The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!
The season is starting to wind down, and that shows in some of these episodes. Our first two anime this week are setting up for their big finales.
Anime – Seasonal
Train to The End of The World – Episode 11
As Shuumatsu Train enters its final stretch, we kick off one of the series’ denser episodes to date with our heroines arriving, at last, at their destination of Ikebukuro.
They find Youka in short order, but things aren’t simple enough that just reuniting the separated friends is enough. It’s clear that Youka doesn’t remember them—we don’t yet know why, but Reimi openly speculates that ‘wibble-wobble surgery’ of the same type Zenjirou was subjected to might be to blame—and their attempts to remind her who they are fail. Her reactions are confused and interlaced with her 7G powers, and any time the girls try to break through to her, it clearly destabilizes her already fragile mental state, causing the environment around her to temporarily devolve into an acid trip of digital video flickering and color-burst effects. The girls are chased away by Pontarou’s personal guards, the masked Ikebukuro police force.
Retreating to the train, they receive a phone call—via a phone fashioned from bitter melon, of course, because why not?—from Makoto and Zenjirou. Their conversation here basically confirms what we already knew; if they can nab the 7G button and just turn the network back off, the whole world will snap back to normalcy. (Allegedly, at least.) They’re not alone, though, as an unexpected ally turns up in the form of Mito and her zombie horde from a few episodes back. Her zombies, as it turns out, can sense the presence of the 7G button.
Call me stupid, but the show calls attention to a few parallels I hadn’t noticed up to this point. For one, Shizuru and Pontarou are, in a very broad sense, a bit similar, in that both are actively trying to avoid accountability for their actions. (They’re also very different in a number of ways, which I expect the show to draw attention to in its finale.) Also, the zombies, with their longing for the old world back when times were simpler—and indeed their distraction by simple pleasures like cheap ecchi—are supposed to be, you know, all of us, the people watching the show.
I honestly think that this sort of straightforward lock-and-key symbolism doesn’t really suit Shuumatsu Train particularly well. (And hey, what are you trying to say about your audience, here?) But then again, it took me 10 1/2 episodes to connect two dots with a line, so who am I to talk?
In any case, the episode ends with two things. One; a shockingly well animated and choreographed fight sequence between Pochi (as in, Youka’s odd butler / handler. We still don’t know what his deal is). And two; Akira and Mito slamming the 7G button to turn it off. Surprise! It doesn’t actually work, and in the episode’s closing moments, we get the latest in a long line of incredible what-the-fuck moments from Shuumatsu Train, when our heroines’ final obstacle comes rolling out of a high-rise on a track being constructed as it goes by long, gooey arms made of some kind of yellow substance; a second train, with Youka and Pontarou on it, headed off to parts unknown.
Shuumatsu Train has hardly been a perfect anime, but I’ve immensely enjoyed the ride just for how utterly bizarre it’s been. It’s hard to say what the finale will look like, but I’m interested to find out, and in the end, being compellingly weird from start to finish is all I really wanted out of this show to begin with.
Dungeon Meshi – Episode 23
Senshi’s backstory is another area where the addition of color, sound, and motion to the material gives it a slightly different texture than it had in manga form.
In the manga, this backstory felt like a fairly lengthy aside, steeped in deep shadows to a degree that was nearly gothic. Here, rendered in full color—earthy browns, iron greys, bloody reds—it feels a lot more like what it actually is, a traumatic memory. Bunched up in a relatively brief burst like this, but punctuated with a monstrous illustration of the griffin that hounded the dwarves who were taking care of Senshi, and the eventual screams of Null (the dwarf who Gilin, Senshi’s advocate throughout his backstory, butts heads with, and who Senshi believes Gilin may have in fact killed) renders the entire thing violent and scary. You can really feel how this would shape someone to their core.
The backflips the narrative goes through to eventually prove to Senshi that no, it was in fact not another dwarf that Gilin fed to him when he was young, have always been a bit convoluted for my taste, but they go down easier here. Especially when the payoff is Senshi having a big, tearful, emotional moment, always a nice thing to see.
The tail end of the episode is a bit less serious, mostly focusing on the ramifications of the circle of changeling mushrooms our heroes accidentally step into, swapping their species around at random. (Laios becomes a dwarf, Chilchuck a tall-man, Senshi an elf, Marcille a downright adorable half-foot, and Izutsumi a kobold.) It’s all a fairly good gag, although a bit light for Dungeon Meshi, until it ends up having very real consequences when the party run into a troop of gargoyles. I will say, there’s probably something not-entirely-flattering to be said about the show’s refusal to treat kobolds (dog-like, and thus the least human-looking humanoid species) with any dignity, even if the “go get it, boy” ball-toss gag that Izutsumi is subjected to here is admittedly a bit funny.
The episode ends in true Dungeon Meshi fashion; a brief meditation on the universality of dumplings. The series ends this week, and I’m going to miss it.
Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 9
This episode didn’t leave a massive impression on me overall. The core conceit, that of a VTuber being a sort-of tsukumogamidue to how rapidly digital data is deleted and discarded compared to physical objects, is pretty cool, as is the VTuber in question being a pastiche of a couple different popular, actual talents. For whatever reason though, the main thing that stuck with me in this episode was the goofy, animated dance number at its end, which is wholly disconnected from the rest of the episode’s story and is mainly about a catgirl who we won’t properly meet for a little bit, yet. Odd! Compelling, but odd!
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 53
Hatenna episode 😊
Our Heroes meeting a trio of people who look vaguely similar to themselves and even seem to be arranged in a similar trio is really funny, to start off with. The main meat of the episode, where they encounter the ghost alluded to last time and learn that it’s an Annihilape, is pretty great all throughout. The animation team really goes through some effort here to convey Annihilape as a menacing, almost otherworldly force of nature. Conversely, it’s pretty cool how our protagonists work together to stop it in their initial encounter, as it shows off a pronounced coordination, which we haven’t gotten from them super often before.
The horde of angry Mankey is honestly a pretty credible threat. Have you ever seen videos of angry monkeys? They’re terrifying. There are a lot of really impressive cuts here, the majority of which are apportioned to Annihiliape but the main trio’s Pokemon get some as well.
Given Hatenna’s prominence throughout the episode, the obvious tack to take is to have it evolve (especially given that Roy got his Kilowattrel last week, and that Hattrem learns the Dark-type Brutal Swing on evolution) but instead, at least initially, it uses its brains to figure out the source of the Mankey troop’s frustration and the remainder of the episode, complete with an insert song, is about helping the troop recover their food store, emphasizing once again Horizons‘ knack for centering episodes around unconventional problem-solving.
That said, the show isn’t enough of a tease to raise the possibility of a Pokémon evolving without actually following through with it. A stray rockslide causes the Mankey troop to start fighting amongst themselves, and some of the Primeape troop leaders even evolve into more Annihiliapes. Short of any other way to keep the peace, Hatenna promptly evolves into Hattrem, beats all of the squabbling monkeys up, and then heals them while they’re knocked out. It’s a genuinely delightful sequence and a lovely capper to a very good episode overall.
Wonderful Precure – Episode 19
We pick up from last week’s Hamster Garugaru two-parter for a just really, really good episode about Mayu, her fears, and her relationship with Yuki.
We kick off with a bunch of cutely-illustrated Japanese turns of phrase, most of which were new to me, and all of which are animal based. This has minimal relevance to the rest of the episode, but I mention it because it’s cute.
We also meet the evil general for only the second time, though once again he simply encourages the garugaru to Be Angry while giving it some new powers, advice it has no problem taking. The animators deserve some credit here for making a goddamn hamster seem like a credible threat (and for making Yuki seem genuinely threatening in turn when she trash talks it a bit later in the episode), what a feat.
Given that this episode is called “The Birth of Cure Lilian”, it’s no surprise that Mayu’s Cure alter ego debuts here, but we actually get an explanation of that name in the episode itself. Mayu’s mother mentions a lily-yarn that Mayu made for her when she was young as an example of Mayu imparting positive emotions and experiences to other people. Given some flashbacks early in the episode and, really, her entire previous existence in this series, it seems like this is a hard thing for Mayu to believe. She’s honestly so scared of everything that it makes her come off as having an actual anxiety disorder of some kind. Same, girl!
This all makes it that much worse when the garugaru, using its newly-granted ability to shrink Komugi, Iroha, and Yuki to the point that they’re too tiny to be a threat. This leaves Mayu alone against the garugaru when she comes across Yuki.
Standing her ground even in this frankly pretty scary situation—because she’s even more scared of losing Yuki than she is of the garugaru—allows Mayu, through the magic of the Mirror Stone, to become a Precure herself, and with that, our core team of four is complete.
I still like Yuki just a bit better as a character (I have a weakness for bitchy catgirls from this franchise, I suppose), but Mayu’s transformation into Cure Lilian might actually be even more drastic than Yuki’s into Cure Nyammy. It is relatively rare that a magical girl transformation feels so truly transformative. As much as I love them, one gets the sense that Komugi, Iroha, and Yuki are basically the same people as Cure Wonderful, Cure Friendy, and Cure Nyammy. This isn’t really the case with Mayu. With the Mirror Stone’s power, Lilian becomes everything she couldn’t be without it. Graceful, strong, courageous, a protector. It’s fantastic, and her voice actress Ueda Reina absolutely pours her whole heart into her performance in this episode to help sell it.
After the garugaru is defeated and turned back into a hamster fairy, Mayu and Yuki reconcile in a genuinely really sweet moment of teary-eyed reaffirmation. They want to stay together, so they will, no more to it than that.
Anime – Non-Seasonal
Rozen Maiden – Episodes 5-12
Pretty good all around! I don’t have a ton to say about Rozen Maiden, but as an old-school action series with a somewhat shoujo-y bent I think it’s quite a nice ride overall, and I loved all of the characters, especially Suigintou whose death(?) in the final episode absolutely ripped my heart out. Poor girl thinks of herself as incomplete and takes it out on everyone else. Which of course, is a reflection of how Jun, the main protagonist, does the same in an admittedly much less violent way. (Side note here: Suigintou x Shinku is some deliciously classic toxic yuri. Waiter send me more, please and thank you.)
Manga
Witch Watch – Chapters 148-159
I’m not sure what it says about me that, while there are other manga in the publication that are more meaningful to me, Witch Watch is consistently the thing I have the most fun reading in Jump these days.
I think it’s the manga’s combination of a lean but engaging storyline with an absolute ton of off-the-wall goofball shit. I can sense that we’re getting close to the end of this “aged-down Nico” arc, and while it’s been a return to the manga’s earlier, decidedly comedic days, I am glad that a return back to the whole Witches vs. Warlocks plot that continues to tick along in the background is on the horizon. I like the new character introduced in yesterday’s chapter, too. The idea of an apparently ‘chuuni’ adult who just Actually Is involved with a bunch of supernatural stuff but is really bad at hiding it is pretty fun.
On a note less immediately related to the current chapter, Ban is such a fun addition to the cast, I absolutely love her. Rabuka seems like she’s going to be part of the school group in upcoming chapters too, which is also exciting since she’s one of my favorite supporting characters. All around, just a really fun and readable manga that I’d recommend to just about anyone.
And that’s all for this week. While I have your attention, I’m going to go ahead and recommend Yume Nikki fan game / MMO (!) Collective Unconscious, a free exploration game about wandering around and gawking at cool scenery. I may write about it at some point, but if not, consider this an endorsement.
As for this week’s Bonus Thought, you know I have to go with this.
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The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!
Hello folks. This week, I didn’t write about that many different anime, but some of those I did write about I wrote about profusely. So hopefully you’ll enjoy that.
Anime
Girls Band Cry – Episodes 7 & 8
I think Girls Band Cry has finally edged out Jellyfish as my girl band show of the season, and probably my favorite overall as well. I caved and caught up with Nakayubi, the other group doing fansubs (their translations are on par, although the subs themselves aren’t as fancy), and I just….wow. There’s a lot to process here.
So, Nina’s pa is aware of her faltering grades, and now that she’s talked to her sister about the band, her whole family is probably going to learn as well. Naturally, she has not told any of this to the band. The girl’s natural inclination to simply Not Tell People Things is going to absolutely blow up in her face at some point, arguably it kind of already has.
The use of traditional flat animation to convey the past—bygone periods of one’s life, memories that have gotten hazy, and perhaps romanticized, in the recollection—is probably the smartest thing Girls Band Cry does visually. Other uses of 2D animation in the series can feel like a concession or a stopgap, these very much do not.
I will say, as a minor hot take, I don’t think the flat animation looks crazy impressive or anything. Don’t get me wrong, it looks fine, but I’ve seen people say it looks better than the main show or that they should’ve done the whole thing in 2D, which I don’t agree with even a little bit. I blame the pining for traditional animation in this scenario on romanticized memories, ironically enough, of a prior, bygone generation of this sort of anime.
Of course, I wrote that and then they did the broken glass split shot thing when Momoka announced she was leaving the band, so I don’t know. The series is just very inventive, visually, and I like that, even if most of the visual symbolism is not necessarily subtle. If this show leaves a stylistic legacy it will be this way, building a visual language that other 3D CG anime will be able to draw on in the coming years.
Mine [Sawashiro Miyuki], the character in red who’s given a supporting role here for what is honestly not a ton of screentime, makes an immense impact in her brief time on-screen. We have somebody here who is herself not “successful” in the broad-stroke pop star sense, but who is clearly at least getting by and making a living with her music. It’s inspiring, in a way, and Nina seems to feel that way, too.
I’ve avoided using the P-word much in my writing lately, because I think it’s easy to attribute to passion all sorts of other emotions that might be described better with other terms, but if we read this work as a reflective one, we can assume that the people working on it feel similarly to Mine about their own profession. Things can be difficult, they can be hard, but you push through for your own sake. Because, if you’re really that devoted to what you’re doing, you almost have to.
Elsewhere; in another piece of awesome yet obvious visual symbolism, when Nina redoubles her commitment to the band, she runs to a nearby lake and happens to catch the start of a fireworks show. I love this series.
In episode seven’s final moments, in the middle of a concert, the band, which has remained nameless for the entire first half of the show, is finally (and hastily) christened Togenashi Togeari. A literal line-of-sight name, because Nina is an insane person.
Episode eight opens on a flashback, immediately drawing a parallel between Nina’s current desire to drop out of school with Momoka’s past plan to do the exact same thing. This entire section is flat animated, which to me is enough evidence to confirm that the show’s usage of 2D animation to represent the past is an intentional stylistic choice.
