Posted on June 10, 2024 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [6/10/24]

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 tsukumogami due 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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Posted on May 27, 2024 in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [5/27/24]

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.

Posted on February 4, 2024February 5, 2024 in anime

Seasonal First Impressions: WONDERFUL PRECURE is Doggone Great

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.“

-Zhuangzhi

After last year’s season proved that adults, magic babies, and even boys can be Precures, Wonderful Precure continues the trend by introducing the first Cure who is buppy. An absolute good girl. A magical woofer. What I’m telling you is that the lead character of this season is a literal dog. Truly, we are breaking new ground here.

It’s a little meaningless to ask ourselves if this is a “gimmick” or not. Precure seasons tend to make pretty heavy use of loose visual themes, so in some sense they’re all gimmicks, other than perhaps the original Futari wa team. (And even they had the whole black/white duality. Plus the hand-holding thing.) It’s more important to acknowledge that, for however silly this premise may seem on its surface, Wonderful Precure‘s first episode is exactly that. It’s a significantly more low-key affair than last year’s opening blast of explosive punch, but it trades that in for a surprising amount of character depth given the relatively short amount of time we get to know the characters in question.

It goes something like this; Iroha [Atsumi Tanezaki] and her cute little dog Komugi [Maria Naganawa] live in the happy burg of Animal Town, a place known for how much its residence love their pets. We open, as so many magical girl anime do, on a typical day. Iroha is late for school, and Komugi wants to play but sadly, her human can’t stay. Anyone who’s ever owned a pet knows this whole song and dance, and it makes for a cute and relatable opening few minutes of the show.

^{Pictured: The main character of the show, and a human.}

Komugi herself, despite still very much being nothing but an ordinary dog at this point, is given a fair bit of internality here as well. While Iroha is away at school, Komugi dreams a sad little dog nightmare about how she and Iroha will always live separate lives. That sadness is here represented by a washed-out shade of denim-y blue-grey, and a pair of shadow girls who look like they’re on leave from Revolutionary Girl Utena, representing Iroha’s human friends.

Iroha herself seems very kind and peppy, it’s clear she loves animals, as in when she hollers a greeting at the cat in a window of a local Pretty Holic shop just opening up in her neighborhood. That cat, Yuki [Satsumi Matsuda], is a haughty little furball in the classic cartoon mold, and seems to lightly scold her own owner Mayu [Reina Ueda] when the latter actually hides upon hearing Iroha’s cheerful how-do-ya-do at her cat. One gets the sense that she’s very shy and anxious, a likely hint toward the direction her own character development will take in later episodes.

Finally, there’s Satoru [Takuma Terashima] and his pet bunny Daifuku, who are introduced as the former studies a local landmark called the Mirror Rock. Satoru seems to be our supporting boy, at the moment, a character archetype many previous seasons of Precure have used to greater or lesser effect. He gets flustered when Iroha chats him up and it’s clear the two already know each other, so if you want to place your bets on who the token puppy-love interest is here, it’s probably him.

Daifuku does rather little in the few minutes they’re on screen, but still manages to convey an immense amount of personality just by Looking Like That.

This early part of the episode is very character-driven, and it does a great job of balancing all of these different introductions, giving us just enough of a look into these characters (both pet and human!) to tell us what they’re like, while firmly foregrounding Komugi and Iroha as the show’s actual leads. Frankly, it’s actually fairly light on any indication that this is even is a magical girl anime. Only a brief cut over to a mysterious, sinister-looking orb and a demonstration of its corrupting effects on a land of magical talking animals reminds us that this is a Precure series we’re watching, and the more typically mahou shoujo genre elements largely only emerge in the episode’s second half. It’s worth noting, though; the orb seals all of these animals in magical black eggs. These are, it would seem, our local plot devices this time around.

In the episode’s second half, Iroha, at a dog park with Komugi, has an encounter with a giant, rampaging sheep that seems to have been taken over by some sort of sinister force, which we shortly learn is termed “garugaru.” (The work of the aforementioned orb, no doubt.)

Iroha is able to distract the beast, helping a local boy out of danger, but she fails to account for the sheer speed of the thing, and the fact she’s now in danger herself. Komugi, initially trembling at the sight of this monster, rushes in to save her owner, despite being outmatched in comparison to this angry ram creature in just about every respect.

You can probably guess what happens next.

^{That “three, two, wan!” countdown is ungodly cute.}

Yes, suddenly filled with magical energy, Komugi becomes a real, entire human girl, and then transforms into a Precure. Every Cure’s first henshin is an event, and Komugi’s is just as much of one as any long-time fan would expect. The new Cure Wonderful’s approach to fighting the monster is novel, as she doesn’t really attack it per se (perhaps owing to the fact that the baddies this time around are, you know, animals). Instead, she blocks its own attacks with a giant, paw-shaped shield and chases it around to wear it out.

Finally, when it’s exhausted and cornered, she realizes it’s in pain, and gives it a gentle hug, which is enough to purify it and turn it back into a regular sheep.

What this simple textual description leaves out is the sheer amount of personality the animation has here. Cure Wonderful is, on the inside at least, still a jumpy little puppy, and she’s drawn as such even as a human and even when in her magical girl form. It’s honestly just absolutely delightful, and if this is any indication of how the character will be written and drawn going forward, we’re in for a year of adorable, fuzzy charm.

But let’s give some credit to Iroha, too, who ends the episode in exactly the fashion you’d expect a baffled middle schooler to respond to their dog suddenly turning into a person. At first, she has no idea who this girl is and wonders where her cute little dog went. Then, as the facts of the situation slowly dawn on her, she is completely dumbfounded. Her expressions really must be seen to be believed, especially when she tries the whole “give me your paw” trick on the newly-human Komugi and the former dog still responds as expected.

All told, and to the surprise of few, Wonderful Precure marks another fantastic opening episode for a series that has gotten very, very good at doing those. It’s already February, but I think I can safely predict that we’re in for a wonderful year.

Posted on February 5, 2023February 5, 2023 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: The Wild Blue Yonder of SOARING SKY! PRETTY CURE

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Sometimes, my job is a bit hard. Not because writing about anime is physically difficult or anything, but because sometimes it’s hard to articulate when something manages to tap into a pure, raw, and very basic emotion. I can hardly contain my kiddish giddiness. On the one hand, what is there to say? New year, new Precure season. This makes Jane happy; we’ve been here before. On the other, this is possibly the strongest Pretty Cure premiere I’ve ever personally been here for. 24 minutes of high-flying, rollicking action, a white-hot streak cut through the blazing blue sky.

Soaring Sky! Pretty Cure, the first entry in the series to use the full “Pretty Cure” title instead of the shorter “Precure” in English since the original Pretty Cure, opens with our heroine, Sora Harewataaru (Akira Sekine) atop a giant, talking bird, arriving in a floating sky city for some reason or another just as—wouldn’t you know it?—an evil pig man shows up to kidnap the local king’s daughter.

Sora, as we very quickly find out, is not the sort of person to simply sit idly by and let that happen without comment. She rushes headlong into trouble, pulling off a pretty damn impressive little bit of parkour a full 15 show-minutes before she ever gets her powers.

She tries to part this villain from his ill-gotten gain and, whoops, falls into the portals he uses to teleport around. Soon, she finds herself falling out of the sky over a strange city that is wholly unfamiliar to her, the infant princess Ellee (Aoi Koga, yes, they got Kaguya to voice the baby) in hand, a literal bolt from the blue.

That city would be pretty familiar to anyone reading this. Because where she ends up is Earth. Yes, the latest Pretty Cure series is a reverse isekai. And it slaps.

