Posted on September 10, 2022March 11, 2023 in anime, Reviews

ROOTS Needs to Touch Grass

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

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

Magic Planet Anime posts will be extremely irregular for the foreseeable future. See this post for details.

Maybe I just don’t quite get it.

.hack//Roots, the second entry of the storied .hack franchise, is a kind of anime that doesn’t really get made anymore, on several fronts. It’s an adaption of (and sort of a prequel to) the video game .hack//G.U. It’s also a fairly low-key and unflashy speculative fiction series. There used to be a lot of these; stuffed to the brim with a lot of place-names, people-names, and thing-names, where the central plot is the main fixture but is, at least in theory, supported by a whole lot of worldbuilding and Lore™. The slow pace is a key part of it too, enough so that my pet neologism “Proper Noun Machine Gun” doesn’t quite feel appropriate. (Proper Noun Composite Bow, maybe?) Usually, the plot is about finding a McGuffin of some kind. Or several McGuffins. Often, there are competing factions who want the McGuffin(s). At a glance, you’d usually guess they were mid-budget productions. You were usually correct. All of this is true in Roots, to at least some extent, and I have to admit that it made getting invested in the series hard for me. That in mind, I did not really care for it at all, we’ll circle back around to why.

In the past decade, anime like this have had their niche crowded out by light novel adaptions and the like, which have a more uptempo pace and are generally a lot campier. So, I must admit that for the second .hack franchise entry in a row, I went into Roots with the mentality of a pop cultural archeologist. .hack//SIGN was so of-its-era that the very net culture it was loosely based on is basically a foreign country nowadays. Roots is much the same, despite being a bit more recent (it hails from 2006) as signposted by its tangle of now-ancient MMO slang, some of which was never common in the anglosphere to begin with.

But enough about that, what’s it actually about?

^{Hint: not this.}

For the first half of its show, there’s a straightforward answer to that question. Our main character is Haseo (Takahiro Sakurai), a surly noob who finds himself getting ganked on his very first day playing hit MMO The World. As the series’ plot revs up, he gets caught between the machinations of two guilds; the Twilight Brigade, led by the mysterious Ovan (Hiroki Touchi) searching for the Key of the Twilight—you may remember it from SIGN—and the enigmatic TaN Guild, who oppose the former for initially nebulous reasons. Haseo joins the Brigade at about the show’s quarter mark, and consequently they form the bulk of our remaining main cast. The main other members of note are Shino (Kaori Nazuka), who Haseo quickly forms a close bond with, and Tabby (Megumi Toyoguchi), who is another new player in search of friends in the digital fields and cities of The World.

Our McGuffins this time around are glowing crystals called Virus Cores, things of obscure provenance found in glitched-out locations within The World called Lost Grounds. The show opens before these things start to actually turn up, but they’re the main plot-drivers for the earlier parts of the series.

But detailing the plot from this point on becomes, or at least I feel it becomes, rote. Eventually the Brigade dissolves and things crumble into a syrupy morass, and the show never really recovers.

Before we discuss why, though, let’s consider the overall positives.

What I will give the series is that its soundtrack and background visuals are consistently excellent. As a production, and keeping in mind its origins, it is generally just a solid affair all-around. (There are some rough spots toward the end, but they’re relatively few in number.) The fight choreography is engaging on the occasion that fights actually pop up. In general, the show looks and sounds good. Unfortunately, that is about the sum of my unambiguously positive thoughts on .hack//ROOTS.

After the opening third or so of the series, these strengths clash with an increasingly sluggish central plot, and the series slows to a crawl. There is a lot of utterly leaden exposition—some of it handed out by decent characters, in spite of that, like the wise cat-man sage Phyllo (Junpei Takiguchi)—that is probably interesting if you have much more prior investment in this franchise than I do, but without that existing experience it mostly just comes across as boring.

There are, though, writing-side positives, too. Haseo’s character arc is terrible, as we’ll get to, but some of the other character writing is fairly strong.

For instance, a bit under halfway through, there’s an excellent bit of character work where Shino professes that she likes being in the Brigade because she feels that she can truly be herself there. There is something to this idea of Ovan (or really, Shino herself, given that she does just as much to make the Twilight Brigade what it is, while it exists) as a great creator-of-spaces. Areas where people can just be without having to worry about the pressures of the outside world. In the modern, mundane internet, there are plenty of such spaces, although not as many as there used to be, many of them on services like Discord. And there is also something to Roots’ depiction of one of these spaces falling apart; about halfway through the series, most especially in episodes 12 and 13, where the Twilight Brigade all quit after Ovan’s sudden disappearance, and Shino dies outright at the hands of the mysterious digital executioner Tri-Edge (Sayaka Aida). The collapse of a place like this is genuinely a sad thing and trying to convey that through the story is one of .hack//Roots‘ better ideas. Unfortunately, having good ideas and telling good stories are different things, and just because Roots can do the former does not imply it can necessarily do the latter.

From here, the plot again greatly slows down, and most of the remainder of the show is spent on Haseo’s deeply tedious quest for vengeance against Tri-Edge. On paper, you can see how this would work. Sacrificing almost every positive attribute you have in order to “get stronger” so you can avenge the death of a loved one is a tried-and-true narrative, one that’s been done many times in anime, and sometimes to great effect. But two things sink Roots’ attempt to tap into this bit of the collective human psyche. For one, the very fact that the series takes place within an MMO makes the whole thing feel slightly ridiculous, even with Shino being literally dead. For two, and much more importantly, Haseo is just not an interesting character. He begins the series as a whiny dweeb, and the series’ attempts to sell him as a genuine menace when he decides to go full raging avenger just don’t work.

Shino is gone, Haseo has given up a lot, so all of this, again, should work, but none of this changes the fact that what he’s mostly doing is mopily level grinding in an MMO. It’s silly, which would itself be excusable if there was any sense of drama to any of this, but there isn’t. Instead, Haseo mostly looks like a scrawny teenager cosplaying Cu Chulainn Alter for the back half of the show, something that really does not help its stabs at gravitas land.

^….

Elsewhere, things are better. More grounded characters like Tabby, whose struggles still consist mostly of her wanting friends and not knowing how to deal with her first friend group breaking up, is the one who’s best and easiest to relate to, among the main cast. She carries that torch through the whole show, and she might be my favorite character over all. At show’s end, she quits The World, and plans to become a nurse, so she can help people in the real world.

Other minor characters like Pi (Sanae Kobayashi), who is effectively a combination minion of the obligate mysterious conspiracy / put-upon secretary, and Saburou (Shizuka Itou), a hacker with a talent for longwinded, clunky metaphors, brighten things up when they’re onscreen. But we here again return to the central problem of these characters just not being on-screen all that often.

And even when they are, they’re usually talking about Haseo. I’m reminded of that Simpsons episode about Poochie the Dog, except in this case Poochie is the show’s main character. We’re supposed to buy him as an avenging badass, but on a simple vibe level, it just doesn’t work.

This disconnect renders most of the show’s entire second cour tedious, but there are bright spots even here.

Episode 19, for example, treats the annoying but relatively mundane practice of Real Money Trading (RMT’ing, as the show frequently abbreviates it) with all the deadly seriousness of an episode of The Wire. Here, former TaN member Tawaraya reappears under a new account, using the name Tohta (Kenta Miyake), and busts up a ring of RMT’ers exploiting the playerbase for money. It’s a surprisingly interesting plot, with a fair amount of intrigue and actual mystery that is sorely lacking from much of the preceding material. It’s the one time the show’s self-seriousness actually works in its favor. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last, as the series returns to its ongoing main plot in the following episode and almost immediately loses that edge.

Finally, in the last few episodes, we learn that Phyllo has passed away, and has spent the last eight months of his life with a terminal cancer diagnosis, logging in to The World every day, just to chat up players. It’s a sincere, resonant ode to the quiet life, and the idea that some people find a deep joy in just communicating with others at all. It is maybe the single most affecting moment in the entire series….and then the entire rest of the last episode is just about Haseo again. Even when .hack//Roots has a good idea—and it has a fair few of them!—it can’t stay focused for long enough.

The problem with these sorts of anime is that they live and die by their central plot, which is usually driven by some kind of mystery. Here, at least in Roots‘ second half, the mystery is what precisely happened to Shino, why Tri-Edge attacked her in the first place, and where he is now. But there’s no compelling sense of discovery to it, everything just feels far too slow for something like this, and many of the plot points raised here do not actually get resolved by show’s end. (For actual conclusions you’d have to play G.U. itself, or perhaps watch one of its film adaptions.) So, the show drags and drags, all buildup and no payoff. Despite having only 26 episodes, it is mostly a series of intermittent highlights surrounded by doldrum. The bright spots make the experience more tolerable, but they don’t make it good. The disparate strengths never form a whole.

I don’t want to make it seem like I hate .hack//Roots. I certainly don’t. But I do find it frustrating, there are few things moreso than an anime with decent ideas that it just can’t figure out how to fit them together. Roots was actually fairly popular, once upon a time, but I think there’s a reason that the .hack series on the whole has largely faded from view. Its sprawling, inaccessible nature certainly has never helped, but if this is more indicative of the average tone and tempo of the franchise than Sign was, I can understand why people are not super interested anymore. Certainly, my personal journey with .hack ends here; I’m logging out.

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Posted on July 12, 2022 in Manga, New Manga First Impressions

New Manga First Impressions: CHAINSAW MAN Revs Again

New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a newly-available-in-English manga.

This column contains spoilers for Part 1 of Chainsaw Man.

Content Warning: The material covered here contains depictions of extreme violence.

Two weeks ago, I had no working relationship with Chainsaw Man whatsoever. But sometimes, the stars align, and something grips you like it’s trying to choke you out and just doesn’t let go. Sometimes too, that happens just before a long-awaited follow-up is about to start. They say timing is everything because it is, and sometimes that timing works out in your favor. Hence this going up mere hours after the opening chapter of Part 2 drops on MangaPlus.

Suffice it to say we’re bending the rules here, too, since Chainsaw Man Part 2 is only a “new” manga with a fair bit of definitional stretching. (MangaPlus doesn’t even count it as a different series than Part 1.) So if you’re not caught up with the first Chainsaw Man arc, if you’re in the position I was in barely a week ago, I recommend closing this column now and go giving it a read, because I’m about to spoil the hell out of it.

