Tag: Review

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Far End of Summer, SONNY BOY, and Me

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

“Rajdhani’s parrot laughs.”

Abstract art faces an inherent double standard. It must both earn its right to be non-literal in the first place, and is expected to eventually “make sense” to its audience. It’s an impossible task, to convey truths through symbolic language alone but to do so so clearly that it cannot be accused of pretension.

Sonny Boy has only just ended, so it is hard to say where, eventually, it will fall, in the public consciousness. Some abstract anime are eventually acclaimed as classics, others are derided as nonsense. Either way, the series stands as one of the most compelling of the year. Enough so that simply saying such can feel rote–or even worse, dogmatic. But sometimes the reason so many people think something is interesting is simply because it genuinely is. Sonny Boy stands as a rare moment where a truly out-there piece of art has managed to capture the imagination of the public at large. Even by itself, that is a huge achievement.

On a production level alone, Sonny Boy speaks for itself. Its character designs lean more realistic than most modern TV anime, making it immediately stand out, with characters being distinguished by face shapes and so on. Its backgrounds are painterly and convey, as needed, a sense of surreality or depict vivid, natural landscapes. Accompanying all this is a bold, sharp directorial approach that knows precisely when to fully cut loose, scored by a well-curated soundtrack of synthesizer pieces, indie rock, and, sometimes, dead silence. To some point, mentioning these things at all feels like box-ticking. It is obvious from watching even any few random minutes of the series that it looks and sounds fantastic. So the big question is not one of production then, it’s one of theme. What is Sonny Boy about?

In a very real sense; nothing less than our lost generation. Sonny Boy centers on a classroom of high schoolers sent, per their own words, “adrift.” References to The Drifting Classroom and Robinson Crusoe abound. The nature of the anomaly that shifts our cast from the mundanity of modern Japan into the chaotic randomness that is the Matroyshka Doll worlds-within-worlds land they end up in is never explained and is not really the point. Nor is the nature of the superpowers they get (no quirky name here, they’re just called “powers”) examined either. Sonny Boy is an exploration of what young people would do, given all the time in the universe to do it, and of the social systems that shape them into who they are.

Our ostensible main character is Nagara, a somewhat unassertive and otherwise unremarkable young man. But much of the cast get put under the microscope, always to interesting effect. Take for example Mizuho, whose principled nature clashes with the remnants of the student council. An entire early episode revolves around her unwillingness to apologize for a wrong she didn’t commit, and for this part of the series, Sonny Boy seems like it may conclude that any group of people, isolated and given enough time, will reinvent the worst aspects of the society they originally come from.

But, Sonny Boy abandons this comparatively straightforward, political strain of thought early on. (Consequently, there is a certain crowd who will be displeased that the show is not an effective handbook for revolution. So it goes.) As it marches through its twelve episodes, the series becomes increasingly big-picture and existential. Political themes give way to religious ones, which finally give way to the philosophical. So whatever one might think of Sonny Boy, they absolutely cannot fault it for lack of ambition.

Because our generation (Millennials, and, increasingly as they reach majority, “Gen Z” as well) is often derided as overgrown children rather than real adults, Sonny Boy earns its right to use an all-teen cast in this scenario even more than most would, given that it is us–the literally immature, and the spiritually immature–at whom Sonny Boy is directed. It feels deliberate that the only adults in the series are respectively an imposter playing at an authority they don’t truly possess (Ms. Aki) and someone so far removed and incomprehensible to the rest of the cast that they may as well be divinity (the Principal).

In this sense, Sonny Boy is that old metaphor, a ball of confusion. If it’s sometimes hard to tell quite what’s going on, well, it’s even harder to tell what’s going on in real life. I would say “especially when you’re young”, but it’s easy to argue that part of Sonny Boy‘s core thesis is that, in the grand scheme of things, we’re all young.

That, of course, could feel to some like a cop-out. One might want to know what all of this is building up to. And while the series certainly settles well into a role, in its midpoint, as a mint for surreal parables of the modern age, anyone wanting a broader, singular “point” might feel a little left in the cold.

