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.
Another season, another roundup post for the stuff I didn’t quite have enough to say about to do a full post on. Let’s get into it.
Goodbye, Lara – I am only passingly familiar with the original The Little Mermaid story. Like a lot of Americans, I could tell you a lot more about the Disney version (although it’s been a long time since I’ve seen even that). This…may or may not matter to appreciating Goodbye, Lara in the long-term. But I bring it up because the anime’s opening episode takes an interesting approach to its classic source material.
Goodbye, Lara is not an adaptation of The Little Mermaid. Instead, it’s an original story that uses the original tale as, essentially, a prologue. (I am reminded, vaguely, of the old Peter & The Starcatchers series of young adult novels and their relationship to the original Peter Pan.) It’s hard to make many strong claims about what the series will “be like” in terms of actual narrative because of this, as the story here is that prologue. With some reworked framing, the fundamentals of a mermaid princess—Lara [Hishikawa Hana, who it is honestly great to hear around in a main role again], this time around—fascinated by the human world are the same. The main deviation, as far as I’m aware, being that Lara’s father Rowan actually contextualizes contact with (or even speaking out in favor of) humans as a “sin.” Something about them, he says, corrupts a mermaid’s inner light. This seems like a moral framing at first, but events late in the episode suggest it may be something more fundamental than that. In any case, Lara nonetheless develops a fixation on humans early on, even keeping a collection of various artifacts that fall into the sea over the years, dolls, jewelry, glasses, and so on, as she grows up in the 1770s. She is, eventually, tempted by the words of a delightfully cackle-cackle muahaha villain-ass villain, the sea-witch, Grace [Fukami Rica], exiled from her father’s kingdom.
Of course, she offers Lara a potion that will turn her human. And of course, as we all likely know, this potion has a catch; she has to find true love before it wears off, or she’ll dissolve into foam.
And she does! She falls for a prince of the surface world, and they have a lovely time together right up until the potion starts wearing off and she changes back into a mermaid before his very eyes. In doing so, she finds out that the human/mermaid animosity is mutual, and she fizzles into ocean spray, tears in her eyes.
Grace, watching from a magic mirror, is unimpressed by this, dismissing her tragic ending as boring. (Which, hey, seems a touch disrespectful, since I think that’s how the original book ends? But, then, she is the villain here, so maybe it’s fine.) Which would be an odd note to end on, but of course, Lara isn’t truly dead. Via some magical means, she is resurrected inside of a giant seashell, and is shocked to find her father’s kingdom in ruins. This, if the magic mirrors that she consults to learn the kingdom’s fate can be trusted, is because of her own actions. Lara merely making contact with the surface world was somehow enough to “corrupt” the inner light of not just the mermaids themselves but the land in which they lived. (It’s around here that this starts to feel a bit like commentary on pollution, but it’s really too early to say for sure.)
Grace contacts her again, telling her that, if she’s willing, she might be able to save the kingdom and revive her family (who are not dead per se, but merely in the same kind of stasis that Lara herself seemed to be up until her resurrection). Without any other choice, Lara agrees, and is promptly rocketed back to the human world on a beautifully-animated jet of water.
She finds it quite different from her last go-around, because—small detail—her resurrection took about 200 years and change, and it’s now 2026. The episode ends with her falling from the sky into the waiting arms of a young girl named Otsu Mari [Kawaishi Nana], who does the only logical thing and puts on the boxing gloves she’s carrying to parry the incoming mermaid with a solid left hook. You know, just to prove that she’s no casual.
No but really, why did she do that?
