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Twenty Perfect Minutes: BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! Episode 13 – The Only One I Can Trust Is Myself

Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column where I take a look at a single, specific anime episode that shaped my experience with the medium in some way, was personally important to me, or that I just really, really like. These columns contain spoilers.

This column contains additional spoilers for episodes 1-5 of BanG Dream! Ave Mujica.

This column is a companion piece to the 2/2/25 edition of The Weekly Orbit. They can be read independently, but make more sense together.

“Because….you seem like you’re about to break apart, Sakiko.”

No one ever would, but if someone were to ask me what the biggest whiff of my career was, it was far and away not covering BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! while it was still airing. I wrote a little about it, but not nearly enough. Hilariously, in that article, I call the series “fine,” and mostly gloss over Togawa Sakiko as a character except in how she relates to Tomori. Readers with long memories will recall it actually took me until last year to even finish the damn thing. I can’t defend my own lack of taste there, but I’ve certainly come around since then. (And to anyone who thinks I’m overrating the hell out of one or both seasons of this series, well, you’re not going to come away from this article with your mind changed.)

So, think of this as making up for lost time. As I’ve watched Ave Mujica, MyGO‘s direct sequel and a significantly darker take on (and inversion of) some of MyGO‘s same themes, I’ve felt compelled to revisit the origin story of that season’s eponymous band. With the benefit of hindsight, this feels like doing an autopsy. Anyone caught up on Ave Mujica as of the time of this writing knows that Ave Mujica themselves have broken up. If they get back together, it probably won’t be for a while, and it probably won’t be in the same way. So in hindsight, the first episode they appear in, MyGO‘s thirteenth (which is essentially just Ave Mujica episode zero), feels like the only real example of Ave Mujica as Sakiko, their founder, keyboardist, and composer, intended them to be. Sakiko’s unwillingness to compromise on her vision is one of a number of factors that led to the band’s eventual dissolution, but really, we should have seen this coming.

I mean, it’s kind of right there in the title, isn’t it?

The episode actually opens, at least after a brief and ominous prelude, by focusing on MyGO‘s own core cast. This only makes sense, It’s MyGO!!!!! the band are MyGO‘s main characters, and this is the immediate aftermath of their moment of triumph. Things are, for once, relatively clear, and the anime’s opening song is as clear and shining as the sapphire sky in its visuals. Of particular interest to us in this first half of the episode is a scene between Soyo and Tomori on the bridge near the latter’s home. Soyo says plainly that initially, when they were both members of their previous band CRYCHiC, the emotional rawness of Tomori’s lyrics was never something she was entirely comfortable with. But now, she says, she realizes the emotions expressed in those lyrics weren’t Tomori’s alone. They were hers, too.

Through Tomori’s music, she and Soyo are able to relate to each other. This of course is MyGO‘s last great expression of its thematic core, music as a tool of communication, openness, and honesty. In this, MyGO is overall not entirely dissimilar to the show that replaced it as the girl band anime of the moment the following year, Girls Band Cry. (A fact both franchises took notice and advantage of.) The two have one major difference though, Girls Band Cry wraps its story up around the time that main band Togenashi Togeari’s members begin to truly understand each other, and in this way it’s actually fairly straightforward. (Not even remotely a knock on it, I must stress.) MyGO does not do this. It knows it has to set the stage for its successor, and it knows that it has further work to do.

Thus, when Tomori attempts to reconcile with the last former CRYCHiC member she’s yet to reach out to, it doesn’t go nearly so well, and she finds Sakiko, her former bandmate, holed up in her school’s piano room banging out the sinister classical music like the Phantom of the damn Opera, a final indication, if anyone really needed one, that this is not going to all work out so neatly.

After Sakiko coldly brushes Tomori off, Anon, the somewhat airheaded guitarist of MyGO, attempts to cheer Tomori up by taking her out and about. At a planetarium, they run in to Uika, who Tomori has met before but doesn’t really know. The three have a nice chat, although after Uika leaves, Tomori notes that it’s odd that she calls her by her name, given that Tomori never told her it. All of this is significant because immediately after this conversation, Uika gets in a black cab, and is driven to the first night of her new job: the vocalist for Ave Mujica.

Again, hindsight makes two things really obvious: one, we almost immediately flip the “music is a tool of honesty and open communication” thing on its head. Sakiko’s plan for Ave Mujica requires deliberately obfuscating everything about its members, naturally including Sakiko’s own involvement. As far as she’s concerned, this is her show, and the rest of the band are actors within it. Which leads us to two: this band was never going to stay together. It’s at a fairly tame level here, but even this early on it is very obvious that Ave Mujica do not really “get” each other. Nyamu records behind-the-scenes footage on her phone, which Sakiko confiscates since if it ever got out it would destroy the band’s mystique.

There’s also this little exchange which….honestly, good question?

