If you’re looking for the ingredients of a classic adventure story, they are there in Sabikui Bisco. That’s more evident in the third and most recent episode (“Tag Team”) than it has been. This is probably the weakest episode of the series so far, but it’s good enough that the very term “weakest” feels a bit too harsh. There’s a lot of promise, here, but also some notable room for improvement.
So Bisco fails to take the hat trick. Still, it’s a solid episode. We’re introduced to a couple key points here. The main one is that the mushrooms that we’ve so far been led to believe spread the Rusting sickness actually feed off of it and can thus cure it. This has interesting implications for Bisco’s wider world. Almost everyone thinks the mushrooms cause Rust. The episode opens with a loudspeaker announcement warning the residents of Imihama City to avoid inhaling spores, and elsewhere another character calls the fact that mushrooms create Rust “common sense.”
This is framed as a simple misunderstanding; people assume that mushrooms cause Rust because they grow where it’s found. But I would not be surprised if it later turned out that someone was lying about something for some ulterior motive. It would slot in well with Sabikui Bisco‘s more ambitious storytelling aims.
About the less ambitious ones, though. As foreshadowed at the end of last week’s episode, Bisco and Pawoo* get into it here, and while their actual fight is pretty good, this is where some cracks start showing.
Sabikui Bisco is, at the end of the day, a shonen series. And while it’s not universal, that does tend to imply certain things. One of them is what I will call a, I don’t know, casual sexism tax? Bisco remarks on Pawoo’s looks some three or four times during their fight, and while his internal monologue and later actions imply he doesn’t “really” believe any of the things he says, they’re still kind of shitty. This is the guy we’re supposed to be rooting for, mind you, so comments like this coming out of his mouth unchallenged reflects pretty poorly on the series at large.
Worse, at the end of the fight (which Pawoo only loses because Bisco snipes her with an arrow tipped with some kind of knock-out poison), she’s left behind in the City Watch’s care while Bisco and Milo set off on their journey. (Which, we’ll get back to that momentarily.) Effectively, this writes her out of the series for the time being. I don’t really want to add Sabikui Bisco to the long, long list of otherwise solid action anime that treat their female characters like trash, but this is not a terrific start. A kinda-goofy “sexy” outfit is one thing. This is quite another.
At the very least, the fight itself is pretty good. One can’t say that Bisco wins too easily. Pawoo is the uber-serious shoot-first-ask-questions-later type, so she doesn’t buy any of Bisco’s talk about mushrooms healing the Rust. She does nearly beat the hell out of him, though, which is pretty great. There’s also some truly weird set dressing going on here. Why does their fight at one point pivot to being on top of a huge bowling pin inexplicably in the middle of Imihama? Who knows! It definitely rules, though. Moreso when Pawoo shatters the thing and there’s an audible “bowling strike” sound effect.
You might say Pawoo has no time for games.
There’s also some brief but fun color commentary from recurring secondary character Chiroru Oochagama. (Miyu Tomita, probably best known as the lead character, Riko, in Made in Abyss.) Her cowardly put-upon minion vibe makes her great for this sort of thing, and I hope she never stops doing it.
Intercut with all of this is Milo healing up Bisco’s mentor, Jabi. He eventually recovers enough that, when the time comes for Milo and Bisco to split at episode’s end, it’s he who stays behind to provide a distraction. (At least Pawoo will have some company in Good Characters Temporarily Absent From The Show Jail.)
As for where Bisco and Milo are actually going, it turns out that the “Rust-Eater” alluded to in the series’ alternate English title is, in fact, a mushroom. One that can heal just about anything, including Jabi’s (and presumably Pawoo’s) particularly bad Rust infection, which will eventually claim both of their lives if it’s not treated.
It’s worth noting in the latter case that Milo does give her some of the same injection that fixed up Jabi, but that the mushroom is still being sought out at all implies that this is only a temporary solution. Also, there is a bit where Milo gives a very long, heartfelt, tearful goodbye to his unconscious sister while saccharine music swells. The entire time, Bisco impatiently taps his foot in the background and then tells him off when he’s done. It’s pretty funny.
So, there you have it, Bisco and Milo exiting Imihama and setting out on an epic quest to get a special mushroom. Complete with all the fightbro homoeroticism so common to this sort of anime.
It’s classic stuff, and despite my criticisms of the episode’s handling of Pawoo I did enjoy it overall. (Time will tell if that continues to be the case, but here’s hoping.) There’s a post-credits scene here where Milo and Bisco come across a “war memorial,” a temple made out of and absolutely covered in ancient, rusting war machines. It promptly comes to life when they attempt to stop there for the evening. Thus, cliffhangers beget cliffhangers, and the adventure continues.
Until next week, anime fans.
*Official sources seem to disagree on whether her name should be romanized as Pawoo or just Paw. Because of how these things work, neither is exactly wrong, and they’re pronounced the same way. But the official subtitles use “Pawoo”, so it’s what I’ll be using from here on out.
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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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by Rumi. Thank you for your support.
“Yuki’s pretty amazing. With her around, we can always pick ourselves back up.
No matter what.”
The real giveaway is in the soundtrack. The canned, cheery music so common to the school life comedy genre drops out and is replaced by dead silence and howling wind. That’s the first real clue that something isn’t as it seems. Others arrive in carefully orchestrated, almost subliminal drips. A shot of a seemingly normal school hallway with the windows broken, students who seem rooted to their classrooms, and a vague sense of unease that surrounds the actions of every character but one.
By now, the twist at the end of the first episode of SCHOOL-LIVE! (Gakkou Gurashi domestically, and throughout the rest of this piece) is so well known that its reputation precedes the series itself. This is no comedy. A zombie apocalypse is upon the state-of-the-art school building that our four main characters, out of necessity, make their home. Possibly the whole world, too. That first episode is a masterful little clockwork of suspense building, but if the show’s entire legacy were staked on shock value alone, it would not survive in the popular conscience nearly seven years after it premiered. 33 other TV anime served as Gakkou Gurashi‘s co-seasonals in the summer of 2015. Of those, about a dozen persist in the collective cultural imagination. A work’s quality cannot be judged alone on whether or not people remember it, but it’s truly rare for something without some kind of spark to it to persist for that long. Gakkou Gurashi tapped into something. But what?
My pet theory is that as early as its second episode, Gakkou Gurashi draws on a deep, yawning sadness that resonates with those young enough to relate directly to the show’s cast on up. The melancholy, the anxiety, and the outright dread that come with knowing that who you are now is not who you always will be is deeply rooted in modern culture. If not a universal fear, it’s at least up there. Apocalypse fiction is an extremely direct expression of that worry, and after Gakkou Gurashi rips the Band-Aid off at the end of its first episode, it keeps hammering that button, and it’s never less than effective. Just last year, overlooked OVA Alice in Deadly School succeeded in doing much the same with some of the same methods.
Gakkou Gurashi pulling that same trick for a good five hours could conceivably become a slog. But it never does, because there is some sincere levity cut with all this tension; lighthearted moments colored by the characters’ friendships-of-necessity, or when the series indulges in traditional school life anime tropes, even sometimes in the panic-giggles induced by some of its dark comedy. But all of that only serves to ratchet the tension back up when things get more serious again. This is a show that leaves you with a gnawing fear in your stomach between episodes. There’s a rawness to it.
None of this would mean much if the show’s characters weren’t compelling. But each of them is. The titular School Life Club are a fantastic cast. We have Yuki (Inori Minase, who, among many other things, later appeared in Girls’ Last Tour as Chito), Kurumi (Ari Ozawa, who last year played Elisha in BACK ARROW), Yuuri (Mao Ichimichi, notable for voicing Pecorine in Princess Connect! Re:Dive this very season), and Miki (Rie Takahashi, who just a year after this series aired would land the role of Megumin in Konosuba), their teacher and club advisor, Sakura, AKA Megu (Ai Kayano. Perhaps you know her as Kirika from Symphogear?), and finally their cute little corgi, Taroumaru. (Emiri Katou, voice of Kyuubey.)
These characters largely defy easy archetype pigeonholing, but I’ll be as snappy as I can. Yuki, the heart and soul of the group, is burying repressed traumatic memories under her happy-go-lucky outer shell and spends much of the series knee-deep in delusion. Kurumi is the tough one; by necessity, not choice, and wields a gardening shovel she uses to fight off zombies when necessary. She also has what looks to my armchair-seated eye like an untreated case of PTSD. When it flares up, colors wash out in real time and her heartbeat is turned way up in the audio. Yuuri is the “club president,” and the older sister sort. She takes care of the planning and tries her best to keep everyone else in line. Beneath that facade, it’s her who cracks the worst when push comes to shove. (No one can bottle all that responsibility alone, Yuuri.)
Miki, rescued from a nearby mall, is the most reclusive of the four and takes some time to adjust to the others’ personalities. Megu tries very hard to be the best teacher to her remaining students she can be. Taroumaru is a good boy, as all dogs are.
