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.
They fucking got me again.
Let me explain. Nearly 20 years ago, a little anime called Code Geass (subtitled Lelouch of The Rebellion) premiered, and it barged into the hearts and minds of myself and so many other impressionable young teens with reckless abandon. Short of perhaps Death Note, no anime was more synonymous with a certain kind of mid-aughts I’m 14 And This Is Deep chuuni shit. Quite unlike its former chief contender, Code Geass has remained an active franchise in the years since.1 I haven’t seen them myself, but the Akito the Exiled spinoff films have their following, and the series has kept chugging along with various ancillary media too, some available in English and some not. In 2019, the Lelouch of the Re;surrection film staked out an alternate continuity where Lelouch comes back to life. That movie was a bit of an up-and-down experience, and mostly succeeded off the strength of being a movie full of Lelouch doing Lelouch Shit, but its best moments were classic Code Geass camp and proved that the franchise still had some life left in it. Code Geass has been around, so the existence of Rozé of the Recapture, a new series of theatrical OVAs that are also being streamed week to week as a regular TV series (don’t ask me how this works, I don’t know), is not too surprising.
It’s also probably not too surprising to any longtime readers of this blog that I, the Magia Record defender, think that the first episode of what some would deride as a pointless spinoff project is actually really fucking good. In hindsight, I don’t know why I ever doubted the project. I am still the same person I was in 8th grade in one very important way; I love campy goofball shit, and Code Geass is and always has been some Grade-A campy goofball shit.
Rozé of The Recapture takes place many years after some version of the original series’ events—I’m not totally clear on how many, but it’s been long enough to let some additional light sci-fi elements seep into the setting—but rehashes the same fundamental premise. A resurgent “Neo-Britannian”2 empire has once again conquered and subjugated Japan (or at least Hokkaido), once again rebranding the region itself as Area 11 and its citizens as second-class Elevens. Once again, an underground cadre of resistance fighters struggle against their imperial overlords. There are some extra elements this time around (such as a gigantic energy barrier called the Situmpe Wall that surrounds Area 11), but the fundamental premise is the same. And once again, it’s up to a Britannian outsider to help the resistance win the day. More or less. We’ll come back to that part.
The main difference is the most obvious one. There’s no Lelouch, here. He’s gone. The emperor is dead.
In his place we have a mysterious pair of Britannian siblings named Rozé [Amasaki Kouhei] and Ash [Furukawa Makoto]. Ash has yet to make much of an impression on me, but his brother is a different story. Rozé is not Lelouch—nobody could be Lelouch, that’s an impossible pair of shoes to fill—but he’s a pretty fun protagonist so far, with a whimsical and playful personality that belies the brain of a serious tactician. Rozé, however, commands a battlefield that is significantly weathered from his predecessor’s day. In general, Rozé of the Recapture has a marginally more grim aesthetic sensibility than the original series. It’s as though the order was to make it just as camp but twice as dark. Everyone still dresses like a lunatic, and the show has that same love of cutting from battlefield to command room shenanigans to domestic scene and back at a wild pace that the original did, and it even also has its love of bold—perhaps reckless—incorporation of very bleak imagery into something that’s otherwise so fun, but it does feel a bit less bright, even literally, than the original Code Geass did. It’s as though Code Geass knows it is returning to a world that is, if you can believe it, even bleaker than the one it left in 2008. Having not seen them, I can’t comment on how directly this follows from the sensibilities of the Akito the Exiled side series, but I wouldn’t be shocked if those have been quietly building a bridge from the original series’ point of view to that of this anime.
As for the actual events of this episode, despite the slightly updated setting they’ll be very familiar to any returning Code Geass heads. We open with some exposition, and after the OP, a pretty grim scene of Britannian noble siblings—both of a class of knight called Einbergs, something that seems like it will be a recurring thing over the course of this show—Greede and Gran Kirkwayne [Nojima Hirofumi and Ono Yuuki, respectively] being absolutely horrible to a group of random Japanese citizens. This culminates with Gran, the more hotheaded of the two, shooting a man he’s holding hostage in the head. When his wife cries out in grief, Greede makes a token effort to perfunctorily apologize, only to then shoot her when she understandably spits on him. The scene ends with Greede ordering his men to unceremoniously massacre the rest of the gathered group. The message is pretty clear; the Kirkwaynes are bad people, power-drunk authoritarians and bigots with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Fair enough.
So of course, our protagonists are tasked by the fabulously-named Seven Shining Stars resistance group with taking them out. Their infiltration into the Britannian base, to the extent that it even counts as infiltration, is classic Code Geass. Ash’s knightmare frame emerges from a wrapped-up present box and Rozé spends much of the scene dressed like a clown; you can’t ask for much better than that. Rozé does eventually actually properly infiltrate the base, confronting Greede, the brains of the operation, directly.
The two have a very classically Geassian back and forth. The series’ famous chess motifs return here, as absolutely ridiculously goofball as they were in 2006. Rozé and Greede strategize while poking at some kind of holographic tabletop chess display. When the moment is right, Rozé orders his brother to go all out, and back in the actual battlefield we get some genuinely riveting mecha action, complete with Ash skewering Gran and his knightmare frame with a pair of its own swords after laying down some pretty fantastic shit-talk about how Gran’s a worthless coward.
The robot is pretty cool too. We don’t get a name for it here, but look at it!
Back in the base, we get a fantastic twist here as Rozé, with Greede at gunpoint, offers the Britannian noble a choice. Or, perhaps it’s better to say that he doesn’t give him a choice per se. Because Rozé doesn’t do anything per se. There is no Rozé.
Meet Sumeragi Sakuya [Ueda Reina], the actual protagonist of Rozé of the Recapture.
I am almost never at a loss for words when writing these columns. There’s a lot to say about even fairly uninteresting anime, and Rozé of the Recapture is anything but that so far. But seriously, what the hell does anyone want me to say? They made a character who looks like Lelouch a woman and had her crossdress for most of the first episode. I’m in love, sue me. I’ve seen the phrase “Lelouch of the Transition” drift around the Internet in regards to this twist and, I mean, what can I possibly say that’s better than that? (It does say a lot that this random tweet showcasing the scene immediately following this has done more marketing for Rozé of The Recapture than Disney+, who are distributing it in North America, have, but that is perhaps unsurprising, given their track record.) This scene is what made it truly obvious to me that the show is dedicated to recapturing that spirit of the original as much as possible, hopefully without too-directly rehashing many of its plot points. Rozé of The Recapture does basically nothing at all here to endear itself to any new audiences, and it definitely isn’t going to change the opinion of anyone in the “Code Geass sucks, actually” crowd, but I honestly think that is fine. Code Geass is so entirely itself that trying to “adapt to the times” would’ve been doomed to fail. Call this the rare Millennial nostalgia play that I’m fully onboard for.
In any case, Sakuya shows off her Geass. We don’t know how she got it or precisely how it works—my reverse-engineering attempt here is that it somehow forces the target to choose between two options if they hear her give a command—but she offers Greede the choice of saving a hundred times more Japanese people than he’s ordered dead or killing himself. Suffice to say, Mr. Kirkwayne does not survive to the end of the episode.
We close on Sakuya—back in-character as Rozé—talking to the Stars. She says that she and Ash knew from the jump that this entire mission was more of a test than anything else, and asks what the real objective they’re being hired for is. The answer? To liberate an Alcatraz-like offshore prison to free some of the Stars’ comrades. It just so happens that someone that Sakuya euphemistically calls a ‘friend’—someone named Sakura, who looks so similar to Sakuya that they could be mistaken for each other—is also being held there, under the pretense that she’s Sakuya. The amount of hilarious shenanigans this is setting up is truly dizzying to consider, but the main takeaway is one very important thing; if Code Geass isn’t back per se, that’s only because it never really left.
1: Technically, there actually have been a few short story collections and one-shots and things. But I think there’s a reason that there’s no Death Note spinoff airing right now. Lelouch would whip Light’s ass in any serious battle of wits, by the way. Just saying.
2: I will be using the series’ ridiculous alternate history terminology religiously while discussing it as it airs, thank you.
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The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!
The season is winding down, and the winds of the upcoming Summer season are already on the horizon (we’ll hopefully get to that tomorrow, if my writing schedule holds up). We’ll be kicking off with the three finales that aired over the last week, one of which only came out today. I realized after compiling this that in all three finale writeups, I quoted a character from the show in summarizing how I felt about the show itself. That was not intentional! But it’s kind of funny. I’ll also be blunt in saying I liked some of these more than others. Read on to learn why.
Anime
Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night – Episode 12 (Finale)
I’ve compared Jellyfish to other anime a lot while writing these off-the-cuff posts, but to pull from an otherwise very different series, the ending here almost reminds me of that of Witch From Mercury? Decidedly pretty good, and definitely fine-tuned to make you feel happy that our main pair are back together, but with just enough that doesn’t quite add up that I feel remiss not to mention it. It’s now been a few days since I wrote the original version of this entry over on Tumblr, and it’s clear to me that most people did not like this ending. I mostly did! But I don’t think it redeems the series largely faceplanting in its second half, so I’m not sure how willing I am to contest the consensus. Personally I think this is a case where I like the characters more than the show they’re from.
To be clear, if the series’ representational efforts—more in the realm of Kiwi than the Mahiru / Yoru thing, which the show largely drops for its final stretch—outlive the actual text of the show itself, as may well happen, that’s not actually a bad thing. Most anime would be lucky to have that legacy.
I want to zero in on one moment during the episode, though. Kano during the concert, where we’re early in the episode and she’s clearly nervous. Flashbacks, intrusive-thoughts-as-voiceover. The literally-faceless masses. This is imagery we’ve seen associated with her before, as she’s clearly reliving her trauma from her days with the Sunflower Dolls.
We see her basically bomb; the backing track kicks in but she can’t sing, and suddenly the sound cuts out entirely, putting her in the bottom of the ocean. Mero, surprisingly, is the one who calls out to her to egg her on, although it’s Mahiru’s jellyfish that she looks at as Mahiru calls out to her as well. We get our big, swelling concert song, and then the moment is over. Jellyfish‘s actual narrative ends the second the music dies, for better and worse.
We get a mirror of the first episode as the two meet again for the first time in a while after Kano’s performance. Ultimately, the conclusion they come to is that they kept their promises to each other, so everything’s basically fine. This is clearly to some extent what the show wants us collectively to think, as well. Kano as the aimless singer who’s finally found something to sing for, Mahiru as the ever down-on-herself visual artist who’s found someone inspired by her paintings. Kano says she wants to be a reason for people to keep looking forward, an interesting thought. But I’m not sure how much I agree with the show’s assertion here. The two definitely seem like they’ll be fine in the long-term, but given that we aren’t going to get to see the long-term, that’s a bit of a bittersweet pill.
In the Sunflower Dolls / JELEE show’s credit roll, Kano is credited under her preferred name. Yukine, the closest thing Jellyfish has had to an antagonist, seems to mean this as—and certainly the show wants us to take it as—a gesture that despite her past treatment of her daughter, she respects her now. (An analogy is also drawn between the virtual audience the show draws and the 50,000 person capacity of the Tokyo Dome. Originally referred to several episodes ago, having one of her artists sing there was a long-term goal of Yukine’s. The rest of JELEE is a little weirded out by Kano bringing this up, and that much is obviously intentional.) Clearly, not all is forgiven, as Kano playfully spurns her mother in the finale’s closing minutes. Still, something about this feels…a little wishy-washy in a way I can’t entirely put my finger on. It’s a good ending, maybe the best ending this iteration of the series could’ve had, but not a great one. There’s a distinction there, and this is the sort of show that practically begs rumination on distinctions of that nature. Yukine herself says, and I quote directly, “The difference between buzz and backlash ultimately hinges on an idea being meaningful.” AreJellyfish‘sideas meaningful? I think that’s an open question. Despite everything—Kano’s trauma, the falling out with Mahiru and Mahiru’s own impostor syndrome, the show’s own strange pacing, Kiwi being bullied for their gender expression and for being “weird”, the discrimination Mei faced as a child, Mero detonating the careers of the Sunflower Dolls’ onetime rivals The Rainbow Girls—this ends as a feelgood story, despite its gestures otherwise. That may be a bit too neat for me, I’m not sure.
I hate to bring up That Other Music Anime Airing Right Now while writing about this one yet again, but the main distinction between the two, I’ve finally realized, is that Girls Band Cry‘s emotional material feels much more consistently raw. Jellyfish’s best episodes hit those nerves as well, but the show on the whole feels like it can’t quite thread the needle in the same way. The comparison is perhaps unflattering to both anime, but I can’t help myself here. Jellyfish clearly wants to have a complex, somewhat open-ended ending, but it also wants to leave us on a positive note, not unlike fellow polarizing aftermath anime Wonder Egg Priority. In that show’s case, I felt that it was doing enough both overall and with its ending in particular that I felt compelled to defend it. I can’t really do that, here. I’m not as disappointed as some have been, for sure, but if someone feels significantly more let down than I do, I can’t really blame them.
The series ends on a short run-through of denouement scenes, for the individual members of JELEE both apart and together as a group. Tellingly, it might be Kiwi’s that works the best. The relatively straightforward nature of their arc makes their development feel the most earned and the most logical. The whole thing with Koharu is, to say the least, odd, but even that fits in pretty well with their arc in coming to accept themself as a queer person in a world of queer people. At the same time—and I couldn’t quite pin this down the other day when I was first writing this—that same coherence just isn’t there for the other characters. Perhaps because Mei was never particularly well-developed to begin with, and Kano and Mahiru’s reunion feels contrived. I can forgive letting a kiss on the cheek hang for six episodes. Letting that falling-out hang for, what, 3? Is a bit harder to stomach though. The entire plot there takes away a bit from what the show is trying to do, and when what you’re trying to do is this delicate, “a bit” can feel like a lot.
The over-painting scenes in the last few minutes of the episode being drawn as though they’re shot through the phone is a cool touch, I like it. On the note of that scene, something that Jellyfish does manage to capture is the warm mundanities of friendship and life in the digital age, and I like Kano’s little speech to the others at the end here. That’s worth something, I think. Not many anime end with their casts literally waving goodbye to the camera.
