important than its credentials though are that its fundamental strengths are all still intact. It’s still the radiantly warm, charming, easygoing love story of a pair of complete nerds, Gojo and Marin, who bond over cosplay, Marin’s favorite thing in the whole world, essentially. Far from having suffered from the time away, MDUD actually returned to us this year with even more visually sumptuous treats than it had when we last saw it. While there aren’t any more clips from Flower Princess Blaze in this season—the only fictional anime I’ve ever written a review of—there are plenty more where that came from, including a faux-OVA that kicks off the season. In fact, my favorite arc of this season revolves around one of these impressive bits of pastiche. Marin’s enthusiasm for a horror game called Coffin is central to the season’s final stretch. Coffin has a sort of willfuly faux-retro look I associate with the like of itch.io visual novels and such. To see an aesthetic like that in a series like this is really quite something, even moreso when it’s tied to a truly awesome-looking horror cosplay shoot the characters are involved in.
More than just being visually snappy though, Dress-Up Darling also continues to gently prod at the seams of gender expression. Another arc in this season sees Marin engage in some cross-play as part of a contest. New character Amane Himeno, is also a crossplayer (though if one wants to interpret Amane a bit more LGBT-y, I certainly won’t stop you), his whole backstory about dumping his girlfriend when she learned about his hobby and was disgusted by it is one of several ways that MDUD suggests that this kind of gender essentialism is on its way out. Honestly, more than maybe anything else on this list, I really hope it’s right about the world’s vibes. We needed that sunshine in 2025.
5: CALL OF THE NIGHT, SEASON 2
Of the two unexpected returns from 2022 anime on this list, I was actually more surprised by this one, in a way. Dress-Up Darling was popular, so a sequel at some point felt like a sure thing. Call of The Night, though, always felt like it was just outside the popular kids club.
Which only makes sense, Call of The Night sees the vampire as a stand-in for just about any kind of outcast. That’s why Ko, our male lead, fit in so well with Nazuna and the other vampires back in season one. But its second season took a turn for the queer (explicitly so) and, related to that, the dark. A majority of this season focuses on Nazuna’s past, giving us backstory for herself, but also characters like Hondo Kabura, who we met in season one but didn’t really get to know. (Kabura’s episodes, particularly the first, are some of the best of the year full stop.) In these stories, Call of The Night draws direct parallels between vampirism and queerness, adding it to the list of the many, many things that can get a person cut off from normal society. Anko returns here too, also getting a fully fleshed-out series of flashback episodes that frame her former relationship with Nazuna herself, directly in queer terms. All of that explodes in a final act that is as spine-chilling as anything else to air this year, nearly ending in truly dire terms when it seems like Anko is really willing to throw away everything to exterminate the vampires she’s come to hold in such contempt.
The queerness makes the fact that none of these relationships last, and their arguable replacement with Ko’s and Nazuna’s, sit just slightly uneasily. I don’t think it’s a real flaw, but if someone held it against the series I’m not sure I could blame them. Honestly, that unease is maybe the main reason it’s not in the top three. Still, you can’t argue with the effectiveness of something like this. It’s powerful. And, well, in addition to everything else I’ve said. In the last episode of the season, Anko makes a comment that she feels she’s gotten older but hasn’t really grown up. I relate. So hey, points for that, too.
4: THERE’S NO FREAKING WAY I’LL BE YOUR LOVER! UNLESS….
Here we have a show that’s going out of its way to complicate being on the list at all! Literally today, the day I’m writing this, December 31st, the show better known as Watanare, dropped a five-episode coda to its excellent first season. This was originally a theatrical release, so I’m not really counting it for the purposes of this entry. Just know that here—there’s always somewhere where this is true on the list, it seems, even if I wait until the final day of the year—I’m working off incomplete information.
Even so, Watanare was already fantastic just with the 12 episodes it initially aired with. I’d hesitate to describe Watanare as a romcom, although that’s probably the closest fit in terms of strict genre. If it’s anything, it’s a situationship dramedy, a harem series where girl after girl can simply not help falling under the spell of local dangerous pink thing Amaori Renako. Initially confessed to by overbearing rich girl Ouzuka Mai, Renako’s high school life quickly becomes a ball of un-resolvable romantic entanglement. It’s an absolute charm to watch from start to finish, as one never really knows which of Renako’s seemingly endless parade of girlfriends is going to throw things into a tizzy next.
