Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 44 · 11:55pm Dec 13th, 2022
Ah, the trials of watching too much current material. All my time is stacked with things I can only watch one episode of per week, so it takes forever to finish anything. But I did fit a few in, so this week's featured items are Carole & Tuesday and Terror in Resonance, plus four other good to okay things, after the break.
Carole & Tuesday is ostensibly a series about music. AugieDog first recommended it to me, and a couple other people chimed in to say it was good. One point totallynotabrony has made before is whether a series focused on music is actually about the music or more about the drama in the lives of the musicians. This does both.
It's not going to be to everyone's tastes, for multiple reasons. One, it's a very slow burn. The intro to the first episode already frames it as "here's how the great duo had their beginning," so that immediately disarms any possible tension about whether they'll make it. The first half of the run barely has anything in it that makes for much of an arc. It's mostly one-episode plots that show the girls trying yet another scheme to gain public attention, and all the early ones fail, but again, the framing device has already told us that doesn't matter. It's not until the halfway point that much more of an arc comes up.
Two, the musical style may not be to everyone's tastes. The episodes are named after 1970s-80s songs, and while some of them seem like strange choices, stylistically at least, the titles are still very relevant. But three of those titles in particular are songs by Carole King, The Carpenters, and James Taylor, and that kind of late 70s/early 80s light/folk rock is what the girls mostly sing. If you like that, you'll be well rewarded. If you don't, then you might be put off. They do venture out of that style a little, and there are instances of other performers as well, particularly for an American Idol-type competition they enter. The other contestants use a variety of styles, some of them deliberately played for humor, but some are genuinely good.
So, about that plot. Up front, we have Tuesday, who seems to come from a rich family, running away from home without much of a plan. She loves music and plays acoustic guitar well, but it's unclear whether her intent is to become a street musician, yet as soon as she arrives in the city (well, after having her luggage stolen, which was nice to see result in a payoff several episodes later), she listens to Carole playing her keyboard on a bridge and is immediately enthralled.
And this brings me to point three that may rankle some. Eventually, there are some true antagonists, but for much of it, everyone does seem willing to help them to some degree, so there are never that many setbacks, aside from the ones I already talked about that were non-issues since it's spoiled up front that everything works out. It did feel a little too good to be true that there were so many angels.
Since the music itself is the supposed main plot thread, it really is a show about the music, but yet again, since we already know how that turns out, it doesn't generate any tension. I wouldn't blame anyone for feeling like that leads to stagnation, and even as much as I liked the music, that was about all that kept me going through the second quarter or so. But that's where the B plots kick in.
Both B plots start to get revealed soon enough in the series, but they don't ramp up until well in. There's another up-and-coming singer named Angela, who's a child actor and model trying to branch out into singing. In this future world (on Mars, no less), so much is done by AI. It can be hard for humans to find low-level jobs, and AI has even mostly taken over things like analyzing public tastes to write songs and optimize them for the performers' abilities. Carole and Tuesday are seen as both an oddity and a breath of fresh air in that they write their own songs. Angela is backed by a legendary AI developer, and she sees the girls as serious rivals, for reasons that don't get revealed until later. Her arc, with the exception of one event that was fine for plot development but timed in a really cliched way, was nicely compelling. I really do wish they'd given more closure to the brief appearance by a character named Cybelle, though, and there's a stalker arc that kind of stops without much explanation of why it happened.
And the other B plot is that Tuesday's mother is running against the incumbent to become governor of Mars, and she's following an AI's advice on how to win, which leads her to back some potentially very objectionable legislation, and the late part of the series serves more or less as an allegory for immigration policy.
Through those two developments, the plot transitions from being about music for its own sake to being about music as a vehicle to effect social change, and it was a well-handled flip to keep music as the focal piece to unify all that.
There's also an interesting theme of gender fluidity. There are numerous characters who have a variety of gender identities, but it's also played as sometimes being a product of the environment on Mars. Plus by the end, it gels that there have been thematic explorations of motherhood and loneliness.
Art was quite good, with a bit of obvious CGI, but it got especially smooth when characters were dancing during performances. Like impressively smooth. Music, as I've said, will depend on your taste for the genre, but it was very well done. A couple of the in-episode songs were very good—one had a nicely striking line, which means something a little different taken out of context, but still: "I'm strong on my own. Don't call me pretty." I liked both opening songs they used, and the first-half closing song "Hold Me Now" was very catchy. A bit of an unusual storyline and pacing from well-known director Shinichiro Watanabe, but he does it justice.
Rating: very good.
24 episodes, relevant genres: slice of life, drama, music, sci-fi, yuri.
Terror in Resonance is a series that somehow escaped my attention despite having a great pedigree, and no wonder it got lots of critical acclaim: MAPPA, Shinichiro Watanabe, Yoko Kanno. Yes, please.
It starts out with two young guys pulling off a James Bond-style infiltration and stealing some sort of device from a remote facility. Next, it pops to a pretty incongruous scene at a high school where some girls are bullying another girl named Lisa into jumping off one of the pool's starting blocks while fully clothed. The guys show up, and the younger one calls them out for what they're doing, then jumps into the pool himself. Thus starts an unusual friendship.
