Deal with the Devil - Kakegurui
Kakegurui is set at a fictional high school for the children of the ultra wealthy elite who control business and government. The school has normal classes, but what sets it apart from normal institutions of learning is the way every after school activity involves massively high stakes gambling. From poker to roulette to far stranger and more dangerous games of chance, Hyakkaou Private Academy’s real goal is to ready these up and coming future titans of politics and industry for the tense, high stakes situations they’ll face in the real world.
Coming in to this frankly bizarre setting is transfer student Yumeko Jabami. If this were any other show, Yumeko would beat back the all powerful student council who controls every aspect of school life. She’d be an unimpeachable white knight outplaying everyone in this den of vipers. Instead, though she is friendly and has good morals, Yumeko is, in some ways, the most ruthless and gambling crazed of all the academy’s students!
Yumeko doesn’t so much as bat an eye when her fellow students look down on her or others. She doesn’t care if the student council has made having gambling debt at this school akin to being a slave to your fellow students. She doesn’t give a second thought to people trying to literally take control of others’ entire lives. All she wants is the most exciting, tension-filled gambles possible. The higher the stakes the better. The few times we ever see Yumeko angry is when someone tries to intentionally lose. She doesn’t care if you cheat as long as the base rules of the game are fair as she’ll always find a way to outplay you. But rig a game so that she is sure to win? So that she doesn’t get the thrill of being on the knife’s edge of victory and defeat? That’s her biggest turn-off and she might never speak to you again!
“Deal With The Devil” the opening song for Kakegurui’s first season, is a blast. This fast paced, upbeat, jazzy number is filled to the brim with edgy, double entendre lyrics all relating to gambling. Raising the stakes. Seeing through an opponent’s strategy. Having an unbeatable hand. Etc. It’s gotta be Yumeko singing here, and she is in full control of the situation! The song is the perfect opening for a show that is, itself, wild and edgy. “Deal With The Devil” rarely if ever comes into play during the show. It seems satisfied to open each episode along side its deviously suggestive bits of animation then wait for its chance to impress all over again next episode. Speaking of that animation, it is filled with spoilers for both the first and second season. The best kind. The kind that only make sense once you watch the show. Until then, the frantic pacing of the music will more than keep you occupied.
For a long time, I thought “Deal With The Devil” was a song whose speed and lyrics stuffed with double meanings would be all but impossible to fit into English. There doesn’t seem to be enough time to convey everything as the music zooms to the next line and next verse in the blink of an eye. Boy was I wrong! Kayli ‘Kiyo’ Mills did an outstanding job of creating a completely original cover for the song that lives up to its fast paced power. My one complaint, which seems a bit embarrassing when I say it out loud, is that she fails to meow at the appropriate time! But you know what? For a show as slyly suggestive as Kakegurui… that kind of thinking is absolutely perfect!
Fuwa Fuwa Time - K-On!
Fuwa Fuwa Time is a song whose strong introduction and many repeat performances made it THE song of an incredible anime.
K-On!, the anime featuring this song, is perhaps the ultimate combination of Comedy, Slice of Life and Iyashikei (calming shows with very little drama). It stars five high school girls who join together to continue their school’s light music club… but really all they do is goof off, drink tea, eat cake, go on shopping trips, and maybe every once in a while they actually even play some music.
Somehow, what should be a show that gets dropped because nothing is happening slowly builds and builds until you’ve fallen in love with the smallest character quirks and most mundane happenings. This is a show where, by the end of the first season, a simple look down a familiar empty staircase can evoke feelings nearly as strong as the most dramatic anime around. And not because something dramatic happened. Just because that staircase is the one these characters you’ve come to love use to get to their music room where most of their antics take place.
“Fuwa Fuwa Time” is a song that comes in several different flavors. The original version of the song saw the K-On! girls switch who sang vocals because of silly happenings that left one of them with a blown out scratchy voice. Later versions switched back to the original vocalist for other silly reasons. While still later versions added another club member with a new instrument. The version I’ve chosen is actually one of the last played since it appears over the end credits of the K-On! Movie that released after the tv series. All the versions start off with an instantly recognizable guitar riff that flows into keyboard and drums that support upbeat sing song lyrics. The song is about finding the courage to express yourself to someone you secretly admire. But, really, it could be about anything. The sound of it is just so instantly catchy.
I featured the movie version of “Fuwa Fuwa Time” partially because I like the more airy, stereo separated feel of its opening, and partially because I like the way it switches lead singers back and forth between verses.
