Tag: Spring 2024 Anime Season

Posted on in anime

Seasonal First Impressions: Flipping The Haters Off in GIRLS BAND CRY

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 two immediately noteworthy things about Girls Band Cry, one fairly frustrating, and the other very much a selling point for a series that is going to need it. Point one; you cannot legally watch Girls Band Cry anywhere in the anglosphere as of the time of this writing. There’s just no way to do it. For whatever reason, none of the major streaming services have picked this thing up, and it’s only because of a fansubbing team going by SobsPlease that this article exists at all, since I don’t speak Japanese and would otherwise have written the show off as beyond my reach. If we were talking about a show that was fairly uninteresting, this would still be a little sad, but mostly of no major consequence. However, in the case of Girls Band Cry it is very annoying because of point two. This series has an extremely distinctive visual style. I would go so far as arguing it doesn’t really look like any other TV anime. At the very least, it certainly doesn’t look like any that I’ve ever seen.

All-3D CGI is not new anymore, it’s been an accepted approach to creating TV anime—if a contentious one—for over a decade by now. What separates Girls Band Cry from even its most immediate peers like Bang Dream! It’s MyGO!!! is a stark juxtaposition between its fairly grounded environments and incredibly fluid, almost cartoony character animation. These twin approaches, combined with a flair for directly incorporating visualizations of pure feeling into the series, create a world that feels simultaneously very physical and very stylized. It’s a very interesting contrast, and I imagine some will be turned off of it just because it’s so different from even other 3D CG anime, but it works very well for what the show is trying to do, and I would not be at all surprised if Girls Band Cry ends up influencing other anime to attempt a similar style.

So, you may ask, what is the show trying to do? A fairly simple underdog story about rock bands, so far, but it’s doing it with a real, competitive vigor that’s all the more important because of where and when this is airing.

Our main character is Iseri Nina [Uchiyama Rina], newly arrived in Tokyo*, and apparently fleeing a somewhat difficult home situation, although the details are vague. Following the compass of some online hearsay, she, after a series of minor mishaps, catches a street performance by her favorite musician, Kawaragi Momoka [Yuuri]. Momoka is a former member of and songwriter for a group called Diamond Dust. They’re broken up now, and Momoka and Nina happen to meet after the latter awkwardly introduces herself to and professes her fandom of the former. Hijinks ensue, wherein Momoka is chased from her spot by a pair of punk-looking people, who she promptly flips off as Momoka and Nina, who finds herself caught up in all this, flee together. Momoka also happens to flip the double birdies to their pursuers, beginning both a running gag and an honest-to-god visual motif that I really hope the series keeps coming back to, because it’s funny and earnest in a way that centers the entire narrative.

Nina and Momoka develop a fast friendship, and as they learn about each others’ woes (Nina’s buttoned-up home life, Momoka’s falling out with her bandmates over a song ownership dispute), Momoka lets it slip that she’s moving away the very next day. Obviously, this doesn’t really happen. Nina, who is left Momoka’s guitar, pursues her, and with the unlikely help of the same punks that chased Momoka off earlier, convinces her to stay, and they put on an impromptu street performance that ends the episode. The real lingering message is the one Nina shouts into the crowd while trying to get Momoka’s attention in the show’s closing minutes;

What helps sell this whole unlikely, delightfully cartoony story, is that the motivation for Nina moving to Tokyo in the first place isn’t some grand ambition, it’s just a feeling that she doesn’t belong. As somebody who also moved halfway across the country to get away from family who just Kind of Don’t Get It, I am immediately and immensely sympathetic to her plight. This is admittedly a stretch, but given her reaction to learning that Momoka’s roommate is a gay man, I think she might be queer and closeted, possibly even to herself. I’ll admit that present textual evidence is minimal, but the situation makes the shoe fit. More generally, and even if that turns out to not be the case, there’s a real sense of earnest sincerity to the show’s pop-tough-guy fuck-the-world attitude. “Punk” is a meaningless descriptor in 2024, but the show is genuinely doing something pretty different here, and I think that counts for a lot on its own.

Because while its story is straightforward the way in which it’s delivered sets Girls Band Cry apart from its peers. When Nina is upset, she literally seethes prickly red particles. When she first hears Momoka’s song on the street, the first chord becomes a physical smear of pure blue that wafts over to her ears. When she hears Momoka sing, it’s with such force that an explosion of rock glass erupts behind her. None of these things physically happen, but the show’s willingness to illustrate feelings as though they were literal events is very striking. It also puts it in direct conversation with that other rule-bending underdog story about the power of music airing right now, Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. In a battle of the bands setup, I still think Jellyfish might win, but it’s not really a competition in that way. (And both shows are still very early on in terms of episode count, so who knows where things will eventually end up.)

