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!
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.
Review: Akebi's Sailor Uniform Anime
In Short:
Released in 2022 by CloverWorks, Akebi’s Sailor Uniform is a twelve episode anime based on a manga of the same name. It follows twelve year old Komichi Akebi as she starts her first year of junior high at the same all girls private academy that her mother attended several years before. All throughout elementary school Komichi was the only student in her class, so she is beyond thrilled to finally be able to make friends with girls her own age.
Due to an odd mix up, neither Komichi nor her mother realized that the school recently changed its dress code from the bright white sailor-style uniforms Komichi’s mother wore to more modern dress shirts and dark navy blazers. This leaves Komichi as the one girl at her new school who is dressed differently from everyone else. Fortunately, Komichi’s athleticism, endlessly cheerful attitude, and occasional quirkiness help her quickly become the most popular girl in school as she befriends the fifteen other girls in her homeroom class.
Suggested Minimum Watch: 2 Episodes. The first episode largely covers the lead up to getting Komichi to her new school. The second episode, where Komichi first begins to really interact with her classmates, more closely resembles the flow of the rest of the series.
Full Review:
I was initially a little confused when I heard that the opening song to Akebi’s Sailor Uniform featured the voice actresses of all sixteen members of Komichi’s homeroom class. Having now finished the show, it strikes me as a perfect choice, and one that immediately reflects what the show is all about.
The song fits so well because Akebi’s Sailor Uniform strives to give life to every member of Komichi’s class. Each one of these girls is more than just a few facts on a fan wiki. They each have their own lifelike personalities that are slowly revealed during the course of the anime. By the end of the series I had come to know more about each of these sixteen girls and can now tell you at least one noteworthy scene each of them features in.
For instance, take Toko Usagihara who sits at the desk behind Komichi and is practically the visual and emotional reincarnation of Ritsu Tainaka from K-On! She is someone who is goofy and who loves to mildly tease others, but also someone who enjoys delighting her friends with good-natured surprises. We find that she is actually a bit jealous of Komichi, but she quickly puts that aside to become perhaps the best supporting character in the series.
Or, take Riri Minakami, the blond-haired girl that sits on the opposite side of the room from Komichi. She’s an award-winning athlete and someone who is fiercely competitive in most everything she does. She’s also perfectly happy to annoy her fellow classmates if it gets them to interact with her. At one point, she makes a bet with Komichi that leads to one of the most tension filled episodes in this notably low tension series.
And then there’s Komichi herself. She is this incredible bundle of non-stop energy who tries her absolute best at everything she does. Yes, she’s a little quirky, and a little naive. In some ways, because she lives in a rural area without anyone to interact with other than her mother, father, and adorable little sister, she is just a bit of a country bumpkin. But, to her credit, Komichi is so friendly with and so accepting of her peers that they can’t help but admire her. Her athleticism and generally good grades don’t hurt her any, either. Komichi’s homemade sailor uniform may be the easiest way to pick her out of a crowd at school, but it’s her personality that wins her an entire class of friends.
One of the things this anime excels at is creating memorable moments of interaction between its characters. Their dialogue. Their actions. Everything just sorta works together to make these characters feel authentic. Frequently, episodes will feature Komichi befriending or hanging out with one or two of her classmates which often leads to unexpected, heartwarming scenes.
Sometimes, these scenes are defined by their quietness. At one point, Komichi and a friend are trapped at a bus stop by a sudden downpour and choose to read a book together until the rain lets up. Other times, these scenes can be quite energetic. Like when one of Komichi’s friends attempts to teach her how to cook with somewhat disastrous results.
What’s remarkable is how natural each of these moments feel. Although Akebi’s Sailor Uniform has a bit of tension here and there, and a fair amount of humor sprinkled throughout, the show doesn’t really exist to push melodrama or jokes with punchlines. This isn’t really a K-On!, a A Place Further Than The Universe, or a Sound! Euphonium. It’s more like the show is just here to give us a peak into the girls’ lives. Even their occasional goofy or embarrassing moments are used to reveal these girls’ inner thoughts or dig up some small nuggets of backstory. Many of these moments often have subtle but lasting impacts, too. Like how being temporarily trapped at the bus stop leads Komichi to finally figure out which school club she wanted to join. And how, by joining that club, she inadvertently ends up helping another one of her classmates find the confidence to learn a new skill later on.
Sure, sometimes the girls in Akebi’s Sailor Uniform do notably silly or odd things. The show makes it a minor point to not shy away from embarrassing moments which led to some on The Internet to mistake it for being far more weird or far less wholesome than it actually is. I’ll talk more specifics down in the Dig Deeper section below, but basically, if you see someone accusing the show of being anything but pure and good-natured, there’s a good chance they’re vastly overblowing one scene or another.
Art and Animation:
Akebi’s Sailor Uniform owes a lot to its manga. Perhaps more than most anime. It, of course, gets its strong characters and heartwarming plots from its print version, but it also gets a lot of its art and even its animation almost directly from its manga!
Some of the most detailed scenes of animation in the anime, like Komichi tying her hair back into a ponytail, or the fun episode four ending credits where Komichi does some impressive jump rope tricks, come from moments where the manga would drop everything away and just string together three, or four, or a dozen impressive close ups of Komichi in motion. The anime does a terrific job of taking the detailed art style of the manga and giving it a place where its static drawings could come to life with real motion.
There are certainly anime out there that feature more animation. More frames. More effects. And more details than this show. But I see Akebi’s Sailor Uniform as an animator’s anime. This is a show that Tsubame Mizusaki, a character from the anime Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, would want to work on. She was representative of any number of hard working animators determined to go the extra mile to depict movement and emotion despite all too common time crunches and budget pressures. And that’s just what Akebi’s Sailor Uniform does. It features a fair amount of stunning backgrounds and takes a ton of delight in conveying emotive movements without the benefits of the seemingly unlimited budgets that some anime shows or movies seem to be gifted with.