It’s lurid, violent, bleak, coarse, and profane. The medium; a world where humanity’s fears materialize into living beings called devils, and of course, where humans called devil hunters must stop them. A story about bad people dying in worse ways that is not afraid to kill off even major characters sometimes suddenly and without warning, but never feels like it’s doing so for simple wanton shock value. It’s pretty fucking fantastic, easily a best-in-genre for the new decade without much in the way of competition. Part 2 has much to live up to.

The end of Part 1 marked also the end of the so-called “Public Safety Arc.” Denji surviving, nearly totally alone, after a wave of death and disillusionment that saw him shed whatever naivety he may still have had. But he’s come out the other side a better person regardless, even as he was one of just three named characters (four if you count Pochi) to survive the often-brutal first part of the manga.

It’s clear that some amount of time has passed, although perhaps not much. The main point to note here is the continued lionization of Chainsaw Man himself, Denji’s hellish heroic alter ego who now serves as both a source of inspiration to the general public and, going by the Curry Man buns we see in this chapter, marketing revenue. (That’s capitalism, babey.)

But anyone who’s main draw to the manga is Denji himself may be disappointed with the opening of Part 2. Instead, we follow a new character entirely, whose comparative mundanity is almost certainly a deliberate contrast to Denji’s dire circumstances at the start of his own story. Perhaps more importantly, like all of the best Chainsaw Man chapters, the opener for Part 2 begins with some off-the-wall crazy shit.

^{The logic behind this devil being weak is that no one is really scared of chickens. I feel like enough people have read}^Fourteen^{for there to be at least something there? Maybe not. It’s not like I’ve read it.}

Our real POV character here is Asa Mitaka. An antisocial, and thus, profoundly normal, high school girl. The only real wrinkle here is that her parents were killed by devils, but that’s not particularly unusual within the context of Chainsaw Man. So the notion of the ordinary high school girl remains.

Don’t worry, she doesn’t stay ordinary for very long.

Mitaka seems to spend most of her days being vaguely annoyed at her classmates and, it’s pretty obvious even before it’s said out loud, jealous of their normal, healthy friendships with each other and, eventually, with Bucky, whose absolutely god-awful chicken puns inevitably endear him to the rest of the class. Meanwhile, the class president tries to get Mitaka to socialize a bit more and open up to the rest of her schoolmates.

Now, anyone familiar with Chainsaw Man would be easily able to tell that something was going to go south here, but I think a lot of people will mistakenly pin the suspicion on Bucky himself. Deliberate misdirection? Maybe. But maybe we’ve just been conditioned to be suspicious of devils over the course of the series’ run so far. Either way, he’s actually a genuinely affable sort by the look of it, and for a brief, split second, you can, if you want to, squint and pretend this is a happy manga where people are allowed to have personal realizations about themselves without an accompanying wallop of massive pain and loss.

Moments after this, she trips and falls, crushing the weak little devil to smithereens. It’s all rather nasty.

The fallout is immediate and predictable, and Mitaka takes this about as well as you’d expect.

The class president, as well as the two’s teacher, Mr. Tanaka, get the idea to visit the poor little hell-chicken’s grave. Tanaka is perhaps under the notion that this will make Mitaka feel better, but the class president quite quickly reveals herself to have a rather different motive, and things promptly get all sorts of gnarly.

In the fractions of a second Mitaka has before this monster—the Justice Devil, per the class president’s own admission—slashes her head in half, she feels relieved, because the president brags that she tripped Mitaka, so Bucky’s death wasn’t really her fault. Implicitly, she’s also relieved that she won’t be hurt anymore. That’s the kind of weapons-grade depressing you can expect from Chainsaw Man.

But it also wouldn’t be Chainsaw Man without some bolt-from-the-blue insane twist, and wouldn’t you know it, even with her head doing its best impression of a rotting pumpkin, Mitaka has just enough presence of mind to witness—and hear—a devilish owl perching on a nearby stoplight.

We don’t hear Mitaka think ‘yes’, but what happens next implies that either she did or the owl even asking was a formality. Not a page later, Mitaka—or at least, something in Mitaka’s body—rises back to her feet, only a truly wicked scar where her head was previously carved in half.

The natural questions follow; “Didn’t you just die?” “What the hell are you?” etc.

Reborn, “Mitaka” replies by doing this.

And introduces herself as The War Devil. What follows is, of course, an absolute show-stopper. Hyperviolence on a level that is hard to even describe with words; somewhere in there between the spinal cord longsword and the hand grenade reconstituted from the Justice Devil’s own actual arm, is the kind of bloody poetry that you really just can’t get outside of comic books. It all ends in an explosion and a shower of gore, because obviously it does, this is Chainsaw Man, remember? This kind of casual “I’m back, bitch” flexing is, if anything, hugely welcome in a medium that is only very rarely kind to even its superstars. This is mangaka Tatsuki Fujimoto in a braggart mode he’s earned every right to be in.

^{Bring your own Black Sabbath.}

The chapter’s last page establishes that everything we’ve just seen, if it weren’t already obvious, is an origin story. It’s never a safe bet to call any character’s longevity in Chainsaw Man, but Mitaka (or the War Devil? Or both? It’s a bit hard to say) seems like she’ll stick around for a long while. In the very closing moments here, she makes a comment about nuclear weapons that should be tossing up all kinds of red flags for any long-time Chainsaw Man readers; it’s been established before that those were among the concepts “removed” from reality by Makima’s makimachinations. (On that note; Makima is probably my favorite character in the whole manga, and I think about the only thing this chapter was missing was an appearance by her reincarnated self in the form of Nayuta. But! That will come in time.)

Trying to forecast almost anything about Chainsaw Man is a fool’s game, so I won’t pretend I’ve got anything sussed out. For me, the wait between the old and new Chainsaw Man was only a few days, and even I’m mostly just super happy to have it back. I find it difficult to imagine enduring the whole year-ish hiatus, so I know for sure I’m far from the only person who’s glad to see it again.

Chainsaw Man may well appear here on Magic Planet Anime again in the, ultimately, not-too-distant future, but until then, manga fans.

Posted on July 10, 2022July 12, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) I Would’ve Written a Review, But SHIKIMORI’S NOT JUST A CUTIE

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Sometimes I open these reviews by calling something unusual, weird, or peculiar. This is not one of those times; Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, a romcom from this already romcom-saturated year, is pretty normal. It’s about a pretty normal pair of high school sweethearts, who attend a pretty normal (by anime standards) high school, and have a relationship that is, all around, pretty normal. This is neither a strength nor a weakness, on its own, but it’s worth keeping in mind what we’re actually looking at here.

Even compared to, say, the also fairly conventional My Dress-Up Darling from just a season prior, much about Shikimori is very much standard for its genre. There are really only two axes along which it will catch any interest; for one, the couple are actually dating even from the very start of the story, admittedly a bit of a rarity for the genre. For two; Shikimori herself (Saori Oonishi) is….well, cool. Princely, as more than one character puts it. The series goes out of its way to suggest that, between her and her boyfriend, the easily-flustered shortstop Izumi (Shuichirou Umeda), she’s actually the more masculine of the two. (This despite being shorter and having pastel pink hair. It’s mostly a vibe thing, and it’s usually sold pretty well.)

An important thing to note is that Shikimori began life as a series of Twitter comics. In their original form, Shikimori’s “coolness” was essentially the punchline to a joke. A very simple subversion of expectations that works well in that format.

As such, while Shikimori and Izumi, as well as their supporting cast, are definitely decently-written, both they individually and the anime on the whole feel underdeveloped. The main pair are cute together and I buy that they’re in love—I get why she likes him and why he likes her, which is important—but there is just a little something missing. And over the course of the anime adaption, that absence becomes more and more pronounced, even in the show’s best episodes.

But, let’s focus on the positives first. As mentioned, while most of the characters fall into broad archetypes they are at least competent executions on them. Shikimori genuinely does come across as pretty cool, and maybe even a little intimidating. Izumi seems nice, and is a total softie in an endearing way. Their main group of three friends includes a chummy hothead (Shuu Inuzuka; played by Nobuhiko Okamoto), a feisty wildcat who’s good at sports and also herself seems to have something of a thing for Shikimori (Kyou Nekozaki; Misato Matsuoka), and a stoic, somewhat snarky lovable weirdo (Yui Hachimitsu; Rina Hidaka). All are solid, and it’s fun to watch them interact.

^{Magic Planet Anime understands the glory of Hachimitsu.}

Visually, the series is excellent, directed by a team that includes many staff who will eventually be making the Oshi No Ko anime. They breathe a sense of vibrancy into the school life setting that really does make it feel like a real, present place, and the set design in particular contributes a lot to that. Watching it, you can practically feel the Sun illuminating your face as you walk through the school courtyard. It takes talent to do that, and that talent is worth pointing out and respecting. And at times, it does manage to be genuinely romantic, with relative mundanities like theater and theme park dates blown up big enough that you can really immerse yourself in the emotions they convey. In these moments, when Shikimori is essentially at its peak, it does a good job of that.

And I really wish I could say those moments defined the whole show, that Shikimori lived up to such strong visual work, but mostly they don’t and it doesn’t. It’s pleasant, it’s decent fun, but it is rarely anything more than that, despite these highlights.

Fundamentally, it’s unfair to say any of Shikimori‘s strengths are in some way insufficient because it fails to measure up to some imagined version of what it could be. Things like that are pat and they’re rarely particularly substantial. Yes, Shikimori would be a bit more interesting if, say, Izumi was a girl (he wouldn’t need much of a design change to pass), but a criticism that basic misses the fact that Shikimori is routinely unwilling to commit to even its fairly tame level of gender non-conformance. The entire premise of the anime is that Shikimori is a cool, princely type, but just as often, it’s Izumi who is the assertive one in their relationship’s key moments. A trend that continues up until the last episode, where it’s Izumi who plants the couple’s first kiss on….Shikimori’s cheek.