Suffice to say that all of this is just endlessly interesting. How did Lara merely making contact with a human mess up the mermaid kingdom so badly? Why is Grace so hellbent on seeing her try again when the kingdom’s ruin seems to have been her goal in the first place? Why does the girl that Lara falls onto after being blown out of the water have boxing gloves? No, seriously, how on earth does boxing of all things factor into this story? A good premiere leaves you asking questions, and a great premiere does so with style. Goodbye, Lara, as you can probably guess, is by my estimation a great premiere. Good enough to stand out in a season that hasn’t been short on those and isn’t going to let up with them anytime soon. Koide Takushi, directing here, was previously the animation director on the Revue Starlight movie. So this series, with its sea-deep colors and bold, immediately-iconic character designs, was probably always destined to look good. But the premiere promises that Goodbye, Lara will be more than a mere return to form for Kinema Citrus, it could very well be truly great in its own right.
Grow Up Show – What we have here is a classic “girls passionate about some performing art”-style slice of life series from A-1 Pictures and their relatively new subsidiary Psyde Kick. It’s an original with no prior source material, which is always neat, and Grow Up Show lacks even the public domain roots of Goodbye, Lara. Unfortunately, it’s also the first premiere of the season that I just really did not care for at all.
Grow Up Show‘s premise—that lead Tsurumaki Mizuka [Hirohashi Ryou]is roped into working for the traveling Sunflower Circus after her deadbeat dad, a legendary circus performer himself, essentially sold her to them for 40,000 yen—is precisely the kind of wacky plot motor you’d expect in a show that’s this zany. (And we’re clearly supposed to think that her dad is a terrible person for doing this, even that tone in mind, to be clear.) Accordingly, Grow Up Show is pretty silly, and it makes sure you know that by having Mizuka pull all kinds of wacky faces and such. On top of that, the show is passingly cute, so those who don’t need much more out of their anime than those two things will be satisfied here. However, it’s also pretty cloying in a way I found immediately obnoxious and which did not really let up over the course of its premiere. Mizuka herself is hardly the world’s most compelling protagonist. She’s a grumpy sourpuss who isn’t at all thrilled to be drafted into doing circus work due to its association with her asshole dad. Unfortunately, that’s probably the second most common type of lead for this sort of thing after the completely played-straight “bundle of joy and passion” type, so that isn’t terribly interesting, and is less so because we’re obviously setting up a turnaround narrative here where, by the end of the show, she’ll actually love the circus and maybe even come to reconnect with her estranged father. (If this doesn’t happen, feel free to come back after the finale and call me a fool in the comments section, but, come on.) Beyond that, the only truly noteworthy thing about her is that she’s really flexible. Definitely helpful for a circus acrobat, but not exactly the sort of thing that leads to a character brimming with personality on its own.
The other characters are an unfortunate combination of rote, annoying, and interchangeable, and more than once while they had their little exchanges I found my eyes glazing over. Most of them have one obvious personality trait, if that, few distinguishing physical characteristics, and even the voice actresses seem to largely phone it in, so none of them sound particularly distinct either. The show attempts to make an exception to this nondescriptness with Kawasumi Ouka [Kurosaki Shiori in what is, admittedly, apparently her first major role], a character set up as Mizuka’s partner in the circus’ acrobatic shows. But the two don’t really get any memorable interactions in their time together here. Even when actually practicing one of those acrobatic routines, the attempt to establish chemistry between them just feels very paint-by-numbers. In fact, all of that, the ultra-simple character dynamics, the gimmicky core hook (not a lot of anime about circus acrobatics admittedly, it’s, what, this and Kaleido Star?), and plausibly-deniable girl x girl fanservice, Grow Up Show feels like a slice of life anime from a decade ago, and not in a good way. Even the art style, a poor stab at middle-of-the-last-decade generic moe, feels symptomatic of this. Likewise, the animation, while competent, isn’t particularly compelling either. Perhaps I just don’t have enough appreciation of the inherent beauty of bodies in motion or whatever, but, it did not speak to me despite its technical proficiency.