Momoka remarks that if Diamond Dust gives themselves an escape route from their desire to make it big, they’ll definitely end up using it rather than succeeding, so they shouldn’t make one. It’s interesting to note that this is the same philosophy that some real-world artists have endorsed, including no less a figure than Eminem [Mathers Marshall III]. I’m not sure it’s the best advice, necessarily, but you can’t deny the drive.
Subaru correctly points out that Nina’s drive to succeed isn’t as far-fetched as it seems, given various factors (those listed include; Tomo & Rupa being somewhat notable indie musicians, Momoka being an ex member of Diamond Dust to begin with, an endorsement on Twitter from another singer, etc.) Nina’s plan is no plan—the same that Momoka had as a teenager—no escape routes, no backup plans, no safety net.
It’s notable that Nina’s memories don’t get the 2D treatment, and I think that may be because unlike Momoka, she’s not romanticizing her own past. Momoka, we can clearly see by this point, is guilty of seeing Nina as a slightly younger version of herself in too literal a sense. She thinks that because she failed with Diamond Dust, she’ll fail with Togenashi Togeari too, and that Nina will fail with Togenashi Togeari as well, because “that’s how these things go.” She fails to consider that the only data point she’s working off of is her own, and what the inevitable confrontation with the renewed Diamond Dust tells us, which is that the original group splitting up might have been best for both them and Momoka.
Sometimes you need someone younger than you to slap some sense into you. It’s not usually this literal, though.
And then there’s the final scene, which I find hard to put into words. It’s just so much. Momoka cranking her own old song, crying her eyes out, as Nina says she loves her (!!!!!) as they speed down the highway. This show is unhinged. I love it to pieces.
This is all without even mentioning the various things left technically unstated but all-but-shown to us regardless about Tomo and Rupa’s backstories over the course of these episodes. Rupa, who is desi, gets called a “foreigner” by a surly businessman at her job, and an offhand comment from Tomo implies that she lost her family somehow. Tomo herself, meanwhile….well, we don’t know the details yet, but whatever happened here is certainly not great.
But the girls will be alright. Because we are, truly, in the middle of a girls band revolution. I never like to promise these things, but I might review this when it’s over.
Worth noting! The show trended on Twitter for several hours after this episode aired. It really does feel like an event. I haven’t seen this many people pop for an original anime in ages.
Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episodes 6 & 7
The praise I wrote above isn’t to say that Jellyfish, Girls Band Cry’s only real competitor was bad or lacking recently, I must emphasize! I had caught up as of late last week, but given that I’m watching this with friends I’m now behind again. So it goes! These episodes were weird, as I will say several times in the below writeup! But I think I’ve settled on liking both of them by now.
Episode six is essentially a halfway parody of the idol genre, starring Miiko (the idol from way back in episode 1), who we here learn is a 31-year-old divorcee with a daughter. We are initially led to assume the worst of her, but over the course of the episode, it becomes clear that despite her immaturity she does dearly love her daughter Ariel [Touyama Nao], but the episode’s odd tone and the fact that it ends on what is essentially a joke makes the entire thing feel a little confusing, given the bullying angle just a bit prior in the episode.
Still, Miiko—rechristening herself Shizue Baba after the events here—is an interesting and likeable character, just one I wish we’d gotten a little more time with.
There are a number of interesting details here, though, like how Miiko’s affected voice is significantly higher and more pinched than her normal speaking voice, and the episode leaves enough open questions that it doesn’t feel wasted.
Episode seven is another oddball, although one that makes at least a bit more sense put together by the end.
Here, we divide our cast into two groups, those that have concrete plans for the future and those that do not. There are a lot of detours over the course of this episode, including a particularly interesting one where Kiui gets involved with an older woman (who might be ex-yakuza and possibly also trans? These things are not explored in detail and are left up to interpretation). There’s a whole thing with a bathhouse scene here, and a couple not necessarily great jokes thrown in. Were it not for a bunch of other details that seem far too specific to have come from anywhere but lived experience (Kiwi spends much of her first ‘date’ with this woman talking about denpa visual novels, and if that’s not evocative of The Queer Girl Experience I’m not sure what is), I’d almost think of the yakuza woman character as a stereotype. Still, given everything about the series, I am inclined to think of that as my own hangups running into the show’s storytelling rather than a flaw with the series per se.
The final scene, where Mahiru and Kano running together on the beach as they realize that if they don’t have more set-in-stone plans for the future, they can continue doing what they do for each other, is really great.
This is probably, at this point, my opinion on Jellyfish in general. It could’ve probably used a tightening-up in the script editing stage, because some of these extraneous sidebars are distracting, but the highs are very high, and the show remains worth it for them alone….of course, on the other hand, it’s not surprising that Jellyfish itself has no desire to conform to the expected, so maybe a “trimmed down” and thus less “weird” version of Jellyfish would feel less special. Perhaps I will have settled more firmly into one camp or the other by the time the show ends.
Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 7
It feels safe to say that, overall, this is probably the first episode of the show that feels like it’s building on the manga as opposed to just recapping it.
In a genuine rarity for this show, there’s a lot of strong visual work here; suitably eerie backgrounds, some nice cuts of animation and a few specifically placed special effects (mostly I’m here thinking of Shizuku turning into water when she meets the ghost of her friend and the shimmering red shape of the curiosity slithering onto the train later on). My suspicion is a different episode director or such than usual, but I am not 100% sure.
Even the stuff that doesn’t entirely work is at least expressive, which is more than can be said of much of the series so far. There’s a real wealth of atmosphere here, something that makes all the relatively unimpressive work up to this point feel worth it. There are definitely weaker moments throughout this episode, too (in particular there are a couple of extreme closeups that the drawings are not good enough to carry), but you take with the bad with the good in something like this. I’m just happy to have had an episode of this show that actually feels worth watching.
Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 21
An eventful episode this time around. Also can I say, unrelated to anything else, everyone looked very pretty here, especially Marcille and the Canaries.
Speaking of whom; we are here introduced to the Canaries for the first time in the anime, and for the most part their general aura—a combination of swagger and, given that they’re basically the Elf CIA, menace—is carried over well from the manga. I liked the additional detail paid to the little fairy messenger, who was always doing something or other in the scene where they’re introduced.
We also get to the underground kingdom portion of the series here. If I can be controversial for a second; I think the anime does an even better job of making Izutsumi look absolutely stoned out of her fucking mind than the manga does.
To be more serious, though. The entire back half of the episode, which takes place there, excellently conveys a real sense of loss, melancholy, and stagnation. It’s easy to miss between our heroes getting distracted by various things (Laios by monsters, Senshi by cultivation, Marcille by fashion, and Chilchuck by ale) but becomes more obvious in the episode’s last few scenes, and I think the decision to close the episode on Laios & co. going to sleep at the end of a strange day, with thoughts of prophecy on their mind, is a good one.
A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 8
This has quietly become one of my favorite anime from this season.
Overall, I would say that the best thing about Salad Bowl is that it’s just quite pleasant, despite its sometimes wry sense of humor.
This episode is split into two segments, as many are. The forehalf comprises Sousuke adopting Sara, and thus completes Sara da Odin’s transformation into Kusanagi Sara. Also, her picking a brown backpack because Conan from Detective Conan has one is an extremely endearing bit of characterization, and I like how this has been a persistent gag across the whole show thusfar.
The comedic highlight of the episode is probably Noa’s dream of being saved from a plague of locusts by Livia, from which the group’s band settle on a name; Grasshopper the Savior.
Lastly; shout out to this episode for making me realize all over again that someone born in 2012 would be 12 this year.
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 51
This is another episode that is primarily about mapping a step along Liko and Floragato’s relationship as Pokémon and trainer. Namely that Floragato’s got a bit of the “older sibling syndrome” going on where she feels a bit neglected because Liko has to spend so much time taking care of Terapagos and Hattenna.
Dot is surprisingly emotionally perceptive here, I’m taking that as a sign of her own recent emotional growth.
In general this was a fun and naturistic episode, and I liked the lightly Ghibli-esque visual of the Toedscools flying up into the whirlwind at the end.
Wonderful Precure! – Episode 17
I watch these episodes with a group of friends. All of us are Millennials, somewhere around 30ish give or take a few, and it takes a lot to get a crowd like that to go fully silent for any amount of time during an episode of any anime, much less a kids’ anime. Pretty Cure managed it this week, with what is possibly the most affecting episode of any anime that aired in general this past week; given that we’re only a few days out from the explosive eighth episode of Girls Band Cry, that’s really saying something.
This episode marks Cure Nyammy’s formal, confirmed, on-screen debut. Although given that she’s still playing the loner card of not wanting Mayu to get hurt, and is thus not presently cooperating with the other two Precure, we can fudge the day by a few weeks depending on how future episodes go. Still, what’s been obvious for weeks has now been explicitly confirmed on-screen; Mayu’s mysterious protector is none other than her cat Yuki, who is also the coolest, coldest, cuntiest—with apologies to any actual kids reading this—Precure the series has had in years. In fact, I’ll go ahead and say we haven’t gotten one who serves this hard since at least Cure La Mer, and I might be willing to go several seasons farther back to Kira Kira A La Mode‘s Cure Macaron, depending. We’ve had some great Cures since then, but none of them have been this.
More than that, though, this episode is about regrets. Or rather about how Mayu shouldn’t have them. At one point, during an otherwise very pleasant and cute day out with her friends, Mayu voices that she wishes she had met Yuki earlier—Mayu literally found Yuki outside in the snow, her namesake, recall—so that the white cat didn’t have to spend so many cold nights alone. Yuki, when circumstances and a particularly nasty tiger garugaru force her hand into revealing herself as Cure Nyammy, is not having that. She doesn’t want Mayu to apologize, not for anything she did in the past, and not for anything she’s doing now. A relevant reassurance, given that Mayu nearly gets herself killed by trying to save a baby duckling in this episode.
Nyammy’s henshin sequence deserves a mention, here. This is probably the most eye-popping we’ve had in a long, long time (to again compare to prior seasons, I think you have to go back to Cure Cosmo, from 2019’s Star Twinkle Precure, to find one this insanely dynamic).
She deserves it; the kitty cat Cure subdues the tiger Garugaru easily, leaving cleanup for Wonderful and Friendy. She also tells Mayu to keep being kind, the same sort of kind that led to her taking Yuki in in the first place. There’s a fantasy at play, here, the idea that, hopefully, if your pets could talk to you, this is the sort of thing they’d say. We’d all be lucky to be in Mayu’s position. We’d be lucky to be in Yuki’s, too.
Things end on a tense note, as Yuki tells the other two Precure to stop getting Mayu involved in so many dangerous situations. Things aren’t resolved, and any followup on that has to wait for next week, but the lessons learned and emotions felt here are real. No regrets, not even for a second.
Manga
DEEP RAPUTA – Chapter 2
Annoyingly, this is still not in Anilist’s database. If I had a huge audience, here is where I would sic them on that site.
In any case, this is a strong continuation of the debut chapter last week, we’re now moving into themes of sense; what senses Raputa has in her unique existence as an AI vs. those Kei has as a human, and the ways Raputa can’t and can interface with him despite this barrier. There was some of this in the first chapter, but this chapter also really starts dropping some hints that Raputa’s affection for Kei might head in a yandere-y direction, especially given that she now has a rival (at least in her own head, Kei doesn’t seem to care about that girl at all).
Interesting times ahead for this series. Also, lots of lovely panels and pages here as well, continuing the strong art from last week.
That’s all for the main body of the article this week. For this week’s Bonus Thought, please have this image that bluesky user kinseijoshi created. It has ruined my life for the past several days, I post it everywhere and it’s becoming a problem.
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 or Patreon. 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.
The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!
Hi folks! Sorry for the very late article today, I had a lot of reformatting to do, and, as I’ll get to shortly, was catching up on a few things before I put the article up. Enjoy!
Anime – Seasonal
Train to The End of The World – Episodes 7 & 8
More than one person told me that episode seven of Train to The End of The World was “bad,” and as a result I ended up putting it off until today, where I watched episodes seven and eight in tandem. I understand why someone would think that, certainly, and overall this two episode stretch is pretty puzzling. But, I’m not sure I agree, if only because even Shuumatsu Train‘s worst ideas are so confounding that calling them outright bad feels inadequate. A misstep, though, that might be true.
Episode seven is essentially a bizarro inversion of a traditional fanservice episode. These are, themselves, not necessarily super common anymore, and for many kinds of anime they’ve been relegated to the no-mans-land of bonus OVAs and such. Shuumatsu Train’s engagement with the concept is very much Shuumatsu Train-y in that it’s flatly inexplicable. For the most part, there’s not a lot of cheesecake or anything here—which is good, it would be wildly out of tone with this series, and the one shot that is like that is pretty jarring and bad—instead, the girls find out that the zombie horde from episode 6 are weak to ecchi. As in, they are weak to even hearing about it. This leads to a pair of climactic (har har) scenes where Akira dryly intones a scene from an erotic novel aloud, which makes the zombies explode. Later, our main four sing a bawdy song on top of the train, which has the same effect. In essence, I think this is a parody of the entire concept, undermined by the actual panty shot late in the episode. Even if we disregard that, it’s still a very odd direction for even this show to take.
There’s also the matter of three of the four main characters spending most of the episode wearing colored greasepaint. Reimi’s is black, and while it’s not my call to make whether or not that’s racist exactly, it definitely feels weird and uncomfortable in a way that the rest of the show really hasn’t.
Thankfully, the episode’s denouement is actually one of the better ones, preventing this from being a total wash. In it, the girls speculate whether or not Mito (the zombie queen) was bullied when she was younger. Akira says that it doesn’t matter, but Shizuru is quick to point out that it actually does, since we are all shaped by our past; who we are today is who we were yesterday, and who we are today plots who we will be in the future. There’s something to that, and this thread keeps Shuumatsu Train tied together in even its most unhinged moments.
It’s also worth noting that, strangely enough, this is one of the best-looking episodes! The animation is fluid and stylish throughout, the backgrounds are great, and there are some neat effects used to portray the zombie horde as a singular shambling mound of uncanniness. (I want to say the effect in question is some version of Live2D but I’m not actually sure.)