You know the drill if you’re even passingly familiar with this franchise, but how this all goes down might surprise some. Sora joins the rarefied tier of Pretty Cure protagonists who have done a fair bit of heroism even before getting their magic, and the sheer determination on display here, even through Sora’s obvious jitters at facing down an opponent who is, with her not yet powered, way above her level. When she actually gets those powers, via Ellee (the baby princess is this season’s fairy, you see), she stomps the monster that our pig friend summons flat in only a few minutes. To top it off, her transformation sequence is one of the most elaborate that the franchise has ever produced, complete with an image stage—an imaginary ‘platform’ on which the transformation takes place—that itself shifts and changes as she does.

All of this serves to make Sora seem incredibly cool, on a very elemental, hard-to-quantify level. Her personality has layers even this early on, and the little pocket diary she keeps on her, and the motivational doodles within, imply a level of deliberate building of her own confidence. This is someone who is earning her reputation as a hero, from episode 1, minute 1. She has a cape. What else could I possibly tell you? Of course this character is the first blue lead Pretty Cure. How could she not be? There’s no way someone with this big of a personality was ever going to settle for second banana.

Per the end of the episode, Sora, now Cure Sky, is trapped on Earth with no way to return herself or Ellee home, providing an obvious (and promising!) driver for the series’ first main storyline. Time will tell precisely how co-lead Mashiro Nijigaoka (Ai Kakuma) factors in, although even this early on she’s already an effective foil for Sora. The future is bright for this one, there’s nothing more to say.

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

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

Posted on February 6, 2022February 7, 2022 in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [2/6/22]

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

I’ve been a bit sick over the past week. Not enough to impact my blogging, thankfully. I was originally going to have just three shows for you this week, but, what the heck, why don’t we start with a new face?

Seasonal Anime

Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure

If you write about a chosen medium, it’s generally good to know what your Geek Buttons are. A Geek Button is a thing–and it can really be anything, a series, a whole genre, a visual style, a specific actor, whatever–where the more “objective” part of your critical toolkit just fails to work, and you are reduced to a blubbering fangirl (or fanboy, or fanby, as the case may be). For me, magical girls in general, and especially Pretty Cure, are a Geek Button. I cannot pretend to be remotely reasonable about them. I love almost all of them like they’re my children and the few exceptions are girls who I just wish were in better shows. I will die on the hill that the magical girl warrior archetype is one of anime’s best and most important contributions to general popular culture.

So with that in mind, please say hello to the newest Pretty Cure series. And indeed, the newest Pretty Cure; Yui Nagomi, AKA Cure Precious (Hana Hishikawa in what is, astoundingly, her first named character role in an anime.)

She is adorable. Dare I say precious?

The first episode of a given Precure series has a lot of beats to hit; introducing the protagonist, introducing her mentor / helper characters, if any, establishing the broad strokes of the plot for the season, nailing down the basic thematic overtone it’s going for, and of course, introducing the bad guys and their particular version of the monsters of the week. It’s a lot of stops to have to hit in a 22-minute episode, but DePaPre swings it admirably. The general direction in this first episode is really just fantastic, and notably, it’s helmed by animation director Akira Inagami, who had a role as a character designer all the way back on the original Futari wa Pretty Cure. (A hearty shout out to my good friend Pike, curator of Dual Aurora Wave, for that information. I’d have never known!)

The whole thing is bouncy and joyous and just alive in a way that really defines the best kids’ anime. The episode is great looking from start to finish, though obviously the real Peak TV moment is Cure Precious’ first henshin sequence.

Also scattered throughout are the traditional “Precure Leap,” a fun nod to an episode of Futari wa, and some truly ludicrous attack names (a 500 Kilocalorie punch, huh?)

I’m also fond of Yui’s “mentor” character here, the lavender haired gnc king Rosemary. He’s delightfully camp in a way that doesn’t feel overbearing or like it’s making fun of anyone.

Her fairy is adorable too, of course.

And I must make a nod toward Gentle (or “Gentlu” as Crunchyroll’s official subs hilariously render her name), who both puts in a supremely cool showing as the anime’s starter villain and is also the smart pick for Character Most Likely To Undergo A Face Turn And Possibly Become a Precure Herself. It wouldn’t be the first time the series has done that. (My favorite example being from Fresh. Which, fun fact; was the first Precure series that Hana Hishikawa watched as a young child in nursery school, going off an interview she gave a few weeks ago.)

^{Gentle wouldn’t even be the first villain with this specific hair color to eventually become a Precure. Will history repeat itself? Time alone will tell.}

The only “bad thing”, really, about DePaPre, is that it won’t appear in this column much. I’ll try to make exceptions for particularly great episodes but given that I watch it with friends on its premiere night, much like Tropical Rouge Precure before it, it can be difficult to find the time, given that these Reports go up on Sunday.

Still, I’ll absolutely be watching every single week. And if my opinion is worth anything to you, I think you should be too.

CUE!

I don’t really know what to think about CUE! Any time I feel like I should just write it off and stop following it entirely, it does this.

“This,” for reference, is another subtly great episode about the inside of the voice acting profession. It doesn’t start out that way; the first third or so of this episode is actually mostly about Haruna’s pet turtle, about whom she says increasingly ridiculous things. (To wit; it’s not a turtle because he has a name, she asks him for advice, and he looks like “an old man” and “a philosopher. It’s all pretty funny.)

But the episode gets serious at around its 1/3rd mark, honing in on the art of injecting emotion into even very short exchanges of words. Haruna’s role, remember, is just “additional voices.” So in her first scene in Bloom Ball, which the girls record here, she only swaps a single sentence with Maika’s character, who only replies with one of her own. And we hear those two sentences some four or five times over the episode’s duration.

I’ve said this before, but running the same scene back-to-back, for any reason, is challenging. You risk boring your audience, and when the scene in question is this short you risk it even more. But, somehow, CUE! pulls it off again.

The mechanics are very simple; the girls learn a little bit about how voice acting works. They record their lines, Haruna and Maika’s get held because the author (present at the recording) remembers that the bit character Haruna is playing comes up again way later in the story. Once again, this is supposed to sell Haruna as someone with an immense amount of untapped voice acting talent. It doesn’t work quite as well as the showstopper she drops in episode 2, but it’s still pretty good, and it proves that when CUE! is on, it’s on.

For something that should be super dry, it manages to stay quite interesting, employing its favorite trick, jumping in and out of the world of the show-within-a-show. Here, since all present are actually recording, things are further embellished by the show being mid-production. No full-color cuts here; it’s all monochrome and pre-correction. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate the nightmare that making a finished cut that looks convincingly unfinished must be.)

Flummoxing as it sometimes is, if CUE! keeps making episodes like this I will continue to watch them. Just, please, I’m begging you, either focus on the idol girls less or make them more interesting.

Princess Connect! Re:Dive

One of the reasons I declined to give Princess Connect! Re:Dive its own dedicated column is that I know my limits. A picture truly can be worth a thousand words, and a gif from a show like this can be worth a short novel. What am I supposed to say about this?

Okay, fine. If you wanted to, if you were some kind of joyless miser, you could be mad that this episode is all set up and no resolution. Frankly I think that’s an absurd criticism, and the idea that everything must be resolved within the space of a single episode just because this show started out as a “slice of life series” is so far removed from how I experience art that I have a difficult time even comprehending it. Nonetheless it is what some people think, and I’ll give those people their moment of acknowledgement here.

For the rest of us; holy shit.

Princess Connect season 2’s fourth episode is the sort of absurd instant-classic that demands rewinds, screencapping, and a visit to Sakugabooru. And it’s the fourth episode of a twelve-episode season. That’s nuts. That’s the kind of comically overconfident flex that usually presages some great disaster. But why would that be the case here? CygamesPictures aren’t working on anything else this year. It’s amazing what a well-equipped studio can do when actually giving its workers proper time to do so.