One of the reasons I think of Fuwa Fuwa Time as THE song of K-On! Is, oddly enough, because we almost never hear all of it. Instead, the show frequently features the song’s intro or outro as a way to signify the start or end of a concert or a performance without having to play and animate the entire thing. I bet the entire song is played beginning to end less than five times throughout the show’s run. But we hear pieces of it so often that I can’t hear even the first few guitar cords without immediately picturing the anime. It’s that ingrained in my mind.
Speaking of the animation, though, this song is one of the first in a line of K-On! songs to feature totally unexpected music videos. Who would expect a song about a secret admirer struggling to express hidden love would be represented by… a peace-loving outlaw hippy band performing concerts and running from both the police and the military in their 1950’s Cadillac?!
K-On! has many fantastic songs. Some are more closely related to its characters or what passes for the anime’s goofy, minimal plot. There’s one or two that probably generate stronger feelings of friendship or love, like a song about one character’s beloved sister or the group’s most treasured friend. But if you want me instantly thinking of K-On… just play me the first second or two of “Fuwa Fuwa Time” and you’ll have me nostalgic for one of anime’s most landmark shows.
Finally, as I often do, I look for a great english cover of the anime songs I love. This version by GS 1.0 hits it out of the park with full cosplay and just a great energy about the whole thing!
Bang Brave Bang Bravern
Easily the most surprising and standout anime in the Winter 2024 season, Bang Brave Bang Bravern has me laughing out loud every week with its wacky, save the world mecha hijinks.
Bang Braven, I guess that’s what I’ll call it, is different in tone from a serious Gundam or Macross, and while self-aware, it’s also not an SSSS.Gridman style show, either. Even though it’s dealing with largely real-world military forces (well, until it doesn’t) the show I think it feels closest to is actually Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. I doubt this will have a tournament arc like Gurren Lagann did, but they share a similar sort of energy, excitement, and humor.
Sometime around the modern day, American and Japanese forces are having a joint military exercise around Hawaii. Everything from aircraft carriers to ground forces to American Titanostrider mechs and Japanese equivalents are simulating a joint attack on a fortified beachhead.
And then, aliens attack.
Even our best soldiers and most powerful machines are all but useless against the shielded alien mechs that descend from space and soon blanket the entire world similar to Independence Day. The situation looks all but lost for our heroes in Hawaii, but then, at the last moment, a red, blue, and white talking mech saves the day and takes in one of the Japanese mecha pilots as its pilot.
This new mech is named Bravern. Bravern is loud. Bravern is bombastic. Bravern encourages his new pilot, Isami Ao, yell out the names of super attacks along with him. With Bravern’s help, the surviving joint forces are able to push back the aliens around Hawaii. And then things get even crazier.
Unlike most other mecha shows, where the gundams, or similar mechs, are just stationary machines without their pilots, Bravern himself remains very much a character after the battle ends. Though Bravern’s head is multiple the size of an entire human, he participates in strategy meetings. He leads the joint forces in exercise routines that include runs and pushups for the humans and their machines. He leads training courses on, complete with an overhead projector, showing the joint forces how to overwhelm the enemy’s shields. Bravern is such a fun character he pretty drives the show much like Kamina did for Gurren Lagann.
That doesn’t mean we don’t have other good characters. Pilot Isami Ao has so far been a reluctant pilot of the brash Bravern. There is some bond between them that hasn’t been fully explored yet. There’s also Lewis Smith, one of the American pilots who wishes he could operate Bravern, but Bravern will not let him for some reason. Again, something about that bond between Bravern and Isami. Maybe some sort of past battles they shared in space that Isami has since forgotten about? Minor characters include the joint forces commander. And the airborne command and control operators who direct our heroes into battle.
Whatever secrets the show is holding on to for now, it is just hilarious and a joy to watch. And not just for the humor that makes it good. This week’s episode had a touching moment where a bunch of the soldiers and technicians Isami helped save in the opening battle got to thank him and buy him drinks. Lewis Smith is having to deal with not being the superhero pilot after being rejected by Bravern. We also got a glimpse of the allied forces’ first counterattack location, and it was kinda gut wrenching to see these soldiers and technicians in shock over the battering their homelands have taken.
The show is not going to instantly appeal to everyone. It is fairly silly and tongue in cheek despite some of its more serious, straightforward military trappings. But for anyone willing to have a bit of knowing fun thrown into their serious military mecha show, there’s nothing in recent memory that can top this.
Also, the ending credits of each episode. Neither words nor a single image can do them justice. Just… wow.
Ensemble for Polaris - Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song
Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song- follows the character Diva, a newly created artificial intelligence in a robot body. Like all AI’s in this anime, Diva was given a singular main task to perform. AIs in this world come in a huge ranges of shapes and sizes built for specific purposes. Some are music teachers. Some are vacuum cleaning drones. Diva was created as a songstress and told to make people happy with her singing and then told that to accomplish her goal she’d have to sing from her heart.