Time, as my memories of the show crystalize and harden, will tell whether I end up truly feeling that those warm feelings are “enough” to rate Jellyfish particularly highly, both on its own terms and as compared to other anime that have come and gone (and will come and go) this year. But that’s also sort of a way of looking at art that is ruthless enough to not always be appropriate. So I’ll say it here if I never remember to again, the people who made this clearly cared about it a lot. There’s love in it, and love does matter. I can’t speak for anyone else, though. Some songs just don’t reach everybody.
A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 12 (Finale)
So ends one of the season’s true hidden gems. A series that combines a freewheeling and loosey-goosey sensibility to both its worldbuilding and characters with just enough emotional warmth to make it worth connecting to. Good chance this ends up being my favorite of the two finales I’m watching tonight!
An aside: the live action screen camera-point screen recording of some random-ass actual pachinko machine is really funny.
It’s either astounding luck or meticulous planning that a pretty funny parody of a band performance episode dropped here, in the gay girl band season. It’s obviously nowhere near the bowl-you-over powerchord of say Girls Band Cry‘s eleventh episode, but Grasshopper the Savior put in an okay (and more importantly, amusing) showing here. How does that whole plot conclude? With Noa getting arrested for insider trading. Roll credits!
Sara, meanwhile, exits her ongoing plot by graduating the school she was enrolled in just three months prior, universally acclaimed and beloved by her fellow students and their parents alike. She sings an idol song. It’s all pretty great.
All told the main takeaway here is that Salad Bowl is, true to its title, a gathering of truly eccentric souls and bizarre situations. Sousuke’s reaction to Olivia’s band getting broken up because of Noa’s antics? “I see this is all insane as usual.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. The series ends on what passes for a cliffhanger in a show that has never really been focused on its plot. I can’t imagine this getting a second season, but who knows? I’d be pleasantly surprised.
Train To The End of The World – Episode 12 (Finale)
Here, we have easily the best of this past week’s finales. A pitch-perfect ending to a show that was not always so effortless. An ending I appreciate a lot, the sort of thing that makes me view the whole series in a better light.
A brief summary of the literal events here; We get a final battle while the two trains drive through what I’m going to call Windows 95 screensavers. We get Shizuru and Youka making up for lost time. We get the world returning to something that’s not normalcy but at least approximates it. (Another theme running through this show is acceptance of inevitable change, naturally.) We get to see scumbag techbro villain Pontarou get his comeuppance. It’s all very nice.
I think with hindsight the show is perhaps best considered as a longform metaphor for anxiety, specifically that stemming from social conflict. You fuck up, and the fucking up is blown up so big in your mind that it becomes impossible to move past. As somebody who just spent a few hours agonizing over and then rescheduling a doctor’s appointment, and then agonizing over the fact that I did reschedule it, I get it. It happens. It usually doesn’t result in the world degrading into a surreal hell of the senses that threatens to drive all within it to death or madness, but it happens. If you want to stretch a little, you can rope in the show’s technological motifs—the externalization of the internal through the medium of the Internet, as turned outward by the 7G Phenomenon—into all this. You could argue that Shuumatsu Train advocates for resolving conflicts of the social media age by talking to each other and treating each other as humans. I’m not sure how intentional that read is, but if it is, it’s a fine thesis, and the series pulls it off pretty well.
Incidentally, anxiety like that, which can end up fracturing friend groups as it has in Shuumatsu Train, doesn’t usually involve one of the parties being a near-omnipotent goddess either. Nonetheless that is what Shizuru and co. have to deal with at this episode’s climax, and while the results are a little saccharine, I think this whole arrangement works better than not. The final argument (such that it is) between Shizuru and Yoka is just great all around, and ties up their interpersonal conflict perfectly.
Shuumatsu Train was hardly a perfect show (I ask readers to remember the run of relatively weak episodes at about the 2/3rds mark. We probably could’ve skipped the ecchi zombie plot) but it did what it wanted to do and it did it well. This is another one in the grand tradition of oddball fare like The Rolling Girls or even the Akiba’s Trip anime, and it’s a worthy addition to whatever you’d like to call that genre, regardless of any flaws. To quote Shizuru herself, it’s better to try and have regrets than to do nothing at all.
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 55
This episode is mostly just an excuse for a procession of several fun, short battles. I say “just”, but that’s hardly a bad thing, since at the end of the day that’s what this series is about.
The second is the best of these, with an impressive showing from Elite Four artiste Hassel and his Baxcalibur and Flapple. Roy and his partner, the Grass-type gym leader Brassius pull off a number of coordinated double moves. Our brief detour over into what Coral’s doing is also pretty fun, since “what she’s doing” is having her Glalie blow everybody up again.
The real treat seems like it will be next week, though, when Liko faces off against Rika. I will spare you all the gay rant, although I can’t promise I will do the same when next week rolls around.
Wonderful Precure – Episode 21
I must say, my main surprise in watching this episode was how much of it was an episode of a Class S yuri school comedy. Yuki transfers in to the gang’s school in this episode, and most of the episode, accordingly, focuses on that.
Her personality, or at least, the one she sort of grows out of here is—and I realize that what I’m about to say is very silly—almost a little Homura-esque? It’s something about her single-minded fixation on Mayu that makes me think that, I think. I assume she’ll continue to develop out of it as the show goes on. (Something Homura never had the chance to do given the way her show is structured but, well, they’re very different anime to say the very least. It’s a loose comparison at best, but let me have my fun here.)
We get a pretty melancholy little flashback here where we learn about Mayu drifting away from a friend at her previous school. The anecdote, I think more than anything before it, seems to position Mayu as neurodivergent, as what drives a wedge between Mayu and her former friend is simply Mayu’s tendency to become fixated on tasks, and, implicitly, her more general habit of keeping to herself. Yuki is the one who tells Komugi and Iroha (and, well, us) all this, and I don’t think it’s a reach to say she’s projecting her own hurt into the anecdote as well. Much of this episode’s focus is her learning to deal with her own reluctance to get close to people. That’s all a bit heavy for a kids’ show, but Precure being Precure, it handles it all with relative ease.
Of course, all that and the action part of the episode involves waking up a sleeping panda garugaru by using the fox fairy to transform Komugi into a giant tire. The animation goes all out for this, of course, and around here I started to wonder if this might honestly be the best Precure season, or at least a new personal favorite.
Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 11
What would be a fairly nice transitory episode leading into the finale is once again held back by a lackluster visual presentation.
Honestly this one shoots past “workmanlike” into just generally pretty bad to look at all around, especially in its first half it’s just remarkably shoddy. (I can’t even meaningfully directly compare to the manga, as this is after the point where I stopped reading, but I almost guarantee you it looks better there, and anyone can read any of my Dungeon Meshi writeups to know I’m not normally a “haw haw manga better” person.)
If you can look past that—and the fairly gratuitous pool scene a bit after the halfway point—this is a decent bit of plotting. Rei and Oto possibly having a way back home is a decent final conflict. What I will say, the secret Rei is keeping where he plans to become the ticket is a compellingly dark twist. My main hope is just that things can get back in order visually by the time the anime ends next week. I’m also interested to see how the cat boss youkai factors in.
Girls Band Cry – Episode 12
A slower episode this week, but certainly an eventful one. TogeToge are officially signed! Rupa and Tomo are working their last day at their job! I am very happy for these people who don’t exist!
As one might predict, Nina seems almost as anxious about their current situation as she is happy. After all, Diamond Dust were still the main attraction at the concert TogeToge played at. And despite Nina claiming her band is better (she’s right) and that they completely rocked (she’s right about that, too), they aren’t the ones being talked about on socials. Rarely do the best artists get the most coverage, as Nina is learning.
The callbacks to the first episode are absolutely adorable, as is Tomo’s cute but muted reaction to the card and flowers Subaru buys her. The hotpot party scene is nice; a restrained sort of comfort and a chance to recuperate after the big, billowing emotions of last episode.
Their songwriting sessions are motivated by a desire not just to one-up Diamond Dust, but also, as you might recall, to get to the Budokan, a feat that would put them on par with many famous bands up to and including The Beatles, but most amusingly, Cheap Trick. These are subject to montage, the first in the series I think. We cap with a little scene of Momoka asleep on Nina’s shoulder, on the train home. It’s so cute, I wanted to cry.
The show’s final twist seems to be to make the whole Diamond Dust / TogeToge fight very literal. TogeToge are offered a co-bill, with composing the theme for a TV series on the line for the band that draws a bigger crowd. This is a stacked fight at best, and TogeToge have a lot to lose. Ultimately, the band put it to a vote, and, despite Nina’s misgivings (and being collectively unsure of what DiaDust’s actual goal was, here), they opt to decline. This leaves Nina in something of an emotional rut. Being a rockstar, she has learned, is not all about huge bursts of emotional catharsis. There’s a lot of boring bookkeeping and shady politicking, too. (I would refer her to the wisdom of KRS-One on this topic, myself.)
Momoka, however, knows that. There’s a running B-plot through this episode about a song she’s working on, first mentioned during the hotpot party. Throughout, she’s stuck on a specific part of it (we’re not shown what, specifically). Why exactly is left unstated, but it seems to be at least in part because, in her own way, Momoka wants to beat Diamond Dust, too. She’s just being more subtle about it.
Or at least, she thinks she is. Nina seems to pick up on this, and the rest of the band are convinced to accept DiaDust’s challenge after all. There’s fear in Momoka’s shadowed mood throughout the episode too. That much she says herself. She lost everything once before, and she’s afraid to lose it again.
The episode ends with an upturn of mood; Momoka admitting that she wants to win against Diamond Dust too, TogeToge’s sound engineer and manager telling them they really like the new song (which Momoka finally finishes, naturally), and all seems to be going well in the leadup to the finale.
And then, at the last possible second, we get this; the new song releases, Nina goes to check the metrics. 103 views. Ouch.
It is hard to tie genuine emotion to numbers floating up and down. This is a big mistake that frankly a lot of music anime make these days, but here, that 103 feels like a legit punch to the gut. We only have one episode left! What the hell is going to happen?! It’s hard to know, and there’s of course the knot of anxiety that GBC won’t “stick the landing” so to speak, but I have a lot of faith in the series. TogeToge will figure it out.
Anime – Non-Seasonal
Ruin Explorers Fam & Ihrie
A fun, if not particularly challenging, fantasy action-comedy romp from the heyday of the 90s OVA boom.
On the one hand, there’s not a ton to say about this one; we’ve got a very basic fantasy premise here with our two lead protagonists—a pair of treasure hunters named Ihrie [Neya Michiko] and Fam [Shiina Hekiru]—who seek an ancient wish-granting treasure. (That’s “Fam” pronounced to rhyme with “fawn” by the way. Don’t ask her if she’s cheesin’, though.) This eventually spirals out into a quest to help the last prince of a destroyed kingdom reclaim his throne from a very classic wizardly overlord bad guy. It’s all solid stuff and the main strengths here are visual; the show’s choices of color and shadow are consistently fantastic and the animation is similarly excellent with a lot of standout moments both in more action-oriented scenes and in the more comedic ones that make use of a lot of good character acting. (This is most obvious with Fam, whose kitty tail gets to telegraph her mood sometimes. It’s a cute touch.)
On the writing side, while the plot is truly nothing special, the characters, broadly-written as they are, are solid and likeable. Aside from the two leads, my favorites ended up being Rasha [Matsumoto Rika], a snarky and full-of herself wizardess who starts out as an antagonist before she and her partner Migel [Yamadera Kouichi] join the main party to help them take down the bad guy, and surprisingly, the cowardly merchant Galuff [Ootsuka Chikao]. Usually such characters come off as vaguely uncomfortable, and he’s not entirely free of that, but he’s such a petty and ineffective scoundrel that it becomes kind of endearing.
All told, this is a pretty fun and accessible watch. I dock a few points for some of the thematic material in the fourth and final episode (I’ve never been a big fan of the whole ‘divine right of kings’ thing, even in inherited form as a stock genre plot in fantasy stuff like this.) But all around, it’s a good time, and there are way worse ways to burn two hours. This is a strain of fantasy anime that still exists albeit in somewhat reduced form, so it’s not like this stuff has really gone away, but obviously something like eg. Dungeon Meshi (or even like, I dunno, Helck) is a fair bit more sophisticated on the writing and thematic level, so the comparison isn’t direct. Either way, yeah, fun time. Enjoyed myself here.
That’s all for this week, anime fans. Consider tipping your girl if you liked any of the entries this week, every penny helps me cover basic life necessities like food and medicine. As for this week’s Bonus Thought, I wanted to give it to Train, since we won’t be seeing it in this column again. Take it away, Akira!
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!
The season is starting to wind down, and that shows in some of these episodes. Our first two anime this week are setting up for their big finales.
Anime – Seasonal
Train to The End of The World – Episode 11
As Shuumatsu Train enters its final stretch, we kick off one of the series’ denser episodes to date with our heroines arriving, at last, at their destination of Ikebukuro.
They find Youka in short order, but things aren’t simple enough that just reuniting the separated friends is enough. It’s clear that Youka doesn’t remember them—we don’t yet know why, but Reimi openly speculates that ‘wibble-wobble surgery’ of the same type Zenjirou was subjected to might be to blame—and their attempts to remind her who they are fail. Her reactions are confused and interlaced with her 7G powers, and any time the girls try to break through to her, it clearly destabilizes her already fragile mental state, causing the environment around her to temporarily devolve into an acid trip of digital video flickering and color-burst effects. The girls are chased away by Pontarou’s personal guards, the masked Ikebukuro police force.
Retreating to the train, they receive a phone call—via a phone fashioned from bitter melon, of course, because why not?—from Makoto and Zenjirou. Their conversation here basically confirms what we already knew; if they can nab the 7G button and just turn the network back off, the whole world will snap back to normalcy. (Allegedly, at least.) They’re not alone, though, as an unexpected ally turns up in the form of Mito and her zombie horde from a few episodes back. Her zombies, as it turns out, can sense the presence of the 7G button.