It might sort of be a competition in another sense, though. Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article about the state of the then-omnipresent idol girl group genre. In the nineteen months since then, that entire format of anime, quite contrary to my prediction in that article, has virtually disappeared. The only idol anime airing right now is THE IDOLM@STER: SHINY COLORS, and of the type that we normally think of when the term “idol anime” comes up, it’s the only one slated to air this year at all, every other example being a movie, a spinoff, or shows which fall outside of the traditional format (like Oshi no Ko‘s second season or, on the other end of things, kids’ anime Himitsu no AiPri). I bring this up not to make the claim that idol anime are dead necessarily, but to underline that there does seem to be some kind of shift occurring, as we move back to the similar but markedly less formulaic girls band genre. Once (BOCCHI THE ROCK!) is a fluke. Twice (the aforementioned MyGO) is coincidence. Three times is a trend. What’s remarkable is that despite these shows all being very different, there’s a running thread of visual experimentation that makes them exciting. If these two facts really are connected, then it’s a damn good time to think girls playing guitars are pretty cool. The rocker girls are back, and if this wave continues, they just might be the future.

1: Technically the place she moves in to is just outside of Tokyo, but even in-text, this is acknowledged as splitting hairs. A bit like the Chicago / Chicagoland distinction where I live.

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: JELLYFISH CAN’T SWIM IN THE NIGHT, But With The Moon on Them, They Can Shine

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.

I think most people know that jellyfish aren’t fish. They’re cnidarians, part of an ancient order of primitive animals that date back to the earliest days of multicellular life on earth. Perhaps because of their ancient origins, or simply because they’ve never been pressured otherwise, jellyfish do not actually swim per se. They have no muscles with which to do so. Instead, jellyfish are carried along by the ocean’s currents. Clearly, this has worked out just fine for them, but what any one person might make of that situation is going to vary. When you see the jellyfish, do you see something hapless, or something that just needs a little help to get going?

This question, of course as a metaphor, is central to Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night, which, over the course of one of the year’s strongest premieres, establishes itself as a fairly unique take on an old, old story in the TV anime format. Jellyfish is not technically an idol show—indeed, the industry seems to be moving away from those over the past year or so, and Jellyfish here premiered on the same day as another non-idol music anime, Girls Band Cry—but it shares much of the DNA of one. Specifically, a kind of starry-eyed, emotionally-driven resonance, which it spins into an underdog story about the difficulty of pursuing your passions against the backdrop of a world that may be apathetic or actively hostile to your attempts to do so, not to mention the specter of self-doubt, a force that should not be underestimated.

Jellyfish‘s visual techniques are varied and are all applied very well. Chiefly, the show seems focused on cementing a solid sense of place early on, nighttime Shibuya rendered as a concrete but also almost supernatural nexus of nocturnal vibe, where anything seems possible if you reach out to touch it, and you can truly be yourself. The directing on this thing, courtesy of Takeshita Ryouhei (recently also known for the Paldean Winds ONAs), is nothing short of incredible. Our protagonist, Kouzuki Mahiru [Itou Miku], is an uncomplicated but fully-realized character, she is near-literally haunted by flashbacks throughout the opening episode, as they manifest in front of her as glowing apparitions of her former self and her friends. She has involved daydreams that interrupt the flow of the episode, only to be waved off or rewound back like a video tape; daydreams where she worries about a future as a “nobody”, or emotional outbursts she’s too self-conscious to actually have. (As a fellow serial imaginer, and hell, a fellow nobody, I sympathize.)

Mahiru used to be an artist. She isn’t anymore, but as we learn throughout the course of the first episode, after arguments with her sister about makeup, funny socks and TikTok influencers, and in-between hashing out tentative Halloween plans with her friends, she used to be an artist. Once, when she was a child, a drawing of hers was even selected to be made into a mural, a mural that still stands in the show’s version of Shibuya up to the present day; a sprawling tangle of bold lines and colors that, of course, form a jellyfish. Her friends, as kids often do, saw the mural and made fun of it, not knowing it was hers. This single act was enough to completely uproot her self-esteem, and eventually she takes a marker and scribbles over her own “Original Concept by:” credit on the mural. Thus rendered anonymous, it clings to a city wall, disowned but not disappearing.

As part of the landscape, it becomes a backdrop for—we must assume—many things, but the most relevant is a street performance by a random indie idol named Miiko [Uesaka Sumire]. Mahiru doesn’t much appreciate said performance using her mural as a backdrop, but can’t muster up the nerve to say anything. After all, it would, in her own words, take a real “hot-blooded weirdo” to speak up in the middle of a concert.