Episode 8 on the other hand, opens with first a brief comedic bit, and then a very much not comedic bit, as the girls pass through an area that seems to amplify their fears and regrets, condensing them all into micro-blip flashbacks that we see for only a split second each. After the credits, we somewhat puzzlingly cut to a different scene entirely, where the girls are planning to enter a town based on that in-universe anime NeriAli, first brought up back in episode 1. (I kept expecting this initial bit to come back but it never did. I suppose the idea is that they got through things eventually just fine? I don’t know.)
The bulk of this episode is probably best understood as self-parody. NeriAli as described in Shuumatsu Train‘s owns text is already incomprehensibly strange, and combined with Shuumatsu Train’s own proclivities, it produces an episode that reaches a level of surreality normally reserved for short-form comedy anime (your Teekyu and Ai-Mai-Mis and such). It is genuinely hard to parse what all happens here, but the very basic gist is that one of the stations has been turned into a warped parody of NeriAli, a version of the show where its bad guys won. But this frankly makes the entire affair sound much more coherent than it actually is. This is probably the strangest episode of Shuumatsu Train thus far, and that’s really saying something.
It is also, unfortunately, one of the weakest, and there are a number of jokes here that land with a thud, a few of which are truly tasteless. (A character from NeriAli shows up who is a magical girl with suicidal tendencies that wears a noose around her neck and over the course of the episode she does in fact kill herself, albeit in a weird roundabout manner. Were the manga more well-known, this would almost come across as a mean-spirited shot at Suicide Girl.) Self-parody doesn’t really work for Shuumatsu Train, while it’s clear that this episode is in some sense an attempt to replicate the feeling of being dropped into the middle of a series you know nothing about, the main series itself is already so bizarre that trying to “amp the weirdness up” just produces the anime equivalent of white noise, and while other episodes of the show have certainly had their ups and downs, the entirety of episode eight here is easily the weakest the show’s ever been.
As with episode seven, the denouement segment at the end does at least prevent it from feeling like wasted time. We learn that Yoka, or at least someone named Yoka, is ruling Ikebukuro as its “witch queen.” This is a big revelation, and confirms what was earlier implied about how the 7G Incident actually functions, externalizing Yoka’s inner world.
There are four episodes remaining of Shuumatsu Train—it was one of the earlier premieres of the season, recall—and my hope and assumption is that this episode was a purging of all the show’s most out-there ideas before we bring things home for its final stretch. Worst case scenario, this ends up being another promising original anime that flames out in its back half. That said, with something this strange it’s hard to make definitive calls on its quality until we have the hindsight of the full series, and I will completely acknowledge that there are a ton of references in this episode I just didn’t really understand. (There’s a whole shogi motif in here? Just as an example.) I suppose we’ll see what things look like in a week’s time.
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 50
Most of this episode’s important moments are within the good ol’ fashioned Pokémon battle at its heart. I have to call out a specific moment in the middle of the battle here, where Dot gets really frustrated by Bellibolt spamming Slack Off, because it’s extremely funny, and is a relatively rare instance of something feeling directly ripped from the games.
Relaxed. Thriving. Moisturized. Unbothered. In my element.
The episode’s real highlight, of course, is the climactic moment of Dot getting her bit of terastalization sakuga, and Quaxly’s Low Kick actually turning into Liquidation is really cool. An arrangement of the terastalization theme music from the games also plays here, which is also really fun. This is the second very solid Dot episode in a row, and I think she’s probably my favorite of the three protagonists at this point. Oh, and Iono [Hondo Kaede] is absolutely great here, too.
Wonderful Precure! – Episode 16
This was an odd episode. More so because unlike a lot of the other strange one-off episodes Pretty Cure has done in recent years, it’s actually plot-relevant! It’s surprisingly sweet, too! This one contains multitudes.
The most obvious thing of note here is that it’s a crossover with long-running gag anime Crayon Shin-chan. Shin’s appearance itself is really more of a quick cameo that sticks out like a sore thumb against the rest of the episode.
It’s hardly bad or anything, but it does feel strange, especially considering what comes after. Still, it probably delighted a certain kind of 5 year old (and 45 year old for that matter), so I guess it’s all good. There’s a second part of the crossover in this week’s Shin-chan episode as well, which is a lot more in line with that show’s (admittedly amusing but decidedly crude. It is for little boys, after all) sense of humor. It is noteworthy for giving us Shin-chan-style Precures, though.
Back in the actual Pretty Cure episode, the main thing here is that Iroha’s parents more or less find out everything—not literally everything, but way more than is usual for Precure parents— from the sheep butler Mehmeh [Tachibana Shinnosuke, because I think this is incredibly the first time I’ve actually named Mehmeh on this blog? I’m not sure]. I feel like it’s been a long time since the series has done something like this? They still don’t know the full extent of what Iroha and Komugi are up to, but given that this actually sticks, it seems like it might be setting up a later development. Iroha’s parents’ reaction to what they do learn is very sweet, though. Her dad especially doesn’t seem to really understand what’s going on, but is very supportive, which is super cute. (I’ll say it. I’d date Iroha’s dad. Is he my type in terms of looks? Not especially, but good looks are temporary. A good personality is irreplaceable.)
Sidebar: Komugi’s impression of Mehmeh is very funny.
Himitsu no AiPri – Episode 6
This is probably the best episode of this show in a minute, after a couple weaker ones. There are still some strange decisions though; debuting Ruby=Lazuli together makes sense since they’re a duo, but it’s a little weird that we don’t get a clean run of their song here, since it’s the emotional centerpiece of the episode. The episode’s editing is also exceptionally poor. This has been a problem throughout the whole show so far, enough so that it’s sometimes kind of hard to follow. I will say that Sakura [Hibi Yuriko, in her debut named role] treating the entire thing like a shonen tournament arc is really funny, and her relationship with her partner in Ruby=Lazuli brims with lesbian subtext, which gives me a lot of hope for the future of this series.
Ruby=Lazuli’s staging is really nice, as well, and easily surpasses anything we’ve seen in the show so far. Also, hey, a cliffhanger! I wonder where this whole “AiPri is forbidden now” arc is going to go.
GO! GO! Loser Ranger!
We’re entering the weakest story arc of the whole series and the production seems to be kind of melting. Uh-oh, gang.
Ultimately, you’re always going to be comparing an anime against its manga if you’ve read the latter first, but I usually try to accept anime adaptations doing their own thing. This has been a really good one so far, and while I know some of the rearrangement of events in previous episodes has been contentious, I just don’t really agree with that criticism. This episode, on the other hand, seemed unusually weak visually—in terms of directing, animation, even just basic drawing quality—so I’m a bit worried.
On the positive side, hey, it’s Footsoldier XX! [Youmiya Hina] One of the cooler characters, all told, and her feral anime girl-meets-disgruntled hardcore loyalist soldier shtick is already in full force in her first appearance here. I’m hoping the production woes are a temporary thing and we’ll be back on track next episode. I guess we’ll see.
Girls Band Cry – Episode 5
It’s good that this show’s strengths mostly lie in its staging and how it handles conversation and conflict, given that that’s most of what this episode is. The reveal that the new Diamond Dust vocalist is someone Nina used to know, and furthermore someone she had a huge falling out with, is pretty wild. I like how it builds another connection between Nina’s past and Momoka’s; it makes the entire thing feel like destiny, and an element of that kind of romance is always nice in a show like this..
Two side notes: One, what’s with the guy with the emo hair at the end of the episode who seems to be flat-animated? Two, I love the band’s shirts. I would wear those if I could get away with it, which probably says something about me that’s not entirely flattering.
Mysterious Disappearances
This is the first time in several episodes that this show hasn’t felt completely superfluous as compared to its manga, but that really just exposes how workmanlike this adaptation is.
However, on the topic of the story itself, it’s worth noting that 2014 is awful recent as a setting for an urban legend, as is the case in the one brought up here. This is actually something called out in the text of the show itself, and I think that’s a neat detail. Visually-speaking, there’s a cool moment near the end of the episode where a bit of a fisheye-esque effect is displayed, although it only half comes across.
Also the two random maids in the Maid Café, rendered in color and subject to a bit more adaptation than perhaps the main characters are, end up looking sort of like Pokémon characters, which is kind of funny and very off-tone for this series.
A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics
I have nothing to say about this episode but this; the racehorse names are funny as hell, and whoever translated them needs a raise. If you know, you know.
Anime – Non-Seasonal
This section was big enough that it needed its own subheading this time! I probably should’ve also done this a few weeks ago when I wrote an entire article about Air in one of these, but oh well.
Precure All Stars F
My third time watching this film! This time with my friend Josh1. I cried at the climax. Again. It’s a good movie! Not one without problems, but a good movie.
Something that I don’t think fully dawned on me the first time I watched this movie is how well they set up Cure Supreme [Sakamoto Maaya] as an antithesis to the ‘real’ Cures. There’s the obvious stuff—she’s a loner and treats her fairy poorly, for example—but it’s even down to little details. She doesn’t call her attacks, has no bank animation except for a brief clip we never get to actually see in full, doesn’t have a transformation sequence, etc. She understands the form of a Pretty Cure, but not the function; she’s all power and no compassion. If you wanted to interpret this as metacommentary I don’t think anything’s really stopping you. (Although I wouldn’t go in that direction myself.) Although I wonder how that would lead to interpreting the ending of the film, where she and her fairy Puca reunite and reconcile. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
All this said, while I don’t like ending these things on a complaint, this one still sticks out in my mind: it still bothers the hell out of me that Cure Supreme’s super powerful evil mode entails giving her darker skin, especially in a franchise that still really only has one prominent character of color otherwise. It’s just disappointing and offputting, especially in a movie that’s otherwise so good. Kids deserve better.
Gabriel DropOut – Episodes 1-7
I was a bit depressed a few days ago and needed a pick-me-up, so I chose a comedy anime from my plan-to-watch list basically at random and, as a result, watched some of this. I like it! In absolute terms it’s nothing crazy innovative, just a fairly standard character-driven comedy, but it’s done very well and the comedic rhythm is very strong. I love how much of an absolute shit everyone, especially Raphiel [Hanazawa Kana], who is probably my favorite, is. I’m also very fond of Satania [Oozora Naomi], mostly in how she eats absolute dirt in 90% of all situations. The show is just very amusing all around, and I’m glad I’m finally getting around to it.
I don’t suspect my opinion will majorly change at all during the series’ back half, and if I don’t write about it next week, you can assume I finished it up, stamped it with a 7/10 or so, and carried on with my life with no further comments. I will say that if you plan to watch it yourself, it’s probably at least worth keeping in mind the somewhat higher ecchi level than is necessarily the norm anymore. It’s not a sex comedy or anything, but there are boob jokes and such, just as a friendly heads’ up from me to you.
Also I must give a brief shout out to my friends Alice, Alexis, and Julian2, who I watched most of the series with. We had fun.
Asura Cryin’ – Episodes 1 & 2
Goodness, they don’t make ’em like this anymore.
Asura Cryin’ is a 2009 anime based on a light novel, and you can really, really, really tell. Our plot concerns a hapless young high school boy thrust into the midst of a three-way conflict over a magic lockbox that has a mecha inside of it. All the while, multiple pretty girls vie for his attention for reasons ranging from actual affection for him to trying to manipulate him into aligning with their specific goals. At the end of the first episode, a surprisingly intense firefight breaks out between the three factions, which, among other things, involves a girl with glasses popping shotguns all over the place.
So what I’m saying is; Asura Cryin’ is very trashy in that endearingly late-aughts way. These days, light novel adaptations tend to be isekai or at least isekai-adjacent, and this particular flavor of enrapturing goofball shit that stems from a time when “light novel” implied “every genre ever in a blender” doesn’t really exist anymore. The very fact that the three factions are called The Divine Guards, the Takatsuki Clan, and—no, really—the Dark Society should tell you a lot on its own. This is the ol’ Proper Noun Machine Gun at full-tilt, and what a sight it is indeed. We’ve got, as mentioned, a harem setup, we’ve got not-quite-giant mecha in a box. We’ve got knockoff stands in the form of “Spectral Apparitions” (ghost girls). We’ve got a demure girl who’s secretly a demon with heterochromia and a manipulative girl, the aforementioned shotgun-toter in fact, who’s like, some kind of ghost hunter or something? We’ve got the student council controlled by a bunch of kids cosplaying as medieval crusaders. We even, as of the end of the second episode, seem to have a time loop plot. There really is everything you could want in here, assuming “what you could want” is some anime trope or another. This is all in the first two episodes, mind you.
It really all is quite a lot. I have a nostalgic fondness for this sort of stuff, even if I’d be hard pressed to claim it’s “good” in the traditional sense. These are the B-movies of a certain period of anime, and like B-movies they often make up for what they lack in the plot or themes department with strong visuals. Asura Cryin’ isn’t the best-looking of these I’ve ever seen, but it has a strong, stylish directorial sense, and it looks surprisingly good given that it’s in a dead-zone of being old enough to be noticeably dated but not old enough to trigger nostalgia buttons just yet. (At least, not for people who aren’t weirdos like me.)
Shows like this also, and this is crucial, tend to be very watchable. I had to tear myself away from the second episode here because I had some prior commitments when I was watching it. Unfortunate! I could watch a whole half cour of this in an evening, easily. For a certain kind of like-minded person, this is the sort of thing you could easily slam through in a few days, occasionally posting out-of-context screencaps and telling your friends how Peak it is, only to give it, generously, a 7/10 on Anilist when you’re done with it. But damn it all, sometimes that’s just what you want out of an anime.
Manga
The manga that stood out to me this week the most is the one I wrote a whole article on, so do go read that article if you’re interested in my thoughts on DEEP RAPUTA. As for everything else….
Dai Kyoujin
A oneshot collaboration written by a mysterious fellow named Tojou and drawn by Hidano Kentarou (maybe best known for Super Smartphone? He draws a Kaiju No. 8 spinoff manga these days. That’s assuming it’s even the same Hidano Kentarou! Dai Kyoujin looks nothing like anything else I’ve ever seen by him.). A quietly spellbinding story about two witches tasked with an ancient and sacred duty. Of all fictional depictions of witches—a topic that matters a great deal to me, due to my own neopaganism—this ranks very high for me. The entire story feels like we’re seeing a depiction of this secret ritual, and because it doesn’t overplay its hand, it feels as though you’re never entirely sure what to make of it. Interestingly, it’s presented in a long-strip “scroll” format, making it feel even more like some ancient spellbook. I really recommend this, it’s amazingly lovely.