Call me stupid, but the show calls attention to a few parallels I hadn’t noticed up to this point. For one, Shizuru and Pontarou are, in a very broad sense, a bit similar, in that both are actively trying to avoid accountability for their actions. (They’re also very different in a number of ways, which I expect the show to draw attention to in its finale.) Also, the zombies, with their longing for the old world back when times were simpler—and indeed their distraction by simple pleasures like cheap ecchi—are supposed to be, you know, all of us, the people watching the show.
I honestly think that this sort of straightforward lock-and-key symbolism doesn’t really suit Shuumatsu Train particularly well. (And hey, what are you trying to say about your audience, here?) But then again, it took me 10 1/2 episodes to connect two dots with a line, so who am I to talk?
In any case, the episode ends with two things. One; a shockingly well animated and choreographed fight sequence between Pochi (as in, Youka’s odd butler / handler. We still don’t know what his deal is). And two; Akira and Mito slamming the 7G button to turn it off. Surprise! It doesn’t actually work, and in the episode’s closing moments, we get the latest in a long line of incredible what-the-fuck moments from Shuumatsu Train, when our heroines’ final obstacle comes rolling out of a high-rise on a track being constructed as it goes by long, gooey arms made of some kind of yellow substance; a second train, with Youka and Pontarou on it, headed off to parts unknown.
Shuumatsu Train has hardly been a perfect anime, but I’ve immensely enjoyed the ride just for how utterly bizarre it’s been. It’s hard to say what the finale will look like, but I’m interested to find out, and in the end, being compellingly weird from start to finish is all I really wanted out of this show to begin with.
Dungeon Meshi – Episode 23
Senshi’s backstory is another area where the addition of color, sound, and motion to the material gives it a slightly different texture than it had in manga form.
In the manga, this backstory felt like a fairly lengthy aside, steeped in deep shadows to a degree that was nearly gothic. Here, rendered in full color—earthy browns, iron greys, bloody reds—it feels a lot more like what it actually is, a traumatic memory. Bunched up in a relatively brief burst like this, but punctuated with a monstrous illustration of the griffin that hounded the dwarves who were taking care of Senshi, and the eventual screams of Null (the dwarf who Gilin, Senshi’s advocate throughout his backstory, butts heads with, and who Senshi believes Gilin may have in fact killed) renders the entire thing violent and scary. You can really feel how this would shape someone to their core.
The backflips the narrative goes through to eventually prove to Senshi that no, it was in fact not another dwarf that Gilin fed to him when he was young, have always been a bit convoluted for my taste, but they go down easier here. Especially when the payoff is Senshi having a big, tearful, emotional moment, always a nice thing to see.
The tail end of the episode is a bit less serious, mostly focusing on the ramifications of the circle of changeling mushrooms our heroes accidentally step into, swapping their species around at random. (Laios becomes a dwarf, Chilchuck a tall-man, Senshi an elf, Marcille a downright adorable half-foot, and Izutsumi a kobold.) It’s all a fairly good gag, although a bit light for Dungeon Meshi, until it ends up having very real consequences when the party run into a troop of gargoyles. I will say, there’s probably something not-entirely-flattering to be said about the show’s refusal to treat kobolds (dog-like, and thus the least human-looking humanoid species) with any dignity, even if the “go get it, boy” ball-toss gag that Izutsumi is subjected to here is admittedly a bit funny.
The episode ends in true Dungeon Meshi fashion; a brief meditation on the universality of dumplings. The series ends this week, and I’m going to miss it.
Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 9
This episode didn’t leave a massive impression on me overall. The core conceit, that of a VTuber being a sort-of tsukumogamidue to how rapidly digital data is deleted and discarded compared to physical objects, is pretty cool, as is the VTuber in question being a pastiche of a couple different popular, actual talents. For whatever reason though, the main thing that stuck with me in this episode was the goofy, animated dance number at its end, which is wholly disconnected from the rest of the episode’s story and is mainly about a catgirl who we won’t properly meet for a little bit, yet. Odd! Compelling, but odd!
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 53
Hatenna episode 😊
Our Heroes meeting a trio of people who look vaguely similar to themselves and even seem to be arranged in a similar trio is really funny, to start off with. The main meat of the episode, where they encounter the ghost alluded to last time and learn that it’s an Annihilape, is pretty great all throughout. The animation team really goes through some effort here to convey Annihilape as a menacing, almost otherworldly force of nature. Conversely, it’s pretty cool how our protagonists work together to stop it in their initial encounter, as it shows off a pronounced coordination, which we haven’t gotten from them super often before.
The horde of angry Mankey is honestly a pretty credible threat. Have you ever seen videos of angry monkeys? They’re terrifying. There are a lot of really impressive cuts here, the majority of which are apportioned to Annihiliape but the main trio’s Pokemon get some as well.
Given Hatenna’s prominence throughout the episode, the obvious tack to take is to have it evolve (especially given that Roy got his Kilowattrel last week, and that Hattrem learns the Dark-type Brutal Swing on evolution) but instead, at least initially, it uses its brains to figure out the source of the Mankey troop’s frustration and the remainder of the episode, complete with an insert song, is about helping the troop recover their food store, emphasizing once again Horizons‘ knack for centering episodes around unconventional problem-solving.
That said, the show isn’t enough of a tease to raise the possibility of a Pokémon evolving without actually following through with it. A stray rockslide causes the Mankey troop to start fighting amongst themselves, and some of the Primeape troop leaders even evolve into more Annihiliapes. Short of any other way to keep the peace, Hatenna promptly evolves into Hattrem, beats all of the squabbling monkeys up, and then heals them while they’re knocked out. It’s a genuinely delightful sequence and a lovely capper to a very good episode overall.
Wonderful Precure – Episode 19
We pick up from last week’s Hamster Garugaru two-parter for a just really, really good episode about Mayu, her fears, and her relationship with Yuki.
We kick off with a bunch of cutely-illustrated Japanese turns of phrase, most of which were new to me, and all of which are animal based. This has minimal relevance to the rest of the episode, but I mention it because it’s cute.
We also meet the evil general for only the second time, though once again he simply encourages the garugaru to Be Angry while giving it some new powers, advice it has no problem taking. The animators deserve some credit here for making a goddamn hamster seem like a credible threat (and for making Yuki seem genuinely threatening in turn when she trash talks it a bit later in the episode), what a feat.
Given that this episode is called “The Birth of Cure Lilian”, it’s no surprise that Mayu’s Cure alter ego debuts here, but we actually get an explanation of that name in the episode itself. Mayu’s mother mentions a lily-yarn that Mayu made for her when she was young as an example of Mayu imparting positive emotions and experiences to other people. Given some flashbacks early in the episode and, really, her entire previous existence in this series, it seems like this is a hard thing for Mayu to believe. She’s honestly so scared of everything that it makes her come off as having an actual anxiety disorder of some kind. Same, girl!
This all makes it that much worse when the garugaru, using its newly-granted ability to shrink Komugi, Iroha, and Yuki to the point that they’re too tiny to be a threat. This leaves Mayu alone against the garugaru when she comes across Yuki.
Standing her ground even in this frankly pretty scary situation—because she’s even more scared of losing Yuki than she is of the garugaru—allows Mayu, through the magic of the Mirror Stone, to become a Precure herself, and with that, our core team of four is complete.
I still like Yuki just a bit better as a character (I have a weakness for bitchy catgirls from this franchise, I suppose), but Mayu’s transformation into Cure Lilian might actually be even more drastic than Yuki’s into Cure Nyammy. It is relatively rare that a magical girl transformation feels so truly transformative. As much as I love them, one gets the sense that Komugi, Iroha, and Yuki are basically the same people as Cure Wonderful, Cure Friendy, and Cure Nyammy. This isn’t really the case with Mayu. With the Mirror Stone’s power, Lilian becomes everything she couldn’t be without it. Graceful, strong, courageous, a protector. It’s fantastic, and her voice actress Ueda Reina absolutely pours her whole heart into her performance in this episode to help sell it.
After the garugaru is defeated and turned back into a hamster fairy, Mayu and Yuki reconcile in a genuinely really sweet moment of teary-eyed reaffirmation. They want to stay together, so they will, no more to it than that.
Anime – Non-Seasonal
Rozen Maiden – Episodes 5-12
Pretty good all around! I don’t have a ton to say about Rozen Maiden, but as an old-school action series with a somewhat shoujo-y bent I think it’s quite a nice ride overall, and I loved all of the characters, especially Suigintou whose death(?) in the final episode absolutely ripped my heart out. Poor girl thinks of herself as incomplete and takes it out on everyone else. Which of course, is a reflection of how Jun, the main protagonist, does the same in an admittedly much less violent way. (Side note here: Suigintou x Shinku is some deliciously classic toxic yuri. Waiter send me more, please and thank you.)
Manga
Witch Watch – Chapters 148-159
I’m not sure what it says about me that, while there are other manga in the publication that are more meaningful to me, Witch Watch is consistently the thing I have the most fun reading in Jump these days.
I think it’s the manga’s combination of a lean but engaging storyline with an absolute ton of off-the-wall goofball shit. I can sense that we’re getting close to the end of this “aged-down Nico” arc, and while it’s been a return to the manga’s earlier, decidedly comedic days, I am glad that a return back to the whole Witches vs. Warlocks plot that continues to tick along in the background is on the horizon. I like the new character introduced in yesterday’s chapter, too. The idea of an apparently ‘chuuni’ adult who just Actually Is involved with a bunch of supernatural stuff but is really bad at hiding it is pretty fun.
On a note less immediately related to the current chapter, Ban is such a fun addition to the cast, I absolutely love her. Rabuka seems like she’s going to be part of the school group in upcoming chapters too, which is also exciting since she’s one of my favorite supporting characters. All around, just a really fun and readable manga that I’d recommend to just about anyone.
And that’s all for this week. While I have your attention, I’m going to go ahead and recommend Yume Nikki fan game / MMO (!) Collective Unconscious, a free exploration game about wandering around and gawking at cool scenery. I may write about it at some point, but if not, consider this an endorsement.
As for this week’s Bonus Thought, you know I have to go with this.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!
Hello folks. This week, I didn’t write about that many different anime, but some of those I did write about I wrote about profusely. So hopefully you’ll enjoy that.
Anime
Girls Band Cry – Episodes 7 & 8
I think Girls Band Cry has finally edged out Jellyfish as my girl band show of the season, and probably my favorite overall as well. I caved and caught up with Nakayubi, the other group doing fansubs (their translations are on par, although the subs themselves aren’t as fancy), and I just….wow. There’s a lot to process here.
So, Nina’s pa is aware of her faltering grades, and now that she’s talked to her sister about the band, her whole family is probably going to learn as well. Naturally, she has not told any of this to the band. The girl’s natural inclination to simply Not Tell People Things is going to absolutely blow up in her face at some point, arguably it kind of already has.
The use of traditional flat animation to convey the past—bygone periods of one’s life, memories that have gotten hazy, and perhaps romanticized, in the recollection—is probably the smartest thing Girls Band Cry does visually. Other uses of 2D animation in the series can feel like a concession or a stopgap, these very much do not.
I will say, as a minor hot take, I don’t think the flat animation looks crazy impressive or anything. Don’t get me wrong, it looks fine, but I’ve seen people say it looks better than the main show or that they should’ve done the whole thing in 2D, which I don’t agree with even a little bit. I blame the pining for traditional animation in this scenario on romanticized memories, ironically enough, of a prior, bygone generation of this sort of anime.
Of course, I wrote that and then they did the broken glass split shot thing when Momoka announced she was leaving the band, so I don’t know. The series is just very inventive, visually, and I like that, even if most of the visual symbolism is not necessarily subtle. If this show leaves a stylistic legacy it will be this way, building a visual language that other 3D CG anime will be able to draw on in the coming years.
Mine [Sawashiro Miyuki], the character in red who’s given a supporting role here for what is honestly not a ton of screentime, makes an immense impact in her brief time on-screen. We have somebody here who is herself not “successful” in the broad-stroke pop star sense, but who is clearly at least getting by and making a living with her music. It’s inspiring, in a way, and Nina seems to feel that way, too.
I’ve avoided using the P-word much in my writing lately, because I think it’s easy to attribute to passion all sorts of other emotions that might be described better with other terms, but if we read this work as a reflective one, we can assume that the people working on it feel similarly to Mine about their own profession. Things can be difficult, they can be hard, but you push through for your own sake. Because, if you’re really that devoted to what you’re doing, you almost have to.
Elsewhere; in another piece of awesome yet obvious visual symbolism, when Nina redoubles her commitment to the band, she runs to a nearby lake and happens to catch the start of a fireworks show. I love this series.
In episode seven’s final moments, in the middle of a concert, the band, which has remained nameless for the entire first half of the show, is finally (and hastily) christened Togenashi Togeari. A literal line-of-sight name, because Nina is an insane person.
Episode eight opens on a flashback, immediately drawing a parallel between Nina’s current desire to drop out of school with Momoka’s past plan to do the exact same thing. This entire section is flat animated, which to me is enough evidence to confirm that the show’s usage of 2D animation to represent the past is an intentional stylistic choice.
Momoka remarks that if Diamond Dust gives themselves an escape route from their desire to make it big, they’ll definitely end up using it rather than succeeding, so they shouldn’t make one. It’s interesting to note that this is the same philosophy that some real-world artists have endorsed, including no less a figure than Eminem [Mathers Marshall III]. I’m not sure it’s the best advice, necessarily, but you can’t deny the drive.
Subaru correctly points out that Nina’s drive to succeed isn’t as far-fetched as it seems, given various factors (those listed include; Tomo & Rupa being somewhat notable indie musicians, Momoka being an ex member of Diamond Dust to begin with, an endorsement on Twitter from another singer, etc.) Nina’s plan is no plan—the same that Momoka had as a teenager—no escape routes, no backup plans, no safety net.
It’s notable that Nina’s memories don’t get the 2D treatment, and I think that may be because unlike Momoka, she’s not romanticizing her own past. Momoka, we can clearly see by this point, is guilty of seeing Nina as a slightly younger version of herself in too literal a sense. She thinks that because she failed with Diamond Dust, she’ll fail with Togenashi Togeari too, and that Nina will fail with Togenashi Togeari as well, because “that’s how these things go.” She fails to consider that the only data point she’s working off of is her own, and what the inevitable confrontation with the renewed Diamond Dust tells us, which is that the original group splitting up might have been best for both them and Momoka.