The show’s structure is fairly simple for most of its runtime. The School Life Club must attend to some task, either something fairly serious like a supply run or some whim of Yuki’s. They do it, and along the way fun is had while, simultaneously, the knowledge that this can’t last forever looms large. It’s a difficult dichotomy to make work, but Gakkou Gurashi manages it, and it’s the show’s main strength.
One of the traits that separates art that is merely very good from that which is great is, in my mind, applicability. A story’s ability to resonate beyond the context in which it was originally written. In the seven years since Gakkou Gurashi first aired, the global climate crisis has escalated to the point of emergency. To the extent that even talking about it in contexts like this can feel like a cliché. Gakkou Gurashi so expertly plays that single chord of apocalyptic despair that when it strikes a nerve, the resonance is as deep and dark as an abandoned well. The “zombies” (or whatever they are) are a formality; they’re everyone who’s not looking out for us, either by malice or by being beaten down by the weight of it all. Our collective abusers and our fellow victims united into a single shambling mass of consumptive darkness.
This is to say nothing of any number of other global crises to which one could easily apply the zombie apocalypse metaphor. Some of the writing in the series would seem rather on-the-nose if it were penned today.
It’s pure projection, of course. But in hindsight, it certainly can feel like the “zombie fiction” boom that Gakkou Gurashi came about at the end of was prescient; the skeletal hand of the Grim Reaper knocking on our collective door. Going about our daily lives in spite of it all, we can all feel like Yukis in our own way. If she’s delusional, maybe she’s no more so than we are.
Perhaps that’s a bit heady, and one would prefer to look at Gakkou Gurashi as an outgrowth of or reaction to the school life genre. The endless everyday that defines that sort of work turned vile and strangling. Consequently, I sometimes see Gakkou Gurashi spoken about as though it is a singular, weird blip in modern TV anime history. I have seen it referred to as an attack on (or worse, a “deconstruction of”) that genre, and I’ve seen it criticized as being all shock value. (And to avoid seeming like I’m talking strictly about other people, I naively believed some of this myself when the series was new. It is a part of why it’s taken me so long to watch it.)
For my money, none of these things could be further from the truth. Gakkou Gurashi is a comparatively early example of a strain of anime that would come to define some of the very best of the 2010s. “Post”-school life work like A Place Further Than the Universe, O Maidens in Your Savage Season!, and even Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! It is distinguished from these far more grounded stylistic cousins by its apocalyptic setting. But if one views the slice of life genre as an organic, living thing, one can imagine Gakkou Gurashi as a sort of evolutionary defense mechanism. A warning: “Our daily lives are under threat, here are the stakes.” (If you wanted to, you could also probably draw a line backwards connecting it to other fare that combined a high school setting with supernatural elements and a broadly similar tone space. Say, Angel Beats!)
With all this in mind, Gakkou Gurashi is not without light. The School Life Club’s rare excursions outside their school, while dangerous, contain moments of joy and human connection they would never have if they stayed locked up. This is how they meet Miki in a flashback that spans most of episodes four and five. The original School Life Club trio is able to liberate Miki from her comparative isolation. Miki’s own history with her friend / maybe-more Kei–who struck out on her own out of frustration sometime before the events of those episodes–serves to frame all this. Both Miki and Kei eventually choose freedom over isolation, but because they don’t do so together, they lose each other. It’s a complicated tangle of cutting loss and the balm of simple contact, and it’s remarkable how well Gakkou Gurashi can walk that tightrope, and how well it continues to walk it as the series goes on. Nothing is without sacrifice, but at the same time, it tells us, no situation is truly hopeless, either. This is, I would in fact argue, Gakkou Gurashi‘s core thesis.
This is best expressed with Yuki. Yuki is, by any conventional definition, extremely mentally unwell. But while Gakkou Gurashi sometimes seems like it might play this for shock, it never really does aside from arguably that first episode swerve. Everyone who actually gets to know Yuki–including Miki, who is initially extremely offput by her mannerisms–finds her a necessary ball of joy in a world that sorely needs it. Her friends in the club indulge her tendencies where they’re harmless and curb them on the occasion they cause real trouble.
She is never treated as lesser than any of the other characters simply because she has specific needs, and when at the series’ end she becomes more lucid it feels less like some part of her is being erased and more that she has simply grown as a person. She confronts a truth she’s been hiding from; the fact that Megu sacrificed her life to save the School Life Club some time ago, and reconciles with the state of the world in general. A lesser “zombie apocalypse survivors” sort of story would frame her as a burden. But Gakkou Gurashi never even suggests it. The one and only time she ever voices the concern that she might be weighing the others down, she’s immediately corrected by all present. Yuki is a symbol of a hope placed not on some distant Other coming to the rescue, but in each other, a slice of life lead girl slipping that genre’s bounds to become, in her own way, a genuine hero.
In general, the girls’ relationships with each other feel as authentic as any friendship from a “normal” slice of life series. And that’s the thing, despite what it may be easy to assume, Gakkou Gurashi still is a slice of life series. Decent chunks of even very serious episodes are spent on fairly mundane activities. Some whole episodes are devoted to them, such as when the club gets the idea to send out letter balloons in episode seven. Or episode nine, where Gakkou Gurashi manages the impressively absurd feat of squeezing an egregious pool episode into its remaining runtime, complete, at least in the fansub I watched, with a random reference to the then-recent Kill la Kill. (It’s easily the least essential episode of the whole show, but even something that nakedly cliche is a welcome breather between what comes before and after.)
In its final stretch, the girls of the School Life Club are thrust into crisis. Zombies break through the school’s barriers. Kurumi gets bit. It’s bad. If Gakkou Gurashi were the shock schlock people (including my younger self) have mistaken it for at times, it would be very easy for the series to end on a down note to be “shocking.” Instead, we get a miracle. Yuki gets the idea to dismiss the zombie horde via the school PA. Improbably, it works.
The scene falls apart in the retelling, but in the moment, it’s magical. There are losses (poor Taroumaru really looks like he’s going to pull through, but he doesn’t), but the School Life Club carry on. Maybe all of this is helped somewhat by the fact that I binged the entire series in only two sittings. Maybe it is also helped by my new HRT regimen making me even more vulnerable to sappy bullshit than I already was. But I like to think I’d have bawled like a baby regardless. The show is as good at tugging your heartstrings as it is inspiring dread. Not many anime can claim that.
Gakkou Gurashi can get away with that heartstring-pulling because by the time it happens, we’ve already spent some five hours with these characters. We have seen them not just survive but thrive in a world that has well and truly gone to shit.
And that difference, the distinction between simply surviving and truly living, is what that line in the maddeningly catchy OP theme means. “We have dreams like we’re supposed to.” Different dreams, maybe, than the ones we had when we were younger, but dreams, nonetheless. Gakkou Gurashi‘s final shot is the School Life Club, having held for themselves a “graduation ceremony” now that hiding out in the school is no longer tenable, flying down the empty highway in Megu’s old car, seeking to link up with other possible survivors. The city they drive through is in ruins, but there’s barely a hint of melancholy. The future is theirs to seize.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by The Mugcord Discord Server. Thank you for your support.
Who are movies made for?
The pop media machine is, by all accounts, an absolutely insane thing to spend your life involved with. Across all media, all over the world, the roiling mass that is the entertainment industry stamps out new books, albums, television shows, and, of course, movies. This complex, if working in its most cynical mode, can produce truly horrible works of profound soullessness. At its best, though, it can allow work that is beautiful, brilliant, and life-affirming to reach a mass audience. Pompo: The Cinéphile, the first theatrical release from Studio CLAP, is neither of these things, but it’s closer to the latter than the former. Being a movie about movies, that’s a good thing.
Pompo is a complicated and sometimes frustrating film, not a rare thing for art about art. It clearly has its heart in the right place, but there are a few key issues that prevent it from really rising to the level it clearly aspires to.
But before we examine Pompo in detail to hash out why that’s so, it would perhaps be best to take the measure of our cast. Starting with Pompo herself.
The eponymous Joelle D. “Pompo” Pomponette (Konomi Kohara, probably best known to readers of this blog as either Cure Milky from Star Twinkle Precure or Chika Fujiwara from Kaguya-sama: Love is War!) is not actually the main character of Pompo: The Cinéphile, but she is important. A filmmaking prodigy superproducer, Pompo has, at the time our story begins, funded a string of extremely cheesy but highly profitable B-Movies after being bequeathed a fortune from her grandfather, who is also a (retired) film producer. Pompo is a mercurial little ball of fairy dust, and she’s quite endearing.
Her movies seem pretty great.
She also has an intern / sort-of apprentice, Gene Fini (Hiroya Shimizu, in his first major anime role), who serves as our real main character. Gene, who looks like the concept of sleep deprivation given human form, serves as an embodiment of all of Pompo‘s big ideas about the purpose and nature of human artistic achievement.