And this would itself be fine if the show had a bit more fire to it. Comparing almost anything to Kaguya-sama: Love is War! is going to make that thing look bad, but it and Shikimori aired in the same season, and (spoilers here) they both have a kiss in the finale. It is telling that Kaguya‘s finale is a heart-pounding hurricane of grand romantic gestures that defy all common sense and reason, and the kiss that caps that episode is a full-on makeout. Shikimori just can’t compete with that kind of thing, even with all the visual panache in the world. It can’t even really compete with the aforementioned Dress-Up Darling, a series that is in many respects much less consistent, but by simply having the running plot of two crazy kids who aren’t dating yet but clearly eventually will be, it feels much more urgent. And, frankly, that show’s unabashed horniness—tasteless as it could often get—feels more reflective of a lived-in teenage experience than Shikimori is. (So does Kaguya, despite its absurd premise and in-theory unrelatable rich kid cast, for that matter.)

As it is, Shikimori is clearly is aiming for a laid-back, iyashikei-esque easy pace. It achieves that, so it’s perhaps even more unfair to complain that that’s “all” it does. But at the same time, this absence of any more substantial emotional weight is highlighted by the show itself, because when it can find a piece of the original story that it can make something truly wild out of, it does so with gusto.

Take, for example, the side character Kamiya (Ayaka Fukuhara).

Kamiya once fell hard for Izumi, too, but no longer pursues him because she knows he’s taken, and she has no chance. Over the course of the episode-ish’s worth of material that focuses on her, she imagines herself as a counterfeit Cinderella, her glass slippers and Prince Charming alike missing.

The series itself bends around her, bringing a rainy overcast to the serene high school rooftop, threatening a Biblical flood. Hers is a deep, dramatic, and messy love. And it demands a story louder, wilder, and more complicated than Shikimori, one that could accommodate the drama that inherently comes along with this kind of thing. But Shikimori is not that story, and her feelings prove too much of a challenge for it to wholly untangle. It’s not coincidental that when her short arc reaches its conclusion, she essentially disappears from the show entirely.

It still feels wrong to judge a series based on what it isn’t, rather than what it is. But the pieces of the show that focus on Kamiya—and other, smaller shards of something that is simply bigger than the rest of the series, always out of shot or between the frames—almost demand you to imagine a world beyond Shikimori‘s fairly limited notion of teenage romance. There is a lot else out there, and on some level, Shikimori knows this. In a few places, it almost seems frustrated with itself, that it cannot truly cut loose from the bounds of its own genre. The most obvious of these is perhaps the OP animation, which depicts a dimension- and genre-hopping pair of micro-vignettes for our lead couple, far removed from the series itself. Including even, perhaps most tellingly, one where there is a token acknowledgement of that same basic criticism I mentioned earlier; a version of the series in which Izumi and Shikimori are both girls.¹

^{These two shots are literally all of Fem!Izumi we ever see, but they raise the question of why she looks so sad and troubled. In this tiny bit of non-verbal characterization, the OP animation establishes that she and Shikimori must have a rather different relationship than that between regular Izumi and Shikimori. The fact that I’m able to write this much about it is ample evidence both that this team is quite talented and that there’s a lack of stuff like this to chew on in the main series.}

What you get, then, is a series that is a warm, personable elevation of what is ultimately very thin material. This isn’t to say that the Shikimori is a bad show—if I thought that I’d say so outright—but its origins as a gimmick strip on Twitter never really stop casting a long shadow over it. And in the end, it comes across as an elaborate expression of a very basic thought; “wouldn’t it be great if I had a tall, cool girlfriend?” Sure, it would be. Lots of people would love that. But you need something beyond that to push it past the realm of the merely cute, and Shikimori can only manage that in frustratingly short bursts. I find it almost impossible to imagine actively disliking Shikimori, but at the end of the day, you are basically watching six hours of fluffy Pixiv fanart.

The ongoing new romcom boom will do weird things to this particular period of anime in the long view of history. It’s hard to say if this show—or My Dress-Up Darling, Komi Can’t Communicate, etc. etc.—will persist particularly long in the public memory. In the case of Shikimori specifically, I rather doubt it. If it picks up a long-term fanbase, it will be a cult one, made up of people for whom the show offered some measure of comfort during difficult situations or simply helped them get through a day. To those people, Shikimori will be a cup of tea during an illness or a cool breeze on a summer day. To everyone else, it will be a pleasant, but half-remembered memory that pops up like a firework into the sky; brilliant for a fleeting moment, and then gone.

1: A correction: A commenter pointed out that this is actually Kamiya, which comparing the screenshots is obvious and I feel a little silly for thinking otherwise. Still, given its juxtaposition with all the alternate universe stuff I think my confusion is a bit more understandable, and my larger point still stands.

Posted on June 29, 2022April 7, 2023 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) BIRDIE WING -GOLF GIRLS STORY- Just Doesn’t Give a Damn

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

“The Symphogear of Golf”

-Blurb for a now-deleted review of the first episode by Anilist user SolidQuentin.

Just accept that it makes no sense. Birdie Wing doesn’t care about your feelings—toward golf or toward anything else—and that includes how serious you think it’s being. This is sports anime as Rorschach Blot, a series that practically dares you to take it on its own terms even as it’s consistently the goofiest fucking thing that aired in its season.

Consider this; it’s ED theme (which I may or may not be listening to as I write this), is the achingly beautiful Tsukuyomi track “Nightjar.” For a series like this, it’s totally incongruous as an ending at first glance; a deeply sincere piece of work attached to an anime that is on its face, absolutely ludicrous. It’s right there in the premise; golf taken as deadly-serious as a shonen martial arts tournament or a mob movie, with all the camp that tonal dissonance implies. Over Birdie Wing‘s criminally short 13-episode first season, lives and livelihoods alike are staked on golf games. Pride is, too, and absolutely all of this is given the same narrative weight. (With one exception, as we’ll get to.)

Somehow, in that ED, when a shot of a golf ball dissolves into the night sky, an eagle cutting a shadowy figure against the moon, it makes a kind of sense. If it’s absurd, it’s not in a bad way at all.

It begins with illegal betting; our protagonist Eve (Akari Kitou) makes what little money she can to support her adoptive family by pulling off impossible shots. Golf balls fire like revolver bullets between moving train cars and lop the limbs off of trees. It’s totally insane, and, in its own way, hilarious. But as Eve meets her rival / golf girlfriend Aoi Amawashi (Asami Seto), and the series continues to tick on, things like that just keep happening. Every time, you expect Birdie Wing to tip its hand and reveal that the entire thing is a joke, but it never does. Not when we’re introduced to Golf Mafia Boss Rose Aleone (Toa Yukinari), not when we see that another mob boss owns an illegal underground course that can physically morph its shape into a new, random course every time, not when Eve’s first major hurdle as a player is a woman with a snake motif named Viper the Reaper (Kaori Nazuka) who tries to psyche her opponents out with a scented tattoo. Not ever. It almost feels like a challenge, Birdie Wing dares you to blink first, because it certainly isn’t going to. About the closest it ever gets is this joke about Eve’s inexplicable, fluent Japanese.

Rose Aleone eventually dies. Seriously, she loses a golf game, and her life is snuffed out in a pastiche of old gangster movies that is way, way better and more genuine than it really seems like it should be. Eve moves to Japan and effectively stars in a second, different, marginally more conventional absurd-serious golf anime for the series’ second half. That shouldn’t really work either. It does too, to the surprise of no one. I’ve barely even found time to mention the flirty toying that Eve and Aoi are constantly engaged in. It definitely slots the series comfortably next to, if not outright in, the yuri genre.

I’ve spent a lot of time describing Birdie Wing and rather little elaborating on my own feelings on it. To tell the truth, because of its nature wherein what one brings to Birdie Wing strongly influences what one takes away from it, I almost think it’s not really meant for people like me. Folks who can’t really shut off the analytical part of their brain even when they’re totally enjoying something. But enjoy it I did, so on the other hand, maybe I’ve been played as thoroughly as any other member of this show’s audience. (In this respect, it very much is like Symphogear, making it the second anime in as many weeks that I’ve reviewed to have some trace of the seminal singing-girls-punch-things anime in it.)

Let me put it this way. Late in the series, we’re introduced to supporting character Kinue Jinguuji (Mai Nakahara). Jinguuji is a fairly classic character in the “had to give up on her dreams because a passion for something is not the same as being good at it” mold, something many other anime have done before and plenty others have done in a way that is, at least on paper, more poignant. But somehow, the fact that Jinguuji’s dream is this—golfing, the most boring sport in the world, and one of the hardest to take seriously—makes what would ordinarily be a light tap feel like a sucker punch. Through sheer commitment to the bit, Birdie Wing will make you care about this.

In the end, the show’s first season ends in a shrug, setting up more plot points than it resolves. Why? Because it knows it’ll return like a golfing T-1000. The 13-episode count was a fakeout, and season two is slated for next winter. What else is there to say? Bury Birdie shallow, it’ll be back.

Update: Season two has premiered! You can read my coverage here.

Posted on June 21, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) To Heaven & Back on a Song: The Soothing World of HEALER GIRL

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

“These are the beautiful miracles sung by humanity.”

The first thing to know is that Healer Girl was inspired by Symphogear. Comparisons between anime rarely do either work any favors, but for Healer Girl, knowing the name of its stylistic ancestors puts some things into perspective. The Symphogear comparison is merely the most recent in a list that also included Macross and, less centrally, G Gundam.

Ostensibly, these are strange bedfellows for what is at its heart an iyashikei series / sometimes-musical. In practice, it makes perfect sense. Like in Symphogear, the music in Healer Girl is not a background element; it’s diegetic, and the very source of the protagonists’ abilities itself. I’ve taken to calling this sort of thing the “dynamic music” genre, perhaps you have some other pet neologism. In either case, understanding that the music is not just a plot element but what the entire work is built around is key to understanding Healer Girl at all. It’s not a complex series, but there is stuff going on here beyond pretty songs.

Take our protagonists. Three young girls; Kana (Carin Isobe), Hibiki (Akane Kumada), and Reimi (Marina Horiuchi). For the majority of the series, they serve as interns at a clinic run by their teacher, Hibiki’s cousin Ria (Ayahi Takagaki).

