Ragashingo

In Short:

Shoushimin: How to Become Ordinary is a 22 episode anime made by studio Lapin Track in 2024 & 2025 based on an existing series of novels and manga. It follows Jogoro Kobato and Yuki Osanai, two clever yet quietly quirky high school students who have a knack for solving minor mysteries. In addition to its fascinating main characters, the show features great art, inventive direction, and slow, subtle storytelling that rewards you for paying close attention to details.

This is a show that is slower paced than most anime. Sometimes, an odd glance or even a barely mentioned omission can be key to an entire plot line. Some will really appreciate what the show does, but others may find it too slow for their liking.

Suggested Watch Minimum: 3 episodes. The second episode is possibly the best example of the show’s subtle, slower-paced mini-mysteries, while the third episode is where the first arc really kicks in. Both need to be watched to have a good idea what you are getting into.

Full Review:

We first meet Jogoro Kobato on a sunny afternoon in the courtyard of the high school he recently applied to. The student number on the entrance exam printout he holds in his hand matches one of the many numbers posted on the display board he and several other potential students are standing in front of. He made it in, and can’t help the smug, satisfied smile plastered on his face as a result.

A minute later, Jogoro receives a text message and briefly searches around until he finds Yuki Osanai. The two have clearly met before, and, with a knowing look, the small, shy girl is able to instantly read Jogoro’s smug expression and softly replies: “Me, too.” They both made it in.

Yuki asks Jogoro if he’d like to go get some sweets to celebrate, but then suddenly tucks in close to him to hide as she spots another friend, a girl this time, leaning against a wall away from the courtyard. This girl is clearly not celebrating, and Jogoro begins to speculate that she must not have been accepted. But then he stops and apologizes to Yuki by saying: “ I’m failing to be an ordinary person, huh?”

This short interaction in the first couple of minutes of the show tells you almost everything you need to know about these two characters, and it begins the set up of the show’s biggest and best mystery. Jogoro is smart and a little smug. Yuki is insightful, shy, and loves to eat sweet thing. And, for some reason, the two of them really do wish to become ordinary as they expand on a bit as the episode continues.

Over the next few of episodes we learn that these two each have aspects of their pasts they wish to distance themselves from now that they’ve entered high school. For Jogoro, it’s his instinctive habit of wanting to solve any sort of mystery he sees. For Yuki, it’s something a bit more frightening, especially coming from such a small girl. But what these two did in the past and what happened to make them both want to change are things that won’t all be fully teased out until the show’s final episodes. One thing that soon becomes clear, though, is that these two have made some sort of promise to support each other in their mutual goal to become ordinary.

One of my favorite aspects of the show is the way Jogoro and Yuki regard each other. They’re almost always together. They help each other when the other has a bad day. They enjoy subtly teasing each other and challenging each other’s problem solving abilities. But when asked early on if they are in a relationship they just stare blankly at each other, seemingly having never considered such a thing.

There’s also this mutual respect they have for each other’s odd way of thinking that is really sweet. For instance, when they first meet back in middle school, Jogoro declares he is looking to challenge himself and solve a case all on his own. When Yuki asks him how he’d feel if she told him he was being vain and self-congratulating he responds by saying he’d appreciate that she understood what he just said. And neither one of them is mocking the other or being offended. Time and time again they are able to communicate their thoughts and even their flaws directly without judging each other.

The way they relate to others is interesting, as well. Jogoro, for instance, rarely gets mad or excited even when he should. Instead, he maintains that same sort of intellectual disconnect where even when someone does try to insult him. His deadpan logical way of processing the world can even be infuriating to others, but that’s just the way he is. And Yuki? She can be sweet and supportive, but woe to anyone who manages to upset her! She never once lashes out or raises her voice, but those on the receiving end of her quiet, manipulative anger end up wishing she would have. When she tells Jogoro she’ll have no mercy on someone at the start of the final act, you legitimately feel bad for that other person!

Throughout the show, these two soft-spoken, slightly odd students end up working together to solve mysteries big and small mostly in and around their high school. Some of the mysteries are insignificant and mundane. How do you make three really good mugs of hot cocoa in the fewest possible steps? Which member of the school’s newspaper club was lying about eating the lone prank cupcake filled with spicy mustard instead of normal sweet jelly? That sort of thing. But other mysteries Jogoro and Yuki get mixed up in involve serious matters like identity theft, kidnapping, arson, and even attempted murder. And all of these mysteries are set up so this pair of mildly clever high school students have a legitimate chance to solve them. The show has a groundedness that I really enjoyed.