Rounding this out is our secondary lead, Natalie Woodward (Rinka Ootani, also in her first major VA role), an aspiring actress who Pompo sees some potential in, and who eventually becomes the subject of a script she writes. She gets probably the least screentime of all the major characters, which is a bit of a shame, because her can-do attitude is charming. Importantly, she’s also taken under the wing of Mystia, a veteran actress (Ai Kakuma, who, among a number of other roles, was Aki-sensei in last year’s Sonny Boy).
The script written for her is quite important. Pompo pens it with Natalie and a retired, world-famous actor, one Martin Braddock (industry legend Akio Ōtsuka) in mind. She doesn’t want to direct this film, though. That falls to Gene.
All of these characters are fun, including Gene, who avoids most of the pitfalls associated with being a slightly dull male lead. He falls backwards into directing a huge movie and initially he is left wondering why, exactly, he’s agreeing to all this. But subtle-unsubtle tricks like his pondering who–if he had to pick one person–he would shoot the move for, and the scene going out of focus except for Pompo in the background, better explain his feelings than he himself can.
But yes, this script of Pompo’s forms the film-within-a-film Meister, about a disaffected, jaded former musician regaining his love for music after he meets a young girl in Switzerland. The shooting of Meister, consequently, is the backbone of Pompo‘s plot. There isn’t much in the way of traditional conflict in this part of the film, as Gene’s struggle to form his own directorial vision takes up the bulk of the screentime. This treats us to engaging details that draw attention to the serendipitous side of the filmmaking process. Say, one of Meister‘s scenes changing mid-shoot because a fog bank rolls in, or the cast collectively coming up with an entire extra scene in order to take advantage of a chance rainstorm.
This is all visually lovely too, and Pompo deserves serious credit for its utterly gorgeous backgrounds, which really capture the serene majesty of the Swiss alps. Or, both earlier and later in the film, the hustle and bustle of Hollywood. (Sorry, “Nyallywood.”)
Indeed, speaking purely from the visual angle, Pompo is downright fantastic. It’s edited like a whirlwind and is just about allergic to regular scene transitions, subbing in unusual ones whenever it can. (It’s particularly fond of a three-part punch-in effect, which frames both the departing and arriving scene in interesting fashion.) Very little of Pompo is content to frame a shot simply. Not when there’s some unusual, stylish angle it can use instead.
There are also some cool scene tricks, my personal favorite being the way it sometimes frames a character reflecting on a conversation as said conversation playing out on a film screen while the character “watches” the memory. A motif of film reels, both literal and symbolic, also runs through movie, giving it an extra bit of visual continuity. Similarly, characters’ eyes literally glow when they’re displaying passion or raw talent.
Despite the film’s own focus on live action material, there is also the feel of a great anime film here, too. The animation is highly expressive, with Pompo herself getting a lot of the best cuts. She will literally bounce into a room, inflate like a balloon when complaining about how movies over 90 minutes are “bloated,” and her Play-Doh ball of a face gives us the movie’s best expressions.
Once we move away from production strengths though, things get more complicated. The characters and visual style are great, and it’s because of the film’s brisk pace none of that wears out its welcome. But we at some point need to discuss what Pompo: The Cinéphile is actually about, and it’s here that things get a little dicey.
You see, Gene’s movie eventually runs into production issues because of Gene himself. He spends weeks editing it but just can’t seem to make it his own. (This, as Pompo itself points out, is why directors rarely edit their own movies.) Eventually, he decides that he needs to shoot an additional scene. Pompo is not happy about this! An additional scene this far after shooting has wrapped is a huge undertaking. She rightly raises the objection that it requires a lot of expense, it requires getting the cast and crew back together, and so on. Gene is undeterred, and Pompo eventually caves, causing the movie to miss an initial premiere. In turn, this causes a number of important financial backers to withdraw their support.
This problem is eventually rectified by the intervention of minor character Alan Gardner (Ryuuichi Kijima, active in the industry since 2007, and for whom playing roles like this seems to be a recurring thing) who convinces the massive bank he works for to finance the movie. It’s a truly ridiculous sequence of events that involves, among other things, giving a financial presentation while secretly livestreaming said presentation, his own efforts to interview Meister‘s entire cast and crew, and also-secretly setting up a Kickstarter for all of this.
It’s ridiculous, and if it involved anything but a bunch of bankers, I’d probably like it a bit more for that very reason. I do still respect the sheer audacity of dropping this into your movie about why movies are important, but it does not fit at all.
When all this financing (complete with a documentary on the making of the film!) is still not enough, Gene ends up in the hospital from overwork, and it’s here where Pompo truly hits a wall. Overwork is an utterly massive problem in the entertainment industry, especially the anime industry. While I have no reason to believe that Studio CLAP is guilty of the same practices as some of its contemporaries simply because it’s an anime studio, the result of this whole development being Gene ripping out his IV and dragging himself back to the editing room with everyone’s only-slightly-reluctant support just scans as a little weird. And maybe more than a little tone-deaf. It’s even weirder when Gene starts ranting about the things he’s sacrificed to make his great film. In a scene that is supposed to be uplifting, it instead feels like the ravings of someone who desperately needs to be pulled away from his work for a while.
This is all even odder when considering Meister. In that film-within-a-film, that very same stepping away is what allows the main character, Dalbert, to regain his own love of music. Indeed, he rediscovers a love of life itself in the mountains of Switzerland when he meets Lily (Natalie’s character). Gene has no comparable experience, because he’s new to the industry, and by his own admission, his life has been rather uneventful.
Gene and Dalbert are not similar characters, despite the film’s heavy-handed attempts to conflate them. It’s a truly strange note for an otherwise good movie to stake its emotional climax on, and it doesn’t do much to convey the film’s intended thesis of art as a universal conduit for human empathy and resonance. Consequently, when the final scene hits and Meister sweeps the “Nyacademy Awards,” it comes across as masturbatory and unearned.
All of this leaves Pompo as, frankly, a mess, in thematic terms. Beginning with some weirdly cynical moralizing earlier in the film about how happy people are less creative and peaking with that fictional Oscar-sweep at its end. It almost makes Pompo seem like the victim of the very same conceptually fuzzy editing-room chop-jobbery that its final act depicts. Maybe it was! It’s hard to know.
Comparing the film with its source material, the still ongoing Pompo: The Cinéphilemanga, raises another possibility. One gets the sense that director Takayuki Hirao may have wanted to tell a more grandiose story than the one that the comparatively modest and more comedic manga presents. If so, this may be a simple case of a director being a poor match for the source material. It is possible to build a gripping story out of the rough struggle to make art that truly expresses oneself. But Pompo is not that story. Trying to force it to be such drags the film’s final act down quite a bit.
Does all this ruin the film? No, because it remains an engaging watch throughout on its production merits and because the characters are fun to keep up with. (Even at its very end, it pulls off the cute trick of itself sticking to Pompo’s 90 minute rule. Not counting credits, the film is exactly 90 minutes long.)
So, Pompo: The Cinéphile remains a perfectly enjoyable flick in spite of its issues. And I’m excited to see what Hirao will do in the future, if this is indicative of a visual style he intends to keep pursuing, especially if he’s given a more fitting story to work with. In general, this is a very promising start for CLAP, marking as it does their big international coming out party.
But all of this faffing about with the film’s message does kneecap Pompo as a coherent statement, firmly marking it as “just” a pretty good movie instead of a truly great one, which is a bit of a shame.
Still, there is a place for pretty good movies. As one, Pompo is certainly worthwhile. Don’t expect to add it to your classics shelf, but it’ll sit with the rest of your Blu-Ray collection just fine.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!
I’m revealing my age here, but humor me for a moment. Are you, dear readers, familiar with classic party rock track “Centerfold” by The J. Geils Band? (If not, Stereogum’s Tom Breihan, a critic I admire very much, wrote a pretty great article about it as part of his pretty great-in-general column The Number Ones. You can consider this a recommendation.)
That song is a boiling soup of emotion. The song’s narrator finds out his high school crush poses in an adult magazine now and he’s hit by some admixture of guilt and desire. “Centerfold” doesn’t sound guilty, though, it sounds celebratory, from its production to the nagging “nah-nah nah nah nah nahs” in the chorus. Any actual negative feelings in the song are washed away by its presentation. It all sounds like a good time, and because pop media’s presentation informs its message, it is a good time.
I bring this up because, in a very roundabout way, that’s also, in a very broad sense, sort of what I think of My Dress-Up Darling. The situation presented in its second episode, “Wanna Hurry Up, and Do It?”, would be, in a series that were even slightly more connected to the real world, appalling. Marin completes her strong-arming of Gojo into becoming her cosplay outfitter. Along the way, she both rambles at him about eroge games and eventually shows up at his house unannounced to make him take her measurements. (That’s what the episode title is referring to. What did you think it meant?) But the presentation sells it as a good time, at least in a comedy anime sort of way. Dress-Up Darling‘s second episode is almost all comedic, and it leans heavily into the series’ ecchi side. (If I’m giving every episode an Egregiously Horny Score out of 5, we can call this a solid 4.) Which isn’t to say it’s devoid of more substantial character moments, as there are a few, but let’s just say this is an episode where I had to be judicious about what to take a screencap of.