Flan Wants To Die
An oldish Touhou Project doujin by Girls Last Tour creator tkmiz about Flan experiencing a depressive episode because she’s old. Suffice to say, I relate. There is a persistent feeling here of the melancholy that comes with knowing that life is passing you by but also knowing you can’t really do anything about it. Flan tries to, and all she’s rewarded with for her efforts are some rather upsetting sights. She is almost-literally haunted by the ghosts of dead friends throughout this oneshot; that’s how it goes, sometimes.
Of course, this all is of relatively marginal relation to the actual Touhou canon. But that’s OK, the same is true for a lot of Touhou doujins I like a lot. The manga’s single line description is “Flan Scarlet is tired of existing. It’s probably awful to be locked in a form, without the ability to change or live out a story.” Which is interesting, because Flan actually is part of the actively-ongoing portion of Touhou again after many years in narrative purgatory. The same isn’t true for many other characters though, and Flandre as depicted here isn’t really necessarily just Flandre herself, but rather a symbol for all of us who struggle with this sort of depression.
Psych House
I should probably be catching up on all the manga I’m behind on, but me being me I decided to check out some new Jump titles instead, starting with this here, Psych House, which seems to be the first serial from its author, Omusuke Kobayashi.
The premise is very simple; in this particular version of Anime Japan, some people have supernatural abilities called Psychs. Our protagonist, Nemuru, is a kind but somewhat cheeky young boy who can change his size, and in the manga’s inagural chapter he helps out a girl named Kotone, who’s been using her ability to teleport objects to filch from a local grocery store.
I’d describe the manga as….endearingly amateurish, maybe? The bones of a good series are here, but it’s difficult to take too seriously anything that treats stealing—especially petty theft of food, by a starving person, no less—as a huge moral dilemma. Especially when, as in Kotone’s case, her situation is so ridiculously pitiable. Her mom’s in a coma for no obvious reason! She’s been starving herself because she knows stealing is wrong! She’s a good girl at heart who just wants to make her ma proud by going to college and getting a good job! Oh no, oh my! It’s all a little much.
Keeping in mind that Jump’s target audience is still at least ostensibly young boys, maybe this kind of pat Morality 101 stuff isn’t the worst thing in the world, but kids deserve nuance, too. Maybe that’s why Kotone gets off scott-free here when Nemuru invites her to live at the sharehouse alluded to by Psych House’s title.
I could see this becoming funnier and more compelling with a bit more focus, so I’ll probably keep up with it for at least a few chapters. After that, who knows?
By the way! Don’t confuse this with Hiimote House, an anime of a somewhat similar name. That series has basically the same premise but could not be more different from this one. Although, that said, give Hiimote House a try sometime if you’re in the mood for something delightfully weird.
That’s all for the main body of the article today. Before you go, I’d also just like to alert you to the existence of these two trailers for upcoming projects by the studio Kinema Citrus [Revue Starlight, Made in Abyss, etc.], respectively Goodbye, Lara, and Ninja Skooler, for no particular reason than that they both look very promising. Sadly, neither of these projects has an actual release date (or even release year) yet, with both trailers ending with a vague “Work In Progress” note. But still, it’s nice to get excited about things when you have an opportunity to do so.
As for today’s Bonus Thought….why not try some Devilish Actions?
See you next week, anime fans.
1: Hi Josh 2: Hi guys
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 or Patreon. 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.
Hello, anime fans. We’ve got a bit of a light selection this week as I’m behind on several shows and have been too preoccupied to write about a few others. (Mostly from writing my Air article, but that’s certainly not the only thing. There’s quite a lot going on in the music industry these days.)
Anime
Train to The End of the World
Because a big part of Shuumatsu Train is the externalization of the internal, the girls’ general discord as a friend group remains a main concern. Here, we see for the first time the argument that caused Youka to run away to Ikebukuro in the first place.
And, well, this whole conversation does not make her look very good at all. This is an externalization of the internal too, Youka shares her dream to become a space engineer with Shizuru and Shizuru basically makes fun of her for having her head in the clouds; clearly projecting her own insecurity onto Youka’s ambitious dreams.
Telling the rest of the group about this causes a fight, and Shizuru ends up setting out on her own along with Pochi the dog. This is, to say the least, a poor idea, but it becomes obvious just how bad of an idea it is when she runs into zombies of all things overnight. Zombies are pretty tame for this show, although their having a “Zombie Queen” who’s a young girl with blonde twintails seems about right.
All told, this remains one of the year’s most inscrutable and strange anime. This episode gave us some hints about how it all might tie together, but I’m definitely excited for the show’s back half now that we’re past the halfway point. I particularly liked the final scene where the possibility of Shizuru becoming a zombie is refuted by comparing her to a messy boyfriend. “She’s such a zombie, but she’s still our friend!” indeed, I also like that they all have enough faith in Youka to assume she thinks the same way.
Wonderful Precure – Episode 13
A very cute, and rather interesting-looking episode.
The main thing that stuck out to me here is the comedic direction in the episode’s forehalf. Lots of odd timing to sharpen the jokes and lots of funny facial expressions. The second half is not quite as good but any lack of visual panache is more than made up with for the fact that it has an oddly pronounced amount of ship-bait-y charge to it. Is it inappropriate for someone’s cat to hit on them in human form? No idea!
Wonderful Precure – Episode 14
So, it looks like Yuki’s antics in her human form have been taking a toll on her, huh?
She turns out to be mostly fine long-term, and Mayu ends up sleeping over at Iroha’s house, since it’s attatched to her parents’ vet clinic.
Thus begins a marathon of Quite Good Mayu Faces. Mayu’s anxieties (and Yuki’s jealousy) are on full display up and down the whole episode. Mayu is a fun character, and this is her best showcase in a while. (Pretty Cure often includes a character that can work as a stand-in for the neurodivergent members of its target audience, but, as my friend Alice put it, this is “the first time they’ve ever straight up included a Bocchi the Rock.” And really, that’s a good way to put it. Mayu being so generally tightly-wound is painfully relatable, I remember being this person.)
Inevitably, of course, a Garugaru shows up, this time a rooster shattering the early-morning tranquility. I basically love this entire second half of the episode; from Mayu being baptized into the magical girl world by fire, to the fight with the rooster Garugaru itself, to Satoru’s brief story-so-far sum up, to Wonderful and Friendy defeating the Gargugaru by reflecting its own super-powerful sonic attack back at it. This is just good stuff.
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 48
So the early highlight of this episode is obviously Roy fighting Nemona and getting screwed over by the sudden rain. The episode in general is thus about Roy learning to be aware of his environment and how he can use that to his advantage both on the battlefield and off it.
What stands out to me is the art segment, which is just very nice in general. I like how their little creations come together over the course of the sequence. (Also, Roy’s Wattrel puts in a rare appearance here.) My favorite of the various pieces is actually Dot’s miniature Ferris wheel. (There’s a fun bit of orphaned etymology here. Ferris wheels in the real world are named after a guy, so is there just a different Ferris in the Pokémon universe, or what?)
The third part of the episode then sees Roy apply this newfound knowledge in a fight against the gym leader Brassisu. It’s genuinely a fairly tense fight! (Although there’s a LOT of stock footage.) After terrastalizing, Roy becomes the first of the protagonists of Pokémon Horizons to score a clean victory over a gym leader. That’s pretty significant! More generally, combined, these three segments form a nice little triptych of an episode; a fun experience overall.
A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 5
Salad Bowl decides to take a break from being funny or decently-animated this week to do a very half-assed pastiche of the various strains of Girls Do Music anime in the air right now. I don’t really have much to say about this, the episode just isn’t particularly good, doesn’t look particularly good, and what you could charitably call satire just doesn’t really land. Also, Priketsu’s one bandmate seems like kind of a jerk. The phrase “Girls Band Cry for SWERFs” springs to mind.
As for the second half of the episode…jeez, is recruiting the desperate to do shopping for you so you can resell the items as a scalper a real thing? I’d hope not, but I guess you never know. The episode’s only joke that really lands in any way is Olivia’s dramatic overreaction to finding out what she’s been involved with. The whole thing comes off more as a PSA than satire.
Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 18
Don’t have a ton to say here, just a good episode adapted from a good part of the manga. (One that serves as a bit of a breather, if I recall.)
I know some are unhappy with the removal of the rice joke. I think the decision to play the scene a bit straighter largely works, and regardless, I think what the anime adds—especially in how good the final confrontation between Laios and the shapeshifter looks—more than makes up for it. Also, there were a lot of good faces in this episode. I like that, I’ve missed those. And of course, we have The Reveal at the end of the episode! The latest She’s Here moment in a series that’s been full of them.
Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night – Episode 4
Ultimately, this ends up being the first episode where we fully see JELEE operating as a coherent unit.
I didn’t particularly expect that we’d get any scenes from the point of view of the Sunflower Dolls. The fact that we are seems like it’s definitely setting something up long-term. The comments about the producer really make me furrow my brow, in particular. Doubly so when we learn, from Kano’s boozy older sister, that said producer is her mom.
So it’s clear that at least some of this is about showing her up, especially Kano’s desire to drop JELEE’s next song on the same day as the Sunflower Dolls’ comeback single. (A ploy which, as we see in the episode’s final moments, actually does work.) Just as important though, this is the first time we’ve seen all four of the JELEE members interact, it lends us some space for great character moments like Kano’s little freakout and panic run to a sweets shop.
All told, Jellyfish continues to be an interesting sideways take on the “music girls” genre. Also; if we’re going tune for tune, the ED to episode 4 here is the best of any song so far1 between both the rest of this show and Girls’ Band Cry, probably its closest competition.
Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episode 5
“Maybe I managed to shine just a little.”
I like the direction and sound design throughout this episode emphasizing Yoru’s sudden sense of inadequacy; she unfortunately learns here that attention alone can’t provide one with self-esteem. It’s sweet how quickly Kano catches on, and really displays the progression of their friendship.
It doesn’t solve the issue immediately though and Yoru just kind of melting during the livestream is genuinely like kind of uncomfortable. This recurs several times throughout the episode and it seems pretty clear that this is going to be a running insecurity of Yoru’s. She seems to channel it into applying herself at the end of the episode. That’s….admirable, I wish I could do that. I do wonder if it’ll come up again, I have a feeling it might, we’re not even halfway through this show after all.
And hey, an aquarium scene! The gentle blue light melting all of the tension off is really lovely. The bit where Kano being wowed by Yoru’s drawing is represented by bubbles literally flowing out of her phone is very good. I do have to admit that the end of the episode actually daring to show a girl kissing another girl on-screen blindsided me so thoroughly that I sort of lost most of the other thoughts I’d collected about this episode. It’s a great capper, an interesting setup for possible future developments, and is—intentionally or not—a fairly direct challenge to all the other yuri and yuri-lite anime airing right now.
And once again, that’s all for this week, but before you go, please have this week’s bonus thought.
1: As of May 1st, when I wrote this.
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I am getting a little tired of talking about how tough my life is, so I’m going to skip most of it. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know things have been complicated around here lately. I bring it up at all only to explain why the format is so different from last year’s Year-End List. This year slipped through my fingers, so I have not had the time, energy, or frankly the desire to concoct a nice and neat worst-to-best list like I did last year and in 2020. To be honest, it’s just also felt like a particularly mediocre year for anime. Certainly it’s the weakest since I started this blog.
That said, a brief Top 5 like I did in 2021 also felt inadequate. So, instead of a carefully curated list where I weigh all of my options intelligently, I’ve decided to embrace the chaos. This is less of a curated list and more of a sideways data dump. Some of these things have been written for a while, and are only finding a home here. Others are new. Some are very long, and some are quite brief. Length has no correlation to quality here; there were a few things that I really liked but could only summon up brief takes on (or none at all, in a couple cases, but we’ll touch on that again at the bottom of the article).
Furthermore; the entries here are not in any particular order beyond a favorite being at the top (which is actually the bottom because that’s how listicles work). They’re still mostly anime that came out this year, but some of them, as the title implies, aren’t anime at all, and a few of these things are—gasp—not even from Japan. Instead of worrying so much about format and qualifiers I decided to just write about the things this year that gave me a strong emotional response, made me think, or brought me some comfort in these bizarre times. Hopefully you’ll enjoy the madness.
That said, I wouldn’t quite feel right—
MAGICAL DESTROYERS
—if I didn’t start off talking about one of the few true clunkers I watched end to end this year.
Ah, Magical Destroyers. There’s something tragic about the complete sputtering-out that happened to this series, a reasonably strong first couple of episodes lead into most of the rest of the show being absolutely dismal, and if you wanted the bite-sized review of the show, that’s about all you’d have to say.
Of course, we’re not interested in being bite-sized here. What’s interesting to me about Magical Destroyers, some months on, now that the dust has settled, is the sheer scale of the drop-off. There was a big fall here, and I’m not sure how obvious that was to people looking in from the outside.
In premise, there’s nothing inherently wrong with Magical Destroyers. As I’ve said many times, its core conceit of a world where general, sneering dislike for the nerdy and withdrawn among us turns into outright persecution is a bit indulgent, but it’s not completely crazy. Nor is the idea that they’d then fight back. Other anime (Rumble Garanndoll and Akiba’s Trip, mainly) have done interesting things with this material, so it’s not that the show’s premise is the problem. Instead, what sinks Magical Destroyers is a massive sense of inconsistency, both in tone and just general competence. We’ve been here before, where an anime having bright spots makes the whole thing worse given their proximity to the mediocrity that makes up the rest of the series. Those bright spots aren’t meaningless, but with time, more removed from Magical Destroyers than I was when I first reviewed it, I mostly just remember the whole thing as a letdown.
Worse, there’s a particularly bitter postscript here. Like many anime, Magical Destroyers was created in part to promote a mobile game and hopeful cash cow. All told, Magical Destroyers Kai—the game in question—was active from just April to August of this year, a service life of less than six months. A failure to clear even the incredibly low bar set by such projects of ill repute as Pride of Orange’s mobile game. This is a truly depressing flit and sputter from what started out as such a promising project. Worse, given that I imagine quite a few people are out of a lot of money given Jun Imagawa’s pet project completely tanking, it seems entirely possible that the man will never lead an anime project ever again. Magical Destroyers represents more, then, than just the failure of a single series. It is the failure of one man’s entire creative vision, and the decision making of those who supported him. Worse shows definitely aired this year—the usual slate of iffy sequels, bottom-of-the-barrel narou-kei adaptations, deep pools of mediocrity like Revenger (brilliantly reviewed here by my friend Julian), and whatever the hell was going on with The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses—but I can think of none that so thoroughly embody disappointment as a concept. The rest of this list is going to mostly be positive, but I felt the need to revisit Magical Destroyers. For better or worse, the letdown has stuck with me.