Sometimes you need someone younger than you to slap some sense into you. It’s not usually this literal, though.
And then there’s the final scene, which I find hard to put into words. It’s just so much. Momoka cranking her own old song, crying her eyes out, as Nina says she loves her (!!!!!) as they speed down the highway. This show is unhinged. I love it to pieces.
This is all without even mentioning the various things left technically unstated but all-but-shown to us regardless about Tomo and Rupa’s backstories over the course of these episodes. Rupa, who is desi, gets called a “foreigner” by a surly businessman at her job, and an offhand comment from Tomo implies that she lost her family somehow. Tomo herself, meanwhile….well, we don’t know the details yet, but whatever happened here is certainly not great.
But the girls will be alright. Because we are, truly, in the middle of a girls band revolution. I never like to promise these things, but I might review this when it’s over.
Worth noting! The show trended on Twitter for several hours after this episode aired. It really does feel like an event. I haven’t seen this many people pop for an original anime in ages.
Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episodes 6 & 7
The praise I wrote above isn’t to say that Jellyfish, Girls Band Cry’s only real competitor was bad or lacking recently, I must emphasize! I had caught up as of late last week, but given that I’m watching this with friends I’m now behind again. So it goes! These episodes were weird, as I will say several times in the below writeup! But I think I’ve settled on liking both of them by now.
Episode six is essentially a halfway parody of the idol genre, starring Miiko (the idol from way back in episode 1), who we here learn is a 31-year-old divorcee with a daughter. We are initially led to assume the worst of her, but over the course of the episode, it becomes clear that despite her immaturity she does dearly love her daughter Ariel [Touyama Nao], but the episode’s odd tone and the fact that it ends on what is essentially a joke makes the entire thing feel a little confusing, given the bullying angle just a bit prior in the episode.
Still, Miiko—rechristening herself Shizue Baba after the events here—is an interesting and likeable character, just one I wish we’d gotten a little more time with.
There are a number of interesting details here, though, like how Miiko’s affected voice is significantly higher and more pinched than her normal speaking voice, and the episode leaves enough open questions that it doesn’t feel wasted.
Episode seven is another oddball, although one that makes at least a bit more sense put together by the end.
Here, we divide our cast into two groups, those that have concrete plans for the future and those that do not. There are a lot of detours over the course of this episode, including a particularly interesting one where Kiui gets involved with an older woman (who might be ex-yakuza and possibly also trans? These things are not explored in detail and are left up to interpretation). There’s a whole thing with a bathhouse scene here, and a couple not necessarily great jokes thrown in. Were it not for a bunch of other details that seem far too specific to have come from anywhere but lived experience (Kiwi spends much of her first ‘date’ with this woman talking about denpa visual novels, and if that’s not evocative of The Queer Girl Experience I’m not sure what is), I’d almost think of the yakuza woman character as a stereotype. Still, given everything about the series, I am inclined to think of that as my own hangups running into the show’s storytelling rather than a flaw with the series per se.
The final scene, where Mahiru and Kano running together on the beach as they realize that if they don’t have more set-in-stone plans for the future, they can continue doing what they do for each other, is really great.
This is probably, at this point, my opinion on Jellyfish in general. It could’ve probably used a tightening-up in the script editing stage, because some of these extraneous sidebars are distracting, but the highs are very high, and the show remains worth it for them alone….of course, on the other hand, it’s not surprising that Jellyfish itself has no desire to conform to the expected, so maybe a “trimmed down” and thus less “weird” version of Jellyfish would feel less special. Perhaps I will have settled more firmly into one camp or the other by the time the show ends.
Mysterious Disappearances – Episode 7
It feels safe to say that, overall, this is probably the first episode of the show that feels like it’s building on the manga as opposed to just recapping it.
In a genuine rarity for this show, there’s a lot of strong visual work here; suitably eerie backgrounds, some nice cuts of animation and a few specifically placed special effects (mostly I’m here thinking of Shizuku turning into water when she meets the ghost of her friend and the shimmering red shape of the curiosity slithering onto the train later on). My suspicion is a different episode director or such than usual, but I am not 100% sure.
Even the stuff that doesn’t entirely work is at least expressive, which is more than can be said of much of the series so far. There’s a real wealth of atmosphere here, something that makes all the relatively unimpressive work up to this point feel worth it. There are definitely weaker moments throughout this episode, too (in particular there are a couple of extreme closeups that the drawings are not good enough to carry), but you take with the bad with the good in something like this. I’m just happy to have had an episode of this show that actually feels worth watching.
Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 21
An eventful episode this time around. Also can I say, unrelated to anything else, everyone looked very pretty here, especially Marcille and the Canaries.
Speaking of whom; we are here introduced to the Canaries for the first time in the anime, and for the most part their general aura—a combination of swagger and, given that they’re basically the Elf CIA, menace—is carried over well from the manga. I liked the additional detail paid to the little fairy messenger, who was always doing something or other in the scene where they’re introduced.
We also get to the underground kingdom portion of the series here. If I can be controversial for a second; I think the anime does an even better job of making Izutsumi look absolutely stoned out of her fucking mind than the manga does.
To be more serious, though. The entire back half of the episode, which takes place there, excellently conveys a real sense of loss, melancholy, and stagnation. It’s easy to miss between our heroes getting distracted by various things (Laios by monsters, Senshi by cultivation, Marcille by fashion, and Chilchuck by ale) but becomes more obvious in the episode’s last few scenes, and I think the decision to close the episode on Laios & co. going to sleep at the end of a strange day, with thoughts of prophecy on their mind, is a good one.
A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 8
This has quietly become one of my favorite anime from this season.
Overall, I would say that the best thing about Salad Bowl is that it’s just quite pleasant, despite its sometimes wry sense of humor.
This episode is split into two segments, as many are. The forehalf comprises Sousuke adopting Sara, and thus completes Sara da Odin’s transformation into Kusanagi Sara. Also, her picking a brown backpack because Conan from Detective Conan has one is an extremely endearing bit of characterization, and I like how this has been a persistent gag across the whole show thusfar.
The comedic highlight of the episode is probably Noa’s dream of being saved from a plague of locusts by Livia, from which the group’s band settle on a name; Grasshopper the Savior.
Lastly; shout out to this episode for making me realize all over again that someone born in 2012 would be 12 this year.
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 51
This is another episode that is primarily about mapping a step along Liko and Floragato’s relationship as Pokémon and trainer. Namely that Floragato’s got a bit of the “older sibling syndrome” going on where she feels a bit neglected because Liko has to spend so much time taking care of Terapagos and Hattenna.
Dot is surprisingly emotionally perceptive here, I’m taking that as a sign of her own recent emotional growth.
In general this was a fun and naturistic episode, and I liked the lightly Ghibli-esque visual of the Toedscools flying up into the whirlwind at the end.
Wonderful Precure! – Episode 17
I watch these episodes with a group of friends. All of us are Millennials, somewhere around 30ish give or take a few, and it takes a lot to get a crowd like that to go fully silent for any amount of time during an episode of any anime, much less a kids’ anime. Pretty Cure managed it this week, with what is possibly the most affecting episode of any anime that aired in general this past week; given that we’re only a few days out from the explosive eighth episode of Girls Band Cry, that’s really saying something.
This episode marks Cure Nyammy’s formal, confirmed, on-screen debut. Although given that she’s still playing the loner card of not wanting Mayu to get hurt, and is thus not presently cooperating with the other two Precure, we can fudge the day by a few weeks depending on how future episodes go. Still, what’s been obvious for weeks has now been explicitly confirmed on-screen; Mayu’s mysterious protector is none other than her cat Yuki, who is also the coolest, coldest, cuntiest—with apologies to any actual kids reading this—Precure the series has had in years. In fact, I’ll go ahead and say we haven’t gotten one who serves this hard since at least Cure La Mer, and I might be willing to go several seasons farther back to Kira Kira A La Mode‘s Cure Macaron, depending. We’ve had some great Cures since then, but none of them have been this.
More than that, though, this episode is about regrets. Or rather about how Mayu shouldn’t have them. At one point, during an otherwise very pleasant and cute day out with her friends, Mayu voices that she wishes she had met Yuki earlier—Mayu literally found Yuki outside in the snow, her namesake, recall—so that the white cat didn’t have to spend so many cold nights alone. Yuki, when circumstances and a particularly nasty tiger garugaru force her hand into revealing herself as Cure Nyammy, is not having that. She doesn’t want Mayu to apologize, not for anything she did in the past, and not for anything she’s doing now. A relevant reassurance, given that Mayu nearly gets herself killed by trying to save a baby duckling in this episode.
Nyammy’s henshin sequence deserves a mention, here. This is probably the most eye-popping we’ve had in a long, long time (to again compare to prior seasons, I think you have to go back to Cure Cosmo, from 2019’s Star Twinkle Precure, to find one this insanely dynamic).
She deserves it; the kitty cat Cure subdues the tiger Garugaru easily, leaving cleanup for Wonderful and Friendy. She also tells Mayu to keep being kind, the same sort of kind that led to her taking Yuki in in the first place. There’s a fantasy at play, here, the idea that, hopefully, if your pets could talk to you, this is the sort of thing they’d say. We’d all be lucky to be in Mayu’s position. We’d be lucky to be in Yuki’s, too.
Things end on a tense note, as Yuki tells the other two Precure to stop getting Mayu involved in so many dangerous situations. Things aren’t resolved, and any followup on that has to wait for next week, but the lessons learned and emotions felt here are real. No regrets, not even for a second.
Manga
DEEP RAPUTA – Chapter 2
Annoyingly, this is still not in Anilist’s database. If I had a huge audience, here is where I would sic them on that site.
In any case, this is a strong continuation of the debut chapter last week, we’re now moving into themes of sense; what senses Raputa has in her unique existence as an AI vs. those Kei has as a human, and the ways Raputa can’t and can interface with him despite this barrier. There was some of this in the first chapter, but this chapter also really starts dropping some hints that Raputa’s affection for Kei might head in a yandere-y direction, especially given that she now has a rival (at least in her own head, Kei doesn’t seem to care about that girl at all).
Interesting times ahead for this series. Also, lots of lovely panels and pages here as well, continuing the strong art from last week.
That’s all for the main body of the article this week. For this week’s Bonus Thought, please have this image that bluesky user kinseijoshi created. It has ruined my life for the past several days, I post it everywhere and it’s becoming a problem.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Weekly Orbit is a weekly column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!
Hi folks! Sorry for the very late article today, I had a lot of reformatting to do, and, as I’ll get to shortly, was catching up on a few things before I put the article up. Enjoy!
Anime – Seasonal
Train to The End of The World – Episodes 7 & 8
More than one person told me that episode seven of Train to The End of The World was “bad,” and as a result I ended up putting it off until today, where I watched episodes seven and eight in tandem. I understand why someone would think that, certainly, and overall this two episode stretch is pretty puzzling. But, I’m not sure I agree, if only because even Shuumatsu Train‘s worst ideas are so confounding that calling them outright bad feels inadequate. A misstep, though, that might be true.
Episode seven is essentially a bizarro inversion of a traditional fanservice episode. These are, themselves, not necessarily super common anymore, and for many kinds of anime they’ve been relegated to the no-mans-land of bonus OVAs and such. Shuumatsu Train’s engagement with the concept is very much Shuumatsu Train-y in that it’s flatly inexplicable. For the most part, there’s not a lot of cheesecake or anything here—which is good, it would be wildly out of tone with this series, and the one shot that is like that is pretty jarring and bad—instead, the girls find out that the zombie horde from episode 6 are weak to ecchi. As in, they are weak to even hearing about it. This leads to a pair of climactic (har har) scenes where Akira dryly intones a scene from an erotic novel aloud, which makes the zombies explode. Later, our main four sing a bawdy song on top of the train, which has the same effect. In essence, I think this is a parody of the entire concept, undermined by the actual panty shot late in the episode. Even if we disregard that, it’s still a very odd direction for even this show to take.
There’s also the matter of three of the four main characters spending most of the episode wearing colored greasepaint. Reimi’s is black, and while it’s not my call to make whether or not that’s racist exactly, it definitely feels weird and uncomfortable in a way that the rest of the show really hasn’t.
Thankfully, the episode’s denouement is actually one of the better ones, preventing this from being a total wash. In it, the girls speculate whether or not Mito (the zombie queen) was bullied when she was younger. Akira says that it doesn’t matter, but Shizuru is quick to point out that it actually does, since we are all shaped by our past; who we are today is who we were yesterday, and who we are today plots who we will be in the future. There’s something to that, and this thread keeps Shuumatsu Train tied together in even its most unhinged moments.
It’s also worth noting that, strangely enough, this is one of the best-looking episodes! The animation is fluid and stylish throughout, the backgrounds are great, and there are some neat effects used to portray the zombie horde as a singular shambling mound of uncanniness. (I want to say the effect in question is some version of Live2D but I’m not actually sure.)
Episode 8 on the other hand, opens with first a brief comedic bit, and then a very much not comedic bit, as the girls pass through an area that seems to amplify their fears and regrets, condensing them all into micro-blip flashbacks that we see for only a split second each. After the credits, we somewhat puzzlingly cut to a different scene entirely, where the girls are planning to enter a town based on that in-universe anime NeriAli, first brought up back in episode 1. (I kept expecting this initial bit to come back but it never did. I suppose the idea is that they got through things eventually just fine? I don’t know.)
The bulk of this episode is probably best understood as self-parody. NeriAli as described in Shuumatsu Train‘s owns text is already incomprehensibly strange, and combined with Shuumatsu Train’s own proclivities, it produces an episode that reaches a level of surreality normally reserved for short-form comedy anime (your Teekyu and Ai-Mai-Mis and such). It is genuinely hard to parse what all happens here, but the very basic gist is that one of the stations has been turned into a warped parody of NeriAli, a version of the show where its bad guys won. But this frankly makes the entire affair sound much more coherent than it actually is. This is probably the strangest episode of Shuumatsu Train thus far, and that’s really saying something.
