 The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I summarize my journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of popular culture over the past week. Expect spoilers for covered material. I’ve been a bit sick over the past week. Not enough to impact my blogging, thankfully. I was originally going to have just three shows for you this week, but, what the heck, why don’t we start with a new face? Seasonal Anime Delicious Party♡Pretty Cure If you write about a chosen medium, it’s generally good to know what your Geek Buttons are. A Geek Button is a thing–and it can really be anything, a series, a whole genre, a visual style, a specific actor, whatever–where the more “objective” part of your critical toolkit just fails to work, and you are reduced to a blubbering fangirl (or fanboy, or fanby, as the case may be). For me, magical girls in general, and especially Pretty Cure, are a Geek Button. I cannot pretend to be remotely reasonable about them. I love almost all of them like they’re my children and the few exceptions are girls who I just wish were in better shows. I will die on the hill that the magical girl warrior archetype is one of anime’s best and most important contributions to general popular culture. So with that in mind, please say hello to the newest Pretty Cure series. And indeed, the newest Pretty Cure; Yui Nagomi, AKA Cure Precious (Hana Hishikawa in what is, astoundingly, her first named character role in an anime.) She is adorable. Dare I say precious? The first episode of a given Precure series has a lot of beats to hit; introducing the protagonist, introducing her mentor / helper characters, if any, establishing the broad strokes of the plot for the season, nailing down the basic thematic overtone it’s going for, and of course, introducing the bad guys and their particular version of the monsters of the week. It’s a lot of stops to have to hit in a 22-minute episode, but DePaPre swings it admirably. The general direction in this first episode is really just fantastic, and notably, it’s helmed by animation director Akira Inagami, who had a role as a character designer all the way back on the original Futari wa Pretty Cure. (A hearty shout out to my good friend Pike, curator of Dual Aurora Wave, for that information. I’d have never known!) The whole thing is bouncy and joyous and just alive in a way that really defines the best kids’ anime. The episode is great looking from start to finish, though obviously the real Peak TV moment is Cure Precious’ first henshin sequence. Also scattered throughout are the traditional “Precure Leap,” a fun nod to an episode of Futari wa, and some truly ludicrous attack names (a 500 Kilocalorie punch, huh?) I’m also fond of Yui’s “mentor” character here, the lavender haired gnc king Rosemary. He’s delightfully camp in a way that doesn’t feel overbearing or like it’s making fun of anyone. Her fairy is adorable too, of course. And I must make a nod toward Gentle (or “Gentlu” as Crunchyroll’s official subs hilariously render her name), who both puts in a supremely cool showing as the anime’s starter villain and is also the smart pick for Character Most Likely To Undergo A Face Turn And Possibly Become a Precure Herself. It wouldn’t be the first time the series has done that. (My favorite example being from Fresh. Which, fun fact; was the first Precure series that Hana Hishikawa watched as a young child in nursery school, going off an interview she gave a few weeks ago.) Gentle wouldn’t even be the first villain with this specific hair color to eventually become a Precure. Will history repeat itself? Time alone will tell. The only “bad thing”, really, about DePaPre, is that it won’t appear in this column much. I’ll try to make exceptions for particularly great episodes but given that I watch it with friends on its premiere night, much like Tropical Rouge Precure before it, it can be difficult to find the time, given that these Reports go up on Sunday. Still, I’ll absolutely be watching every single week. And if my opinion is worth anything to you, I think you should be too. CUE! I don’t really know what to think about CUE! Any time I feel like I should just write it off and stop following it entirely, it does this. “This,” for reference, is another subtly great episode about the inside of the voice acting profession. It doesn’t start out that way; the first third or so of this episode is actually mostly about Haruna’s pet turtle, about whom she says increasingly ridiculous things. (To wit; it’s not a turtle because he has a name, she asks him for advice, and he looks like “an old man” and “a philosopher. It’s all pretty funny.) But the episode gets serious at around its 1/3rd mark, honing in on the art of injecting emotion into even very short exchanges of words. Haruna’s role, remember, is just “additional voices.” So in her first scene in Bloom Ball, which the girls record here, she only swaps a single sentence with Maika’s character, who only replies with one of her own. And we hear those two sentences some four or five times over the episode’s duration. I’ve said this before, but running the same scene back-to-back, for any reason, is challenging. You risk boring your audience, and when the scene in question is this short you risk it even more. But, somehow, CUE! pulls it off again. The mechanics are very simple; the girls learn a little bit about how voice acting works. They record their lines, Haruna and Maika’s get held because the author (present at the recording) remembers that the bit character Haruna is playing comes up again way later in the story. Once again, this is supposed to sell Haruna as someone with an immense amount of untapped voice acting talent. It doesn’t work quite as well as the showstopper she drops in episode 2, but it’s still pretty good, and it proves that when CUE! is on, it’s on. For something that should be super dry, it manages to stay quite interesting, employing its favorite trick, jumping in and out of the world of the show-within-a-show. Here, since all present are actually recording, things are further embellished by the show being mid-production. No full-color cuts here; it’s all monochrome and pre-correction. (Let’s take a moment to appreciate the nightmare that making a finished cut that looks convincingly unfinished must be.) Flummoxing as it sometimes is, if CUE! keeps making episodes like this I will continue to watch them. Just, please, I’m begging you, either focus on the idol girls less or make them more interesting. Princess Connect! Re:Dive One of the reasons I declined to give Princess Connect! Re:Dive its own dedicated column is that I know my limits. A picture truly can be worth a thousand words, and a gif from a show like this can be worth a short novel. What am I supposed to say about this? Okay, fine. If you wanted to, if you were some kind of joyless miser, you could be mad that this episode is all set up and no resolution. Frankly I think that’s an absurd criticism, and the idea that everything must be resolved within the space of a single episode just because this show started out as a “slice of life series” is so far removed from how I experience art that I have a difficult time even comprehending it. Nonetheless it is what some people think, and I’ll give those people their moment of acknowledgement here. For the rest of us; holy shit. Princess Connect season 2’s fourth episode is the sort of absurd instant-classic that demands rewinds, screencapping, and a visit to Sakugabooru. And it’s the fourth episode of a twelve-episode season. That’s nuts. That’s the kind of comically overconfident flex that usually presages some great disaster. But why would that be the case here? CygamesPictures aren’t working on anything else this year. It’s amazing what a well-equipped studio can do when actually giving its workers proper time to do so. The actual plot here is cartwheeling fantasy screwiness that wouldn’t be out of place in one of the many, many books with dragons and swords on the cover that I read in middle school. That sounds like an insult, but this sort of high-stakes epic-in-the-old-sense-of-the-word plot is what’s missing from a lot of modern fantasy anime. It’s spectacle; even down to details like Karyl still playing both sides, the guild of animal girls we meet here, and the giant golem fight that caps the episode. I feel legitimately bad for the other fantasy anime airing right now. It’s not like In The Land of Leadale or Reincarnated as a Fantasy Knockout don’t have their merits, but they aren’t this. The only competition Priconne really has in this regard is Demon Slayer, but while that show definitely looks great, it’s always had issues with making its flashy animation feel like it entirely fit with the rest of the world. Priconne never even sniffs that problem; the compositing is as excellent here as anything else. Even moments where characters are literally just standing around look incredible. The only real issue is that Priconne’s plot is so mile-a-minute I could see it getting hard to keep up. (I’m already a bit lost myself. Having not played the game probably doesn’t help.) But even so; at least for me, that feeling actually adds to the exhilaration of watching this thing in motion. The Proper Noun Machine Gun has rarely been put to such good use. Tokyo 24th Ward Unfortunately we must end this section of the week’s writeup on something of a sour note. If I had known I was going to be covering Tokyo 24th Ward this frequently, I’d have just made it another weekly column. Maybe that would’ve been a bad idea, though, given how the show’s shortcomings are generally more compelling to me than its strengths, which I increasingly think are actually rather modest. Fundamentally, the problem is this; if your anime (or movie or book or album or whatever) invokes political themes, you are inviting all comers to scrutinize it from their own political point of view. Everyone on Earth has such a point of view, whether or not they’re cognizant of it. In of itself, that’s fine, but if your work’s political themes are, say, shallow and inadequate, it raises a problem. Are Tokyo 24th‘s shallow and inadequate? I don’t really know. The signals are, shall we say, mixed. Getting a big head over this kind of thing is nothing new to mainstream TV anime. Turn of the decade classic Code Geass, for example, managed to be good largely by trading away any actual meaningful political commentary for sheer camp value. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to nail more specific and well-thought-out political messages. Akudama Drive did it only two years ago. (Full disclosure: I haven’t seen Akudama Drive myself, at least not yet, but I trust Inkie’s judgment on the series utterly.) It’s also possible–although both less rare and not as impactful–to make broader statements without rendering them entirely meaningless. Something as goofy as Rumble Garanndoll managed that much just last season. The gist of the plot forming over Tokyo 24th‘s last two episodes has been this; the graffiti artist / hacker Kunai (Souma Saitou, who has been in many support roles like this) is going to blow up a cruise ship full of the ultra-wealthy. Normally I’d here provide his motivations, and just from what little we’ve learned about him–his upbringing in the ridiculously named Shantytown ghetto in the poorest part of the Ward, his grandmother’s illness, the fact that Ran has eclipsed him artistically–one could come up with a good half dozen motivations for why this poor man might feel motivated to extreme action. Kunai’s actual motives are different, and much more personal. He’s been tricked into selling an app he developed by the owner of an enormous corporate megalopoly, a fellow named Taki. Taki rewires the program to turn it into that mysterious “Drug D” we’ve been hearing so much about over the past couple of episodes. Kunai’s resentment, then, is borne not from his situation but from something very specific. He feels as though he’s been used. And he’s right about that! He has been used. Ran correctly points out, when the two meet at the episode’s climax, that Kunai is not the “criminal” he self-laceratingly claims to be. He’s a victim of circumstance. On one level, Tokyo 24th humanizing an actual terrorist to this degree is admirable. On another, it seems like an easy out to give Kunai a single grudge motive rather than anything more circumstantial and messy. Plus, there is what actually happens to Kunai. At the episode’s end, Kouki–that’s Cop Boy, if you’ve forgotten–bypasses the advice of his friends and orders Kunai shot dead by a police sniper. Kunai bleeds out in Ran’s arms, begging his friend to continue to be the one thing he couldn’t: an artist. It is difficult to know how to take this. Is it a shocking display–and condemnation–of police brutality? Does the show think he’s in the right to have done that? (I don’t want to think so, but I’ve gone broke overestimating anime before.) Or is this another thing where Shuuta’s enlightened centrist fence-sitting is going to somehow turn out to be the solution? Tokyo 24th has given me very little reason to believe the former might be what it’s going for, but I suppose it’s not impossible. A number of details about Tokyo 24th‘s worldbuilding lead me to believe that won’t be the case (it’s insane that an anime that uses so much graffiti aesthetic has perhaps two Black characters and zero major ones), but I’ve been wrong before. Honestly in this specific situation I’d be happy to be. But for the record, I’m not alone here. Some critics have been far harsher than me. And I’m split between feeling like I’m giving the anime way too much slack and coming down on it way too hard. It’s unfair, in a way. An anime that tries to be a Statement opens itself up to all kinds of nitpicking from audiences both domestic and abroad that other anime could easily dismiss out of hand. Should I not be giving it some points for even trying? Maybe, but “some points” might add up to a 3 or 4 out of 10 depending on how badly it fucks up the landing, and I’m not at all confident it won’t. Wanting to be a critique of the state of the world isn’t the same as actually being one. All of Tokyo 24th‘s effort will be meaningless if it cannot find some way to intelligently apply it. We will see Tokyo 24th here again, maybe as soon as next week. For good or for ill I cannot yet say. Elsewhere on MPA Let’s Watch SABIKUI BISCO Episode 4 – “Ride the Crab” – For an episode that features absolutely zero Pawoo, this was still quite a good 30 minutes of Sabikui Bisco. There must be a solid Milo / Bisco shipping community out there, right? Let’s Watch MY DRESS-UP DARLING Episode 5 – “It’s Probably Because…” – I think people are starting to get sick of My Dress-Up Darling‘s over-the-top horniness. Last week I would’ve disagreed, but this past episode was….a lot. And not really in a good way. That’s most of what I’ve got for you this week, anime fans. But before I go, a small recommendation! A new manga was picked up by Jump recently, and is available officially in English on the MangaPlus website. It’s called Magilumiere Co. Ltd., a magical girl-action-office comedy whatsit that poses the question; “what if being a magical girl was, you know, a full-on career? And what if an ordinary college grad seeking to enter the workforce suddenly found herself basically dropped into a small Magical Girl Company’s employ?” That’s kind of a long question, admittedly, but Magilumiere does have answers. It’s to soon into the manga’s run for me to have any terribly detailed opinions on it, but I like it so far, and “magical girl + other stuff” is always a fun combination. Give it a read if you’re so inclined. See you tomorrow for more Sabikui Bisco, friends! Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. 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Special Notice: This should really go without saying, but since I’m going to be talking about all of these shows in general, overall terms, you can expect spoilers for all of them, up to and including their endings. So here we are again, anime fans. Another year firmly in the past tense, not just within our specific sphere of interest but in general. Time is a funny thing, it’s already late November as I write this opening paragraph, which isn’t much less time than I gave myself last year, but despite the fact that I am demonstrably writing about fewer shows, I wanted to at least try and give each of them a bit more attention. Yes, this marks a change in format. Last year I undertook the–in hindsight rather absurd–task of ranking every anime I’d finished that came out that year. The format required me to spend a fair amount of writing real estate on anime that I either didn’t like or simply had no strong thoughts on at all. This year, I wanted to simplify a bit. Only a bit, mind you. This is still me we’re talking about, after all. So, this year the job is less complex, but simultaneously more difficult. 5 Anime I liked more than the rest; five that stuck with me and that I think will continue to stick with me. Plus, a handful of honorable mentions to get a positive word in for some anime that I enjoyed but couldn’t wholly self-justify putting in the main top five. Just to fully disclose; as usual, these are indeed only my opinions, thoughts, and observations. My opinions that I consider reasonably informed and well thought out, but opinions, nonetheless. There is also the fact, of course, that anime I didn’t watch cannot make it onto this list by default, with apologies to the several anime I heard very good things about this year but did not find the time to watch myself. (Chiefly here I am thinking of ODD TAXI and Eighty-Six, but there are other examples too.) This list also consists exclusively of serial fiction, in the interest of keeping things fair, so the final Rebuild of Evangelion film isn’t here either. (Which is a shame, because it would’ve easily earned a spot on this list. My hope is that next year I’ll have seen enough anime films that actually came out in 2022 to make them their own list, but we’ll see.) And it’s only shows that are actually finished, so if Ousama Ranking ever shows up on one of these lists, just as an example, it’ll be the list for next year, when it concludes. Ultimately then, what you have is a snapshot of what I consider particularly worthwhile in the medium of serial anime. A couple things went into picking shows for this list. The simple question of how much I enjoyed watching it week to week is obviously the biggest factor, and all else being equal is what I prioritized. But I did try to give at least some consideration to more nebulous things, such as general public reception, whether I think they will stand the test of time, etc. etc. (Factors that I am of course completely capable of being wrong about. But hey, I try my best.) Above all else was the simple fact of what they meant to me. It is, after all, my list, no one else’s. Anyway, enough beating around the bush, let’s get to it. #5. Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story Season 2 Madoka Magica was not the only franchise to make a welcome return this year, but of those that did, it’s probably the one closest to my heart. I will fully admit, there’s some circumstantial bias here. I missed out on the original Madoka Magica when it was airing now a good ten years ago. On some subconscious level it’s possible that my opinion of Magia Record is elevated by the simple fact that I get to see it unfold in real time. I’d be hard pressed to say that MagiReco’s second season was the most accessible anime of 2021–that’s part of why it rounds out the bottom of the list–but it was certainly among those I felt the most connection to. (Covering it week by week, on what would become my last bit of work for The Geek Girl Authority, probably helped.) To a point, a show that looks like this speaks for itself. Public consensus has held for some time that Studio SHAFT‘s golden age is firmly in the past tense, but if there’s a case to be made for that whole “SHAFT Renaissance” idea that bounces around Anime Twitter from time to time, it’s somewhere in the frames of Magia Record. The season’s stronger episodes (which make up a good chunk of its brief eight) absolutely drip with style, and its premiere in particular is the sort of love letter to both the fans and the series itself that you just don’t get super often. Combine that with its wildly ambitious (some might say overly ambitious!) storyline that attempts to mythmake by tying together disparate parts of the wider Madoka ‘verse, it giving relatively minor characters like Kuroe a chance to shine, and just the frankly kinda insane fact that the Madoka Train is still chugging along at all a full decade later? Yeah, Magia Record earns its spot on the list, even if it is “only” at #5. It’s totally possible that MagiReco’s third season–whenever it arrives–won’t be as good as this, or indeed that it’ll be much better, but this list is a ranking of what’s aired this year, and this year, the oddball middle segment of a three-part story happened to be the fifth-best anime of the whole damn thing. Go figure. #4. SSSS.DYNAZENON As a sequel to one of the best anime of the 2010s–2018’s SSSS.GRIDMAN—SSSS.DYNAZENON is odd. It takes place away from that anime’s setting and involves only two of its characters (and only in a supporting capacity.) But considered thematically, these deviations from its predecessor make perfect sense. If, as is often held to be the case, we can map GRIDMAN‘s characters to the inner workings of a single mind, and thus make the case that that series is about self-acceptance, DYNAZENON is the logical progression. The exterior to GRIDMAN‘s interior. Like a lot of anime this year, DYNAZENON dealt in themes of alienation and misplacedness. Common emotions that we all struggle with in a world where things feel like they’re falling apart faster and faster all the time. Yet, at the same time, it re-lit the fire of that old truism; no man is an island. How? Easy. Director Akira Amemiya proved yet again that, yeah, you can still make a show that’s at least 50% giant robots fighting giant monsters by volume actually say something and have it not come across as corny or just over-wrought. DYNAZENON manages the impressive task of welding those fight scenes together with interrogative character work all over again, in a way that feels distinct from, but very much related to, GRIDMAN‘s approach to that problem. All five members of our core cast are disconnected from society in some way. Be it Yomogi’s parents’ separation, the death of Yume’s older sister, Koyomi and Chise’s mutually-enabling shut-in habits, or even how Gauma is lost from his own world entirely. Over the course of the series they heal, but the journey is not a smooth or easy one, and the kaiju represent allegorical threats to their wellbeing as much as physical ones. This is to say nothing of the Kaiju Eugenicists, those alarmingly-named villains who serve as the main four’s opposites on the other end of the good guy / bad guy spectrum. They’re alienated too, but their alienation consumes them, and is the driving force behind their desire to subjugate and destroy. In the case of Sizumu, it quite literally turns him into a monster. DYNAZENON‘s driving question is thus how to move on from that alienation, from those things that drive a wedge between us and others. To its credit, it offers no easy solution, although in showing what really happened to Yume’s sister when no one was there to support her, it offers a dire warning of the consequences of not at least trying. The Dyna Soldiers find solace in the pieces of the Dynazenon itself, which, perhaps tellingly, is formed from what appear to be mere toys in their dormant state. But more importantly, they find solace in each other. To quote my own writeup of the tenth episode from back in June:
It’s known that a third part of the trilogy; a crossover, likely in film form, called GRIDMAN x DYNAZENON, will round out this particular series of stories from Amemiya and co., beyond that, details remain scarce. But SSSS or no, if they can keep making stuff like this, stuff that hits you right in the heart? His place as one of the new decade’s best directors is assured. Keep broadcasting, kaiju king. #3. Sonny Boy Another theme we’re going to be seeing a lot of here is transience. It’s rather been my “word of the year,” so I hope you’ll forgive my use of it again, here, but it’s true. All things pass, and for many people our whole lives involve, at least to some degree, reckoning with that fact. Sonny Boywas not the only show this year to grapple with that fact, but it was notably thorough about it. It begins in the void, but soon crash-lands into an island on the far side of summer. There, surreal parables about life, death, and everything in-between unfold like the show’s own Matryoshka Doll worlds. Universes within universes, wheels within wheels. The purpose? An ode to our lost digital generation; the Millennial/Gen-Z continuum. Adults are imposters putting on a show or so distant that they’re divinity. No one is truly there to guide the cast, much like there’s no one truly there for us except ourselves. They, as we, need to make peace on their own. Of the anime on this list, I will cop to “understanding” Sonny Boy the least. There is a lot of symbolism here; it’s a dense show. (Which, hey, means it’s good for a rewatch.) But the series’ core of melancholy-hopeful nihilism is easy enough to map out, and that’s what earns it a spot on this list. Well, that and its absolutely stunning visual style. Sonny Boy looks like very little else that aired in 2021, and its surrealist, painterly looks would earn it a spot in the honorable mentions even if the show genuinely was all talk and no walk. But thankfully, while it may occasionally lean inscrutable, its heart beats strong. Of the various treatises on the passing of everything that 2021 produced (gee, I wonder why that was on everyone’s minds), Sonny Boy stands as one of the more accepting. But in a way, my typing this is pointless. One of the show’s own characters put it best. Perhaps I should be giving Rajdhani a co-writing credit for how often I’ve used these screenshots when talking about Sonny Boy. (As a side note; creator Shingo Natsume‘s next project is a sequel to The Tatami Galaxy. So, it seems like this is hardly the last time he’s going to direct something delightfully confounding. Perhaps it’ll show up on the list next year!) #2. Heike Monogatari If Sonny Boy explored transience via surreality and imagined worlds far from our own, Heike Monogatari grounded its own investigation of the concept firmly in the real-world concerns of history and myth. Based on a historical Japanese epic, The Heike Story has the benefit of hindsight. From the beginning of the first episode, each character’s steps fall with inevitability. From Lord Shigemori, who takes protagonist Biwa in after her father is callously murdered by members of his own clan, to Taira no Kiyomori’s heartless power-grabbing ploys, every man, woman, and child here has their fate sealed before the first episode of the series even begins. There is one exception: Biwa herself. (She’s voiced by Aoi Yuuki, in what would be the strongest role in the career of almost any other voice actress but is just another casual triumph for her. She brings alternating innocence for the Biwa we see most of the time, and stately, religious gravitas for the white-haired “seer” Biwa.) Her role? To be conscripted as fate’s chronicler and become representative both of the nature of the original epic itself and more generally as a symbol of all of us. Witnesses to history, as we are, who so often are powerless to change it despite our own strengths. It can feel grim and fatalistic; seasons change and an empire falls like a leaf from a tree in autumn. But Heike Monogatari never makes it feel that way. Things simply are, and then they aren’t. Dust becomes dust, time ticks on. Heike Monogatari is observance and acceptance, and the stormy lining to its silver cloud is that it’s so obviously timeless that even writing about it feels sort of pointless. It’s like trying to review The Iliad. It could have been #1, easily, and in almost any other year it would’ve been. Yet, at least to me, it was still somehow “only” the second-best anime of 2021. But, before we get to the top of the list, let’s go through some honorable mentions. Because you’re worth it, dear readers. Honorable Mention: takt op.Destiny Ribbons of highway and a great blue sky way. Ruins, cities, deserts, forests, monsters, and song. A world that’s lost its music. That was takt op.Destiny. Hardly the year’s most “together” production, takt op has the dubious distinction of sharing a bizarre ending twist with notable “would’ve probably made this list if quality wasn’t a factor at all” shortlister The Detective is Already Dead. But obviously, its spotty ending is not why it’s here. Of what I saw in 2021, takt op had some of the most purely joyous animation. Most of it took the form of fight scenes, and it’s easy to dismiss that sort of thing as lowbrow. But by tying it together with a thematic core about rescuing a world that thinks it no longer needs art with that art, it manages to make it