The show soon sets Diva on an exciting one hundred year mission involving time travel and a world ending AI uprising that she is tasked with stopping. Diva gains a talkative know-it-all AI partner, and hand to hand combat skills, and far more knowledge about life and death than she ever wanted, but throughout it all, she continues to struggle with the question of how to make people happy with her singing, and how an AI like her can possibly truly sing from her heart.
“Ensemble for Polaris” is one of the few songs Diva does not sing. Instead it is first sung by Estella, a caretaker AI hostess who tends to the needs of her guests aboard Sunrise, an orbital resort space hotel she runs. This slow, almost haunting tale about space and the mythical beings that inhabit it searching for and finding each other is first sung to calm and wow a room full of Estella’s human guests. The song comes back later during a moment of high tension where it’s themes of two lost souls finding one another becomes even more relevant.
“Ensemble for Polaris” doesn’t quite represent Vivy in the same way that “Moonlight Densetsu” can be said to represent Sailor Moon. If you want that, Vivy’s “Sing My Pleasure” is kinda it’s overarching theme song. But this song was one of the first big examples of music being used in the show to change people’s lives for the better. The way it was used at the end of the 4th episode brought real tears to my eyes and had me rush to tell my friends that I’d found a new great anime.
Anime where music plays an outsized, in-universe roll is… kinda my thing. 🙂
Moonlight Densetsu - Sailor Moon
The first song I can remember as being from an anime has to be the english version of Sailor Moon’s “Moonlight Densetsu”. Sailor Moon, itself, was, back then, this strange cartoon with super powered girls fighting scary monsters while trying to live out their normal lives. There were awesome elemental attacks, and cool transformations, and ultimate finishing moves. And this song kicked all that off each episode.
But, more than that, the Sailor Moon theme song was the battle music that played in the final confrontation of the evil queen vs Sailor Moon representing the last guardian standing between earth and ultimate evil. Watching tiny Usagi hold her ground against the overwhelming attacks of Queen Beryl is kinda my first and maybe best memory of good fighting back against evil. Queen Beryl shouts about how the world is already filled with filth and hate, but Usagi responds that she believes in the world and in her friends. It’s a theme played out so many times in so many different anime, but for me, its starts here with those first guitar riffs of Moonlight Densetsu!
The song itself is interesting because even though it is the key bit of music used in the first season’s final battle of good against evil… it’s not all that upbeat and its lyrics have very little to do with such an epic struggle. Instead, it’s the soft focus, dreamy, angsty musings of a teenage girl happy to be born on the same planet as the boy she is in love with. But for something so unsuited to dark lightning being repelled by a shrinking bubble of light… it actually fits plenty well. The themes in that final battle, of hope and love overcoming evil, are kinda exemplified by these innocent musings of a girl in love.
In the years and decades since, I’ve found that the version I fell in love with is the english remake of the original Japanese song. And while I respect the original a ton, there’s something about that english version set to the cuts of the english Sailor Moon opening that still excites me to this day. Usagi does this little slashing move with the silver crystal beating back Queen Beryl’s dark lightning attack and in that one instant the song and animation comes together for me in a moment of iconic perfection.
That said, I more often listen to the original and to AmaLee’s fantastic english cover. Both instantly send me back to that fight of good vs evil in some of my earliest days of watching anime!
Episode 6 of Bunny Girl Senpai Might Have The Most Wholesome Twist Ever
I’ve been watching back through Bunny Girl Senpai and just re-finished Tomoe Koga’s arc. I’d forgotten how good it was. Both in the way it played out but I’d really forgotten the way it ended! I gasped when the endgame started and couldn’t help the big smile on my face as the show kept pilling on more and more happiness.
For the last three episodes, Sakuta has been acting as Tomoe’s boyfriend so as to help her avoid being asked out by a guy who her friend has a crush on. Being asked out would not only hurt her friend, it would disrupt Tomoe’s own precarious spot in her class’ social groupings. Almost everything she’s done over her first year in high school has been to fit in. She is constantly on her phone keeping up with her friends in their chat group. She changed her look and manner of speech when she moved to the big city for high school. And now she’s taken on a fake boyfriend in Sakuta. Her goal was to hang out with him for a few weeks and then have a public breakup so they could both go their separate ways. No entanglements. No complications. But her heart didn’t see it that way.