Sometimes the show has to drop to beautiful still panning shots to get its point across, but when it really wants to animate something, it does so brilliantly. This is a show that, in brief moments of effort, can rival Sound! Euphonium in its depictions of a musical instrument or challenge volleyball anime Haikyuu!! for the best depiction of a game winning spike.
As I already mentioned, Akebi’s Sailor Uniform does something fun and unique with its opening song by allowing all sixteen of the main voice actresses to participate. The ending theme is nice and warm in a way that fits the show well. There’s also a nice song or two within the anime sung or played by characters. Interestingly enough, the production also recorded a short album by Komichi’s favorite idol, Miki Fukumoto. You can hear those tracks in a couple places throughout the anime.
All In All:
Akebi’s Sailor Uniform is a fun, good-natured show that allows its energetic lead to become the glue that binds her entire junior high class together. It’s got some great music, some great animation, and does a particularly good job of creating impactful moments while it spreads its story around its fairly large cast of characters. And it does all this without resorting to any sort of tragedy or drama. It was a true delight to watch, and I think it will be well regarded as one of the better pure slice of life anime yet produced.
With a title like Akebi’s Sailor Uniform, you naturally wonder “why does this girl care so much about her school clothes?!” I loved the way it set up and layered Komichi’s reasons for loving her uniform. Komichi first fell in love with sailor uniforms the way kids get enamored by lots of this: by seeing it on tv. Specifically, Komichi saw her favorite teen idol, Miki Fukumoto, star in a random commercial for a brand of bottled water and Komichi couldn’t help but fall in love with Miki’s sailor uniform.
But then the show goes further, and has Komichi find a picture of her mom wearing a similar uniform back when she was Komichi’s age. Really though, knowning Komichi’s mom, I bet she dug that picture out for her daughter. Komichi’s mom was so active and supportive, I can just imagine her getting a lot of enjoyment seeing her daughter freak out over that old photo.
Then there’s the way they go together to the fabric store and Komichi’s mom lets her pick out the colors. And the way that Komichi takes up every household chore so as to allow her mom more time to work on her uniform. And it all comes together in that highly detailed almost dreamy shot of Komichi posing for her mother and sister downstairs after pulling on her new school clothes with that small, pure smile on her face. Simply amazing.
To me, the whole first half of the first episode did a terrific job of selling why Komichi’s sailor uniform was so important to her. It also really kinda gets all of that out of the way so the show can focus on character moments later on with the uniform just being a common thread (yes… pun away…) linking Komichi to her friends.
Oh. And I didn’t mention her too much in the main review, but Komichi’s little sister Kao is this show’s secret weapon. My favorite moment with her has to be the time she greeted volleyball star Hitomi Wasio with “You’re big!” only to get picked way up in the air by Hitomi, who is the tallest girl in Komichi’s class. “What is this little thing?” Hitomi deadpans while Kao giggles and cheers. 🙂
Another thing I liked a lot about the show was the way it occasionally added these extra layers of depth to its characters. Sometimes in unexpected ways. Two big examples here:
– The way Toko Usagihara’s smile briefly fades after she lends Komichi her blue dress. Toko says something like “If I were you I might have gone to school in Tokyo…” Later, after Komichi enthusiastically fails at cooking, Toko says: “I feel kinda relieved, though. I thought you were this perfect girl that could do anything.” In a show that is almost entirely devoid of conflict… Toko’s tinge of jealousy at Komichi’s looks and skills is really neat to catch on to.
– The anime does a really good job of adapting Erika’s storyline. Specifically in relation to her willingness to play the piano. At the beginning of the school year, Erika had not played her piano for some time. She had one in her dorm room, but it was covered in dust. Later, she wipes off that dust, and later still, we get to see her play a few notes on the piano in the music room while Komichi and Oshizu Hebimori hide from her. As the series draws to an end, Erika shakes off her rust while practicing for Komichi’s big afterparty dance. When Erika gets up on stage and plays her heart out for Komichi she oddly thinks: “The only reason I was able to enjoy playing like this again… was because of Komichi-san.”
There’s a second half to Erika’s story. Later in the manga we get to see the capital ‘R’ Reasons of why Erika stopped playing her piano earlier in life. There’s a bunch of little details dropped in the anime about this. Even one of the school clubs Erika joins is relevant, but the key piece of the puzzle is left out on purpose. As the story progresses past the ending of the anime, you begin to realize that there’s even more to Erika’s character than you thought there was. I love that the anime did the ground work for that future story even though it probably knew it’d never get to tell the second half.
Finally… the thing that disappointed me the most about Akebi’s Sailor Uniform was the way a few on The Internet reacted to it. There were some who strongly implied or outright accused it of being lewd. Of objectifying and sexualizing young girls. For the most part, I think these accusations are complete nonsense. That they say far more about the commentator than they do the show. Maybe that’s a bit of a mean way of putting it, but I read way too many people comment that they were hesitant about watching this show because of what others said about it. Which is a shame when the show is almost entirely pure and good-natured.
There were people who got worked up over Erika sniffing her nail clippers. To me, this was a scene that basically served to break the ice between Erika and Komichi, and was something Erika would not normally do. She straight up said she did not normally take her nail clippers with her. I think this was an embarrassing moment that the anime decided not to shy away from. And why should it have? Yes, it was embarrassing… but it was also something done on a whim. The point here was that Erika was nervous about her first day of school, and that Komichi’s act first, think later nature help start them down a path towards friendship.
There were plenty of others who accused the show of having a foot fetish. To me, this is just complete nonsense. Yes, we got quite a few detailed frames of feet in this show. But not a single one of them was lewd in any way. Komichi fidgeting while she talked with her father on the phone, or the show detailing a close up of her feet while she stood poised to jump into the pool… is not anything! Of all the accusations, the ones saying the show has a “foot fetish” are the ones that made me the most angry because the accusation is entirely made up.
