Tag: tv

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [7/29/24]

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, anime fans! I’m quite behind on basically everything this week, but hopefully you’ll enjoy reading about what I did manage to cover, regardless. Also, here’s an odd thing, in two of the below entries I end up talking at length about the shows’ ED themes. That wasn’t on purpose! But hey, serendipity and all that.

Anime

Wistoria: Wand and Sword – Episode 3

Another week, another pretty OK Wistoria episode.

Will meets an underclassman here with the fairly incredible name Iris Churchill [Ookubo Rumi]. Initially, she seems like any other bumbling student, and Will spends the majority of this episode helping her defeat a giant ice monster. However, because Wistoria knows every trick in the fantasy book, Iris is actually a double agent for the Magia Vander and is scouting for promising students for what seems to be some kind of upcoming confrontation between the wizards and the angels that were mentioned back in episode 1, the ones that live “beyond the sky.”

This whole plot is the most interesting thing Wistoria has going for it so far. It’s still hardly original, and when we meet the Magia Vander here they too all fall into classic archetypes (most obvious with the haughty elf sorceress Alf Ellenor Ljos [Amamiya Sora]), but it’s at least decently compelling.

Iris herself seems to have some kind of Thing™ going on with Elfie, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more to the both of them than is obvious here, even taking the little twists we’ve been shown so far into account.

Oh, one other thing I did appreciate. When Will gears up to head to the dungeon (and we briefly meet his artificer friend Rosty), they draw him ripped as hell while he’s changing his shirt. I applaud the lack of cowardice, it would’ve been really easy to just make him look nondescript there.

Narenare -Cheer for you!- – Episode 3

The only way out is trusting the process.

Okay, no, let’s stop for a second. What is this show? I thought I knew. In fact, as of the end of this episode, I thought I might have some idea again, but I’m now sitting with it and thinking and….seriously, what is going on here?

In theory, Narenare could not be simpler. It’s a show about cheerleading. That’s a little unusual in the context of the “girls do stuff” supergenre of anime, but it’s nowhere near the weirdest of these things in premise. But that hides how strange the execution of this all is. In this episode alone, we see several scenes from the last two weeks involving the character Suzuha. Except this time, they’re from her perspective, and we see that far from being the cool, aloof near-cryptid we’ve been presented with so far, she’s actually just extremely shy.

The show lets us in on her inner monologue by way of a chibi version of herself that hangs out in thought bubbles and occasionally just rides around on her head. It’s hardly the strangest thing I’ve seen in an anime this season (Nokotan is airing, after all), but it’s a notably weird way to present this information given the show’s genre. This is a general trend that’s true of everything in this episode; Kanata suddenly getting “the yips” about cheerleading (treated with grave seriousness by those around her), Shion’s singer-songwriter aspirations, and so on. The show seems allergic to anything that would make its several running plot lines any easier to follow. Things are mostly followed up on by having them plonked onto the existing storyline in a decidedly odd way.

A friend1 compared this to Pride of Orange, another Girls Do X show that clearly had no idea what it was doing. But to be honest, I don’t really see it. Pride of Orange‘s main flaws were an overwhelming lack of interest in its own premise and cast, and just a general deep cynicism toward the entire idea of the hobby/club anime as a genre. I don’t get that off of Narenare at all. It is clearly sincerely trying to present an inspiring and straightforward sports girls narrative, but it seems either unable or unwilling to understand why those shows usually present things in the way that they do. The result is a strange, alienating effect, in a way that feels uncannily GoHands-y in vibe if not looks. (Despite a shared affinity for weird color filter bullshit, Narenare looks much nicer than anything GoHands have ever done.)

Anyway, I plan to keep watching, because I am interested in if this effect is intentional or not. My guess is that it isn’t, this thing has three different people on script and you could absolutely get something like this just by having too many cooks in the kitchen, but still, I’m curious to see if it manages to pull something out of this regardless or if it just completely crashes.

OTP, by the way.

Quality Assurance in Another World – Episodes 3 & 4

This show has a lot of issues, and I want to appreciate what it’s going for regardless, but it doesn’t make it easy.