A clinic, because as Healer Girl quickly establishes, in its world, the power of music is literal. Carefully-applied musical treatments can literally heal injuries, soothe sickness away entirely, and aid in surgery. This sort of there-is-power-in-the-song thing is something idol anime have been flirting with for years but never really commit to. (A personal frustration of mine.) Part of me enjoys Healer Girl just because it has the stones to actually dive into this idea. At twelve episodes, it doesn’t have the time to answer every question I had (I really want to know what healing music looks like around the world, but the show sadly doesn’t really go into it), but maybe it doesn’t need to.

From that central premise, Healer Girl builds a few strong, simple metaphors. Healing music as art is the easiest to understand, and effectively renders the series as a defense of itself. Taken through this lens, the anime is a series of iterative exercises; how much can art really help with? In the first episode, Kana sings a song to a boy who’s scraped his knee to take the pain away. Just three episodes later, the girls assist in a surgery where someone nearly dies on an operating table, and they face the truly harrowing experience of possibly failing to help someone. Much like conventional medicine, healing music definitely has its limits, but also like medicine, it certainly helps. Is this Healer Girl‘s argument, that art can heal the world, if not by itself, at least in a supporting role? It’s a strong reading, and I do think that’s at least partly what the series is going for.

Consider also the show’s actual music. A lot of people—including myself—initially assumed Healer Girl was going to be an idol series, and it is true that there is an associated idol unit, the Healer Girls themselves. But, if we consider it a part of this idol anime lineage, it’s a highly unconventional one, at least for 2022. In style, the Healer Girls are a lot closer to forgotten ’90s American soft-pop sensation Wilson-Phillips than anything presented in, say, its seasonal contemporary Nijigasaki High School Idol Club. More to the point is the presentation; the titular healer girls don’t really dance, and their songs are not performances. They’re tools. And learning how to use those tools forms the show’s other main theme; the passing of knowledge and love from one generation to the next.

Much is made of the girls’ relationship with their mentor Ria, a well-developed character in her own right. Reimi has a cute, one-sided crush on her, and much is made of her incredible skills. (Which we finally get to see in action in episode 9.) Over the course of the series, Ria guides the girls through simply being her pupils toward being healers in their own right. In the show’s finale, it implies via paralleling that Kana may herself one day take students of her own. It’s rare to see teaching and imparting wisdom treated as something beautiful and graceful, but that just makes appreciating it when a show can properly pull it off all the more important.

And look, all this writing about what the show means, and I’ve barely told you anything about why you might want to watch it! The simple truth is that, like most of Studio 3Hz‘s productions, the show is just damn good-looking. It’s beautiful, colorful, wonderfully vibrant, almost a living thing itself, in a way that is truly rare and all too easy to take for granted. That vibrancy makes Healer Girl something to be treasured. Naturally, it translates to the soundtrack as well; Healer Girl is at most half a musical, but enough of the show is sung—including incidental dialogue, in some episodes—that if you enjoy that medium, you’ll like Healer Girl as well.

And on top of that, it’s simply fun to watch. Rarely are anime fans starving for some classic slice-of-life antics, but Healer Girl‘s are a particularly well done set thereof. The show is very funny when it sets its mind to it, and not working in that mode 100% of the time only renders it more amusing when it does.

There’s even a pastiche of an old, old slice of life trope, the obligate “high school rock band” episode—episode 7, here—that’s been sorely lacking from most modern anime for a whole generation at this point. I have to admit, seeing one in this day and age made me nostalgic, so I suppose that’s another emotion that Healer Girl can effortlessly tap into.

Because of this kaleidoscopic emotional approach, Healer Girl‘s characters feel truly alive as well, even comparatively minor ones like the girls from the rival healing clinic (of course there’s a rival healing clinic), Sonia (Chihaya Yoshitake) and Shinobu (Miyu Takagi).

And, of course, we should discuss Healer Girl‘s visual ace in the hole. The girls don’t merely sing; the world changes around them as they do, a literalized, visualized version of the consensus fantasy-reality created by the most powerful music here in the real world. But in Healer Girl‘s universe, it can change the world in a truly direct and immediate way, and these bubbles of magic are called image songs. Episode 9 is the best showcase of them, where we see Ria greatly aid a surgery with hers; she influences literal events by manipulating abstract visual material within the image song. In doing so, she herself is a metaphor for the real impact of art in our own world. It’s a curious, but justified little thematic mobius strip, something that impressively never feels pretentious or self-impressed. Healer Girl knows what it’s doing, maybe that’s why there isn’t a weak episode in the whole thing.

The only real tragedy about Healer Girl is that its strongest moments are those where it instills pure awe in the audience. And that, unfortunately, is not something I’m truly able to replicate in text format. You will just have to take my word for it, that my jaw dropped more than once throughout the show, that I teared up a few times, and that several episodes—particularly episode 5 and the latter half of the finale—left me frustrated, although in a strangely positive way, over my inability to fully convey their emotional impact in mere words. You will just have to see it for yourself, and if you haven’t, I again strongly recommend that you do.

If there’s justice in the world, Healer Girl will be a watershed moment. But even if it inspires nothing, even if this artistic lineage ends here, I find it impossible to imagine that it will ever lose its potency as a work unto itself or, indeed, as a healing tool.

There is often a desire—spoken or not—in seasonal anime watching culture for something to get “another season.” Healer Girl, however, was clearly crafted with just these twelve episodes in mind. That renders the show small, certainly, but it does not rob it of its power. In a way Healer Girl is like the over-the-counter medical records mentioned in the first episode. It will soothe your sickness if you let it; simply rewind the tape and play it all back again. One more time; if you feel it, it’ll heal you.

If you’d like to read more about Healer Girl, consider checking out my Let’s Watch columns on the series.

Posted on April 3, 2022April 3, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) Reckoning with MAGIA RECORD: DAWN OF A SHALLOW DREAM

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

Here we are, again and at last. I have written about Magia Record; the anime adaption of a mobile game spinoff of the original Puella Magi Madoka Magica, again, and again, and again over the past two years. This will, barring something truly unexpected occurring, be the final time. Dawn of a Shallow Dream is the final “season”–really more of a movie with intermissions–of the series. Part of me will miss it.

Magia Record on the whole is, to use a term I consider neutral, but some would call a denigration, messy. Its pieces do not all fit neatly together. It overreaches, and from a purely technical point of view, it’s a serious mixed bag, marrying near-immaculate directing with consistently inconsistent quality of actual, y’know, drawings. Its three seasons are all very different and its cast of characters is too large for it develop them all equally-well. Its core theme–persistence in the face even of impossible odds and crushing despair–is arguably overdone within this genre, and is better-executed by its parent series, by Symphogear, and perhaps even by distant cousins like Day Break Illusion. Aren’t we all a bit tired of this by now?

Well, if you’re reading this, you probably know how I feel about these things (and if not, you will soon enough.) So, it will not surprise you that the answer from me, the woman who thought Blue Reflection Ray was really underrated, is “no, I’m not tired of it at all.” Bring them on a hundred strong, I say.

My thoughts on Magia Record have shifted a bit several times since the first season originally aired, but I remain resolute on a key point. As a “Precurification” of the original Puella Magi Madoka Magica‘s general idea–that is to say, a vehicle for delivering and iterating on “Madoka stories” within a fixed format–it absolutely kills. Shallow Dream is its swing at a grand finale. It doesn’t hit every target perfectly, and I will discuss what bones to pick I do have a bit farther down, but it makes a good show of things in its own way.

Magia Record‘s plot has always been a point of contention; the show is very cognizant of its own worldbuilding. Lucid, even. But that doesn’t translate to it always being clear to the viewers. This is probably the simplest it’s ever gotten, and thankfully things are conveyed fairly strongly here. Even so, to sum it up I can only offer something like; Iroha (Momo Asakura) and friends stop Embryo Eve by weaponizing the power of human connection. Not perfectly, of course, because this is Madoka, but, you know, pretty well. Along the way we get some long-overdue explanations for what was going on with Iroha’s sister and their two friends. Also because this is Madoka, about a quarter of the cast dies along the way. You can’t win ’em all.

I completely understand why MagiReco’s insistence on burrowing so heavily into its foretext is offputting to some (I would argue it’s still in service of a solid thematic goal, regardless), but it does mean that for the hardcore magical girl fan, Magia Record has been a treat of well-done henshin sequences, fight scenes, and just in general, deliciously weird imagery that nothing else in the genre quite touches. We don’t get as much of that in “season three” here as we did last year for season two (there’s really only one fight in the whole thing and it’s pretty brief), but it remains a pleasure to look at, even when the character art goes headlong into “why is SHAFT like this?” territory.

The background we get for Touka (Rie Kugimiya), Nemu (Sumire Mohoroshi), and Iroha’s long-missing sister Ui (Manaka Iwami) fill in a lot of the gaps from the first two seasons, which does have the nice benefit of making this all feel a little more like it’s one thing instead of three discrete shows under a broad umbrella. Their turn from good intentions to total villainy makes sense in hindsight. From just wanting to save Iroha, to trying to loophole their way out of the magical girl system entirely–which of course, horribly backfires and is why Ui goes missing in the first place–and finally to their full villainous, cult leader-esque incarnation from seasons one and two, it’s all compelling stuff, a story of how the best of intentions can go horribly awry when met with poorly understood circumstances.

Elsewhere, Momoko (Mikako Komatsu) and Mifuyu (Mai Nakahara) give their lives to free as many of the girls trapped by Magius’ “witch factory” as they possibly can. The sequence is heartwarming and tinged with a cosmic all-is-love energy. Nothing in the Madoka universe comes without sacrifice, of course, but we would all be lucky to go out, if we had to, while helping so many others.

Not everything works quite so well. In particular, I can’t help but be a touch disappointed with the treatment of Kuroe (Kana Hanazawa), who becomes a witch here before being killed off, mostly to teach Iroha a lesson about how she can’t just impose her own worldview on other people. This feels like something that should’ve come up more strongly than this earlier in the series, and Kuroe being offed when we just got to really know her does leave something of a bad taste in my mouth. Even so, the sequence is undeniably pretty damn cool.