As much as its writing (which is very good, don’t get me wrong), another important aspect of Watanare is its atmosphere. The series has a slightly unreal visual quality, I’ve previously compared it to city pop album covers and, honestly, I can’t really think of any better way to pin it down. It’s achingly romantic but not cloying, embracing all the messiness that comes with relationships and amplifying it until the knob breaks. It’s one of a couple anime where I’m kicking myself for not putting it at the top of the list! But it is what it is, 2025 was a very good year for the medium. Also, the finale’s conclusion remains an all-time way to end your high school romance show. No notes. Muri muri!
3: CITY: THE ANIMATION
Occasionally, an anime comes along that is both extremely good but also simply so good that it becomes a bit difficult to write about. What is there to say about CITY THE ANIMATION? Do you point out that it’s a massive artistic flex from, take your pick, director Ishidate Taichi who pulls off some truly unhinged stuff here, original mangaka Arawi Keiichi who has now had his work adapted into an era-defining comedy anime twice, just Kyoto Animation in general, putting the lie to any idea that they’re out of new ways to make a show just fucking slap from start to finish?
It’s true that this anime’s vast cast, a widescreen portrait of the titular city on the whole as opposed to just one or two residents, makes known a real joie de vivre that is tough to match in any year’s comedy offerings. It’s true that the directorial stuff really is that crazy, the way the show breaks into sectioned-off visual pieces in episode five only to knit itself back together into a quilt at the end of that episode must be seen to be believed. The same is true of the musical in the final episode, the show’s surprising number of silent segments that rely on expressive animation alone, etc. But at some point we’re just listing things about the show that are impressive, not necessarily the things that are good, and there is a distinction there.
So if I had to pin why I rate it so highly on any one thing in particular, it’s simply this: CITY was one of only a handful of things this year that made me optimistic about the future of anime. It was very easy to be cynical this year, for reasons I’m not really going to get deeply into but which I’m sure you can guess at if you follow the medium at all. In its specific mastery of the fundamentals, it’s a masterpiece in a very old-school, craftsmanship-first way, and I would not be surprised if it eventually emerges as the consensus best anime of 2025. It wasn’t my personal favorite, but it came very, very close.
2: UMAMUSUME: CINDERELLA GRAY
Every year, I do a little thing on social media where I have people try to guess what they think my number one pick is going to be. There were two anime that were highly mentioned this time around, and one of those was Cinderella Gray. In literally any other year, you all would’ve been right.
We’ll get to why you weren’t in a minute, but 2025 was the year I got really into Umamusume. And if I wanted to put this entry at the very top of the list because of that alone, I think I would’ve been justified in doing so. But even if we ignore the entire rest of the series, I think the story of Oguri Cap’s rise to fame is one of the year’s best. Oguri herself is maybe the year’s single best protagonist, a lovable country bumpkin who also happens to be one of the absolute strongest people in her sport.
While the series more than makes sense in aggregate, I think Cinderella Gray is best thought of as a series of moments. (Any of you who just asked “hype moments?”, you’re the people I’m really writing this entry for.) Picture Oguri and a favorite race will spring to mind, one of her beastly final spurts, or a moment of tension. Or maybe you favor one of the other characters instead, and what comes to the forefront is a flash of white lightning, a victory clinched or lost in an instant, the scowling face of a prior era’s ruler. Cinderella Gray is a series of become verbs. Want. Strive. Struggle. Achieve. If I say that Umamusume as a whole enterprise has achieved an almost talismanic importance to me, I sound like a lunatic, so let me just say instead that it lights something in me that I can’t entirely name. Maybe that’s silly, but it’s the truth. For as goofy as Umamusume’s very premise seems and, honestly, is, it is genuinely inspirational in a way that very few things are. (In fact, I’ve said this before, but it is truly incredible that Oguri Cap is still inspiring people some some 30 years after the end of his career. Sure, it’s in a different form, but how many athletes, human or otherwise, can claim that? It’s a pretty exclusive club, and it’s not one he’ll be leaving any time soon.)