The issues first; over the past two episodes it’s been saddled with a light-novely writing style that just actively saps the series’ momentum. I actually thought this was adapted from a light novel, and having since learned that this was a manga first, I’m baffled that this is how this is all being delivered. There’s tons of exposition just rattled off in a very flat way and the sheer incuriosity Nikola has about her own world is kind of weird (this, to be fair, might be on purpose). Some of the exposition is fine because it’s spiced up with flashbacks or some similar other visual trick, but when it’s literally just two characters talking it gets old quick. I’m hoping we’re moving past this part of the story.

What I appreciate though is just how utterly fucking weird this show is. There’s a bit here with our leads in a dungeon, and Nikola gets carted off to be sacrificed by…monsters that are giant coins with human faces? And the thing they’re sacrificing her to is a huge hand with a mouth that acts like a sea serpent?

These legitimately feel like monsters out of a buggy shovelware RPG, and I appreciate that about the show. Similarly, the fate of Haga’s two companions that we meet here are legitimately pretty eerie. One is stuck in the floor and the other is trapped in a kill loop, buggily hovering over a death trap that she can’t properly trigger because she has invincibility mode turned on. (All this is used to explain Haga’s disdain for the debug mode feature, fair enough.)

We also meet a gamemaster AI called Tesla here who introduces herself by abruptly possessing Nikola so she can give Haga orders. All rather bizarre!

And then the episode ends with our leads running into an NPC who’s T-posing. Which brings us to episode 4, which I did not particularly care for.

The comedic side of the series is still strong here. It’s hard to mess up something as inherently goofy as “a whole village is stuck T-posing because their model animations are fucked up.” But we also meet a pair of new characters here, a furry bug-tester named Amano who aspires to be a mangaka back in the real world, and Ru, an NPC he’s fallen for, who he ends up drawing manga within the game for. Ru is a pretty compelling, if simple, character; a disabled girl who loves hearing stories. But then, oops, she dies at the end of the episode, by having a literal building dropped on her head when some of the baddies from episode 2 return to stomp through town while riding a dragon. It just feels kind of hacky and I’ve rarely seen such a straightforward example of a female character being killed to give another Man Pain to motivate him. I’m not a fan, suffice to say.

So who knows where Quality Assurance is going to end up by the time it’s over. This is one of several anime that have had the broadcasts of their next episode delayed because of Olympics coverage, and depending on what my schedule looks like in nine days when it returns, I may just drop this entirely, if that’s how it’s going to handle things going forward. I don’t know, my opinion on this series soured fairly quickly.

The Elusive Samurai – Episode 4

Our first two parter and unfortunately I don’t think it entirely works. Still a good episode, but it doesn’t feel quite as essential as the last three.

Lots of eye imagery here, which makes sense given that Tokiyuki’s adversary this time around is an archer known for his preternatural eyesight. The whole dog-hunting competition is kind of where the episode falls apart a little bit because while I applaud experimenting around, the CGI just doesn’t look as good as the other weird shit the show has done. Even elsewhere in this episode, that stuff looks better.

Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian – Episode 4

Honestly most of this episode is pretty dull. School drama is almost never compelling to me and that’s what the whole episode is built around. Worse, Alya and Kuze spend most of it apart so we don’t get any of their banter. (Also he basically solves the problem Alya’s caught up in for her which is not great from like an optics perspective, eh. This is minor compared to my other issues with the episode, but it still feels worth mentioning.)

The shorter second part of the episode is better since they’re back together and we get more of their repartee, which is the show’s main strength, and also a bit of relationship development (punctuated with a very powerful slap, since this is a pretty straightforward romcom anime at heart).

All of this is beside the real point of the episode, though; the song covered in the ED this week is fucking “Hare Hare Yukai”!

This is less of a weird pull than it might seem, given that Alya’s voice actress is a millennial and presumably grew up on the series, and there is a line to be drawn from Haruhi to this series, even if Roshidere‘s self-awareness is itself a pretty standard and accepted thing by now. (Somewhere in here Kuze thinks to himself that something doesn’t befit the main character in a romcom. Slow down, buddy, the fourth wall can only take so many hits.) I was delighted by this, and it redeemed an otherwise iffy episode in my eyes, so I’m happy it was done.