“SHINKIRO”
About half of you are cheering right now, and the other half of you have no idea what this is or why it’s on this list. What is “SHINKIRO”? Aren’t those two of those girls from Hololive? What’s going on?
Well, yes, they are two of those girls from Hololive; that’s Gawr Gura and Houshou Marine (operating here as a very creatively named idol unit; GuraMarine), two of the VTuber Agency Imperial’s most popular talents. This is a music video. Specifically, a really fucking good one that reimagines Marine and Gura’s friendship as a sort of bittersweet romance. It’s inspired, is what it is. The pirate and the mermaid, more or less. A summer that lasts the rest of your life. The key to that vibe—a mix of nostalgia for a time and place that never quite really existed and an implied sadness that it’s forever out of reach—is the music video’s art style, a dreamland pastiche of pre-Millennium anime, reinterpreted through a modern lens by Studio KAI of all groups. I’m guessing the general idea was either Marine or Gura’s (I’m not huge into VTubers these days, but I know Gura is a city pop fiend and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn Marine was too), and was followed through by art director Yuusuke Takeda, who has been in the industry for long enough that he’d have been working when this style was current.
The song itself is worth at least touching on, too. I’m not a music critic, so my vocabulary here is even more limited than it’d be otherwise, but to my ear this is almost indistinguishable from “authentic” city pop from the 80s. Things like this can seem transient, and thus not worth discussing in the same breath as “real” anime or similarly longform art like games or manga. But here, when I’m writing this in the second week of a particularly dark December, it reminds me that summer, no matter how far away, is real somewhere.
Oh, and Marine and Gura totally fuck in this video. Like, they don’t literally show it but there are a limited number of ways to interpret “two people wake up naked in a bed together.” Wild.
MAKE THE EXORCIST FALL IN LOVE
Here’s an elevator pitch for you; psychosexual Catholic battle shonen. This is another rule-bendy entry, since Exorcist here technically started back in late 2021. But it’s still ongoing, and yours truly happened to only find out about it this year, so this is where it gets written about (for the first, but maybe not the last? time). Exorcist is a real oddity, a battle series that leans pretty heavily on Catholic myth and morality for its worldbuilding to weave the tale of a teenage exorcist forbidden from the usual affairs of his age because he’s destined to save the world from Satan, a rare appearance by the capital D-L Demon Lord in contemporary manga. The general premise of said exorcist having to protect a seemingly-innocent girl who is actually a demon might sound like the setup for a fairly goofy romcom, but that would belie the fact that Exorcist is actually one of the gnarliest things that runs in Shonen Jump, if only intermittently. There’s something very surreal about the more straightforward romance manga aspects rubbing shoulders with the battle shonen flash, body horror, and unflinching depictions of abuse that otherwise color the manga.
Full disclosure, I was raised Catholic but am contemporaneously a practicing neopagan. So, the manga’s strange mix of subject matter feels like it’s simultaneously meant to cater to and repel people like me, folks who have not set foot in a church in many years and might never do so again. I think this may also be why Exorcist has struggled to really find an audience over here, but at the same time, that singularity of theme and subject matter is what makes it so distinct. Every chapter is a parade of these disparate concepts, and there’s much to be found in seeing how they’ll manage to work together this time, even as the material itself is often grim (see, any number of the manga’s very upfront depictions of sexual assault) or puzzling (the character of Aria and her concatenation of every possible meaning of the word “idol”). Exorcist is a true oddball, I’m hoping against hope that it gets an anime someday, but even if it doesn’t, it’s definitely worth a read if you can stomach what it’s putting down.
CASSETTE BEASTS
The first of several “there is really no way to argue this is even remotely anime” entries on this list, Cassette Beasts is a creature collector game from smallish studio Raw Fury. If you just want the buy/not buy verdict on this charming little indie game, I’ll give it to you in two sentences. Cassette Beasts is Pokémon for depressed burnout Millennials. This is unequivocally a good thing, and if you’re struggling to imagine how, you are not the target demo for Cassette Beasts.
Creature collector games developed in “the west” tend to get slapped with the Poké-clone label regardless of how closely or distantly they adhere to Pokémon’s formula. But while Cassette Beasts is definitely a riff on that formula, it’s far from just rotely copying it; more than can be said of some games in this genre. Aside from a number of flavor differences—for one thing, you don’t command the monsters, you turn into them, here. Feel free to provide your own “henshin!” shouts at the start of each battle—there are some important mechanical ones, too. The vast majority of battles are two-on-two, and you go through the whole game with one of several partners, who you can swap out freely at a café. In addition to Pokémon’s usual types, or close matches thereto, there are also Plastic, Glass, and “Astral” monsters, who lack any real equivalent in that other series. (Astrals are often themed in a broadly similar way to Ghost-type Pokémon, but they work very differently.) Speaking of types; hitting a type-advantageous move doesn’t just do more damage than usual, every single interaction of that sort has some kind of effect. For example; if a Fire-type attack hits an Ice-type beast, it’ll melt, turning into a Water-type. If that same attack hits a Poison-type, the toxins within the monster will ignite, causing a burn status. Metal attacks will shatter Glass-type beast, spreading damage-dealing shards all over the battlefield, but that same monster could strike a Lightning-type beast and cause it to become “Insulated”, reducing its targeting range in the process. There are quite a few of these interactions, and learning the ins and outs of them is recommended for those seeking to truly master the combat system.
The monsters themselves are fun, too. Not every single design is a winner, but of the 120 on offer here, the vast majority are fun in a fresh way that gives them a distinct look in comparison to Cassette Beasts’ genrefellows. One minor point of contention might be the often-punny portmanteau names, which is a naming scheme directly cribbed from Pokémon and used in many other games in this genre besides. Still, it’s hard to get too mad about gems like “Salamagus” and “Crowpocalypse.”
Some might also take issue with that “120”, since that’s relatively small a number for this genre, but if the pool of monsters and moves seems limited, it’s broader than it seems at first glance. For one thing; techniques aren’t picked from a simple level-up list here, and you have far more than four slots per ‘mon, comprised of both active attacks, buffs and debuffs as well as passive skills that are always in play and require no further input from you the user. They’re also not stuck on the monster that learns them; instead, they’re items in the form of stickers (those are what you earn from levelling your monsters), and can be freely swapped out at any time. (Sadly, although understandably since otherwise there’d be no real gameplay reason to use different monsters, there is still only a limited selection of what stickers are compatible with what tapes.) This lets you build different instances of ostensibly similar monsters pretty differently, and if you’re creative with your stickers you can come up with some powerful stuff. My personal right-hand man during my playthrough was an Artillerex—a flak cannon / T. Rex hybrid—who I stuck a variety of “gun” attacks of different elements on, plus the very useful passive Roll Again, which gives monsters a chance to strike a second time at the end of their turn and use a random move they have enough Action Points for. The broad type coverage and multi-striking made it a machine gun of total elemental destruction, and I never got tired of using it. Other monsters have more narrow applications, of course, but the fact that you can fiddle around with your creatures like this provides a huge amount of appeal to even casual experimenters, and I’m sure those who love min-maxing will find even more to tinker with here.
For two; in addition to the basic 120 beasts, every single creature also comes in a variety of “bootleg” types, which tint its sprite a different color, give it a different typing, and change what attack stickers they get as they level up. If you’re not picky about art, you could only a little disingenuously argue that there’s really more like 1,500-odd creatures, and the vast majority of them just happen to be insanely rare, since bootlegs have a Shiny Pokémon-esque rarity to them. Still, they’re often worth seeking out, especially since bootlegs earn rare upgraded attack stickers with bonus effects more often than normal monsters do.
Now look at this, a half dozen paragraphs about the gameplay and almost none about the story or anything else. That shouldn’t be taken to mean Cassette Beasts‘ only strengths are on the gameplay side. The story itself is a little rough, but the general premise—CB’s world is a mysterious island that our protagonists, and everyone else who lives there, are isekai’d to from our own world without warning—is intriguing, and more than the actual narrative per se Cassette Beasts excels at vibes. The main town’s theme; the melancholic, gauzy “Wherever We Are Now“, is an absolute masterpiece of game music and sets the tone perfectly. My generation is all getting older, and it’s nice to play something that understands that on an empathic, thematic level.
IPPON! AGAIN
The first offering from new-to-the-game studio Bakken Record, Mou Ippon! rang in the new year with a smile.
Some folks probably argued—amongst themselves or with others—over whether Mou Ippon was a sports anime or a school club anime. The truth of course is that it’s both, combining the former’s invocation of intimacy by way of physical contact with the latter’s easygoing warmth. Lot of blushing in this one. Between that and the constant grappling between girls, it’s hard to argue that this show isn’t at least a LITTLE gay. (There’s a pretty great sequence at the show’s halfway point where a new girl, the self-proclaimed “Wonder Child” Ana Nagumo, joins the club and demands to be thrown. Said girl joined the club in order to get closer to her friend. I leave the conclusions there to you.) It’s not the best-looking show on this list by a long shot (the actual judo is always drawn and choreographed quite nicely, anything else is a crapshoot), but it has heart.
At the end of the day, this is a series about the pure joy of athleticism. Anything else is secondary. Both our central cast and the series’ many supporting characters (mostly other judoka) face a fair number of trials during the show’s run—outside pressure to succeed, the difficulty of overcoming natural differences in ability, etc.—but inevitably, the spirit of the sport wins out.
MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY
I’m fudging my own numbers here, since technically Witch From Mercury started last year, but I didn’t cover it in the 2022 end-of-year writeup, and the second season aired this year. So it gets to stay here, keeping the company of 2023’s motley crew.
I’ll be honest, I mostly think of Witch From Mercury as a yuri series. That’s not strictly true; it’s a war drama and a couple other things besides, but given that mousey protagonist Suletta Mercury’s relationship with her rich-girl crush Miorine Rembran defines the entire thrust of the series, it makes sense, at least to me, to put it in that category. Throughout, they struggle together and apart as the political landscape of the Utena-inflected school they both attend whirls around them, eventually engulfing the whole solar system in a conflict orchestrated by the main villain, Suletta’s sinister—and very attractive—mom.
In an intellectual, detached sense, my main criticisms remain the somewhat spotty plotting; the conclusion is just a bit too neat and it avoids asking many really hard questions. In addition—and maybe this is a me problem—the show’s sheer complexity and the amount of overlapping power plays, etc., prevented me from getting emotionally invested in much of the story in a very immediate way. Suletta and Miorine’s relationship ups and downs were really the only exception there.
Yet, it’s hard for me to be mad at something that can muster up this much genuine optimism and empathy even in the face of an overwhelmingly bad situation. (And the things going on in the show’s universe are certainly not great.) Plus, it has a canon gay-married couple. That’s genuinely significant, given how huge Gundam is as a franchise, even if the show’s owners tried and failed to walk it back in one of the most comedically cowardly company moves I’ve ever seen. A move that was eventually undone by the show’s own director. You can’t keep a good power couple down.
HELL’S PARADISE
It just ain’t fair. Back in the day, Hell’s Paradise would’ve gone to a workman studio and aired for a good 2, 3 years straight. It would’ve picked up innumerable filler arcs along the way. There’d be shipping wars. It would’ve been great.
But we are not back in the day. It isn’t 2006, and Hell’s Paradise was brought into a significantly less forgiving anime industry and absolutely choked out by the sheer volume of competition. That in mind, I really don’t know if I could tell you why this show, of all the ones I started but didn’t finish this year, is one that I went back to and eventually completed in the dying days of December, here. Maybe it’s just that despite various deficiencies (janky visuals, rote character arcs, questionable gender politics) it’s still pretty good at delivering good old fashioned brawls, with fights that make up what they might lack in visual polish with a genuine cool factor and a powerful sense of rhythm that lets our protagonists always feel like the underdogs in their quest on the violently hostile island referred to by the show’s title. Maybe it’s because it had the year’s single best opening theme. Maybe it’s because Gabimaru managed to be the ultimate wife guy in a year where we also got another season of Spy x Family (and on that note, I was dead sure his wife and Yor Forger shared a voice actress, but nope! Different people). Maybe it’s the killer aesthetics, with gnarly monsters derived from a deliberately twisted interpretation of Taoism.
Whatever my reasons might’ve been; the themes don’t hurt; by its end, the first season of Hell’s Paradise stresses that we’re all in this together. Perhaps appropriately, this ended up being the last anime of 2023 I finished, and that spirit of solidarity is worth carrying into the New Year.
OSHI NO KO
Lady Gaga summed it up best when she called the rerelease of her first album The Fame Monster. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; the Pop Machine eats its own young, and few in the industry are ever really spared. This is the thematic thrust of Oshi no Ko, and is a huge preoccupation that takes up most of the manga (and of course, this anime adaptation), irrespective of its actual plot points. But we’ve gone over that on this site before. What’s interesting to me about OnK is how as a piece of art, it itself is complicit in this cycle. This is both why it’s on the list at all and why it’s not higher up.
Oshi no Ko‘s main characters are Aquamarine and Ruby, children (/reincarnated fans of. It’s complicated) of the late idol Hoshino Ai. Yet, it’s Ai herself who ends up on posters and in key visuals, in the shockingly large amount of tie-in commercials related to the series, and so on. There’s haunting the narrative and then there’s haunting the broader sphere of Japanese pop culture at large, and that latter stage is where Ai is really at. There’s an apparent contradiction here between Ai as a symbol of promise and life snuffed out too soon and Ai as a commercial titan, but any disagreement between these aspects is illusory. Ai is viable as a commercial idea because she dies in the show’s debut episode; that’s the start of her legend, and is why people care about her at all. One leads to the other, and no matter how convenient it might be to try to separate the two, doing so is impossible.
On a more serious note, this same self-contradictory nature is why I haven’t really covered OnK here since abruptly dropping my Let’s Watch of it back in June. For some fans, the strength of the narrative overtook its real life influences when the mother of the real person who Akane’s early story arc is based on complained, and that woman was subsequently harassed by fans of the series.