The explosive, world-conquering vibe check aside, it really is a great story, too. One that deals with the temporary nature of all of these things just as it effortlessly embodies the thrill of chasing after them. Future seasons of Cinderella Gray—and there will be future seasons, I’m almost certain—will shift the thematic balance in regards to which it emphasizes, but its first season (in two parts. Confusing!) is a triumphant, star-reaching pulse of a thing. It doesn’t hurt that every one of Oguri’s competitors, from her career-defining rivalry with Tamamo Cross to even cool-as-hell one-offs like Obey Your Master, are great characters in their own right. Added together ,what you have here are the first two chapters of an epic. And in fact, that’s the main reason this isn’t at the top of the list. They are going to make more Cinderella Gray, and—spoiler here—as someone who’s read the manga, I have every reason to believe it’s going to be even better than what we have already. Keep running, Oguri Cap, you’re not at the finish line yet.
So, that’s 19 of 20 anime down. As I said, in any ordinary year, everyone who guessed my #1 pick would be Cinderella Gray would be absolutely right, and I hope I’ve conveyed at least some sense of why that’s so. Unfortunately, 2025 was not an ordinary year. So if you want to feel bad for Cinderella Gray, lament only that it was not born in a different era.
Congratulations to everyone who guessed my #1 pick. By my reckoning, that’s my good friends June, Astro, Persica, and Wolfie.
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1: AVE MUJICA -THE DIE IS CAST-
Look. I know, okay?
I am keenly aware of how it looks to have a girl band anime as my show of the year, two years in a row. Back to back girl band dramas! She’s lost it! She should have her anime critic card revoked!
Unfortunately for all of you, there is no license to be an anime blogger. I only write these things because I’m weird enough to want to. So here, at the end of one year and the start of the next, let’s do this whole song and dance one more time.
I think there’s a good chance that, at this point, people who read my blog regularly have seen this image of Sakiko more than the people who animated it.
I tried a few different placements of the top three before settling on this one. I would be lying if I said I was perfectly happy with it, but I made up the format of these posts in the first place, so I feel an obligation to stick to them. There are no ties. If I have to single out what I think is the best anime of the year, of those I watched, there really isn’t any doubt. It’s Ave Mujica, whether you want to call it by its marketing-mandated full English title or not, there just really isn’t any other option. Other anime this year were many things. In many years, being merely a work of deep, healing beauty, or being something inspiring enough to remind me to push forward day by day, would be enough to place at the top. That was the case in 2022 with Healer Girl or, yes, in 2024 with Girls Band Cry, and it was the case this year with Cinderella Gray. Nothing I’m about to say is meant to disparage any of those anime, which are all fantastic in their own right. But, this year was different. This year, the demiurge walked among us. She had blue hair and trauma, and she made it everybody’s problem.
Ave Mujica is, technically, yet another anime on the list that’s a sequel, being the followup to 2023’s BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!MyGO is an excellent series in its own right, and had the subseries stopped there, we would still absolutely be talking about it was one of the best anime of the 2020s. But, MyGO, at the end of the day, was still a band girl anime, the genre label that has emerged for this cluster of anime that deal with young girls processing their pain and sorrow through the power of music. I already went over the basics of MyGO‘s story leading into Ave Mujica during my review-not-a-review of the series, so I won’t repeat myself, but it is worth emphasizing that everything that happened in the first season, as great as it was, was still pretty normal territory for this genre. And then, at the eleventh hour, its final episode turned it into something else.
It does put me in a funny spot, though. More than anything else I’ve ever put this high on the list that I didn’t do literal week-by-week coverage of, I have already written about Ave Mujicaextensively. I have arguablywrittentoo muchaboutthe damnthing. Seriously, it’s a little excessive. But I couldn’t help it! Something about Ave Mujica drove me a little crazy, and maybe that’s a function as much of my own declining mental health as it is anything about the show, but I really do think Ave Mujica is a born classic. The best anime either define their times or embody them, and if there has ever been a better representation of the emotional cement mixer that is the mid-2020s, I’m not aware of it. Under everything, under the arguments about whether this is even really a music anime, under the tedious discourse about its ostensibly “problematic” elements, you have an anime about five people whose teenage emotional fallout, ongoing trauma, and unique neuroses are blown up to first theatrical, and then mythological proportions. It only makes sense that by the end of the season, Sakiko has declared herself a god lording over a walled garden. What else was she going to do?