Nyamu also directly mentions rhythm guitarist Mutsumi’s famous parents, something she’s insecure about to put it very mildly, while Mutsumi ignores her and continues stone-facedly practicing her guitar. All of this was easy to dismiss as light bickering during the episode itself. Five episodes deep into Ave Mujica, where Mutsumi has retreated into herself, Nyamu has publicly unmasked the entire band, Uika’s obsession with Sakiko is starting to bubble to the surface, and Sakiko’s own self-loathing is at an all-time high, it reads as some truly spooky foreshadowing. This is also where the episode gets its title, upon presenting the girls with their masks, Sakiko says that on stage, the only person one can trust is themselves. A little under halfway into Ave Mujica, we can see how that attitude worked out.

And yet, for all that, the closing minutes of this episode are still such a trip. Ave Mujica are introduced to the world with a stage play about dolls discarded by humans who come to life under the light of a certain moon, and following that, a grandiose, fuming fire of a debut tune named after the band itself. Obviously, the idea of the discarded doll reflects back on Sakiko herself, but Ave Mujica’s audience have no way of knowing that. To them, and really, to us, while we’re under the anime’s spell, Ave Mujica’s purple and red gothic smoke is something enticingly dark and obscure.

This is the first and best argument for the exact opposite of MyGO‘s own point of view. Maybe “communicating your feelings” is secondary to putting on a good show, given that all of these characters are, you know, in a band. That’s certainly what Nyamu thinks, and it’s why, a third of the way into the Ave Mujica anime, she asks if the band even needs to be a band. She’s probably not entirely right to suggest that even in-context, and hell, Ave Mujica’s actual music is some of the absolute best that’s ever come out of girl band anime as a format, but there’s a grain of truth in there. We are all at least a little complicit, because we clearly love the drama, and the drama is why, both on a Watsonian and Doylistic level, the music even exists to begin with. This episode was our first hint of how truly toxic this story would get, and far from being taken aback—checking on this stuff is one of the few things reddit is useful for—people wanted things to get worse. And, fair play to Nyamu’s point of view, they did! And it’s really only seemed to raise the show’s esteem in the eyes of its audience. The series has given us exactly what we asked for. As a production, it’s realized it doesn’t actually need the music of the group itself to capture our imagination and attention.

I resurrected the Twenty Perfect Minutes name to talk about this episode because I do really think the seeds of Ave Mujica the series, probably the best thing airing right now, really start germinating here. But admittedly it’s an uneasy fit for what this column is about, to the extent that it ever had a specific, rigid format. Ideally, these episodes should stand out starkly from the anime they’re part of. This much is definitely true of “The Only One I Can Trust Is Myself,” but because it’s in large part a torch-passing to the Ave Mujica anime proper, it feels a bit like cheating. And since that series isn’t over yet, I have no definitive thesis or grand prediction to make. Some forecasts feel safer than others, especially with the sheer amount of ancillary text surrounding the series (the ARG for example), but anyone who says they know where Ave Mujica is going to go is lying to you.

And right now the “myself” I’m choosing to trust in is my theory that Uika is a lesbian, but we don’t need to worry about that for right now.

But, I did build in the caveat that sometimes this column is just about episodes that I really like, and I really fucking like this episode. I like its starry, clear opening half, where it feels like everything’s been resolved and anything is possible in the best way. And—this is bad of me—I love its second half, where it becomes clear that anything is possible in the worst way. I really like more than one episode of both of these seasons, in fact. (Off the top of my head I could probably do one of these on both the third and fourth episodes of Ave Mujica, if I wanted to. And as for MyGO, my first impressions column basically already is about its third episode. I’d be remiss to not mention that the very first hints of these themes are present even there. After all CRYCHiC is only founded because of a miscommunication, when Sakiko mistakes Tomori’s diary pages for song lyrics.) Will I do any of that? Who knows. It’s been three whole years since the last TPM column, so I’m clearly not exactly in a hurry to crank these out. But, like I said, I’m making up for lost time. To me, this episode is really special, and everything that’s happened since has only made it moreso.

This is Ave Mujica in the brief, shining moment when Sakiko was still in relative control. Before the inevitable clash of personalities tore it all apart. This is about as close as she ever gets to being genuinely cool, in fact, but even she seems to know that it can’t last. One of the very first things she does in this episode, when recruiting Uika to join the band, is declare that the weak version of herself is dead, a completely untrue statement that nonetheless sounds like irrefutable fact when she says it. Her very last action in the episode, in all of MyGO, in fact, is to icily suggest that she needs to come down from the stage high of Ave Mujica’s triumphant, cult-making first concert. She changes back into her everyday clothes and takes a public train back home, a dingy little place with a small forest of beer cans dotting the floor. She grimaces, she sneers a greeting to her “rotten” drunk of a father. If you didn’t understand before where her need to be in control, to portray herself as this theatrical, literal puppet-master came from, it hits you all at once. And then, just as you’re processing the thought, it ends.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Twenty Perfect Minutes

Twenty Perfect Minutes: Eureka Seven Episode 48 – Ballet Mechanique

Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column series where I take a look at single specific anime that shaped my experience with the medium, were important to me in some other way, or that I just really, really like. These columns contain spoilers.