She developed a crush on Sakuta despite her sincere wishes for them to part ways and remain friends. This leads to the arc’s second time loop. Sakuta and Tomoe loop through their final date together four or five times before he finally gets her to be honest with herself and admit her true feelings. It’s a great little scene on its own, with Tomoe recounting the ways things should go. They’ll make a show of breaking up. She’ll help him get with his real girlfriend. And she and Sakuta will become best friends who can laugh about how fun this silly fake dating scheme was at the time. Except Tomoe isn’t laughing. Each time the day ends her heart longs for Sakuta a little more. And each morning she wakes up at the beginning of the same day, secretly hopeful that he is falling a little more for her just as each time she loops she falls just a little more for him. The time loop ends for real when Sakuta forces her to confront her true feelings. With tears running down her face Tomoe makes a heartfelt declaration of love to Sakuta which he gently turns down. Love hurts but is necessary.
And then we’re back to the same shot of Sakuta’s apartment building with the trees in the foreground that we’ve seen these past four or five final date loops. As a viewer am thinking: “Ok, show. I see what you are doing. You’re making me think the loop didn’t end, but you’ll cut to a clock or calendar or something and confirm that, yes, Tomoe’s tearful admission really did let she and Sakuta move on to tomorrow.”
Except that’s not what happens.
Instead of cutting inside to the anticipated clock or calendar, we cut to the newscast of the soccer tournament results that marked the repetition of Sakuta and Tomoe’s first time loop! The one that was happening some three weeks before! Instead of moving forward into the long awaited tomorrow, the show takes Sakuta almost a month back into the past! But for the cutest, most wholesome reasons!
It turns out that everything that Sakuta had experienced over the last three weeks was all a part of Tomoe’s “laplace’s demon” simulation of the future. Now, Sakuta gets to live through the three week period a second time knowing most everything that will happen. He again gains Tomoe as a coworker at his job. He again helps her friend find her phone charm. He again gets to see his sister’s eyes sparkle as she accepts her gifted new outfit. He again gets to study with Mai dressed in her bunny girl outfit. And this time aces his midterms instead of failing them because he’s already seen the questions. And, of course, most critically, he uses his knowledge of Mai’s responses to earn himself official boyfriend status and even a kiss from Mai.
What could have just been a perfectly great cathartic resolution to Sakuta and Tomoe’s story arc instead turned into three weeks of good luck granted to Sakuta for all his selflessness and hard work! All handed to me, the viewer, through one of the best double fake outs I can remember.
Well done, show. Well done! It’s this kind of amazing writing and execution that makes Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai a sparking diamond in the rough.
2022 Was A Great Year for Anime
2022 was a great year for anime. I don’t think I’ve experience a year this good since the phenomenal 2018 which gave us shows like:
- A Place Further Than The Universe
- Violet Evergarden
- Revue Starlight
- Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai
- SSSS.Gridman
- Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms
What 2022 gave us was both some wildly popular mainstream shows, and a fair number of excellent shows that came in out of nowhere or were just plain happy to exist off the beaten path. One thing that made me extra happy this year were the number of shows centered around music and personal creativity.
Here’s the shows I enjoyed most in 2022:
Police in a Pod – This police slice of life anime that sprung from the mind of a former real life Japanese patrol officer somehow manages to be both amusing and all too real. It follows the lives and happenings surrounding two patrol officers working out of a small neighborhood police station and features a wide variety of on the job and off the job situations the two must tackle.
The show mixes the joys of rescuing victims of abuse and catching criminals who think they are too clever to be caught with the real challenges and hardships officers go through in an effort to live their lives and keep their sanity while working in a system that doesn’t always have their best interests in mind. Everything from simple patrols, to search and rescues, to responding to troubling calls like domestic violence and suicides is represented here. The dialogue is witty without being annoying or “Marvel snappy”. And the institutional knowledge on display is fabulous, even if the animation budget was a size or so too small.
Akebi’s Sailor Uniform – As discussed at length in my review, this show is a modern classic. It’s an animator’s anime that takes joy in depicting the motions and emotions inherent in young teenager Komichi Akebi’s life as she goes to school, plays sports, and makes lots and lots of friends.
While it may never be as outwardly flashy as the effects-heavy combat animations in popular action anime, the artwork and artistry this show has to offer is, in many ways, second to none. The way the show combines that with a full class of interesting characters and a great soundtrack makes me think it will long be remembered.
My Dress-up Darling – Cosplay, dressing up as your favorite characters from tv or games or movies, is a popular pass time. But also one that is expensive and takes a good deal of skill to pull off successfully. Energetic, outgoing hipster Marin Kitagawa knows this all too well when her efforts to design a costume in an effort to become her favorite game character fails miserably. But then she meets the reserved Wakana Gojo at her high school one evening. His talents at designing outfits for tiny hina dolls for his family business sees him get roped in to be her cosplay costume designer.