There’s a further reason, in fact, that I put this at #1, the very real possibility that this all comes crashing down around us, some day very soon. I mentioned in the Cinderella Gray section that I sometimes rate things slightly lower on these lists because I believe they will become even better with subsequent entries. Crucially, I don’t really know if that’s true with Ave Mujica. Everything it’s built up is such a high-wire razor’s-edge balancing act that it feels completely impossible that season three, whatever it will entail, could ever top this. (Spare a thought, also, for Mugendai Mewtype, the other BanG Dream band slated to get an anime in the coming year, who have the unenviable task of following this.) I’ve been wrong before, and I would love to be wrong here, too, but the yawning uncertainty of the future does make me feel like I have to recognize Ave Mujica for what it is now. The dream, remember, is only illusorily eternal. The walled garden only exists until we wake up. Memento mori and all that. Is this the crescendo of this black opera? Do we wait on just the grim conclusion, or somehow, some way, will it find even higher to climb? I don’t know! That uncertainty is a little scary, but it’s also exciting.
So that’s how we close the year, with a screaming, gothic thrash of pain as we rocket toward a cryptic and hazy future. I’ve made a bad habit in the past of trying to directly tie my anime criticism in a given year to my emotional state, but, well, I don’t think a look at this list necessarily needs a genius to interpret. The future will come whether we’re ready for it or not, but, if we’re going down, at least we’re burning in the same fire. That, I think, is perhaps the spirit I’ve taken Ave Mujica (and Ave Mujica) in, and I hope the spirit you’ll take this entry in, as well. And if this all seems rather dramatic to you, well….yeah! It is! I’ve been a lot of things over the course of my ‘career’ as an anime blogger, but I’ve never been a liar. May 2026 be a year where a sunnier best-of pick makes more sense.
And that’s the list. One of the least-stratified I’ve ever done, I think (I truly do think basically anything from Ruri Rocks on up could conceivably be somebody’s anime of the year). As I do every year, I want to thank all of my lovely internet friends, those from the Ave Mujica Scream Zone who were with me every step of the way through experiencing the show itself, my friends from the Witch’s Manor and the other Discord servers related to those two. A big shout out, as well, to my bluesky and tumblr followers, as well as everyone on the Magic Planet Anime Discord. You guys rock, and I wouldn’t be here without you.
As always, consider tossing me a donation if you liked the list. These year-end lists take a lot of effort.
I’ll see you when I see you, 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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime.
For the Cinderella Gray column, new installments will be posted either on the Sunday each episode airs, or as soon as possible over the succeeding week. Expect spoilers!
Cinderella Gray can be watched, legally and for free, on It’s Anime By REMOW on Youtube. A link is provided below for your convenience. The descriptive blurbs for these articles are taken from those of REMOW’s Youtube uploads.
Hello, umadacchi. Your beloved blogger is a bit under the weather this week, but luckily, this particular episode of Cinderella Gray is mostly one of laying groundwork and doing some character introductions. As such, it’s pretty simple to cover.
Plainly, this episode serves to introduce (or reintroduce, in a few cases) Oguri Cap’s competition at the upcoming Japan Cup. The episode is actually structured as such that it largely introduces Oguri’s foreign rivals first—which makes sense, there’s more to cover there—but we’re going to flip that around and talk about her domestic competition to start with. There are just fewer umamusume in this category, and one of them, Tamamo Cross, is essentially the show’s defending champion. Tamtam gets a nice little practice vignette with her trainer, who warns her against pushing herself. A gentle reassurance from someone who cares, or foreshadowing of something greater? We can’t yet say, but it’s good to see Tamamo around, and it also gives us the delightful treat of seeing her with her head ornamentation removed. Cute!