The actual plot here is cartwheeling fantasy screwiness that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the many, many books with dragons and swords on the cover that I read in middle school. That sounds like an insult, but this sort of high-stakes epic-in-the-old-sense-of-the-word plot is what’s missing from a lot of modern fantasy anime. It’s spectacle; even down to details like Karyl still playing both sides, the guild of animal girls we meet here, and the giant golem fight that caps the episode.

I feel legitimately bad for the other fantasy anime airing right now. It’s not like In The Land of Leadale or Reincarnated as a Fantasy Knockout don’t have their merits, but they aren’t this. The only competition Priconne really has in this regard is Demon Slayer, but while that show definitely looks great, it’s always had issues with making its flashy animation feel like it entirely fit with the rest of the world. Priconne never even sniffs that problem; the compositing is as excellent here as anything else. Even moments where characters are literally just standing around look incredible.

The only real issue is that Priconne’s plot is so mile-a-minute I could see it getting hard to keep up. (I’m already a bit lost myself. Having not played the game probably doesn’t help.) But even so; at least for me, that feeling actually adds to the exhilaration of watching this thing in motion. The Proper Noun Machine Gun has rarely been put to such good use.

Tokyo 24th Ward

Unfortunately we must end this section of the week’s writeup on something of a sour note.

If I had known I was going to be covering Tokyo 24th Ward this frequently, I’d have just made it another weekly column. Maybe that would’ve been a bad idea, though, given how the show’s shortcomings are generally more compelling to me than its strengths, which I increasingly think are actually rather modest.

Fundamentally, the problem is this; if your anime (or movie or book or album or whatever) invokes political themes, you are inviting all comers to scrutinize it from their own political point of view. Everyone on Earth has such a point of view, whether or not they’re cognizant of it. In of itself, that’s fine, but if your work’s political themes are, say, shallow and inadequate, it raises a problem. Are Tokyo 24th‘s shallow and inadequate? I don’t really know. The signals are, shall we say, mixed.

Getting a big head over this kind of thing is nothing new to mainstream TV anime. Turn of the decade classic Code Geass, for example, managed to be good largely by trading away any actual meaningful political commentary for sheer camp value. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to nail more specific and well-thought-out political messages. Akudama Drive did it only two years ago. (Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Akudama Drive myself, at least not yet, but I trust Inkie’s judgment on the series utterly.) It’s also possible–although both less rare and not as impactful–to make broader statements without rendering them entirely meaningless. Something as goofy as Rumble Garanndoll managed that much just last season.

The gist of the plot forming over Tokyo 24th‘s last two episodes has been this; the graffiti artist / hacker Kunai (Souma Saitou, who has been in many support roles like this) is going to blow up a cruise ship full of the ultra-wealthy.

Normally I’d here provide his motivations, and just from what little we’ve learned about him–his upbringing in the ridiculously named Shantytown ghetto in the poorest part of the Ward, his grandmother’s illness, the fact that Ran has eclipsed him artistically–one could come up with a good half dozen motivations for why this poor man might feel motivated to extreme action.

Kunai’s actual motives are different, and much more personal. He’s been tricked into selling an app he developed by the owner of an enormous corporate megalopoly, a fellow named Taki. Taki rewires the program to turn it into that mysterious “Drug D” we’ve been hearing so much about over the past couple of episodes. Kunai’s resentment, then, is borne not from his situation but from something very specific. He feels as though he’s been used. And he’s right about that! He has been used. Ran correctly points out, when the two meet at the episode’s climax, that Kunai is not the “criminal” he self-laceratingly claims to be. He’s a victim of circumstance. On one level, Tokyo 24th humanizing an actual terrorist to this degree is admirable. On another, it seems like an easy out to give Kunai a single grudge motive rather than anything more circumstantial and messy. Plus, there is what actually happens to Kunai.

At the episode’s end, Kouki–that’s Cop Boy, if you’ve forgotten–bypasses the advice of his friends and orders Kunai shot dead by a police sniper. Kunai bleeds out in Ran’s arms, begging his friend to continue to be the one thing he couldn’t: an artist.

It is difficult to know how to take this.

Is it a shocking display–and condemnation–of police brutality? Does the show think he’s in the right to have done that? (I don’t want to think so, but I’ve gone broke overestimating anime before.) Or is this another thing where Shuuta’s enlightened centrist fence-sitting is going to somehow turn out to be the solution? Tokyo 24th has given me very little reason to believe the former might be what it’s going for, but I suppose it’s not impossible. A number of details about Tokyo 24th‘s worldbuilding lead me to believe that won’t be the case (it’s insane that an anime that uses so much graffiti aesthetic has perhaps two Black characters and zero major ones), but I’ve been wrong before. Honestly in this specific situation I’d be happy to be. But for the record, I’m not alone here. Some critics have been far harsher than me. And I’m split between feeling like I’m giving the anime way too much slack and coming down on it way too hard.

It’s unfair, in a way. An anime that tries to be a Statement opens itself up to all kinds of nitpicking from audiences both domestic and abroad that other anime could easily dismiss out of hand. Should I not be giving it some points for even trying? Maybe, but “some points” might add up to a 3 or 4 out of 10 depending on how badly it fucks up the landing, and I’m not at all confident it won’t. Wanting to be a critique of the state of the world isn’t the same as actually being one. All of Tokyo 24th‘s effort will be meaningless if it cannot find some way to intelligently apply it.

We will see Tokyo 24th here again, maybe as soon as next week. For good or for ill I cannot yet say.

Elsewhere on MPA

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 4 – “Ride the Crab” – For an episode that features absolutely zero Pawoo, this was still quite a good 30 minutes of Sabikui Bisco. There must be a solid Milo / Bisco shipping community out there, right?

Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 5 – “It’s Probably Because…” – I think people are starting to get sick of My Dress-Up Darling‘s over-the-top horniness. Last week I would’ve disagreed, but this past episode was….a lot. And not really in a good way.

That’s most of what I’ve got for you this week, anime fans. But before I go, a small recommendation! A new manga was picked up by Jump recently, and is available officially in English on the MangaPlus website. It’s called Magilumiere Co. Ltd., a magical girl-action-office comedy whatsit that poses the question; “what if being a magical girl was, you know, a full-on career? And what if an ordinary college grad seeking to enter the workforce suddenly found herself basically dropped into a small Magical Girl Company’s employ?” That’s kind of a long question, admittedly, but Magilumiere does have answers.

It’s to soon into the manga’s run for me to have any terribly detailed opinions on it, but I like it so far, and “magical girl + other stuff” is always a fun combination. Give it a read if you’re so inclined.

See you tomorrow for more Sabikui Bisco, friends!

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

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

Posted on December 22, 2021December 22, 2021 in Uncategorized

The Five Most Magical Anime of 2021

Special Notice: This should really go without saying, but since I’m going to be talking about all of these shows in general, overall terms, you can expect spoilers for all of them, up to and including their endings.

So here we are again, anime fans. Another year firmly in the past tense, not just within our specific sphere of interest but in general. Time is a funny thing, it’s already late November as I write this opening paragraph, which isn’t much less time than I gave myself last year, but despite the fact that I am demonstrably writing about fewer shows, I wanted to at least try and give each of them a bit more attention.

Yes, this marks a change in format. Last year I undertook the–in hindsight rather absurd–task of ranking every anime I’d finished that came out that year. The format required me to spend a fair amount of writing real estate on anime that I either didn’t like or simply had no strong thoughts on at all. This year, I wanted to simplify a bit. Only a bit, mind you. This is still me we’re talking about, after all.

So, this year the job is less complex, but simultaneously more difficult. 5 Anime I liked more than the rest; five that stuck with me and that I think will continue to stick with me. Plus, a handful of honorable mentions to get a positive word in for some anime that I enjoyed but couldn’t wholly self-justify putting in the main top five.