What follows is a remarkably wholesome budding romance between these two lead characters, even though Marin’s greatest wish is to dress up as some surprisingly provocative figures from her favorite games and tv series. Respect, recognition of effort, and acknowledging one another’s boundaries and dreams play just as large a role in this romance anime as the crazy, and often revealing, costumes Marin commissions from Wakana.
The Executioner and Her Way of Life – There’s a genre of anime called “Isekai”, a word which means “different world”, which revolve around the core premise of a normal guy or girl from our modern world being transported to some kind of alternate fantasy world where they often gain impossible abilities and become the hero destined to save the day. There’s a lot of these. So many that copy cats and uninspired efforts sometimes give bad name to the good examples of the genre.
This show is one of those good ones mostly for the way it flips the concept on its head. In this particular fantasy world, people from our modern day Japan get summoned across dimensions and gain great magical powers, but those powers are just as often unbelievably dangerous as they are helpful. So, there exists a whole sect devoted to finding these would be heroes/villains/natural disasters and ending them before they can become a threat to themselves or others.
Our main character, priestess Menou, is tasked with killing newly transported innocent schoolgirl Akari Tokitō whose new innate powers of time manipulation are so dangerous they threaten everyone and everything. There’s just one problem: Akari is so powerful that she cannot be killed. Even a successful surprise assassination from Menou early in the series just sees Akari’s time powers turn back the clock on her own body so her fatal injuries are undone.
In order to save the world, these two characters come to form an unlikely friendship based on the mutual desire to find a way to kill Akari before her powers spiral out of control and break time itself. The show features fun characters and a good plot twist or two that make it all worth watching.
Healer Girl – In our modern day, the science of musical healing is beginning to join more traditional medical techniques for treating patients. We follow three up and coming musical healers as they apprentice at a local clinic and seek to earn their professional licenses.
This show is fun, colorful, and surprisingly musical. The three main character, of course, sing to do things like heal minor injuries or support surgeons during surgery, but singing is so innately a part of their lives that they do it all the time. This leads to fun segments of the girls singing out their life-long motivations or singing out technical musical terms for an upcoming exam while they clean their clinic. While it doesn’t have the biggest budget and there’s no particular conflict to keep you glued to your tv, this show provided me with enough wholesome musical fun to keep me watching week to week.
Ya Boy Kongming – Speaking of music, this show with its concept of ancient Chinese military strategist Zhuge Liang Kongming reawakening in modern day Japan in order to devise clever marketing strategies for an unknown club singer named Eiko Tsukimi just seemed far too odd for people to give it a chance. And then everyone saw it’s glorious opening with it’s crazy, upbeat music and outstandingly artsy animation and we were all hooked.
Spectacular, fortune-changing opening aside, this show kept its audience around by being a surprisingly well put together story of an unknown talent climbing the music charts to starhood while making friends and changing lives for the better along the way. If you liked Carole & Tuesday, you’ll like this too. It’s got music. It’s got heart. It’s got better art than I initially expected. It’s got one of the best anime openings of all time. What more do you really need?!
Birdie Wing: Golf Girls’ Story – Imagine the perfect golf anime. Stunningly detailed lakes and sand traps and fairways and brilliant blue skies. Extremely well animated swings. Intense on course rivalries. That perfect clinking sound of sinking a long, difficult putt. Now… mix in a hefty does of the extremely over the top gambling anime Kakegurui and add a dash of… I don’t know, something insane like Kill la Kill or Gurren Lagann… then stir vigorously. That’ll just about get you to Birdie Wing.
This is a crazy story of a female golfer named Eve who yells out the names of powerful secret swing techniques taught to her by a departed golf master. She plays illicit rounds of golf against wealthy, overconfident would-be rivals who bet against her often in opposition to the wishes of the cutthroat international golf mafia. She does this so she can humiliate everyone involved and pocket large sums of money so she can continue to protect her bar where she and her friends take care of a needy group of orphans. All of which goes well until Eve finally meets a true rival in the endlessly calm and collected Aoi Amawashi who herself is the offspring of two golfing legends. Aoi has become enslaved in corporate sponsorships thanks to her overbearing CEO of a mother and she too is in the sights of the golf mafia. Eve and Aoi become infatuated with each other’s skill and personality the first time they meet and soon join forces to take down the golf mafia and the invasive corporate powers ruining their lives.
Uh… yeah, this show is out of its mind. Which probably makes it the best possible golf anime that can be made!
Summer Time Rendering – High school aged Shinpei Ajiro is returning home to his small Japanese island town in order to attend the funeral of his similarly aged adoptive sister Ushio Kofune who recently died in a drowning accident.
Except, maybe it was no accident. And maybe the supernatural was involved. By the end of the first episode Shinpei ends up getting murdered only to awaken a few days earlier back on the ferry he rode in on… and the expansive, intersting story goes from there. The animation is excellent. The characters are great. The story is well plotted. And I’m not gonna talk about any more of it… Just go watch it, already!
