Ragashingo

In Short:

Released in 2013, Kill la Kill is a 24 episode + 1 OVA anime that is the first series produced by studio Trigger. In it, we follow delinquent punk high school girl Ryuko Matoi as she searches for the person who murdered her scientist father. This leads her to Honnouji Academy, a place where top ranking students are gifted special uniforms that give them superpowers, and to the school’s indomitable student council president, Satsuki Kiryuin, who just might have the answers Ryuko seeks.

Kill la Kill features inventive, flashy, over the top fights, a story that is absurd but also absurdly well put together, a great soundtrack, and one of the best English dubs around.

Kill la Kill is overwhelmingly an extremely silly show. If you want something serious you should look elsewhere. Also, much of the show is dripping with mild fan service and sexual humor. There are even a few short scenes of sexual abuse committed by the main villain that may turn some viewers off to the series.

Suggested Watch Minimum: 1 episode. Kill la Kill has a great, action packed first episode that does a good job to set up its story and demonstrate the types of humor to expect from the rest of the show. If you like it, it gets much better. If you don’t or find it questionable, be aware that this is the most sane and contained the show gets. Anything you don’t like will be magnified several times over by the end.

Full Review:

Kill la Kill starts as our protagonist, the too cool for school Ryoko Matoi, arrives at an island off the coast of Japan whose entire city is dominated by its high school, Honnouji Academy. The academy is run by its student council president, the sword wielding Satsuki Kiryuin. Satsuki and her Elite Four rule ruthlessly and control every aspect of the students’, teachers’, and town people’s lives. In particular, they hand out special Goku Uniforms (“god uniforms” is probably the best translation for these sets of clothing) infused with Life Fibers that give anyone wearing one superhuman powers. The worthier a student is, the more highly powered a uniform they are given. Clothing, as you’ll quickly see, plays a very large role throughout this series.

Ryuko arrives at the academy with a large case strapped on her back. Inside it is a huge scissor blade. She is carrying around literally one half of a pair of giant scissors which she uses as a sword. Thinking herself a badass, Ryuko determines that Satsuki is in charge and demands the Student Council President tell her everything she knows about her father’s murder. Turns out, Ryuko isn’t nearly as tough as she thought, and is quickly shut down and has the crap beaten out of her by one of the lower ranked school club presidents wearing his special boxing club Goku Uniform.

Ryuko retreats to the burnt down ruins of her father’s mansion only to accidentally find a secret underground lab filled with giant piles of discarded clothing. Still bleeding from her beat down, some of her blood drips onto one particular sailor uniform which comes alive and forces itself on her… yes, it literally grabs her and forces her to wear it. Ryuko finds that while wearing this living, talking, single-eyed uniform, and especially when she uses its power to transform into a much more skimpier version of the outfit magical girl style, she too is granted super strength, speed, and durability. She names the uniform Senketsu (meaning “fresh blood”) and together with it, challenges the boxing club president who beat her earlier to a new fight. Ryuko wins this rematch in ridiculously easy fashion. She destroys her opponent’s special uniform with a cut of her scissor blade and absorbs its power.

The first episode ends with Ryuko again demanding that Satsuki Kiryuin tell her who killed her father. From there, Kill la Kill goes to outright crazy places with a plot that is both stunningly wacky and unexpectedly well crafted. The goofiness in this show maxes out the extreme-o-meter, but so do its expertly hinted at twists and turns.

The show is very silly. Ryuko’s best friend, Mako, is a clueless, brainless girl who is always getting herself in trouble. She is always interrupting Ryuko’s battles to deliver some important message in the silliest, most wonky, most disconnectedly nutty ways possible that often help Ryuko overcome her current challenge. Mako’s family is equally wacky with her little brother always robbing everyone and her father acting as an incompetent, illegal, back-alley doctor.

But, what this show has, above all else, is an overwhelming sense of style. Although it doesn’t have anything close to to the budget of something like Demon Slayer or an entry in the Fate series, it puts every cent it does have to good use. Its action scenes are very well done. The fights in this show get so intense that a simple glare from one character can smash walls and send dozens of mooks flying. The effects work is top notch, too, with explosions and destruction ranging far and wide. Even the way locations, characters’ names, and random plot points are introduced with large blocky letters that slam onto the screen is both amusing and intense. And the soundtrack is freakin’ amazing. (If you don’t end up sing shouting “DON’T LOSE YOUR WAAAAAY!” during high action moments by the third episode, you ain’t alive.)