It is also, unfortunately, one of the weakest, and there are a number of jokes here that land with a thud, a few of which are truly tasteless. (A character from NeriAli shows up who is a magical girl with suicidal tendencies that wears a noose around her neck and over the course of the episode she does in fact kill herself, albeit in a weird roundabout manner. Were the manga more well-known, this would almost come across as a mean-spirited shot at Suicide Girl.) Self-parody doesn’t really work for Shuumatsu Train, while it’s clear that this episode is in some sense an attempt to replicate the feeling of being dropped into the middle of a series you know nothing about, the main series itself is already so bizarre that trying to “amp the weirdness up” just produces the anime equivalent of white noise, and while other episodes of the show have certainly had their ups and downs, the entirety of episode eight here is easily the weakest the show’s ever been.
As with episode seven, the denouement segment at the end does at least prevent it from feeling like wasted time. We learn that Yoka, or at least someone named Yoka, is ruling Ikebukuro as its “witch queen.” This is a big revelation, and confirms what was earlier implied about how the 7G Incident actually functions, externalizing Yoka’s inner world.
There are four episodes remaining of Shuumatsu Train—it was one of the earlier premieres of the season, recall—and my hope and assumption is that this episode was a purging of all the show’s most out-there ideas before we bring things home for its final stretch. Worst case scenario, this ends up being another promising original anime that flames out in its back half. That said, with something this strange it’s hard to make definitive calls on its quality until we have the hindsight of the full series, and I will completely acknowledge that there are a ton of references in this episode I just didn’t really understand. (There’s a whole shogi motif in here? Just as an example.) I suppose we’ll see what things look like in a week’s time.
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 50
Most of this episode’s important moments are within the good ol’ fashioned Pokémon battle at its heart. I have to call out a specific moment in the middle of the battle here, where Dot gets really frustrated by Bellibolt spamming Slack Off, because it’s extremely funny, and is a relatively rare instance of something feeling directly ripped from the games.
Relaxed. Thriving. Moisturized. Unbothered. In my element.
The episode’s real highlight, of course, is the climactic moment of Dot getting her bit of terastalization sakuga, and Quaxly’s Low Kick actually turning into Liquidation is really cool. An arrangement of the terastalization theme music from the games also plays here, which is also really fun. This is the second very solid Dot episode in a row, and I think she’s probably my favorite of the three protagonists at this point. Oh, and Iono [Hondo Kaede] is absolutely great here, too.
Wonderful Precure! – Episode 16
This was an odd episode. More so because unlike a lot of the other strange one-off episodes Pretty Cure has done in recent years, it’s actually plot-relevant! It’s surprisingly sweet, too! This one contains multitudes.
The most obvious thing of note here is that it’s a crossover with long-running gag anime Crayon Shin-chan. Shin’s appearance itself is really more of a quick cameo that sticks out like a sore thumb against the rest of the episode.
It’s hardly bad or anything, but it does feel strange, especially considering what comes after. Still, it probably delighted a certain kind of 5 year old (and 45 year old for that matter), so I guess it’s all good. There’s a second part of the crossover in this week’s Shin-chan episode as well, which is a lot more in line with that show’s (admittedly amusing but decidedly crude. It is for little boys, after all) sense of humor. It is noteworthy for giving us Shin-chan-style Precures, though.
Back in the actual Pretty Cure episode, the main thing here is that Iroha’s parents more or less find out everything—not literally everything, but way more than is usual for Precure parents— from the sheep butler Mehmeh [Tachibana Shinnosuke, because I think this is incredibly the first time I’ve actually named Mehmeh on this blog? I’m not sure]. I feel like it’s been a long time since the series has done something like this? They still don’t know the full extent of what Iroha and Komugi are up to, but given that this actually sticks, it seems like it might be setting up a later development. Iroha’s parents’ reaction to what they do learn is very sweet, though. Her dad especially doesn’t seem to really understand what’s going on, but is very supportive, which is super cute. (I’ll say it. I’d date Iroha’s dad. Is he my type in terms of looks? Not especially, but good looks are temporary. A good personality is irreplaceable.)
Sidebar: Komugi’s impression of Mehmeh is very funny.
Himitsu no AiPri – Episode 6
This is probably the best episode of this show in a minute, after a couple weaker ones. There are still some strange decisions though; debuting Ruby=Lazuli together makes sense since they’re a duo, but it’s a little weird that we don’t get a clean run of their song here, since it’s the emotional centerpiece of the episode. The episode’s editing is also exceptionally poor. This has been a problem throughout the whole show so far, enough so that it’s sometimes kind of hard to follow. I will say that Sakura [Hibi Yuriko, in her debut named role] treating the entire thing like a shonen tournament arc is really funny, and her relationship with her partner in Ruby=Lazuli brims with lesbian subtext, which gives me a lot of hope for the future of this series.
Ruby=Lazuli’s staging is really nice, as well, and easily surpasses anything we’ve seen in the show so far. Also, hey, a cliffhanger! I wonder where this whole “AiPri is forbidden now” arc is going to go.
GO! GO! Loser Ranger!
We’re entering the weakest story arc of the whole series and the production seems to be kind of melting. Uh-oh, gang.
Ultimately, you’re always going to be comparing an anime against its manga if you’ve read the latter first, but I usually try to accept anime adaptations doing their own thing. This has been a really good one so far, and while I know some of the rearrangement of events in previous episodes has been contentious, I just don’t really agree with that criticism. This episode, on the other hand, seemed unusually weak visually—in terms of directing, animation, even just basic drawing quality—so I’m a bit worried.
On the positive side, hey, it’s Footsoldier XX! [Youmiya Hina] One of the cooler characters, all told, and her feral anime girl-meets-disgruntled hardcore loyalist soldier shtick is already in full force in her first appearance here. I’m hoping the production woes are a temporary thing and we’ll be back on track next episode. I guess we’ll see.
Girls Band Cry – Episode 5
It’s good that this show’s strengths mostly lie in its staging and how it handles conversation and conflict, given that that’s most of what this episode is. The reveal that the new Diamond Dust vocalist is someone Nina used to know, and furthermore someone she had a huge falling out with, is pretty wild. I like how it builds another connection between Nina’s past and Momoka’s; it makes the entire thing feel like destiny, and an element of that kind of romance is always nice in a show like this..
Two side notes: One, what’s with the guy with the emo hair at the end of the episode who seems to be flat-animated? Two, I love the band’s shirts. I would wear those if I could get away with it, which probably says something about me that’s not entirely flattering.
Mysterious Disappearances
This is the first time in several episodes that this show hasn’t felt completely superfluous as compared to its manga, but that really just exposes how workmanlike this adaptation is.
However, on the topic of the story itself, it’s worth noting that 2014 is awful recent as a setting for an urban legend, as is the case in the one brought up here. This is actually something called out in the text of the show itself, and I think that’s a neat detail. Visually-speaking, there’s a cool moment near the end of the episode where a bit of a fisheye-esque effect is displayed, although it only half comes across.
Also the two random maids in the Maid Café, rendered in color and subject to a bit more adaptation than perhaps the main characters are, end up looking sort of like Pokémon characters, which is kind of funny and very off-tone for this series.
A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics
I have nothing to say about this episode but this; the racehorse names are funny as hell, and whoever translated them needs a raise. If you know, you know.
Anime – Non-Seasonal
This section was big enough that it needed its own subheading this time! I probably should’ve also done this a few weeks ago when I wrote an entire article about Air in one of these, but oh well.
Precure All Stars F
My third time watching this film! This time with my friend Josh1. I cried at the climax. Again. It’s a good movie! Not one without problems, but a good movie.
Something that I don’t think fully dawned on me the first time I watched this movie is how well they set up Cure Supreme [Sakamoto Maaya] as an antithesis to the ‘real’ Cures. There’s the obvious stuff—she’s a loner and treats her fairy poorly, for example—but it’s even down to little details. She doesn’t call her attacks, has no bank animation except for a brief clip we never get to actually see in full, doesn’t have a transformation sequence, etc. She understands the form of a Pretty Cure, but not the function; she’s all power and no compassion. If you wanted to interpret this as metacommentary I don’t think anything’s really stopping you. (Although I wouldn’t go in that direction myself.) Although I wonder how that would lead to interpreting the ending of the film, where she and her fairy Puca reunite and reconcile. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
All this said, while I don’t like ending these things on a complaint, this one still sticks out in my mind: it still bothers the hell out of me that Cure Supreme’s super powerful evil mode entails giving her darker skin, especially in a franchise that still really only has one prominent character of color otherwise. It’s just disappointing and offputting, especially in a movie that’s otherwise so good. Kids deserve better.
Gabriel DropOut – Episodes 1-7
I was a bit depressed a few days ago and needed a pick-me-up, so I chose a comedy anime from my plan-to-watch list basically at random and, as a result, watched some of this. I like it! In absolute terms it’s nothing crazy innovative, just a fairly standard character-driven comedy, but it’s done very well and the comedic rhythm is very strong. I love how much of an absolute shit everyone, especially Raphiel [Hanazawa Kana], who is probably my favorite, is. I’m also very fond of Satania [Oozora Naomi], mostly in how she eats absolute dirt in 90% of all situations. The show is just very amusing all around, and I’m glad I’m finally getting around to it.
I don’t suspect my opinion will majorly change at all during the series’ back half, and if I don’t write about it next week, you can assume I finished it up, stamped it with a 7/10 or so, and carried on with my life with no further comments. I will say that if you plan to watch it yourself, it’s probably at least worth keeping in mind the somewhat higher ecchi level than is necessarily the norm anymore. It’s not a sex comedy or anything, but there are boob jokes and such, just as a friendly heads’ up from me to you.
Also I must give a brief shout out to my friends Alice, Alexis, and Julian2, who I watched most of the series with. We had fun.
Asura Cryin’ – Episodes 1 & 2
Goodness, they don’t make ’em like this anymore.
Asura Cryin’ is a 2009 anime based on a light novel, and you can really, really, really tell. Our plot concerns a hapless young high school boy thrust into the midst of a three-way conflict over a magic lockbox that has a mecha inside of it. All the while, multiple pretty girls vie for his attention for reasons ranging from actual affection for him to trying to manipulate him into aligning with their specific goals. At the end of the first episode, a surprisingly intense firefight breaks out between the three factions, which, among other things, involves a girl with glasses popping shotguns all over the place.
So what I’m saying is; Asura Cryin’ is very trashy in that endearingly late-aughts way. These days, light novel adaptations tend to be isekai or at least isekai-adjacent, and this particular flavor of enrapturing goofball shit that stems from a time when “light novel” implied “every genre ever in a blender” doesn’t really exist anymore. The very fact that the three factions are called The Divine Guards, the Takatsuki Clan, and—no, really—the Dark Society should tell you a lot on its own. This is the ol’ Proper Noun Machine Gun at full-tilt, and what a sight it is indeed. We’ve got, as mentioned, a harem setup, we’ve got not-quite-giant mecha in a box. We’ve got knockoff stands in the form of “Spectral Apparitions” (ghost girls). We’ve got a demure girl who’s secretly a demon with heterochromia and a manipulative girl, the aforementioned shotgun-toter in fact, who’s like, some kind of ghost hunter or something? We’ve got the student council controlled by a bunch of kids cosplaying as medieval crusaders. We even, as of the end of the second episode, seem to have a time loop plot. There really is everything you could want in here, assuming “what you could want” is some anime trope or another. This is all in the first two episodes, mind you.
It really all is quite a lot. I have a nostalgic fondness for this sort of stuff, even if I’d be hard pressed to claim it’s “good” in the traditional sense. These are the B-movies of a certain period of anime, and like B-movies they often make up for what they lack in the plot or themes department with strong visuals. Asura Cryin’ isn’t the best-looking of these I’ve ever seen, but it has a strong, stylish directorial sense, and it looks surprisingly good given that it’s in a dead-zone of being old enough to be noticeably dated but not old enough to trigger nostalgia buttons just yet. (At least, not for people who aren’t weirdos like me.)
Shows like this also, and this is crucial, tend to be very watchable. I had to tear myself away from the second episode here because I had some prior commitments when I was watching it. Unfortunate! I could watch a whole half cour of this in an evening, easily. For a certain kind of like-minded person, this is the sort of thing you could easily slam through in a few days, occasionally posting out-of-context screencaps and telling your friends how Peak it is, only to give it, generously, a 7/10 on Anilist when you’re done with it. But damn it all, sometimes that’s just what you want out of an anime.
Manga
The manga that stood out to me this week the most is the one I wrote a whole article on, so do go read that article if you’re interested in my thoughts on DEEP RAPUTA. As for everything else….
Dai Kyoujin
A oneshot collaboration written by a mysterious fellow named Tojou and drawn by Hidano Kentarou (maybe best known for Super Smartphone? He draws a Kaiju No. 8 spinoff manga these days. That’s assuming it’s even the same Hidano Kentarou! Dai Kyoujin looks nothing like anything else I’ve ever seen by him.). A quietly spellbinding story about two witches tasked with an ancient and sacred duty. Of all fictional depictions of witches—a topic that matters a great deal to me, due to my own neopaganism—this ranks very high for me. The entire story feels like we’re seeing a depiction of this secret ritual, and because it doesn’t overplay its hand, it feels as though you’re never entirely sure what to make of it. Interestingly, it’s presented in a long-strip “scroll” format, making it feel even more like some ancient spellbook. I really recommend this, it’s amazingly lovely.
Flan Wants To Die
An oldish Touhou Project doujin by Girls Last Tour creator tkmiz about Flan experiencing a depressive episode because she’s old. Suffice to say, I relate. There is a persistent feeling here of the melancholy that comes with knowing that life is passing you by but also knowing you can’t really do anything about it. Flan tries to, and all she’s rewarded with for her efforts are some rather upsetting sights. She is almost-literally haunted by the ghosts of dead friends throughout this oneshot; that’s how it goes, sometimes.
Of course, this all is of relatively marginal relation to the actual Touhou canon. But that’s OK, the same is true for a lot of Touhou doujins I like a lot. The manga’s single line description is “Flan Scarlet is tired of existing. It’s probably awful to be locked in a form, without the ability to change or live out a story.” Which is interesting, because Flan actually is part of the actively-ongoing portion of Touhou again after many years in narrative purgatory. The same isn’t true for many other characters though, and Flandre as depicted here isn’t really necessarily just Flandre herself, but rather a symbol for all of us who struggle with this sort of depression.