Lycoris Recoil – Modern day Japan is a nice safe place because it is a country of nice, caring people. Well, that, and because the government runs a miniature army of “Lycoris”, highly trained assassins disguised as schoolgirls, who are constantly on undercover patrols killing any and all bad guys before they can threaten anyone.
The show follows top Lycoris Chisato Nishikigi and her recently demoted partner Takina Inoue as they work out of a small cafe and help everyday people solve larger than life problems. Chisato is what made this anime great. She is upbeat, excitable, and very nearly hyperactive. Her refreshing outlook on life sees her try to fully enjoy her each and every moment but also sees her unwilling to kill because she does not wish to take similar precious moments away from anyone… even bad guys. It’s a philosophy she spends the entire show imparting on her new, grumpy, by the book protégé, Takina.
Highly enjoyable characterizations and some excellent animation made this a must watch series, even if the entire concept was a bit odd.
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury – Marketed as the first of the long running Gundam series to feature a female lead character, Witch From Mercury is not your typical Gundam show in more ways than one. It starts with a hard hitting prologue and then switches gears to something of a space high school setting where our lead character, Suletta Mercury, seems like the outer space version of a country bumpkin dropped into an odd mix of petty school cliques, intense Earthian vs Spacian economic rivalries, and high stakes corporate politics. Oh, and Suletta and her mother at first seem to know nothing of the tragic prologue they were both very much a part of!
This show features awesome giant robot fights, a suspiciously idealistic main character, and a plot that seems to know what it’s doing but at the same time plays its cards very close to its chest. It’s up to the viewer to pick out the little discrepancies strewn about the episodes that makes this outwardly happy show into something much more intense and horrifying that it first appears.
Admittedly, this show is only at its halfway point, and it could totally take a bad, unsatisfying turn in its second half this Spring. But, for now at least, it’s a hands down smashing example of a show that trusts its audience to dig into its story and find the hints that it is constantly dropping. I love that kind of thing!
Do It Yourself – Set in a slightly more high tech Japan filled with helpful AI pet robots and quadcopter drones that fill the skies each day as they deliver orders to people’s houses, this show is actually a celebration of putting love and attention in to making things by hand.
The show opens with klutzy, high schooler Serufu Yua finding herself at odds with her childhood friend and neighbor Miku Suride. The two are being spit up as they are about to start their first day at different high schools. Serufu is going to a traditional school, while Miku is going to be attending a high tech academy. In an effort to fix their ailing friendship, Serufu ends up joining her school’s Do It Yourself club and starts in on rebuilding a wooden bench that used to sit between their houses.
Along with the injury prone Serufu and her slightly stuck up friend comes a delightful cast of characters all who join the DIY club for different reasons. By the end, they are all participating in making some excellently envisioned arts and crafts to promote their club.
In addition to fun characters and a nice, low-key story, this anime has also gotten a lot of praise for it’s somewhat stylized approach to art and animation. It’s nowhere near flashy as some shows, but apparently a lot of work went into creating and maintaining its complex shot composition and semi-watercolor look.
Bocchi the Rock! – At first glance, this show has been done before. Four girls joke and laugh and bond as they throw around tons of witty dialogue whilst forming a band? This show is just K-On! Except, it isn’t. Not at all. Instead, what this fascinating anime provides is a feast of crazy animation and film making techniques that explore the inner thoughts and worries of lead character Hitori “Bocchi” Goto as she is dragged outside her incredibly lonely comfort zone when she is invited to join an after school band.
Without Bocchi as its lead character, this woud be a show very similar to K-On!. Just one with its characters much more focused on actually forming a band instead of listlessly goofing off and drinking tea. But with Bocchi as its lead, the show is instead this weird, wild, detailed and all too relatable portrayal of how someone with lifelong crippling social anxiety acts and thinks. Bocchi is prone to getting lost in her overwhelming worries and delusional flights of fancy whenever she has to interact with others. The animators put a ton of time and energy into finding ever more inventive ways to portray her inner turmoil with a shockingly wide array of art styles ranging from courtroom sketches and film noir scenes to claymation, puppets, and even brief, jarring moments of live action.
Beyond its inventively artistic portrayals of Bocchi’s often panicked mental state, Bocchi the Rock also boasts a decent knowledge of how bands and clubs operate. And it has a great core cast of primary and secondary characters. And it tuggs at you with great moments of friendship and bonding. And it features a surprising number of fully animated on-stage full length song performances. And it is consistently very strong on the art and animation side of things even outside of Bocchi’s freakout moments.
Yeah, this is a complete, unique package. It’s kinda no surprise it quickly became one of the most talked about animes of the year.