One other thing this show has is a best of the best English dub. This ranks up there with something like Steins;Gate or Cowboy Bebop, in that the show has an amazing voice cast and a dub team that wasn’t afraid to let the voice actors loose to interpret the original Japanese in fun ways. This means the dub isn’t a one hundred precent direct translation at times, but the English actors were allowed to make the characters their own in spectacular fashion without changing too much of the meaning. Let me put it this way: This is a show with a cast so good that it has Matthew Mercer in a secondary roll. (One that he does an amazingly silly job at, as per his character, by the way!)

A few words of warning: In addition to being highly silly at times, Kill la Kill gets a lot of use out of lightly sexualized fan service. You’ll see it almost immediately in the extremely skimpy natures of Ryoko and Satsuki’s transformed outfits. And it continues to ramp up as the show progresses. Often this shows up in silly, laughable ways like character dressed only in the bare minimum of gun harnesses or one character who continuously slides out of their clothes and does “sexy poses” for no real reason. But, there is one main villain who uses sex as a reward, punishment, and weapon at various points in the show’s second half in ways that might be disturbing to some. There is no actual nudity in this show, and even at its “worst” very little objectionable content is actually shown on screen, but it can get pretty suggestive when it wants to.

All In All:

Kill la Kill is one heck of an experience. It is loud and over the top to the extreme yet it knows exactly what it is doing and plays into it. It’s story is nothing less than absurd yet also has some awesome twists, reversals, and character moments any other show would die for. It’s art and animation is fairly low budget yet is deployed and managed so well the show somehow has some of the best action scenes in anime. And the dub is so good and the actors have so much fun that I fully recommend watching it in English instead of the original Japanese.

In Short:

Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song- is a 13 episode anime created by Wit Studio in 2021. It tells the story of an android Artificial Intelligence nicknamed Diva who was created by humanity expressly for the purpose of singing. Her life takes an unexpected turn when an AI from the future named Matsumoto is sent back in time and demands she help him save humanity from a world ending AI uprising. To do so, Diva must overcome the limits of her personality and programming and assist Matsumoto by helping him interven in key historical events that will occur over the next one hundred years.

Suggested Watch Minimum: 2 episodes. Vivy – Fluorite Eye’s Song- is largely broken up into short, impactful miniature story arcs. It even debuted with its first two episodes shown back to back on the same day. If you try to judge this show just its first episode you will be quite literally cutting its first story in half. Really, though, I’d recommend you proceed to episodes three and four as they are some of the strongest in the series and give you more insight into the way the show skips large periods of time between its story arcs.

Full Review:

When I first heard about Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song- I was instantly intrigued by the premise, but was a bit unsure how it would turn out. It looked to me that it would be a bit too silly. The first trailer showed a pair of mismatched characters: A soft spoken songstress and her partner, a loud, fast talking AI trapped in a small robot teddy bear. I was afraid that the show would try too hard to be funny. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. While the show does have some humor here and there, it is largely a serious sci-fi story that features great characters, tense situations, a very strong soundtrack with several outstanding songs sung by Diva and others, and some of 2021’s best art and animation.

Characters

Our main character, A-035624, is a purpose built songstress AI nicknamed Diva whose only job it is to sing at a large theme park called NiaLand. When we first meet Diva she has only been active for a little over a year. She has a beautiful singing voice, but the world is still new to her and she is doing her best to puzzle her way through it. We learn that all of the many AIs humanity has created are each given a core mission upon activation. Diva is no exception. When she was first activated, she was told that her mission was to make everyone happy with her singing, and to do so she would need to learn to sing from her heart.

In her own quiet way, Diva is obsessed with her core mission given to her by the scientists and engineers who created her. She doesn’t rush towards it. It’s not even something that she needs to achieve anytime soon. Instead, it is a problem that she picks away at day after day. One of the first thing she realizes as a person is that doing anything from one’s heart is a difficult concept even for the humans around her. Over and over throughout the series, Diva will ask others, AIs and Humans alike, what it means to them to do something from their heart. Their answers will slowly shape Diva’s own answer to that question.