Just to fully disclose; as usual, these are indeed only my opinions, thoughts, and observations. My opinions that I consider reasonably informed and well thought out, but opinions, nonetheless. There is also the fact, of course, that anime I didn’t watch cannot make it onto this list by default, with apologies to the several anime I heard very good things about this year but did not find the time to watch myself. (Chiefly here I am thinking of ODD TAXI and Eighty-Six, but there are other examples too.) This list also consists exclusively of serial fiction, in the interest of keeping things fair, so the final Rebuild of Evangelion film isn’t here either. (Which is a shame, because it would’ve easily earned a spot on this list. My hope is that next year I’ll have seen enough anime films that actually came out in 2022 to make them their own list, but we’ll see.) And it’s only shows that are actually finished, so if Ousama Ranking ever shows up on one of these lists, just as an example, it’ll be the list for next year, when it concludes.

Ultimately then, what you have is a snapshot of what I consider particularly worthwhile in the medium of serial anime. A couple things went into picking shows for this list. The simple question of how much I enjoyed watching it week to week is obviously the biggest factor, and all else being equal is what I prioritized. But I did try to give at least some consideration to more nebulous things, such as general public reception, whether I think they will stand the test of time, etc. etc. (Factors that I am of course completely capable of being wrong about. But hey, I try my best.) Above all else was the simple fact of what they meant to me. It is, after all, my list, no one else’s.

Anyway, enough beating around the bush, let’s get to it.

#5. Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Season 2

Madoka Magica was not the only franchise to make a welcome return this year, but of those that did, it’s probably the one closest to my heart. I will fully admit, there’s some circumstantial bias here. I missed out on the original Madoka Magica when it was airing now a good ten years ago. On some subconscious level it’s possible that my opinion of Magia Record is elevated by the simple fact that I get to see it unfold in real time. I’d be hard pressed to say that MagiReco’s second season was the most accessible anime of 2021–that’s part of why it rounds out the bottom of the list–but it was certainly among those I felt the most connection to. (Covering it week by week, on what would become my last bit of work for The Geek Girl Authority, probably helped.)

To a point, a show that looks like this speaks for itself. Public consensus has held for some time that Studio SHAFT‘s golden age is firmly in the past tense, but if there’s a case to be made for that whole “SHAFT Renaissance” idea that bounces around Anime Twitter from time to time, it’s somewhere in the frames of Magia Record. The season’s stronger episodes (which make up a good chunk of its brief eight) absolutely drip with style, and its premiere in particular is the sort of love letter to both the fans and the series itself that you just don’t get super often. Combine that with its wildly ambitious (some might say overly ambitious!) storyline that attempts to mythmake by tying together disparate parts of the wider Madoka ‘verse, it giving relatively minor characters like Kuroe a chance to shine, and just the frankly kinda insane fact that the Madoka Train is still chugging along at all a full decade later? Yeah, Magia Record earns its spot on the list, even if it is “only” at #5.

It’s totally possible that MagiReco’s third season–whenever it arrives–won’t be as good as this, or indeed that it’ll be much better, but this list is a ranking of what’s aired this year, and this year, the oddball middle segment of a three-part story happened to be the fifth-best anime of the whole damn thing. Go figure.

#4. SSSS.DYNAZENON

As a sequel to one of the best anime of the 2010s–2018’s SSSS.GRIDMAN—SSSS.DYNAZENON is odd. It takes place away from that anime’s setting and involves only two of its characters (and only in a supporting capacity.) But considered thematically, these deviations from its predecessor make perfect sense.

If, as is often held to be the case, we can map GRIDMAN‘s characters to the inner workings of a single mind, and thus make the case that that series is about self-acceptance, DYNAZENON is the logical progression. The exterior to GRIDMAN‘s interior. Like a lot of anime this year, DYNAZENON dealt in themes of alienation and misplacedness. Common emotions that we all struggle with in a world where things feel like they’re falling apart faster and faster all the time. Yet, at the same time, it re-lit the fire of that old truism; no man is an island.

How? Easy. Director Akira Amemiya proved yet again that, yeah, you can still make a show that’s at least 50% giant robots fighting giant monsters by volume actually say something and have it not come across as corny or just over-wrought. DYNAZENON manages the impressive task of welding those fight scenes together with interrogative character work all over again, in a way that feels distinct from, but very much related to, GRIDMAN‘s approach to that problem.

All five members of our core cast are disconnected from society in some way. Be it Yomogi’s parents’ separation, the death of Yume’s older sister, Koyomi and Chise’s mutually-enabling shut-in habits, or even how Gauma is lost from his own world entirely. Over the course of the series they heal, but the journey is not a smooth or easy one, and the kaiju represent allegorical threats to their wellbeing as much as physical ones.

This is to say nothing of the Kaiju Eugenicists, those alarmingly-named villains who serve as the main four’s opposites on the other end of the good guy / bad guy spectrum. They’re alienated too, but their alienation consumes them, and is the driving force behind their desire to subjugate and destroy. In the case of Sizumu, it quite literally turns him into a monster.

DYNAZENON‘s driving question is thus how to move on from that alienation, from those things that drive a wedge between us and others. To its credit, it offers no easy solution, although in showing what really happened to Yume’s sister when no one was there to support her, it offers a dire warning of the consequences of not at least trying. The Dyna Soldiers find solace in the pieces of the Dynazenon itself, which, perhaps tellingly, is formed from what appear to be mere toys in their dormant state. But more importantly, they find solace in each other. To quote my own writeup of the tenth episode from back in June:

The only reason she couldn’t be saved like Yume herself was just a single episode ago is that, in a very literal sense, no one was there to support her. I suspect that SSSS.DYNAZENON may lose some people off that fact alone, but the point here is that Yume is still affected by her death. There are no easy outs, not even here.
But there are words of advice. Before the two leave each other for the last time, Kano tells Yume that she needs to rely on others more. And that, right there, is the entire thesis of SSSS.DYNAZENON as a series. Where SSSS.GRIDMAN dealt with the internal, all of its characters mapping to different parts of a single psyche, SSSS.DYNAZENON is external.
^{SSSS.DYNAZENON Recap: (S02E10) Which Memories Do You Regret?}

It’s known that a third part of the trilogy; a crossover, likely in film form, called GRIDMAN x DYNAZENON, will round out this particular series of stories from Amemiya and co., beyond that, details remain scarce. But SSSS or no, if they can keep making stuff like this, stuff that hits you right in the heart? His place as one of the new decade’s best directors is assured. Keep broadcasting, kaiju king.

#3. Sonny Boy

Another theme we’re going to be seeing a lot of here is transience. It’s rather been my “word of the year,” so I hope you’ll forgive my use of it again, here, but it’s true. All things pass, and for many people our whole lives involve, at least to some degree, reckoning with that fact. Sonny Boy was not the only show this year to grapple with that fact, but it was notably thorough about it.

It begins in the void, but soon crash-lands into an island on the far side of summer. There, surreal parables about life, death, and everything in-between unfold like the show’s own Matryoshka Doll worlds. Universes within universes, wheels within wheels. The purpose? An ode to our lost digital generation; the Millennial/Gen-Z continuum. Adults are imposters putting on a show or so distant that they’re divinity. No one is truly there to guide the cast, much like there’s no one truly there for us except ourselves. They, as we, need to make peace on their own.

Of the anime on this list, I will cop to “understanding” Sonny Boy the least. There is a lot of symbolism here; it’s a dense show. (Which, hey, means it’s good for a rewatch.) But the series’ core of melancholy-hopeful nihilism is easy enough to map out, and that’s what earns it a spot on this list. Well, that and its absolutely stunning visual style. Sonny Boy looks like very little else that aired in 2021, and its surrealist, painterly looks would earn it a spot in the honorable mentions even if the show genuinely was all talk and no walk. But thankfully, while it may occasionally lean inscrutable, its heart beats strong.