Another thing I really like about the show’s story is what it tells you and what it doesn’t. If a show holds back too much about a mystery, the solution will seem to come out of nowhere. If it lets you in on too much, you’ll solve the mystery long before the supposedly smart characters do which will make them seem stupid for missing the obvious. Somehow, Shoushimin: How to Become Ordinary managed to walk a fine line. It does often hold important clues back, but it always did so in a way that let me make similar leaps of logic to the ones Jogoro and Yuki were making as long as I was paying attention. Instead of being frustrated at the show for holding back too much or too little, I was always delighted at the solution to each mystery whether or not I managed to solve them beforehand.

Beyond the characters and story, I really enjoyed the show’s art style and its directing. The backgrounds and character designs are generally well done. I liked the show’s use of lighting here and there to enhance a scene or even just using subtle glows and light bounces to make the environments feel real. This isn’t a show with a ton of flashy animation, but every once in a while it shows off a little. Yuki’s love of sweets is sometimes shown in stunning detail. Just watching her fork cut a cake is one of the standout moments of animation early on. One of my other favorite bits of animation was the pouring of warm, bubbling milk into a mug in the second episode. You could almost taste the hot cocoa they were mixing in that scene!

Finally, there’s the show’s directing. Again, it’s not particularly flashy, but I do think it was pretty special. For one, the show likes transporting our main characters to different environments as they ponder the solution to the puzzles before them. Sitting around inside working through the facts of a mystery is at one point shown as climbing an exterior concrete spiral staircase. When Jogoro and Yuki at one point come to a disagreement, we see them portrayed outdoors separated by a river. The places they imagine themselves in don’t always make direct sense, but the segments do a good job of conveying the emotions of the scenes they are in.

The show also likes to make use of cutaways and interesting camera angles. When something important happens, it might cut to someone’s brief reaction, or it will position the camera to catch a meaningful reflection or put it directly overhead to capture people’s movements while they are eating. Nothing here is so stunning that it set the Internet ablaze, but when all put together, I really came to appreciate just how often the show went above and beyond boring static shots even when the only thing in a scene was just two people talking.

All In All:

Shoushimin: How to Become Ordinary is an oddity to be sure. It has this quiet confidence to take things slow and revel in the subtle quirks of its main characters. It’s willing to spend entire episodes on singular insignificant mysteries but it will also drop hints and clues to upcoming cases episodes in advance before you even know to look for them. And I really enjoyed the way the show gives you all the clues you need to solve each mystery but holds enough back to make you really pay attention and work for the answers before it reveals everything at the end of each case.

In Short:

Girls Band Cry is a 13 episode anime from 2024 made by Toei Animation that follows five girls as they try and come together as a professional independent rock band. It’s five main characters are all quirky and real with their own hangups and somewhat troubled pasts they work to overcome. While there is some serious drama, the show avoids becoming gritty or depressing. Instead, it’s a delight to see these characters squabble and fight and bounce off each other but still become good friends in the end.

Suggested Minimum Watch: 1 episode. While you don’t really meet the full set of main characters till roughly the midway point, episode 1 does a good job showcasing the show’s style of drama, humor, quirkiness, and features a strong showing of its approach to its tightly produced Rock n’ Roll musical numbers. If you like the first episode, you’ll like the rest of the show.

Full Review:

I almost didn’t watch Girls Band Cry because of the way it debuted and because of the way I approach music. For me, music is something that has to be connected to other things. I’ll enjoy the heck out of songs if they are connected to a show or movie or even just a moment in life that I love, but I almost never seek out music for its own sake. So when Girls Band Cry started by first releasing music videos almost a year before the anime came out I pretty much ignored the songs and didn’t plan on watching the anime. The music alone just didn’t mean anything to me. But then, a year later, I happened to give the first episode of the anime a chance and was hooked! Perhaps it’s not my favorite anime of all time, but I consider it one of my standouts in recent years.

Girls Band Cry follows in the footsteps of Sound! Euphonium and A Place Further than the Universe in that all three are shows whose stories and characters were penned by Jukki Hanada. His style of writing that puts the personalities and actions of characters at the forefront just clicks with me. Characters’ good times and bad, their delights and dilemmas, their strengths and weaknesses, they all flow together that makes so many of his shows among my favorites.

For Girls Band Cry, we have five main characters who have each set out on their own in life for their own highly personal reasons.

Our main viewpoint character is Nina Iseri. Early on, we learn she was plagued by some sort of bullying incident in high school and because it she convinced her parents to let her drop out and move away to Tokyo to live and study on her own for college. Nina can be sweet and devoted, but just as often she can be prickly, stubborn, and a lot to deal with.

On her first bumbled day in the big city, Nina comes across a musician a few years older than her named Momoka Kawaragi. It turns out it was Momoka’s hit song “Void” that helped Nina get through the worst of her bullying. We soon learn that Momoka, for her own reasons, left her rising star of a band Diamond Dust and has tried but largely failed to strike out on her own. She lost things she didn’t expect when she left her band and she’s been unable to find them again.