Oguri’s other main competitor from Japan is Gold City, who actually practices with her at Musaka’s behest as they try to build Oguri’s stamina, given that the Japan Cup, at 2400 meters, is longer than any race Oguri’s yet run.
Oguri and Gold City, in a nice change of pace from some of Oguri’s more serious rivalries, hit it off pretty much immediately, and the episode’s penultimate scene is a funny exchange between the two of them wherein Oguri asks Gold how she keeps her hair so nice, leading to a whole bit about shampoo.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the international competition is given a bit more focus. Umamusume doesn’t get the chance to feature horsegirls from anywhere but Japan terribly often, so when they do, they tend to go all out. It is also worth noting that this is another case where the umamusume aren’t named directly after the real racehorses—rights issues, one imagines—and it’s fun to compare whose legally-distinct name is an upgrade and try to imagine how they might have gotten from one name to another.
Easily the most prominent of the umamusume featured here is Toni Bianca [Kaida Yuuko, based on the real horse Tony Bin], presented as a genuine menace. Enough so to merit an at least passing comparison to Symboli Rudolf (herself the last Japanese horsegirl to win the Japan Cup). She has an impressive record, too, most notably, she’s the most recent Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe champion.
Of the girls introduced here, Bianca is perhaps the most classically in the ‘arrogant rival’ mold. When our good friend the reporter Fuuji, a recurring presence throughout this episode, asks her what she intends to accomplish by running in the Japan Cup, Toni replies nothing. She intends to win, and she will win, and that’s that. Fuuji is impressed by this of course, but there’s the subtle implication of something more complex going on when later, on her own, she contemplates that the upcoming race will be her magnum opus. What that could mean, we don’t yet know, but it’s enough to raise some intrigue about a character who is otherwise a bit broad.
Even more so is the UK’s representative, Moonlight Lunacy [Sekine Akira, based on Moon Madness. I’m honestly not sure how they got away with that one].
She has a refined and elegant design, and some banter with Fuuji reveals that the two have at least some prior history together—she apparently competed in the last Japan Cup, only to come in fifth—and she kicks him for being tactless when he brings up her previous defeat in the race. Still, I’d say she’s firmly the least interesting of the umamusume introduced here.
Contrast, for example, Ellerslie Pride [Tomita Miyu, based on Bonecrusher, easily the biggest name downgrade here], the sole Japan Cup runner from the southern hemisphere and representing the hope of not just her home country New Zealand, but that entire half of the globe in general.
Her somewhat tough appearance (and the straight-up intimidating name of her inspiration) belie a horsegirl who is clearly a little desperate to put her country on the map. She actually visits a shrine as her first order of business in Japan, apparently praying for her own success. (Fuuji bothers her, too, and gets a giant shrine bell dropped on his head for the trouble.)
And of course, there are the Americans. Michelle My Baby [Takagaki Ayahi, based on My Big Boy] is incredibly tall compared to almost every other character we’ve seen in the series so far. We don’t learn terribly much about her—although on a fact-finding mission for Musaka, Belno Light describes her as having the strength of a bulldozer—but when you’re introduced by slam dunking a basketball from across the court, maybe you don’t need much in the way of complicated character motivation.
Which leaves us with one last character to meet. The other American umamusume is an apparently utterly unremarkable racer, no G1 wins, no record of really any note at all, and she’s also rather hard to get ahold of. Fuuji tries to find her but doesn’t succeed. Belno does, though, although one gets the sense it might be because she wanted to be found.
This is how we meet Obey Your Master
[Ishigami Shizuka, based on Pay The Butler].
When Belno finds her, Obey is literally face down, ass in the air, sniffing the grass. Why is she doing this? Who knows! Belno asks her, and her response is that it “smells amazing.” So at first, one might reasonably conclude that Obey is just weird. Weird girls are not new territory for Umamusume—see Gold Ship, a generational cryptid sort of girl, as just one example—but Belno, and indeed Oguri Cap, are not so lucky. Obey seems to immediately cotton on to what Belno is doing (and jokingly calls her “James Bond”). In fact, Obey knows all about Oguri Cap, starting from her career as a regional star in Kasamatsu up to the Fall Tenno Sho where she lost to Tamamo Cross. But actually, Obey even knows who Belno is, and it is with some sense of alarm that Belno Light processes that the last girl she’s been sent to find is not normal.