But it takes some time for them to encounter each other again. The boys have been masterminding terrorist attacks in Tokyo, but they're always careful to make sure nobody gets killed in any of them. Lisa's such a misfit—she has no friends at school, and home life is torture due to a mother with serious mental health issues. The younger boy, who goes by 12, is eager to let her hang out with them, but the older one, 9, considers her a liability. They give her a choice, and keeping in mind that they don't want to kill anyone, it's rather interesting how that choice shapes up. Could she have ended up dead? If so, would they have deemed it her choice and not their responsibility? I found that something to ponder as we learn more about what's going on.
Like any terrorists, they have an agenda, and it's nothing too surprising. They want to expose a government cover-up that significantly affected them in their secret past. Only they find themselves matching wits against another person brought in to counter them. It ends up being a similar situation and tone to Death Note, and like it, don't watch if you can't take some tragedy along the way. My main hangup about the plot had to do with the riddles the boys left for the police to disarm their bombs. At least the show walks you through the solution to each, but it requires information so esoteric that viewers aren't going to be able to figure them out on their own. Part of the fun in a mystery is trying to solve it yourself, after all.
One thing this show does very well is give lots of the characters engaging arcs. 12 and 9, of course, and Lisa felt like the main character at times, like her development was the whole point. Then there are also the police who realize all is not as it seems but get undermined by their own leadership, particularly one detective who's been in a predicament before that's much the same, plus his daughter has some tangential importance as well. Even this foreign opponent gets a bit of an arc. It's a great series for characterization.
Art is pretty good. With Yoko Kanno as composer, I would have expected to like the music better than I did. Not that it's bad. Just that it wasn't a standout to me, at least for the first half. Later on, there were a few things I would have liked to keep off the soundtrack, but there's little of it posted to YouTube beyond the same five or six songs over and over, which aren't the ones I liked the most. However, I'll cop to this being a series where the music may be more subject to personal taste than normal. The director based the premise on a visual that popped into his head while listening to a particular Icelandic band, and the music tries to evoke the same style. They even make a meta reference to it late in the run.
One thing I doubt was a meta reference but might be: Lisa's family name is Mishima, and part of the political intrigue is something that happened because Japan wanted to regain international prominence after WWII. There's a real historical figure named Mishima who advocated a return to the old monarchy after the war, and I don't know how well he's generally known. There was an artsy biographical film made about him in the 80s. Given what happened to him, I wonder if her name was an intentional choice to make that connection. It would seem to fit thematically.
Rating: very good.
Zankyou no Teroru, "Terror of the Echo," 11 episodes, relevant genres: strategy, psychological thriller, action, drama.
Blackfox (movie)—a cold open has main character Rikka, a little girl, being chased through a large house by a masked samurai and trying to defend herself. She lives with her father, a landmark AI developer, and grandfather, a legendary swordsman, and she's inherited an aptitude for both. Her father recently built some intelligent AI animals, but his research partners want to weaponize them and have him killed for his refusal to cooperate. Thus begins Rikka's mission to seek revenge later as a teenager, who'd been hiding under an assumed identity ever since. As part of the raiding team, one of the father's former partners had coerced his own daughter into helping. I only bring that up here because it'll be an obvious plot point to iron out everything between the two girls. It hits every beat you think it will, so there's nothing really original here. It's only a few years old, so it's not even an early entry into that plot. I did like the blink-and-you'll-miss-it reference that there may be a fourth AI animal out there and the fairly subtle reveal of what became of it. Not bad character arcs, good art, pretty good music, but it doesn't break any new ground. Rating: decent, but high in that range, relevant genres: drama, sci-fi.
Comic Girls (12 episodes)—first-year high school student Kaoruko writes manga under the pen name Kaos. I'm not sure what the circumstances are, since she isn't published, so maybe a sampler to gauge market interest or something? Whatever the situation, she ranks at the bottom of the reader survey, the only one not to get a single vote. But her editor sees potential and arranges to transfer her to another school that maintains a dorm where manga artists live together, though it's kind of a trade insider thing. The other students at the school don't know about it. When Kaos arrives there, she finds another new arrival, in a similar state, as her roommate, and the two girls in the next room over both have serialized publications already. Not only can Kaos pick their brains for info, she also helps them draw backgrounds and such, so she gains good experience. It's fairly slice of life, but it's done humorously as well, and there are some good running jokes, like a fifth girl who lives in the attic and draws horror manga. She's delightfully creepy. Another is that one of the experienced girls next door originally wanted to write children's comics, but her editor thought her art style would play well as hentai, so she draws that now. She was very reluctant at first, but she's finally starting to be okay with it. And of course Kaos's further attempts to draw something keep getting rejected by her editor. It's a nice story of perseverance, plus the comedy lands often enough to make it reliably amusing. The theme of suffering for your art should definitely resonate around here. Art is on the good side, and the music is average. Rating: good, relevant genres: slice of life, comedy, a little yuri.