Early in the first episode, we meet our second main character, Matsumoto, a cube-shaped AI sent back from a terrible future where a massive AI uprising is in the process of wiping out humanity. It is his mission to change that future by partnering with Diva and using the wealth of historical knowledge he was sent back with to help her alter a handful of key moments over the next one hundred years. Where Diva is quiet and contemplative and somewhat unsure of herself, Matsumoto proves to be a loud, fast talking, boisterous AI who is sure he is the best thing ever. Naturally, these two clash immediately. But for more reasons than just the ways they express themselves. The two approach difficult situations in fundamentally different ways.

Matsumoto’s way of doing things is to achieve the best possible outcome as soon as possible using the most efficient means currently available. If his records of history say that a government official is known to have committed some huge tragedy, he might calculate that the best way to prevent that tragedy will be to eliminate that official. Diva, though, is less sure about her place in the world, and is prone to taking a more compassionate approach. She would rather try and understand why a terrible event occurred in the hopes of defusing the situation without having to take more extreme measures. This always comes back to her core mission. Anyone she is forced to kill, anyone she must sacrifice for the greater good, is someone who she can’t make happy with her singing.

To Diva, saving the world is not something she was designed to do. It is not something she wants to do. Matsumoto has to frame things in a way that leave her no real choice but to help him. Even then, Diva is highly protective of her core mission to sing and make people happy. At one point early on she angrily refuses a software upgrade Matsumoto attempts to give her because she is afraid it might disrupt her ability to sing. To Matsumoto, singing has nothing to do with his mission of saving the world. He is flabbergasted that Diva would put herself, and his mission, at risk for something as inconsequential as singing.

The differing approaches of these two characters quickly forces them into an uneasy compromise. Matsumoto agrees to leave Diva to her singing as long as her goals don’t affect his mission to save the world. From her end, Diva rationalizes that helping Matsumoto complete his mission to save humanity is in line with her mission of making people happy by singing to them. If everyone dies in the coming AI uprising, there will be no one left to sing to. Diva and Matsumoto frequently bicker and argue throughout the series, each coming from their own point of view, but over time and through the course of some dramatic events, their unfriendly truce slowly evolves into something much more solid.

Stories

The second core strength of Vivy -Fluorite Eyes Song- is the stories it tells and the way its episodes are structured. Instead of being one long story, the show divides itself up into a handful of smaller stories that play out largely separate from each other over the next one hundred years. The initial two episode story takes place in the year we met Diva. The next one takes place fifteen years later. The next one several years after that. And so on. One of the interesting things about this show is how much we don’t see. For Matsumoto, these long stretches of time go by in an instant. He was sent back to fix key moments in history. The rest of the time he simply shuts down and is inactive for spans of years or decades in order to prevent making inadvertent changes to future events.

For Diva, her mission to learn how to sing from her heart continues on during the months, years, and decades that Matsumoto is powered down. One of the things the anime does well is show how the short amount of time Diva spends with Matsumoto during each mission help shape her evolution as a person and a singer. So, while we don’t see the years in between from either character’s perspective, when we rejoin Diva after each time skip we get to see how much she has grown and changed and improved. Sometimes the changes are subtle, other times the changes are shockingly dramatic.

Looking beyond Diva’s personal story, the show largely revolves around four distinct missions Matsumoto brings to Diva, each with its own small cast of new characters and impactful events. All four stories are their own little mystery. Matsumoto has detailed historical records of what originally happened leading up to the AI uprising, but it very quickly becomes clear that the news reports and social media chatter recorded by history didn’t always capture the full behind-the-scenes details of the events he and Diva are trying to alter. Each of these stories have some truly great characters beyond our main pair. They also have some shocking twists and cliffhangers that had me gasping in awe and wishing the next episode would hurry up and come so I could see the conclusions. There’s quiet scenes. There’s action scenes. There’s bittersweet joy. There’s meaningful despair. Matsumoto tells Diva early on that her next one hundred years won’t be easy, and he is right, they truly aren’t

The show’s focus on the few brief days that Diva and Matsumoto work together to save the future, and the way it largely skips over the years and decades in between these missions, does limit how much we see of the changes the two make. If done wrong, the show could have ended up a series of interesting but disconnected short stories. Fortunately, the show always makes sure to tie each new mission to the results of the previous one in some way, even if those previous events occurred decades earlier. Sometimes, the changes Matsumoto directs Diva to make work out exactly as intended, but often their meddling results in unexpected consequences that complicate each new mission.