Of the various treatises on the passing of everything that 2021 produced (gee, I wonder why that was on everyone’s minds), Sonny Boy stands as one of the more accepting. But in a way, my typing this is pointless. One of the show’s own characters put it best.

^{Perhaps I should be giving Rajdhani a co-writing credit for how often I’ve used these screenshots when talking about Sonny Boy.}

(As a side note; creator Shingo Natsume‘s next project is a sequel to The Tatami Galaxy. So, it seems like this is hardly the last time he’s going to direct something delightfully confounding. Perhaps it’ll show up on the list next year!)

#2. Heike Monogatari

If Sonny Boy explored transience via surreality and imagined worlds far from our own, Heike Monogatari grounded its own investigation of the concept firmly in the real-world concerns of history and myth. Based on a historical Japanese epic, The Heike Story has the benefit of hindsight. From the beginning of the first episode, each character’s steps fall with inevitability. From Lord Shigemori, who takes protagonist Biwa in after her father is callously murdered by members of his own clan, to Taira no Kiyomori’s heartless power-grabbing ploys, every man, woman, and child here has their fate sealed before the first episode of the series even begins.

There is one exception: Biwa herself. (She’s voiced by Aoi Yuuki, in what would be the strongest role in the career of almost any other voice actress but is just another casual triumph for her. She brings alternating innocence for the Biwa we see most of the time, and stately, religious gravitas for the white-haired “seer” Biwa.)

Her role? To be conscripted as fate’s chronicler and become representative both of the nature of the original epic itself and more generally as a symbol of all of us. Witnesses to history, as we are, who so often are powerless to change it despite our own strengths. It can feel grim and fatalistic; seasons change and an empire falls like a leaf from a tree in autumn. But Heike Monogatari never makes it feel that way. Things simply are, and then they aren’t. Dust becomes dust, time ticks on.

Heike Monogatari is observance and acceptance, and the stormy lining to its silver cloud is that it’s so obviously timeless that even writing about it feels sort of pointless. It’s like trying to review The Iliad. It could have been #1, easily, and in almost any other year it would’ve been. Yet, at least to me, it was still somehow “only” the second-best anime of 2021.

But, before we get to the top of the list, let’s go through some honorable mentions. Because you’re worth it, dear readers.

Honorable Mention: takt op.Destiny

Ribbons of highway and a great blue sky way. Ruins, cities, deserts, forests, monsters, and song. A world that’s lost its music. That was takt op.Destiny. Hardly the year’s most “together” production, takt op has the dubious distinction of sharing a bizarre ending twist with notable “would’ve probably made this list if quality wasn’t a factor at all” shortlister The Detective is Already Dead. But obviously, its spotty ending is not why it’s here. Of what I saw in 2021, takt op had some of the most purely joyous animation. Most of it took the form of fight scenes, and it’s easy to dismiss that sort of thing as lowbrow. But by tying it together with a thematic core about rescuing a world that thinks it no longer needs art with that art, it manages to make it all feel meaningful. For the bounty of good to great anime 2021 did have, it was rather short on anime that I felt compellingly made the case for art itself–something last year had in spades–boiling down to mostly just this, Love Live! Superstar!!, and Kageki Shoujo!! (Which itself only missed the list by dint of a dry run of episodes in its middle third.) So, for filling that niche, I am quite grateful to takt op, perhaps the year’s messiest pile of camp.

Honorable Mention: Zombie Land Saga Revenge

If someone asks me what I thought about the general quality of anime in 2021, I will tell them that I had to relegate the second season of Zombie Land Saga to the Honorable Mentions list.

Honestly it barely feels fair. Zombie Land Saga Revenge is everything you could want out of a sequel; it builds on the original in logical and interesting ways. Franchouchou start the season having blown their biggest concert, washed up and down and out. But the mountain waits for no one, so what can you do but try to climb it again? And we saw them climb again. Those ridiculous zombies fought claw and jaw to bigger and bigger concert placements, and along the way we saw them grow as people, with particular star turns for Junko and Yuugiri. Let’s not forget that in the latter case, Revenge decided to just become a historical drama for several episodes, an outfit it wore better than many actual historical dramas do. Zombie Land Saga truly can do it all. The best idol anime of 2021, and almost certainly its best comedy. And I had to put it on the HM list. What a year it’s been, eh?

Honorable Mention: BLUE REFLECTION RAY

More than any other anime on this list, and maybe more than any anime I’ve ever covered period, I really strongly think Blue Reflection Ray is underrated. It’s a victim of circumstance, really. Animated by a studio long past its prime in a year that had two other anime that did many of the same things as it but in a more flashy and accessible way, there is a real case to be made that BRR never had a chance. But this list is, ultimately, about anime that I love. And I truly do think BRR was something special.

^{And not}^just^{because it’s really gay, although that certainly helps.}

As a love letter to the magical girl genre, as a scrappy example of what even the most “low budget” of anime can accomplish with enough sincerity and grit, and as a rumination on how society treats young girls–another theme that came up quite often in art this year–Blue Reflection Ray stands tall with the best of them. When, in its penultimate episode, the Reflectors transform back-to-back-to-back just like a “real” magical girl team for the first and only time, BRR felt just as important as any other magical girl series. Girls in a world of lies living their truth for the first time.

Speaking of other magical girl anime.

Honorable Mention: Tropical Rouge Precure

This was the hardest cut from the proper list. TroPre is relegated to the HMs by a technicality; it’s not actually over yet, a quirk of the show’s odd schedule. (Precure series generally run for a full four cours over the course of an entire year, which makes accounting for them in otherwise neat and orderly lists like this one difficult. And yes I’m aware I said that only finished shows would be on the list. Sue me.) But that’s okay, because while Tropical Rouge Precure is great, it’s on this list less for what it actually is and more for the experiences I had while watching it. Its placement here is not due to its excellent sense of humor, its wonderful characters, or its at-times gorgeous animation, even though those are all very much merits the series has.

Unlike most other anime on this list, I did not–and do not–watch TroPre by myself. I watch it with a group of friends, every weekend, at around the same time. In this way, I get to have an experience that I very much would’ve liked to have had as a little girl; getting to talk about one of my favorite magical girl anime with some other girls my own age. A sense of lost youth is a common side effect of being transgender, and while never having gotten to chat about Sailor Moon with schoolmates is pretty low on the list of things I’m sad I missed out on, it is still on that list. So, as a balm for that particular little hole in my soul, I value the series a lot. We plan to continue this practice next year, so unless something goes horribly wrong, you can expect to see Delicious Party Precure somewhere on the list next year, too.

There have already been three magical girl anime somewhere in this article, and that’s the end of the honorable mentions. So you may well wonder; what’s at #1?

Well, a different sort of magical girl anime.

Oh come on, you can’t actually be surprised.

#1: Wonder Egg Priority

I knew from the minute I started writing this list that Wonder Egg Priority would be my #1.

I tried to talk myself out of it more than once; to convince myself to put Heike Monogatari at the top of the list instead. I like that show and Wonder Egg almost as much as each other. It would’ve been a compromise, but it was one I could’ve lived with.

But that’s the thing, right? It still would’ve been a compromise. And it’s my list, so there is no room for compromise. Wonder Egg Priority is my favorite anime of the year. Is it the best anime of the year? That’s a level of definitiveness that I don’t normally strive for when writing, even if this sort of format implicitly demands it. But if I’m the one being asked the question? Then yes, it absolutely fucking is.

Quite unlike my #1 pick for last year, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Wonder Egg Priority ends the year not as a widely beloved (or at least liked) exemplar of its staff’s prowess. Its place in the popular discourse is, and probably always will be, that of a great folly. A production train-crash that physically hurt the people working on it and squandered its potential and left its audience profoundly disappointed.