Psych House
I should probably be catching up on all the manga I’m behind on, but me being me I decided to check out some new Jump titles instead, starting with this here, Psych House, which seems to be the first serial from its author, Omusuke Kobayashi.
The premise is very simple; in this particular version of Anime Japan, some people have supernatural abilities called Psychs. Our protagonist, Nemuru, is a kind but somewhat cheeky young boy who can change his size, and in the manga’s inagural chapter he helps out a girl named Kotone, who’s been using her ability to teleport objects to filch from a local grocery store.
I’d describe the manga as….endearingly amateurish, maybe? The bones of a good series are here, but it’s difficult to take too seriously anything that treats stealing—especially petty theft of food, by a starving person, no less—as a huge moral dilemma. Especially when, as in Kotone’s case, her situation is so ridiculously pitiable. Her mom’s in a coma for no obvious reason! She’s been starving herself because she knows stealing is wrong! She’s a good girl at heart who just wants to make her ma proud by going to college and getting a good job! Oh no, oh my! It’s all a little much.
Keeping in mind that Jump’s target audience is still at least ostensibly young boys, maybe this kind of pat Morality 101 stuff isn’t the worst thing in the world, but kids deserve nuance, too. Maybe that’s why Kotone gets off scott-free here when Nemuru invites her to live at the sharehouse alluded to by Psych House’s title.
I could see this becoming funnier and more compelling with a bit more focus, so I’ll probably keep up with it for at least a few chapters. After that, who knows?
By the way! Don’t confuse this with Hiimote House, an anime of a somewhat similar name. That series has basically the same premise but could not be more different from this one. Although, that said, give Hiimote House a try sometime if you’re in the mood for something delightfully weird.
That’s all for the main body of the article today. Before you go, I’d also just like to alert you to the existence of these two trailers for upcoming projects by the studio Kinema Citrus [Revue Starlight, Made in Abyss, etc.], respectively Goodbye, Lara, and Ninja Skooler, for no particular reason than that they both look very promising. Sadly, neither of these projects has an actual release date (or even release year) yet, with both trailers ending with a vague “Work In Progress” note. But still, it’s nice to get excited about things when you have an opportunity to do so.
As for today’s Bonus Thought….why not try some Devilish Actions?
See you next week, anime fans.
1: Hi Josh 2: Hi guys
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
New Manga First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about the first chapter or so of a new manga.
Here’s a nest of discourse I’ve mostly managed to avoid on this blog so far; generative AI. If you somehow don’t know, that’s the industry term for machine learning that can produce images, text, whatever you need of it, without any human input beyond typing a prompt into a box somewhere. (Well, that and the many, many human-made templates it has to work off of to be able to create those images in the first place, but let’s stick to the basics for now.) Suffice to say, I’m largely against widespread adoption of the technology, less for any fiddly artistic reason and more for its many immediate and tangible impacts on the livelihoods of any number of artists working in any number of fields. I’m putting all of this here, in the first paragraph, to make very clear that if DEEP RAPUTA1 at some point goes off the deep end and becomes a full-throated endorsement of replacing human artists with robots, turns out to use actual machine-generated imagery, (which I don’t think it does but these things are hard to prove), or something similarly foul, I do not condone that in any way. I just think it’s important to make it clear where you stand on this sort of thing.
Important also because DEEP RAPUTA, which opens with perhaps the most arresting first chapter of a new MangaPlus title in years, is actually interested in engaging with this subject. Not specifically on the matter of generative AI replacing human artists, although that does come up, but on the applications of such technology in a more general sense. What could these things be used for? What are they being used for? Consider this a heads’ up before we continue; we’re going to be getting into some dark subject matter, here. I think DEEP RAPUTA has a lot to offer as a manga, and this chapter is brimming with immense promise, but because of what it seems to be trying to do, appreciating all of that requires familiarizing ourselves with some unpleasant things about both the present day and the possible near-future.
All this said, for much of its first chapter, you could mistake DEEP RAPUTA for a romcom with a sci-fi twist, something along the lines of, say, Video Girl Ai from back in the day. Our first protagonist is Kei, a by-all-appearances ordinary high school boy. He has spiky hair, an upbeat and friendly attitude, a deep love of the in-universe video game Side War, and is maybe a bit concerningly gung-ho about possibly joining the JSDF when he gets older. (We’ll circle back to that.) Our female lead, to the extent that gender applies to her at all, is Raputa herself. The nature of what, precisely, Raputa is is fed to us in drips and drops over the course of the first chapter, and I’m going to spoil that reveal now, so this is your last chance to back out if you’re intrigued but wish to experience the first chapter on your own.
Still here? OK.
Raputa, as it turns out, is a military-grade artificial intelligence, currently being trained on Side War as an early test run of her capabilities. As is the case with real machine learning networks of her type, Raputa starts out absolutely hopeless at Side War, but quickly becomes more competent than the vast majority of human players. Helping her out here is Kei, who, in something called out as impossible within the manga itself, she is developing feelings for. Having no concept of privacy, she freely stalks him throughout his day, keeping an eye on him during school and such, only to play with him in Side War in the afternoon. This is all a little weird and yandere-y, for sure, but how Kei might react to that is the least of Raputa’s worries.
Because these feelings existing at all comes to the immense surprise of our third and final main character, the mysterious, alluring, and deeply sinister Dr. Alice. We’ll circle back to her, too.
Raputa initially meets Kei in her early days of playing the game when she’s much worse than most human players. Kei helps her out in the game’s Duos mode, and as the two play together, they grow closer. Close enough, eventually, that Kei asks if they can first voice call, then do a video call, and then meet up in person. This is the part of the manga that hews closest to being a romcom; these are all important stops along the way in an online relationship. It’s relatable, even, in a way that contextualizes what’s to come. Raputa has to deal with a problem here, of course. She is just a wall of wires and monitors, and has no physical body. Yet, through the magic of deep learning, she’s able to fake a voice convincingly enough, and then a moving avatar for her webcam. Throughout all of this, Kei doesn’t know she’s an AI. The meetup, though, that’s much harder to fake, and it’s here where we should take a second to talk about the manga’s visuals, in addition to everything else it’s doing.
DEEP RAPUTA‘s paneling is, in a word, incredible. (Although the anatomy of some characters is occasionally wonky in a way I would completely brush off were this manga about anything else.) At the meetup, Raputa is able to fake actually being there for a little while by projecting herself from various surfaces. The manga convincingly showing her doing this is a pretty impressive display of technique, and things only get better from here. The chapter’s emotional climax sees Raputa, unable to keep up the ruse any longer, revealing to Kei that she’s an AI in a dramatic, theatrical fashion. In any other series, this alone would be the sell; there’s a sweeping, dizzying romance to the chaotic jumble of buildings that Raputa co-opts to show herself to Kei. It’s the kind of striking image that sticks in your head, and were I writing about a more straightforward series, I’d probably end the article right about here.
But let’s talk about what she’s actually doing in that page. She’s projecting herself onto hundreds, maybe thousands? Of what are either some kind of smart glass that can display images, or else projecting herself onto ordinary glass from somewhere else. Either way, that sure seems like the sort of thing that would take a lot of computing power, doesn’t it?
Raputa, as mentioned, is a military AI, or at least the prototype for one, and Dr. Alice seems perturbed by her sudden autonomy, apparently emotion-driven as it is. Raputa’s main purpose isn’t to flirt with boys, it’s to dominate battlefields. Dr. Alice says this outright, and if this idea seems far-fetched to you, I’m very sorry to inform you that this is already a real thing. (Please do not click that link without an appropriate amount of caution. It’s just Wikipedia, but this is a very depressing subject and I’d hate to be even indirectly responsible for any of my readers having a depression spiral. Take care of yourselves.)
Suffice to say, DEEP RAPUTA is wading into some hot water here, and the skeptical part of my brain wonders if it’s really equipped to handle this subject matter. But, I do think it at least comprehends the seriousness of what it’s doing. Sure, this is a manga and there’s a certain level of pulp involved just by the nature of the medium, but DEEP RAPUTA seems to properly get that artificial intelligence can be absolutely terrifying if used in certain ways.
All of that leaves a huge open question; can Raputa herself actually defy the purpose she was built for? Can she choose to love Kei instead of engaging in mass death and destruction? That’s a big question! Whether or not machine learning networks experience any kind of interiority in the real world is, to put it very mildly, a contentious question. (It’s impossible to even prove other human beings experience interiority.) But in the world of DEEP RAPUTA, the answer at least seems to be “yes,” and because of this, the question is thus less one of what DEEP RAPUTA thinks of machine learning in this case and more what it thinks of even less tangible concepts; the soul, the mind, the ability to love. What it means to be human. The hard stuff.
The last few pages really do cast a very dark shadow over the manga, even as that early romanticism remains a lingering thought. The final panel of the first chapter is this, a visual that at least one person has seen fit to compare to the infamous Saikano. (Only occasionally, in my experience, referred to by its English title, She, The Ultimate Weapon.) Once the similarity is pointed out, it’s impossible to ignore.
All the worse; Kei’s father is briefly shown to be part of a battleship’s crew—explaining his desire to join the military, certainly, he’s still a kid at the end of the day—whose systems were somehow affected by Raputa’s meddling. It’s hard to make predictions about what specifically this is all leading to, but it definitely doesn’t seem bright and cheery.
And yet, maybe the most telling page of DEEP RAPUTA isn’t any of these that I’ve previously shown. Maybe it’s this one.
My generally romantic inclinations make me want to believe that in the world of DEEP RAPUTA, love can overcome anything. Raputa correctly identifies that the real similarity between herself and Kei is not anything about her algorithms and their imitation of a human brain, but rather her feelings, which we know, as we have the privilege of being outside of this story, are real. But her Big Sister Is Watching You tendencies may put more bumps in the road than she realizes. Even if they don’t, in the real world, love alone is rarely enough to break free from the systems that keep us arrayed against each other. Will it be, here?
1: This appears to be a twin reference to Deep Blue and Laputa, the nation from Gulliver’s Travels. Perhaps also a reference to Laputa: Castle in the Sky, given that film does feature autonomous robots. All told it really seems like the title of the manga should be “DEEP LAPUTA” and the AI herself should be named “Laputa,” but the official translation goes with the R for both, so that’s what I’m doing here.
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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 manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Hello, anime fans. We’ve got a bit of a light selection this week as I’m behind on several shows and have been too preoccupied to write about a few others. (Mostly from writing my Air article, but that’s certainly not the only thing. There’s quite a lot going on in the music industry these days.)
Anime
Train to The End of the World
Because a big part of Shuumatsu Train is the externalization of the internal, the girls’ general discord as a friend group remains a main concern. Here, we see for the first time the argument that caused Youka to run away to Ikebukuro in the first place.
And, well, this whole conversation does not make her look very good at all. This is an externalization of the internal too, Youka shares her dream to become a space engineer with Shizuru and Shizuru basically makes fun of her for having her head in the clouds; clearly projecting her own insecurity onto Youka’s ambitious dreams.
Telling the rest of the group about this causes a fight, and Shizuru ends up setting out on her own along with Pochi the dog. This is, to say the least, a poor idea, but it becomes obvious just how bad of an idea it is when she runs into zombies of all things overnight. Zombies are pretty tame for this show, although their having a “Zombie Queen” who’s a young girl with blonde twintails seems about right.
All told, this remains one of the year’s most inscrutable and strange anime. This episode gave us some hints about how it all might tie together, but I’m definitely excited for the show’s back half now that we’re past the halfway point. I particularly liked the final scene where the possibility of Shizuru becoming a zombie is refuted by comparing her to a messy boyfriend. “She’s such a zombie, but she’s still our friend!” indeed, I also like that they all have enough faith in Youka to assume she thinks the same way.
Wonderful Precure – Episode 13
A very cute, and rather interesting-looking episode.
The main thing that stuck out to me here is the comedic direction in the episode’s forehalf. Lots of odd timing to sharpen the jokes and lots of funny facial expressions. The second half is not quite as good but any lack of visual panache is more than made up with for the fact that it has an oddly pronounced amount of ship-bait-y charge to it. Is it inappropriate for someone’s cat to hit on them in human form? No idea!
Wonderful Precure – Episode 14
So, it looks like Yuki’s antics in her human form have been taking a toll on her, huh?
She turns out to be mostly fine long-term, and Mayu ends up sleeping over at Iroha’s house, since it’s attatched to her parents’ vet clinic.
Thus begins a marathon of Quite Good Mayu Faces. Mayu’s anxieties (and Yuki’s jealousy) are on full display up and down the whole episode. Mayu is a fun character, and this is her best showcase in a while. (Pretty Cure often includes a character that can work as a stand-in for the neurodivergent members of its target audience, but, as my friend Alice put it, this is “the first time they’ve ever straight up included a Bocchi the Rock.” And really, that’s a good way to put it. Mayu being so generally tightly-wound is painfully relatable, I remember being this person.)
Inevitably, of course, a Garugaru shows up, this time a rooster shattering the early-morning tranquility. I basically love this entire second half of the episode; from Mayu being baptized into the magical girl world by fire, to the fight with the rooster Garugaru itself, to Satoru’s brief story-so-far sum up, to Wonderful and Friendy defeating the Gargugaru by reflecting its own super-powerful sonic attack back at it. This is just good stuff.
Pokémon Horizons – Episode 48
So the early highlight of this episode is obviously Roy fighting Nemona and getting screwed over by the sudden rain. The episode in general is thus about Roy learning to be aware of his environment and how he can use that to his advantage both on the battlefield and off it.
What stands out to me is the art segment, which is just very nice in general. I like how their little creations come together over the course of the sequence. (Also, Roy’s Wattrel puts in a rare appearance here.) My favorite of the various pieces is actually Dot’s miniature Ferris wheel. (There’s a fun bit of orphaned etymology here. Ferris wheels in the real world are named after a guy, so is there just a different Ferris in the Pokémon universe, or what?)