ATRI -My Dear Moments- – Episodes 2 & 3

I have realized that I like this show quite a bit.

On the face of it, ATRI depicts a fairly difficult situation. Its two main characters, Atri herself and her human caretaker Natsuki, aren’t exactly the most likeable of people. (Although Atri, who is merely clumsy and loud, is so more than Natsuki, who is sometimes outright nasty to her.) But something about these characters, and their world, compels me. I think it’s a fairly common thing to feel (even if you don’t necessarily think it rationally) that we are living in the end times of some sort, so post-apocalyptic fiction like this takes on a specific resonance in the modern day. But it’s more than just “the show is good because it depicts people getting by after a climate collapse,” which I think would be oversimplifying it.

I think I was closer on the mark with the AIR comparison I made last week than I initially realized. In addition to the obvious similarities—both take place in a coastal town, both have a heavily summer-drenched aesthetic that is a key part of the show’s visual and aural appeal—the general setup is fairly similar too, both in depicting a young (or at least young-seeming) girl and her male caretaker and their strange relationship that doesn’t neatly fall into any single category.

I’ve seen a lot of people deride the show as a rote male fantasy (in the vein of the many girl-with-a-quirk romcoms I’ve discussed this season) and while I’m not going to deny that there’s definitely at least a little of that, I don’t think it’s remotely the entire picture and seeing people write this off entirely because the main character is kind of a dick annoys me. Especially since I think his being a dick is part of the point of the series. (Hell, we get a very straightforward motivation for that here; when the ocean started rising, his dream of becoming an astronaut and helping with a climateering project fell apart and he hasn’t had any motivation to do much of anything since. It’s pretty understandable that this would turn someone crabby.)

I also like Minamo, one of the island town’s few remaining schoolgirls, very much an endangered species after the climate collapse that took place in this series’ backstory. There’s a very pronounced melancholy to almost everything she does, and she and Atri have a nice conversational scene together in her house—also half reclaimed by nature—in this episode where we learn her father evacuated to the mainland, and she chose to stay behind despite his wishes. That’s interesting! And when Atri visits her school at the end of the episode she seems to have some kind of weird flashback thing, which is also interesting.

The series has a lot going for it. In addition to everything I’ve just said, and also its deeper themes which are only just starting to take shape (persisting in the face of loss, even massive loss, is definitely going to be one), it’s also pretty funny! I can technically imagine how Atri’s antics might grate on someone but I find them endearing, and it’s hard not to when the character animation is so expressive.

Episode 3 isn’t quite as strong as Episode 2, but it’s still pretty good. Here we’re introduced to an entire secondary cast, the three young children that Minamo teaches about whatever she can at the high school, plus their older brother figure Ryuuji [Hosoya Yoshimasa]. The kids, especially their ringleader Ririka, seem fond of Natsuki, arbitrarily deciding that he’s secretly an assassin sent from the mainland and playing pretend with him based on that premise. Ryuuji is a lot colder to him, and seems to think his showing up at the school at all is an act of condescension. The episode deals in a lot of exposition about the situation on the mainland and the main thing to take away here is that the people of this island have essentially been abandoned. The kids, we’re told, actually did try to evacuate to the mainland and attend school there, but they were treated poorly and through circumstances we’re not given a super clear picture of, they eventually ended back on the island. They actually live at the school, with Ririka in particular spending a lot of late nights essentially camping out on the rooftop as she reads about electricity generation, hoping she might fix the island’s lack of electricity. By episode’s end, Natsuki has some idea of how that might be done, and his radical plan involves salvaging parts from the flooded-over disused windmills (a lovely shot of which serves as the episode’s visual center) and the fact that the school’s second floor floods at high tide.

All told, while this might be the weakest episode so far, the general buildup saves it, as does Atri’s continuing antics. I particularly like the bit here where she insists that she’s a “combat android” and we get a detailed, completely fake, flashback to her last days in “the war.”