But let’s talk about our actual characters for a moment here, because it’s Marin who launches this whole sequence of events to begin with. One of the things that makes Marin seem like a real character as opposed to a cardboard cut-out is that she’s extremely assertive. Honestly a little too assertive, to the point of obliviousness, which is where a lot of the comedy here comes from. The episode opens immediately after the closing scene of last week’s, and it’s in the very same room where the two have basically just met that Marin goes into a bit more detail about this character she’s trying to cosplay. For one, her name is Shizuku-tan. She’s the gothic type.
At one point Marin refers to the chest area of Shizuka’s outfit as a “boob bag,” which gives My Dress-Up Darling the dubious honor of being the first anime I’ve ever seen use the term in-fiction.
For two, she’s from an erotic dating sim. Called…this.
(The title is immediately drawn attention to, of course.)
Gojo takes all this in with a disbelief that is pretty common among those who have just had their head dunked into the far side of otakudom. (I’m actually kinda with him here, I’ve never really understood the appeal of eroge either. Not out of any moral objection, I just can’t fathom being horny while gaming. They are mutually exclusive activities in my mind.)
Marin also repeatedly calls the series “epic,” which I’d say is only a bad pick because someone her age nowadays would probably say it’s “based” instead.
There’s also a pretty funny style cut where Gojo brings up that stuff like this tends to be 18+ and Marin, we’ll say, selectively declines to hear him.
It sounds–and is–simple, but a huge part of what makes this come across as funny instead of just weird is Gojo’s reactions. Over the course of the episode, they slowly ramp up from “in vague disbelief as to what he’s hearing” to “looks like he’s just survived a war.” I will cop to finding his increasing distress amusing.
That second reaction doesn’t come until the latter half of the episode. While Gojo does agree to help Marin with her outfits, he reasonably proposes that they should wait to do measurements until Monday, since by the time this episode starts it’s already quite late on a Friday evening.
Naturally, Marin shows up unannounced at his house the next day while his grandfather happens to be off running an errand. (She notes that she googled his last name and “doll shop” to find the address. That’s honestly kind of creepy! But hey, comedy anime.)
Sidenote: the fit is insane.
She barges in and shows herself around. This alone makes Gojo nervous, but it is absolutely nothing compared to the fact that–as Marin correctly points out–measurements are generally taken while the measure-ee is undressed. Of course, Marin is very cognizant of the fact that she can’t well strip down to her underwear in the house of a boy she only met a few days ago. That would be nuts!
A bikini though. That’s fine. Obviously.
There is going to be a whole section here where there are very few pictures of Marin and a whole lot of pictures of Gojo’s absolutely devastated facial expressions. You may thank / curse me for my modesty in the comments.
Maybe I’m a simpleton for still finding stuff like this funny over a decade into being an anime fan. I think I actually appreciate naked stupidity like this a bit more than I did when I was actually in the target audience for this series. But can you blame me, here? Look at Gojo, guy’s about to die.
Na na na na na na.
This particular visual dynamic–Marin doing something teasing and sexy and then Gojo reacting like he’s been stabbed in the gut–makes up most of the rest of the episode. It’ll wear thin if this is what the whole rest of the show is going to be like (I want the cosplay dates alluded to in the OP sequence, damn it!), but as a single episode thing? It’s pretty fun.
In spite of his own raging hormones, Gojo does successfully take Marin’s measurements. Marin herself even gets flustered at one point, in an amusing but also genuine and human moment. This episode was fine–if one has a high tolerance for H comedy, that is–but those moments of real connection between our two leads are where I think Dress-Up Darling is at its strongest. I hope we get more of them as the series rolls on.
But if not, hey, the sight of Gojo studying Slippery Girls 2 like he’s prepping for exams so he can get outfit references is pretty goddamn funny.
Godspeed, Gojo.
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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.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
Over the past decade, an artistic movement has emerged in anime that values perseverance and centers the stories of young women. If this movement has a name–or is even a cogent scene as opposed to a simple undercurrent–I am unaware of it. But one would have to be fairly oblivious to not at least feel it in the air. Artiswitch was not the most prominent example of this lineage to come out last year, but with the benefit of hindsight, it might be one of the best. And it’s certainly among the most inventive. My only regret with this series is that I didn’t cover it when it was new. (I actually didn’t plan to cover it at all, assuming I’d have nothing of note to say about it. Arguably I still don’t, but, hey, these things have a way of sneaking up on you.)
In terms of “literal plot,” there isn’t much to Artiswitch. Our protagonist, Nina (Utano Aoi, in what appears to be her first-ever anime role), is a witch who maintains a mysterious shop somewhere in Harajuku, Tokyo. Customers find their way to the shop, and when they leave, they take with them an item that changes their lives.
This premise is not a unique one, and in particular fans of forever-underrated CLAMP classic xxxHOLIC will find the general idea familiar, but Artiswitch’s format (a series of shorts, only totaling to about 45 minutes in all) prevents it from preoccupying itself with the sort of sprawling story that that series eventually develops. Instead, we get a lot of symbolism, compelling imagery, and sharp direction. Artiswitch is all mood and atmosphere. Which isn’t to say there are no points being made here, but anyone who requires their anime to have an easily decipherable linear Point A–>Point B plot should check out now.
The first two episodes establish the format. A customer (a tomboyish athlete in the first episode, and a shy, follow-the-leader sort of girl in episode 1 and 2 respectively) makes their way to Nina’s shop. They pick up an item, prompting the witch to deliver her catchphrase (“would you like to peer deeper?”), and from there things dissolve into full-on music video territory.
Quite literally, since these segments, which take up the middle third of each episode, are set to songs and feature little to no dialogue. Going into detail about each of these would be tantamount to spoiling the series, but the first episode’s already gorgeous conceit of the tomboy Haruka rediscovering her repressed feminine side by donning fire-red lipstick and dress is where things start. They ramp up exponentially from there, with the remaining episodes serving to twist the formula in various ways.
The most notable deviations here are the final two. But simply explaining what happens would feel like trying to strangle the life out of the series. It’s less a “what” and more a “how.” When Nina meets a maybe-nemesis in the form of a gothic lolita with ambiguous motives and a habit of, ahem, raining on other folks’ parades, things become less straightforward, and it’s around here where I feel like simply recapping the literal events of the series would be doing it a disservice.
Artiswitch clearly has a lot on its mind, and were I forced to come up with a single flaw I thought were present in the series, it might be a lack of clarity. But at the same time, that feels fundamentally misguided.
And it would require ignoring the final episode, where Nina’s wish-granting capabilities are turned back on themselves, and it is she who must dive into her own mind. We see why she entered this magical line of work to begin with, and the sight of her past self comforting her present with the affirmation that she is moving forward and is doing her best, despite her own doubts, is why I decided to write this short review in the first place.
Fundamentally, art resonates with its audience based on shared thoughts, experiences, and feelings. Those things change from person to person, but taking special note of when a series has successfully struck a chord with me is the entire reason I write at all. Leaving Artiswitch un-commented-upon just didn’t feel right. I have to confess, I am in fact worried about doing this series justice while simultaneously trying to avoid pinning it to a corkboard like a dead butterfly.
But I probably shouldn’t be so concerned. It flits and flies free. On a practical level, I am excited to see what director Kazuma Ikeda (who seems to have an extensive background in design, something that really shines through here) does next. But beyond that, this is the sort of thing people will keep discovering as the years roll by, and even now the comments sections below each episode are crowded with testimonials, in a plethora of languages, from those to whom the series already clearly means quite a lot. The shop stands waiting, all one needs to do is step inside.
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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.
This review was commissioned. That means I was paid to watch and review the series in question. You can learn about my commission policies and how to buy commissions of your own here. This review was commissioned by The Mugcord Discord Server.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. But you really shouldn’t care in this case. Seriously, don’t watch this.
If you close your eyes, you can almost picture it.
The time is early 2020. The place? An opulent office space somewhere in Tokyo, the residence of a chief CEO. A real big shot. His suit and his coke habit mark him as a survivor of the ’80s entertainment biz. He’s been places. He’s seen things. He’s helped stars rise and he’s made them fall.
Today is a day like any other, when a representative pitching a new series–an anime–strides into his office. The rep talks smooth as Crisco, and the boss doesn’t need much convincing. His pitch is simple; everyone’s got an idol show. Your company needs one too. The boss is hung up on only one point. He’s been around the block, he knows his stuff, and he knows that just blindly copying this hot new trend won’t cut it. They need a twist.
Idly, he taps a remote on his desk, and the jumbo flatscreen on the other wall lights up. It’s a sports channel, but they’re not broadcasting any of Japan’s typical national pastimes. Instead, he sees an ice rink, and a black puck zipping across it.