“I’ll tie up my hair, swaying in the wind, take one giant leap onto the earth, and then hold my head up high and go see him.“

Eureka Seven is a series that deals with big ideas and has a large cast. But for nearly all of its 50 episodes, the story remains centered on Renton Thurston and the titular Eureka, with tangents and leaps over to other characters being generally tied to one or the other in some way. This makes sense, it gives the anime a solid grounding and provides a foundation on which to build up those big ideas. It is completely and totally understandable that Eureka Seven, at its core, is the story of Renton and Eureka.

Except, of course, when it’s not. Arguably, the single best episode of the anime, and the one that embodies some of those big ideas the best, is one of the few that isn’t really about either of those characters.

For about twenty-four minutes, Eureka Seven ceases to be the story of Renton and Eureka, and becomes the story of Anemone and Dominic. A girl who has hidden herself for so long that she’s forced herself to forget how to smile, and a young man so desperate to right the wrong he’s committed by not telling her how he feels that he’ll go to any lengths to finally do it. One of Dewey Novac’s surgically-altered child soldiers, and someone who used to believe in the man. “Ballet Mechanique” does not, as some similar episodes in other anime do, turn Eureka Seven into a different show, because the themes and emotional core remain the same. But it is a fascinating, heart-rending, but ultimately, uplifting look at what the series is like through different eyes.

“Ballet Mechanique” opens, after some basic scene-setting, with Anemone, deployed on what looks to be a suicide mission, and her internal monologue.

It’s faux-casual. Anemone lists her regrets; she’d like to go shopping more, she wants to try different foods. And of course, tossed in with a careful, pained fake-indifference, she would just love to have a real romance. Certainly, she seems to imply, there is no way a certain lieutenant who she at this point believes has abandoned her is at all on her mind. She tries to downplay her own heartbreak. The defense mechanism of someone who has never been allowed to express pain.

By this point in the series, anyone watching blind (a category I myself was in) is holding their breath. Eureka Seven is an anime with several emotional peaks and valleys, and there is a long stretch in the middle of the series where it seems like things are going to go very badly indeed. By “Ballet Mechanique”, the tone has been more hopeful for some time, but at least for me, there was a lingering thought in the back of my mind that I was hearing a teenage soldier’s last thoughts before her tragic demise.

As she moves out, alone with only her LFO (the theatrically-named Type the:END) to keep her company, the façade rapidly starts to crack. She starts to wish that she had told Dominic how she felt when she still had the time, and that when she dies (tacitly accepting it as inevitable) that she’s reborn as someone smarter.

Meanwhile, the moment Dominic learns that Anemone is involved, he springs into action. Dominic is not normally that sort of character by any means–he’s not even an LFO pilot–so it takes real guts for him to hijack one of the Izumo’s escape pods to intercept the:END himself. He even balks at Holland’s attempt to get him to turn back.

Eureka and Renton’s involvement in “Ballet Mechanique” centers around their initial interception of Anemone. This being the rare episode where they’re more supporting characters than the main focus. They first fight, and then attempt to save, Anemone when the Nirvash’s drive (a literal empathy machine) makes it clear to them that she can be. But, it’s key to note, Renton and Eureka cannot, and do not, save Anemone.

That is up to Dominic. He arrives, falling from the sky and screaming his heart out. The episode’s climax is a tangle of shouted emotion and pained declarations of love. Anemone and Dominic kiss while falling through the air, a piece of imagery Eureka Seven had a notable fascination with and that it would repeat two episodes later in its finale.

Even the:END gets a brief turn here, as he’s “purified” by Anemone’s change of heart, only to die minutes later when he protects her and Dominic from Dewey’s orbital cannon.

Eureka Seven is a messy series, and it’s one that, despite being very strong overall, has few single standout episodes, since they tend to rather immediately flow from one to the next.

Even “Ballet Mechanique”, I must admit, became just a touch harder to follow among some of the finer points upon my revisiting the episode nearly a year later to finish this article. (I don’t really remember what that laser cannon was about. Do you?) But still, it remains one of the show’s strongest cases for its core theme of love as a salve to the world’s many evils. Plus, if I can admit my own bias, it’s an incredibly cathartic end to the character arc of Anemone, who was and remains my single favorite character from the series.

At Eureka Seven‘s end, she and Dominic stand as the title couple take center stage. They lock hands the entire time, quieter than the leads, but no less in love.

“I once was lost
but now am found
was blind,
but now I see”

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

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Twenty Perfect Minutes: Searching For Setsuna in Episode 3 of LOVE LIVE NIJIGASAKI HIGH SCHOOL IDOL CLUB

Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column series where I take a look at single specific anime that shaped my experience with the medium, were important to me in some other way, or that I just really, really like.

Disclaimer & Thanks: I am new to Love Live as a property and enlisted my good friend Heinzes to help me Love Live Fact Check this column. Thank you very much!

“There are school idols and they have their fans. Isn’t that more than enough?“

Let me let you in on a small secret. As a medium commentator of any sort: critic, blogger, video essayist, whatever. You tend to set little arbitrary rules for yourself. “I won’t review this until a week after I’ve watched it.” “I won’t score anything 10/10 unless I’ve seen it more than once.” Things like that. But sometimes you come across something that just hits you in such a way that’s so specifically your thing that these rules suddenly seem like they don’t matter, and that’s about when it’s time to break them. When I started Twenty Perfect Minutes my intent was to do it fairly infrequently and to showcase episodes of older anime. A few years old, at minimum.