The other moment I think people got worked up over unnecessarily over was the scene where Komichi pulls on her skirt and sailor uniform for the first time. The anime showed it in a lot of detail. So did the manga. But not because it was objectifying her. It did so because this was a special moment in this girl’s life. Her mother had made these clothes for her. She was trying them on for the first time. This outfit is one she knew would largely define her to her classmates at her new school for the next few years. And it’s not like Komichi was dressed provocatively in any way prior to pulling on her clothes. Her undergarments were actually surprisingly modest. Again, I think people who tried to turn this moment of awe in this girl’s life into something crude deserve some serious push back.
There was one scene in the show I do think deserves some scrutiny. In episode 3, Kei Tanigawa arrives home to find that her mom has gone out shopping. Alone in her room, she takes some partially undressed selfies. Komichi had spent the day pestering her to show off her legs. Telling her how pretty she thought her skin was. That part, I see as innocent. Komichi is the same girl who will smell her own feet or try to trade her sailor uniform top for a classmate’s blazer in the middle of class without thinking things through.
What Kei did, though… we only have to listen to her own inner thoughts as she snapped the photos on her phone.
“I actually took one! That’s so risque!”
“But it’s not lewd or anything… right?”
“I’m just taking a picture of myself.”
“And yet my heart is pounding.”
“I might be… a pervert.”
“I can’t send any of these.”
Yeah, this is a girl who knows what she is doing… has decided that what she is doing… is wrong. Or at least that she is uncomfortable with it. So… why does the anime show it? I think it has to do with one of her final thoughts:
“It’s like I’m seeing a version of myself I don’t know.”
Kei is seen by her classmates as the proper, strict, rules following student who cozies up to the teachers. And that annoys her a good bit.
“I can hear you.” She thinks to herself about the criticism others voice about her when she isn’t in the room. “I’m not trying to be particularly serious or anything. I just… don’t think anything is worth getting in trouble with the teachers over.”
These are the thoughts and the actions of a girl who is a little depressed by how others see her. By following the rules at school, she is not doing anything wrong at all. And yet, socially… she is. Kei looks over to Komichi, a girl who dances freely in the courtyard or who abruptly approaches people to ask them how they are doing, and wishes she herself could be a little less uptight.
“She so easily does the things I’ve always wanted to, but couldn’t.” Kei thinks about Komichi.
And that’s what she does with her selfies. They are minor acts of rule breaking. A minor rebellion. If the girl herself sees her own actions as a little risque or lewd, we can’t really argue with that, can we?
It’s our jobs as viewers to weight the anime’s willingness to show us these actions and scenes with the value they bring to the story or character. To me, there’s real value here. Of seeing the shy, depressed Kei alleviating some of her negative feelings.
We should also consider what Kei did afterwards and how this changed her. Did she fall into the clutches of a predator? Did she make this an ongoing habit? No. Aside from one accidentally sent photo, this is the only time we know of her doing this. And, on the positive side, her actions seem to have unlocked her love of photography. She went on to join the photography club. She pretty much became the class photographer and even made a wholesome photobook about her friends. If the show had shown us a fully nude shot of this girl then the equation would certainly change.
On balance, I think this was a positive thing the show did. It peered into a girl’s insecurities and we saw her address and overcome them. She is much happier at the end of the series than she is at the beginning and with no apparent ill effects otherwise. What sort of judgement should we put on the writers or animators for this sort of outcome?
Would the story be better without a couple of those lewd shots appearing on screen? Are we to just outright ban girls and women from ever doing anything we consider bad? Some of these questions you can only answer for yourself. But, you also need to properly convey context to others if you’re going to bring up these issues with them.
My answers? I think this was a good character moment. Yes, one that pushed some boundaries in some minor ways, but, on the whole of things, was nowhere close to what some people were presenting it as. I think it fit in with this show that is willing to mix in a few embarrassing moments with the far larger number of sweet, wholesome ones to tell a story of realistic characters and their actions.
Review: Kill la Kill
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.
There are almost certainly Easter eggs and references all over this show but I didn’t catch that many. The one thing that I saw online that I thought was pretty cool is the very first time we see Ryuko transformed, when she is blocking the boxing club’s punches, a piece Ragyo’s theme Blumenkranz plays signifying that Ruyko is, in fact, her daughter. It pretty much takes a rewatch to notice this as neither Ragyo nor her theme appear again for several more episodes.
Review: Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song-
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.
One of my absolute favorite parts of Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song- was the risks it was willing to take with its story. Most notably the way it changed Diva over the course of her one hundred year mission. She went from a quiet, unsure singer to a badass willing to sacrifice others’ loved ones to save numerous lives, to a bright cheerful amnesiac who had completely figured out her core mission of how to sing from her heart, to a conflicted, confused, incomplete version of her former selves who had to start again.
I loved it when she truly became “Vivy” in the Metal Float arc, and I loved it just as much when the show dared wipe her memory and have her spend decades as her carefree “Diva” personality. That she ultimately saved the world by remembering all the things she went through was very touching and very fitting for someone who had struggled for so long for the sake of a mission she often wasn’t sure was completely real.
Another one of my favorite parts is near the end of the Ophelia arc when Matsumoto truly realizes how much Diva meant to him and he reassures a soon to be deleted “Diva” that he respects the importance of her core mission just as much as he respects his own. He calls them equals when before he scoffed and belittled Diva’s desire to learn how to sing from her heart. It wasn’t super flashy and wasn’t even all that tear-jerking, but it was a good moment of storytelling that I really appreciated.
That said, there were a few places I was left a bit confused as to what the show was doing. For as good as it was telling a time skipping story, it left a few notable loose ends behind.
First and foremost was the ongoing plot with Yūgo Kakitani. As a boy, he was traumatized when his AI piano teacher was destroyed while rescuing strangers from a fiery car crash. But to me, his discomfort at the way his family treated this robotic person just wasn’t enough to justify him joining a terrorist group and attempting to kill people.