all feel meaningful. For the bounty of good to great anime 2021 did have, it was rather short on anime that I felt compellingly made the case for art itself–something last year had in spades–boiling down to mostly just this, Love Live! Superstar!!, and Kageki Shoujo!! (Which itself only missed the list by dint of a dry run of episodes in its middle third.) So, for filling that niche, I am quite grateful to takt op, perhaps the year’s messiest pile of camp. Honorable Mention: Zombie Land Saga Revenge If someone asks me what I thought about the general quality of anime in 2021, I will tell them that I had to relegate the second season of Zombie Land Saga to the Honorable Mentions list. Honestly it barely feels fair. Zombie Land Saga Revenge is everything you could want out of a sequel; it builds on the original in logical and interesting ways. Franchouchou start the season having blown their biggest concert, washed up and down and out. But the mountain waits for no one, so what can you do but try to climb it again? And we saw them climb again. Those ridiculous zombies fought claw and jaw to bigger and bigger concert placements, and along the way we saw them grow as people, with particular star turns for Junko and Yuugiri. Let’s not forget that in the latter case, Revenge decided to just become a historical drama for several episodes, an outfit it wore better than many actual historical dramas do. Zombie Land Saga truly can do it all. The best idol anime of 2021, and almost certainly its best comedy. And I had to put it on the HM list. What a year it’s been, eh? Honorable Mention: BLUE REFLECTION RAY More than any other anime on this list, and maybe more than any anime I’ve ever covered period, I really strongly think Blue Reflection Ray is underrated. It’s a victim of circumstance, really. Animated by a studio long past its prime in a year that had two other anime that did many of the same things as it but in a more flashy and accessible way, there is a real case to be made that BRR never had a chance. But this list is, ultimately, about anime that I love. And I truly do think BRR was something special. And not just because it’s really gay, although that certainly helps. As a love letter to the magical girl genre, as a scrappy example of what even the most “low budget” of anime can accomplish with enough sincerity and grit, and as a rumination on how society treats young girls–another theme that came up quite often in art this year–Blue Reflection Ray stands tall with the best of them. When, in its penultimate episode, the Reflectors transform back-to-back-to-back just like a “real” magical girl team for the first and only time, BRR felt just as important as any other magical girl series. Girls in a world of lies living their truth for the first time. Speaking of other magical girl anime. Honorable Mention: Tropical Rouge Precure This was the hardest cut from the proper list. TroPre is relegated to the HMs by a technicality; it’s not actually over yet, a quirk of the show’s odd schedule. (Precure series generally run for a full four cours over the course of an entire year, which makes accounting for them in otherwise neat and orderly lists like this one difficult. And yes I’m aware I said that only finished shows would be on the list. Sue me.) But that’s okay, because while Tropical Rouge Precure is great, it’s on this list less for what it actually is and more for the experiences I had while watching it. Its placement here is not due to its excellent sense of humor, its wonderful characters, or its at-times gorgeous animation, even though those are all very much merits the series has. Unlike most other anime on this list, I did not–and do not–watch TroPre by myself. I watch it with a group of friends, every weekend, at around the same time. In this way, I get to have an experience that I very much would’ve liked to have had as a little girl; getting to talk about one of my favorite magical girl anime with some other girls my own age. A sense of lost youth is a common side effect of being transgender, and while never having gotten to chat about Sailor Moon with schoolmates is pretty low on the list of things I’m sad I missed out on, it is still on that list. So, as a balm for that particular little hole in my soul, I value the series a lot. We plan to continue this practice next year, so unless something goes horribly wrong, you can expect to see Delicious Party Precure somewhere on the list next year, too. There have already been three magical girl anime somewhere in this article, and that’s the end of the honorable mentions. So you may well wonder; what’s at #1? Well, a different sort of magical girl anime. . . . . . . . . . . . Oh come on, you can’t actually besurprised. #1: Wonder Egg Priority
I knew from the minute I started writing this list that Wonder Egg Priority would be my #1. I tried to talk myself out of it more than once; to convince myself to put Heike Monogatari at the top of the list instead. I like that show and Wonder Egg almost as much as each other. It would’ve been a compromise, but it was one I could’ve lived with. But that’s the thing, right? It still would’ve been a compromise. And it’s my list, so there is no room for compromise. Wonder Egg Priority is my favorite anime of the year. Is it the best anime of the year? That’s a level of definitiveness that I don’t normally strive for when writing, even if this sort of format implicitly demands it. But if I’m the one being asked the question? Then yes, it absolutely fucking is. Quite unlike my #1 pick for last year, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, Wonder Egg Priority ends the year not as a widely beloved (or at least liked) exemplar of its staff’s prowess. Its place in the popular discourse is, and probably always will be, that of a great folly. A production train-crash that physically hurt the people working on it and squandered its potential and left its audience profoundly disappointed. Which, of course, is a massive oversimplification. I try to at least pay some attention to what The Public At Large think about the anime I cover, if anything. But the fact remains that while the consensus will probably always be against WEP, and not totally without reason, there are people who still like it. I am one of them. There are dozens of us. I just happen to like it more than anything else that aired this year. But of course you want to know why, which is a fair question, given what this website is and what I write about on it. It would be fairly easy to fall back on its many technical merits. Wonder Egg Priority is an incredible-looking show, constantly toeing a line between appearing pristine as jeweled glass and wild as paint-buckets tossed at canvasses. If CloverWorks never make anything that has quite this level of visual pop ever again, it would not be a mark against them in any way. We could talk also about its soundtrack, an underappreciated aspect of the series that colors every moment of it in a way rare both this year specifically and in general. (Sonny Boy is its only real competition from 2021 in this aspect.) If we wanted to really stretch our critic-brains, we could turn toward its thematic merits. To try to break down the series’ elaborate use of symbolism. Or perhaps its understanding of how gender roles define and oppress us, and how the modern world will beat any young girl it can’t control into submission, co-opt her for its own ends and twist her into hurting others like her. (See: Frill.) We could cite its deeply compelling four main characters and their own specific twists on this notion; a recovering hikikomori (Ai), a former idol with past sins on her mind (Rika), a mysterious wunderkind with a vanished sister (Neiru), and the series’ own high-strung, gender-nonconformant take on the obligatory “boyish one” (Momoe). We could talk about how they smash personifications of pedophilia, misogyny, and transphobia to paint-colored smithereens and are pursued by anonymous maniacs called Haters through their imaginary worlds. We could talk about how their mysterious “benefactors” who promise they can restore the dead to life turn out to be little more than hucksters past their prime. We could talk, at length, about all of this. We could even talk about this! But frankly, I think “all of this” is, incredibly, at least to me, somewhat secondary. It is true that Wonder Egg Priority has all these merits, and I think they alone could be used as an argument for why the show is very good. And if they were all that Wonder Egg Priority did right, it would have earned a comfortable spot somewhere a few ranks back. Maybe between Sonny Boy and Heike Monogatari, as “merely” a show from 2021 that I’m confident I’ll still be thinking about in 2031. In truth, what is often cited as its greatest “objective flaw” (and oh, how I hate that phrase), is what locked me into holding it close to my heart forever, and why, if asked, I will say it’s among my all-time favorites. Wonder Egg Priority doesn’t really have an ending. Its story comes to an abrupt halt. Little is resolved, one of the main characters is missing. It’s a question mark. There is no “to be continued.” This is, I realize, a stance held by very few. But endings are rarely what truly move me about stories. (Heike Monogatari is one of a quite small number of exceptions.) So on its own, WEP’s lack of an ending is no serious fault to me. Indeed, Wonder Egg Priority could have ended in any number of ways, from the sappy to the depressing, that would’ve given it some measure of critical and fan acclaim. If it had really nailed it, it could’ve sat alongside modern born-classics like Revue Starlight, hailed as a truly great example of what TV anime as a medium could achieve. Instead, it dissolved into a cloud