So of course, one does.

Yamanouchi Kano [Takahashi Rie] is, in terms of attitude, everything Mahiru is not. But she used to be something, too; an idol herself, part of a group called the Sunflower Dolls, in her case. We later learn that her departure from her chosen field was, unlike Mahiru’s, involuntary. (These things tend to happen when you deck another girl in your group, a murky incident we’re not given many details on here and which I’m willing to bet will form a strong running B-plot throughout the whole show.)

It’s a little funny to see a show frame street heckling as a powerful, heroic act, but in-context and in the moment, it really is. Mahiru comes off as a little mystified by Kano, but she’s clearly taken by her, and it’s very easy to read the relationship that almost immediately takes hold here as something more intense than simple admiration if you’re so inclined, but what’s truly important is that this provides a seed for Mahiru to realize that she wants to pursue art again.

She’s not the only one; Kano has a thing going on as an utaite1 despite being blackballed by the idol industry proper. She does this under the name JELEE, providing another, marginally more literal meaning to the show’s title. Naturally the end of the episode sees the two combining their powers, but this takes some doing.

It’s clear that Mahiru’s insecurity, while it might stem from a single obvious cause, has since grown beyond it, and when Kano initially tries to get Mahiru to join her, she literally runs away, spouting a fountain of excuses and retreating to the relative anonymity of the evening train. Encountering Kano again, during Halloween night, while once again in Shibuya, gives Mahiru the final push. Once again, the pair encounter Miiko. Once again, she’s performing in front of the mural, this time covering “Colorful Moonlight”, a song Kano wrote during her days in the Sunflower Dolls. Once again, Kano tells her off. This time, though, things go a step further. Borrowing an acoustic guitar and stepping into the performer’s spotlight herself, Kano begins singing her version of the song, here stripped down to just guitar and vocals.

This marks the first time we hear the song unobscured, and this is where Mahiru finally frees herself of her own anxieties, even if only temporarily. She draws behind Kano, making huge, swooping lines with a stick of lipstick, she marks up her own mural with googly eyes; making it look like the jellyfish from the logo of Kano’s youtube channel. This whole thing is being livestreamed, and thus, JELEE ceases to be one person, and becomes a collective; what Mahiru cannot accomplish on her own, she finds is possible in the company of Kano, someone who stokes her creative fires and inspires her. On that beautifully-executed note, the episode ends.

Not long after this incredibly important shot.

I’ve glossed over and simplified much in the recapping of this episode’s actual plot, because in some ways the literal events take a distant backseat to the emotional beats. I haven’t had space to mention the brilliant little scene near the beginning where Mahiru hesitantly chooses between an angel or devil costume, only for Kano—who we haven’t met yet—to snatch up the devil without a second thought. I haven’t talked about the series’ use of symbols; jellyfish obviously, but also lipstick as a signifier for all things simultaneously “adult” and ruthlessly constraining, a sort of deliberate inversion of how a lot of anime for young girls use that same symbol, the use of video effects to emphasize the artificiality (and thus lack of consequence) of Mahiru’s daydreams. Ultimately, the thing is that these are details, and while there is a lot going on in Jellyfish and such details greatly enhance it, it is very clearly a big-picture show. That’s why it feels like there really is something special about the idea of not an idol anime or a girls’ band anime but an artist collective anime. Something too to the idea that the lead is not even the singer, but the visual artist. (Our eventual other two members of this troupe are a VTuber and a pianist, who knows how that’s going to work? I’m excited to find out!)

This is not a perfect premiere—what is?—some of the dialogue is a little strained, and I would really like to see the camera be a bit less leery going forward, but these feel like such minor complaints compared to the pure pulse of breathtaking energy that is the rest of the premiere.

Jellyfish, in a word, is hyperactive. Eager to make you look at its murals and songs, its nighttime Shibuya, the strong, instantly-formed shock-of-destiny relationship between its two leads, its flashy camera tricks and video effects, its characters, its idea that everyone has a song inside of them. This is a show that wants to impress you. “Isn’t all this beautiful?” It asks, and the wonderful thing is that it’s completely right; it is.

1: A kind of internet-based singer, originally associated with NicoNicoDouga, now common on Youtube as well. Perhaps the most famous utaite-turned-professional in contemporary J-pop is Ado, apparently a deliberate influence, in the case of this anime.

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is 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.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: 30 Stops to Ikebukuro – What Even is TRAIN TO THE END OF THE WORLD?

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.