If there is an overall message, it is what the character Rajdhani states in the penultimate episode and Nagara finally internalizes in the finale. The world–all worlds–are chaos in motion, “an endless exercise in vain effort”, as Rajdhani puts it. But in this seeming meaninglessness, there is beauty.

Call Sonny Boy, then, a treatise on optimistic nihilism. Life is, and then it isn’t. It is a hectic, meaningless thing, to hear Sonny Boy tell it. The other side of that, of course, is that that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

The final words of the series, spoken by Nagara, are “Our lives are only beginning. What lies ahead will take just a little bit longer.” It’s a simple, almost prayer-like coda to a series that is otherwise anything but. Yet, a truth is a truth. Like some of its peers that have aired this year and in the recent past, all Sonny Boy asks of us is to take care of one another and do our best. All we can do is make the most of what we have, and all we have is ourselves and each other.

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the 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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, KeyFramesForgotten

(PODCAST) KeyFrames Forgotten Episode 3 – WINDY TALES

Our third episode arrives some months late. Forgive us, folks! This whole podcasting thing is hard. More importantly; Windy Tales is a lovely, subtle little show from Production IG’s mid-2000s period with an unconventional art style and a lot to say about the impermanence of all things. You can listen to the podcast below, or, when it’s finished processing, check out the Youtube mirror at the bottom of this article.

KeyFramesForgotten is a podcast about anime you haven’t thought about in a while. Join anime nerds Jane-Michelle and Julian as they discuss anime from the recent or not-so-recent past that the general public has forgotten about. We discuss the merits of these anime, why the public has left them behind, and whether we think they’re worth a second look.

You can follow Jane on Twitter here and Julian on Twitter here.

Posted on in anime, Reviews

(REVIEW) The Door to The Common is Open: There’s a Light at the End of the Tunnel in BLUE REFLECTION RAY

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

She said
“I feel like I’ve come untethered,
in a room without walls.
I’m drifting on a dark and empty sea of nothing.
It doesn’t feel bad, it feels like nothin’ at all.”

Let’s not mince words, as far as gaining its own fanbase or leaving a cultural impact of basically any kind, Blue Reflection Ray never had a chance, at least not over here in the West. Not only was it easy to write off by anyone so inclined due to its floaty animation, sprawling story, Shoujo-inspired art style, and links to an already-obscure parent series (the larger Blue Reflection franchise), it was also sandwiched between two other magical girl anime tackling some similar subject matter in a more succinct and accessible way; Wonder Egg Priority and the second season of Magia Record respectively.

Nonetheless, it’s 24 weeks later and I find myself still with a real soft spot for BRR, in spite of everything. Maybe it’s because more than almost any other magical girl series I’ve ever seen, the enemy as personified in Blue Reflection Ray is not something simple. Instead, its real antagonist is sheer emotional burnout, the very death of feeling itself. Late in the series when main villain Shino infiltrates The Common, humanity’s collective unconsciousness, she drives the whole world into apathetic, mechanical lockstep. “Going through the motions” made very literal.

How do you tackle that? Comparatively little popular art in general even tries. And of that that has, it’s hard to argue Blue Reflection Ray is the best-equipped for it. But by god, there is glory in the fight, and fight Blue Reflection Ray did. Over the course of a nowadays-somewhat-rare two-cour run, this scrappy little show with a small initial audience and an ever-smaller one as it went on fought like hell. And now that it’s over, was it all worth it?

Let’s put it this way. Despite its ramshackle production, Blue Reflection Ray also has some real strengths. It takes genuine courage to even try to portray some of this stuff. And while one might (not incorrectly) accuse the show of being rather melodramatic, the fact remains that as a frank look at how bleak life can become when it’s defined by such evils as child abuse and suicidal ideation, there’s a real power to it. It feels written from a place of empathy, not voyeurism. Sincerity is a virtue, and it’s one Blue Reflection Ray has in spades.