These two strike up a friendship with Momoka doing her best to pull the uncooperative Nina into a new band along with drummer Subaru Awa. Sabaru is an energetic delight, but she too wishes to strike out on her own. For her, it’s to buck the expectations one prominent member of her family has for her. Subaru wants the freedom to do her own thing, but knows she’ll hurt at least one of her most supportive family members when she does so.

Later on, these three are joined by Tomo Ebizuka and Rupa. Like Subaru, Tomo is a girl roughly Nina’s age whose family let her down, so she left them behind. She is serious about making music her career, but struggles to work with those less serious than herself. Rupa, who is Tomo’s roommate, has her own sad past and, as a girl of mixed race, lives in a sometimes unpleasant present. So Rupa, like the others, has some reasons to let out her frustrations on a rock band stage.

The ways these five fit together, or rather the ways they sometimes don’t, is what makes the show. Momoka pulls the five of them into her new band but then hesitates as things start to get real. Nina is constantly a lovable pain in the ass with the way she stubbornly rejects genuine offers of help or friendship. Subaru has to hide her identity on stage for fear of disappointing her family. Tomo thinks she’ll drive everyone away if she voices her real opinions on the others’ levels of skill and commitment, etc. The arguments and honest conversations that come out of these conflicting wants and needs can be fiery, but as Momoka explains early on, some of her best memories of being in a band were the fights with her friends. And so it is with the anime.

The five girls eventually settle down, learn each others habits and hangups, and do come together. There is drama here, but it’s not as heavy as the classic rock band anime NANA, for instance. Girls Band Cry remains generally lighthearted and while some situations can comes as a shock or take multiple episodes to resolve, the girls do eventually resolve them. The writing here is excellent. The personalities feel real. There’s some humor along the way, but it’s humor that fits in with the show instead of humor that is the show.

Animation and Music:

Girls Band Cry is a 3d CGI production, meaning most everything except the rare one off background character is done as computer animation. While the show generally lacks the overwhelmingly rich level of foreground and background detail something like a full blown Disney/Pixar movie has, Girls Band Cry does have its own strengths that become more apparent the more you watch. The show features a smooth, constant, 24 frames per second rate of animation. A lot of hand-drawn and CGI anime updates less frequently where Girls Band Cry updates the movements of its camera and characters every frame. In practice what this mean is every scene has something happening. Every character movement is smooth and detailed. From big sweeping gestures to the show’s frequent use of highly expressive facial reactions, everything is snappy and fluid in ways you might not expect from most 3d productions. Or from most traditional, hand-drawn anime for that matter.

And this is surprising. At lot of 3d rendered shows skimp on this. Expressions often remained static and unchanging. Characters movements are sometimes jerky or or unnaturally stiff, especially when they aren’t the center of attention. Not so in Girls Band Cry. Its animation is actually really good! And consistently so! Which must have taken a ton of work all for a new, unknown, original anime based on nothing before it. There is no hundred issue manga funding this show.

Finally, beyond the well-written characters and consistently good animation, there’s the rock music and the music sequences. Girls Band Cry’s music is influenced a lot by Nina’s experiences with bullying and feeling cut off. She sings about making tough choices. About feeling alone in crowds. About how patronizing it can be to tell someone to do their best but then tell them to fit in. And all this is held up by some of the very best music video type sequences in anime. There’s breathtakingly good motion capture of the girls playing instruments and singing. There’s fun, creative camera moves that pan, and snap and rotate and spin to the beat of the music.

There’s a variety of cool effects from raindrops hanging in the air to pretend glass walls shattering as they are referenced in the lyrics, to the momentary color inversions during one particularly awesome guitar solo. These sequences generally serve as rewarding ends to episodes. Some are high flying moments, others are yelling about injustices in the world through song, but they’re all brilliant showpieces of music and animation working hand in had.

All In All

Girls Band Cry is about learning to be yourself, learning when to reject help and when to accept it, learning how to fit in with others and address their wants and their fears alongside your own. And it’s about these five girls supporting each other and combining their strengths to accomplish something bigger than their individual selves. It’s fun and entertaining rather than being heavy and depressing, but it is not a comedy-first show the likes of K-On! or Bocchi The Rock!. Aside from its showcase on-stage rock sequences, it doesn’t necessarily do anything never seen before. If you’ve watched NANA, K-On!, Bocchi the Rock, Ya Boy Kongming, and other music anime then you’ve seen a lot of the building blocks that Girls Band Cry draws upon, but it combines them with good character writing in fun ways that ended up making it one of my favorite anime of 2024.