Consider the train. Trains connect places, and therefore people. They shorten distances, enabling the average person to travel far and wide with relatively little of the immense pain that travel was in pre-industrial times. Nonetheless, trains aren’t cars. You can’t pick where you’re going to go; if it’s not somewhere on the line, you’re never going to get there. In this way, trains are both freeing and restrictive. They will get you where you want to go, but only if where you want to go is along a predetermined path. You know, like college.

I can’t prove it, but I have an inkling that this dichotomy was the genesis of Train to The End of The World (more snappily known as just Shuumatsu Train in some corners), or at least a small part of that genesis. Shuumatsu Train kicks the spring season off1, notably, as an original production. So we’re all on the same page, equally travelling blind to wherever this railcar happens to take us, which is an inarguable positive for something that’s as out-there as this series is already shaping up to be. It comes to us from EMT Squared, who have been around for a while, and in fact, they also made Fluffy Paradise, the first anime I covered here on Magic Planet Anime last season, but are certainly not a household name. More immediately interesting to your average anime viewer may be the resume of director Mizushima Tsutomu, an industry lifer with a truly odd body of work. What sweeping statements can you make about the guy who directed Squid Girl, ANOTHER, Witchcraft Works, most of Girls und Panzer, Shirobako, and Joshiraku, among other things? If nothing else, you can’t pigeonhole the man. For reasons like its eclectic staff, and also its rather bizarre first key visual, it was hard to know what to expect from Shuumatsu Train. In a way, that’s exciting; some of last season’s best anime were originals (I am here thinking mainly of super robot pastiche / self-effacing yaoibait comedy Brave Bang Bravern! and superpowered delinquent punch-up Bucchigiri?!), so it would be great to see things continue in that direction.

However, the main question Shuumatsu Train wants to answer, as it begins, is “what would happen if a spam pop-up ad could abduct you in real life?” This is just one part of what I can wholeheartedly call one of the absolute goddamn weirdest pre-OP introductory scenes I’ve ever seen. A girl enters a train station, en route to it’s-not-really-important, and is promptly met with cheers, because she’s the 77,777th person to enter the train station that day. This, of course, means that she is immediately snatched up by a mobile owl statue and deposited at the top of a building. There, a black-and-silver-haired huckster named Pontaro Poison implores her to push a huge shiny button labeled “7G.” 7G, as you can surely intuit, is the successor to 6G, the successor to 5G, the communication standard. 7G, the huckster explains, allows us to “instantly broadcast” our thoughts and “make visions real.” After some chiding, the girl presses the button, an the world promptly dissolves into a surreal hell of abstract buildings, psychedelic colors, and warped faces. Cut to opening credits!

When we return from the admittedly very nice title sequence, two years have passed and the world has fallen into an incredible state of disrepair, and in the city of Agano, almost everyone has turned into animals. If Shuumatsu Train makes a mistake in its opening episode, it might be that the entire rest of it takes place here, in a setting that is certainly weird but doesn’t measure up to the sheer WTF factor of those first couple of minutes. It’s actually a bit tempting to say that the series overexplains itself a bit, because, courtesy of our narrator and main character Shizuru [Anzai Chika], we get a clean rundown of what actually happened. As one might guess, the present state of the world was indeed caused by the launch of this mysterious 7G Network. Here, it happens that folks from the area turn into animals at the age of 21 and 3 months. The town’s populace thus consists of a few relatively ordinary high school girls and a whole bunch of talking animals, at least a few of whom are struggling to hang on to the mental faculties they still have, and one of them, a sun bear, briefly leaps at one of the girls in a short but fairly uncomfortable scene.

It should be noted that this is said to be a state of affairs unique to Agano. Other regions have different, and, it’s implied, more overtly dangerous problems to deal with. Also, one guy has inexplicably remained physically human but can only run around making choo-choo noises, keep him in mind.

Now, it might be tempting to claim that Shuumatsu Train has scuttled its own mysteries right out of the gate here. But given how this information is presented to us, it doesn’t seem like the series is terribly bent on building up that sort of mystery. As becomes clear over its first episode, Shuumatsu Train is an adventure series first and foremost. Despite its bizarre premise, the series makes legible gestures toward themes of growing up in an indifferent world that is spiraling into chaos, a core that resonates not in spite of being buried under layers of surreality, but because of those layers.