The last battle against Eve, in which it is only just barely prevented from merging with Walpurgisnacht, is suitably epic, even when it gets interrupted by the ranting, raving, honestly a little out-of-nowhere? Hijacking by Alina Gray (Ayana Taketatsu).

These scenes are all notable individually, and there are a number of others I’ve not discussed here. (Yachiyo (Sora Amamiya) makes up for her absence from much of the season by getting a lovely, touching reunion with her late partners, or rather, the magic they held that lives on inside her, for example.) But you may ask what this all adds up to. It’s a fair question.

The truth of the matter is that Magia Record is, again, messy. It is not an immaculate distillation of its core values down to a euphoric four-episode package. It does not “transcend” and become “more than the sum of its parts,” perhaps. But I challenge anyone with even the slightest shred of affection for this series–Madoka, not just Magia Record–to watch the closing shots; where the surviving magical girls band together and push forward, heads held high even in the face of their unenviable, tragic situation, and not feel something.

Magia Record ends with a literal closing of the book; the white-gloved hands of a Goddess (Aoi Yuuki) shutting it with an affectionate finality. The girls narrate that no one knows of the battles they fought and what they sacrificed. That no one knows of the dreams they held that were lost. Of their picking up the pieces and starting again. The existence of the series itself, and of this review, is proof otherwise, of course. And you could interpret this as a tragic ending, if you were so inclined. But what, really, is more positive than starting again? I have said this before in other columns and will say it again in many more. The true essence of hope–that nebulous thing–is to live on, and to help others do the same.

Posted on April 1, 2022April 2, 2022 in anime, Misc. Anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Lost Legacy of FLOWER PRINCESS BLAZE!!: How a Forgotten Toei Series Shaped 15 Years of Magical Girl Anime [April Fools’]

This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.

“This world was not made for us. But I understand now that it’s the only one we have.”

For most here in the west, the history of Toei‘s forays into the magical girl genre begins with Sailor Moon, a monstrously successful franchise that is widely beloved to this day. If they know a little more, it ends with Pretty Cure, another monstrously successful franchise that is widely beloved to this day. Those with a still more slightly expansive knowledge of the company’s history might also be aware of Ojomajo Doremi, a marginally less successful franchise that is still beloved enough that it spawned a sort of distant sequel film, Looking for Magical Doremi, as recently as 2020, a full fifteen years after its original conclusion. Those who particularly care about the genre might point out that they’ve made all sorts of magical girl anime over the years, including Himitsu no Akko-chan, one of the very first. Regardless, all of these anime get their flowers from those in the know, and none could rightly be called overlooked by anyone with a decent knowledge of the medium.

But the same is not true for every magical girl series they’ve made.

The year is 2006. Futari wa Pretty Cure has just ended its second and final proper season. Alongside Splash Star, a reboot of the Precure IP, Toei launches a second action-oriented magical girl offering; Flower Princess Blaze!!

Time and the language barrier have rendered this decision obscure and puzzling, but in the moment, it must’ve made sense. Splash Star was the “safe bet”, essentially a retuning of the original Pretty Cure concept. Blaze was the wildcard; stranger, more experimental, and airing a bit later in the day. (Perhaps aiming for a slightly older audience–the 10-14 demo, perhaps–than Pretty Cure and its predecessor Doremi did.)

Splash Star has proven divisive over the longview of history, but in the moment, it absolutely crushed its younger sibling in terms of popularity and sales. Flower Princess Blaze did not do badly; it pulled decent ratings and sold decent amounts of tie-in merchandise. But it was nowhere near as successful as Precure, and “decent” only goes so far. That is perhaps why, when its second “season” concluded in late 2008, the IP was shelved.

(Technically, when airing, the show was split into two “seasons” which aired back-to-back with only a short break between them, Flower Princess Blaze and Flower Princess Blaze!!–yes, the exclamation points are the only difference in title–but the distinction is minimal, and the few later releases of the series haven’t made it, applying the second title to the series on the whole and treating its combined 126 episodes as a single, sprawling saga. The only place I’m aware of that still draws a line between the two is Wikipedia.)

To this end, Toei evidently decided their grand experiment had failed, and cut back to just one girls’ anime. Pretty Cure soldiered on and continued to be insanely popular, but its shadowy younger sister disappeared like a thief in the night, never to be heard from again.

Despite this, Flower Princess Blaze has proven to be quietly influential, with a diverse array of artists and industry figures both within the anime medium and without citing it as an inspiration. Puella Magi Madoka Magica‘s soul gems were taken directly from this series in all but name. And not one but two Pretty Cure seasons–Heartcatch and Happiness Charge–would later make fairly obvious homages to some of its villains.

Even outside the specific lineage of Toei magical girl anime, there are nods in works separated by space, time, and even medium; Steven Universe‘s Gem Homeworld draws on the Midnight Kingdom for architectural inspiration, Wish Upon the Pleiades xeroxes its finale outright, Anime-Gataris features the show’s real-life director as an in-show character. Most recently, and perhaps most famously, My Dress-Up Darling licensed the name and worked actual footage from the series into its own plot, giving lead girl Marin a fixation on secondary villain (and fan favorite) Black Robelia, (rendered “Lobelia” in that show’s official subs) whom she cosplays in several episodes.

And yet, in spite of the shadow it casts over the past 15 years of the magical girl genre, the series remains fairly obscure, especially in the west. Well, I’m not naïve enough to think I can change that on my own, but perhaps this, combined with the renewed interest from MDUD’s cameos, can help a little bit. Today, we dive into one of the strangest magical girl sagas of all time. Wilted flowers and shattered crystals. A hundred worlds in peril and the six girls who’ll save them. Midnight cities and a battle at the end of the universe. This is Flower Princess Blaze.

It starts out so simply. We follow two girls; one of them, Mirai Tengeji / Princess Daisy (Sakura Tange), cast in the then-young but already-typical mold of the upbeat, peppy lead magical girl. She has her foibles (the most obvious of which being her comically rough manner of speaking), but she is certainly what we’d now recognize as the most “typical” of Blaze‘s characters. With a minimal amount of tweaking, she’d fit right in with any given Pretty Cure season.

But she’s not the real main character, not really. Much of the show instead centers on her rival–then friend, then rival, then friend again–Shion Nikaido / Princess Lily (Rumi Shishido). Some context: it’s established before too long that the Midnight Kingdom, the requisite baddies-of-the-week, both a group and the physical place they hail from, form when ordinary people fall into despair, that word that translated anime love to use as a catch-all for negative emotional states. That’s not a background detail; each and every episode features someone, whether it’s a minor one-off character or one far more important, joining the Midnight Kingdom. Sometimes they’re rescued by episode’s end, but it’s far from a sure thing. As such, even early on, Flower Princess Blaze operates with a level of intensity and tension very rare for children’s anime.

At the climax of the series’ first major arc, Shion, learns that her own sister (and former comrade) Neon, (Houko Kuwashima) joined the Kingdom’s ranks after abandoning her position as the Flower Princess Hydrangea.

The revelation that Neon and Black Robelia are the same person remains one of the show’s most iconic twists, eventually fully elucidated in flashback, as does the ensuing scene. Hints peppered throughout the show’s first cour that Shion and Neon are not blood related come to a head here, where Robelia lays out her motivations plainly. People look down on them for their familial situation, she feels like a burden on her parents, she basically flat-out says she wants to die. She’s sick of the world and wants to burn it to the ground. (Her heartbreak over teenage crush Soma probably didn’t help either. Although I think some reads of the character over-emphasize that point.) But this scene is illustrative for another reason; in most magical girl anime, at least those aimed at a young audience, this is not a point of view that would be given any serious credence. There’d be a rebuttal, Shion would assure Neon that people really do love her, something.

But earlier in the episode, Mirai tried that on Shion, and the two had a (comparatively rare for the genre) mahou-on-mahou scuffle. It’s perhaps for that reason that Black Robelia’s speech is so effective that Shion actually defects too. Her flower crystal goes black, and the Midnight Kingdom gains another soldier. This sets up a pattern that recurs three more times over the remainder of the anime, until Mirai is eventually the only Flower Princess still standing. (Not for nothing is Flower Princess Blaze one of the few magical girl anime I can name where the bad guys are also given henshin sequences.)

One of the reasons that the late-series development of all the Princesses eventually shaking off this evil influence feels so well-earned is that we know why they felt this way to begin with. It’s the old adage; no man is an island. Or, well, no little girl in this case.

There’s a lot of good in this show, and much I haven’t mentioned (the other three Flower Princesses; Anemone, Azalea, and Rose, all get solid character arcs as well.) But that’s not to say the series is flawless. Something that Dress-Up Darling lightly pokes fun at when discussing the show is that it’s 126 episodes long. By the standards of the day, that probably didn’t seem unreasonable. For many modern anime fans, however, it’s untenably long, not helped here by the fact that Blaze is a victim of the same spotty visual consistency as any anime of that length. (Plenty of episodes look great, but plenty of others look…well, less than great.) It’s also the only magical girl anime I’ve ever seen with a form of Dragonball Z‘s fight length problem. There are a few encounters in the series that take up entire episodes or even several episodes in a row, and while that certainly does make them feel suitably epic, it can make a few stretches of the show feel oddly empty, too.

Not helping matters is the fact that the show’s main big bad, The Wilt Princess Spiderlily (Minami Takayama), does not appear at all until episode 60. She does not appear in person until almost 20 episodes later, in episode 78. There is a fair amount of running around, here. Adding to this is that while the defection of one of the Flower Princesses to the Midnight Kingdom is shocking the first time, it does become a bit predictable by the time Rose, the last of them, falls to the darkness. Although Blaze doing the whole “adding magical girls to the team as the show goes on” bit in reverse is certainly not something I’ve seen before or since, and Mirai’s few episodes totally alone are suitably harrowing.

This all said, even in its less substantial stretches, there’s a lot to appreciate. The surreal atmosphere of the Midnight Kingdom itself, which our protagonists eventually visit–as well as the surrounding Land of Sadness–is just wonderful. In the second half of the series, Mirai and the remaining princesses leap across a good dozen different worlds when the Earth itself becomes too inundated with negative magic for them to stay.