of smoke, seeping into our collective memories forever. It became an unanswerable question and an unsolvable puzzle; quiet as God and twice as unknowable. In doing so, it embodied the boiling haze of steaming existential confusion that is the modern zeitgeist better than almost any work of fiction I have ever experienced. Wonder Egg Priority left an axe-wound in the popular imagination. For that, I love and respect it immensely. In a way, it is this aspect that most closely ties Wonder Egg‘s form to its message. The girls’ struggle, ultimately, is against suicide personified. The Temptation of Death. The fact that they don’t explicitly “win” is contentious. But that’s the whole point; we don’t see how this story ends. Some small glimpses of incremental progress aside, we know nothing. Only that Ai marches forward, in spite of it all, to try again. I have seen it argued that this is a relentlessly bleak ending, but both the reality of the subjects Wonder Egg speaks on, and its own stylistic flourishes make it fairly obvious that this is, in fact, hopeful. To live in the modern age is to live in a world filled with poison. To live on in spite of that, to get up every day, to snap your gaze toward the horizon and walk–as Ai does–is optimism. This world wants us dead. We live anyway. Quite unlike last year’s #1, I do not expect that Wonder Egg Priority will ever be hailed as timeless or classic. I think if it is remembered at all, it will be as a mistake. The avalanche of public consensus is hard to fight against, particularly in the age of social media. But, as I have learned many times this year, I can be wrong. If I have ever been wrong about anything relating to this medium I’ve devoted so much of my time to writing about, I would like it to be this. Because whenever I so much as think about Wonder Egg Priority, it comes back to me in an instant. The hyper-technicolor magical girl psycho-drama that no one asked for, but that we–or perhaps just some of us–sorely needed. Wonder Egg Priority might never gain any coveted status as a must-watch, as a classic of its medium or genre, as “one of the good anime,” or anything of the sort, but if it does not gain some kind of following, there is something truly wrong with this world indeed. We endure precisely because we know we’re not alone. It would be a horribly cruel thing for one of the best articulations of that idea ever put to the silver screen to be lost to obscurity. Yet, in spite of everything I just said, I hold no delusion that I am the Wonder Egg Guru. I have spent the better part of a year attempting to reckon with the WEP Project’s first, last, and only output. To explain it succinctly, to square how much I love it with how strongly I oppose the worst parts of the industry that let it exist. But the fate’s-honest truth is that I am not much closer to “closing the book” on Wonder Egg Priority, for myself or anyone else, than I was when the TV broadcast ended in late March. It’s an enigma. I think at least some part of it always will be. And maybe it seems unfair to give the gold medal to an enigma. Maybe the #1 spot should be saved for something I can explain better. But it is my view that the role of the critic and commentator is not that of an interpreter. It is that of an honest witness. I could have sat here and thought myself into circles. I could have tried to justify putting something–anything–else at #1, but that’s not honest. And if I don’t have honesty, what do I have? So, there it is. The most magical anime of 2021. The best anime of the year, so says me, is a series that draws a line from the strained psyche of four teenage girls to our own place, lost in the fog that smothers this haunted planet. Then, in a grand confrontational hammer-smash, it reveals that there is no line at all; these things are one in the same. Now that’s a magic trick. And, yes, that’s the list. What did you think? As I mentioned last year, I try not to pay too much mind as to whether my picks will be “controversial” or not, but, well, last year I didn’t top the list with what is probably the most divisive show of the entire year. So tell me your thoughts! Did you love my picks? Were they utterly baffling to you? Maybe 50/50? What were your top five, top six, top whatever anime of 2021? I’d love to hear from you, so please do leave a comment here or on Twitter. If you’re one of the folks who was disappointed by my #1 (and more than one person explicitly said they would be, whoops!) then…well, I hope this will spurn you to write your own lists, at the very least. (I maintain that basically everyone’s life could be improved by running a blog.) Incidentally, I ran a very small little competition on my twitter account yesterday, and wanted to shout out @lilysokawaii, @pikestaff, and @theplatinumdove for correctly guessing my #1 pick. For the rest of y’all: better luck next year! Tomorrow, an article will go up that briefly discusses my plans for 2022, as she fast approaches. I’ll see you then, anime fans. Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
The Frontline Report is a weekly column where I briefly summarize the past week of my personal journey through anime, manga, and the related spheres of pop culture. Expect some degree of spoilers for the covered shows. Hello, anime fans! You may have noticed the site looking a little different this past week. I got a new WordPress theme which comes with a somewhat spiffier look and more general readability. Sadly switching themes does seem to have made the archives a bit of a pain to browse and there’s not really anything I can do about it until I can eventually afford a WordPress Premium plan and implement some custom CSS. I’m going to try to work on a workaround at some point in the future, but in the meantime, I beg your patience. All that in mind, I do strongly urge you to take a gander at this article’s footer and consider pledging some support. It really does help me continue writing in a very real and tangible way. Administrative notes aside, we’ve got a bit of an interesting bit of zeitgeist in the air this week. Four of the five anime covered here are about an all-female cast pushing through some obstacle(s) or another. For the girls of Magia Record this triumph is shadowed with equal parts tragedy, but nonetheless, it remains compelling. For the most part at least, it seems the girls are alright. Blue Reflection Ray This is among the first anime to actually end since I started doing this column. I’ve already written about the series at length in my review of it and I’ve no desire to repeat myself too much. So let me just say, Blue Reflection Ray is that rare anime that just kind of clicks with you if you’re the right sort of person. It has its flaws, sure, but I wouldn’t trade the series for the world and I’m very happy with how it ended. I may simply be a straight-up sucker for magical girl anime. But my view that there is always room for these stories of girls triumphing over the evils of the world remains unchanged. Blue Reflection Ray was not the best to ever do it, it wasn’t the first, and it certainly won’t be the last. But it is a valid, meaningful part of that artistic lineage, and no one can take that away from it. The Detective is Already Dead Another recently-concluded show. Boy, Detective was….something, wasn’t it? I think after the dust settles and it recedes into memory, the few people who remember Detective at all will remember it more as a sometimes-compelling trainwreck more than anything genuinely awful. I don’t mean to come across as elitist about this, but I think anyone saying it’s truly terrible hasn’t seen any truly terrible anime. (Not that I blame them, of course.) But it certainly wasn’t particularly good either, and I can’t picture it picking up even the ironic cult following of something like Big Order. Such is the curse of being rough going but not outright bad enough to watch “as a joke”. That said, as I mentioned in my review of the series, I do think all of that gives it a kind of charm if you’re a pretty specific sort of person. But most people aren’t that sort of person, of course. So into the dustbin of history it will inevitably end up. What a tragic fate for our heroic detective! But so it goes. So it goes. Kageki Shoujo!! I stand by what I said last week, and what do you know, Kageki Shoujo!! stuck the landing. I’m still not sure I’d put it in my personal upper echelon of anime from 2021 (you’ll have to wait for my year-end rankings to find out for sure), but it did what it wanted to do and it did it well. That’s worth quite a lot all on its own. The finale this week succeeds in my mind largely because of two things. One; it finally gives us, however briefly, a Sarasa performance that’s truly her own. Her take on Romeo & Juliet‘s Tybalt here is a wonderful thing to behold, and watching the audience (which, mind you, is just her own classmates) dance in the palm of her hand as she wrings the dark, moody character for all he’s worth is just excellent. Two; it ties up some other loose ends, in particular with respect to the hitherto slightly underdeveloped Sawa Sugimoto. Her own frustration at not getting that very same role comes through just as clear as Sarasa’s triumphs, and how she deals with that disappointment ends the show on a realistic, but still high, note. Inevitably, some will be a bit cold on the choice of stopping point. (We don’t even get to actually see any of our girls act in a proper play, after all.) And the faint hope of a second season remains in the air. But I think that so many people care so much about Kageki Shoujo!! in the first place speaks a lot to its strengths. No one really expected much of this series, but it ended up captivating the crowd anyway. Isn’t that sort of surprise what