He smiles at the serendipity as the rep stands there confused. “Son.” The boss says, his tone cool and confident. “There’s our twist.”
This is probably not how Pride of Orange, a near-instantly forgotten entry in the “idol anime but also something else” subgenre from late last year, actually got greenlit. But it makes more sense to me than the alternative. Some washed-up suit OK’ing this is the only way it seems plausible that it was made at all. What’s the other explanation? That this was focus-tested? That multiple people sat down and assured themselves that yes, idols playing hockey is exactly what the youth of Japan want in their cartoons?
If the show had actually been good, it’s possible I’d be sitting here praising the ingenuity of conjoining these two things that absolutely do not go together at all. But we don’t live in a world where Pride of Orange is a good show, so that’s irrelevant. In the US, this is the kind of thing that gets mocked on VH1 by washed-up celebrities 20 years after it airs off the surreal premise alone. Some real Baywatch Nights shit. I don’t know if they have a similar pop culture backwash hall of shame practice in Japan, and if so, whether it includes anime, but Pride of Orange had better hope so on both counts, because there’s no way anyone’s remembering it otherwise.
You might take all this to mean Pride of Orange is bad. You’d be right to. It is bad! But every single bad anime I’ve ever covered on Magic Planet Anime before has had a saving grace that Puraore does not; they were bad in interesting ways. Pride of Orange is bad in the same way that Imagine Dragons, ugly logos, and direct-to-Netflix specials are bad. It is an obvious product of a pop cultural media machine completely failing to deliver the one thing that said machine should always be able to. In this case, a baseline watchable cartoon. Beyond its ridiculous premise, there just isn’t much to it. It’s audiovisual wallpaper. An active test of your patience that dares you, with its sheer brain-numbing mundanity, to blink first. This is anime-by-algorithm, a so-inoffensive-it’s-offensive patchwork of tropes, plotlines, and even character designs cribbed from other, better anime, kludged together by grey-suited executives without a single creative bone in their bodies. That’s before we get to its more serious flaws, mind you.
So, what is this horrible abomination unto mankind? Well, as mentioned, it’s theoretically an idol series where the idols are also a hockey team. In practice it’s more the other way around. The “idol” bit feels tacked-on enough (a grand total of two dance sequences, with almost no buildup, over its whole run) that I wonder if it wasn’t initially conceived as a straight sports series and then later altered. It does have the cast structure of an idol series, at least, and all characters present fall into broad archetypes that the genre popularized, but quite unlike some personal favorites in it (say, 2011’s The Idolmaster, 2018’s Zombie Land Saga, or 2020’s Love Live! Nijigasaki High School Idol Club),* none of them have much personality. Probably the best of the lot are Naomi and Riko, whose distinction mostly comes from the fact that they’re quite obviously dating each other. (Their brief arc, which culminates in episode 9, is unquestionably the highlight of the series.)
The remainder of the cast is fairly anonymous, including theoretical protagonist Manaka.
“My literal only personality trait is obnoxious cheerfulness.”
We should also talk about Youko, the team’s coach. Youko is an outlier here, because she’s not devoid of personality like most other characters. Instead, her combination of doofy catchphrases, manipulative, obnoxious personality, and general overbearing nature combine to make her come across as weirdly creepy.
In one of the show’s “arcs” (the term seems generous), she attempts to recruit the star player of a rival team, Yu, who’s recently left the life of a hockey prodigy behind to experience a normal teenagerhood. (God knows we can’t have that in our sports anime.) In her efforts, Youko resorts to tactics such as repeatedly, incessantly calling her phone, standing outside of her house and yelling(!), and engineering a situation where she deliberately leaves a pen behind when invited into Yu’s house by her grandmother. This, of course, means that Yu has to return said pen (I’d argue she doesn’t, really, but neither Yu herself nor her grandmother object to the idea). When Yu does so, Youko ropes her into a bizarre bet, which she loses, and essentially forces her to join the team. This is glossed over with the non-explanation that Yu actually enjoys being on the new team, so it doesn’t matter. Youko is similarly unpleasant to her other players, and even engages in gaslight-y emotional manipulation a few times, giving her an almost predatory vibe.
None of this is ever addressed, because Pride of Orange has neither the writing chops necessary to address it nor the forethought to simply not make the coach a skeevy weirdo in the first place. I would also argue that Youko having to quite literally trick the cast into becoming an “idol group” on top of being a hockey team feels like it betrays a broad disdain both for the show’s audience and its own genre.
“The fact that I’m allowed to be an influence in children’s lives is, on a moral level, horrific.”
But really, while Youko’s situation is the worst of the series’ many writing flaws, it’s far from the only one. Frequent issues like conflicts springing up and then being almost immediately resolved, or flashbacks grinding action scenes to a dead stop to repeat to us information we either already know or could easily infer, recur repeatedly throughout. Pride of Orange often feels like the first draft of an anime that, even were all these issues fixed, would still be merely just below average. All these little problems add up, and they make Pride of Orange an altogether miserable watching experience.
One could try to chalk all this up to Puraore’s length, but two of the anime I previously mentioned were also single cour. It is very possible, with economical character building, stylish animation, sharp writing that builds a solid triumph narrative, etc., to make your audience care about even a quite large cast in that amount of time. Pride of Orange never swings that, because it has none of those things. It doesn’t even manage to instill much of a base level thrill off the novelty of its premise, the one thing that objectively distinguishes this series from any other. In October, right around when Pride of Orange started airing, a pilot short called “SHAREDOL” managed to do that much in less than three minutes. Length is no excuse.
In the broadest sense, the problem is this. The best anime can, in the moment, feel monumental. I’ll again draw a comparison to The Idolmaster (you’ll have to forgive my lack of experience with sports anime, which would honestly be more appropriate here, but the general structures still apply). One got the sense, during the series’ climactic concert, that those girls had done everything to earn their moment. They would’ve bled and died on that stage if that’s what it took. It feels, as it’s happening, huge. All-important.
Pride of Orange manages the almost impressive feat of going in the other direction. Of making not just its parent genres, but its entire medium feel small, trivial, and trifling. While watching it, I felt transmogrified into a disapproving stepmother, finger-wagging at myself for watching these silly cartoons. And you can accuse me of projection, and say that no anime, no matter how bad, should make me feel this way. But the fact of the matter is that taken together, as a whole, Pride of Orange‘s cheez-whiz take on the sports and idol anime genres improbably transforms simple boredom into existential dread. It is such a yawning void of mediocrity that it’s somehow one of the worst anime I’ve ever seen. At the risk of repeating myself, it is distinguished from past Magic Planet Anime worst-of candidates like Speed Grapher, Big Order, The Day I Became a God, and fellow idol trainwreck 22/7 by the fact that those anime were bad in a way that still made it clear that the people behind them cared about them. They may have had any number of very serious qualitative flaws. They may have been downright offensive at times. But a certain kind of terribleness can only come from misplaced passion, which at least implies that there is passion.
Let me be very clear; this is not true of Pride of Orange. I do not get the sense that anyone who worked on this series cared about it at all. Whether because they did not want to or because circumstances made it so they could not I do not know, but the few tiny pinpricks of light that poke through–Naomi and Riko’s relationship, the vanishingly brief pair of dance numbers that comprise the entirety of the show’s “idol” element, the surprisingly solid soundtrack–make it clear that for the vast majority of this show, nobody involved gave a shit. It has all the artistry of a McDonald’s order and ends with a limp, nondescript hand gesture too lazy to be a middle finger. Make no mistake, all of this is tragic.
And perhaps the worst part is that I don’t think Puraore is unique in this way. Things like Pride of Orange are what you get when a zeitgeist is about to die. Most of my time as an active anime enthusiast has been spent in the midst of the idol anime boom. I have liked a decent amount of those shows, but I wouldn’t quite call myself an “idol anime fan.” Those who would should be wary; things like Puraore are not a good sign. The same is broadly true of the “all-female cast does stuff” supergenre in general, and for that matter, anime on the whole.
What else is there to say? Pride of Orange is symptomatic of an industry that is simply producing way, way too much content by sheer volume. Few people watched it. Fewer of those who did will remember it–fondly or otherwise–in a few years’ time. It is hypergeneric but endlessly replaceable, a combination ice skate / high heel stomping on all our faces forever. In this light, the name of the protagonists’ team sounds less like a quirky sports team name and more like a sneered command. Dream, monkeys. Dream hard. Because there has to be something better than this.
* I should make a note here to apologize to all involved with Selection Project, a different idol anime from the Fall 2021 season that I derided as unimpressive in my impressions post for the first episode. I foolishly assumed that because Pride of Orange has a stupid premise it might be more interesting than SelePro. I have heard through the grapevine that Selection Project apparently eventually got quite good, something Puraore cannot say. (And really it’s hard to imagine how it could possibly be worse.) If one of these two anime ever picks up a cult following, it will not be the one I reviewed for you today.
Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Hello, treasured readers! I don’t have much to say this week, but I will remind you to pop on over to the poll to choose what I cover weekly on Let’s Watch sometime before December ends if you’re interested in doing that and haven’t done so yet. Other than that? A fairly short one this week with just two shows, but on the plus side; they’re both anime that haven’t appeared in this column for quite a while.
Komi Can’t Communicate
It’s been quite a while since Komi Can’t Communicate last appeared here. If you’re wondering why, I will remind any returning readers that I am following NovaWorks‘ fansub release, which is going slowly, but remains absolutely worth it because of their inventive typesetting and clear love of the material.
In the third episode, their most recent release, we’re introduced to a new character, Himiko Agari.
She’s kind of…weird. Initially it seems like her main role will be to give Komi a friend who also has pretty severe anxiety. And most of her introductory segment focuses on a miscommunication the two have. (Or rather a lack of one; Komi wants to introduce herself to Himiko but instead just follows her around the school building silently. Which understandably freaks Himiko out.)
And then we get to the climax of the bit and the punchline is…this.
It’s just a bit confusing, really. For one thing, it isn’t much of a joke. For another, this particular shade of Himiko’s personality seems to flip on and off like a lightswitch as the scene demands. This is hardly the quandary that Najimi’s characterization posed, but it is symptomatic of a strange tendency for Komi to sometimes squish its characters down to one-note cutouts for the sake of gags.
Even the soundtrack gets in on this. Komi‘s OST tends to slide into a gentle sway full of plucked guitars and soft strings whenever it wants to sell a genuine “friendship moment.” But it’s just as quick to cut the music entirely if it can subvert that for a quick joke. In general, this all still works a lot better here than it did in the source material, but it’s a notably odd sensation nonetheless, and prevents the show from flowing well at times. Does Komi want to have a core of real, warm compassion for its characters, or is everything just a setup for a parade of gags? One gets the sense that the series itself doesn’t quite know the answer, and on the occasion that it tries something, and it falls flat, that tends to be why.
What tends to work a bit better than the personality gags are situations where the humor comes from Tadano (or one of Komi’s other friends) attempting to help Komi socialize more, and inadvertently speeding into a brick wall in the process. That’s more or less what happens with the final segment of this episode, where Najimi invites the two of them to play a chant game. Style checks of the Pokémon anime and some classic “comedy anime treats a mundane activity like a shonen battle” humor follow, and it’s genuinely great.
You don’t need to know that the studio behind Komi Can’t Communicate is OLM, who have also done the Pokémon anime since it premiered in 1997 and made a hot-streak return to non-primetime anime production this year between this series and ODD TAXI to find this funny. But, hey, now you do anyway.
Elsewhere, a bit about cellphone-related anxiety taps in to the sort of universal cringe-beholding-cringe feeling that tends to make the best sort of this kind of comedy tick. All of this, of course, is accentuated by the visual treat that the series continues to be. It remains one of the best-looking anime of 2021. (An aside should be made also to also again shout out Komi’s voice actress, Aoi Koga, who gets barely two actual lines in this episode but still manages to somehow make the character burst with personality even when she’s mostly communicating through wordless single syllables.)
So if it’s rough around the edges, maybe that’s worth sitting through for the moments when it really shines. Komi is an odd one, and if it hasn’t entirely kept that “must-watch” mantle from its premiere, it’s at least a worthwhile watch regardless.
Rumble Garanndoll
It’s been a while since we last checked in with Rumble Garanndoll. To be fair, the fact that it airs on Mondays makes covering it here a smidge inconvenient. (By the time this article goes live, the “next episode” will already have aired.) Nonetheless; I’ve kept up with it intermittently. My opinion on the show’s merits (of which it has quite a few) and flaws (same) has evened out into thinking it is a solid little action series with a quirky aesthetic bent that, as a nice bonus, has something to say. This is roughly how I felt about BACK ARROW from earlier this year–also a weird mecha anime–although I think Rumble‘s self-aware otakucore vibes might fit with how I like my media a little better. (Which probably says nothing good about me, but oh well.)
Since I last wrote about it, Rumble has introduced a third (and presumably final) Battery Girl; Misa “WerdCat” Kuroki. Misa is the youngest of the Battery Girls and, in a refreshing change of pace, looks to Hosomichi more as a surrogate older sibling than a romantic interest. Her story manages to squeeze some life out of the ancient “pa went missing one day and never came back :(” trope, to surprisingly affecting….er, effect.
I remain undecided on the main visual metaphor here, a bright red linker cable, of the sort that was used to connect handheld consoles in the pre-WiFi era. (Specifically the consoles that show up here are NeoGeo Pockets. Presumably the Gameboy would’ve been too mainstream.) Much of these episodes’ plots revolves around an attempt to find one in the dungeons under Akihabara (yes, there are dungeons here. Don’t question it.) And in the flashbacks when we see Misa’s father go missing, they are the only thing fully colored in the otherwise sepia tone scenes. It’s a silly visual symbol, but this is just the frequency Rumble operates on, and one must accept it if they wish to enjoy the show.
Similarly, when Misa takes control of the Doll itself, turning it into “Cat Three,” the series manages the impressive task of making a giant robot-sized kotatsu table look rather cool as it turns into an artillery platform. Rumble Garanndoll is nothing if not devoted to its shtick.
Y’know, like, nya?
The main antagonist of this arc, Yakumo Kamizuru, is also intriguing. Perhaps best described in a nutshell as a “fascistic shrine maiden who is also a mecha pilot,” Yakumo is one of the show’s more interesting antagonists. She retreats at the end of the arc, despite only minutes prior disparaging the entire resistance as “failures” and “losers”, chuckling to herself as she does so. Her name, an apparent allusion to Koizumi Yakumo, is interesting to me. The historical Yakumo was a Greek-Irish-American who eventually settled in Japan after developing a fascination with its culture in the late 1800s. (And much besides, he’s an interesting figure.) If I may wander into fan theory territory here, I do wonder if this is meant to indicate that our Yakumo here isn’t actually from “True” Japan. Perhaps she’s a defector originally from “Illusory” Japan. Her general attitude belies an interest in older Japanese culture. So part of me wonders if, assuming this is true, she didn’t defect just because she was bitter about people caring more about modern pop culture than older things. (I may of course, be wildly wrong. But hey, if I make a called shot about this, I want the credit.)
All this is to say nothing of the most recent episode, the ninth.
Episode Nine takes place almost entirely at a festival organized by the Resistance. In some anime, this would be a filler episode. Here, it leads directly into our presumable final confrontation (there are, after all, only three episodes of this thing left).
Much of the episode revolves around a ramen stand, where Hosomichi meets an in-disguise Captain Akatsuki Shinonome and, of course, the stand’s owner. Said old man (who goes unnamed here) serves to show us both what life is like for the older ordinary residents of Akihabara, including why they might join up with the resistance in the first place, and to start a conversation between these two opposing people.
Now Rumble has to be careful here, because we’ve never really been given a look inside Akatsuki’s head, and there has been prior to now little reason to not believe he’s simply a garden-variety authoritarian. Here, he gains some character detail as he veiledly explains his own point of view to the ramen shop owner (and to Hosomichi.) The danger of doing this of course is always that your work’s audience might end up sympathizing with the fascist; an especially real possibility here at the end of the episode when a drunk-off-his-ass Anju (that’s Hosomichi’s “boss” if you’ve forgotten) shows up, makes a huge show of representing the resistance, and starts bullying the ramen shop owner. My main hope is that this is obviously enough meant to not be a real criticism from the show’s end of the resistance, so no one will take it that way.
The shop owner himself, incidentally, may go down as one of the great relatable anime characters of the year. At least to me.
Amen, brother.
And lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Rin and Hayate’s meeting here. We get to see sadly little of it and it’s most likely setup for something in the next episode, but they make a rather cute couple. (Which a random doujin shop owner voiced by Mayumi Shintani actually mistakes them for.)
The final confrontation is set to take place just outside what looks an awful lot like Tokyo Big Sight, AKA The Comiket Building. Which, honestly, where else would Rumble Garanndoll finish?
Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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.
Good day, anime fans. I don’t have terribly much to say this week in the lead-in. Here’s some thoughts about an anime I’m a bit mixed on, one I really like, and one that I….just feel like I have to tell people about.
Mieruko-chan
I have always been a bit of two minds about the Mieruko-chan anime. I thought, and still think, that its positives outweigh its negatives, but it is admittedly difficult to evaluate a show that contains a somber, heartstring-tugging story about a teacher’s failed pregnancy in the same episode where the lead at one point pisses herself in fear. That’d be episode 8, and that’s Mieruko-chan in general. Something tragic and something funny (or “funny”, in this case) within the span of minutes of each other and seeming like they don’t quite go together.
One could argue this reflects the chaotic uncertainty of life in general. Normally, that is in fact exactly what I would say, and I have said similar things about other shows with this kind of tonal yo-yoing. But there are a lot of anime out there that pull this off than Mieruko-chan does, and it just doesn’t fit together properly much of the time. Increasingly, I just wonder if this is the sort of series that should’ve stayed in the manga format.