We can just say it. Obey is a freak. I fucking love her, she is one of my favorite charcters from Cinderella Gray in general, but she is an odd, odd character. The combination of everything we see here; her wild eccentricity, the star-shaped pupils, her encyclopedic knowledge of the competition, and of course the episode’s instantly-infamous final scene where she dances alone in the dark, Oguri Cap and Tamamo Cross’ race playing on her television and her rivals’ photos plastered all over her walls, brings to mind nothing less specific than Kurokawa Akane from Oshi no Ko. In fact, despite some obvious differences, she comes off as an outright interpolation of the character into a radically different context. I can’t prove that the inspiration actually worked that way—if it did, mangaka Kuzumi Taiyou would have to have been pretty quick on the draw, as Cinderella Gray and OnK started serializing around the same time—so if that reference point seems improbable to you, we can also just say that Obey comes off as a bit serial killer-y in, especially, that final sequence. This is, of course, fantastic, and it implicitly suggests that the true showdown in the Japan Cup will not be between Oguri Cap, Tamamo Cross, and—as one could be fooled into thinking from the start of this episode—Toni Bianca, but between those two and Obey.
Obey explicitly identifies Tamamo Cross and Oguri Cap as her “enemies” for the Japan Cup. And they both, it seems, will have to be careful to not be her next victim.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
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.
Everyone who knows anything about GNOSIA has made essentially the same joke about it. Finally, an Among Us anime! It’s the kind of essentially-obligatory reference that can quickly get old, but, honestly, in the case of GNOSIA it’s not really a bad place to start in terms of describing the thing. And the series itself directly invokes Among Us‘ public-domain, lycanthropic predecessor werewolf.
GNOSIA is set aboard a space ship en route from one planet to another. On the planet they departed from, they were attacked by something called a gnosia, and now the gnosia is one of the people on board. What’s a gnosia? How does it spread from one person to another? We don’t really know that, yet! Things are kept in deliberately broad terms in this first episode. From what little we do know, it seems like some kind of virus that….turns people into? Replaces them with? Alien shapeshifters. Again! It’s all a bit vague.
But that’s part of the point, as it turns out. Because our viewpoint character is Yuri [Anzai Chika], an amnesiac freshly woken from suspended animation by Setsu [Hasegawa Ikumi], a non-binary soldier who seems to be the unofficial semi-leader of the proceedings. Setsu explains the entire wolf-among-us situation to Yuri, and Yuri’s drafted into the process of voting on which of the crew will be placed back into suspended animation. There are a few key points to absorb here, and the bulk of the episode is devoted to fleshing these out.
Here’s what we—along with Yuri—learn over the course of the first episode. One, this voting-out-the-impostor situation is mandatory, because the ship’s controlling AI, LeVi, will enable the self-destruct sequence if the passengers don’t attempt to get rid of the gnosia themselves. Two, the ship periodically jumps into hyperspace. Humans can’t stay awake during these jumps, but the gnosia can, giving them an opportunity to attack. Three, the fact that one person is placed back into cold sleep “per round” means that if the gnosia isn’t caught by a certain point, it will be down to just one human and the gnosia, at which point the human “loses.”
If all of this sounds very video game-y, that’s because GNOSIA is a relatively rare anime that’s actually adapted from a video game, in this case originally a Vita title that’s been ported several times over the years. (Hilariously, dating from 2019, it actually predates Among Us‘ explosion in popularity.) Usually, when an anime is said to feel “gamey” that’s a bad thing. But, for the second time this season, I’m going to suggest that something that’s usually a negative is not necessarily one. The gaminess lets us, the viewers, feel involved as Yuri learns about the setting and the cast of characters.
Speaking of, in addition to Yuri and Setsu themselves, the first episode also introduces a quiet, reserved woman named Jina [Seto Asami], a blunt enby who’s so straightforward that it’s to their own detriment who goes by Racio [Nanami Hiroki], and a flirtatious, charming, deeply suspicious, and radioactively hot woman with the somewhat cryptic moniker of SQ [Kitou Akari].