The real nail in the coffin, though, at least for me, came in the episode’s second half, where Mizuka watches the Sunflower Circus girls’ performances and is asked to critique them. It is a tragic fact that, if any narrative attempts to speak on the arts themselves, it will often do so through a character. In doing this, it then hands idiots with blogs like myself endless ammo, because it’s so easy to fling comments made by these characters back at the narrative itself. But, being complete easy-mode for critics doesn’t actually make it wrong, and I was not happy to realize that the admittedly-lazy buzz of “aha, it’s like the show is talking about itself” was the most engagement I was going to get out of the episode. I am not exaggerating when I say I had to really struggle to not completely check out for everything afterward.
Maybe I’m being mean, and yes, sure, it is technically possible that this series will somehow pick up later in its run and I’ll look like a fool for writing it off, but I truly doubt it. In an anime season that is this packed, both with excellent things that have already premiered (including specifically those about young girls in the performing arts) and things that are about to, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to stick with this for a full twelve weeks. Slice of life “cute girls doing cute things” anime often fly under the radar in terms of anime genres that seem to only get new entries due to some perceived bottomless demand for them, in comparison to say narou-kei isekai or harem romcoms (both of which are made in much higher quantities and, I would say at least, have much lower averages in terms of quality over all), but an anime like this is a nice reminder that it is perhaps good that there aren’t actually way more of these things, because at some point you’re just diluting the scene with cruft.
Also there’s not even a girl who’s a clown, which is an enormous missed opportunity.
Sparks of Tomorrow – These three anime are listed in alphabetical order, but even so, it might be appropriate that I’ve saved this one for last, as it’s by some measure the one I have the least to say about. Sparks of Tomorrow‘s big claim to fame is being the newest Kyoto Animation project, and to be sure, Oota Minoru (who has been at KyoAni since the Haruhi days but hasn’t actually directed an entire anime of his own until now) and his crew bring the usual levels of expected polish and style to the production. The backgrounds are also very nice, and give a real sense of believability to the series’ setting, an alternate-history, steam-powered 1907 Japan where electrical engineering never caught on and electric lighting and the like is still very much a novelty. Our hero is Sakamoto Kihachi [Uchida Yuuma], younger brother of a presently-vanished electrical genius whose dream was to bring electricity to the masses.
Now, this is the second paragraph and I have already used the word “electrical” and its variants five times. (It is perhaps for the best that the show’s early, unofficial English title, The 20th Century Electric Catalogue, taken from an important book and plot token in the story, was never canonized.) Kihachi’s brother, the contents of the Catalogue itself, and how he would’ve revolutionized the world with it, are all left pretty up in the air at the moment, and while you could argue that the show is indulging in some Great Man Theory here—in an opening bit of narration we’re told the present state of affairs is because all of the early “electrical geniuses” died young, so clearly it’s up to Kihachi’s older brother to fill their shoes—it really feels, at present, like we’re more supposed to latch on to the feeling of something important as opposed to any specifics. Fair enough, but it does make the premiere feel a little odd overall.
What it does have going for it is a decent cast of characters. Kihachi himself is disillusioned by his brothers’ disappearance, and spends most of his days fixing various machinery at a Buddhist altar shop that took him in. His opposite number, our female lead Momokawa Inako [Amamiya Sora], is very impressed by the electrical inventions Kihachi shows her. Toward the end of the episode she literally thinks she’s in heaven for a moment, thanks to a particularly impressive display. Inako’s main talents are an intense credulity and open devoutness in, um, just about everything, really. It’s a somewhat strange, cartoonishly naïve personality for a character to have, but it works in its own way. The real linchpin of the cast though, for my money, is actually our villain, a bizarre, scheming sleazeball named Mizoe Yousuke [Uchiyama Kouki] who is the heir to a steam engine zaibatsu and strong-arms Inako’s dad into letting him marry her as part of a plot to claim the Electric Catalogue for himself. All of this is, in a word, odd, and I’d be lying if I said I had any idea of what to make of it at this early juncture. (And the often extremely zany animation, which is fairly uncharacteristic of KyoAni’s usual house style, really only emphasizes the strangeness.) But odd is good in the world of the anime premiere, and while this isn’t entirely my thing, I can imagine it appealing to some on novelty alone.
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