Ya Boy Kongming – The Magic Planet

Anime Orbit Weekly is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material.

Hello, anime fans. Once again, I’ve got a couple short writeups for you below, and some links to my work of this past week below that. Don’t have much else to say this week! (Still dealing with Medical Issues™) So please, do enjoy.

Seasonal Anime

Estab-Life

Before we talk about the episode of Estab-Life that actually aired last week, I want to discuss the first one again. Why? Because the show has actually gotten an English dub, and against all odds, a solidly good one. The real stars of the production our are leads, Julie Shields is a touch stiff as Equa, but given the character’s weird nature that only makes sense. Alexis Tipton‘s take on Feles really gets the “always at least a little fed up with everyone’s nonsense” aspect across splendidly, and the dub impressively manages to amp the ship teasing between Equa and Feles up even more. Martes, played here by Sarah Wiedenheft, is also done very well. Wiedenheft’s take on Martes’ fake-drunk rambling near the conclusion of episode one is a particular highlight.

The supporting characters are also dubbed well throughout, and Anthony Bowling‘s take on the robot buddy Alga sounds totally different than the original JP dub but in an interesting, transformative way. He’s gruffer, here, and his snarky side made more obvious. Good performances require a good director, of course, and it’s probably thanks to ADR Director Jeremy Inman that all of this comes together so well. All in all, a solid dubbed start to the series that I hope will give it a somewhat wider audience, it deserves one.

This week’s episode is leaner than that explosively weird premiere. Essentially; Equa has a cold, so the rest of the team needs to extract their client (a wheezy otaku) without her. They fail to do so, because their mission devolves into bickering and they don’t communicate with the client terribly well. What they seem to not quite get—but Equa definitely does, as she demonstrates when she shows up anyway toward the episode’s end—is that the Extractors’ main goal is to give their clients some agency. Without doing that, they can’t accomplish anything else, either. I suspect this theme will come back around as the series enters its second half.

The Demon Girl Next Door – Season 2

It took a bit, but it seems like the second season of The Demon Girl Next Door is starting to find its footing. The first segment of episode 3 is about Shamiko learning to use the computer (and then, more specifically, Twitter). Gags like this are arguably old hat at this point, but the execution here is pretty good, starting from Momo’s “Magical Girl Lesson on Internet Literacy.”

The pair’s inability to be honest with each other is also brought back, here. Both want to connect with the other on social media but can’t get themselves to directly say it, which leads exchanges like this, where Yuuko tries to be sincere.

Only to course correct moments later.

In the episode’s second half, Momo takes Yuuko’s ever-present, normally statue-bound ancestor Lilith (Minami Takahashi) on an outing to a health spa. This is mostly an excuse for the self-proclaimed Witch of Eternal Darkness to annoy the magical girl. There’s a few moments of genuine bonding in here, too. (This is also the best-looking part of the episode. I’m a sucker for the shadowless technique.)

….but of course, this being Machikado Mazoku, that much is also rolled into a gag, where Momo promptly uses the newfound knowledge that Lilith is scared of the dark to blackmail her.

It’s good that the series seems to be finally stabilizing after a somewhat rough first two episodes. (They were hardly bad, but the lack of structure was noticeable.) Next week promises to get the ball rolling on the show’s actual plot once again, something I quite look forward to.

Summer Time Rendering

Somewhere in the Pacific, there’s been a death on the island of Higotoshima. A tragic accident; a girl drowning at sea while saving another from the same fate. Shinpei Ajiro (Natsuke Hanae) returns there—to his home—for the first time in two years to pay respects to the departed; his sister by all but blood, one Ushio Kofune (Anna Nagase). For its first fifteen minutes, it’s all atmosphere. The palm trees hang huge and crooked like hangman’s gallows, and the summer sun beats down a heat so hot it’s oppressive.

Every bead of water—from tears to air conditioner condensation—is placed with elegant finesse. At night, Ushio’s own sister Mio (Saho Shirasu) stares at her own house from outside, like she’s a stranger. The island goes eerie. Something is in the air. This is Summer Time Rendering.

Eventually, something like an explanation creeps forward, though not without a payment in blood. The so-called Shadow Sickness, a haunting via doppelganger that ends with the victim being killed by their own double. This, it seems, is the island’s secret. By the time Mio’s holding herself at gunpoint at the end of the episode, everything’s spun into freefall. Shinpei gets a bullet to the brain for his troubles, only to wake back up on the same boat he arrived on the previous day.

Who can say, really, where all this is going? Summer Time Rendering is not going to be a regular fixture of this column. (It’s being held in streaming jail, for one thing.) But I may cover it occasionally. In truth though, if you want to see what happens, you’ll just have to seek it out for yourself. Good luck.