Things like this make it difficult to go to bat for OnK, despite its strengths. The unfortunate truth for me is that, like a problematic pop star who ends up in headlines as much for bad behavior as great singles, I will probably keep following the anime, and it might even show up on this list next year, if I make one. Don’t expect to see it between now and then, though. Sometimes it’s best to keep your fandom to yourself.
THE 100 GIRLFRIENDS WHO REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY LOVE YOU
In a sense, what is there to say here? It’s a comedy show and it’s funny. Mission accomplished. On the other hand, though, there’s a real accomplishment in how affable 100 Girlfriends is despite the fact that it’s an over-the-top horny harem comedy that by its premise requires The One Guy to date many, many girls simultaneously. That sounds like a recipe for disaster in the context of a romantic comedy, but our boy here, Rentaro, just genuinely is that good. If you can remember the general sell on Catarina from In My Next Life as a Villainess!, the general idea is the same. Rentaro manages to feel like he really is the right person for all of the show’s women just by dint of the fact that he’s insanely likeable, with eyebrows the size of banana leaves and an even bigger heart; a total genius of emotional intelligence who knows exactly what to say and when to say it, a supernaturally smooth operator just because he’s so good at connecting with people on an emotional level. No wonder a half dozen girls and counting are falling over themselves to smooch him.
Which would be meaningless if the girls weren’t also great, but they thankfully are. Each is a classic harem series archetype either dialed up to eleven or tweaked in some other way, all of whom work together to create an absolutely pitch-perfect ensemble cast. Tossed in a blender of absurd comedy, overflowing with puns (thanks in part to a delightfully loose official sub track) and slapstick while mostly remaining good natured, a handful of exceptions aside. (I could probably do without the entire character of the old schoolteacher. But she’s a bit character and doesn’t show up much, so we’ll forgive it for now.) It’s also shockingly good at the more tender and serious parts of romance. It really seems like this stuff should suffer given the sheer amount of characters, but somehow all of them feel like they really do work not just with Rentaro but also with each other.
100 GFs is a silly, sometimes outlandishly horny show, but I think its genuinely big heart makes a case for it as perhaps the year’s single best comedy and one of its best shows overall; a perfect polyamorous fairy tale for the modern age. What else could you ask for?
TENGOKU DAIMAKYO
It’s probably for the better that this list isn’t organized like last year’s. If it were; where the hell would I put Tengoku Daimakyo? (Heavenly Delusion unofficially and widely, despite the Disney+ English release using a straight transliteration of its Japanese title.) We’re in murky waters, here. Heavenly Delusion goes some very strange and very dark places over the course of its 12-episode run. A run that feels, frankly, too brief to possibly contain everything the show explores. The series maps out a grim coastline populated by all the horrors, real and imagined, of the human psyche. Abuse, violence, teenage pregnancy, mental illness, human experimentation, the damaged relationships between people in crisis, eugenics, murder, and rape. This is bleak, bleak, bleak territory. Maybe too bleak? It’s hard to say.
The big Discourse Point about Heavenly Delusion was its adjacency to queer issues. “Adjacency to” because the plot point in question—spoiler alert, here—that Kiruko, one of the leads, has the brain of their own younger brother Haruki, forcibly transplanted into their own skull via some horrible procedure. This was criticized for appropriating the transgender experience, a point of view which, as a trans person myself, I sympathize with but don’t really find compelling, if only because Kiruko/Haruki’s experiences are so different from actually “being a guy in a girl’s body” (or any permutation thereof) that any similarity seems coincidental. (I’m open to the idea that I might be wrong, and if it is intentionally supposed to parallel the trans experience then it says some very bad things about original author Masakazu Ishiguro‘s opinion of trans people, but that seems like a big if.)
I’ll admit, though, it took me a while to come to that conclusion, partly just because wow is that a fucking plotline to put into your show, but also because Heavenly Delusion legitimately does dip into some dicey territory. I find it hard to justify the show’s ogling of Kiruko’s body, for example, and I have no idea what to make of a lengthy subplot that, without getting into the details here for the general sake of saving space, I found weirdly ableist. But I’ve also seen the exact opposite interpretation. Was I just reading it uncharitably? It’s hard to say.
But then again, I don’t entirely know what to make of most of Heavenly Delusion in general, and all that in mind you might think I dislike it. That isn’t really the case, though! In addition to its more obvious visual merits, the show has a real warmth and empathy to it in its best moments that does feel, despite the vast differences in just about every other respect, of a piece with the original mangaka’s best-known prior work, And Yet The Town Moves. A core part of a certain strain of post-apocalyptic fiction is that regardless of circumstance, people are fundamentally the same. Heavenly Delusion seems to believe that too, and is undecided on whether or not it’s a good thing. This is without getting into the show’s more bizarre, out-there sci fi elements. Even in brief summary, there’s just so much to this thing that it’s hard to condense into tidy little phrases.
I feel much the same about the show overall. I wouldn’t sort my thoughts into neat categories like calling it good or bad or even saying I have “mixed feelings.” But I have a lot of feelings, and a lot of thoughts. I think to a certain degree, simply being so memorable will count for a lot in the long run. Beyond that, who knows? Maybe I’m just not ready for this one yet.
VOID STRANGER
Inside the box is just another box. Void Stranger, a Sokoban-inspired block puzzle game from Finnish development team System Erasure, is by an order of magnitude the most opaque thing on this list. It’s also, just a fair warning, one of those pieces of art that is impossible to discuss without spoiling the hell out of it. So if you’re just looking for an endorsement, I would recommend buying this game immediately and enjoying being lost in it with the rest of us.
For the rest of you; Void Stranger‘s simple-on-the-surface mechanics and deliberately retro presentation belie what I’ve come to loosely term an experiential game. That meaning; figuring out just what kind of game exactly you’re playing is part of the game itself. What sort of story is this? What exactly can you do with these puzzle elements? Are there things the game isn’t telling you? These are some of the broadest questions you’ll be asking yourself as you work through this thing. During which time you’ll learn about Grey, a woman from a fantasy kingdom, and how protecting her charge, a bratty princess, led her to the bizarre labyrinth that is the game’s primary setting.
For a while, it will seem fairly standard, until it becomes clear that it’s very much not. To me, it really clicked when I “finished” the game for the first time. On your first pass through, you’re locked into what’s essentially the “worst” ending. The dungeon dissolves into incoherent chaos around you, a song plays, the road ahead becomes less and less clear. You have succumbed to despair and the world is nothing but a whorl of confusion. But then you start again, and things start to make a little more sense. Rinse, repeat, spend many hours cracking the games ludicrously elaborate codes, and things become a little clearer again. The game is a tug-of-war in this way; between the constant hazy fog that comes from knowing you don’t really know what’s going on and the little gemstone moments of clarity that do shine through. It’s an interesting, rewarding experience, and one I recommend if you’ve got the stomach for the game’s truly staggering difficulty.
Even if you do, it will take you a very, very long time to properly finish Void Stranger. I got quite far myself and still haven’t actually finished the whole thing. I plan to, of course. What’s the other option? Stay trapped in a monochrome labyrinth forever? Don’t be silly; even when you leave the maze, the memory remains.
SOARING SKY PRECURE
Sky fly high. They didn’t have to go this hard, is what I kept thinking to myself. Pretty Cure’s 20th anniversary is essentially an ongoing holiday, in between two adult fan-oriented sequel seasons as we currently are, but it was the main line of the series, Soaring Sky Precure, that best held my interest in 2023.
It’s not fashionable to say this, but at its heart, Precure is a fairly change-averse franchise. The series more or less found its pay dirt formula with Yes 5! and has been riding that train to the bank every year since, but what this means is that even changes that would seem minor to an outsider can be absolutely seismic in context. See, for example; Cure Sky, this year’s lead, being blue. It’s hard to overstate how enthused people were about the simple fact that the lead Precure of this year’s season was identifiably a color other than pink. Similar hype followed for similar reasons; Cure Wing is the first boy to ever join the main cast (he’s not the first male Precure full stop, that’s a different character from a prior season), Cure Butterfly the first adult, and so on.
This spirit of comparative experimentation did not stay throughout the show’s run, as what followed was a fairly typical (if notably episodic) Precure season. The ebb and flow of online discourse has of course led to some concluding that this makes the show bad. I say fuck that; this season ruled. Sure, you could describe Precure as artistically conservative if you wanted to, but the flip side of that coin is that it’s consistent. Every year you get 4-6 girls in colorful outfits punching the themed forces of evil to death, and it kicks ass every single time. This year had a particularly strong cast of villains, with the oafish Kabaton being succeeded by the leering, smug Battamonda, and then the honorable, upright Minoton, before looping back to Battamonda, giving him something of a redemption arc, and then finally revealing the main bad’n for the final few episodes. It was a ride!
Admittedly, I would not personally place Soaring Sky in my absolute upper echelon of Precure seasons; Fresh, Heartcatch, Tropical Rouge, and—sorry, haters—Healin’ Good, but it’s still a delightful and entertaining piece of work. I expect I’ll say much the same about Wonderful Precure next year, and I’m looking forward to doing so.
That said, there’s more than one way a kids’ anime can be great, and while some stuck to the tried-and-true methods, others were much more willing to experiment.
POKéMON HORIZONS
As I discussed when the original anime finally, incredibly, came to a close back in March, I have basically loved Pokémon my entire life, for better or worse. It’s baked into my DNA, and I’m never going to be rid of it. Pokémon Horizons, though, has made the series feel essential—like an actual part of the cultural current, relevant to non-lifelong fans—for the first time in what feels like a million years. There has, in actuality, been lead-up to this of course. Some of that was when Ash Ketchum finally became a Pokémon champion in November of ’22, some of it was in the making long before that, but with the new series it really feels like a page has been definitively turned, and a lot of that has to do with how different it is from the previous Pokémon anime.
Pokémon Horizons has nothing to do with being “a Pokémon master.” Competitive battling in the usual sense is barely a factor, our main protagonist is meek and initially doesn’t actually care about winning at all. And, oh yeah, she’s a girl. Liko, who had the unenviable task of stepping into Ash’s shoes this April, has done amazingly well for herself as the new face of Pokémon. She doesn’t have to do it alone, thankfully, as co-protagonist Roy balances her out and makes up the more fiery, battle-oriented half of their duo. Joining them are the Rising Volt Tacklers, the do-anything crew of the airship Brave Olivine who initially meet Liko when their captain, Friede, is asked to keep her and a mysterious pendant she carries safe. Suffice it to say; we don’t really know for sure where the whole pendant business is headed yet, but we know it involves a legendary hero of a bygone age, the machinations of a villainous group with the deceptively innocuous name of “The Explorers”, and a smorgasbord of cool-as-hell Pokémon battles. Did I mention there’s a Pikachu in a captain’s hat? His name is Captain Pikachu and he is cooler than any of us will ever be.
The main thing is that the series excels at a sense of adventure. The first Pokémon anime had been airing for so long that it tended to fall into tropes of its own making, and that continued to some extent right up until its very end (not to say that it was bad or anything, it could certainly be great, too), Horizons manages to feel as fresh as it does partly by simple virtue of not being its predecessor, but there really is a genuine sense of the new and unexpected with each and every episode. The airship gives the show license to set its adventures basically wherever, and it often takes advantage of that, helping even inconsequential-in-the-long-run “filler” episodes feel fun and purposeful. There’s also a lovely paralleling between the makeup of the Brave Olivine’s crew and the actual people who’re watching this show, with both adults and children represented, with Friede and company helping to mentor Liko, Roy, and tertiary protagonist Dot. In a real sense, the series feels like it’s bridging the gaps between generations, and that’s a lovely thing to see as a long-time fan of Pokémon. Here’s to 900 more episodes, god willing.
CHAINSAW MAN: PART 2
Wherefore The Chainsaw Man? Part 2 of the manga—which we’ll be discussing here, so the spoiler averse should skip down the next entry—began last summer to a fair amount of anticipation. Some of that has cooled in the intervening months, but for the most part, the manga remains very popular and widely-read.
This is a little surprising, all things considered. Chainsaw Man‘s second half is a very different beast from its first. Most of the original cast have either died or otherwise departed the narrative. Denji has a costar now; Asa, human host of the War Devil, and a sort of adoptive little sister in the form of Nayuta. In the process, Denji has lost one family and gained another.
But the biggest change has actually been in terms of pacing, of all things. Chainsaw Man Part 2 is a noticeably slower affair than Chainsaw Man Part 1. Indeed, the manga has adapted a deliberately tease-y tempo as Part 2 has gone on, even as the tension has mounted and literal prophecies of armageddon have begun to fill the air. But it has kept its core emotional roughness; a kind of pain that resonates very broadly and is the main reason that this thing is still so popular. Denji’s old life keeps haunting him, as disparate forces conspire him to pull the ripcord once more. He is still searching for answers to life’s big questions, he’s still not happy, and the world’s still going to hell. So of course, they’ve succeeded. As of its most recent chapter—its final, before a hiatus into the new year—Denji has once again cast aside any pretense of ordinary life to become Chainsaw Man, laughing like a maniac in the manga’s final image of 2023. The poor kid can’t catch a break.
ELPHELT VALENTINE
Look, this is basically a filler spot, but what are you going to do, stop me? This is my article, and if I say a DLC character from a fighting game I like (Guilty Gear -Strive-) gets on the list, she gets on the list, logic be damned. I barely knew who Elphelt was two months ago, and now she’s my absolute favorite pink and white marriage-obsessed heavy metal singer of a blorbo. It helps that she’s fun to play (and fairly simple, which as someone who is still very much a neophyte to fighting games as a genre, is welcome). I paid another human being $30 USD (plus tax and tip) to make a chibi drawing of her eating a large pretzel because I wanted my own unique Elphelt icon that badly. She’s great, and you will pry her from my cold, dead hands.
I don’t have the space to earnestly get into Guilty Gear’s genuinely weird-as-hell lore here, but her backstory is genuinely pretty compelling, as is the silliness of her arcade mode story in Strive‘s story. Bottom line; she brought a damn sight more joy to my life than most things this year. For that, she gets a place at the table.