As far as its literal story? Fairly simple stuff, at least in concept. A group of magical girls (the Reflectors of the title) must stop a villainous group, from robbing the innocent girls of the world of their feelings. The only obvious kink in the rope here is that the villains are another group of “red” Reflectors rather than monsters or something of the like. But Blue Reflection Ray‘s length lets the story unfurl and twist in odd, unusual ways. And the enemy Reflectors have their own complex backstories, which are doled out to us at a slow enough pace that in certain parts of the series, it can make one question if our girls are really in the right to begin with. The most prominent example being protagonist Hiori’s own sister, Mio, whose enigmatic decision to join Shino defines the first third or so of the series.

All these attempts at nuance do have a downside. Which is that while the characters’ stories are resonant and even powerful when properly played out, say, as in the case of turncoat Nina, anything that fails to be sufficiently resolved stands out as jarring. The most glaring example being the curious one-dimensionality of the aimlessly sadistic Uta, one of the red Reflectors. Some of this is understandable by virtue of the fact that Blue Reflection Ray is meant to link two games in its parent franchise, and some things are deliberately left to be resolved in the future, but Uta’s case is particularly strange. While she’s still a fun enough character, she sticks out like a sore thumb against the backdrop of the rest of the cast, who are otherwise fairly well-developed.

Uta after an average day of kicking puppies and stealing candy from orphans.

There is also the matter of that aforementioned production. Blue Reflection Ray has the misfortune of being a minor work by a studio long past its prime, J.C. Staff, and as such even the best-looking episodes are mostly competent rather than genuine eye-poppers, and some are outright bad. There is still some great direction here, and other aspects of the visual design, such as the peculiar look of the altered zones known as Leap Ranges, will certainly appeal to some. (I once described them as Madoka Magica‘s Witch Labyrinths by way of 90s computer art, and I stand by that comparison.) But on the whole BRR is not a series one should watch under the impression that it’s a feast for the eyes. Similarly, while there are a decent amount of fights, and some number of those contain most of the show’s best cuts, they tend to be over pretty fast.

On the other hand, all these restraints mean that on the rare occasion BRR does do something aesthetically in line with the traditions of the magical “transforming heroine” subgenre–your Pretty Cures, Sailor Moons, and such–it’s legitimately wonderful. In episode 23, the girls transform back to back for the one and only time in the whole series, complete with a transformation chant and a monster to fight afterward. And it is absolutely magical. Blue Reflection Ray is certainly aware that it’s part of a storied artistic lineage. If it only needs to invoke said lineage once, then that is enough.

So where does that leave us, all things considered?

Well, I choose to look at it this way; Blue Reflection Ray understands a certain truism of the human experience very well. We hurt ourselves in isolation but find solace in the company of others, it’s a concept as old as time. No man is an island. It’s also the same general idea that powers much of the magical girl genre, regardless of tone. It’s so obvious that it should be, by all rights, a cliché.

Yet, in BRR’s finale, with its deep blue sky, weepy reunions, and heavy, saccharine piano, it feels like nothing less than the truth all over again. The answer the series returns to, over and over again, is that love for each other is what can truly save us. Friendship, familial love, and romantic love, all equally important bulwarks against the darkness.

There is a minor running joke in some circles, one with more than a single grain of truth, that magical girl anime fandom can feel like a religion. If that’s so, let Blue Reflection Ray be a sermon, and let all who have ears hear the song. The same old same old has never felt so important.

“I’m pretty happy lying here with you,
it feels good to feel somethin’.”

Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the 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 is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Monthly Movies, Reviews

(REVIEW) EVANGELION: 3.0+1.01 THRICE UPON A TIME

SPECIAL WARNING: This review contains extensive spoilers for the reviewed material, and assumes familiarity with it and the remainder of the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise.

“You’ve grown to be an adult, Shinji.”

In a very real sense, this is the end of something. Neon Genesis Evangelion has existed as a series since 1995. Long before it became a “franchise” as such, there were those original episodes and the films that followed them, most famously End of Evangelion. The Rebuild movies, always controversial, serve as a way to rewrite and redefine Evangelion, which has remained true through the rocky first, the astonishing second, and the burned-black, emotionally deadened third entries in the series. That Thrice Upon a Time, the fourth and final, will spawn mountains upon mountains of discourse is only natural. This is Eva. One can talk forever about its influences and its impact, but there is nothing else that is truly like it. Twenty-six years of history come to a stop here. Welcome to the end of an era.

