Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 52 · 10:21pm May 23rd, 2023
Looking forward to reviewing this season's crop in another month or two, but for this week, featured items are a series from a while back, Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun, and a movie from two years ago, Sing a Bit of Harmony, plus five others of varying goodness after the break. The new shows this season have been a mixed bag. Heavenly Delusion was my early front-runner for favorite, but it's gotten off track, and a wonderful installment of Insomniacs After School ratcheted that show up to the top.
Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun is about high school student Sakura, who wants to confess her feelings to classmate Nozaki, but when she does so, she phrases it oddly, leading him to think she's a fan of the manga he contributes to a monthly feature magazine. Knowing she's a member of the art club, he asks her to his place, but to her chagrin, it's to see if she'll help him with the background art. Several other students at their school also help in various ways, as she gradually discovers, and it seems like they want to keep their involvement secret, though it's not for Nozaki's sake: he's outright told the entire class he draws a published manga, but nobody believes him (Sakura hadn't heard that before and didn't know).
In particular, Nozaki draws a high school romance manga, so he's very interested in observing romantic situations to use as source material, even though he's absolutely clueless about it in real life. So goes Sakura's attempts to get together with him.
It's not just the few students who help Nozaki—several of their friends get in on the plot as well, and it's a fun cast, though well-worn archetypes, for the most part. It's mostly humor, driven by the irony of a romance mangaka being so oblivious to romance, and Sakura helping him write love stories while her own love interest is going nowhere (done deliberately so it can be taken in a meta sense). To me, that's both the strength and weakness of the series. Fortunately, it's a comedy first, and it succeeds well at that. It was reliably amusing, and a few of the gags were even outright hilarious. The romance mostly gets left as an afterthought, which leads much of the middle of the series feeling stagnant, and as it's the only real plot element, it means the overall plot is weak, too. Though slice-of-life comedy is a perfectly cromulent genre, too, so it's not that it can't succeed that way. It's just that it's billed as a romance, and the subject matter almost universally skews that way, so it feels underdeveloped on that front.
Still, since it comes across as primarily comedy and does that well, it sneaked over the line into feature-worthy quality for me. I wouldn't be surprised to learn the manga will come to a more definite conclusion, which is always something you have to be willing to accept for an anime adaptation that ends before the manga. In fact, the show is nearly a decade old and the manga is still going, so the show probably did as much with that aspect as they reasonably could.
The OVAs are quite short, 2-4 minutes each, and continue off a plot thread from the series finale. Art is very good, and the music was also pleasantly well above average.
Rating: very good.
Gekkan Shoujo Nozaki-kun, 12 episodes + 6 OVAs, relevant genres: comedy, romance, slice of life.
Sing a Bit of Harmony is another entry in the ever-more-crowded "how human can an AI be?" genre. In its favor (imo at least) is that it doesn't get philosophical about it. It's more about the emotional impact of a particular AI's presence and the effects it has on people's lives. It was released in late 2021.
In a near future where AIs are common for driving things like home security systems, cleaning robots, even on down to judo sparring partner robots, a lot of the town's adults are employed by a large tech company. (Toward the end it's shown that this town is on a small-ish island toward the northeast of Japan.) Main character Satomi is a high school student, and her mother is one of the chief AI designers there. The house's AI, not knowing any better, allows Satomi to see her mother's appointment calendar, which reveals they've been working on an android AI, the first one designed to be passable as human, and plan to send her to school. She will act as a transfer student, and if nobody notices anything too odd about her behavior, the experiment will be considered a success.
Well, it doesn't work out that great, one main reason being that the android, Shion, has a penchant for breaking into song, often enough that this would qualify as a musical for me, having about the same number of songs that a Disney movie would.
As a side note, not long ago I reviewed a series called Healer Girl and rated it as very good, noting that the music was great and two episodes in particular were essentially musicals. The same composer worked on this movie, so no surprise the music is very good here, too. It had better be if there's going to be that much of it and it's going to take that prominent a role.
Satomi begs the few classmates who witness the failure to keep it a secret in order to preserve her mom's reputation at work. Her childhood friend Toma is very talented with computers and manages to cover it up, but the alliance is tenuous, as even though Satomi is one of the top students, she's regarded as a tattle-tale because of an incident which eventually gets explained. Suffice it to say they're reluctant to help her, but it comes out over the course of the movie that she's in earnest, and they learn to respect her. Ironing out all their differences is one of the better plot threads.