On the other hand, occasionally it does hit it out of the park. Episode 9, the most recent as of when I’m writing this, is about 50% about Miko and friends visiting a haunted house. Realizing that she can here react to whatever she sees however she likes, Miko revels in the chance to scream her lungs out. Much to the confusion of Julia, her also-able-to-see-ghosts sometimes-rival whose inability to perceive the larger spirits that torment Miko has given her a very inaccurate idea of what our lead is actually like. (Julia is probably my favorite character in general, it must be said.)
So, I don’t know, maybe the show is fine as it is. My hope is that the transition into the arc about Zen Toono, a substitute teacher at Miko’s school, will signal the start of a more interesting run as the series enters its final few episodes.
Perfectly nice, I’m sure.
Ranking of Kings
Last week dropped a bombshell; through some dark magic, King Bosse was back, in the body of his son Daida. Meanwhile, as Bojji trained in the underworld, he appeared to now be able to split boulders with his fists. We get a fair amount of explanation relating to these developments here, but as in basically any good ongoing piece of serial fiction, they raise as many questions as they answer.
We open on a flashback with a young(ish), not-yet-King Bosse negotiating with, wouldn’t you know it, the great red devil who showed up when he passed away a number of episodes ago.
His wish? To be the strongest. The demon’s reply? He can’t conjure power out of nowhere, but if Bosse had a family, he could steal it from a blood relative. Bosse, thus, finds the strongest giant woman in the world and proposes to her. (In doing so, he performs a perfectly understandable action for sinister reasons. Quite a jerk, King Bosse.)
This, as we learn (though it’s not hard to figure out), is Bojji’s biological mother. What exactly happened to her after the tiny prince was born is not revealed here, though it’s hard not to assume the worst. Bosse carves out his own realm in what seems to be just a few short years.
That is Bosse in the distance, walking away from a whole battlefield of dead orcs. In some anime, this would be a way to show how cool he is. Ousama Ranking is not such an anime.
This sequence, and much of Ousama Ranking in general, seem to contemplate the cruelty of power. If one has to do such terrible things to become so strong, what can one possibly do with their strength that’s actually worth it? And does it not inevitably lead to the pursuit of power for its own sake? After Bojji is born, Bosse swears that he will ensure a future for the prince where he wants for nothing. It’s safe to say, given the present, that he didn’t succeed. But there is a marked disconnect between Bosse as we see him in the past and Bosse as we see him returned in Daida’s body. The influence of his vizier Miranjo1–a flesh-and-blood person in these flashbacks but trapped in Daida’s mirror in the present–may have something to do with it, but it’s hard to call definitively.
We also catch up with Domas and Hokuro. Their relationship here changes quite rapidly. It develops from Hokuro trying to kill Domas for his treachery and failing, to Domas rescuing a to-be-executed Hokuro from Queen Hilling’s wrath out of apparent guilt, to Domas being ordered by Bosse–who makes himself known to the swordsman–to destroy a cave to the underworld that exists beneath the castle. Ousama Ranking‘s pacing has been brisk but quite good so far, and this marks the rare occasion where it’s a bit too fast. This seems like the sort of plot that could’ve carried its own episode. Although, I will note, there’s no reason to suspect that Domas and Hokuro’s partnership won’t continue to change. Their interactions in this episode end with Domas promising to train Hokuro. Training he claims Hokuro will sorely need for the task ahead of them.
Finally, there is Daida. Yes, it would appear that the blonde prince is still alive. Although what state, exactly, he’s in, is quite ambiguous. The final moments of the episode conclude with him waking up in a totally black void. He stumbles around, wondering if he’s been imprisoned somewhere, but the total lack of any features seems to imply his prison his more metaphysical in nature. Spare a thought for the ambitious prince, he’ll need it.
As for Bojji? Well, the little big man’s training is complete in this episode as well, though this is one of the show’s episodes where Bojji assumes a minor role in his own show. (Not a bad thing, but notable.) Perhaps his newfound power can help him rescue his brother? Maybe because Bojji came by his strength honestly he won’t fall into whatever pit of ambition Bosse ended up in? It’s hard to say. All we know for certain is this; The Ranking of Kings continues, and somewhere nearby, a devil grins.
Waccha PriMagi!
A new face on this column, and one that’s quite the watching experience.
I’ve been following Waccha PriMagi since it aired. But it’s something I watch with friends on the weekends, so I haven’t really ever thought of it as something I intended to write about in this column. And my knowledge of the larger Pretty Rhythm / King of Prism (I’m not even sure which name is “more correct”) meta-franchise which it’s a part of is quite limited. But I really feel like I need to just tell somebody how utterly bonkers this show is. To record it for posterity so that a hundred years hence, someone can know that yes, this was a real thing and yes it really was like this. God help us all. Or maybe international superstar Jennifer help us all. In the show’s world they seem rather interchangeable.
She’s like if Beyonce` was blonde and had the most generic name ever.
The actual premise isn’t much to stretch the brain here. Matsuri, our protagonist, likes idols and wants to be one. One day, the magical cat girl Nyamu appears and helps her become one. There’s a competition to see who’s the best idol, pretty standard stuff for the genre aside from the magic element, and even that is not really where the weirdness comes from.
No, the weirdness comes from two things. For one, the gaudy character designs. The girls, especially in-costume, look like they’ve been shot with a glitter cannon by Lisa Frank, and there are enough pride flag colors snuck into character designs that it feels like an intentional easter egg on the part of a character designer rather than simple coincidence. Even the comparatively “dark” designs like Lemon’s gothic lolita ensemble are just so much. This is a strength, not a weakness, but it’s a level of audacity in character design that is rather rare, and it takes some getting used to.
Secondly, there is the writing.
Good god is there the writing.
I wouldn’t dare to say that Waccha PriMagi is badly written. It’s a kids’ show, and it’s not for a 27 year old college dropout who writes a blog for a living. It is however, definitely hyperactively written. Compared to it, co-seasonal Tropical Rouge Precure (which is also for young kids, mind you!) looks downright sedate. The simple quantity of things that happens in a given episode is through the roof, and episodes tumble into one another as though the entire series were a single long film. There is little of the episodic nature often associated with kids’ anime. This shit has continuity, and it has the audacity to expect you to remember it all. (Or maybe it doesn’t, given that the most recent episode, the tenth, is a recap episode less than a dozen episodes in.)
Is any of that a problem? Honestly, not really. The series’ sheer chaos works in its favor. Most anime take a fairly straight line from point A to point B. Waccha is content to doodle all over the map on its way there, which is why it took ten episodes for us to get a concise explanation of what the tournament that will presumably drive much of the rest of the plot actually is. This would be annoying for a shorter anime, but as Waccha is an annual it seems safe to assume it will run for a full four cours (landing somewhere between 42 and 50 episodes by its finale), so it has plenty of time to figure out petty things like “plot” and “making sense” later.
What it does excel at, chaotic as it is, is character interaction. The characters in this are great. The sole exception I’d maybe make being our actual lead, Matsuri, who I find a bit of a cipher outside of her idol fangirling. (Even then, she’s pleasant and charming, just not to the level of the other characters.) Nyamu is a total brat, something like a land-bound cousin of TroPre’s Laura La Mer. There’s a cool senpai in the form of Hina, whose day-glo raver look could maybe dull some of the surprise from learning that the song from her first concert kinda slaps.
Seriously, why does this sound like something that would dominate the radio in 2007?
Then there’s Miruki, a baldly two-faced little conniver who would be absolutely detestable if she wasn’t so damn funny. It’s here worth noting that these characters all have their own animal companion friends. And hers is a decidedly stoned-looking bear. And finally there’s Lemon Kokoa, my personal favorite character. I should also take a minute to mention the incredibly good official subtitles this thing has, with full credit to translators Natalie Jones and Nathan Lopez. They’re a bit loose, which some purists may dislike, but they add a lot of color to the show by incorporating modern stan terms, including “stan” itself, “bias,” etc. I mostly bring this up because Lemon is an idol otaku, and also just generally a reclusive, anxious wreck of a gamer girl shut-in. When she and her friends (read: her MMO guild) show up, the translators also take the opportunity to tangle in some modern internet slang. Which leads to the decidedly surreal experience of seeing, say, a phrase like “big mood” in an anime.
Lemon is just below the frame, having passed out from the immense stress of being perceived.
She also has easily the best outfit in the series, the aforementioned gothic lolita dress patterned after the stained glass in a cathedral. A friend described her debut song as sounding “like Touhou music,” and I couldn’t agree more. It also rules.
Yes, the logo behind her says “Radiant Abyss.” It says that because Lemon is cooler than all of us.