Yet, here I am. Writing in late 2020 about an anime airing in late 2020. Love Live Nijigasaki High School Idol Club is the voluminously-titled most recent entry in the storied and frankly massive Love Live franchise. It is also not finished, and as such by writing this I very much risk making myself look like a fool come the end of the season. But if that is a risk, it’s one worth taking, because Nijigasaki‘s third episode is not just the best episode of the young season, it’s one of the strongest this year period.

It’s been a solid year for a lot of different kinds of anime, but very little has made me cry, and as someone who values high melodrama I do unashamedly check for that when mulling over how good I find a series overall. Nijigasaki arguably tossed its hat into the Anime of The Year conversation from the word “go”, but if there was any doubt, it should be cleared up by this episode; “Shouting Your Love”.

Before we can discuss “Shouting Your Love” though, we have to backtrack a bit, to that word “go”, and explain how we got here. First of all, let’s meet Yu.

No not You. Yu.

Yu is interesting. She feels simultaneously pretty typical for the genre but just enough to the left that it’s fresh. Yu begins the series as someone with a lot of passion searching for an outlet. She does not start as an idol (or even an idol fan). We get to see her fall in love with idol music in real time, as the opening half of the first episode is devoted almost entirely to this. And it’s back in that first episode where Nijigasaki pulls out its artistic ace in the hole.

Yu (and her friend Ayumu) happen to catch a public performance by a local idol, Setsuna. The song itself (“Chase!”) is a great slice of upbeat J-Pop if you’re into that sort of thing, but what really sells the scene is twofold. One is a number of close shots of Yu’s face, letting us see her reaction change moment to moment. The other is that we see Setsuna’s performance gradually shift from a simple depiction of what she is actually physically doing, to–at the exact moment that her music hits Yu in the heart–a music video-within-a-show. The stage erupts into fire; figurative passion transformed into literal flame. My understanding is that these inset MVs are not entirely new to Love Live as a franchise, but Nijigasaki‘s use of them feels deeply woven into the narrative. The show wouldn’t entirely work without them.

Yu’s journey starts here, her passion is ignited and it’s her drive that leads the plot forward from this point on. What is left largely unsaid in that first episode–and what brings us back to the third–is Setsuna‘s journey. The very short version is that Nijigasaki pulls off an elegant piece of narrative symmetry here: in the first episode Setsuna lights a fire in Yu’s heart, and Yu, in the third episode, rekindles the dying embers in Setsuna’s.

As this early part of the series has gone on, it’s established that “Setsuna Yuki” isn’t a real person. She’s the alter ego of Nana Nagakawa, the student council president of the titular Nijigasaki High. The performance that Yu and Ayumu witnessed was, in fact, her last and only. Some attention is even paid to the fact that Yu can’t find any other songs by her. (And real life is rife with examples of low-output musicians, from The New Radicals to Mr. Fantastik, so it’s quite a relatable experience.)

What would otherwise be a very straightforward plot detour is spun into a miniature epic through “Shouting Your Love”‘s framing. Nana’s true identity was revealed an episode prior. Here, we get to see her most “normal” side first. Despite her own misgivings about her role in the former Idol Club, she has many traits of a good leader that shine through even here. She seems to know almost every student by both name and educational track, and isn’t above doing dirty work herself. After an introductory sequence where Nana mulls over her decision to quit before deciding it’s for the best, the first thing we see her do is chase down a stray cat. It’s charming and sets the rest of the episode up nicely.

But while this fleshes out her character a bit, the real revealing turn is her initial encounter with Yu, who is idly playing “Chase!” to herself on a piano. Yu initially mistakes Nana for a fellow Setsuna fan, but Nana quickly rebuffs her. But as she does so, it becomes clear before long that Nana is less talking to Yu and more trying to justify her decision post-hoc to herself.

In a vacuum this is a pretty simple development. In the context of the rest of “Shouting Your Love” it helps Nana feel like someone legitimately going through a serious crisis of the self. The actual argument that broke up the Idol Club–something about passion vs. cuteness–is perhaps a bit underexplored, but the conflict it represents feels real. It’s clear to us the audience that Nana doesn’t really want this to be where her time as an idol ends, and she’s trying to convince herself more than anyone else. At one point she even sits down to watch a Youtube upload of her own performance; only to scroll down and realize that all the comments are asking fundamentally the same question: why did Setsuna quit?

You can read a lot into her internal monologue in this episode. And there may be more than one answer. Personally, it seems to me that she’s someone with a tendency to put what others expect of her before what she wants herself. It would fit with her demanding position on the student council, an aside remark by her mother about “mock exams”, and her decision to disband the club once she felt like she was getting in everyone else’s way. She even seems to think that she was holding them back from competing in the Love Live, the school idol “tournament” after which the entire franchise is named. And indeed, her final comments in that very monologue seem to frame things that way, with her justifying her decision as a sacrifice for the benefit of her friends, the new members of the club, and so on.