I have my favorites already, but in general this is a really strong group of characters, enough so that I didn’t want any of them to be the gnosia. (Another way my own point of view sympathized with Yuri. As they, naïve to the world, want to trust everyone here equally.) Of course, after two rounds of voting, we learn that, nonetheless, one of them is.
The second round ends with Yuri and SQ, who’s managed to sway Yuri to her side of things, locking Setsu in cold storage, after having lost Racio to the previous round and Jina to a gnosia attack during a hyperjump. This turns out to be the wrong decision, as SQ—the one who’s been acting very suspicious the entire episode—is, in fact, the gnosia. The good news for Yuri is that now that they’re equipped with knowledge of how the gnosia operates, they can do a better job next time around. But, ah, SQ attacks and kills them, right, since she’s the gnosia? So how could there be a “next time” for Yuri?
Well, before entering cryosleep, Setsu hands Yuri a mysterious cube which promptly breaks when Yuri tries handling it. This, they explain, will let them go beyond death.
Yes, on top of its main premise, GNOSIA is also a time loop anime. This takes things from merely interesting to absolutely fascinating. Introducing as it does two interlocking rings of mystery that must somehow be related, each of which raises more questions about the other than it answers. There’s a lot to like here, and with the anime slated for a full two cours there’s a lot of time for it to bend and twist our expectations in myriad ways. All this in mind, it might be the season’s easiest recommend, I could see almost any anime fan getting something out of this.
I should mention at least in passing that the show looks and sounds good, too. In particular, there are some really great cuts of SQ emoting in the premiere here that make me very optimistic about how much fun this show is going to be long-term, and the cold, sealed-off atmosphere of the ship itself is hard to beat.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
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.
“Until the day that beautiful monster grants my wish with her own two hands….”
The first thing is the pacing, and the second is the sound design. I’m late to this one, I know, but upon watching the first two episodes of This Monster Wants To Eat Me, the latest in a growing number of decent-to-great yuri adaptations from up and down this year, those were the two elements that stuck out to me the most. Normally, when one brings up an anime’s pacing, it’s to complain. It is all too easy to fuck up the sequencing of events when adapting a manga to animation; by rearranging them illogically, by sticking so close to the source material that you sap the life out of the thing (the more common of those two scenarios these days), or simply by pacing them wrong. Events that are snappy on paper aren’t necessarily so in motion, timing is a key consideration when it comes to picking an approach for adapting this material.
Keep all this in mind as I say, usually, when an anime feels slow, that’s said as a bad thing. Especially if it was based on a manga. Watatabe—as This Monster is more commonly known—proves that it’s not necessarily so. This is an anime that creeps, lurches, and crawls. What it lacks in traditional production polish it more than compensates with in deploying its sense of timing and its audio to create atmosphere. Despite being set in the dead of summer, this is an anime that most makes sense as a Fall series. Mermaids should get to trick or treat, too.
As for what this is all actually about? Well, our main character, Hinako [Ueda Reina], is depressed. We don’t have the details yet, but it seems that she lost her family to some tragic accident some time ago. She wants to die, but she either doesn’t want to or can’t bring herself to end her own life, so she spends a lot of time gazing into the sea and waiting for her time to come. Early in the first episode she runs into a mysterious girl, Shiori [Ishikawa Yui], who warns her that leaning over the railing by the coast isn’t safe. She could fall in, after all! Nonetheless, when she returns to the same spot to do more or less exactly that later that day, strands of thick, dark hair creep out of the water like animate seaweed. Our heroine is thus attacked by an iso-onna, who drags her into the water to consume her.
In its way, this isn’t so bad, Hinako thinks. Sure, it was out of the blue, but this is what she’s been looking for, isn’t it? And nothing, not even the attempts of her best friend (the rowdy Yashiro Miko, played by Fairouz Ai), has really helped. But, in an even more surprising turn of events, the girl from earlier intervenes, sprouting fishscales and a long, sickle-wicked claw to drive the water ghost away.