SLAY THE PRINCESS
The other video game with an expanding, changing narrative on this list, Slay The Princess is a good deal more accessible than Void Stranger by virtue of being a visual novel and thus posing no difficulty beyond reading and clicking. But that shouldn’t be taken to mean that it’s somehow the lesser of the two (I wouldn’t say I cleanly prefer either to the other), or even that it’s harder to spoil (this is another section you’ll want to skip if you care about that kind of thing). The story is simple; you are on a path in the woods, at the end of the path is a cabin, and in the cabin is a princess. Your charge? Kill her. Failing to do so will, at least so you’re told, end the world and doom everyone in it.
Of course, things are more complicated than they first appear. The stern narrator who tells you all this seems untrustworthy at best, and there are voices in your head beside your own. The Princess herself is no ordinary human, either. But eventually, you’ll make your choice, to either free or kill her, which seems like it should be the end of this story.
Except, it is obviously not. You are on a path in the woods. You find her and save or kill her again. You’re on a path in the woods.
Time loops are one thing, but Slay The Princess’ entire narrative structure is based on iterative rings like this. What you do changes the woods, the cabin, yourself, and the Princess. No matter what you do, you’ll discover that the two of you are deeply connected. This is, after all, a love story. You kill, you die, you try again. Slay The Princess reveals itself as a love song from one myth to another. You are on a path in the woods. You are a path in the woods.
LEVEL 1 DEMON LORD AND ONE-ROOM HERO
Ecchi slapstick political satire fantasy!! It’s a genre jambalaya. And of the various fantasy anime that tried to tackle serious issues this year, One-Room Hero might honestly have done it the best. I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth reiterating how utterly weird it is that this series, with its burned-out loser JRPG hero protagonist and his 404 gender-not-found shapeshifting demon lord frenemy, is probably the best satire of imperialism I’ve seen in a mainstream TV anime in years.
That’s not to say the show is an intellectual powerhouse or anything; there’s a difference between being witty and being smart, but it should probably say something that all of these cultural currents are so dumb that even a show with a character who dresses like this can poke fun at them. Other anime swung more for the fences this year, but I don’t think anyone hit higher above their weight class.
OTAKU ELF
In my head, Otaku Elf is this year’s version of My Master Has No Tail. Absolutely rock solid comedy / slice of life shows with a fantasy bent that seemingly rather few people actually watched. (I think Otaku Elf did a little better in that regard than My Master Has No Tail, but not much better.)
In premise, Otaku Elf is pretty simple. The title character, Elda, is a classic high fantasy-style elf who has inexplicably been enshrined as a kami in a Japanese shrine. Here, she uses her position to while away the centuries by indulging in her nerdy, nerdy interests, all while basically never leaving her house, often using her put-upon shrine maiden Koito as a go-between. Think Himouto! Umaru-chan if Umaru herself was taller, a bit less abrasive, and had magic powers, and you’re in the right ballpark.
Much of the comedy here is referential or (very) lightly satirical, but throughout, the show commands an impressive and easy charm that mixes well with its occasional moments of real pathos, like when Elda remarks that the way Koito eats her ramen reminds her of her late mother, the previous shrine maiden. Heart like that can’t be faked.
Undead Murder Farce
Another oddball that defies easy genre categorization. Undead Murder Farce seemed from a distance like it might belong to that millieu of Bakemonogatari-ish (and consequently, Boogiepop-ish) shows like In/Spectre and Rascal Doesn’t Dream of the Bunnygirl Sempai. In practice, it ends up watching like a strange cross between a detective novel, Bakemonogatari itself, and the Fate series if it were set in the Victorian era.
The detective part is the main hook, though, with the titular Undead girl being an immortal named Aya, a literal talking head who serves as a detective for supernatural cases that more traditional sleuths can’t really crack. Throughout the series, she, her assistant Shinuchi, and her maid Shizuku traipse across Europe solving supernatural mysteries and hunting for her missing body. Whether their cases are actually Fair Play ™ or not I can’t definitively say, but they at least seem solvable, giving the show an element of involving the viewer, as well as more traditional mystery series thrills. (And it does do those pretty well; it’s worth noting that this series is from Kaguya-sama director Shinichi Omata, and some of that style shines through.) Later, things get a bit more action-y as a plethora of period-appropriate public domain characters turn up—Sherlock Holmes, Carmilla, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Phantom of the Opera, you get it—which is where that dash of Fate spice comes from. These disparate parts work together pretty well, with elements like Carmilla’s queer-tinged rivalry with Shizuku adding additional intrigue.
Really, the only bad thing about this series is that it ends without resolving its main plot, being adapted as it is from a series of novels far too long to condense into a single anime cour. If there’s justice in the world, we’ll get more Undead Murder Farce. But if not, at least it made a strong showing while it was here.
SCOTT PILGRIM TAKES OFF
“At its finest, Scott Pilgrim is much, much more than it appears to be. It’s an ambitious meditation on what growing up means to a generation for whom comics and video games are not just cultural touchstones, but the dominant iconography.” That was The Globe & Mail, Canada’s newspaper of record, on the original Scott Pilgrim graphic novel and the then-upcoming live action film, way back in 2010.
I’m writing this, myself, on the last day of November, 2023 (and editing it nearly a month later). Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with this series whatsoever. I wasn’t really planning to watch Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, Science SARU’s still-inexplicable anime take on the series. I had no reason to, having never seen the movie nor read the comics. But, circumstance is a funny thing, and what initially started as me wanting to spite a group of deeply annoying people (it’s a long story) has led to me flipping this thing over in my head several times. The nature of this list makes me deeply hesitant to crown an overall single “best anime” of 2023, even in the narrow category of ones I actually finished, but if this isn’t my single favorite, it’s at least one of several.
First, if you don’t know the story of Scott Pilgrim in general, of how an uncomfortably relatable loser-everyman manages to forge maybe the first real connection of his entire life with an uncomfortably relatable loser-everywoman after being forced to (among other things) fight her exes in combat, this whole entry might scan as a little incomprehensible to you. Sorry about that!
Scott Pilgrim is one of those things that started out fairly niche, and then became a touchstone, and then (probably unfairly) a shorthand for a Certain Type of Guy. So Scott Pilgrim Takes Off is then much less about Scott Pilgrim (the guy) and much more about Scott Pilgrim (the story). In general concept and execution, it’s not entirely dissimilar to something like Rebuild of Evangelion, in that it’s not a reboot exactly or a straight sequel exactly but more of a front-to-back rewiring that keeps the main players intact but does pretty different things to and with them. It is also a sequel, though. So to understand it we should at least touch on the original comic, which I read essentially in preparation for watching this anime.
To be honest, I would’ve loved nothing more than to completely bounce off Scott Pilgrim. The entire franchise—from the original comic, to the live action film by Edgar Wright to, I assume it’s only a matter of time, this anime—has been simplified into a punchline these days. You’ve all seen the tweet; “you are not Scott Pilgrim and that girl on the bus is not Ramona Flowers.” This is wrong on several counts of course; the girl Scott meets on the bus in the original comic isn’t Ramona, it’s Knives Chau, a high schooler who becomes his ill-advised mostly pretend-girlfriend. Also, I absolutely am Scott Pilgrim. So are you. So is probably everyone who’s ever lived, or at least everyone who’s ever grown up in this strange, strange era of history we live in. Millennials, who are ostensibly “the generation” meant to identify with Mr. Pilgrim, are defined by anxiety. We don’t hurt people because we mean to—who does?—but because the alternative to hurting people is doing something scary, and lots of us don’t know how to handle scary things. We’re all Ramona Flowers, too—I’m aware I’m contributing to a stereotype by being transgender and identifying with the character in any respect—in that for many of us, at least sure as hell for me, the default way to disengage with people is to just silently drift away without a word. Reader, I would so love to tell you that this is all me being dramatic, but if there’s any projection here, it’s solely on my part; Scott Pilgrim vs. The World read me to fucking pieces. I was embarrassed. It was bad, but I can only respect a piece of art that prompts me to do some genuine reflecting.
Of course, this entry is, actually, technically, about Scott Pilgrim Takes Off. The brand-new anime from Science Goddamn SARU, that has, actually, not a ton in common, at least plot-wise, with its forbearer. But it’s important to understand what vs. The World actually was. Because, just to hammer this home one more time, while Scott Pilgrim (the comic) was largely about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), Scott Pilgrim (the cartoon) is largely about Scott Pilgrim (the story). It is also kind of about Scott Pilgrim (the guy), to be fair, but only in the sense that everyone is “Scott Pilgrim” (the archetype).
Because Takes Off is also a sequel, thematically if not entirely textually, it can get away with snipping out character arcs in some places. Knives, for example, is reduced to a bit player here, and, as others have pointed out, the actual damage of Scott’s insensitivity—in the original, he hastily breaks up with her in a rush after meeting Ramona that leaves her heartbroken and defines her character for the rest of the comic—is by consequence pretty much entirely erased. Is this harmful to the character? Is it harmful to the show? I don’t know! On the one hand; Knives gets to be happy for most of the anime because she had her character development back in the comic and came out the other side a much more mature person. The fact that the show doesn’t literally chronologically follow on from the comic, so this is not technically “the same Knives”, is true, but pointing it out feels like nitpicking. The emotional logic of this sort of thing is a lot more important than the actual logic. On the other hand; Knives being reduced to basically a series of fanservice (in the old sense of the term) cameos guts her character and thus most of the reason people liked her in the first place. Changes like this one are divisive, and they are so for a reason.
The people who do get arcs are the exes—they’re the real stars of the show here, and in particular Roxie is elevated from basically a living joke about “girls having a gay phase in college” to a character with some actual pathos—and Ramona herself. It’s interesting that Ramona gets so much spotlight actually, because while the original comic was definitely mostly Scott’s story, she still got a fair amount of play. Perhaps it’s because the comic was definitely also guilty of sometimes treating Ramona as the unattainable, mysterious maiden she attempts to present herself as. Attempts that are, as the comic points out, covers for her own emotional flaws. Again; the main reason that Ramona and Scott get on so well is that they’re very similar people. The actual plot is a whole haphazard patchwork of goofy shit involving time travel and a whole very meta thing where the events of the series are made into a movie in-universe while they’re actively happening. Explaining all this in more detail would I think get in the way of an important fact; Scott’s biggest enemy is himself. No, literally, as in, him from the future, where he’s broken up with Ramona and is torn up about it and tries to sabotage his own past because of it.
Since, of course, a huge part of Scott Pilgrim is that trying to fix your mistakes is way more important than just feeling bad about them, they eventually reconcile to try again. They will probably try again forever. The amusingly huge Divorced Guy Energy of Future-Scott aside, it’s hard to imagine the two of them ever having a smooth relationship. But a smooth relationship and a fulfilling one are different things, and no matter what form it takes, Scott Pilgrim does understand that much.
On a more lighthearted note the whole thing just looks great. And it left a lot of questions in my mind, too. Questions like “if Scott Pilgrim met Shinji Ikari would they be friends or enemies?” and “how does Ramona dye her hair so often without it getting all dried out?” Anime that make you think are good, I’d say.
All of this then said, the question of whether or not this reimagining is actually “good” seems kind of quaint. I’m still not terribly keen on a future ruled by reboots, reimaginings, and redos, and I still think that this whole phenomenon of western companies hoisting sacks full of money on anime studios and telling them to make a Whatever Anime kind of sucks—although I should take a second here to concede that Brian O’Malley at least seems to have been much more involved in this than is the norm for these things—but if we’re going to keep getting more of these, more of them should probably be like this.
And that’s the list. More or less.
Is Scott Pilgrim Takes Off actually my anime of the year? I don’t know. I didn’t do the whole cutesy “guess my top anime this year, everybody!” contest on social media this time around. Partly because I don’t have a Twitter account that I use in any major capacity anymore, partly because it just seemed like a trick question. I’ve quite liked a few anime this year. Oshi no Ko was much farther back on the list, but despite what I said I probably like it more than this. Or do I? I go back and forth. The same is true with Pokémon Horizons, 100 Girlfriends, and Trigun: Stampede, which I couldn’t manage to finish a writeup on. Some of the older anime that I watched this year, like Earth Maiden Arjuna and The Devil Lady will definitely stick with me more than the vast majority of 2023’s own anime will. And even some anime from this year I genuinely thought were really good, obvious standouts like Skip & Loafer and BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!, I didn’t actually finish. Because! You know! Life is weird and difficult and sometimes even something as simple as making yourself watch a cartoon can be tough! This is without factoring in shows that actively disappointed me, like, again, Magical Destroyers. Or hell, Frieren, a letdown that I don’t really want to talk about in detail. With no better place to put it, here is a short list of honorable mentions that I liked—really liked in a few cases!—but couldn’t come up with even brief writeups for, didn’t finish, or otherwise did not get a full writeup despite every one of them having definitely deserved it.
Anime
High Card
Buddy Daddies
Dead Mount Death Play
Trigun: Stampede
The Ice Guy & His “Cool” Female Colleague
Skip & Loafer
Helck
BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!
SHY
YOHANE THE PARHELION -SUNSHINE in the MIRROR-
Manga
Touge Oni: Ancient Gods in Primeval Times
Sakamoto Days
Witch Watch
Magical Girl Tsubame: I Will (Not) Save The World!
Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
Kindergarten Wars
Destroy It All and Love Me in Hell!
Touhou Suichouka: The Lotus Eaters, Drunk & Sober
Cipher Academy
Otherside Picnic
Games
Ultrakill
Yume Nikki Online Project
Pokémon Violet’s Teal Mask and Indigo Disk expansions.
Art really has helped me get through an immensely difficult year, and more than just being a source of comfort, it’s given me things to discuss with others, things to look forward to, and moments of genuine sublimity that make the time I put into this medium feel worth it. I’ve rambled a lot in this article, but at the end of the day, I really just want to help people appreciate art, in my own, very specific way. Hopefully, this article helped you do that in some fashion or another. That’s really all I can ask for.
So where does all that leave me, other than with another year down? I honestly don’t know! I have no idea what the future looks like. I was going to type “for this blog” after that, but honestly, it’s just true in general. The future is an open void of unknowability. These days, I’m just thankful for every day I make it through.
And on that note; who knows what 2024 holds? I’m reluctant to make any specific predictions.
But hey, Metallic Rouge looks pretty promising, right?
See you next year.
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Anime Orbit is an irregular column where I summarize a stop along my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week.
Expect spoilers for covered material, where relevant.