In fact on my first viewing of this episode I actually thought it might end there, because I wasn’t paying particularly much attention to how far along the video was. In the best way possible; “Shouting Your Love” is the rare anime episode that feels twice its length. The second half of the episode sees the newly-reformed School Idol Club briefly hijack the school announcement system to call Nana and “Setsuna” to the roof. (After a heartfelt meeting where they decide they want to try to get Nana back in the club, of course.)

Here, she has another talk with Yu, who at this point in the series seems like someone whose wildfire passion may well be contagious. Yu asks Nana to rejoin the club. Nana replies that she’ll hold everyone back from being able to compete at the Love Live, to which Yu says this.

And the facade of Nana as the dutiful student council president who always puts others before herself promptly snaps like a twig.

It’s hard to not just post screencaps of the entire conversation, which is so heartfelt that in places it borders on a confession scene (not the first like this that Yu’s been responsible for in Nijigasaki and I doubt it’ll be the last).

Shippers eat your heart out.

The important thing is that Yu’s words reach Nana, much like Setsuna’s song first reached Yu. In a stylish hairflip, Nana’s braids come undone, and Setsuna is reborn in an instant. Because this is an idol series–because this is Love Live, perhaps–she of course bursts into song. “DIVE!”, the insert song here, is a fist-pumping rocker whose “music video” weds the earlier fire theme of “Chase!” to an underwater aesthetic, laying Nana/Setsuna’s personality out in symbolic language as she, in the MV, breaks through a reflective underwater wall of ice, perhaps a visual metaphor for this rediscovery of what is, in my estimation, her real self.

But we can talk about symbolism and other such concerns all we like. The biggest thing I can say in the favor of “Shouting Your Love!” is that I’ve now watched the ending scene three times. And while it’s true I cried the first time, I think it’s even more impressive that I couldn’t stop myself from grinning ear to ear every single time. “Yu” is kind of brilliant as a character name, because while she is a character in her own right, when you’re watching the idol performances, you’re seeing them, essentially, as Yu sees them. If you open yourself to it, the passion of the series–the same passion I’ve talked about at length, here–can easily light your heart on fire as well.

It’s impossible to know if we’ll still be talking about Nijigasaki in these same terms in a few weeks. A lot can change over the course of an anime’s run, after all. But it’s hard to imagine a world where this episode ever feels less wonderful. To tell the truth, as someone who recently set music as a creative outlet aside, I can’t help but relate to Nana. But even more, I can’t help but relate to Yu, who seems just as star-struck by the wonder of art that I am in moments like….well, like “Shouting Your Love”.

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

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Twenty Perfect Minutes – YuruYuri Season 2 Episode 11: The Akari Who Leapt Through Time

Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column series where I take a look at single specific anime that shaped my experience with the medium, were important to me in some other way, or that I just really, really like.

So, full disclosure, this episode is the reason Twenty Perfect Minutes exists. YuruYuri is a good show, but it’s pretty orthodox. Its main point of deviation from other school life comedies (or slice of life shows if you prefer that term. Or even, *shudder*, Cute Girls Doing Cute Things) is the higher level of explicit Gay in the show’s text. (It is called YuruYuri, after all.) Shows like that don’t really tend to have singular standout episodes. I love Lucky Star, for example, but it’s a pretty consistent experience. You know what you’re going to get with each episode, something that’s largely true of the genre on the whole.

Occasionally, however, a series like this will get just a bit more narratively ambitious. “Ambitious” is an adjective rarely associated with the school life genre and it’s true that this is not, you know, Gunbuster, but when a series like this decides to cash in on the goodwill its characters have built up with its audience, the results can be quite surprising. I absolutely love this episode, there’s not a lot else like it in the genre.

H.G. Wells, eat your heart out.

Let’s be clear here; YuruYuri is not a particularly weird series. “The Akari Who Leapt Through Time”, however, is a pretty weird episode in the context of it. Not just because of the obvious, that it involves time travel (and is named after one of the most famous time travel stories in the entire medium). It has a peculiar, melancholy overtone, and casts protagonist Akari in a somewhat different light than the rest of the show. All of this is still filtered through the lens of a light comedy anime of course, but the difference in mood and tone is noticeable. This being the sole script turn for director Masahiko Ohta might explain things somewhat, but it’s unique nonetheless.

Akari herself is a neat, fun, straightforward character. Her central joke is very simple–she’s the ostensible protagonist, but because of that, she has no real standout characteristics. Thus, she has so little presence that she is easily overlooked, and in some episodes she can even literally turn invisible with an Akariiiin~! sound effect. In the series proper, Kyouko, and sometimes Yui, tend to fulfill the protagonist role more than she does. YuruYuri had previously made some gestures to the fact that she was legitimately distraught by this, but the accidental time travel that sets this episode’s plot into motion really puts that in focus.

Akari spends the episode’s first half trying to undo mistakes that her past self made. This is certainly amusing, (and serves to dish out fun callbacks to the very beginning of the series), but through the comedy it’s easy to see that she’s kinda desperate. Things like her scribbling a message on her first-year desk so Past-Akari doesn’t flub her class introduction, or trying to deflect Chinatsu from joining the Amusement club, are as amusing as they are revealing.