Let’s start not at the beginning, but at the end.

After the harrowing of the soul that was You Can (Not) Redo, Thrice Upon a Time concludes as the only iteration of the Evangelion series to receive a wholly unambiguous happy ending. There is no room for confusion here. Shinji Ikari is all grown up, and accordingly, this movie will make you weep like a proud parent on graduation day. For a certain kind of Eva fan, this is a claim to be met with skepticism. Eva derives no small part of its immense reputation from being a truly withering under-the-microscope look at depression. But it’s important to clarify our terms here: Thrice Upon a Time does not rob Eva of that accolade, it reinforces it. After twenty-six years of spiraling, Thrice assures even those of us in the darkest pits of misery that yes, there is a way out of this. As a kind of anti-End of Evangelion, it is an open window disguised as a trap door.

Which is to say, having a happy ending and being a happy movie are two different things. Getting to that ending is quite the ride, a fact only enhanced by Thrice‘s incredible length, clocking in at two and a half hours. Improbably, it earns every second, but one could be forgiven for wondering.

After some action-focused eye candy to start things off with a bang, and which mostly stars Mari, the film refocuses on its protagonist. We open with Shinji in near-catatonic burnout. He is entirely non-verbal for the first forty minutes of the film, and the first words anyone says to him are an accusation that he is a spineless loser. When, at one point, he gets a look at Asuka’s collar, has a PTSD flashback, and vomits on the spot. This, just so you know, is what we’re dealing with here. That he manages to, in the course of only the film’s remaining 110 minutes, go from there to where he is by its finale is nothing short of astonishing. If Thrice Upon a Time did not have two and half decades of cachet to lean on here, it probably wouldn’t work.

Over the course of Thrice Upon a Time, we see Shinji make sustained and–this is key here–permanent character growth for, arguably, the first time ever. His character actually changing in a sustained way, the way one’s character is supposed to change as they grow up, rather than simply shifting. Where You Can (Not) Redo seemed to bitterly mock the very idea of ever growing as a person at all, Thrice demonstrates that it’s possible with nothing more than some genuine care. Village 3, the town of survivors that Shinji, Asuka, and one of Rei’s clones are based in for the first third or so of the film, is a place where people are forced by the aftermath of the near-Third Impact disaster to work together.

It is in this environment, shepherded by two of his old friends; the now-adult Kensuke and Touji, that Shinji is finally able to make real, positive changes to himself. Village 3 shows Shinji what he does not have. His friends have become adults, started families, and, in the way that their circumstances dictate, become healthy and productive people. Shinji has none of that, and although he never says as much out loud it’s clear even early on in the film that he’s keenly aware of it.

But he’s not alone, here. Asuka stands at a distance from Village 3–as she always has from everyone–and the Clone Rei, naïve as a newborn, rapidly integrates into it, only for her to die near the film’s one-third mark. This could easily send Shinji spiraling, but the fact that she appears to die happy seems to spark something inside him, which Kensuke in particular helps nurture, and this becomes the catalyst for his growth.

It’s tempting to map out his entire emotional journey here, but a fair amount of it feels so natural that doing so could be an article unto itself. If we skip ahead to near the film’s climax where Shinji is suddenly not only able to face Gendo but do so unafraid, you could be forgiven for thinking a natural transition impossible. Yet, it simply works, there is no explanation for it beyond the built-up credibility of Shinji’s long history as a character. It makes sense because he’s Shinji.

Further in, the middle stretch or so of the film is a clash of dazzling surrealities. Massive battleships slug it out in conceptual spaces, nonce terms like The Key of Nebuchadnezzar, The Golgotha Object, and The Anti-Universe gain biblical significance fitting their names.