Which, of course, is a massive oversimplification. I try to at least pay some attention to what The Public At Large think about the anime I cover, if anything. But the fact remains that while the consensus will probably always be against WEP, and not totally without reason, there are people who still like it. I am one of them. There are dozens of us. I just happen to like it more than anything else that aired this year.

But of course you want to know why, which is a fair question, given what this website is and what I write about on it.

It would be fairly easy to fall back on its many technical merits. Wonder Egg Priority is an incredible-looking show, constantly toeing a line between appearing pristine as jeweled glass and wild as paint-buckets tossed at canvasses. If CloverWorks never make anything that has quite this level of visual pop ever again, it would not be a mark against them in any way. We could talk also about its soundtrack, an underappreciated aspect of the series that colors every moment of it in a way rare both this year specifically and in general. (Sonny Boy is its only real competition from 2021 in this aspect.)

If we wanted to really stretch our critic-brains, we could turn toward its thematic merits. To try to break down the series’ elaborate use of symbolism. Or perhaps its understanding of how gender roles define and oppress us, and how the modern world will beat any young girl it can’t control into submission, co-opt her for its own ends and twist her into hurting others like her. (See: Frill.) We could cite its deeply compelling four main characters and their own specific twists on this notion; a recovering hikikomori (Ai), a former idol with past sins on her mind (Rika), a mysterious wunderkind with a vanished sister (Neiru), and the series’ own high-strung, gender-nonconformant take on the obligatory “boyish one” (Momoe).

We could talk about how they smash personifications of pedophilia, misogyny, and transphobia to paint-colored smithereens and are pursued by anonymous maniacs called Haters through their imaginary worlds. We could talk about how their mysterious “benefactors” who promise they can restore the dead to life turn out to be little more than hucksters past their prime. We could talk, at length, about all of this.

^{We could even talk about this!}

But frankly, I think “all of this” is, incredibly, at least to me, somewhat secondary. It is true that Wonder Egg Priority has all these merits, and I think they alone could be used as an argument for why the show is very good. And if they were all that Wonder Egg Priority did right, it would have earned a comfortable spot somewhere a few ranks back. Maybe between Sonny Boy and Heike Monogatari, as “merely” a show from 2021 that I’m confident I’ll still be thinking about in 2031. In truth, what is often cited as its greatest “objective flaw” (and oh, how I hate that phrase), is what locked me into holding it close to my heart forever, and why, if asked, I will say it’s among my all-time favorites.

Wonder Egg Priority doesn’t really have an ending.

Its story comes to an abrupt halt. Little is resolved, one of the main characters is missing. It’s a question mark. There is no “to be continued.”

This is, I realize, a stance held by very few. But endings are rarely what truly move me about stories. (Heike Monogatari is one of a quite small number of exceptions.) So on its own, WEP’s lack of an ending is no serious fault to me. Indeed, Wonder Egg Priority could have ended in any number of ways, from the sappy to the depressing, that would’ve given it some measure of critical and fan acclaim. If it had really nailed it, it could’ve sat alongside modern born-classics like Revue Starlight, hailed as a truly great example of what TV anime as a medium could achieve.

Instead, it dissolved into a cloud of smoke, seeping into our collective memories forever. It became an unanswerable question and an unsolvable puzzle; quiet as God and twice as unknowable. In doing so, it embodied the boiling haze of steaming existential confusion that is the modern zeitgeist better than almost any work of fiction I have ever experienced. Wonder Egg Priority left an axe-wound in the popular imagination. For that, I love and respect it immensely. In a way, it is this aspect that most closely ties Wonder Egg‘s form to its message. The girls’ struggle, ultimately, is against suicide personified. The Temptation of Death. The fact that they don’t explicitly “win” is contentious. But that’s the whole point; we don’t see how this story ends. Some small glimpses of incremental progress aside, we know nothing. Only that Ai marches forward, in spite of it all, to try again.

I have seen it argued that this is a relentlessly bleak ending, but both the reality of the subjects Wonder Egg speaks on, and its own stylistic flourishes make it fairly obvious that this is, in fact, hopeful. To live in the modern age is to live in a world filled with poison. To live on in spite of that, to get up every day, to snap your gaze toward the horizon and walk–as Ai does–is optimism. This world wants us dead. We live anyway.

Quite unlike last year’s #1, I do not expect that Wonder Egg Priority will ever be hailed as timeless or classic. I think if it is remembered at all, it will be as a mistake. The avalanche of public consensus is hard to fight against, particularly in the age of social media. But, as I have learned many times this year, I can be wrong. If I have ever been wrong about anything relating to this medium I’ve devoted so much of my time to writing about, I would like it to be this.

Because whenever I so much as think about Wonder Egg Priority, it comes back to me in an instant. The hyper-technicolor magical girl psycho-drama that no one asked for, but that we–or perhaps just some of us–sorely needed. Wonder Egg Priority might never gain any coveted status as a must-watch, as a classic of its medium or genre, as “one of the good anime,” or anything of the sort, but if it does not gain some kind of following, there is something truly wrong with this world indeed. We endure precisely because we know we’re not alone. It would be a horribly cruel thing for one of the best articulations of that idea ever put to the silver screen to be lost to obscurity.

Yet, in spite of everything I just said, I hold no delusion that I am the Wonder Egg Guru. I have spent the better part of a year attempting to reckon with the WEP Project’s first, last, and only output. To explain it succinctly, to square how much I love it with how strongly I oppose the worst parts of the industry that let it exist. But the fate’s-honest truth is that I am not much closer to “closing the book” on Wonder Egg Priority, for myself or anyone else, than I was when the TV broadcast ended in late March. It’s an enigma. I think at least some part of it always will be. And maybe it seems unfair to give the gold medal to an enigma. Maybe the #1 spot should be saved for something I can explain better. But it is my view that the role of the critic and commentator is not that of an interpreter. It is that of an honest witness. I could have sat here and thought myself into circles. I could have tried to justify putting something–anything–else at #1, but that’s not honest. And if I don’t have honesty, what do I have?

So, there it is. The most magical anime of 2021. The best anime of the year, so says me, is a series that draws a line from the strained psyche of four teenage girls to our own place, lost in the fog that smothers this haunted planet. Then, in a grand confrontational hammer-smash, it reveals that there is no line at all; these things are one in the same.

Now that’s a magic trick.

And, yes, that’s the list.

What did you think? As I mentioned last year, I try not to pay too much mind as to whether my picks will be “controversial” or not, but, well, last year I didn’t top the list with what is probably the most divisive show of the entire year. So tell me your thoughts! Did you love my picks? Were they utterly baffling to you? Maybe 50/50? What were your top five, top six, top whatever anime of 2021? I’d love to hear from you, so please do leave a comment here or on Twitter. If you’re one of the folks who was disappointed by my #1 (and more than one person explicitly said they would be, whoops!) then…well, I hope this will spurn you to write your own lists, at the very least. (I maintain that basically everyone’s life could be improved by running a blog.)

Incidentally, I ran a very small little competition on my twitter account yesterday, and wanted to shout out @lilysokawaii, @pikestaff, and @theplatinumdove for correctly guessing my #1 pick. For the rest of y’all: better luck next year!

Tomorrow, an article will go up that briefly discusses my plans for 2022, as she fast approaches. I’ll see you then, anime fans.

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

Posted on September 26, 2021October 9, 2021 in anime, Weekly Writing Roundups

The Frontline Report [9/26/21]

The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture. Expect some degree of spoilers for the covered shows.

Hello, anime fans! You may have noticed the site looking a little different this past week. I got a new WordPress theme which comes with a somewhat spiffier look and more general readability. Sadly switching themes does seem to have made the archives a bit of a pain to browse and there’s not really anything I can do about it until I can eventually afford a WordPress Premium plan and implement some custom CSS. I’m going to try to work on a workaround at some point in the future, but in the meantime, I beg your patience.

All that in mind, I do strongly urge you to take a gander at this article’s footer and consider pledging some support. It really does help me continue writing in a very real and tangible way.