Myriad Colors Phantom World (Musaigen no Fantomu Warudo, 13 episodes + 1 OVA)—in the fairly near future, a biomedical accident unleashed a virus that gave everyone the ability to see phantoms, previously invisible supernatural creatures. It also gave some people special abilities to fight the few phantoms that are harmful to humans. Such people form professional organizations, plus school-aged ones join school clubs that also take on lesser missions. Main character Haruhiko and his friend Mai are the least successful team in their school's club, but they get more skillful as they recruit three more members to join them, plus Haruhiko has a small phantom, somewhat like a familiar, who hangs around him. It's even implied that the phantoms were never real until the virus; it might have given humans the ability to create them. Either way, this boils down to a "monster of the week" plot, and it's standard fare. One episode about the first girl they manage to recruit, Reina, is fairly heartfelt, but there's no sort of plot arc until the last two episodes, and even then, it gets wrapped up in an anticlimactic way. Very heavy on fan service, particularly for the OVA, which is of course a beach episode. I mean... Mai pretty much has to fondle her own chest to activate her elemental attacks, and most of the girls are very amply endowed. It's not bad, but there's nothing to recommend especially, unless you really like the yokai hunting genre. Art was pretty good, reminiscent of the style of things like Sword Art Online and from the same era. Music was average. Rating: decent, relevant genres: action, drama, supernatural, comedy.
The Great Jahy Will Not be Defeated! (Jahy-sama wa Kujikenai!, 20 episodes)—Jahy is second in command of the dark realm, but a magical girl shatters the mana stone that's the source of all the demons' powers, tossing her into the human world and somehow reverting her to a child. A pair of sisters take her in and give her a job at the pub one of them owns, meaning Jahy has to expend what little magical energy she can store up each day in taking on her adult form so she can work there. She eventually encounters various other rivals and underlings who've been ejected to the human world, though she's still the only one whose age was affected. It's a plot that's been done several times in recent memory, and nothing about it is surprising. There's a fair amount of eye candy in Jahy's adult outfit and a few very well-endowed characters, and of course it's going to be a feel-good story about Jahy changing her mind about people in general as she enjoys the close bonds she forms. It's not even so much that her arc in particular is that compelling—they did a nice job of making two of the side characters have nice arcs. There's a little girl named Kokoro that Jahy meets in a park, plus she comes across the magical girl again, and her arc was particularly good, both in what she's sacrificed to do her duty and what kind of emotional issues that's left her with. It has its tender moments, but naturally this setup would lean toward comedy, and it tells all the jokes you'd expect, though it's really more that it tells the same few jokes over and over. Art is good. The opening song for the first half was pretty cute, but the rest of the music was just average. Rating: decent, relevant genres: comedy, slice of life, drama, fantasy.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
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I still need to finish Comic Girls, I found it really sweet and fun, I just got distracted and haven't watched the final ep. The roommate with the suggestive art was really cute and I loved her arc a lot. Seeing her realize how much people adored her work at the signing was definitely a highpoint of the series for me.
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Yes, I loved seeing her finally realize what she meant to her audience when she attended the convention and gave up any pretense at trying to represent herself as something else.
Also, you might have missed it a few blogs ago, but I'd recommend Akebi's Sailor Uniform to ferrets. It's a really cute and wholesome series, plus it has a unique art style. I loved when Akebi finally convinced her friend to do a self-portrait photograph.
I'm surprised it never occurred to me before, but you should give Princess Tutu a try. It seems like it'll be your typical magical girl anime at the start, but it quickly shapes into something rather different.
while I can't possibly keep up with anime, I do keep up with anime soundtracks, and Carole and Tuesday unsurprisingly was fantastic :D
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It's on my list for when I get better and start watching new stuff, it definitely looks exactly like what I enjoy n_n
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Hm, sounds interesting. Wikipedia had a very long plot summary, and to avoid spoilers, I only read the first paragraph, but I like the idea. Added.
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I liked the music in general, even some of the serious ones by the other artists, but I did save three of the songs, "Hold Me Now," "Lay it All on Me," and "Lost My Way," but on the last one, I might actually prefer the shorter in-episode cut, which doesn't have the guitar part for a plot-related reason. I also might give "Mother" a fresh listen and decide whether to keep it.
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yeah, Hold Me Now is great! :D
I had heard Carole & Tuesday was good, but didn't know much about it. Some of the points covered in your review definitely have my attention.
Of the rest, I haven't heard of most of them. I tried a little of the Jahy manga, but came away with the impression that it was an inferior copy of The Devil is a Part-timer. Though I guess that's at least something - the author also has a seven-volume manga about girls groping each other.
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Yeah, I've heard Jahy is similar to that show, and since I haven't seen the other one, I don't have a personal opinion on which is better. Most people seem to say Jahy isn't as good, but don't exactly give either a ringing endorsement, so I'm probably not going to pursue Part-Timer.
Carole & Tuesday is an odd bird. I like slice of life, and even I felt like it dragged a lot after the first few eps until the halfway point, but it gets much more interesting there, and now that I've finished it, I find it's stuck with me really well. I do think it could have been told in half the number of episodes, but the American Idol arc was at least fun enough to bridge to the serious parts, and was a bit of a parodic jab.