At show’s end, The Princesses are eventually turned back to the side of good, in some of the show’s best episodes. There is of course a magical doodad, the Miracle Seed, which they assemble. Reunited, they’re faced with a choice. Spiderlily lays it out for them plain; they can destroy her with the artifact and end the threat of the Midnight Kingdom forever, but if they do, they’ll be sent back in time. From our perspective, just before the very first episode. Their memories will not stay, and they’ll forget all the times they’ve had together. A square-one reset, like the whole thing never happened.

Of course, none of them hesitate, and we are treated to a shockingly rough scene where Spiderlily dissolves into red smoke as the girls’ memories are literally ripped from their heads. Time rewinds, and for 5 of the last episode’s final 15 minutes it really does seem like we just watched the entire series be undone in an instant. We soon learn one person does remember, Mirai, whose companion is the only one who seems to have survived the time reset. The exchange that follows, as Mirai breaks into tears and her fairy tries to comfort her, is one of the most eerily prescient in animation history, given the series’ obscurity. Especially the mention to the now ex-magical girl that even if no one else remembers their adventures, they still happened. Forgetting does not undo the work they’ve done.

Of course, both within the show and without, it turns out that people do remember. There’s a brief timeskip to the following day, and Mirai’s interactions with Shion are cold until she lets slip a small detail from their now-past lives. At this, Shion’s demeanor changes in an instant, and the two break into happy tears. The montage that follows weaves some adorably fluffy nonsense about how the strength of one’s heart means that true friends never forget each other. It’s a sweet, and surprisingly simple, end to one of the wildest rides in mahou shoujo history.

After its conclusion, the Flower Princess Blaze IP, as mentioned, was shelved. Enigmatic director Ryusei Nakao (no relation to the voice actor of the same name) had an apparently acrimonious (sources differ) break with Toei over this fact and dropped out of the industry entirely. It’s unfortunate, since Nakao’s distinct style does lend an unreal air to the show, especially with regard to the surreal liminality of the Land of Sadness episodes. Most other staff on the project went on to other things, largely much more successful than FPB had been. (Some, including character designer Yoshihiko Umakoshi, already known for his work on Doremi, would even work on later Pretty Cure seasons. Heartcatch in his case) Even with regard to the director, if he was only going to make one project, this is a hell of a legacy to leave.

Flower Princess Blaze has had a particularly bizarre half-life, not just for its genre but anime in general. Comparable in some respects to other non-Sailor Moon, non-Precure magical girl anime of the time period and slightly before. The main difference of course, is that there aren’t any fingerprints from Cosmic Baton Girl Comet-san or such on Steven Universe and whatnot. FPB’s legacy is paradoxical; forgotten by most but embedded into the very DNA of many far more successful anime.

There is one famous example, in particular.

I have heard it claimed that Homura Akemi is directly patterned after Shion. (The show’s TVTropes page once called her an “expy,” site slang for a copycat character, until some roving Madoka fan removed the line, and to be fair, not without reason.) There are definitely parallels to be drawn between Shion’s quest to save her sister and Homura’s to save Madoka. There are important differences here, though (for one thing, Shion is only subjected to a time loop once, and it’s along with everyone else. Shion also fails pretty early on but unambiguously succeeds once she becomes the first Princess to return to the side of good. A very different structure than Homura’s story), and it’s important to not confuse influence with rote copying, but it’s hard not to see at least a faint resemblance. One can definitely see many traces of Flower Princess in Madoka in terms of mood and atmosphere as well, and the bizarre “Deep Wilt” creatures that the Princesses encounter later in their adventures are almost certainly one inspiration for the Witches. It’s an askew influence, and not purely 1 to 1, as some other anime bloggers with too much time on their hands have previously argued, but it is definitely there, and it continues to be a source of contention.

I would say that if Flower Princess Blaze really did inspire even some part of Madoka Magica (and it seems unlikely, all told, that it didn’t), that casts its shadow even wider, including to relatively recent fare like Wonder Egg Priority and Blue Reflection Ray.

But to an extent, the ongoing debate over its impact muddles a simpler truth. Even if FPB had inspired absolutely nothing, it would still be a damn good show. I said earlier that Flower Princess Blaze is obscure, and that’s true in the grand scheme of things, but it’s never really gone away either. In the late 2000s and very early ’10s, it made messageboard rounds as a stock “hidden gem you have to see” recommendation, alongside anime such as RahXephon and Read or Die. (It helped that it was given an excellent fansub treatment by one-off group Mid-Nite Subs in 2010.) It’s managed to stick around in some corners of the internet, both domestically and abroad.

It’s a decent fanart magnet to this very day, and if you stick your ears to the walls of those anime forums that are still around, it’s said you can still hear Shion / Neon shippers (hmm) fighting with Shion / Soma shippers (also hmm). This is to say nothing of the aforementioned cameos in Dress-Up Darling, which have reignited fan interest even further. (It’s worth noting that because of the MDUD dub, Mirai, Shion and Neon are the only three Princesses to have official English voice actresses; Luci Christian, Monica Rial and the ever-underrated Jamie Marchi respectively.)

Maybe, to cheesily echo Robelia’s famous quote moments before she returned to her true form, this world just wasn’t made for Flower Princess Blaze. But it’s become a part of it anyway, and its impact on anime–as a medium and an artform–is an inarguable good. That counts for a lot.

Until we meet again, Princesses burning bright with hope.

“Lustrous flowers bloom bright from dark soil. I believe that we, too, will live on in a way.”

Like what you’re reading? Unfortunately, the anime you just read about does not exist, and this post constitutes an April Fool’s prank of truly stupid proportions. Seriously, you have no idea how long it took to write all this and make it feel semi-believable, and that’s with me fudging a few details, like its alleged air-hour. Anyway, if you want to see me write in terms this grandiloquently pretentious about actual, real anime, (such as My Dress-Up Darling, where Flower Princess Blaze originated and which I covered week by week). Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders. I don’t plan to do this again next year, but no promises. I figure, if you can’t laugh at yourself once in a while, what’s the point of even having a job this silly? PS: The joke is not that this anime doesn’t exist. It’s that I just made you read a fanfic formatted like a review.

Posted on March 29, 2022March 29, 2022 in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Get Away from It All with ESTAB-LIFE: GREAT ESCAPE

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.

“Do you want to run away from your current situation?”

And so, the season begins with a doozy.

ESTAB-LIFE: Great Escape is peculiar on several fronts. For one, it was a beneficiary of the increasingly-common practice of a pre-air screening. The first two episodes have actually been out for about a week, today merely marks the start of its actual broadcast run. (And just to clarify; to give it parity with the other anime I cover in this column, I’m only looking at episode one here.) It’s also an all-CGI affair, still novel enough a thing to be worth noting. It comes to us from Polygon Pictures, who have built their particular fiefdom of the anime industry entirely out of that sort of thing. Its director is Hiroyuki Hashimoto, whose filmography is a bit scattershot. (It’s difficult to make firm statements about a man whose greatest contributions to popular culture thus far have been directing the anime adaptions of Magical Girl Raising Project and Is The Order a Rabbit?) Nonetheless; this is first original anime, not based on any existing property. But interestingly, the “original plan” (whatever that means) is credited to someone else; Gorou Taniguchi. Who you may know as the man who directed Code Geass, perhaps the grandfather of all truly gonzo camp-fest anime of the past decade.

This is all well and good, but you’re probably wondering–even with that colorful legacy in mind–what this show is actually about, which is fair enough. Here are, with as little embellishment as I can muster, the events that unfold in the first five minutes of ESTAB-LIFE, before the opening credits even roll.

We open on a rain-drenched funeral with a priest solemnly reading out last rites for the deceased. His prayers are interrupted by a car horn, and our cast–two anime girls, a small robot, and a wolfman–pile into the Hearse, with apparent intent to drive it somewhere. We cut to a slight bit later, and our heroes(?) roll up to some kind of military checkpoint. The ball-shaped android manning the checkpoint notices that something is amiss when one of them sneezes(?!) and pulls an emergency alarm. At this, our heroes blow through the checkpoint while pursued by a cloud of armed drones, to the irritation of the third anime girl hiding in the coffin in the back seat. They arrive at a gate, which they must hack open, or something, while under fire. One of the drones shoots one of our heroines dead in the eye, at which point she bursts into water, only to reform seconds later. Her compatriot remarks that this ability of hers is useful.

It is at this point that the OP plays, and it sinks in what kind of anime we’re in for.

Eventually, a kind of context for all this does emerge. The setting is Japan (naturally), but a Japan divided into many independent city-states called “clusters” that have little contact with each other. A civilian moving freely from one cluster to another is unheard of, and met with harsh, sometimes lethal response from the “moderators” who govern these cities. That’s where our heroes come in; they’re extractors, people who spirit away citizens who are bored or disaffected with their lives.

As we establish, that’s mostly by night. By day, they’re ordinary citizens at what appears to be an all-girls school; the two male members of the main five hold down the fort at home, we must assume. The three girls are Equa (Tomomi Mineuchi), Ferres (Rie Takahashi), and Martese (Maria Naganawa). Respectively, the compassionate leader whose only desire to help out everyone the group possibly can, the cynical one who swears she’s going to quit this extractor business any day now, and the cocky, flirty one who can turn into water. (She’s a slime-person “demihuman”, as we eventually learn.) There’s a lot of great banter here, and even though I singled out Martese as the flirter it’s worth noting that all three of them kinda seem to be into each other, which is cute.

I won’t belabor the point by going over every single beat of the episode. Its main plot centers around the girls smuggling their philosophy teacher, one Yamada-sensei, out of their cluster. This eventually comes to involve, in no particular order; the man having to thumbprint a document saying that the extractor team can’t guarantee his prosperity or happiness in his new city, his being handed an emergency grenade by the team’s robot, Alga (Shou Hayami), just in case he gets captured and has to “end it all,” and Martese creating a diversion in a police station by pretending to be drunk off her ass. (This backfires. One of the cops scans her and finds out she’s a slime person, and apparently, slime people can’t have alcohol because it’s dangerous to them. The more you know!)

The actual extraction goes pear-shaped, because of course it does. Even with three girls with guns, a talking robot, and a wolfman who doesn’t talk but does have two swords (Shinichirou Miki) on your team, sometimes things go wrong. Eventually, Yamada-sensei does end up making it to his new cluster of choice; but he has to get there by rope, and it’s not after a whole lot of shenanigans involving busted elevators and improvised building-climbing. Nietzche quotes are thrown around.