Worse, while I loved his fight scene with Diva late in the series, the events leading up to it were pretty unclear. Who gave him an AI body? Why did he decide that fighting Diva to have her answer questions about the way AIs think would work better than just asking her? Why did he fight her at all if he’d already had a change of heart about the usefulness of AIs as shown by his granddaughter near the end of the series.
I was sure that Kakitani was going to be a character that joined forces with Diva as the series progressed. A human joining with an AI to work towards a better future. Instead, Kakitani’s story is kinda just one of him attempting to carry out murderous crimes over a span of decades. Diva ends up stopping him each time but instead of learning about the kindness of AIs, he just kinda decides to have one last fight… and then he dies unsatisfied. I was really hoping for more from his character.
The other big issue the show has is that it kinda undoes everything Diva accomplishes with Matsumoto over their one hundred year mission. Each time they made a change the Archive was there working behind the scenes to blunt their progress. Some people go so far to claim that the show is a disappointment because of this, but I don’t think so. In my view, the Diva that we saw in the first episode would never have been able to write her song or make the decisions she did in the final battle against the Archive. It was Diva’s experiences, good and bad, over that one hundred year period that readied her to oppose the Archive. Basically, I think some people wanted the show to be Terminator, where decisive actions matter most when it was more focused on character growth as the way to a better world.
To be fair, I was really hoping that Diva would jump back another one hundred years and speed run her life saving everyone along the way with her knowledge of everything that happened during her first failed attempt to save humanity. I wanted to see her save the Sunrise, and Grace, and Ophelia, and Kakitani and have them all there with her in her second attempt to defeat the Archive. Alas, the show wanted to go in a different direction than I was hoping for.
My final issue with the show is the wrap-up was a little soft. What happened between Humanity and the AIs after the Archive was shut down? Did Humanity dare trust widespread AI helpers ever again? We just don’t know. I’m a little more satisfied with a rebooted, memory wiped Diva, however. Yes, it is bittersweet that the heroine that Diva developed into over her one hundred year mission was lost, but in a lot of ways I’m still happy for her. Diva was never meant to be a heroine. She was never meant to fight misguided humans and AIs, or watch her actions lead someone to suicide, or struggle with her own grief and despair as an important part of the personality she spent decades developing was deleted out from under her. She was meant to sing and make everyone happy, and my take on the ending is she was given the chance to pursue her core mission once again without all the heartache and tragedy that was forced upon her.
Review: Gekijouban Shoujo☆Kageki Revue Starlight Movie
I finally got to see the Revue Starlight Movie, and it was incredible.
The anime series, which the movie follows up on, was mostly about main character Karen Aijo refocusing on her acting ability in order to star in a lead role of the musical stage play Starlight alongside her childhood friend Hikari. Their determination to fulfill their promise to be stars together helped show the other stage actresses at their musical theater academy what it really meant to be Stage Girls. The show beautifully explored the motivations of each of the nine main cast members by pitting them against each other in one on one magical musical stage battle Revues where they fought with swords and axes and bows, but where their drive and stage presence determined who won the day. Ultimately, Karen and Hikari’s promise brought together their entire class as friends who now realized that being the one exclusive Top Star wasn’t all there was to musical theater. It drove home the message that even when you fail you can always stand up and try again.
The movie simply asks: Then what?
For Karen, the driving force in her life ever since she was a child has been her powerful but naive promise to star beside her friend in one particular play. She did that. So, what happens to her determination and drive once she achieves her goal? For the others, the movie takes a deeper look into places the show left them at in relation to their friends. All of them are graduating soon. Where will they go? What stage will they seek out? How will being pulled apart after graduation affect their relationships with each other?
Like the series, the movie is more a spectacle than a story. The heart of the movie, as was true of the heart of the show, are its incredibly artistic and deeply layered Revues. In them, stage combat set to awesome musical duets filled with vivid, imaginative imagery see the girls’ desires and motivations clash against each other in order to reveal their true feelings.
Should they continue to take their acting seriously after they graduate? How do you support one another if you both want to be stars rather than merely a leader and a follower? Can fear, rivalry, and jealously be channeled for a greater good? What happens if one person wants to take a different path than the other wishes for them? How can a honest, heated rivalry help drive people to greater heights? It’s these kinds of things that are explored in the midst of battles set in a variety of locations like the top of speeding subway trains, within olympic sports competitions, or as part of over the top stage dramas set inside other stage dramas.
Art and Sound
The Revue Starlight Movie is animated beautifully with many different settings featuring tons of bold, bright colors and well thought out designs. This is easily the prettiest Revue Starlight has ever been. With the movie-level budget and lack of week to week tv show deadlines, the team was able to really stretch their legs as compared to the tv series while still matching it stylistically. In some ways, the Revue Starlight art style is a bit simpler than the “animated realism” you see from movies like Belle or Your Name. Backgrounds are a bit more painterly and a bit less complex, for instance. But that doesn’t mean the movie skimps on lighting or location design or animation. Revue Starlight has always been very aware that it’s job is to portray the grandeur of the stage, and the movie does just that on numerous occasions.
The magical Revue battles, which were always the artistic high points of the series, are even more so in the movie. There’s just a bit of extra lavishness to all of them. If the big episode eight fight between Hikari and Banana with its dramatic tension and incredible scene changes was the high bar for the series, it would be something closer to the minimum level of extravagance for most of the Revues in the movie. There are stunning scene changes, killer outfits, great use of wide shots and of close ups, and just a general heaping of theatrics infused within every scene.
The music in the movie is just as wonderful. There are definitely a bunch of callbacks. One of my favorites is a new slow instrumental version of “Knowledge of a Stage Girl” that does a wonderful job of enhancing a tender moment at the party kicking off the girls’ final theater festival. There’s also a bunch of great new music. All the new Revues, of course, have their own full length scores, and they are awesome. The visuals of the Revues are all outstanding, but the music isn’t left behind at all. Some of the most powerful moments come precisely because the way the music and visuals come together.