I don’t expect I’ll cover Waccha PriMagi often on this column, and it may well never appear here again. As I said, it’s more of a fun weekend watch with friends for me. But! I should stress that if you can find some folks to watch it with, it is immensely fun. (I imagine watching it solo unless you’re a sugar rush’d-out ten-year-old might be a bit much. But you’re welcome to experiment and see if I’m wrong.) Waccha absolutely drips with style and personality. Sometimes when you’ve got so much of that, common sense takes a back seat. Personally, I think it suits the show just fine.
1: I am admittedly not fully sure if this is intended to be her actual name or is some sort of title. In Japanese the character is apparently only referred to as “Mahou no Kagami”, which I believe simply means “Magic Mirror”, so I’m not entirely certain what’s going on there.
Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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.
Hello again, anime fans. I don’t have terribly much to say in my lead-in here. It’s been a bit of a week and I’m a bit struck by the winter blues. I hope you won’t begrudge me that this week’s column is only about two shows. For what it’s worth, I think they’re some of the best that have aired this year. One of 2021’s great stories comes to an end and another begins to hit its stride….
The Heike Story
A common nugget of wisdom holds to show, not tell, when weaving a story. But it’s a false dichotomy in some ways. In the Heike Monogatari, now concluded after eleven weeks, the showing and the telling are one in the same. Never has this been more true than in the series’ final act, where Biwa, fully embracing her role as a chronicler of fate, tells us of the Heike’s demise as we see it happen; two perspectives unified like the visions from her own mystical eyes.
The series’ finale is a thing of beauty. The Heike Clan make their final stand in a battle at sea. They lose, as we knew they would from day one. Many, including the young Emperor, cast themselves into the sea. It is not what you’d call a happy ending.
A common criticism I saw of Heike Monogatari during its airing is why, exactly, Biwa did not “do more” to help the Heike who are, after all, her adopted family. As a critique it makes some sense on the surface. She can see the future, and if anime has trained us to expect anything it’s that those with heterochromia and mysterious powers will intervene to stop bad things from happening. But I cannot help but think this is a simplistic view of both Biwa’s personhood and her situation. She is a witness to history; as we all are, in spite of whatever unique talents we may or may not have. Many of us could “do more” to change things with our own talents, yet we do not. If it is a character flaw on her part, it is one most of us share.
And then there’s the series’ moral, such as it is. A fundamental truth of the world; all things are impermanent. Everything dies, empires rise only to fall. What remains are the stories we pass down and the feelings we hold with us. That, truly, is all.
This is a theme that has run through some seventy years of anime history, but if one wanted to find contemporary examples, they would not need to look all that hard. Surely critics who have studied more classical literature than I have will point out that this is a “very Japanese” and “very Buddhist” theme. Perhaps these things are true, the series is based on a historical epic after all and such things are very much informed by their era and place. I also think, though, it may also be a warning against self-importance akin to what we often grant ourselves here in the Anglosphere. We treat ourselves as living at history’s end, but it continues to happen every day in spite of us.
Heike Monogatari‘s true triumph is to delve into the minds of those gone by; to make the past feel real by showing us the human beings behind history’s academic brushstrokes. In doing so, it reminds us that we are all mortal, and we are all witnesses. Like Biwa, many of us will live to see the fall of all kinds of empires. The only question is whether we will deign to sing about it.
I don’t usually pick shows up mid-season, but Ranking of Kings (known as the somewhat snappier Ousama Ranking in its home country) just didn’t give me much of a choice. “Positive buzz” is one thing, but Ranking on a pure visual level does not look like most anime. This is a reflection of the source material, which seems to draw both on a western-influenced fairy tale book influence and on older strains of anime, not many of which have particularly many artistic descendants in the modern day. So provably, even speaking aesthetically, Ranking stands apart from the usual seasonal grind. This would be interesting on its own, but without a strong story to back it up, it wouldn’t be worth much. Thankfully, Ranking stands as a buzzer-beater candidate for one of the year’s most unique anime from just about every angle. Its visual style could fool one into thinking it’s a happy, straightforward story, but the truth of the matter is that it’s more of a deliberate contrast against the complex character writing and political machinations that our lead, the Deaf Prince Bojji, finds himself caught in.
It’s an utterly fascinating little show, and eight episodes in I can confidently say I have no idea where it’s going to go from here. But what I can do is tell you where it’s been. Doing so alone should be enough for any skeptics to hop aboard the Bojji Train before it’s too late.
Our setup is pretty simple. Bojji is the eldest son of Bosse, the king of a nameless kingdom of which he was the founder. In the show’s opening act, Bosse dies, leaving the question of succession a difficult one. Bojji is Deaf, physically small, and has the misfortune of living in a distinctly fantasy-medieval setting. (Ranking effortlessly pulls off letting us into Bojji’s inner world without any spoken dialogue, but many of the adults around him tend to treat him with vague disdain, or at best, an infantilizing overprotectiveness.) He’s also not much of a swordsman, despite the guideship of his trainer Domas. Though interestingly, he’s great at dodging, a skill that has yet to quite pay dividends narratively but is sure to later.
In contrast to Bojji, there is his younger half-brother, Prince Daida. Daida is much more in the image of a traditional heir to the throne than Bojji. It is thus unsurprising that when Bosse passes away, the kingdom’s council of advisors votes to install Daida as the king instead of his older brother. One might initially think that the story’s central conflict will come down to Bojji’s quest to reclaim his rightful throne, and it may still circle back around to that eventually, but something that simple would not do justice to the sheer amount of stuff this series has covered so far.
For instance; adding fuel to the movement to replace Bojji as the heir apparent is that when Bosse passes away, a massive red devil appears and gestures at the prince. What does this mean? We still don’t know a good half-cour later.
Which is good, because that’s how you build some genuine mystery. Details like this are packed into every minute of Ranking’s runtime and things are only explained directly if absolutely necessary. As a watching experience, it’s engrossing, and doesn’t have much recent competition. I haven’t even brought up Bojji’s plus-one, his shadowy friend Kage who the prince won over with his kindness, and whose obligate backstory episode is one of the show’s highlights.
Some of this attention to detail might come down to Ranking‘s runtime; it’d feel rushed were it only one cour, but it’s thankfully two. (This sadly puts it out of the running for my top five list I’ll be publishing at the end of December. I’m sure the folks at Wit Studio are just heartbroken.)
I have to admit that I considered doing a writeup of this week’s episode as well, but in deference to those who have perhaps not started watching the show yet but might find it interesting based on what I’ve said, I will not do so. Next week, though, you have my promise! Stay strong in the meantime, Prince Bojji!
He’s a mighty little man.
Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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.
Let’s start with the obvious; what a title! In a time period where there are quite literally more anime being made per season than ever before, a series needs to do all it can to stand out. A novel premise is one way to do that, and Irina: The Vampire Cosmonaut, which is about basically exactly what that title implies, certainly delivers on that front.
The short version; some amount of years after the end of not-quite WW2, two nations, not-quite The United States (“Arnack”) and not-quite The Soviet Union (“Zirnitra”) are competing in a space race. In lieu of sending an actual human aboard a rocket, Zirnitra’s space program opts to use a vampire. Which, in the world of Irina, basically means a normal human but nocturnal and with pointy teeth. (The series goes out of its way to assure us that all the traditional vampire clichés are just myths. Which, in of itself, is something of a cliché by this point. But the point is made; it’s not a garlic and crucifixes sort of story. Fair enough.)
Surely there are no shady, immoral reasons for this.
Our actual lead is not Irina, the titular vampire, herself, but rather her caretaker, a training program flunky named Lev.
This is Lev. He’s pleasant enough.
It’s here I should point out; this thing is tagged with the Romance genre on every site I can find it listed on, and between Lev, Irina herself, and Lev’s assistant, Anna, there is absolutely the possibility for this to descend into mediocre harem hell. However, I prefer to assume an anime is going to become the best version of itself. What would that look like for Irina?
Well, the show’s strengths are evident even this early on. While none of the characters strike as super complex (at least not yet), the important ones feel well-thought-out. Lev is trying to reconcile having to give up on his own dream of cosmonauthood with his new responsibility taking care of Irina. Irina is all too happy to tell every human in earshot that she hates them, which is evidently a defense mechanism from being treated like an object her entire life. (That’s not me reading into the series; the latter is obvious from visual cues and the former is explicitly pointed out a number of times.)
There’s not a ton going on, so far, but the promise is there. The early scenes especially seem to hint at something deeper going on, with context-free flashes of Irina clutching a necklace, which she still has in the present, in the midst of a snowstorm. And in the political undertones of her involvement in the spaceflight program in the first place.
Really, for this sort of thing, “promise” is enough. It’s distinct enough that it can coast by on potential, at least for now. Irina is not going to be most peoples’ premiere of the season, but you could do far, far worse. And who knows? We might be talking about it in far grander terms six weeks from now.
Grade: C+ The Takeaway: Keep an eye on this one. Consider picking it up if you want an additional show and the novel combination of sci-fi and romance genres with a dash of horror appeals to you. Otherwise, maybe hold off until it gets some more positive word-of-mouth.
Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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