Unrelated to the show itself, I want to briefly talk about the OP and ED and specifically the songs used for them. The OP, with a theme by mega-idol group Nogizaka46, is just an absolutely gorgeous thing and I really recommend watching it for yourself even if you have no interest in the show. The part where Atri dances and whips the ball (which later turns into the Moon!) around has such lovely, fluid motion that it’d make the entire project a worthwhile endeavor on its own even if the show itself were a complete throwaway.

But the ED, more specifically its theme, is actually even more interesting to me despite the fact that I like it less. Because it’s by 22/7. Yes, that 22/7, the idol group tied to the multimedia project of the same name, including its profoundly disappointing anime from a few years ago. That anime also had a great OP with some incredible visuals and a fantastic theme song, but the show itself was meandering and mediocre, and I don’t think it’s really stayed in the public consciousness over the past four years. (You’re more likely to find defenders of the earlier slice of life shorts.) Nonetheless, the group itself has stuck around. The ED is significantly cheerier than most of their songs, or at least the ones that I’m familiar with. But it’s pretty good! To be honest I’m just sort of shocked that they’re still active, although I think a good chunk of the original members have since departed (not that odd with idol groups, and I can’t imagine there’s much incentive to stay in 22/7 specifically).

It will be very odd if they end up soundtracking one of my favorite anime of the summer, but they well might! ATRI has tons of potential and I’m eager to see if it lives up to it, each individual episode has had its ups and downs so far, but it’s going to be the aggregate that really makes or breaks the show. I’m hardly the only person to have compared this to the KEY visual novel adaptations of old, and I’ve gotten the feeling that people really want that style back in some capacity. As such, I think there is a real chance for the series to leave a big impression on people. Here’s hoping.

Manga

“Hitokiri” Shoujo, Koushaku Reijou no Goei ni Naru

This manga feels like someone read all of those “I wish somebody would just make a shonen manga with a lesbian as the main character” posts and took it as a challenge, to an almost comical degree.

To wit; the plot is basically a string of excuses for our lead to get into fights. Our lead girl was raised to be the bodyguard of a noble in fantasy-Japan, but before she could actually do that, her would-be master was murdered. The opening pages of the story are thus her getting revenge on this other person’s killer and then fleeing the country to go to fantasy-Europe, where she remains for what exists of the story so far. There, she meets a noblewoman on a train in the midst of said noblewoman getting attacked by assassins and offers her services. The noblewoman agrees to this, and from there forward the manga has, so far, solely been these characters moving from place to place and situation to situation, with bodyguard defending noblewoman (and her maid, a character in her own right) from attack.

All of this is handled in an almost childish fashion. Half of the dialogue consists of people threatening to kill each other. Of the half that remains, half of that half is the main girl explaining to her present opponent how she plans to kill them. This probably sounds like a complaint, but it’s honestly pretty funny. The end result is that our protagonist has such a matter-of-fact approach to murder that the whole manga feels like dry humor. Like, look at all this.

Interestingly, though. The manga implies that all this violence is something that weighs on her mind a lot. There are really only three kinds of scenes where she shows any real emotion, and two of them have to do with murder. For one, during battle, whether she’s being particularly sadistic or enjoying the high of fighting someone who’s an actual match for her.

For another, the one time her charge tries to exonerate her behavior by claiming that she’s not a murderer, our girl actually rather strongly insists that she is, even if what she does isn’t illegal. She seems surprised that anyone would even suggest otherwise.

The only non-violent strong reaction she has to anything is when she meets her future employer, who gets attacked shortly thereafter. We don’t have an inner monologue for her here, so we can’t know for sure what she’s thinking, but this thing is being marketed as a yuri series, so I don’t think I’m off in calling this gay.

All this together, I don’t really know if I’d call “Hitokiri” Shoujo, Koushaku Reijou no Goei ni Naru good exactly, but it’s definitely at least compelling. I’m not sure how much of that is intentional, these apparent character quirks could just as easily be the side effects of the shortcut-heavy nature of the narou-kei scene (and this does appear to have been adapted from a light novel). But with only four chapters out I’m at least willing to give it some time to see where it goes.

That’s all for this week, anime fans! Enjoy this book, as your Bonus Thought.

1: Hi Josh.

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Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [6/24/24]

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.” Are Jellyfish‘s ideas 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 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 The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [5/6/24]

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 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.