All of this falls through, and Akari is of course distraught. Where the episode takes a turn for the genuinely unexpected though is some particularly salient advice, and who dispenses it.

YuruYuri never quite felt like it knew what to do with Akane, Akari’s older sister. The character’s weak core joke (that she’s a siscon) makes her probably the least essential member of the entire cast. Indeed, that joke is present here, too, in one of the episode’s few missteps. Though it’s mercifully only brought up briefly.

This shot feels like a visual metaphor.

Weak gag aside, this is an uncommon instance of Akane acting in a genuinely sisterly manner toward her younger sibling. Namely, in addition to letting her sleep over while school genius Nana works on the time machine to try to repair it, she points out to Akari it’s possible that changing the past might alter her memories. Our heroine is distraught over this, and in the episode’s most purely sweet moment, she nods off in her sister’s bed, and has a melancholy dream.

This sequence is so very simple: Akari singing a little blue ditty over some footage from prior episodes, and, eventually, crying at the possibility of losing her time with them.

So simple, but so sweet and affecting. The next day, when Akari has her final chance to perhaps change the course of things, she’s struck by the thought again that doing so might change her memories, and can’t bring herself to go through with it. She starts crying on the spot.

Later, when she uses the fixed time machine to return to her own era, we get the emotional payoff. The difference between how Akari thinks everyone will react when she returns, and how they actually do react, is stark.

The former:

The latter:

School life comedies (and really, character comedies in general) are a genre that live and die by how well the audience connects to the characters. This is a principle that’s been understood in cartooning since the dawn of the medium, but it’s one thing to simply make a character likable. It’s quite another entirely to make the audience relate to them. Who among us hasn’t occasionally undervalued their self-worth? It’s quite a common problem.

The point I’m getting at here is: more than just a focus episode or the vehicle for some fun jokes, “The Akari Who Leapt Through Time” is the rare episode of a school life anime that feels like a genuine character study.

Is it still all, ultimately, pretty lighthearted? Yes, of course. As such a character study it’s a fairly simple one. And if I can levy a single main complaint at the episode it’s that the final revelation that the whole thing was a story told by Kyouko is unnecessary and cheapens the experience just a little. But honestly, the episode is otherwise so well put together that it doesn’t feel like it matters that much. Plus it does say a lot about how much Kyouko and friends care for Akari, all jokes aside.

YuruYuri is a good show overall, and I’m quite fond of it. (It may even show up in this column again.) But, I think speaking frankly, this was its peak. In a genre that can occasionally feel like it coasts on archetypes, “The Akari Who Leapt Through Time” manages the feat of making its lead, a simple redheaded girl who’s easily overlooked, feel genuinely human.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

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

Posted on in anime, Twenty Perfect Minutes

Twenty Perfect Minutes – Darling in the FranXX Episode 15: Jian

Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column series where I take a look at single specific anime that shaped my experience with the medium, were important to me in some other way, or that I just really, really like.

“It has to be you.”

Whatever happened to Darling in The FranXX? Rarely are anime-originals as popular as it was, but in 2020, just two years after it aired, there is a vague sense of embarrassment associated with the series. I won’t pretend to hate DarliFra, myself: I enjoyed watching it at the time even if, with hindsight, I greatly overestimated its cleverness. It is though hard to argue that it’s particularly well-put-together. If you want an anime that’s easy to rag on, DarliFra lines up neatly, it’s almost a microcosm of everything wrong with the TV anime mainstream. Shaky writing that leans on cliche and borrows from better shows, loads of unnecessary cheesecake-style fanservice-centric pandering, and most infamously, a thematic “Get Yourself A Wife, Otaku-san” core so comically conservative, out-of-step with wider cultural trends, and patriarchal that it inspired an endless outpouring of memes and general ribbing even at the time, and even from people who enjoyed it. It’s often pegged as the single most divisive entry in Studio TRIGGER‘s filmography, a descriptor that only isn’t true by the arguable technicality of it being made by a purpose-built split committee called Code 000 (which effectively consisted of TRIGGER staff plus staff from a just-pre-CloverWorks A-1 Pictures, but DarliFra’s odd production history is too long of a tangent to go on here).

Yet, all of this said and meant, DarliFra is certainly a watchable show on a moment-to-moment level, and there are a few times when it almost actually realizes the vision it’s striving toward. I would argue however, that in terms of genuinely reaching that vision? That happened just once, almost exactly halfway through its run. Thus, on this Twenty Perfect Minutes column, we cover the one and only truly great episode of one of the most contentious hit anime of the 10’s.

This episode, centering around the grand mid-show plot point of storming the Gran Crevasse, is a winning one for two big reasons. One: it’s impeccably-directed. Much of the episode is action setpiece after action setpiece, and those were always DarliFra’s strongest moments. That said, the kinetic action is intercut with various other things. Most prominently, Hiro, our protagonist, who is emotionally reeling from the absence of Zero Two. There’s a neat little trick deployed here (and sparsely in other places in the series) where instead of having Hiro voice his feelings, either aloud or in voiceover, they’re actually written on-screen. These more tense, dramatic shots are arguably just as important as the fights. Throughout, this episode is the rare moment where DarliFra’s running subplot about the romance triangle between Hiro, Zero Two, and Ichigo actually seems to tick the way the series wants it to, and the direction does a lot to sell that.