There are also a couple of minor romance arcs and just people coming to like Shion as a person, but there's an interesting yet subtle plot arc in the background about why Satomi is so worried about her mother: she's bumped up against a glass ceiling at work, and failing this experiment will probably keep her below it indefinitely. Of course all the other threads turn out well, but this is the one that would seem to be in the most jeopardy.
Shion doesn't exactly act as expected, though. An AI is supposed to respond to orders only, so why does she have a passion for singing? Why is she so fixated on making Satomi happy? The obvious answer is that Satomi's mother designed Shion to do those things, but that's not the case. It was an interesting mystery to see unfold.
Art was very good with not-so-obvious CGI, the music was great, and the story was really nice, something I'd also call very family-friendly.
Rating: very good.
Ai no Utagoe o Kikasete, "Let Me Hear You Sing of Love," movie, relevant genres: drama, sci-fi, romance.
Blade Runner: Black Out 2022 (short film)—as a lead-up to the Blade Runner 2049 movie, the studio put out three short prequel films of about 5 minutes each, two of them live action, which showed scenes involving characters who actually appeared in the movie. Black Out 2022 is the one animated short and takes place first, and it covers an incident referred to in the movie, a watershed moment where replicants felt their existence threatened and humans lost any remaining trust they had in replicants. It's good on action, and I liked the characters involved, wherein a group of replicants stages what one side would call a revolution and the other would call terrorism. And really, it results in the replicants still getting the short end of the stick, obviously, but with some hope. Art and music were both high quality. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, sci-fi.
Blade Runner: Black Lotus (13 episodes)—this series happens after Black Out 2022 but before the other prequels to the second movie. A girl named Elle has no memories and is wandering around the city, but fighting off a gang leads her to encounter several people who will become important, including a mechanic, a police officer, and a guy Joseph who does nothing now but screams ex-cop. Elle had been carrying an encrypted storage device, and Joseph helps her decode it. Gradually, she starts to recover her memories, leading her to a conspiracy involving a number of the people who later appear in the 2049 movie. Not that the plot will surprise much, but the fates of the side characters are still in question. They did a good job of making Elle and Joseph pretty compelling characters, and it does address themes appropriate for the franchise. I was holding out that they might make a second season, given they specifically called this "season 1," but it did come to a conclusion, and I've seen no indication it'll continue. The fights are nicely executed, there's a pretty extensive (and good) soundtrack, and the art is one of the better CGI treatments I've seen. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, drama, sci-fi.
Denkigai no Honya-san (The Electric Town's Bookstore, 12 episodes)—I don't remember what path I followed to get here, but it wasn't what I was expecting. It's mostly random comedy about the staff at a large comic shop. Each one of course has their own personality quirks and types of manga they prefer, and there are some love triangles around. A couple of side characters include a manga artist and a government official whose job is to make sure the adult stuff is handled and sequestered properly. Random comedy's going to be hit or miss, and this runs a bit on the adult side of things, but I still found it reliably, if not outrageously, funny. If you like bawdy random comedy and comics, then it's likely to be amusing to you. Episodes are divided into anywhere from two to four short arcs that are often connected. If there's one in particular that stands out, it'd be episode five. It's a funny look at the theories behind proper uses of panties in manga, and when it can pull off a genuinely funny Schroedinger's cat joke about that, I have to give them credit. I never felt like the show was wasting my time; it kept up a steady stream of "amusing" but rarely rose too far above that, yet that one episode was definitely a cut above. Art was pretty good (I have to say the shop's horse mascot—a play on a real comic shop—was weird and looked nothing like a horse), and the music was average. Seriously, though. Watch the panties episode. Rating: borderline, but I'll let that one episode bump it into the "good" range, relevant genres: random comedy, romance.