following seasonal anime at all is all about? It probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to feel “proud of” a show, but nonetheless that’s where I find myself at with Kageki Shoujo!! When the season started I was fairly sure it would be written off by most due to sharing some vaguely similar subject matter and a very similar name with Revue Starlight. That it’s managed to comfortably find and secure its own audience, even over here in “the West”, is a lovely thing. I’ve rarely been happier to be proven wrong. Magia Record Magia Record‘s second season is over, though not without some amount of tumult, coming as it does after a week of delays and with a number of technical issues. As with before, most of my thoughts are over on Geek Girl Authority. Though with an asterisk, this time. This is the last article I’m going to be writing for them. My current plan is to fully focus my efforts over here on Magic Planet Anime. So, if you could give it a look, that’d mean a lot to me. The people at GGA have been great to me in the, gosh, two years I’ve written for the site, and I’m happy to part with them on the best terms possible. As for the episode itself? Honestly it’s a real treat to have Mami survive a season of anything Madoka-related alive and unhurt. Everything else, probably deliberately, remains up in the air right now. I’m definitely quite invested in the fate of Kuroe, in particular. Her disappearance here raises a lot more questions than it answers. Tropical Rouge Precure I don’t write about Tropical Rouge Precure, or really Precure in general, much in this column, both because its air-day, fairly late on a Saturday night here in the States, makes it hard to talk about the “current” episode and because, being a year-round show with four full cours, it doesn’t change that much from week to week. Most of the time, that is. But every once in a while Precure will deliver an absolute knockout, and that’s episode 29 (“Reviving A Legend! The Pretty Cure’s Power-Up Makeover!“) for Tropical Rouge. Easily the best-looking episode of the show so far (and one of the best of the year period, up there with Magia Record season 2’s debut episode among others), it introduces some half dozen new plot points without making anything feel congested or convoluted and looks amazing while it does it. It’s the rare anime episode that feels twice its length in a decidedly positive way. Expect this one to come up in conversations even years from now. Episode 30 has since aired too, and it’s also good, but 29 has to remain the star here, an all-timer if there ever was one. Elsewhere on MPA I linked them already, but seriously, do check out my reviews of The Detective is Already Dead and Blue Reflection Ray if you have the time. I’m quite proud of how the both of them turned out. Lastly, it’s yet to fully come to fruition, but I can say with relative confidence that a new episode of KeyFrames Forgotten is on the way. I’m not entirely sure when it will arrive, but the wheels are in motion, you have my word of that much. Until next week, anime fans. Wanna talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers? Consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category. All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders. This week’s episode is interesting. It focuses not on any individual character, but on several. We learn a bit more about Latte (the dog princess and our seasonal mascot), Nodoka’s mother, and Nodoka herself. As a small note before we get started, the regular opening this week is replaced with footage from the upcoming Precure Miracle Leap movie! So be wary if you don’t want to be spoiled! As for the episode itself; we firstly learn that Nodoka’s mother quit her job when Nodoka was ill. I happen to like this extra little bit of detail; fleshing out Nodoka’s illness and the period of her life that was defined by it makes it feel more like an authentic part of the character as opposed to just a tacked-on element. Nodoka’s mother, as it turns out, was a delivery driver (a job during which she met Nodoka’s father). Seemingly what’s actually meant by this is that she delivers produce by truck, but the ambiguity here does indeed invite you to imagine a young Japanese bachelor falling for his Uber driver. Importantly though, the show does go out of its way to portray this as a respectable job that people find interesting, which is good! It’s a nice contrast to how such work tends to be treated in American media in the rare instance it’s brought up at all (namely, as a punchline). A good amount of the episode’s first half is actually spent with Latte and the other mascot animals. Nodoka’s mom was her primary caretaker when the young Precure was at school, and now that she’s working again the dog princess finds herself lonesome at home. This particular plot thread is briskly resolved by the mascots resolving to look out for her more, missing her mother Queen Teatine (that’s the dog in the dress in the first episode if you’ve forgotten), as she does. Daruizen is this episode’s baddie, and sics an animated strawberry patch on Nodoka’s mom and a local farmer while the former is making a delivery. Nodoka’s illness comes up again here, as when the Precure rush to the strawberry farm Nodoka struggles a bit to keep up. What drives her forward is the knowledge that her mom’s in danger of course, and who could blame her? Nodoka really does seem to have enviably great parents. Daruizen also sets up what is probably the (unintentionally?) funniest moment of the episode. The Pretty Cure franchise occasionally has comedic timing that many actual comedy anime would kill for. Of course, the Precure soon arrive to put a stop to all this. Daruizen seems to take a particular interest in Nodoka/Cure Grace herself. Initially he derides her as weak while she’s immobolized by some of the corruptive gunk that this week’s megapathogerm generates, and in fact smears some of it on her face, which is honestly just kinda nasty. Then, when she bounces back, seems rather curious about her apparent strength before teleporting away (as Precure villains do). This is pretty much the end of the episode. The strawberry elemental (yeah) that the Pathogerm infected gives our girls an Element Bottle, presumably closely based on a new collectible doodad of some sort being rolled out in real life, but this is more amusing than anything. There’s also a small pair of mirrored asides where Nodoka’s mom thanks Chiyu and Hinata for befriending her daughter and, in the Healing Garden, Queen Teatine thinks about the wonderful friends Latte must’ve made. It’s cute, and we also get another shot of that mysterious statue-fied woman down there. Is this ultimately a filler episode? Yeah, kind of, in that it has little to do with the show’s overall narrative through-line, but it’s the good kind. We learn a little more about our characters and their lives. Solid stuff all around. This week’s shot of the week is this, the result of me desperately trying to catch the spirit of a nice cut that happens during this episode’s fight sequence. The cut itself is simply too short to capture it this way, but I did get this, which looks like some kind of meme-in-the-making. I kinda can’t stop laughing at it. If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.
This week’s dose of Precure goodness is an episode about how two of our girls don’t quite “get” each other and how they learn to overcome that. It’s also quite funny, but I’m starting to think that that’s just an inherent trait of Hinata, who this episode is partly about. The gist is pretty simple. Hinata and Chiyu just kind of don’t vibe with each other. This is mostly on the former’s end, as she seems to mistake Chiyu’s genuine concern for her wellbeing for her being angry, which isn’t actually the case. Speaking as someone with anxiety problems, I get where Hinata’s coming from. If you’ve got issues with this sort of thing it can be hard to sort well-meaning attempts to help from people just being upset. Not helping is that on Chiyu’s end, she’s a rather serious sort, which only furthers the confusion. Early in the episode, Hinata’s called on to answer a question in science class (about photosynthesis, if you’re curious), and can’t. This sets her flaring in a way that will be immediately familiar to anyone with a generally anxious personality. I don’t use the phrase “I feel seen” often, but, well. While Hinata is reckoning with feeling bad over her poor memory, Chiyu gets hit with things of her own. The girls resolve this in a wonderfully Kids Show fashion, with an aquarium trip courtesy of some tickets Nodoka’s mom won in a raffle. They bond in a similarly goofy fashion, after some false starts, Hinata discovers that Chiyu cracks up at bad puns. And we’re talking awful here. The rest of the episode proceeds in pretty standard fashion. A Pathogerm shows up and gets stomped flat following some antics where Pegitan goes missing. All in all it’s an episode that’s mostly cute as opposed to consequential, but I do like the exploration of Hinata and Chiyu’s insecurities and how they’re beginning to overcome them together. Some additional stray thoughts: -A flashback to how the Pathogerms and Healing Animals fought when they first clashed a long time ago gives us an absolutely wonderful sequence where a giant mass of darkness going toe to toe with a dog in a wedding dress. I love anime. -This is the worst-looking episode of the show so far. It’s far from horrible, but it’s noticeable. This isn’t really that shocking given where we are in the series (Precure shows tend to look their least good from episodes 5 to 15 or so, is my understanding) but it’s still a touch annoying. Shot Of The Week is another Tiny Hinata. I’m predictable, okay?