Top to bottom, the whole episode is also stuffed with great banter and surprisingly good little character moments. (Especially in the animation department, which is far from a given in any anime.) That, combined with its generally oddball nature and focus on “escape” as a main theme makes it remind me less of any recent seasonals and more of that Idolmaster short I covered a few weeks ago.

All in all, it’s hard to say where, exactly, ESTAB-LIFE is going, but it’s certainly going somewhere, and the ride seems worthwhile. Keep an eye on this one.

Grade: B
The Takeaway: Interesting character designs, great banter, an intriguingly odd plot, and a general sense of WTF-ness combine to make this an early standout in the young season.

An administrative note: I alluded to this in the body of the article itself, but I have basically no clue what’s going on with this thing’s schedule. The regular broadcast apparently starts today, but on some JP services it’s apparently going up in three batches of four episodes each. And I’ve seen conflicting reports as to what schedule streaming services available in the US will be following. Personally, I’m probably just going to watch it week by week like any old seasonal. I hate to think that an unorthodox release schedule might hurt Estab-Life‘s chances at gaining an audience, though.

Posted on March 28, 2022March 28, 2022 in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 12 – “Bow and Arrow Duo” (SEASON FINALE)

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

Well folks, here we are. I always meet the end of each season with a certain air of cleaning out the cobwebs. Maybe that just speaks to my impatience and love of novelty (after all, the many shows that will come out next season remain nothing but a sparkle of infinite possibility until they actually air.) Still, more than usual, I am glad to put this one in the books. I haven’t started watching episode twelve of Sabikui Bisco as I type this, but the show has not exactly wowed me over the last third or so of its run, and whatever I end up thinking of the finale, I can’t really change that. On the other hand, I don’t want to go into it with clouded eyes, either. Judging something before I watch it is bad form.

Without further ado then, let’s hop on the crab and find out; can Sabikui Bisco nail the landing, totally saving the show just in the nick of time?

Well, in short, no. But! It does make a pretty good show of trying, and that counts for something.

The actual plot here is dead simple. Bisco, in revived-mushroom-super-saiyan form (reborn “as a god” I believe is how Jabi puts it) has to take down Kurokawa. Who, we here find out, has not turned into the Tetsujin giant so much as he’s “piloting” it. And when Bisco can take down the Tetsujin’s armored form we’ve been following for the past few episodes in just a couple shots, surprise, it has a second form. Tirol helpfully explains that they can’t just kill it while it’s like this, because if they do it’ll self-destruct and take out nearby Imihama along with it. So the only solution? Taking out the pilot.

Our heroes’ plan to do this is also pretty straightforward. Step 1. Have Pawoo break the giant’s helmet with her pole. Step 2. Have Bisco snipe Kurokawa’s sort-of still alive body from the head of the giant. The show spices this up in a few ways; mostly by giving everyone some delightful banter. Pawoo in particular shows a lot of personality here. She also starts gunning pretty damn aggressively for Bisco! Which, me being me, you might assume I’d complain about. But honestly, “warrior woman who aggressively steals a kiss from the guy she’s into” is about the only way they’ve depicted Pawoo that actually makes the pairing make some sense. (And hey, he does offer her “anything she wants” if she comes back alive.) This is the most chemistry they’ve ever had. It only took, you know, 11 and a half episodes.

She even brags about it to Bisco’s surrogate dad afterwards! I would’ve liked to see more of this brash, charmingly arrogant side of Pawoo. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t get to.

The actual execution of the plan goes from A to B to C so quickly that it almost feels perfunctory. Pawoo bonks the giant, the giant’s mask breaks, revealing just how ugly the damn thing actually is.

^{It’s like if you tried to sculpt an ugly infant from cherry Jell-o.}

Kurokawa and Bisco get into it a little bit, and then Milo once again overtakes his sister in the “getting with Bisco” department as he helps Bisco line up the all-important pilot snipe. The power of homoeroticism saves the day, and Kurokawa goes down in one.

And that’s honestly kind of it! We do get some additional stuff throughout the remainder of the episode. Bisco and Milo get a nice moment where they just chill on the bed of giant mushrooms that’s sprung up in the wake of the battle, and the last 10-ish minutes of the episode are a montage showing everyone’s rust infections being cured. (Bisco is now 100% Rust-Eater Mushroom by volume. How does that work? How does anything in a shonen work! Who cares?) This includes Pawoo! Who looked beautiful with her rust scarring and looks just as beautiful without it.

There’s a timeskip, and sometime later we get a fun closing scene where Bisco has to once again pass through the government gate from episode one, this time with Milo in tow. I’m fond of this whole bit, especially Milo also getting a wanted poster where he’s branded the “Man-Eating Panda.” Oh, and the very last interesting worldbuilding tidbit is something we see via a TV. Imihama has a new, political firebrand of a governor who’s done radical things like condemn the persecution of the mushroom-keepers and even declared independence from whatever’s left of the Japanese government. That governor? Pawoo, who–and you’ll have to forgive me here–looks fine as hell in a suit.

And on that victory for WLW everywhere, Sabikui Bisco ends. I didn’t dislike this episode, but from basically every perspective it really felt to me like the show started running out of steam by its end. And as nice as some parts of this episode were, it didn’t really change that. I have rarely seen a series so thoroughly tie up its own premise by the end of its first season. Even many original anime leave a bit more to the imagination than this. One could call that a strength, I guess, but to me it mostly feels weird. Especially since there actually is a sequel to the manga.

We do get one hook here, aside from Imihama’s independence–and I imagine it’s what said manga follows up on–Bisco is now immortal because of his mushroom-fueled resurrection godhood whatever. He doesn’t really like that, and it’s on the note of trying to cure this particular condition that the story ends. So there clearly is some space for the story to continue, should Sabikui Bisco have done well enough to warrant that. Even so, we’re a far cry from where we were back in episode one, and while I always try to judge anime based on what they are, and not what they could’ve been, a part of me does miss the neon-streaked nocturnal urban ambience of the premiere. And on a different note entirely, the smaller-scale character-focused episodes that followed it.

There’s also the issue of this episode’s somewhat inconsistent art. There’s some stuff that looks really great, like when we see Bisco’s resurrection from his perspective in the episode’s opening minutes.

But a lot of the character art is spotty, and it brings down an otherwise solid finale somewhat. Even so, as a decent finish to a decent show, “Bow and Arrow Duo” does its job just fine. (And boy, am I conscious of the fact that I’m yo-yoing between positive and negative opinions a lot in this article.) The series’ final shot is a framed picture of Milo and Bisco, and I think that’s a nice image to end on.

And ordinarily, dear readers, this is where I’d tell you I’ll see you next season. That’s true as far as the Let’s Watch columns go. (I won’t even be announcing the winner of the Community Choice poll until this coming Saturday in the weekly Frontline Report column.) But the first show of what looks to be a very busy season actually premieres tomorrow. So, with that in mind, I’ll see you then, anime fans.

Posted on February 13, 2022February 13, 2022 in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Last Flight of DRAGONAUT – THE RESONANCE

^{This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.}

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

The common wisdom is such; if you want to really take the measure of a period of time, don’t look at media from it that everyone remembers. Things that persist over the years tend to be your classics, your cult classics, and your so-bad-its-good’s. If you really want to get in the head of someone living in a period of time, look at the stuff no one remembers. Occasionally something will pick up a reputation as an “overlooked gem” and worm its way into that second category, but that’s rare. Things that are forgotten tend to stay forgotten and are often indicative of things that were popular at the time but not so much nowadays. So, the theory goes, they’re representative of an unfiltered look at a period.

If all this holds true, shows like Dragonaut – The Resonance may represent the true spirit of the late ’00s. A GONZO production from the period where basically all they were making was stuff like this, Dragonaut comes to us from 2007, one of an absurd even by modern standards nineteen projects GONZO produced that year. It aired that Fall to middling interest alongside similarly forgotten-today fare like Ayakashi and Night Wizard. As such, Dragonaut stands out not for any particularly exceptional quality but because, like many weird one-off projects from this era, it has ostentatious character designs and an absurd premise.

It is the near future, and poor Pluto, already stripped of the dignity of being a planet, has been obliterated by a massive asteroid called Thanatos. Some years later, a SpaceX-style civilian space plane launch goes awry when an alien dragon from said asteroid unexpectedly collides with the plane, killing everyone aboard sans a single survivor, the pilot’s son and our protagonist, Jin. (Voiced by the legendary Daisuke Ono.) The government promptly covers the whole business up, and a full two years pass as Jin has to endure the public at large blaming his father for the accident. He only uncovers the truth of things when by sheer chance, he meets a beautiful girl with supernatural abilities named Toa (Minori Chihara, best known as Yuki in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya). Obviously, she is also an alien dragon.

To put it bluntly, this is an absurd start to an equally absurd anime. Dragonaut isn’t totally devoid of merits, but the sheer, overbearing goofiness of its very setting makes it a little hard to take seriously. It quickly comes to involve bonded pairs of artificial dragon-people who can change from human to dragon-alien-mech-things (“Communicators”) and back and their riders / pilots who compose the titular Dragonaut program in the service of an international organization called the ISDA. It’s pretty cool and extremely dumb in equal measure. Moreso because the dragons, in dragon form, are handled by GONZO’s CGI department, which means we get huge, chunky CG rigs that are not quite articulated and lit enough to look fully convincing but do look like they’d make sick toys. (Their color palettes are also not the best, sadly. Which can make some of them hard to distinguish mid-fight.)

The corny tone is not really a bad thing. One of my favorite anime from this period is Witchblade, which has a similar issue. If anything, Dragonaut could stand to have been cornier. If there’s a real flaw here, it’s that Dragonaut starts out fairly self-serious and never really lets up. One might say it’s “very anime,” but it’s not camp. This contrasts in an ugly way with its sillier aspects.