Ya Boy Kongming!

Over the past few weeks, Kongming has strategized and schemed his way into getting Eiko, his friend, client, and the idol singer he’s an unashamed fan of, into bigger and bigger placements. Last week that culminated in stealing the thunder of a popular indie band at a pop-up festival. Here, Eiko presented with a choice. She’s invited to a second festival of a similar size. Or, the festival-runner making this offer explains, a truly massive summer music festival, but there’s a catch on that one. She needs 100,000 likes on social media. Eiko, no longer content with taking the easy route, opts for the latter option, to the amusement of the festival organizer and the comical distress of her boss.

Kongming brainstorms several solutions, but one is to hire other personnel to join Eiko’s backing band / form a group / etc. Specifically, he suggests “a mighty rapper.”

This is an interesting obstacle for a series like this to hit. Hip-hop and anime are uneasy bedfellows and trying to integrate one into the other usually results in—at best—offputting results. And as someone who’s a lifelong fan of both, I feel pretty qualified in making that statement. (Not for nothing will I never cover Hypnosis Mic on this site.) But there are degrees here. “Rapper” is vague, does Kongming mean an actual, full-on hip-hop artist? Or more of an EDM / pop rapper, someone constant late ’00s / early ’10s Billboard Hot 100 presence Flo Rida? In either case, there’s a lot of leeway. To put it another way; chelmico. aren’t Lauryn Hill. Calliope Mori is not Paul Wall. “A rapper” can be a lot of different things. What does the show actually mean when it says it’s going to involve one?

For the time being, it seems like neither Kongming the series nor Kongming the person are actually interested in answering that. Kongming spends several nights (it’s not clear how many exactly) chatting up a hypebeast outside of the club he and Eiko still both work at. The scene contrasts the two’s approaches for this stretch of time; Eiko hustles with her singing at home, Kongming seemingly skips out on his duties to go party early in the morning. Eventually, when Eiko confronts him about this, he convinces her to come with her one night to a club in Roppongi (an area of Tokyo I mostly associate with being the setting of the truly god-awful Speed Grapher. But it’s hard to hold that against the place). Kongming rubs shoulders with quite a few people while out, including a ripped Black American who speaks no Japanese, several girls who are club regulars and seem to think Kongming is cute, and the aforementioned hypebeast guy. None are the mentioned “rapper.” We don’t meet them here at all, and they remain a question mark for the series, for now.

Eventually, he explains to Eiko, all of this is “intel gathering.” He’s trying to read the scene, and the two resolve the minor misunderstanding over bowls of udon, after the club.

The climax of this scene sees Eiko reveal the full scope of her ambitions to Kongming; she doesn’t want to just be a singer. She wants to perform at the world’s largest EDM festival. A concrete, but absurd, goal, for someone who is still at this point a fairly unknown pop singer from Tokyo. This is, she says, the first time she’s ever told anyone she wants to do this.

Kongming thanks her—he also lightly reprimands her over her continued lack of self-confidence–and there are no hard feelings here. At episode’s end, Eiko passes Kongming her phone, and asks for his thoughts on her new song. The credits creep down the screen as 96Neko‘s voice hisses out of the tinny iPhone ear buds. I could describe how I feel about the song, but how Kongming feels is a lot more important.

She is, of course, embarrassed by this high praise. But it’s a good reminder of why anyone is watching this show in the first place. Yes, the premise is funny. But what Kongming is actually about is how one person can be so moved by music that they need it like a fish needs water—again, Kongming’s words, not mine. Kongming may be the one to put Eiko on the path to stardom, but he needs her, too.

Elsewhere on MPA

Let’s Watch HEALER GIRL Episode 3 – Cleanup, Run Run Run

I picked up a third seasonal. Why? Because I really, really love Healer Girl, and I hope to contribute in some small way to it becoming even a little more popular. That’s genuinely it.

Let’s Watch KAGUYA-SAMA: LOVE IS WAR -ULTRA ROMANTIC- Episode 3

Kaguya‘s episode this week mostly focuses on a trio of the series’ less well-known characters, but it’s a treat nonetheless.

Let’s Watch SPY X FAMILY Episode 3 – Prepare for The Interview

A downbeat turn from Spy x Family this week. Comparatively, anyway; there are still a lot of great little character moments in here, and it’s worth watching for those alone.

And that’s all for this week. See you next time and keep out for an additional article on Tuesday in addition to the Healer Girl recap on Monday, this week! It marks the return of a column we haven’t seen around here since last year. I hope you’re all excited.