This week’s episode begins with a small comedy of errors, and I couldn’t be more delighted. Our episode opens with Hinata encountering Nyatoran. And, consequently, an early contender for the best contiguous five seconds of anime in 2020. This kicks off a runabout where Nyatoran has to pretend to be the world’s one and only talking cat. Hinata initially tries to ask her older brother (a veterinarian) for help, but runs into Nodoka and Chiyu along the way, thus getting our core cast in one place for the first time. The first half of this episode seriously is just Antics, much of which is an excuse for some truly great faces. We also formally learn what many will have already intuited about Hinata. Namely; that she’s clumsy and easily gets caught up in the goings-on around her. Often to the extent of forgetting things like personal commitments. The episode sees her overshoot meeting a pair of friends to go shopping by what seems like a few hours. Personally, I’d say she seems like she has ADHD, but given that this is a cartoon (and a kids’ show at that) it seems unlikely that such a thing would ever be explicitly brought up. But the episode’s real meat is in the second half. Our heroines end up at the mall where Hinata’s friends are hanging out and, surprise, a Megapathogerm attacks. This time being formed out of a mirror in a clothing shop. The villain this time around is Guiwaru, the buff one, who seems to be this season’s entry into the “hot blooded one who likes to fight for its own sake” strand of Precure villain. This is where Hinata makes her debut as a Precure, and–and I realize I’m saying a lot here–it’s possibly the strongest of all three of the current ‘Cures. See Hinata’s got the kind of huge-heart vibe that is more generally associated with the actual lead in shows like this. The entire second half of the episode brims with so much mahou shoujo energy you can practically feel it on your skin, and what makes it great is that Hinata is as caught up in things as the audience is. It feels exceptional that we get to see a magical girl dive in to the role with this much aplomb. Hinata goes from being scared of this week’s Megapathogerm. To hearing the word “Precure” for the first time. To seeing their outfits and fangirling out about them. To threatening the villain in the span of about an in-universe minute. There’s 0 to 100 and then there’s this. Some of this of course is the practical consideration of the episode length, but on the other hand, it really does feel like this just is how she’d react. We’ve only gotten to know Hinata for a few episodes (and this is the first that’s actually about her), but she already feels like enough of a fully-realized character that we can say that this just seems “right” in an ephemeral, difficult-to-qualify sense. I hate pulling out this term, but even before her transformation, Hinata just kind of seems badass. Her reaction to getting smacked halfway across the mall by the Megapathogerm? It is to this ironheaded fashion geek that Nyatoran offers the paw of his heart, in a shot that awesomely, but completely inexplicably, appears to visually reference the opening of Fate/stay night. Of course, anyone with even a passing familiarity with the franchise knows what happens next. The Megapathogerm goes down in what is probably the single best-animated fight of the series so far. Cure Sparkle absolutely dominates the thing to the point where you almost feel bad for it. They even get into an absolutely awesome back-and-forth with energy blasts. The episode basically ends after they beat the thing, but that’s just fine. It’s an A+ note to finish what is almost certainly the series’ strongest episode yet. As for Hinata? As much as I love Cures Grace and Fontaine, I think I might have a new favorite character. Time will tell! There’s a couple other little details I liked too. What springs most to mind is this bit from the beginning. The Pathogerm King here is not gonna be too happy when he finds out what transpired this episode. And we get what seems like a hint about that petrified lady in the animal kingdom we got a brief look at back in episode 1. As for this episode’s Shot Of The Week, despite the abundance of absolutely masterful craftsmanship in the episode’s second half, I think I have to give it to this distance shot from relatively early on, it’s just so charming! Look at Hinata’s face! Until next time!
To be honest there’s not a ton about this week’s episode I want to cover. It’s a fairly typical early plot beat for the franchise, after all, but we shouldn’t undersell the importance of getting our second Precure. First thing’s first though, this might have one of the most unfortunate titles of any Precure episode I’m aware of. That aside the first half of this episode is mostly Nodoka trying desperately to keep this whole “Pretty Cure” thing under wraps, because, as Rabbirin puts it. Nodoka of course, kinda sucks at this, because if there’s ever been a Precure who’s a good liar, I’m not familiar with them. She offers this when Chiyu tries to confront her about being seen near the monster attack the prior day after school. This continues. She eventually relents that she does own the small gaggle of small animals Chiyu saw her with but obviously it’s not until much later in the episode that she’s forced to divulge their actual nature. Instead, we get to see Chiyu hit Nodoka with a cop stare as our heroine cracks under the pressure. Chiyu also takes Nodoka to her family’s inn, which has a fun little sequence where she shows off various things there to Nodoka, who proceeds to just say “fwow!” in various volumes and intensities to all of them. This kind of cute, low-key character building is part of what makes Precure’s charm work so well, so I like to point it out when I notice it. Of course, trouble breaks out not long after, so let’s cut to the chase. This week’s Megapathogerm is this thing, a corrupted water elemental that seems to be able to pollute the water that feeds the inn’s hot springs. Not a great development for Chiyu and her family. For a while, Grace (who Chiyu just happens to catch transform from Nodoka) handles the thing well. But when she has to take a thrown tree to her back, she’s understandably injured. I really like how this bit plays out, because not only is Grace suddenly being semi-sidelined understandable (even for a magical girl, getting hit with a whole-ass tree has to hurt) instead of a naked plot convolution, but it means that Chiyu gets to approach her first transformation from a rare angle. It’s her that makes the first move, rather than the timid Pegitan. The show has been subtly building up Chiyu as a responsible, reliable, cool “older sister” type of character. That she actively seeks out and seizes the chance to become a Precure is rare enough for the franchise to be notable, even if she only has about an in-universe minute between learning about them and becoming one. Of course, you all know what this means. I have to say, I love Fontaine’s transformation. It’s not quite perfect in the technical sense (towards the start there’s a weird cut transition, is mostly why I say that), but stylistically it’s absolutely great. I love how she sends the water jet up and it transforms into a lab coat in the middle of the sequence. That’s some great stuff. It doesn’t take Fontaine very long to defeat the Megapathogerm, of course. Still, I liked her introduction and I’m excited to see Chiyu’s character develop more. The somewhat stoic Cures tend to be among my favorite (last year’s Star Twinkle had Madoka / Cure Selene in the same vein), though given how much I love them all in general I suppose that’s a given. I don’t have a ton else to say about this episode. Pegitan’s little mini-arc where Chiyu helps him get over his anxiety over not being as good at his job as Rabbirin is cute, though a little too short to be hugely impactful. All that in mind, until next time! Shot of the week: A very worried Pegitan realizing that Latte has wandered off. If you like my work, consider following me on Twitter, supporting me on Ko-Fi, or checking out my other anime-related work on Anilist or for The Geek Girl Authority.
Healin’ Good‘s second episode gets a pretty standard “template” of Precure episode out of the way fairly early. One where the mascot(s) and Cure(s) have some kind of brief falling out before reconciling. It’s an easily-traced narrative arc so instead of just recapping the whole episode, I’d like to just zoom in on a few bits (this is also an excuse to write less overall, but you’ll have to excuse me there. It’s been a LONG week). Firstly we get formally introduced to our villain trio. The designs stand out a bit less to me than last Precure’s, mostly boiling down to “twink, big guy, and This Girl” Our evil overlord appears to be made of some kind of evil magma-sludge stuff, which is an interesting direction if nothing else. The main thrust of the episode here though is Rabbirin (Nodoka’s partner if you’ll recall, the rabbit) “breaking up” with her after she sees her fail at a bunch of basic sporting events. This is a pretty silly reason to do this of course but the show manages to sell it pretty well. Nodoka actually is clumsy The reason, of course, is the illness alluded to in the last episode but explicitly mentioned here. We’re not told what it was (and given that this is a kids’ show we may never learn of it by name) but it clearly had her hospital-bound for a good chunk of her young life. We’re even shown that she had to use a wheelchair for sometime. To Rabbirin’s credit, she’s just not being a jerk for no reason. Somewhat rarely for a magical girl anime, the mascot character is actually shown worrying about her partner’s safety. It’s a good point! One rarely made in this kind of show because it kind of runs counter to genre convention, but you can at least see where the rabbit fairy is coming from. What changes Rabbirin’s mind is, of course, a tearful speech. The first of this installment, and a pretty damn good one. This is where Nodoka brings up her past, and we also just get some generally-great dramatic shots that just make you want to cry along with her. It’s interesting to note that Nodoka’s primary motive for becoming a Precure seems to be gratitude. Which while the series has trafficked in dozens of motives over the course of its existence, I’m not sure about that one specifically. Certainly, it’s at least new to me. It’s an interesting concept, and it actually makes her feel quite down to Earth (haha) in contrast to her immediate predecessor Hikaru from last year’s Star Twinkle. Healin’ Good has done a lot to endear me to it so far but Nodoka’s characterization–surprisingly strong given how we’re only two episodes in–is certainly up there. To sidetrack for a bit: Aoi Yuuki brings a sort of even-toned performance to the role that is a bit more downbeat than what she’s most famous for, but no less optimistic and heartening. It works really well, and it’s honestly great to hear the woman finally get to play a “straight” magical girl after the long and winding road she took to get here. (If you’re not familiar, Aoi Yuuki’s starmaking role was that of Madoka Magica‘s titular lead. Later, she’d be equally known as Hibiki Tachibana in Symphogear. Two roles that are adjacent to the genre but have very different takes on it and are aimed at an adult audience. There’s even a little bit in here about how Nodoka “loved becoming a Precure” that certainly seems like it was written with some subtext in mind. Even if it’s pure coincidence, it’s still nice to hear her deliver it. Oh, and Rabbirin actually apologizes for hurting Nodoka. Something that is again, pretty basic but not actually a given. It’s nice to see. It should come as zero surprise that after reconciling, Nodoka and Rabbirin kick the Megapathogerm of the week’s noggin in with almost no effort (this ain’t an action episode, to say the least). This was a surprisingly solid one all around, when I saw the title card drop I was expecting to tolerate it at best. These tend to be among my least favorite kinds of Precure episode, since the conflict often feels a bit artificial. Here, I believed it entirely and I think it was resolved well, if briskly. Elsewhere in the episode, Nodoka went to school for the first time. We get a bit of exposition here (“being Precure is a secret!” For whatever reason, as usual!) Most impressive to me though was the sheer economy in this little exchange. Formally introducing Nodoka’s two co-leads (gal-ish Hinata and responsible, athletic Chiyu) and setting up their dynamic as a trio almost instantly. And at the episode’s tail end, we see that Chiyu actually saw the entire fight in this one go down. Surely, this will lead to long-running drama and is not just a way to segue into our next ‘Cure introduction (I snark, but I live for this stuff). And lastly, I’m generalizing my whatsit I mentioned last week into just a Screenshot Of The Week. I think we’ll be going with this one today, where Nodoka is being scouted by various sports clubs. What it rather looks like is more like she’s about to walk into a yuri doujin. Until next time!