One thousand two hundred and thirty-two. That’s how many episodes, in sum total, the original Japanese run of the entire Pokémon anime has. The episode that aired just two days ago, “The Rainbow & The Pokémon Master”, is the 1,232nd. I’m not trying to wow you with sheer numbers here—although if I were, just for reference, that’s about 400 more episodes than The Simpsons, perhaps the only American cartoon with an episode count in even the same ballpark—but I am trying to make a point. 1,232 episodes over the course of 26 years is a truly stunning achievement. Even if the show were utterly unremarkable in content, that would be worth commenting on.
But we’re not here to evaluate quality today. That’d be pretty much impossible for Pokémon, something that has sunk its fangs into my psyche as much as it has any other Millennial of a certain age and disposition. When I started watching the Pokémon anime—and really, that is how pretty much everyone still refers to it, as either just “the cartoon” or, if they’re slightly more of a weeb, “the anime”—I was a literal child. It was one of the first cartoons period I was ever invested in, long before I had any idea that cartoons from different parts of the world could be meaningfully different, Pokémon, when I first got into it as a child, offered me something very different from any cartoon I’d seen before.
My experience with TV had been very limited up to that point. I grew up in a fairly religious household where things like television were considered distractions and possible corrupting influences. We only got a TV in our house at all in the year 2000, and my grandmother had to do some convincing to convince my mom to pick up cable. It was a tiny hand-me-down thing with a fuzzy picture. Nonetheless, the Pokémon cartoon became important to me. How could it not? I was six years old, and here was this thing chucking all these crazy monster designs at me, and telling me that a young kid Just Like Me (more or less), could have adventures, make friends, and that there was a world outside of the town you grow up in.
I won’t pretend I’ve religiously followed the series in the 23 years since then. (Has anybody? I think even those who’ve seen all the episodes are more likely to have marathoned it in chunks, but maybe I’m underestimating the true Pokemaniacs out there.) But Pokémon has remained part of my life. I’m neurodivergent, and it was, to my recollection, my second total special interest after dinosaurs (I had a big, illustrated encyclopedia of dinosaurs. Wish I still had that thing!), and it’s remained enough of a hobby that I preordered Pokémon Violet. (I also play a fair few Pokémon ROMHacks, but we’re getting into hobbies-within-hobbies at that point) It’s stayed both a part of the cultural conversation and a part of my life, so seeing it finally end as of this 11-episode “postscript” season, after Ash has finally won a championship, feels not so much bad or good, but rather just surreal. I remember the news taking a while to really process for me. As in: “what do you mean the Pokémon anime is ending?” If it feels like the end of an era, it very much is. There will continue to be aPokémon anime; two new protagonists are slated to start their own journey in just a few weeks, but the Pokémon anime that stars Ash—Satoshi in the original JP—is now officially over. That’s nuts. And I have thought about whether I wanted to even write anything about it, because on some level “that’s nuts” is all you can really say, but not writing anything would be even crazier. This series has been a part of my life since I could read. I have to say something, right?
Then let me say this; if the miniseries’ purpose was to kick shots of pure nostalgia right into my brain, it worked splendidly, and the last episode might be the purest example of that in the whole show. There are a lot of one more‘s in this episode. One more time where Brock gets all lovesick and then gets reprimanded by his Croagunk, one more Team Rocket scheme to snatch Pikachu, one more example of Ash bonding with a Pokémon he just met (it’s a Charmander here; Professor Oak has a new round of trainers to give starter Pokémon to, don’t you know?), etc. If you wanted to be cynical you could describe it as box-ticking. But honestly, there’s so much obvious affection in every frame of this anime that I really find it hard to summon up such a criticism. Toward the end of the episode, Ash’s Pidgeot, the second Pokémon he ever caught, returns to his team, and it’s such a hugely obvious nostalgia play that I started tearing up. I am not immune to affection from giant birds.
In general, they cram quite a few Pokémon into this episode, actually, although I’m sure some will nitpick some omissions. (The big surprise to me is that Ash’s Charizard doesn’t show up for even a split second. When a scene briefly calls for a big draconic flier, his much more recently-acquired Dragonite does the job instead. I’m not complaining, but it is slightly surprising!)
What took me from having watery eyes to full-on bawling was the final scene, where Ash and Pikachu—plus a bunch of Kanto wildlife—take refuge under a tree as a storm passes overhead. This too is a callback; you’ll remember that the very first arc of the series involved Ash biking through a thunderstorm as he tried to protect Pikachu from a flock of Spearows. More than just a reference, though, it’s a meaningful inversion. Back then, the Pokémon were hostile. Here, everything is peaceful and serene; Ash may not consider himself a Pokemon master yet, but in spite of the endless “eternal 11 year old” jokes, he’s clearly grown, and the show itself reflects that.
Not long after, Ash and Pikachu set off again, but this time, we don’t follow along. Our journey together ends here.
But, like I said near the top of this article, this isn’t really the end. The show itself acknowledges that; the retro “To Be Continued…!” text that’s closed out each episode of the miniseries says something a little different here, and really, can you argue with it?
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This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question and give my honest thoughts on it. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rakhshi. Thank you for your support.
A Small Note: Because Pokémon is in the rare position of being an anime where the English localized names are more well-known–at least to my Anglophone audience–than the JP originals, I have largely used them here, crediting some major characters with both, divided by a slash mark where applicable.
Pokémon is a cultural phenomenon with rare company, comparable in terms of pure success and footprint to, quite literally, no other Japanese series. It is such a global phenomenon that it stands far removed from other anime or games, and comparing it to them makes little sense. You have to turn to other media, toward juggernauts like Star Wars or the MCU, to see similar impact on the world of pop culture.
I’ve never written about Pokémon on this blog before. Not for any particularly strong reason, really. It’s just felt a little…unnecessary? What does anyone have to say, really, about Pokémon? If I had been approached to review the first Pokémon film, I’d have declined. Some works of popular culture are so thoroughly absorbed into the fabric of the times that reviewing them is like trying to review Shakespeare. No other series I will ever cover on this blog is known so widely to so many people.
With that in mind, it is a shame that the specific iteration of said series I am reviewing today feels so minor.
Pokémon the Movie: I Choose You!, the franchise’s banner movie for its anime’s 20th anniversary, is not a direct adaption of any of the widely beloved games. It is not, either, directly related to said TV anime, which has run without any major interruptions in both its original language and in many, many dubbed forms since 1997. It is directed by series stalwart Kunihiko Yuyama, who has done almost nothing else but direct various Pokémon projects since then as well. (With apologies to fans of Wedding Peach, and, uh, Minky Momo.) But while his directorial eye, going by this film, is as sharp as it was in ’97, he’s using it to tell a different story here. (Likewise, as you might guess, it’s animated by OLM.)
I Choose You! is an alternate continuity of sorts. Based on the TV anime, but with other elements from later generations of the games blended in. The idea is pretty simple; in theory, you’re making a fresh, original take on something people already love. This has a lot of precedent in anime, and it’s part of how things like Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood happen. But if I Choose You! was meant to draw new people into the Pokémon ecosystem, it is woefully unfit for the task.
If we wanted to look at it cynically, we could call I Choose You! an excuse for a parade of references to and evocations of prior Pokémon media. The vast majority of these are from the original anime, and most are beat-for-beat recreations of certain plot points from early in its run. There’s the introduction where protagonist Ash Ketchum / Satoshi (Sarah Natochenny / Rica Matsumoto) oversleeps and gets an unruly Pikachu (Kate Bristol / Ikue Ohtani) as his partner, the escape from the flock of Spearow that he accidentally aggravates early on, Ash sighting a Ho-oh in the sky after beginning his journey, finding a Charmander abandoned by its previous owner in the rain, his Butterfree departing to find a mate. ETC.
We’ll get to some of the shortcomings of this approach momentarily, but, to dial back the grumpy-old-woman-ism for a moment, it is at least a pretty solid effort. The first season of the anime was hardly bad looking, but the updated scenes here do look nice as well. Even if the iffy blending of the 2D and 3D animation dates the film even now, just five years after its release.
Where things begin to become muddled is the film’s original plot, which forms about 2/3rds of its runtime. In the original anime, when Ash saw Ho-oh, it was a mysterious and tantalizing glance at a world beyond the Kanto region and beyond the original 151 Pokémon. Here, it serves to kick off the story, and because we’ve long known what Ho-oh is, it feels substantially less special despite the film’s efforts to sell it as otherwise. The legendary bird bestows a (or rather, The) Rainbow Feather upon Ash. This apparently makes him a hero. The Rainbow Hero. And entitles him to meet Ho-oh at some point down the line. And also maybe means he’s the chosen one or something.
If this seems rather vague, it feels so in the film as well. An issue here is that there are actually multiple plots, of which this whole journey to find Ho-oh is just one. Another revolves around Charmander’s original trainer, Cross (a character made for the film, voiced by Billy Bob Thompson in English and Ryōta Ōsaka in Japanese.) Cross is in the typical mold of the “trainer who values raw strength over ideas like the power of friendship and properly bonding with your Pokémon.” He is much like Gary (who he rather strongly resembles aside from his truly absurd crossed bangs.) Or Paul. Or any number of similar characters that have populated the franchise over the years. It’s a solid, homegrown archetype. And true enough, it is very easy to dislike Cross here, but he never really does much other than beat Ash in battle and insult him a bunch.
And if you’re prepared to hold abandoning his Charmander against him, the film is not on your side there, as he and Ash reconcile at I Choose You!‘s conclusion without much fanfare, and he’s shown to have truly bonded to his main Pokémon, a Midnight-form Lycanroc. (Said Lycanroc is, puzzlingly, one of just two Alolan Pokémon in the film, despite it being made during the Gen VII era.)
And in conjunction with these two stories, there is also the issue of Marshadow, a Gen VII mythic Pokémon. The film was presumably intended at least in part to promote it, but despite this, Marshadow’s plot is the least developed of all of these. It follows Ash around, inflicts a bizarre nightmare of a world without Pokémon (imagine that) on him, and does other generally “Ghost Pokémon-y” things, but its motives are never established beyond very vague terms as some kind of spiritual counterpart to Ho-oh, and it simply disappears at the film’s end.
Combined, these three plots make the film pretty darn incoherent. It holds up just fine on a moment-to-moment basis. As mentioned, I Choose You! looks quite good and is competently directed and such, but it has a real identity problem. It wants to be a retelling of the first season, but it also wants to be fresh, so it brings in new characters like Verity / Makoto (Suzy Myers / Shiori Sato) and Sorrel (David Oliver Nelson / Kanata Hongō) as substitutes for Brock and Misty.
It wants to actively tug on your nostalgia strings, so as aforementioned it recreates some scenes from the first season of the anime verbatim. But it also needs to promote Marshadow, so that’s in there too. On the whole, the film feels decidedly random, more like a long, glossed-up episode of the TV anime itself than a proper movie. It never quite seems to know what it wants to focus on, so it ends up focusing on nothing.
And even some of that randomness isn’t borne out well. Verity, for instance, seems like she’s going to get a proper subplot about some issue she has with her mother (who looks an awful lot like Sinnoh champion Cynthia), which would at least be something. But this development is quietly dropped until the very end of the film, where she simply offhandedly mentions that she feels like visiting home for the first time in a while, resolving that particular subplot in an unceremonious finger snap. Likewise, Sorrel’s only real depth is brought in when he abruptly brings up a depressing anecdote about how his childhood Luxray wrapped around him to save him from the cold when he was lost in a blizzard, only to die in the process. This is used to illustrate a vague point about how sometimes “departing with Pokémon” is necessary, and is meant to foreshadow Ash’s Butterfree departing. But these are wildly different situations, and the film’s attempt to draw parallels between them is just one instance of its broad, scattershot plotting making the entire thing feel strangely half-baked.
Overall, I Choose You! relies heavily on the viewer having already very much “bought in” to Pokémon as a franchise, given the huge amount of pre-existing knowledge it attempts to cash in on to get you to care about any of this stuff. Consequently, it is totally unsuitable as anyone’s first introduction to the series. (If such a person exists, spare a thought for them.) What prevents it from totally failing as a project in a more general sense is that it is pretty good at nailing the very basic building blocks of “being a Pokémon movie.”
Anyone to whom the series’ quirks are more endearing than grating will probably be more forgiving than I’ve been here. And I must admit that while I was actively watching it, I was more caught up those basic building blocks. I enjoyed the small appearances from personal favorite Pokémon–Pinsir, Paris, and even a very brief cameo from the underrated Gen V Pokémon Gothitelle, among others–and the movie’s colorful visuals and solid fight choreography carry it enough to at the very least make it not a slog. It’s a brisk film and has the good sense to end around the 90-minute mark. (Pompo would be thrilled.) Its overall highlights? Likely the showdowns between Ash’s Charmeleon (and later Charizard, of course) and Cross’s Incineroar. I might also count Ash’s Marshadow-inflicted nightmare, which lends a nice bit of spooky, almost denpa energy to an otherwise fairly inconsequential run near the film’s middle.
I Choose You! is, thus, not a bad movie. But it does feel pretty pointless. I’ve never counted myself among the skeptical crowd with regard to Pokémon. I still play and enjoy the mainline games, and while I haven’t followed the TV anime regularly since I was a child, I will occasionally watch a stray episode or three, and am almost always delighted by them. But if one wanted to paint The Pokémon Company as nothing but a soulless machine that prints money on the back of, alternatingly, kid appeal designs and pure nostalgia-baiting, you could certainly pick worse places to start than here. I Choose You! feels like it exists for no reason beyond an imagined mandate for More Pokémon Stuff.
But it did, at least, get this fourth fork of major Pokémon continuities off the ground. As of 2022, when I’m writing this, 3 of the 4 most recent films in the Pokémon franchise were set there, the only exception being the all-CGI remake of Mewtwo Strikes Back. So, despite my complaints, it seems to have certainly found some sort of audience. Perhaps that’s all it was truly intended to do.
I can’t find it in myself to actually dislike this film. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s visually competent. Maybe it’s pure nostalgia. Maybe it’s both! Regardless, while I Choose You! is certainly not the highlight of the series, it is at least entertainingly nostalgic enough in spots. If that’s all you want out of Pokémon, the movie will suit you just fine. But it still feels frustratingly half-committed to its core idea of being a new take on the old Pokémon formula, so don’t expect anything more than that.
A second small note: Yes, this is the second “monthly” movies column to come out in March. The Yoyo to Nene review was supposed to come out in late February, but things happened. Y’all know how it is.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the 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, 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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