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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, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Have you ever thought to yourself; “what if classical Chinese military strategist Zhuge Kongming was transported through time to the present day and became an idol manager?” Well, if you have, then you’re a very strange person. Or you’re the original writer of Ya Boy Kongming! One or the other.

Anime as a medium is sometimes underrated (or occasionally, even ridiculed) in its ability to just casually roll with absurd elevator-pitch concepts. A legend of East Asian military strategy as the manager for a modern-day pop singer? Sure, why not. It should surprise no one that the “mechanics” of how Kongming (Ryoutarou Okiayu) ends up in modern Japan are pretty vague and are glossed through briskly in the show’s opening minutes. There’s something about a dying wish for “a life without bloodshed” in his next life, but beyond that it isn’t elaborated upon much. That’s just fine, because Ya Boy Kongming! is primarily a comedy, and when it does dip into other modes it has the good sense to only touch very briefly on how the whole Samurai Jack-ian “flung into the future” thing works. There are other things to be focused on here.

Instead, he wakes up in a random alley in modern Japan during a Halloween celebration. A pair of randos drag him to a club, where one of them makes him drink some tequila. He then comes to the obvious conclusion; he’s in Hell.

^{It will shock you, I’m sure, to learn that I–a professional anime critic–am not really the clubbing type.}

But then, he hears the voice of an angel in this clamorous and disorienting place. That voice belongs to Eiko Tsukimi (Kaede Hondo when speaking, 96Neko when singing), who quickly establishes herself as Kongming’s co-protagonist.

She ends up taking him home because he gets blackout drunk. (This is kind of crazy, if you ask me, and she seems to think so too; muttering to herself that she “must be a saint.”) The following day, she–somewhat reluctantly–helps him adjust to the modern world, all the while still being mostly convinced that he’s just a guy who’s gotten way too into method acting. (Everyone seems to think this, in fact, including Eiko’s boss, who ends up hiring him because he, too, is a Three Kingdoms-era history nerd.)

This is all pretty funny, and Kongming goes from totally lost about present-day society to reasonably able to navigate his way around a smartphone in surprisingly short order. (A joke in here even implies that he learns about cryptocurrency. Truly a terrifying thought.)

Given all this, one might reasonably assume that Kongming! is purely a screwball comedy. But while the series is definitely funny, it’s not only funny, and the fact that it understands that having a beating heart under the gags is important speaks to a certain consideration of its own goals that isn’t ever a given with anime. (Or for that matter, art in general.) The turn begins when Eiko sings a song in her bedroom, seemingly as much for herself as to comfort Kongming. (Who is, understandably, a bit blue over, you know, everyone he knows and loves having been dead for almost 2,000 years, his country having long since fallen, etc.) Eiko has a seriously powerful voice, and the fact that she’s such a good singer is hugely important here, because Kongming!, remember, is also an idol anime.

Eiko’s whole situation is given as much focus as Kongming’s own unusual circumstances. She’s a bartender and sometimes-club singer. And while her boss is a decent guy in his own way, the job itself seems pretty dead-end. This, and the fact that she keeps failing auditions, makes her consider quitting music altogether. When Kongming asks what drew her to music in the first place, we get a pretty damn bleak flashback to her high school years. The short version; she was nearly a train-jumper, until the man who’s now her boss literally grabbed her out of the way. Taking her to his club to perhaps jolt her out of the whole idea, Eiko is moved by an American guest singer’s performance. This whole idea; that music can sometimes quite literally save people, is at the very core of the idol genre, and snaps Kongming! pretty firmly into place within said genre’s modern zeitgeist.

Plus, on a basic level, all this helps Eiko feel like an actual co-protagonist instead of a backup character. But more importantly, it nails down the show’s stakes. Kongming! appears to want to be both a goofy comedy with a casually fantastical premise and a heartfelt story of a struggling musician trying to succeed in a difficult industry. That’s a hard line to tow, but at least one other idol anime in recent memory managed it. If it worked once, what’s to stop it from working again? The show’s general character helps a lot, too. In both more lighthearted and comparatively serious moments, it has a vibrancy to it that’s easy to take for granted but should always be properly appreciated when it’s there.

The episode ends with Kongming convincing Eiko to keep at it–though by phrasing it that way I’m way underselling the scene, which is legitimately heartwarming–and offering her “his services.” What services? Why, just the finest military mind of Chinese Antiquity. Turned toward helping her make it as a musician, naturally.

Grade: B+
The Takeaway: While the apparently history nerd-baiting nature of its premise may scare some off, this is a show with a huge amount of potential, and fans of “music stories” like this should definitely check this one out.

The Magic Planet

Tag: Ya Boy Kongming

Anime Orbit Weekly [4/24/22]

Seasonal First Impressions: Conquering the Pop World with YA BOY KONGMING!