Throughout it all, this movie is still very much Revue Starlight… meaning it just oozes stunning theatrics from beginning to end, all heavily smothered in layers of intriguing metaphor. Like, why does a tomato explode in the middle of an endless desert just seven seconds into the film? Or, why, at one point, do we see the girls in their normal street clothes standing over themselves in their more ostentatious Revue outfits lying dead soaked in blood, which may or may not be tomato juice. What does it mean for a subway car to transform into a moving battleground? What does it mean to have one person who was engaged in an on-stage duel with a rival to suddenly vanish then reappear while clapping for their opponent from the seats of the audience? It’s kinda amazing how much of the movie’s visual grandeur exists to both be pleasing to the eye but to also prompt further thought. This is a movie that can be analyzed for days and days and still have more to show you.
All In All
The Revue Starlight Movie, like the show, is different from most any other anime out there. It is theatrics and hand to hand combat and catchy duets and constantly shifting imagery and fourth wall breaks that all serve to peel back the layers of its characters’ motivations. I think it is brilliant, but you have to be willing to both revel in its overwhelming spectacle but also be willing to put all that aside and look beyond the flash to see the interesting character moments waiting beneath. If you’re able to do so, you’ll find a series and a follow up movie that will blow you away with how well they are put together and how much fun they are.
One word of warning, you absolutely have to have seen the show before you start the movie. The Revue Starlight Movie just assumes you know what happened before and goes straight to what happens next. On the bright side, this means it doesn’t bog down at the beginning reminding you of what you already know, but it also means that you won’t really understand the characters or their actions very well at all if you haven’t seen the show.
There’s a ton more to talk about, so, if you’ve seen the movie, expand the section below and come Dig Deeper with me!
Each of the movie’s six Revues are awesome, eclectic weldings of singing, dancing, acting, stage combat, music, and orchestration. Like in the series, they all take place in a fictional, magical space, though this time the movie integrates this “Stage of Fate” a bit more directly into the real world whereas the series basically saw it solely located underneath the girls’ musical theater academy. Every one of these Revues is highly metaphorical and highly layered with details big and small.
I promise I did not notice all the nuance and subtle references. Some of the stuff is simply impossible to catch unless you are a native Japanese speaker, and I’m not one. But, I tried my best to share some insights and interpretations of each Revue. Please let me know if you noticed something I didn’t or if you you have a different opinion.
Revue of Annihilation
Banana fought and struggled for so long to keep herself and her classmates trapped in a time loop where everyone lived out the same happy year over and over. In the series, that loop was eventually broken and time began moving forward again. If there’s anybody that knows that you have to focus on what comes next, it’s Diba Nana. This whole Revue is her taking out her frustration on her friends who have kinda become more interested in bickering among themselves than focusing on where it is they will each go next. It’s Banana telling them that no matter where they go they need to be prepared for a new fight because just accomplishing a successful theater production in the past doesn’t mean landing a new role on a new stage will be automatic or a given in the future.
Banana is one of the most gifted actresses among our nine main Stage Girls and she finally gets a chance to show that off brilliantly. She takes on everyone at once and takes them apart with ease. Pay attention to her lyrics. In the second half of the battle, the words she is singing are direct criticisms of the faults of the other girls as she defeats them in battle. Only Maya, who already understands the coming battles of her next stage, is able to stand up to Banana. It’s fitting then that she is the only one that Banana does not criticize.
The music here is interesting because it is somehow both frantic but monotone at the same time. I think it’s the perfect representation of Banana. Incredibly talented, but bursting with an over the top intensity that sorta flattens everything out. Both she and the music are a bit too intense to have a proper, normal range.
Ultimately, Banana is trying to be helpful. Trying to show them that they must chart their own courses or die as Stage Girls. She is even trying to be encouraging to Karen who she almost straight up asks “what will you do next?”. While off the stage, Diba Nana is everyone’s gentle, hard working, lovable “Banana” who cooks them meals and gives them back rubs. But, while on the stage, she is harsh and fearsome, and wholly devoted to her craft. That second one is the Banana we are seeing in this Revue.
Junna’s comment at the end after Banana cuts off her cloak so dismissively relates to how usually Banana is lovable and supportive. It’s rare to see her in full on full intensity acting mode.
Revue of Malice
In some ways this is still the hardest Revue to wrap my head around. Why are Futaba and Kaoruko fighting again if they made up and were “fine” by the end of their Revue in the series? The answer is they weren’t fine! They just put that fact aside for a while longer.
In reality, Kaoruko had been using Futaba for most of their lives. Relying on her. Taking her for granted. Taking advantage of her in so many ways. From having Futaba buy her food and candy, to using her as free transportation, to having her wake her up in the morning and more. Kaoruko took so much and offered so little in return.
And that might have been fine, if Kaoruko had simply cheered Futaba on as her friend devoted herself to becoming a better Stage Girl. Instead, Kaoruko got jealous. And though she got better about fending for herself at the end of their episode, she apparently never really did help or encourage her lifelong friend.
This Revue is a breakup, but it’s also very interesting thematically! In a couple of ways:
1. The beginning with Kaoruko and Claudine is a homage to Samurai movies where the challenger comes to call out their rival in order to duel them and ultimately kill them. I love how both Kaoruko and Claudine play their proper parts thanks to the magic of the Revues.
2. Think about the roles Kaoruko and Futaba play once we reach the cabaret portion of the Revue. In the real world Takarazuka Revue system, which Revue Starlight is heavily based on, the Top Star is always an Otokoyaku. A girl playing a male role. But here we have Kaoruko, someone who earlier in the film was fretting over whether the Auditions had started again because someone else might become Top Star, now playing a Musumeyaku role! A female role. Sure, she is glamorous and sexy and angry, but it is Futaba playing the more prestigious role! That’s important.