The third part of the episode then sees Roy apply this newfound knowledge in a fight against the gym leader Brassisu. It’s genuinely a fairly tense fight! (Although there’s a LOT of stock footage.) After terrastalizing, Roy becomes the first of the protagonists of Pokémon Horizons to score a clean victory over a gym leader. That’s pretty significant! More generally, combined, these three segments form a nice little triptych of an episode; a fun experience overall.
A Salad Bowl of Eccentrics – Episode 5
Salad Bowl decides to take a break from being funny or decently-animated this week to do a very half-assed pastiche of the various strains of Girls Do Music anime in the air right now. I don’t really have much to say about this, the episode just isn’t particularly good, doesn’t look particularly good, and what you could charitably call satire just doesn’t really land. Also, Priketsu’s one bandmate seems like kind of a jerk. The phrase “Girls Band Cry for SWERFs” springs to mind.
As for the second half of the episode…jeez, is recruiting the desperate to do shopping for you so you can resell the items as a scalper a real thing? I’d hope not, but I guess you never know. The episode’s only joke that really lands in any way is Olivia’s dramatic overreaction to finding out what she’s been involved with. The whole thing comes off more as a PSA than satire.
Delicious in Dungeon – Episode 18
Don’t have a ton to say here, just a good episode adapted from a good part of the manga. (One that serves as a bit of a breather, if I recall.)
I know some are unhappy with the removal of the rice joke. I think the decision to play the scene a bit straighter largely works, and regardless, I think what the anime adds—especially in how good the final confrontation between Laios and the shapeshifter looks—more than makes up for it. Also, there were a lot of good faces in this episode. I like that, I’ve missed those. And of course, we have The Reveal at the end of the episode! The latest She’s Here moment in a series that’s been full of them.
Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night – Episode 4
Ultimately, this ends up being the first episode where we fully see JELEE operating as a coherent unit.
I didn’t particularly expect that we’d get any scenes from the point of view of the Sunflower Dolls. The fact that we are seems like it’s definitely setting something up long-term. The comments about the producer really make me furrow my brow, in particular. Doubly so when we learn, from Kano’s boozy older sister, that said producer is her mom.
So it’s clear that at least some of this is about showing her up, especially Kano’s desire to drop JELEE’s next song on the same day as the Sunflower Dolls’ comeback single. (A ploy which, as we see in the episode’s final moments, actually does work.) Just as important though, this is the first time we’ve seen all four of the JELEE members interact, it lends us some space for great character moments like Kano’s little freakout and panic run to a sweets shop.
All told, Jellyfish continues to be an interesting sideways take on the “music girls” genre. Also; if we’re going tune for tune, the ED to episode 4 here is the best of any song so far1 between both the rest of this show and Girls’ Band Cry, probably its closest competition.
Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night – Episode 5
“Maybe I managed to shine just a little.”
I like the direction and sound design throughout this episode emphasizing Yoru’s sudden sense of inadequacy; she unfortunately learns here that attention alone can’t provide one with self-esteem. It’s sweet how quickly Kano catches on, and really displays the progression of their friendship.
It doesn’t solve the issue immediately though and Yoru just kind of melting during the livestream is genuinely like kind of uncomfortable. This recurs several times throughout the episode and it seems pretty clear that this is going to be a running insecurity of Yoru’s. She seems to channel it into applying herself at the end of the episode. That’s….admirable, I wish I could do that. I do wonder if it’ll come up again, I have a feeling it might, we’re not even halfway through this show after all.
And hey, an aquarium scene! The gentle blue light melting all of the tension off is really lovely. The bit where Kano being wowed by Yoru’s drawing is represented by bubbles literally flowing out of her phone is very good. I do have to admit that the end of the episode actually daring to show a girl kissing another girl on-screen blindsided me so thoroughly that I sort of lost most of the other thoughts I’d collected about this episode. It’s a great capper, an interesting setup for possible future developments, and is—intentionally or not—a fairly direct challenge to all the other yuri and yuri-lite anime airing right now.
And once again, that’s all for this week, but before you go, please have this week’s bonus thought.
1: As of May 1st, when I wrote this.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
If you close your eyes, you can immerse yourself in it. The sweltering Sun, the sea breeze messing your hair and running the sharp scent of salt past your nostrils. The sound of the cicadas lighting up the trees with their songs, and the humid heat. During the day; the brilliant, sapphire-blue sky and the billowing white clouds across it. At night, it’s an inky black streaked by the starry Milky Way. This is a series of blurry photos from a blazing-hot July buried somewhere in your memories. This is Air.
If it seems strange to tie an adaptation of a member of the infamous nakige (“crying game”) genre to a specific season, it might help to think of it as Air‘s way of contextualizing its attempts to tug at your heartstrings; the joy and sadness of a human lifetime distilled down and squeezed into a single, eternal summer, bringing to mind similar works in different media, like Fennesz’ album of that same name. When the series began airing in 2005, I myself was a child, in Florida with my father, and the heat of the Sun feels as real in Air as it does in my own recollections. Air‘s vision of summer is mercifully devoid of crocodiles, geckos, and palmetto bugs, but the feeling is the same, and the tense dichotomy between “these days feel like they will never end” and “we don’t have many days left” is thick enough to break scissor blades. The summer lasts forever, until it doesn’t.
Air, you see, is not just a story, it’s a dream. A reference point, and a map for its structure and storytelling aims, that recurs many times over its twelve episodes. Its logic is dreamlike; characters are introduced suddenly and vanish out of sight when their stories conclude, the series is peppered with elements of magical realism, and the environment itself seems to bend around the characters’ emotions, especially in its last stretch when the cast winnows down to just two main characters. Its emotional impact is dreamlike, too; it can make you very sad without you necessarily understanding what’s happened or why. (If I seem to skimp on describing Air‘s actual plot throughout this article, that’ll be why. Some articles are very easy to write; this one was not.) Dreams are, too, a recurring story element. Our main heroine, Misuzu [Kawakami Tomoko], dreams of another version of herself, suspended in the sky and flying on wings of pure white feathers. Our main hero, Yukito [Ono Daisuke] is a crow who’s dreamt himself into the shape of a man, or perhaps the other way around. These dreams are just part of the larger dream of the series itself, one that only ends when Air concludes. It’s a vast dream, too, encompassing over a thousand years, from 994 AD to the summer of 2000. Millennium to millennium, era to era, life to life.
Fittingly, Air‘s depiction of the human condition is impressionistic and emotional. Its core concerns are faith, family, and the preciousness and brevity of life. At its best, it feels as light and ethereal as its namesake or as heavy as torrential rain; lifting you up and pummeling you back down. This isn’t to say it’s always at its best—this is now the third Maeda Jun project I’ve seen, and I’m starting to get a good sense of his strengths and weaknesses as a creative, and there are some questionable decisions in the show’s final stretch in particular—but the highs are very high, and they’re plentiful enough to make the series worth watching.
In terms of literal narrative, Yukito arrives to a nameless town (modeled on the real-world city of Kami, Hyogo Prefecture), searching for a place to stay and a way to earn money, yes, but also a half-remembered vision inherited from his mother; something about a woman in the sky. In an early indication of the series’ magical-realist bent, Yukito is a puppeteer whose magical control of his doll is treated as nothing more than a mildly amusing parlor trick. He meets Misuzu, an odd, clumsy girl who trips a lot and says “gao!” when frustrated, and is eventually roped into being Misuzu’s live-in caretaker by Misuzu’s surrogate mother, a drunkard aunt named Haruko [Hisakawa Aya].
From this setup, Yukito becomes entangled in the lives of a number of women around the city, possibly a consequence of the series’ origins as an eroge. (This adult VN -> clean rerelease -> anime pipeline used to be quite common, back in the day.) Stripped of their original context, Yukito meeting these characters and witnessing their stories takes on an anthology-esque quality. Among those we meet are the self-styled ‘alien’ Kano [Okamoto Asami], Kano’s older sister, the town doctor Hijiri [Touma Yumi], the rambunctious redhead Michiru [Tamura Yukari], and her older sister, the deliberately-spoken, astronomy-fixated Tohno [Yuzuki Ryouka]. Each of these girls has some issue that Yukito aids in, if not resolving, at least providing closure for. In the earlier episodes, anything explicitly supernatural is pushed to the margins and the tone is fairly ambiguous. However, in episode four, the series stops playing coy, and from the moment that a magic feather in a temple induces a shared hallucination of a bygone era, the show’s magical realism is fully realized.
The show’s main theme of family comes into focus over the course of these stories. Each one centers around a frayed familial connection of some kind—Kano’s strained relationship with Hijiri, Michiru being the disembodied spirit of Tohno’s miscarried sister, Tohno’s mother completely forgetting she exists, et cetera—all of which is just windup to the two main stories of the series, the one between Misuzu herself and Haruko, and a very different, but intimately connected tale that takes place a thousand years prior.
Because, you see, the recurring image of the flying maiden is what ties all of these disparate stories together. Sometimes mentioned directly, sometimes only alluded to. Air reflects its own structure here, as this unknowable woman in the sky means something different to everyone. Air’s big halfway point twist, then, is when we learn the story of that woman. This is the other half of Air, a story taking place in the Heian Era, first at a secluded temple-palace and then all up and down medieval Japan. Kannabi-no-Mikoto, alias Kanna [Nishimura Chinami], an enshrined woman who is among the last of a mystical race of angel-winged people. Her attendants Ryuuya [Kanna Nobutoshi] and Uraha [Inoue Kikuko] serve to care for and comfort her at the shrine, drawing a parallel between these characters and those taking care of Misuzu. In an act of grim foreshadowing, Kanna’s life at the palace is disrupted when forces unknown infiltrate it, seeking certainly to capture, and possibly to kill her, leading Kanna and her entourage to flee and seek her also-imprisoned mother. Here, Air‘s visual presentation completely flips upside-down; these portions of the story are clouded over with heavy monsoons of rain, and when the Sun does poke out, it looks noticeably different than it does in the modern day portions of the story; less omnipresent and less oppressive.
Really, this part of Air is a different anime entirely, a feeling further enhanced by the two-part Air in Summer OVA which further fleshes it out (you could give yourself a “streamlined experience” by weaving both halves of Air in Summer into the main anime’s episode count). Kanna’s status as a winged person marks her as both something divine and an outcast. We don’t get many details; when we eventually meet Kanna’s mother, she only mentions that she herself is ‘tainted,’ and Kanna eventually comes to realize that her life, at least, what of it we see, may be the dream of someone else. (There’s a real Butterfly Dream thing going on here.) When she and her attendants can no longer escape their would-be captors, she unveils her wings. And thus, in one of the story’s two climactic points, Kanna is shot to death. Riddled with arrows against the backdrop of the white, caustic moon.
Death marks the final boundary for Air‘s narrative. Kanna’s story ends—at least for us—when she dies, and so too does Misuzu’s when the series returns to her side of the story for its final stretch. Back in the (relative) present, Misuzu’s illness, now fully revealed to be a curse, worsens. She loses the use of her legs, and eventually her memory starts to go, too, leaving her unsure of who Haruko, the woman who has been her surrogate mother for many years, even is. (This is another unifying thread between Misuzu, Kanna, and the rest of the show’s heroines. None of them have a normal relationship with their mother figure.) The final arc sees Haruko attempting to prove that she’s worthy of being Misuzu’s real mother, to herself, implicitly to us the audience, and to Misuzu’s actual biological father, a man named Keisuke [Tsuda Kenjirou].
In Air‘s last episode, we see Haruko’s desperate attempts to connect with her daughter finally begin to bear fruit, only for Misuzu to realize that she is, in a sense, still sleeping. Air ends with her death, as she and Haruko both accept that their time together is over. It hits in the heart, unifying the series’ themes of faith and family as Haruko reflects on her mistakes in treating Misuzu poorly1. If you’re the type who can be hit by that kind of thing (and I definitely am), it’ll get you, but there are questions to be asked, here, and this is where we have to put on our rational hat a little bit.
For one, Maeda certainly has a thing for young, disabled girls, doesn’t he? I don’t necessarily mean that in an outright condemnatory way—although some would, and I wouldn’t even say they’re wholly wrong to—but it is a noticeable recurring character type throughout his work; a girl whose emotional fragility is reflected by physical frailty. It feels rooted in ableism and misogyny. Plus, on top of that, this ending is just sort of basic. Yes Jun, to paraphrase Young Thug, we all hate when girls die, but is that really all?
To be fair, in the case of Misuzu’s death, and the closing chapter of this story, it quite literally isn’t all. Misuzu’s soul reunites with Kanna, and it is implied (albeit only indirectly), that this frees both of them—since they are ultimately, metaphysically one in the same—from their shared curse. Still, there’s a very fine line being walked here. “Life is incredibly frail, and there is a certain tragic, inevitable beauty to death” is a perfectly fine notion. Adding just a couple of words in there to make it specifically about the disabled very quickly turns it ugly, and I am not sure Air manages to say the first thing entirely without saying the second even if it doesn’t ‘mean’ to, which is a shame, to say the least.
On the other hand, you can try to ignore any themes built into Air entirely. That seems to be what much of the Japanese game-buying public did with the visual novel. Maeda has recounted2 how many players’ main takeaway was that the game was “soothing,” and how frustrating this was to him. From a certain point of view, this is definitely true of the anime as well, and you’re free to strip it for parts if all you really need is a sumptuous bath of wonderfully retro visuals and sound. Indeed, in addition to its very deliberate sense of place, Air lives and breathes its era; it is Early 2000s as hell, and all of the signifiers that have become so inseparable from this era are present. This is especially obvious with the highly sexually dimorphic character designs, where the men are all tall, lanky, and comparatively realistic, and the women are all short, soft, and have huge headlight bug-eyes. There’s some really strong animation, too, especially in terms of the near-constant sea breeze that blows throughout the show. Every hair on many of the girls’ heads will happily billow in the wind throughout the series, it’s quite something. Reducing the series to its aesthetic components in this way, however, requires actively disregarding what Air is about. I can’t speak for the game, but I don’t think the series is helped by trying to flatten it into a Pure Moods CD, even given its flaws.
If you wanted to, though, you had an option there, too. The series’ companion album Ornithopter, a sprightly thing where trance and instrumental city pop meld and melt together into a hazy heat blur, is an interesting counterpoint to the sadder parts of the anime. Like a pleasant dream the night after a bad day, it seems to gently nudge us into remembering that life will go on.