The second reason: This is an (again, rare) episode where DarliFra knows to get out of its own way. The reductive, laughably conservative gender politics of the rest of the series are thankfully absent for the majority of “Jian”, and it’s the rare episode where the heavily genderqueer-coded Nines get almost as much shine as Squad 13.

I’m actually kind of cool in this episode!

Almost everyone gets at least a little bit of the limelight, in fact. Even the redshirt Squad 26, who reappear here for just the second time in the series only to have a wonderfully wrenching moment where they’re promptly forced to sacrifice themselves after watching a klaxosaur crush their home. Another thing this episode does right is really hammering home the flat-out cruelty of APE as an organization.

You’d sweat if you were assigned to “blow up your robot to hopefully inconvenience the kaiju” duty, too.

Zero Two is used to great effect here as well. Effectively “feral” from the events of the prior arc at the episode’s start, she gets the “inner thoughts written on-screen” treatment, too, arguably to even better effect. Aside from the fact that we get to see the Strelizia in its alt-mode here (which is always nice), the girl herself is drawn, in interior shots from the first half of the episode, in a way that really emphasizes her bloodlust. This is Zero Two off the deep end, at her worst, and at her most convinced that she’s irredeemable, inhuman, and fundamentally unlovable.

Then, halfway through the episode, Hiro hijacks a training pod and rushes out onto the battlefield to reunite with his beloved. Against orders and against all common sense. The scene that follows, in which Hiro and Ichigo co-pilot the Delphinium while the latter must directly reckon with the fact that Hiro loves Zero Two and not her, is both sincerely affecting and the closest that a shot framed inside one the mech’s cockpits comes to not looking fundamentally ridiculous.

There’s tons of great touches in the couple minutes that follow, aside from just the animation itself (which is gorgeous). Ichigo’s fury at Zero Two’s actions translating to a mech-on-mech dope slap is one, the Delphinium turning out to have “hair” under its helmet is another.

But more importantly, it lets Ichigo, one of the many characters the series at large is guilty of under-writing, express herself in an immediate, visceral way, even as she inarguably “loses” the love triangle. She’d never be this much of a firecracker again.

Of course, fundamentally, this is Hiro and Zero’s story. The two’s reunion here stands out against the rest of the episode. I’m of the opinion that Hiro and Zero Two’s chemistry is among the better things in the show, but this scene is one of the very few where it’s tied together in a way that’s truly emotionally resonant instead of merely cute. The imagery is mixed-up and messy, but the feeling remains. Through cutaways to elsewhere and flashbacks to the characters’ own convoluted intertwined history, through the offputting and arresting images of a young Zero Two being experimented on, and eating the fairy tale storybook DarliFra often attempted to use as thematic thread, it somehow all works. It’s immediate. It hits you in the heart.

The episode caps with the Strelizia transforming back into its humanoid form (in a visual homage to the henshin sequence from Kill la Kill, no less) with a new all-red look and a powerup, and ripping the remaining klaxosaur horde to shreds nearly single-handedly. All the while, Hiro and Zero Two shout out their love for each other at the top of their lungs, behind them blasts the show’s opening theme “Kiss of Death”. Gently teasing them for not cutting the comms are their squadmates. Watching from afar, scheming, is APE. It is the only moment in the entire series where the show’s attempted core thesis of first love as a delirious, rapturous high, depicted by the wonderfully camp visual metaphor of a mecha tearing through an army of monsters, completely makes sense. This is Darling in The FranXX‘s peak. If we are to remember art as it is at its best, this is how we should remember DarliFra.

Execution aside; this is all still pretty, to put it politely, “traditional”, as far as resolutions to a love triangle (and just general “romance problems” plots) go, a larger writing issue that would just a few episodes after this rapidly erode the show’s potential. But, this episode, watched in isolation, is almost good enough to make those criticisms seem irrelevant. It’s not an exaggeration to say that whatever flaws the rest of the series may have, this episode can go toe-to-toe with anime that live and breathe this kind of stuff. Symphogear, its own spiritual predecessors Kill La Kill, Gurren Lagann and Diebuster, you name it.

One of the reasons I love anime is that it has a nearly-infinite capacity, despite the medium’s limitations, to surprise and inspire wonder. Sometimes, that wonder and surprise just happen to occur only in fleeting bursts. Thus it is with Darling in The FranXX.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.

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.

Posted on in anime, Twenty Perfect Minutes

Twenty Perfect Minutes – ReCREATORS Episode 1: The Wonderful Voyage

Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column series where I take a look at single specific anime that shaped my experience with the medium, were important to me in some other way, or that I just really, really like.

“You made this crazy world. I’m stuck between the two….”