Inu-Oh (movie)—released in 2021. It's by a studio with a pretty distinctive animation style, and I've reviewed several of their films before (Night is Short, Walk on Girl; Lu Over the Wall; and Ride Your Wave; and the director also did Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!) with mixed results. This may be the film of theirs I liked the least. They also have a penchant for having long music/dance interludes that do little to advance the plot. Here, the songs do give some context, but I'd advise seeing the sub, as the dub doesn't translate the lyrics. Two shoguns are competing to rule the nation, and gathering certain treasures will give them credibility, but the hunt for one of them blinds a boy, Tomona, and kills his father. He later becomes a musician of a type who's supposed to tell historical tales, but in light of the competing shoguns, he's only allowed to tell the version blessed by the side that won. Tomona befriends a disfigured boy named Inu-Oh, who is happy that Tomona's blindness means he can't see how ugly Inu-Oh is. Together, they basically invent rock 'n' roll and sing story songs about the true version of events, which puts them on the wrong side of the law, though it gains them vast public popularity. It comes to a weak conclusion, and really, plot is not usually this studio's strong point. It's visually interesting, but it feels more like it's nipping around the edges of telling a story. Music was cool in style but got to sounding very repetitive. It gets quite good reviews wherever you look, so it must have just been a miss for my tastes. Rating: decent, relevant genres: drama, historical, supernatural.
Rust-Eater Bisco (Sabikui Bisco, 12 episodes)—from early 2022, I'd passed this over, but totallynotabrony said it was pretty good, so I picked it up later. And, yeah, it is pretty good. Some manner of disaster led to Tokyo's destruction and the transformation of the area around it into a desert with toxic winds bearing rust. Here, the two meanings of rust are conflated, in that it corrodes metal and is a harmful fungus. But rather than abandon the area, people still live nearby and just accept they're going to get sick from it. Bisco is a Mushroom Keeper who believes he can cure rust, but the government is spreading propaganda that mushrooms are the cause of rust. When Bisco encounters a doctor named Milo who's been the only person able to develop treatments for rust, they team up to fight the corrupt government. A few other characters get drawn in, and it's mostly a fun over-the-top action show. It feels thin on context overall, some of those side characters (a disillusioned government goon named Tirol in particular) are underdeveloped, and the bad guy ends up being very generic, but it's not really the kind of thing you watch for the plot anyway. It holds up as a good action show, and they ride a giant crab around, so there's that. Art is rather good, and the music is good too, leaning toward metal. Rating: good, relevant genres: action, adventure.
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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vol. 49 here
vol. 50 here
vol. 51 here
Our opinions continue to differ wildly. If anything, I think Heavenly Delusion is getting steadily better and better as the story builds.
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It's still my second favorite, but it had gotten in a rut. The latest episode finally starts to break out of that, but it feels like they're spending precious little time with the kids in Heaven, though admittedly it might be a stretch to give them much plot, since they mostly go through their forced routines. But given the supposed urgent mission the main characters are on, they sure get sidetracked a lot, and my interest level in those sidetracks has been hit or miss. The farm was just okay, and the subway station could have been cut entirely, though at least it's got some of the show's best comic moments so far. The problem is that it's proceeding like a mystery, but the way to handle that is to gradually dole out new bits of information, and it's been pretty haphazard about that. I think it would do a far better job of keeping tension up if they built the show's outline around a structure like "here are the 10 important facts to reveal to the audience, then decide what order to reveal them in and distribute them evenly across the episodes." Sis's gender status served as an effective distraction from the lack of progress on the mystery, but they wrapped that up pretty quickly and failed to make it an ongoing source of tension (though I bet it will make a resurgence at some point). If you've been following totallynotabrony's blog, he dropped it entirely for similar reasons. I still think it'll turn out to be one of my faves by season's end, but whereas it was easily the top one before, it's got serious competition now.
Oh hey two I've seen. Nozaki-kun is one of my top faves and I'm not sure how often I've put in for background noise. The opening track especially is such a bop.
Denkigai no Honya-san I've seen as well and I agree the panty episode was very funny. I admit Fu girl and Sommelier centered eps were my favourites though.
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I can't remember whether it was you or Augie who recommended Nozaki-kun to me, but it's definitely of a kind with other recommendations I've gotten from you.
And yes, those were definitely two of the better characters in Denkigai.
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Could've been both of us n_n But if you were going off that rec list I made for Jake ages ago it was definitely one of the tops ones.