For example; Shizuru and her friends, Reimi [Erisa Kuon], Akira [Kino Hina], and Nadeshiko [Waki Azumi], each take a different approach to coping with the strange state of the world they live in, exemplified by the goods they ask for from a caravan of armored trucks that visits the town once a month (apparently the last remaining of what was once several such caravans). This is most obvious with Reimi, who Akira not-entirely-incorrectly accuses of being an escapist, who dresses herself in gyaru fashion and wants cute manga and anime magazines to peruse. Akira, meanwhile, is cynical and often makes rude remarks, coming off as more than a little self-important. Accordingly, the book she asks for is an occult treatise by Japanese writer Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (I can’t quite figure out if it’s a real occult treatise or not. I’ll confess to not having been familiar with the man before now). Nadeshiko, meanwhile, seems adrift and aimless, and can’t even recall why she wanted the item she receives from the delivery company, a potted sweet myrtle plant, in the first place.2

Shizuru, meanwhile, has spent the past two years searching for her missing friend Youka [Touyama Nao]. If you’d hazard a guess that Youka is probably the girl from the pre-credits scene, you’d be completely correct, and nothing so innocuous as a random scrap of newspaper used as package stuffing for Nadeshiko’s plant gives Shizuru her first lead as to where Youka might be in years. The newspaper contains a photo on its front page, and Youka is in that photo. The problem? The photo was taken in Ikebukuro, far enough away that one would need to take a fairly lengthy train ride to get there. Running to show Youka’s grandmother, now an elderly guinea pig, this photo of her only granddaughter, Shizuru narrates; the distance between train stops has gotten much, much larger since the world went haywire.

Nonetheless, Shizuru is determined, because the last time she and Youka spoke, they had the kind of friendship-obliterating argument that can haunt you for the rest of your life. Her determination only grows when she discovers an unused train resting on the tracks while having her dog sniff out a cap lost by Zenjirou [Okitsu Kazuyuki], the aforementioned train noises guy. (He manages to just barely strain the word “cap” out, the only time in the whole episode he actually talks in this form.) By putting the conductor’s cap on his head, Zenjirou temporarily reverts to a youthful, vigorous appearance, during which time he mostly rages at “Pontaro,” from which we can conclude he’s a colleague of the huckster from the opening. Or a former colleague, given how angry he seems to be at the guy. And how Pontaro gave him a lobotomy. Such things have a way of destroying friendships.

With a lead on her friend’s location and her mind made up, and now possessing the means and approximate knowledge of how to operate this metal chariot, she promptly drops out of “school” (a tiny class consisting of herself and her friends, taught by an iguana), and attempts to make for Ikebukuro solo. Of course, her friends, for all their differences, won’t stand for that, and they all end up following her as the train’s sign flips over with its destination. Suddenly, the show’s English title makes a perfect sense; Ikebukuro is not the physical edge of the planet, but it is certainly the end of the world in another sense.

I’ve said a lot about Shuumatsu Train here, but honestly there’s also a ton I didn’t mention. The visuals are largely good, although the directing is a bit strange in a way that’s difficult to precisely place my finger on. More pertinently, they’re packed with subtle details that aren’t directly pointed out. When the caravan arrives, the handler who distributes the packages to the girls has an eyepatch, and the heavily-armored trucks are covered in bloody handprints, some of which are quite clearly not human.

There are also many bits and bobs crammed into the worldbuilding; the fact that the 7G Network delivers something that may or may not be electricity, but not enough of it to reconstruct life as it was before the disaster, exemplified by the fact that the Internet and traditional phone networks can no longer be powered, but the low-power, short-distance PHS System, a delightfully obscure piece of real-world communication tech, still works. Sharpening the already-present theme of coming of age in defiance of a world going to hell, there’s a detail early on where Shizuru gets a lecture from her iguana teacher about how she can’t just fill out all of her “plans for the future” worksheets with “I Want To Look For Her,” a heartbreaking bit of miniature characterization that only hurts more as the episode goes on.

Also, the show’s character comedy is mostly pretty funny; Reimi and Akira are introduced having a conversation that feels ripped from a manzai routine. As the series goes on, and likely gets heavier, bright spots like that will become more and more essential.

All of this to say; this is clearly a show with a ton of ideas, and while it’s always a gamble as to whether or not any given work will actually stick the landing, just having so much to chew on from the first episode alone is a great sign. Wherever this train is going, I’m confident the ride will be worthwhile.

1: Technically, the season started yesterday with the premiere of Studio Apartment, Good Lighting, Angel Included. But I didn’t cover that! So we’re not counting it. 🙂

2: There is almost certainly some layer of additional symbolism here with the choice of this plant specifically, as Akira directly calls attention to it before being cut off. A quick sojourn to Wikipedia tells me that there are two plants known by this common name, one of which is psychoactive and the other of which is used in chemotherapy, among other things. I think this particular shrub is the latter. I’m not sure what conclusions to draw from that, but the fact that the show made me want to go look this up is a good thing in of itself.

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 Tumblr and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is 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.