Administrative notes aside, we’ve got a bit of an interesting bit of zeitgeist in the air this week. Four of the five anime covered here are about an all-female cast pushing through some obstacle(s) or another. For the girls of Magia Record this triumph is shadowed with equal parts tragedy, but nonetheless, it remains compelling. For the most part at least, it seems the girls are alright.

Blue Reflection Ray

This is among the first anime to actually end since I started doing this column. I’ve already written about the series at length in my review of it and I’ve no desire to repeat myself too much. So let me just say, Blue Reflection Ray is that rare anime that just kind of clicks with you if you’re the right sort of person. It has its flaws, sure, but I wouldn’t trade the series for the world and I’m very happy with how it ended. I may simply be a straight-up sucker for magical girl anime. But my view that there is always room for these stories of girls triumphing over the evils of the world remains unchanged. Blue Reflection Ray was not the best to ever do it, it wasn’t the first, and it certainly won’t be the last. But it is a valid, meaningful part of that artistic lineage, and no one can take that away from it.

The Detective is Already Dead

Another recently-concluded show. Boy, Detective was….something, wasn’t it? I think after the dust settles and it recedes into memory, the few people who remember Detective at all will remember it more as a sometimes-compelling trainwreck more than anything genuinely awful. I don’t mean to come across as elitist about this, but I think anyone saying it’s truly terrible hasn’t seen any truly terrible anime. (Not that I blame them, of course.)

But it certainly wasn’t particularly good either, and I can’t picture it picking up even the ironic cult following of something like Big Order. Such is the curse of being rough going but not outright bad enough to watch “as a joke”.

That said, as I mentioned in my review of the series, I do think all of that gives it a kind of charm if you’re a pretty specific sort of person. But most people aren’t that sort of person, of course. So into the dustbin of history it will inevitably end up. What a tragic fate for our heroic detective! But so it goes. So it goes.

Kageki Shoujo!!

I stand by what I said last week, and what do you know, Kageki Shoujo!! stuck the landing. I’m still not sure I’d put it in my personal upper echelon of anime from 2021 (you’ll have to wait for my year-end rankings to find out for sure), but it did what it wanted to do and it did it well. That’s worth quite a lot all on its own.

The finale this week succeeds in my mind largely because of two things. One; it finally gives us, however briefly, a Sarasa performance that’s truly her own. Her take on Romeo & Juliet‘s Tybalt here is a wonderful thing to behold, and watching the audience (which, mind you, is just her own classmates) dance in the palm of her hand as she wrings the dark, moody character for all he’s worth is just excellent. Two; it ties up some other loose ends, in particular with respect to the hitherto slightly underdeveloped Sawa Sugimoto. Her own frustration at not getting that very same role comes through just as clear as Sarasa’s triumphs, and how she deals with that disappointment ends the show on a realistic, but still high, note.

Inevitably, some will be a bit cold on the choice of stopping point. (We don’t even get to actually see any of our girls act in a proper play, after all.) And the faint hope of a second season remains in the air. But I think that so many people care so much about Kageki Shoujo!! in the first place speaks a lot to its strengths. No one really expected much of this series, but it ended up captivating the crowd anyway. Isn’t that sort of surprise what following seasonal anime at all is all about?

It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to feel “proud of” a show, but nonetheless that’s where I find myself at with Kageki Shoujo!! When the season started I was fairly sure it would be written off by most due to sharing some vaguely similar subject matter and a very similar name with Revue Starlight. That it’s managed to comfortably find and secure its own audience, even over here in “the West”, is a lovely thing. I’ve rarely been happier to be proven wrong.

Magia Record

Magia Record‘s second season is over, though not without some amount of tumult, coming as it does after a week of delays and with a number of technical issues.

As with before, most of my thoughts are over on Geek Girl Authority. Though with an asterisk, this time.

This is the last article I’m going to be writing for them. My current plan is to fully focus my efforts over here on Magic Planet Anime. So, if you could give it a look, that’d mean a lot to me. The people at GGA have been great to me in the, gosh, two years I’ve written for the site, and I’m happy to part with them on the best terms possible.

As for the episode itself? Honestly it’s a real treat to have Mami survive a season of anything Madoka-related alive and unhurt. Everything else, probably deliberately, remains up in the air right now. I’m definitely quite invested in the fate of Kuroe, in particular. Her disappearance here raises a lot more questions than it answers.

Tropical Rouge Precure

I don’t write about Tropical Rouge Precure, or really Precure in general, much in this column, both because its air-day, fairly late on a Saturday night here in the States, makes it hard to talk about the “current” episode and because, being a year-round show with four full cours, it doesn’t change that much from week to week. Most of the time, that is.

But every once in a while Precure will deliver an absolute knockout, and that’s episode 29 (“Reviving A Legend! The Pretty Cure’s Power-Up Makeover!“) for Tropical Rouge. Easily the best-looking episode of the show so far (and one of the best of the year period, up there with Magia Record season 2’s debut episode among others), it introduces some half dozen new plot points without making anything feel congested or convoluted and looks amazing while it does it. It’s the rare anime episode that feels twice its length in a decidedly positive way. Expect this one to come up in conversations even years from now. Episode 30 has since aired too, and it’s also good, but 29 has to remain the star here, an all-timer if there ever was one.

Elsewhere on MPA

I linked them already, but seriously, do check out my reviews of The Detective is Already Dead and Blue Reflection Ray if you have the time. I’m quite proud of how the both of them turned out.

Lastly, it’s yet to fully come to fruition, but I can say with relative confidence that a new episode of KeyFrames Forgotten is on the way. I’m not entirely sure when it will arrive, but the wheels are in motion, you have my word of that much.

Until next week, anime fans.

Posted on March 12, 2020March 29, 2020 in anime, Let's Watch Healin' Good Precure

Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 6

This week’s episode is interesting. It focuses not on any individual character, but on several. We learn a bit more about Latte (the dog princess and our seasonal mascot), Nodoka’s mother, and Nodoka herself. As a small note before we get started, the regular opening this week is replaced with footage from the upcoming Precure Miracle Leap movie! So be wary if you don’t want to be spoiled!

As for the episode itself; we firstly learn that Nodoka’s mother quit her job when Nodoka was ill. I happen to like this extra little bit of detail; fleshing out Nodoka’s illness and the period of her life that was defined by it makes it feel more like an authentic part of the character as opposed to just a tacked-on element. Nodoka’s mother, as it turns out, was a delivery driver (a job during which she met Nodoka’s father). Seemingly what’s actually meant by this is that she delivers produce by truck, but the ambiguity here does indeed invite you to imagine a young Japanese bachelor falling for his Uber driver.

Importantly though, the show does go out of its way to portray this as a respectable job that people find interesting, which is good! It’s a nice contrast to how such work tends to be treated in American media in the rare instance it’s brought up at all (namely, as a punchline).

A good amount of the episode’s first half is actually spent with Latte and the other mascot animals. Nodoka’s mom was her primary caretaker when the young Precure was at school, and now that she’s working again the dog princess finds herself lonesome at home. This particular plot thread is briskly resolved by the mascots resolving to look out for her more, missing her mother Queen Teatine (that’s the dog in the dress in the first episode if you’ve forgotten), as she does.

Daruizen is this episode’s baddie, and sics an animated strawberry patch on Nodoka’s mom and a local farmer while the former is making a delivery. Nodoka’s illness comes up again here, as when the Precure rush to the strawberry farm Nodoka struggles a bit to keep up. What drives her forward is the knowledge that her mom’s in danger of course, and who could blame her? Nodoka really does seem to have enviably great parents.

Daruizen also sets up what is probably the (unintentionally?) funniest moment of the episode. The Pretty Cure franchise occasionally has comedic timing that many actual comedy anime would kill for.