To lead with a simple truth; this project is the actual reason I created this WordPress blog in the first place. I’ve tried this once before, last year I tried liveblogging HeartCatch Precure on my now-defunct janesanimeblog site on good ol’ tumblr before life got in the way. I wanted to give it another shot, as doing just half an hour a week feels a lot more doable. Whether I have a ton to say or very little will vary week by week of course, but I do want to write at least a little bit about every single episode. Why? Very simple; I love magical girls. That’s not rare among transwomen (or women in general honestly), but something about the pure-hearted straightforwardness of the genre speaks to me. Both in the rare show like Precure that is still actually for kids, and more adult-oriented things like Symphogear. So what of Healin’ Good itself? Well, every Pretty Cure series has two raisons d’arte. The first is pretty obvious for any show marketed to kids. The second is usually an examination of some simple theme or group thereof. Last year’s Star Twinkle Precure (the first Precure I watched end to end!) examined aspirations, imagination, and, aesthetically, space. It’s a little too early to say much that’s definitive about Healin’ Good, but it’s obvious that taking care of yourself is a big part of it. I’m a little iffy on the “health food” tone some of this takes here in the first episode, but honestly, it’s a solid message for kids. Especially given that one of Precure‘s recurring sponsors is McDonald’s. The second seems to be taking care of the planet. There’s a little “Gaia theory” going on here, even this early on the show makes some implicit connections between keeping yourself healthy and keeping Earth healthy. But enough about all that deep stuff. Let’s meet our protagonist. This is the memorably-named Nodoka. She is an extremely good girl. Precure protagonists tend to come in a couple different moulds, and Nodoka definitely fits into the “diligent girl who likes to help people” archetype. Seiyuu fans will already know that Nodoka is voiced by the great Aoi Yuuki, who seems to have taken a circuitous path from voicing Madoka of Madoka Magica fame, to Hibiki of Symphogear, to finally a “no-frills” magical girl in the form of Nodoka. She brings a lot of palpable enthusiasm to the role, and it’s infectious. Nodoka herself seems to have something of a sad backstory. We’re not given the details, but given her parents’ comments early in the episode and a very brief flashback we get later, it seems like Nodoka is or was sickly for much of her life. Her moving to the health resort(?) town is what opens the first episode, and seems to be the result of the old-fashioned “move to the mountains to get her some fresh air” diagnosis. Well before we get to the actual magical part of the episode, Healin’ Good goes out of its way to establish the girl at the heart of it. She enjoys walking around town, helps an American couple take a picture, lounges on some grass to soak up the sun, helps an old lady carry some things, and of course, briefly runs into the two characters who she will doubtless eventually form a trio with. (Let’s pretend to be surprised by that when the time comes, hm? Makes the whole thing more fun.) She is accidentally bowled over by a chatty type with twintails, in what is one of several pretty strong physical comedy breaks. The other girl she encounters running. I could say more, but I think I’ll just let these pictures speak for themselves. Of course, this is Pretty Cure. So while all this is happening, a completely different half of the story is going down nearby. Meet this season’s mascots. This is the first episode, so details are sparse, but these four (who I will be referring to simply by their respective animals for now, not sure what sub group I’ll end up watching long-term) are tasked with partnering with a human to save the world from evil pollution people. By their queen, who is one of those long-haired French dogs I forget the name of. Specifically, she phrases it this way: To which our penguin-shaped friend has a pretty understandable reaction a few minutes down the line. Also a petrified lady is just kind of…there, in the animal kingdom (itself implied to be underground). Just kind of hanging out. We’ll get back to her later in the show, I’m sure, but for the time being it’s just kind of an amusingly incongruous detail. The way they eventually cross paths with Nodoka is pretty standard, but I must shout out the bunny for using this absolutely impeccable piece of logic to figure out what kind of person they should be looking for. Eventually, our baddies show up, created by corrupting tiny nature spirtis called Elements. These things are called Pathogerms, because this is Pretty Cure and Pretty Cure knows that subtlety is for cowards. Your average (Mega-)Pathogerm appears to look something like this. This thing starts corrupting the park that Nodoka was hanging out in. It’s here that Precure and Sidekick cross paths for the first time. You know what happens next. Can I level with you? It’s hard to make a magical girl transformation sequence that I don’t love. I love how simple this one is, and the flower motif is lovely. Will we see it a billion times over the course of this show’s run? Absolutely. Is it ever going to lose its magic? If so, only a little, and by repetition alone. The only quibble I have is, yes, the mascots do become part of the “healing stick” wands the Precures have. Yes, it’s kinda weird. It’s alright, we’ll get over it together, you and I. Nodoka–now Cure Grace–promptly puts her priorities in the exact wrong order, proving again that all magical girls are required to have at least a small amount of Powerful Dumbass Energy. Grace, in grand Precure tradition, then A) jumps real high by accident, and B) pounds the Megapathogerm into the dirt with nothing but a couple of kicks and throws. There’s a “magic bunny shield” thrown in there briefly as a block, but still. Importantly we’re also introduced to this show’s version of the “wawawawawa” from HeartCatch, and it iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis somethin’. Standing around vaguely during all this is this person, who, well, we don’t really know much about them yet, but hey! They’re here if you like androgynous demon folks. I’m not wild about that particular visual trope to be honest (there’s a long history of giving villains stereotypically femme or gay traits), but it’s nothing over the top here so far and who knows, there might be way more to this character than meets the eye, so we’ll let it slide for the time being. Plus, if this sort of design is your thing, I doubt you’re much minding. The episode kinda just ends there, honestly. Other than a genuinely hilarious bit where Nodoka finally registers that she’s been talking to a bunch of animals for the past 15 minutes. But other than that, that’s the wrap for the first episode of the first Precure of the 2020s. Honestly? I loved it. I’m not that hard to please with this kind of thing though and I’m curious as to how more discerning / picky (choose whichever adjective you find more applicable) Precure fans will size up the show. Regardless, you can count on a blog post like this per week barring some kind of major personal problem. I hope to see y’all around, but before I truly end things on this post I wanted to just drop some random thoughts I had no place for elsewhere in it.
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I wanna make this overconfident magical girl learn her place
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