This isn’t anything as simple as a rescue, though. Shiori wants to eat Hinako, too. She’s just not quite tender enough, yet. So begins a particular flavor of twisted love story.
These first two episodes, especially the second, largely take us through the paces of Hinako’s daily life, and how it changes in the presence of Shiori. Hinako technically never straight up says she’s infatuated with Shiori, but lines like the one quoted at the top of this article make it pretty clear how she feels. The dynamic Watatabe is building here is an interesting one. Hinako wants Shiori to kill and eat her. Shiori is explicitly interested in keeping Hinako alive until her flavor reaches its peak. She explicitly compares Hinako to livestock, in fact.
The important bit here is that Shiori is going to eat her eventually, but not right now. This actually bothers Hinako, not because she’s afraid or repulsed, but because if she’s going to be eaten she’d really rather it be soon. Despite the grim tone and the slow, creaking nature of the storytelling, there’s also an almost bratty overtone to the whole thing, as though Hinako is a needy submissive and Shiori, her domme, is teasingly avoiding giving her what she wants most.
This is, of course, the point. Watatabe’s premise is a take on the whole “domestic girlfriend” fantasy—found more often in heteroromantic romance manga, but it can be seen in yuri as well—wherein a depressed character is lifted to life and warmth by someone who insists on taking care of them. (There is in fact an entire style of romance manga and light novels built on this premise. If you’ve ever seen anything tagged “Rehabilitation” on Anilist or MyAnimeList, that’s what that means.) The roles of the nurturer and romantic partner are rolled into one in these scenarios, and Watatabe‘s playful skewering of them involves giving the caretaker/partner character an explicitly malicious overtone. Remember, within the world of the story itself this isn’t actually a metaphor: Shiori literally wants to kill Hinako and eat her, head to toe. But Hinako, depressed and longing to be reunited with her family, either figuratively in death or literally in the hereafter, is fine with that, and in fact wants that. In its way, Watatabe‘s story is quite a wicked little thing.
I don’t think it would work nearly so well without the audio component. The music here is straightforward but devastatingly effective, an arsenal of simple piano and string pieces that hammer home the oppressive summer that Hinako has been living for so long, and remind us that there is a final, sharp end to her relationship with Shiori. The voice acting here is excellent, too. Ishikawa Yui lends a breathy, ethereal tone to Shiori that really sells the idea of her as some otherworldly creature. She can also make Shiori sound forceful, which is helpful when the character needs to project ferocity (as at the end of the first episode), or make clear to Hinako that she doesn’t get to make all of her own decisions anymore (as at the end of the second). Ueda Reina makes Hinako sound exactly the right amount of withdrawn and closed-off. For an example, visually speaking, her daydreams about ocean life intruding into her everyday existence are reasonably effective but hardly flashy. It’s really the flat, deep-sighing tone of voice Ueda brings to the role that ties it all together.
Having the aural advantage is good. The elephant in the room here is that the show doesn’t look fantastic. It doesn’t look bad, I wouldn’t say—although its frequent use of frame-blending pushes things—but it’s definitely a shoestring production and looks the part, and doesn’t hit the visual heights of, say, the best episodes of the similarly-abbreviated Watanare. (Although that had its lesser moments, too.) Similarly, the actual shot composition is effective but largely unspectacular except for a few particularly striking moments. None of this is all that surprising for a low-resource anime at this stage in the medium’s history, but it is at least worth knowing going into it, and if it pushes people toward the manga instead, I don’t think that’s necessarily such a bad thing, even if they are missing out on the lovely sound design here. It is, in any case, a minor weakness. Or at least it is if I’m the one being asked.
The second episode ends set against the interesting love triangle building between Hinako, Shiori, and Miko, who spends much of the episode being jealous of the mysterious relationship that Hinako and Shiori seem to have suddenly developed.
She, in fact, asks Hinako to a festival. Hinako turns her down—it would seem that the accident that caused the deaths of her family is somehow related to this very same festival—but Shiori, not content to let her prized pig simply sit and girlrot, forces her to go. We don’t know how that’s going to work out for either of them, yet. (Or for Miko, for that matter.) But I certainly plan on tuning in to find out.
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 Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto 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 is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. 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.
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