Although this Revue started with Kaoruko and Claudine, I think it is really Futaba’s Revue. “It’s not fair!” She keeps saying. “Why won’t you understand?!” And finally “We can’t go together anymore!” Futaba has decided her own advancement as a Stage Girl is more important than the unfair relationship she has had with Kaoruko all her life. And I say good for her!
But there is one thing at the end that shows the love Futaba still has for Kaoruko. She lends Kaoruko her bike. The bike is more than simply a bike. It’s a symbol of all the years Futaba spent supporting Kaoruko. I think it’s Futaba’s way of saying “I can’t be with you right now, but I won’t just abandon you. I’ll still support you the ways I can.” That’s pretty awesome. In the series, Kaoruko learned to assert herself and stop relying on Futaba so much. Hopefully she can learn to appreciate Futaba properly at some point in the future… But for now, I think this may be the most bittersweet of all the Revues as there is little sign that things might one day end well.
Revue of Competition
“Mahiru has gone nutty again,” someone on Twitter said. But that’s not the case. In this Revue, Mahiru both puts on the performance of her life and does the right thing by convincing Hikari to apologize to Karen for leaving after performing Starlight with her. Mahiru is shown competing in lots of Olympic sports, but her real role here is that of the caring big sister, once more, just like she used to be to her siblings back home.
I love the sports angle of the Revue. Especially the way that Hikari and Mahiru keep switching from their Revue costumes to competing in the various sports. The back and forth instant transitions are really cool. The quick sequence that goes from Hikari throwing her dagger to tennis to volleyball to baseball is just incredible! I also wonder a bit if this Olympics Revue was included because Tokyo was hosting the Olympics the year this movie came out in Japan.
Mahiru does get scary for a bit during this Revue, and its great how the music shifts from her fun, goofy sports theme to something much more frightening, but it’s all an act to scare Hikari into doing the right thing. Into apologizing to Karen both for leaving recently, and maybe for the way she ran away from Karen as a child and never made an effort to be her friend all those years they were apart. Mahiru knows she is not the best Stage Girl. That others will outperform her in singing and dancing and acting. But a hallmark of her character is the desire to help support others and make them smile.
I think Mahiru mainly did this for Karen, to help her when she is confused about where to go next. But, I think Mahiru also did it a little for Hikari and also for herself. She helped spur Hikari on, but she also proved to herself that she can act. Of all the Revues, this is the sweetest because Mahiru is a genuinely sweet person. Need even more proof? At the beginning of the scary part of her performance, Mahiru knocked the head off of Hikari’s Mr. White mascot. But at the end, one of the two figures holding the red finish line for Hikari is her Mr. White with its head taped back on. Mahiru fixed it just for Hikari! 🙂
Revue of Hunting
This may be my favorite Revue of the movie. Because it is so complex. Because it is emotional. Because it is two characters recognizing the faults in one another. And because, by clashing with each other and by calling each other out, they both find the things they had been looking for. Oh, and the music is excellent, too!
From Banana’s point of view, Junna was a Stage Girl who was at her brightest not because she was the most talented, but because she never stopped reaching for her goal, even if it was unachievable.
“Even though you couldn’t become the lead, the appearance of you foolishly, insistently reaching out your hand to the lead… It was dazzling.”
That quote is, of course, referring to Junna’s lines about herself from the series:
“Everyone has their own star. Stars that shine. The morning star. Stars that fall. Though I may not yet see my own star, I gaze upward and on this day I, Junna Hoshimi, will take hold of a star of my own.”
So, what changed? Why is Banana now urging Junna to give up completely. I think it’s because Banana see’s Junna’s chosen path as a form of giving up. Everyone else is going to some prestigious theater troupe or acting school. Junna? Her first choice is a literature department at a university! Meaning, she is withdrawing from being a Stage Girl. This plays into the criticism Banana threw at Junna (literally, in the form of her short sword) during the Revue of Annihilation:
“You can’t get by with nothing but words, don’t you know that?”
Now, she says of Junna:
“You’ve been blinded by the stars you can’t reach, and now you can’t see anything.”
Meaning, she thinks Junna was so in awe of others like Maya that she has given up trying to reach their level.
Now, it’s true Junna was planning to withdraw from theater for a while in order to better understand the stage. But it’s so she can become an even better Stage Girl. That’s something Banana can’t see. Banana has a set role she sees Junna in and it never included Junna giving up.
In some ways Banana has a point. In some ways Junna has relied too much on the words of others and not enough in her own talent. Junna is very smart, but she doubts herself. She always ranks herself lower than others. And even though she claims to want to stand out, to be distinct from the others, Junna has always fought with a bow and almost always from the safety that comes from the height of her flying ring or the shadows at the edge of the stage she tends to hide in.
Banana’s harsh criticism very nearly breaks Junna. Visually, we see this as Banana breaking the crystal on Junna’s bow. It’s only after her best friend and roommate straight up tells her that she doesn’t feel a spark of glimmer in her acting that Junna finally begins to stand up for herself. We finally get to see a truly new side of Junna for the first time. It’s a side that partially agrees with Banana that the words of others are not enough. A side that agrees that just reaching for a star but with no hope of being able to land a lead role is not enough. This new Junna will still reach for her star, but now she will do so until she obtains a lead role. She finally has enough confidence in herself that she really thinks becoming a star is possible.
This also isn’t in Banana’s plans. Banana is used to the kind, sweet Junna who strives and strives but is ok with never achieving. She doesn’t understand this new Junna… and Junna calls her out on it! Junna says:
“I don’t need the role you’ve given me.”
And
“The one who is being blinded by the light is you.”
Dang. And, those aren’t just references to their current conflict. Those are references to Banana’s unending time loop from back in the series.