Re:CREATORS was a weird little blip in mainstream seasonal TV anime. I’m fond of the show–more than many other people are, from what I’ve gathered–but it’s definitely an odd and sideways take on the action anime genre. The “reverse isekai” is arguably more of a part with fellow ’10s genre subversion work like Rolling Girls and Anime-Gataris than it is other action series. It’s not a flawless series to be certain: the writing is an acquired taste to put it mildly and the pacing is downright bizarre. But it didn’t always seem that way, before 21 more episodes stretched out its hyper-meta story, its very first was one of the strongest action-anime debuts in recent memory. Even if Re:Creators itself never became the “story to surpass all stories” glibly dropped in Sota’s opening monologue here, it’s an incredible effort for other reasons.

The first two minutes of the episode are quite quiet and subdued for what follows. We get a context-free collage of shots of popular in-universe media which serve as foreshadowing for later in the series, but more important is the silent suicide of a character who, at this point in the story, we knew nothing about. A girl calmly walking in front of a train; that’s how Re:Creators begins. It’s perhaps the one and only sign in this episode of what the show would eventually become, because what follows is frankly nothing like it at all.

Instead, after his opening voiceover we see Sota sit down on his computer. Pop open ClipStudio Paint, get bored, look at Pixiv. Usual Nerd Stuff. It’s when he goes to watch anime on his tablet that he’s promptly–albeit only briefly–teleported to another world, and it is here where the episode promptly kicks into high gear. The fight scene that comprises the following three minutes might be the single most iconic thing about Re:Creators. It’s not hard to see why. You have Selesia’s Vision of Escaflowne-style fantasy-mech throwing down against one of the downright coolest villains of all time. Altair, though she was nameless at this point in the series.

Hell. Yes.

This scene is honestly amazing. It’s so burned into my mind that on the rewatch for this column I was astounded at how short it is (not even quite three minutes total). In that short time though, we get the Vogelchevalier thrashing about, the delightful digital CGI blue cubes that represent worlds crossing over and breaking apart, Altair tossing swords upon swords at Silesia, and of course, the first appearance of the infamous Holopsicon. A machine gun that she plays like a violin to activate its reality-bending powers. I maintain, and will until the day I die, that if you don’t find something ridiculously cool about that, then your sense of wonder needs a jumpstart.

This here? This rules.

Also great here? The soundtrack. Re:CREATORS developed a reputation for running this specific piece of music–called “Layers”–into the ground, as the show had few pieces of battle music, but having not heard it in its proper context in quite some time, I was immediately delighted to hear it again. It really is one of my favorite battle themes ever.

The following scene, which serves as something of a cooldown, has Selisia and Sota, shall we say, conversing.

Your waifu does not want to smash. She wants to stab.

Sota’s panicked half-rambling explanation to Silesia that she’s a fictional character from a light novel series is occasionally pointed out as a weak spot of this episode, and while it’s not as strong as what surrounds it I honestly think it’s pretty fun. It does strike me as something a panicking nerd would do in such a situation, even if Sota’s reassurance to Silesia that she’s, you know, super popular is not as comforting as he seems to think it is.

Altair follows them to the real world before much else can be hashed out. Selesia puts her sword through the window to sort of flick it open, in one of this episode’s best-remembered shots.

This really is not how any of these things work, but who cares?

She and Altair have a little back-and-forth here. With Altair making the classic “join me” offer as she cryptically monologues.

SHE’S. SO. COOL.

….and Selesia riposting with what is among my favorite instances of anime logic ever.

The escape that Selesia pulls off here–using her magic to jump off the balcony, Sota in tow, and land on and promptly carjack some poor sap’s brand-new wheels–is silly in a way I really appreciate. My favorite moment of the whole thing comes when Selesia, who really does an astonishingly good job of driving a car for someone who’s never seen one before, assumes she’s found the “weapon” button, and promptly pushes it, which turns on the windshield wipers. Quote me: Comedy. Gold.

Another battle scene follows, because Altair is not really the sort of villain you can outrun in a compact car.

Can your favorite villain stop a car by teleporting in front of it and shredding it to pieces with a barrier made of rotating sabers? No? I rest my case.

I might actually like this fight scene a little better than the already-great first. It’s a bit longer and is more dynamic, with a couple changes of scenery and some great up-close locked-blades action between Selesia and Altair while the latter continues to exposit (as much for our benefit as Selesia’s) about her plans and the nature of the world they now both inhabit.

I want you to know that it is taking every bone in my body to not just caption this picture with a row of capital A’s.

What breaks the tie is the mortar-fire-first introduction of Meteora, who appears here for the first time toting some artillery which we’ll learn in an episode or two that she stole from a nearby JSDF stockpile.

The episode winds down here. In his closing voiceover, Sota, among other things, says of these events that the beginning was “haphazard”. He (of course) is not actually talking about the episode, but were he, I’d actually argue the opposite. Anime that plunge you head-first into their stories and worlds as fast as this one does are pretty rare. He also says that it only takes “one minute” for the world to change.

There, I must also disagree. If we’re speaking of our own personal worlds, Re:CREATORS had a big hand in shaping my eventual desire to become an anime blogger. The show in general, and this episode in particular, were one of several that convinced me that there was value in following seasonal weeklies, as opposed to just cherrypicking things that were recommended to me by friends after they were over. This, in turn, lead me to where I am today. I would say, then, with all this in mind, and if you’ll pardon the title drop, that it takes about twenty.

If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.