It’s all wonderful, and all Extremely Anime, in the genericized sense of the term that commentators like myself tend to avoid using. Explosions, giant robots and monsters, incomprehensibly vast scales of combat, and of course the plethora of proper nouns. Asuka pulls a plot-significant item out of her eye at one point, you get the idea. Rarely is this done as well as it’s done here. Somehow all of the disparate parts make perfect sense, and one would not be wrong to invoke one of Eva’s own successors in the feeling of how. There really is a bit of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in it.

But, yes, the key thing. Shinji fights Gendo. He fights Gendo bravely and while wholly accepting himself, and this lets him question his father in a meaningful way for the first time. As the two’s bout turns from physical to conversational, Gendo reveals what we’ve all known all along. He is, beneath his monstrous acts, beneath his abuse, beneath the mad scientist and would-be godslayer, a deeply lonely man willing to go to inhumanly great lengths to see his late wife again. The most evil men tend to be simple, and Gendo is no exception. Shinji defeating Gendo is an entire generation conquering shared trauma. The sort of solidarity that is direly needed in an era as grim as ours, and the sort that means even more coming from Evangelion than it might almost any other series.

It’s prudent to take an aside here to say that the film is of course not perfect. There are faults to be found, but they’re minor and mostly on the production side. Studio Khara’s CGI-heavy, live action film-influenced visual style has always been divisive, and it will never be moreso than it is here, putting the capstone on what is far and away their most well-known series. For my money, I’d say it works in some contexts better than others. Truly disturbing and otherworldly imagery, like Asuka’s loss against Unit 13, or a bizarrely photorealistic, haunting echo of End of Evangelion‘s “floating Rei” are excellent.

In other places, especially in certain battle scenes, one can’t escape the feeling that there’s a grandiosity that these fights should have that they don’t always quite pull off. Mostly in the form of the sheer scale of the actors involved–especially the battleships–not always coming through. Still, these criticisms are easily offset by the other, aforementioned visual merits.

On a slightly more substantial level, one could argue that limiting the film’s perspective to mostly Shinji limits its impact. The death of the Clone Rei relatively early on being the example I suspect many will glom onto. But I think this is the wrong tack to take. Shinji, despite everything, has been all of us. Which is not to say he is all of us. Some folks, even some who love Evangelion dearly, have left that particularly dark phase of our mental illnesses long behind us. But we have all been “back there”, where every room is suffocating, and any activity is a distraction from our mind’s attempt to eat itself. And the fear of going “back there”, of possibly hurting yourself or worse, hurting others, is very real. Which is the exact thing that makes it so cathartic when, pushing back against twenty-six years of history, his own initial characterization, and the countless reductionist depictions of the character as a spineless wimp, Shinji wins. The Son, finally understanding his Father, vanquishes him without further struggle.

The new world he creates, as he is made able to do, is not some perfect paradise. It is a world not unlike ours, though I suspect, perhaps, a little brighter. Of course any distance between the two is a mere illusion. After such a long time clawing at one’s own soul, any daylight is welcome.

If the film’s climax seems to leave some questions unanswered, they simply don’t feel relevant. It’s Mari who pulls Shinji from his rapidly-fading sketch world into the new universe he’s created. The ending scene depicts Shinji, now an adult, living a truly, peacefully, ordinary life.

And so, the Sun shines on a world without Evangelions, and, for us, without Evangelion.

I am reminded by Thrice’s finale not so much of any other piece of Eva media, or indeed any of Gainax’s other marquee properties. Instead, my mind turns to the finale of the largely-overlooked Wish Upon The Pleiades. In that series’ finale, which marked the end of Studio Gainax’s time as a going concern as a producer of TV anime, no words are wasted on complicated, overwrought goodbyes. Instead, as here, it’s simply on to the next. The next universe, the next adventure, the next dawn, or, if you prefer, the neon genesis.

The final remarkable thing about Thrice Upon a Time is that it puts Neon Genesis Evangelion on the whole in the past, and at the same time, immortalizes it for the future. The end of an era, but the beginning of a new day. It is over, but it will be with us forever.

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