Cyberpunk Edgerunners – There’s an old, ongoing joke that anime studio Trigger’s over the top style, luscious animation, and dedication to each of their projects is just what anime needs… that they saved anime… and it’s not really a joke, because it is also true!
This show was seen as a weird, too long delayed afterthought cash in to the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. The game had suffered an extremely troubled production and had come out with so many bugs, crashes, slowdowns, and flaws that Sony took the drastic step of removing the title from its online store for several months while the worst of the problems were being fixed. The game was almost condemned to failed project status by gamers, so having an anime set in the same world come out more than a year later seemed very odd. But, yeah, Trigger did it again.
As something of a sidestory in the 2077 universe, Edgerunners follows a crazy crew of Cyberpunk mercernaries as they cheat and steal and hack and fight their way to success in a retro futuristic world that offers zero comfort or solace. You either go big or you die trying. Somehow, Trigger took this wild world and filled it with a new stories and new characters that are arguably more compelling that those within the game itself. Add in a stellar soundtrack and shockingly good animation and this show is an absolute winner. The show was so well received, in fact, that it pushed the game back onto the top of the internet’s most played charts for a few weeks more than a year after it had been abandoned by gamers.
So, once again, Trigger saved anime. Oh, and they saved gaming this time, as well!
All The Rest – You might notice this list is missing some of the biggest big name hitters. There’s Spy X Family, Chainsaw Man, and Kaguya-sama: Love Is War‘s 3rd season that I simply haven’t gotten to yet. Attack on Titan is in like part four of its final season and I don’t want to watch it until it is finished. And those are just the ones I can think of…
Yep. 2022 was a great year for anime!
Return of the Ice Jerk
I play a good bit of Bungie's Destiny, and one of the... least good... decisions they've made in a long time is introduce a set of powers that seem specifically designed to interfere with the flow of the game. Stasis, aka Darkness Ice, puts up ice walls, freezes players in place instantly even in PVP, and generally just slows and disrupts the game. Even when you are using it the right way in cooperative modes it just screws with everything and often frustrates other players.
Here's an amusing clip of the Stasis ice grenade being used correctly by me but causing unintended trouble by launching an enemy across a battlefield.
Where You Can Find Me
Twitter is falling apart. Facebook is evil as ever. Reddit is annoying. I suppose I'm only @Ragashingo over on Mastodon right now. And here. My own space that I control.
Macross Frontier Episode Guide 28: Labyrinth of Time
After more than a year since its Japanese release, I was finally able to see the Macross Frontier Short Film: Labyrinth of Time. And I really enjoyed it. This story primarily follows Ranka Lee. In large part because with Alto Saotome lost in space and Sheryl Nome still in a coma, she is the only one of Macross Frontier’s three main characters still active within the camera’s eye. But don’t worry, the story makes it a point to involve the other two.
We catch up to Ranka on some settled world whose architecture features things that kinda, sorta, look like artistic gold Tokyo Towers. She’s singing at a concert branded as “From Me To You - Ranka Lee”. Ranka is looking confident on stage and we find her sporting a new, slightly more mature haircut that features a neat bit of longer hair hanging off to her left. (Maybe there’s a hip, technical hair term for that… I don’t know what it might be.) She stars off singing Hoshi Kira (Starshine) in front of a huge audience. Both her outfit and the stage in front of her change dramatically thanks to the Macross universe’s ubiquitous hologram technology. Ranka is visually transported back to the Varja homeworld in front of Alto’s downed Valkyrie and is again wearing a white dress with a blue bow similar to the one she wore when she sang for him back then. Midway through the song, though, she receives a sharp pain in her stomach. Her fold bacteria are responding to something. Ranka, who is apparently a much more professional singer these days, continues on with her song, but it looks like she organizes a search for the fold signal immediately after her concert is done.
Ranka and her adoptive older brother Ozma, along with Luca, Michael, Klan Klan, and Nanase journey out to a Protoculture ruin set in the middle of a lake on the same planet. There they set up monitoring equipment while Ranka and Nanase set up a shrine of sorts containing items important to Alto and Sheryl. Soon, the ruins begin to respond, and Ranka runs forward as the ruins begin to turn and transform. She enters an energy portal just seconds before it seals itself off and is deposited inside the flooded ruin.
The ruin quickly drains itself as it continues to transform and respond to the song that Ranka begins to sing. Pretty quickly, Ranka and her support staff begin to see images of her memories of Alto and Sheryl made large thanks to the Protoculture technology. As Ranka’s song progresses, we see imagery of her meeting Alto for the first time, and of her calling Alto one night when she was nervous and unable to sleep. Ranka also sees images of herself and Sheryl when they sang together on stage and rode one of Frontier’s Island 1 trolley cars together with Alto and Brera as body guards holding back tons of adoring fans.