Such as, for example, its character designs. With only a few exceptions each; the men are either emotionally sensitive feminine boys with period-appropriate emo haircuts, unreasonably diesel Chad-Gods who shake the Earth with each footstep, or grizzled, uniformed commanders who scowl as they make Tough Decisions. The women are warmhearted maidens who bring joy wherever they go, goofy brats, or gene lottery winners with chests so big that they have their own gravitational pull. I’m not one to moralize about this kind of thing, so to me the excessive fanservice mostly comes across as unintentional hilarity. If someone were less inclined to that point of view, I could absolutely understand it making the entire series unwatchable just on its own. Especially in the case of recurring antagonist Garnet MacLaine (played here by Haruhi herself, Aya Hirano), whose outfit looks like three other, unrelated, gratuitous sexy outfits crashed into each other at a hundred miles per hour, and also has the misfortune of being one of just two named POC characters in the series.

The plot is a sprawling kudzu vine of romance, political and military intrigue, and science-fantasy hokum. You might note that this is also true of a lot of great anime from around that time, but Dragonaut‘s handling of much of this material is pretty leaden. Enough so that details like, say, Toa’s name being derived from a bracelet Jin gave to his late sister Ai (“From Jin to Ai”, you see.) come across as comedic rather than stirring.

On one level, all this means that you could freely regard Dragonaut as the shlock that it is. By 2007, the hunt for the next Neon Genesis Evangelion, and the wave of “world story” anime it spawned had largely petered out. Eva had spawned numerous imitators and responses, and even shows outside its genre entirely were affected. By the late 2000’s, that influence had turned into background noise. The gulf between Dragonaut and something like, say, Eureka Seven, one of the very best anime in this vein and from just two years prior, is vast. If we wanted to draw an admittedly imperfect analogy, we could turn toward the history of pop music. If Evangelion was Nevermind–another 90s touchstone–Dragonaut is Daughtry. Everything challenging and artistically interesting about the movement has been squeezed out, and what you are left with is the sad backwash of an artistic point in time that was already firmly in the rearview. It’s not at all unfair to say that Dragonaut is a series of very limited ambition, at least.

On the other hand, that very inconsequentiality makes any judgement of Dragonaut that leans this harsh feel, frankly, a bit silly. (In much the same way that it’s hard to get too mad about the strained bluster of “It’s Not Over.”) No, it’s not some grand, generation-defining artistic statement. I doubt anyone–including anyone who worked on it–thought it was. That doesn’t make it criticism-proof and I certainly have quite a few qualms with it, but we should remind ourselves that we’re talking about a goofy-ass anime about goofy-ass space dragons, here. Condemning it in that manner is perhaps a bridge too far.

Because all this said and meant, the show does have its strong suits. Some of the character relationships are pulled off surprisingly well. Mostly these are various Dragon / Rider pairs. Jin and Toa will not win any originality-in-writing awards, but they’re cute together, and when they’re apart you do genuinely feel their longing for each other. Turning their couple into a trio is Gio (Junichi Suwabe, probably best known as Archer from Fate/), who seems to get on quite well with both of them. My favorite pair, though, is that of rider Akira (Miyuki Sawashiro, voice of Fujiko Mine since 2015) and her dragon Machina (Yuuko Gotou, VA of Mikuru Asahina, making Dragonaut something of a Haruhi Suzumiya cast reunion), whose affection for each other is warm and uncomplicated throughout the first half of the series series, as Akira grows to question the role that the ISDA has forced her into. The two are also very gay for each other; Akira here had a dragon wife long before Miss Kobayashi. (Sadly, the two are the victim of a pretty nasty instance of the “bury your gays” cliche, and they’re killed off around halfway through the show. I will leave the question of their sort-of resurrection as ghosts attuned to Thanatos making that better or worse as an exercise to the reader.)

Rounding out the most interesting characters are the rich girl / butler pair of Sieglinde (Nana Mizuki, who probably needs no introduction, but who you might variously know as Cure Blossom, Fate Testarossa, or Symphogear‘s Tsubasa Kazanari) and Amaedeus (Eiji Maruyama, active as both an anime VA and toku actor from the early ’70s until his death in 2015. Most of his anime roles were kindly and/or badass old guy parts like this, and if Amadeus is any indication, he was damn good at them) who have a cute surrogate daughter / father relationship, and lastly Kazuki (Tetsuya Kakihara and Sawahiro again, depending on where you get your credits from. I’m unsure of what the story was there. Perhaps it was a split role), who fosters an incredibly toxic yandere-leaning jealous streak over both Jin and Gio, and his dragon Widow, (Saeko Chiba, who has a string of supporting roles under her belt, although most of them were behind her at this point. You may know her as Nina Einstein from Code Geass) with whom he bonds over their mutual feeling of being spurned, until his jealousy inevitably mutates into an abusive streak.

^{Seen here in mid-distance, because getting an image of all of these characters together was quite difficult for some reason.}

Production-wise, Dragonaut avoids the pitfalls of some of its uglier GONZO brethren. While the airborne fights are janky because of the CGI’s general inflexibility, the on-foot fight choreography is pretty excellent throughout, accounting for almost all of the show’s visual highlights. On a less technical level it’s also competently directed (by Manabu Ono, who directed a bunch of things for GONZO and has since gone on to helm some later Sword Art Online material) and the color choices are solid. (Outside of the dragons themselves, that is.) There’s generally at least a few cool shots per episode, etc. These are modest strengths, but Dragonaut makes the most of them.

Story wise, things are dicier. The plot aims for profundity and complexity but only occasionally gets farther than simply being complicated. Some of the arcs the show sets up have decent payoffs and others very much do not. In its best moments, like the mid-series episodes 13 and 14, where the ISDA save the world from being blown up by a magic nuke (!), Jin, Gio, Akira, and Machina depart to rescue Toa, who is trapped on Mars (!!), only to be intercepted by a characteristically jealous Kazuki, who they must then fight and seemingly kill (!!!), it is at least quite entertaining. Plot threads roll into each other like tumbleweeds across the desert. Or, indeed, run-on sentences. Occasionally, it’ll make an emotional moment hit just so, and Dragonaut achieves its greatest feat; the ability to perform a half-decent imitation of shows like Eureka Seven, or Eva, or even RahXephon (which I haven’t seen, but a friend who I was watching the series with has). It’s hard to tell if Dragonaut wants to be counted among that number or if it’s content just cribbing notes from those shows. Either way, it’s very much an imitation, not the genuine article.

Things go back and forth like this up and down the whole length of the series. Sometimes these various subplots and diversions end in a way that’s satisfying or at least entertainingly silly, other times they’re straight-up bad. Coming down to an almost even split across the show’s 25-episode runtime, I’d say. The fairly strong character writing contrasted with the relatively weak plotting does make it sometimes feel like a gaggle of good characters searching for a good show to be in and never quite finding one. There is a solid theme wound through here about how different sorts of love mean more to different people, but it’s subsumed by world story tropes riffing on Eva‘s Instrumentality plot in the finale–tropes that had become cliches by this point–and the series ends with a whimper rather than a bang.

Watching it, I was acutely aware of how tired of the pseudogenre everyone must have been at this point. Dragonaut‘s final few episodes seem to default to the Eva mode less out of any real commitment to the themes it explores and more because it lacks any better or more original ideas. It is a decidedly fine ending. Not offensively bad. Not particularly great either.

But being fine was enough, at least, for Dragonaut to be decently popular while it was airing. Hard numbers are difficult to come by, but it seems to have done well enough financially, though not enough to warrant sequels or spinoffs aside from a manga adaption that apparently takes a somewhat different spin on things. It did get a bonus OVA included on its DVD box set, a supremely ridiculous thing where the cast have their characters switched around via a wacky science machine. It is mostly an excuse to parade screwball situations out and have the camera zoom in on the girls’ busts some more; every sense of the word “fanservice” rolled into one. Perhaps unavoidably, given the general thrust of the female character designs, it was a popular fanart magnet for a little while. The few English-language reviews it got predictably nailed the show somewhere in the C-grade range, a trend I am all too aware I’m contributing to here.

All of this constitutes a minor legacy for a decidedly minor show. It still is a legacy, and that is worth something, but there is a reason that people still talk about even other Eva-indebted mecha anime from this time–say, Gurren Lagann, which I’m not a personally huge fan of but which is inarguably a better and more striking an interpretation of some of these same influences–but not Dragonaut. It has largely been left in the dustbin of history. Pierce the heavens, this does not.

Rather than any of its contemporaries, Dragonaut‘s status as an Extremely 2007 Anime reminds me of another, much more recent show, with which it has almost nothing else in common, The Detective is Already Dead. Like that anime (and a few others I’ve covered here over the years), it was a fossil from the day it began airing. Ultimately, Dragonaut represents a small side branch of a larger artistic tradition. That branch has largely come and gone, but the larger Evangelion and Eureka Seven-indebted school it represents survives to this day. Even in terms of fairly specific setups, one of the very few times Dragonaut is brought up in modern anime discussions at all is to compare it with Darling in the FranXX, another extremely-of-its-moment child of Eureka with which it shares a broadly similar premise and some thematic points. There are worse fates for an anime to have, even if DarliFra itself is extremely polarizing.

Most people who worked on Dragonaut went on to bigger things. (“Better” is subjective.) So, while it is always tempting to view the story of any largely forgotten series as a sad one, that really isn’t the case here. While GONZO themselves are gone, as far as I can tell, most of the staff from this project have continued to work in the field. Those who don’t seem to have either later found success elsewhere or had already established a legacy by the time they worked on Dragonaut. I feel comfortable in saying that for almost every single person who worked on it, Dragonaut was a minor step along their paths. I could easily spin this into a condemnation, but I’d be condemning plenty of other shows too. It is the fate of the vast majority of anime that air every year, even now. Hard to hate, equally hard to love, Dragonaut simply is what it is.

Anime is an art form, but it’s also a craft and a field of the entertainment business. In entertainment, works arise to fulfill a desire from their audience. In 2007, people wanted hopelessly romantic stories where high-flying science-fantasy heroes saved the world with the power of love. Dragonaut, for whatever faults it has, is one of those, and it is if nothing else, a competently made one. It was not the most notable, most successful, and certainly not the best of that sort of story, but it gave the people what they wanted. Perhaps sometimes that is enough.

The Magic Planet

Tag: Review

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