Of course, the Precure soon arrive to put a stop to all this. Daruizen seems to take a particular interest in Nodoka/Cure Grace herself. Initially he derides her as weak while she’s immobolized by some of the corruptive gunk that this week’s megapathogerm generates, and in fact smears some of it on her face, which is honestly just kinda nasty. Then, when she bounces back, seems rather curious about her apparent strength before teleporting away (as Precure villains do).

This is pretty much the end of the episode. The strawberry elemental (yeah) that the Pathogerm infected gives our girls an Element Bottle, presumably closely based on a new collectible doodad of some sort being rolled out in real life, but this is more amusing than anything.

*Presumably something will happen once our girls get all nine. My personal bet is on either some kind of augment to their abilities or on a slightly more outside chance; a fourth Precure for the team.*

There’s also a small pair of mirrored asides where Nodoka’s mom thanks Chiyu and Hinata for befriending her daughter and, in the Healing Garden, Queen Teatine thinks about the wonderful friends Latte must’ve made. It’s cute, and we also get another shot of that mysterious statue-fied woman down there.

Is this ultimately a filler episode? Yeah, kind of, in that it has little to do with the show’s overall narrative through-line, but it’s the good kind. We learn a little more about our characters and their lives. Solid stuff all around.

This week’s shot of the week is this, the result of me desperately trying to catch the spirit of a nice cut that happens during this episode’s fight sequence. The cut itself is simply too short to capture it this way, but I did get this, which looks like some kind of meme-in-the-making. I kinda can’t stop laughing at it.

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Posted on March 4, 2020March 29, 2020 in anime, Let's Watch Healin' Good Precure

Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 5

This week’s dose of Precure goodness is an episode about how two of our girls don’t quite “get” each other and how they learn to overcome that. It’s also quite funny, but I’m starting to think that that’s just an inherent trait of Hinata, who this episode is partly about.

The gist is pretty simple. Hinata and Chiyu just kind of don’t vibe with each other. This is mostly on the former’s end, as she seems to mistake Chiyu’s genuine concern for her wellbeing for her being angry, which isn’t actually the case. Speaking as someone with anxiety problems, I get where Hinata’s coming from. If you’ve got issues with this sort of thing it can be hard to sort well-meaning attempts to help from people just being upset. Not helping is that on Chiyu’s end, she’s a rather serious sort, which only furthers the confusion.

Early in the episode, Hinata’s called on to answer a question in science class (about photosynthesis, if you’re curious), and can’t. This sets her flaring in a way that will be immediately familiar to anyone with a generally anxious personality. I don’t use the phrase “I feel seen” often, but, well.

While Hinata is reckoning with feeling bad over her poor memory, Chiyu gets hit with things of her own.

The girls resolve this in a wonderfully Kids Show fashion, with an aquarium trip courtesy of some tickets Nodoka’s mom won in a raffle. They bond in a similarly goofy fashion, after some false starts, Hinata discovers that Chiyu cracks up at bad puns. And we’re talking awful here.

The rest of the episode proceeds in pretty standard fashion. A Pathogerm shows up and gets stomped flat following some antics where Pegitan goes missing. All in all it’s an episode that’s mostly cute as opposed to consequential, but I do like the exploration of Hinata and Chiyu’s insecurities and how they’re beginning to overcome them together.

Some additional stray thoughts:

-A flashback to how the Pathogerms and Healing Animals fought when they first clashed a long time ago gives us an absolutely wonderful sequence where a giant mass of darkness going toe to toe with a dog in a wedding dress. I love anime.

-This is the worst-looking episode of the show so far. It’s far from horrible, but it’s noticeable. This isn’t really that shocking given where we are in the series (Precure shows tend to look their least good from episodes 5 to 15 or so, is my understanding) but it’s still a touch annoying.

Shot Of The Week is another Tiny Hinata. I’m predictable, okay?

Posted on February 23, 2020March 29, 2020 in anime, Let's Watch Healin' Good Precure

Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 4

This week’s episode begins with a small comedy of errors, and I couldn’t be more delighted.

Our episode opens with Hinata encountering Nyatoran. And, consequently, an early contender for the best contiguous five seconds of anime in 2020.

This kicks off a runabout where Nyatoran has to pretend to be the world’s one and only talking cat. Hinata initially tries to ask her older brother (a veterinarian) for help, but runs into Nodoka and Chiyu along the way, thus getting our core cast in one place for the first time. The first half of this episode seriously is just Antics, much of which is an excuse for some truly great faces.

We also formally learn what many will have already intuited about Hinata. Namely; that she’s clumsy and easily gets caught up in the goings-on around her. Often to the extent of forgetting things like personal commitments. The episode sees her overshoot meeting a pair of friends to go shopping by what seems like a few hours.

Personally, I’d say she seems like she has ADHD, but given that this is a cartoon (and a kids’ show at that) it seems unlikely that such a thing would ever be explicitly brought up.

But the episode’s real meat is in the second half. Our heroines end up at the mall where Hinata’s friends are hanging out and, surprise, a Megapathogerm attacks. This time being formed out of a mirror in a clothing shop.

*All the ladies go crazy for a sharp-dressed man.*

The villain this time around is Guiwaru, the buff one, who seems to be this season’s entry into the “hot blooded one who likes to fight for its own sake” strand of Precure villain.

This is where Hinata makes her debut as a Precure, and–and I realize I’m saying a lot here–it’s possibly the strongest of all three of the current ‘Cures.

See Hinata’s got the kind of huge-heart vibe that is more generally associated with the actual lead in shows like this. The entire second half of the episode brims with so much mahou shoujo energy you can practically feel it on your skin, and what makes it great is that Hinata is as caught up in things as the audience is. It feels exceptional that we get to see a magical girl dive in to the role with this much aplomb. Hinata goes from being scared of this week’s Megapathogerm.

To hearing the word “Precure” for the first time.

To seeing their outfits and fangirling out about them.

To threatening the villain in the span of about an in-universe minute.

There’s 0 to 100 and then there’s this. Some of this of course is the practical consideration of the episode length, but on the other hand, it really does feel like this just is how she’d react. We’ve only gotten to know Hinata for a few episodes (and this is the first that’s actually about her), but she already feels like enough of a fully-realized character that we can say that this just seems “right” in an ephemeral, difficult-to-qualify sense. I hate pulling out this term, but even before her transformation, Hinata just kind of seems badass. Her reaction to getting smacked halfway across the mall by the Megapathogerm?

It is to this ironheaded fashion geek that Nyatoran offers the paw of his heart, in a shot that awesomely, but completely inexplicably, appears to visually reference the opening of Fate/stay night.

*Your guess is honestly as good as mine.*

Of course, anyone with even a passing familiarity with the franchise knows what happens next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_XS2jPm_N0

The Megapathogerm goes down in what is probably the single best-animated fight of the series so far. Cure Sparkle absolutely dominates the thing to the point where you almost feel bad for it. They even get into an absolutely awesome back-and-forth with energy blasts.

The episode basically ends after they beat the thing, but that’s just fine. It’s an A+ note to finish what is almost certainly the series’ strongest episode yet. As for Hinata? As much as I love Cures Grace and Fontaine, I think I might have a new favorite character. Time will tell!

There’s a couple other little details I liked too. What springs most to mind is this bit from the beginning. The Pathogerm King here is not gonna be too happy when he finds out what transpired this episode.

And we get what seems like a hint about that petrified lady in the animal kingdom we got a brief look at back in episode 1.

As for this episode’s Shot Of The Week, despite the abundance of absolutely masterful craftsmanship in the episode’s second half, I think I have to give it to this distance shot from relatively early on, it’s just so charming! Look at Hinata’s face!

Until next time!

The Magic Planet

Tag: Pretty Cure

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Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 6

Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 5

Let’s Watch Healin’ Good Precure – Episode 4