Ranka reaches a central area of the ruins and throws Alto’s paper airplane which begins to soar with the magic of her song… only to drop as Ranka begins to doubt herself. She collapses to her hands and knees and trails off singing “What do you think of me now?” and “Have I become a stronger person?” to the images of Alto and Sheryl. It seems clear that Ranka has grown a lot since the war with the Varja, but she still has that core of self doubt that she displays here.
Fortunately, Sheryl’s voice echoes through the ruins, singing the first few lines of Diamond Crevasse. Sheryl’s voice lifts Alto’s paper airplane which is soon joined by a flurry of Sheryl’s own butterflies. Encouraged, Ranka begins her song again, questioning if Alto and Sheryl can hear her. Ranka and Sheryl join in a limited duet as the Protoculture ruin comes alive with color and sound. The song and the ruin build in intensity as representations of Sheryl in a wedding dress and Alto in his kabuki gown and flight suit both appear in huge form, so large they are even visible far outside the ruin. Finally, as the song reaches its climax, we see Sheryl reach out to Alto as a beam of energy shoots forth from the ruins and stretches far beyond the planet out past even our galaxy.
When it all ends, Ranka finds herself back in the center of the again dormant ruin, still on her hands and knees. She stands, looks to the sky and says “I’m not losing you this time” as Alto’s paper airplane returns to her hand.
Movie Impressions
While this short film isn't super densely packed, it does contain a good bit of nostalgia for the two Macross Frontier characters who have been out of the picture since the end of the Wings of Goodbye movie. Ranka looks and sounds better than ever. The whole film is based around her 7+ minute song, and I think it’s one of the character’s best yet. Sheryl always carried the big, weighty musical numbers in the anime and in the movies, but here, Ranka finally gets an epic piece of her own. Something that's not child-like or filled with rainbows and stuffed bears.
Beyond the song, the animation and effects were spectacular. I really enjoyed the song when I first heard it several months ago, but I was a little afraid that the animation would consist of nothing more than reused scenes from the anime. Nope! Other than a few brief flashbacks to Wings of Goodbye at the beginning, this was all brand new, highly detailed animation. It looks pretty dang good, too! I was scared we were getting a minor side project, but instead we got something that clearly had a ton of care and attention put into it!
And then there’s the story. Alto is still far away with the Varja queen. Sheryl is still in her coma. But the two seem to be connected when Ranka awakens the Protoculture ruins. And with that beam, which is said to be an amplified fold wave transmission, I think Sheryl is maybe calling Alto home. With Macross, it’s hard to tell if this is just a one off piece, or something that might be followed up on in a decades time, or the revival of the series’ attention to the Frontier storylines. I would love a new Frontier series. I would also love if we just got a yearly or bi-yearly short film that slowly took us to Alto’s return and Sheryl’s reawakening. But as things are, I just have to brace for this being a one off that will never get a followup. But, even if it is… it still managed to live up to my frankly uncontrolled excitement when I first heard about this new project a couple years ago. So, regardless of what does or doesn’t happen next, I’m glad it exists.
Specific Scenes I Loved
Ranka on the big stage. Satelight, the anime studio that handles Macross, is no stranger to singers on stage. They did Macross Frontier and Macross Delta, as well as the highly musical Symphogear series that has its fair share of singers and stages. But, this may be the studio’s most impressive stage yet. The crowd movement with their pen lights is just right. The feeling of vastness works very well. Even the holographic transformation looks spectacular. I really did love these stage scenes.
Ranka’s run. During an interlude in her song, Ranka runs and pulls off her soaked jacket as the camera spins round and round her. The background movement plus the near constant redraws of Ranka in the foreground are very impressive. She is in motion removing her jacket and running flat out almost the entire time as the camera continues its fast rotations around her. There’s all sorts of flashy energy portals and giant holograms in this short, but this may be the scene that impressed me the most.
The paper airplane flying once more as Sheryl began to sing. I loved Sheryl reaching out with her song and also loved the fairly subtle reference back to the end of Macross Zero where Mao Nome dropped Shin Kudo’s Valkyrie in the water as her voice briefly wavered. The animation here isn’t really the same at all, but the power of a songstress’ voice being able to lift an airplane? Yeah… that’s totally a Macross thing.
All in All
Though this film is short and ends in yet another cliffhanger, I was really glad to dip back into the world of Macross Frontier. It had the music and magic and animation I was looking for in a new installment of the Frontier story. I hope we get more, but even if we don’t, I’ll be grateful for this entry that seems to point the way to a better future for Alto and Sheryl.