In the anime, when Banana and Junna met on the lawn after Hikari and Karen ended Banana’s reenactments, Junna was just there to be comforting to Banana. She gave Banana quotes that basically said everything was ok because everyone makes mistakes. She held Banana while she cried. She noted that even while controlling the lives of everyone and keeping everything perfect for everyone, Banana was still playing with the script of her time loop behind the scenes. She was still trying to make things even better, Junna acknowledged. Junna never criticized Banana… until now.
The reason Banana trapped everyone in her loop was because she was so blinded by the 99th Starlight that she didn’t want to even try to top it. To her, it was perfect, and by setting everyone’s roles in stone, she could protect everyone from hardship and failure. Junna’s responses about being given a role and about Banana being the one who was blinded are subtle but sharp, jagged criticisms of what Banana did to her and everyone else. What Junna is saying here is everyone, herself included, is trying to move forward while Banana is still blinded by the past. Maybe they aren’t moving forward in the way Banana would choose for them, but where they go and what they do in the future is not Banana’s choice to make. Junna, for the first time, is telling Banana she was wrong to trap them in a perfect world where they couldn’t change or grow. She is pointing out that it was Banana who was so blinded by her experiences that she would prevent her friends from moving forward. That’s pretty harsh from Junna, but I think it’s also pretty fair.
The Revue ends in a very interesting way. From Junna, we see clear confirmation that she has embraced a new confidence and sees herself eventually reaching a leading role on a stage of her own. And from Banana, she says something really neat:
“A brilliance like jewels set ablaze. I’ve finally arrived at it. Thank you Junna.”
This is very noteworthy! The whole reason Banana looped again and again was to protect everyone from the pains of moving forward, yes, but in her own words, in the seventh episode of the series, she wanted to redo the 99th performance of Starlight because it was:
“…a brilliance like jewels set ablaze.”
It’s the same words, or very nearly the same words that she says in the movie! By reaching farther and higher than she ever dared reach before, Junna was able to show Banana something that equaled that first perfect performance of Starlight Banana could never manage to get out of her head. That’s very powerful. Banana now truly understands that she can find a new stage and she can find new moments that dazzle her like the 99th Starlight did.
I love that Banana finally found the one thing she could never reach even after hundreds of years of looping, and that it was her friend Junna who gave it to her! I really do hope they get to perform with each other again one day.
Gotta give a callout to the music here as well. It’s really interesting at how strongly it calls back to the Revue of Annihilation until Junna rises to power and shifts everything in her favor. The moment where she takes over the review is very powerful thanks in large part to the build up and climax the music goes through.
Revue of Souls
Here it is. The big Maya vs Claudine Revue that we never got during the series. We saw the aftermath of one, with the stage all destroyed and Claudine defeated, but beyond the intro to the show that showed Maya and Claudine crossing swords, we never got to see them fight each other. But now we have. And it was glorious.
Sure, the Revue has awesome set design, awesome costumes, and a great call back to Maya’s first Revue with Karen, but it also gives us one thing we never truly got in the series. We get to see what Maya thinks about herself. All throughout the series, Maya Tendo was the perfect Stage Girl. She was always there to help. She always recognized and accepted and appreciated challengers. She was always giving correct advice to people like Kaoruko and Banana. But why? What was in it for Maya?
It turns out what was in it for Maya was living up to the expectations placed on her by everyone else. But, doing so always meant having to limit her own emotions and reign in her own desires. The Perfect Stage Girl is a part that she thought she had to play.
The problem seems to be that Maya has never been defeated. She has always been the best. And because of this she has always been full of pride and arrogance. Even Hikari and Karen weren’t true rivals for Maya. They managed to outshine her and Claudine momentarily, but they were so focused on each other and their childhood promise that who they were up against hardly mattered.
But then along comes Claudine, someone just as dedicated to the stage as Maya is. Someone who challenged Maya directly on the first day they met. Yes, Claudine had a bit of a shock when she found that Maya was her equal and maybe more, but we learned near the end of the series that Maya remembered being impressed by Claudine, as well, on their first meeting.
Now, the two finally recognize that yes, they are each other’s true rival. That no one else they’ve ever met compares to each other. And Maya in particular finds she has to truly go all out to compete with Claudine. I love that trio of lines they say to each other:
For heroes, there are trials.
For saints, there are temptations.
For me, there is you.
My mind is pulled off to Hercules and Odysseus and Joan of Arc. Epic figures in history that now Maya and Claudine count themselves among. It’s pretty freaking cool!
There’s another little part of this Revue that I missed the first time. When Maya and Claudine are playing their little board game, Claudine admits that she had lost her love for the stage. She says she was dying inside because she had enjoyed working under Maya so much that she didn’t want to seek out her next stage. This adds some interesting context to Claudine’s part of the Revue. Her desire to have Maya acknowledge her as a true rival is rooted back in the way she almost became content with being in second place during their episode 10 Revue duet.
But now, we get a renewed Claudine who, for the first time ever, was able to beat Maya. It was important for Maya to come to terms with her feelings of stoicism and importance, but it was just as important for Claudine to rekindle that spark of competition within herself. By the end of the Revue both Maya and Claudine are truly ready to seek out their next stage and even ready to fight each other as friendly rivals for future roles.
Oh yeah… and that musical callback to Karen and Maya’s Revue of Pride right as Maya and Claudine run at each other… that was amazing! Another great callback was the way Claudine and Maya did their final dramatic introductions of themselves after switching to their Revue uniforms. Each is parroting and mocking the other’s introductions they gave from the latticework of the Tokyo Tower on the Stage of Fate before their Revue in episode ten against Karen and Hikari.
The Final Lines
And finally, we come back around to Karen and Hikari. This Revue is certainly the most abstract of them all. It’s also one that most directly challenges where things left off in the anime. In some ways, it even reverses some of the strongest positions espoused by the main series.
All throughout the movie we’ve been seeing flashbacks of how Karen came to truly love the stage and how her promise with Hikari went from a child’s simplistic promise to a driving force in her life. It wasn’t just a fleeting promise, it was something that Karen held onto tightly for more than thirteen years as she grew from a child to an adult. Was Karen a little naive? Sure. But her faith in her promise was rewarded in the end.