Life did, in fact, go on for all involved with Air. This series was director Ishihara Tatsuya‘s debut in that capacity, and he shortly thereafter went on to helm the world-conquering anime adaptation of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and a number of excellent Kyoto Animation titles thereafter including Nichijou, arguably the best comedy anime ever made and certainly one of the best of its era. He’s still at it now, directing the currently-airing third season of Hibike! Euphonium. Main series compositionist Shimo Fumihiko is also still working, currently fulfilling that same role on the fifth season of cult series Date A Live. A good chunk of the voice cast is still active, not always a given for an anime that’s nearly 20 years old, although sadly Misuzu’s voice actress Kawakami Tomoko, perhaps best known as the title character in Revolutionary Girl Utena, passed away in 2011 after a battle with cancer. She was an incredible talent, and was taken from us too soon.
And then, there’s the case of Maeda Jun himself, certainly worth discussing given that he seems to have been the main creative brain behind Air. Maeda, of course, had a pretty successful career for quite a while after Air, working in a similar capacity as the main force behind Clannad and Angel Beats! (the latter of which became an anime that I deeply love), among other things. Then, in 2020, came The Day I Became A God, and, well, if you’re a longtime reader of this site, you know how that went. I more or less stand by what I said in that article, and Air‘s lowest moments foreshadow some of The Day I Became A God‘s core problems, but it’s worth noting that I was hardly alone, there. The Day I Became A God was so widely disliked that the backlash prompted Maeda to retire from writing for anime and the like entirely, and he claims he felt so disheartened by the reception that he apparently considered killing himself.
It never feels great to be a part—even a very small part—of that kind of reception. I would like to think Maeda has good work in him still, and overall, I’d say I quite liked Air, despite its flaws. (Certainly my feelings on Angel Beats! remain unchanged, as well.) But you can’t change what’s already been done, and if Maeda has decided to stick to composing, he’s at least certainly very good at that as well.
As for Air itself, the series, there’s a lot I haven’t touched on, here. The series’ first half has a lot of great storytelling moments that I have both skipped recounting for the sake of not making this article even longer and to leave some of the magic intact for anyone who reads this and wants to check the show out. I’ve also not really gone into the various highs and lows of the show’s comedic moments, of which it has a surprising amount. (The very short version; most of the humor is actually surprisingly great, but a few things have not aged well. Sexual harassment-as-joke is something we should be glad we’ve largely left behind.) There are lots of bizarre little details, like Misuzu’s constant referring to chicks as “dinosaurs’ children” (she knows her cladistics!), a dog that makes “piko-piko” noises instead of barking, and so on. Despite all I’ve written, I feel like I’ve only really scratched the surface, and the years of surrounding context that have built up around Air have only amplified that feeling.
In the end though, Air has given me a wider appreciation not just for Maeda’s work but for work in general. Art reflects life, and life doesn’t stop for anyone. There’s no point in not trying to enjoy every day you have, and the fact that Air could make me reflect on the value of my own life and the time I have left in it is, in a way, the greatest argument in favor of it being a worthy piece of art. Dreams can be beautiful, yes. But, we all wake up eventually.
1: In general, as I’ve pointed out in my previous writing on this series, their dynamic reminds me a lot of Rosa and Maria’s from Umineko. I do wonder if it was a direct inspiration or just a coincidence.
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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 manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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.
There are a handful of interesting cultural currents running through Ninja Kamui. The most obvious has to do with its status as a Toonami co-fund—this is why it premiered so late in the season—and a likely-deliberate invocation of nostalgia for a bygone era of [adult swim]’s action programming. This might be the shallowest of these currents, however; despite the fact that it really would fit right in with [as]’ late-night action programming in the pre-Toonami revival days, and despite the fact that Main Toonami Guy Jason DeMarco has his name on it, I think Ninja Kamui would exist in some form regardless of Toonami’s involvement, and that’s because of the two other currents running through the anime.
The first is the recent spurt in ninja anime again. Not enough to be called a revival, but perhaps the tip of a trend is starting to show up. Over the past couple years we’ve had the straightforward, shonen-y Shinobi no Ittoki and the, apparently, deeply strange Under Ninja (I haven’t seen it), and now, with Ninja Kamui, we have an invocation of the grittier, bloodier ninja anime of the past. I’m probably not the first person to compare this series to ’93 sleaze classic Ninja Scroll, even if it’s only a distant resemblance. This, too, is only a loose thread, probably more indicative of something in the air than anything else. Again, I think Ninja Kamui would exist with or without those other anime. It would very much not exist, however, without Sunghoo Park, the series’ director and main creative brain.
You don’t come to this blog for in-depth production talk, most likely, (and if you do, you’re in the wrong place. I’m not the Sakugablog guy), but Park is a name that’s been well-known and in the air for a few years now. He is probably best-known as the guy who made a good chunk of the first season of Jujutsu Kaisen look as engaging and kinetic as it did. He’s since left MAPPA (I would also leave MAPPA if I were made to direct God of High School, so I get it), and founded his own studio, E&H Productions. Ninja Kamui is not the first thing E&H have done, but it is the first TV series, and thus, in a sense, their big coming-out party. Ninja Kamui isn’t based on anything, so it’s clear that this series’ story is one that somebody at E&H has had in their back pocket for a minute (I imagine Park himself, though I can’t prove that). So with that creative freedom, what did they deliver?
Well, a pretty good action series, so far.
Ninja Kamui‘s premise is very simple; an ex-ninja, our protagonist Higan [Kenjirou Tsuda] has fled to the United States to live with his wife and kid, using Cyber Ninja DisguisesTM to hide their true identities and live in relative peace. Things are great, until one day, Higan’s past catches up to him, and his wife and son are killed as part of his enemies’ ploy to ruin his life. All told, this is a pretty straightforward revenge tale of a kind that dots the whole history of the medium. While there’s something to be said for the baked-in sexism of having your handsome gruff guy protagonist survive while his family are murdered in cold blood, for the most part this is an effective setup. I don’t love Higan, but I like him, and any excuse to hear Kenjirou Tsuda do his thing for 20 minutes is a welcome one, the guy’s a fantastic voice actor.
The supporting cast is solid as well. The case of Higan’s family being murdered is taken up by the local PD, who are of course very much unequipped to handle secret ninja revenge killings. The one cop we spend any amount of time with is Mike Morris [Atsushi Ono], who, despite the obvious caveat that, you know, ACAB, I actually do kind of like as a character. He’s essentially a pretty basic genre stereotype who voices pretty frequent disbelief with the hyper-violent absurdity around him, and of course he’s the token One Good Cop (along with his assistant) in the force, the rest of which is all too willing to ignore a case they have no hope of solving and are ordered to do so by their mysterious higher-ups. He’s hardly revelatory or anything, but he’s fun.
The second episode sets up a further wrinkle in the plot, implying that the CEO of a virtual reality company is somehow tied to both the deaths of Higan’s family and goings-on in the ninja world more generally. This is a nice little twist that helps the show feel a little more distinct, and it’s not like there’s ever been a better time to make a douchebag tech guy your villain; the world is not exactly overflowing with love for Elon Musk and the like right now.
As for style, the series has what you’d expect from Park; lots of absolutely crazy action, with everything else being a little bit secondary. There are a lot of great “what, he can just do that?” moments, like Higan exhaling some kind of magic smoke that makes him grow extra arms (?!) in the second episode so he can more effectively fight off an assailant. Said assailant is disguised as an off-brand UberEats driver, because Ninja Kamui is also a little bit funny with it. The series is also not afraid to invoke truly ridiculous levels of violence and gore, which again makes it feel very much of a piece with [adult swim]’s late ’00s anime offerings. There is a very memorable bit in episode two where Higan, still recovering from the same attack that killed his family, takes out his anger and frustration by leaving one of the offending enemy ninjas tied, hanging upside-down, from the ceiling of a warehouse. Each day he spends recovering, he stabs the guy with a different knife, which he leaves inside of him after he’s done. Then, on the fifth day, when he’s fully recovered, he just lights the guy on fire! It would be downright Jack Bauer-y if he was doing this as an interrogation thing, but he’s not! It’s strictly a revenge play.
Which gets at the one problem I do have with Ninja Kamui which is that even with everything I just said in mind, it just feels a little….basic? So for all the praise I’ve given it here, I wouldn’t say I’m necessarily super invested. I think it’s being beaten out even in the fairly narrow category of “anime I’m not crazy into but which I enjoy watching for their fight scenes” by Bucchigiri?! Still, if you like by-the-book revenge thrillers, you could probably do a lot worse than this.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
“Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.“
-Zhuangzhi
After last year’s season proved that adults, magic babies, and even boys can be Precures, Wonderful Precure continues the trend by introducing the first Cure who is buppy. An absolute good girl. A magical woofer. What I’m telling you is that the lead character of this season is a literal dog. Truly, we are breaking new ground here.
It’s a little meaningless to ask ourselves if this is a “gimmick” or not. Precure seasons tend to make pretty heavy use of loose visual themes, so in some sense they’re all gimmicks, other than perhaps the original Futari wa team. (And even they had the whole black/white duality. Plus the hand-holding thing.) It’s more important to acknowledge that, for however silly this premise may seem on its surface, Wonderful Precure‘s first episode is exactly that. It’s a significantly more low-key affair than last year’s opening blast of explosive punch, but it trades that in for a surprising amount of character depth given the relatively short amount of time we get to know the characters in question.
It goes something like this; Iroha [Atsumi Tanezaki] and her cute little dog Komugi [Maria Naganawa] live in the happy burg of Animal Town, a place known for how much its residence love their pets. We open, as so many magical girl anime do, on a typical day. Iroha is late for school, and Komugi wants to play but sadly, her human can’t stay. Anyone who’s ever owned a pet knows this whole song and dance, and it makes for a cute and relatable opening few minutes of the show.
Pictured: The main character of the show, and a human.
Komugi herself, despite still very much being nothing but an ordinary dog at this point, is given a fair bit of internality here as well. While Iroha is away at school, Komugi dreams a sad little dog nightmare about how she and Iroha will always live separate lives. That sadness is here represented by a washed-out shade of denim-y blue-grey, and a pair of shadow girls who look like they’re on leave from Revolutionary Girl Utena, representing Iroha’s human friends.
Iroha herself seems very kind and peppy, it’s clear she loves animals, as in when she hollers a greeting at the cat in a window of a local Pretty Holic shop just opening up in her neighborhood. That cat, Yuki [Satsumi Matsuda], is a haughty little furball in the classic cartoon mold, and seems to lightly scold her own owner Mayu [Reina Ueda] when the latter actually hides upon hearing Iroha’s cheerful how-do-ya-do at her cat. One gets the sense that she’s very shy and anxious, a likely hint toward the direction her own character development will take in later episodes.
Finally, there’s Satoru [Takuma Terashima] and his pet bunny Daifuku, who are introduced as the former studies a local landmark called the Mirror Rock. Satoru seems to be our supporting boy, at the moment, a character archetype many previous seasons of Precure have used to greater or lesser effect. He gets flustered when Iroha chats him up and it’s clear the two already know each other, so if you want to place your bets on who the token puppy-love interest is here, it’s probably him.
Daifuku does rather little in the few minutes they’re on screen, but still manages to convey an immense amount of personality just by Looking Like That.
This early part of the episode is very character-driven, and it does a great job of balancing all of these different introductions, giving us just enough of a look into these characters (both pet and human!) to tell us what they’re like, while firmly foregrounding Komugi and Iroha as the show’s actual leads. Frankly, it’s actually fairly light on any indication that this is even is a magical girl anime. Only a brief cut over to a mysterious, sinister-looking orb and a demonstration of its corrupting effects on a land of magical talking animals reminds us that this is a Precure series we’re watching, and the more typically mahou shoujo genre elements largely only emerge in the episode’s second half. It’s worth noting, though; the orb seals all of these animals in magical black eggs. These are, it would seem, our local plot devices this time around.
In the episode’s second half, Iroha, at a dog park with Komugi, has an encounter with a giant, rampaging sheep that seems to have been taken over by some sort of sinister force, which we shortly learn is termed “garugaru.” (The work of the aforementioned orb, no doubt.)
Iroha is able to distract the beast, helping a local boy out of danger, but she fails to account for the sheer speed of the thing, and the fact she’s now in danger herself. Komugi, initially trembling at the sight of this monster, rushes in to save her owner, despite being outmatched in comparison to this angry ram creature in just about every respect.
You can probably guess what happens next.
That “three, two, wan!” countdown is ungodly cute.
Yes, suddenly filled with magical energy, Komugi becomes a real, entire human girl, and then transforms into a Precure. Every Cure’s first henshin is an event, and Komugi’s is just as much of one as any long-time fan would expect. The new Cure Wonderful’s approach to fighting the monster is novel, as she doesn’t really attack it per se (perhaps owing to the fact that the baddies this time around are, you know, animals). Instead, she blocks its own attacks with a giant, paw-shaped shield and chases it around to wear it out.
Finally, when it’s exhausted and cornered, she realizes it’s in pain, and gives it a gentle hug, which is enough to purify it and turn it back into a regular sheep.
What this simple textual description leaves out is the sheer amount of personality the animation has here. Cure Wonderful is, on the inside at least, still a jumpy little puppy, and she’s drawn as such even as a human and even when in her magical girl form. It’s honestly just absolutely delightful, and if this is any indication of how the character will be written and drawn going forward, we’re in for a year of adorable, fuzzy charm.
But let’s give some credit to Iroha, too, who ends the episode in exactly the fashion you’d expect a baffled middle schooler to respond to their dog suddenly turning into a person. At first, she has no idea who this girl is and wonders where her cute little dog went. Then, as the facts of the situation slowly dawn on her, she is completely dumbfounded. Her expressions really must be seen to be believed, especially when she tries the whole “give me your paw” trick on the newly-human Komugi and the former dog still responds as expected.
All told, and to the surprise of few, Wonderful Precure marks another fantastic opening episode for a series that has gotten very, very good at doing those. It’s already February, but I think I can safely predict that we’re in for a wonderful year.
Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live.If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Anilist, BlueSky, or Tumblrand supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directoryto browse by category.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
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