Art, Animation, and Music

Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song-’s third big strength is its artistry. Normally, I’d just be talking about art and animation in this section, but this time music and song are just as important as the other two.

As an anime, Vivy doesn’t aim at the very highest peaks of animation and levels of detail. There are shows with larger staffs, more detailed character designs and backgrounds, and more fluid actions scenes and special effect. Vivy can’t compete directly with the movie-sized budgets of shows in the Fate series, for instance. But, in some ways it doesn’t try to. Instead, it maintains an art and animation quality that I think of as actually pretty good, but one that intentionally held back just a bit to make sure the show could achieve everything it wanted without killing its production crew.

In a time period were multiple high profile anime shows suffered production troubles and delays caused by a lack of time and mismanagement, the production of Vivy was said to be almost entirely smooth and well planned. The story was written out not just as a script but a full on novel before the animation even went into full production, and the show had multiple episodes finished before its first big reveal at an anime expo.

While it doesn’t quite match the insane levels of detail and effects as some top end anime, don’t write off Vivy as a show that is graphically uninteresting. Vivy managed to impress the anime community on multiple occasions throughout its run and actually came to be regarded as one of the more standout shows of 2021 in terms its art and animation.

One of the ways it impressed was by briefly switching art styles at key moments. Diva is typically drawn with a moderate level of detail, even in close shots, but when the series wanted to show how a big event impacted her it would switch to an ultra-detailed art style and hold a shot on her reaction. We’re talking about going from typical cell shaded art style to full on, highly detailed, fully lit and shadowed and textured drawings that showed both her beauty as a person and her manufactured quality as an AI robot. During these times Diva’s eyes, in particular, look more like an accurate computer rendering of glass optics than cartoon drawings. The effect, which is seen roughly once per episode, really is breathtaking.

Another way the show turned things up to eleven were its occasional action scenes. While they may not be the most detailed and technically demanding scenes in all of anime, they are certainly impressive in their own right and won the series a lot of praise during the course of its run. Instead of going effects heavy with huge flashes and explosions like you might see in a series from Trigger or Ufotable, they feature really solid flow and animation that had a great sense of weight and movement.

While less immediately dramatic and certainly far harder to quickly demonstrate to potential fans, the show’s music and singing deserve at least as much praise as anything it did with its art and animation. When you create a show about an AI songstress, you had better be prepared to have her sing. And wow, Wit Studio sure was. Each of Vivy’s several songs are beautiful. Some are slow and sad. Others are upbeat and happy. They all mark important points in Diva’s life by showing how she has evolved as a person and a performer. Sometimes its her movements and responses to the crowd that show her personal evolution. Other times, it’s the lyrics reflecting on her past adventures with Matsumoto that becomes something special.

One of the coolest things the show does with Diva’s songs is it occasionally replaces the show’s main opening with one of her current performances. Each time it does this we get a new song with some great new animation. It’s really neat to watch as the show flows seamlessly from what are essentially mini music videos into the main bulk of its episode without missing a beat. It’s this kind of planning and unexpected artistry that often makes Vivy a special show.

All In All:

Vivy kinda came out of nowhere. It is an anime original, meaning it’s not a part of some big franchise. It wasn’t created to capitalize on or sell an existing manga. It probably won’t ever have any sequels or prequels. And yet, it told an awesome story filled with great music, tense storytelling, and a good amount of heart. Watching Diva struggle and evolve as a character meant for one role but forced to take on something very different is kinda what the show is all about. The way the anime uses time skips to show the effects of Diva and Matsumoto’s interventions as well as the immortal, ageless quality of its robotic AI characters was pretty cool.

The show is not without its flaws. There are a couple of dangling plot threads. Its use of time skips does sometimes leave you wishing they’d put more time into showing how, exactly, society changed based on what Diva and Matsumoto did during each of their missions. But, yeah, all in all, this was probably my favorite seasonal anime of 2021 because it was artistic and musical and different than anything else out there.