What this Revue points out is that no matter how heartwarming it was in the anime when Karen said, “My stage is you, Hikari,” it was also a deeply flawed position. I love how they showed how incredibly grateful Karen was to Hikari for giving her the inspiration to join school plays and train in dance and acting and to join Seisho Music Academy. But also how they showed just how solely focused Karen was on Hikari to a ridiculous extent.
That scene where both Karen and Hikari turn to the audience watching them is fantastic. It’s a great fourth wall breaking callback to the Giraffe addressing us, the anime viewers, directly in the final episode of the series. Karen made it clear that all this time she barely even noticed the trials and hardships everyone was going through on stage. She never noticed the audience appraising and criticizing her performances. She never noticed the stage lights or any of the other technical challenges that come with acting on a stage. She never even noticed how scared everyone was to be putting themselves out in front of an audience. She ignored all of that because she was so focused on being in a position to do Starlight with Hikari…
…but now they’ve done it. They performed the lead roles in a play of Starlight. Mission accomplished. But, because Karen is as simpleminded as she is, she never thought beyond that point. The anime conveniently never addressed what comes next. It just gave us a happy ending. I love that the movie moves a step beyond and asks: “…and then what?”
What happens next is Karen realizes she doesn’t know what to do. In her perfect world, she and Hikari would be side by side forever. In the real world, Hikari went back to her home in London. In the real world, Karen is a brilliant actress who expected to always have her best friend by her side and now doesn’t. Karen feels dead inside because of all this. She just recently had the time of her life. She did the one thing she’d been looking forward to all her life… but it’s over now and she has nothing else she wants to do.
So what fixes Karen? Well, for one thing, Hikari makes a pretty stunning admission. When they were watching Starlight as children, little child actress Hikari was so in awe of it that she was afraid that she might not ever reach that level. So afraid that she nearly gave up, in fact! It took Karen’s dumb raw idealism and the insistence that they promise each other to do their own Starlight to snap Hikari out of it. If Karen hadn’t been there, Hikari might have given up on being a Stage Girl all the way back when she was five. That’s a pretty awesome revelation! It helps give Karen some amount of fulfillment that her promise wasn’t just an empty thing for herself. She unknowingly saved Hikari way back then!
The other thing that fixes Karen is the thing that always fixes Karen: The idea that she can be reborn as a Stage Girl and face the next challenge. Karen, lovable as she is, is kinda a dummy who often does the right things without realizing the deeper why. I think Hikari’s revelation jumpstarted Karen and caused her to look back on all the fun and challenging times she had as a Stage Girl growing up. It caused Karen realize that, no, her stage was not just Hikari. Sure, doing Starlight with Hikari was a huge goal, but Karen was a real Stage Girl and a star long before she and Hikari met again at the start of the anime.
We see a scene where Karen’s three past selves deliver a tomato to her comatose self. The tomatoes all throughout the movie have represented the willingness and desire and sacrifice to take on the challenge of continuing to be a Stage Girl. Karen had ignored that tomato and walked away from those challenges, but now she had it back in hand. So, Karen goes back to the beginning. We literally see her become Position Zero. She has to ride through her brief storm of insecurity and doubt, but she comes through it just fine and is once again reborn as herself, but now she clearly remembers and cherishes everything it took to reach this point.
After all that, Karen’s post-transformation introduction is forward looking to new stages instead of being focused on the stages of Hikari and the Starlight play. Karen now realizes one last thing that she never even considered before. Now that she and Hikari are going their separate ways, they might just end up competing against each other for the same role. Up until now, Karen has maintained that they could pass their Starlight auditions together. Now, Karen realizes that if she ends up going against Hikari she will want to win. It’s Karen’s last step to becoming a true Stage Girl. And yes, this newfound desire to be the best rips apart Karen and Hikari’s Promise Tower, but the promise had already been fulfilled. It will always be great memory the two will share, but it cannot hold up to the reality of the new stages they are heading towards.
This is quite the departure from the series. It drags Karen a bit more into the real world. One where she knows she might have to defeat others in order to get the roles she wants. Even so, I think Karen will still be the lovable goofball who immediately came to check on and praise Junna for a job well done after their second Revue together. Karen will now try to win, but she won’t seek to destroy her opponents like some stars sometimes do.
In the end, the top of the tower lands on Position Zero, and although Karen is empty from having accomplished her Starlight promise, Hikari tosses her a tomato. Karen can now fill herself up on the ambition of being a Stage Girl. She will be alright now, even as she moves into the real world beyond her childhood. And the movie ends.
Except it doesn’t! Stick around for the credits! We get to see where everybody ends up!
– Kaoruko inherits her position as the 12th Generation leader of the Senka-ryu dance school.
– Maya, Mahiru, and Futaba join the New National First Theater Troupe. (Maya can go anywhere she wants, I’m sure, but I’m a little surprised the other two got in!)
– Claudine joined the Theatre de Flamme in France. But, I’m thinking Maya came to visit at least once since Claudine has a cute little dove in her window.
– Junna did not go to a university literature department! She joined a New York Musical and Drama Academy and is dancing and having fun! Yay, Junna!
– And Banana? She joined the Royal Academy of Theatrical Actors… that’s where Hikari is studying! Maybe we can count on Banana (and Hikari?) giving that Judy Knightley, who ended Hikari’s quest to become a Top Star in the anime, a run for her money next time there are auditions? :p
– As for Hikari, she seemed to be traveling the world visiting her friends, but we last see her at her own Position Zero. There’s a ton of little hints throughout the movie that Hikari actually fully quit out of acting after doing Starlight with Karen, but now she is going back to it. I think it would be fun if she and Banana went from super rivals to best friends.
– And Karen? She has a new audition for a new role, but she’ll happily use her experiences of Starlight to help herself along! 🙂