Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 53 · 10:10pm Jun 27th, 2023
Lo and behold, a bunch of spring shows are ending this week. I've got four feature-worthy items ready to go, so I'll grab the two that were new this season. We have My Clueless First Friend and Skip and Loafer after the break, so it'll skew slice of life this week, plus four other items.
My Clueless First Friend is a really cute and sweet series. There's not much overall plot, but it's got strong characterization, so it's not one of those empty slice of life series. Definitely safe for ferrets. It's a spring show that just finished.
Fifth-grader Akane Nishimura in the town of That There has the bad fortune of naturally looking spooky, so her classmates have always called her a shinigami (for those who don't know, essentially a (but not the) Grim Reaper). She finds they ignore her more if she plays along and dresses in black.
New student Taiyou Takada transfers in, and when everyone warns him about her, he thinks she's the coolest thing. He's so naive that he takes them literally, but he's so nice and charming in his naivete that nobody can bring themselves to ridicule him for his association with her. Thus she has her first friend.
Taiyou also quickly becomes friends with a guy named Hino who is a delight. He's a nice guy, too, but there's a running joke about him that remains funny throughout. And eventually a few more classmates just might overcome their trepidation and be her friend, too.
I quite remember the fifth grade as when the boys and girls first started growing out of "the other gender is gross" stupidity, and having a summer birthday, I was always one of the youngest in my class and thus one of the later ones to turn that corner. So it's no surprise it comes up here too.
Not that they play the "eww, gross" angle at all. Just that kids are not too sure why they have this one friendship that's not quite like the others. Taiyou has a sister who's almost as clueless as he is, except she definitely sees the potential for cute romance here and puts on her shipping goggles. Everything stays on the comfortable side of a schoolyard crush, though I would still say it qualifies as a romance.
Art is done in a simplistic style, but one I liked. Music is nothing special, but anything lavish or grandiose really wouldn't have fit it, either. If you want heartwarming cuteness with enough relatable character development to give it some meat, this is a good one to watch, and there were even a couple of episodes that had a deeper conflict to them. The manga is still going, so no strong conclusions here. For a change, I've mostly been watching subs of this season's shows, but due to a screw-up with one of the episodes, I watched that one as a dub, and I have to say, I don't think they did a great job matching VAs to characters.
Rating: very good.
13 episodes (appropriate for the topic, huh?), Jijou wo Shiranai Tenkousei ga Guigui Kuru, "The Clueless Transfer Student is Assertive," relevant genres: slice of life, romance, comedy.
Skip and Loafer is a really charming show that just completed. It kind of goes without saying that anything I recommend comes with the implicit qualifier that it may still only appeal to people who are fans of its genres. There are a few I think are so good that I'd even recommend them to people who normally wouldn't like that kind of thing.
This ends up being a very slice of life show, so if you don't like those, it'll probably bore you. I found it endearing and liked a lot of the characters.
High schooler Mitsumi is from a rural town, but she qualified for entrance to a prestigious Tokyo school. Even more than that: she earned the highest grade on the test, so she'll be the speaker for the class at the welcoming ceremonies. Only she has no idea how to navigate the big city, so she gets lost on her way and gives up on making it in time. That's when another student, Sousuke, recognizes her uniform and helps her find her way. He's late too, but he's really laid back and doesn't care much. Thus starts an interesting friendship.
While in the city, she lives with what's initially called her "father's sibling," and given that conspicuous avoidance of gender, it's no surprise that ends up being a trans woman, though Mitsumi does refer to her as an aunt, so I'm not completely sure why they used a gender-neutral term to start with, unless it's to deliberately set up that expectation. If so, it worked exactly as designed on me. In any case, her aunt gets involved in the plot in a couple of clever ways.
A lot of these characters are just on the right side of a cliche. Mitsumi isn't very socially gifted, but it helps that the hot guy in class is already acquainted with her. That wins her a couple of friends, but the ones she makes later are the real treat. The drop-dead gorgeous girl who's really down to earth and wishes people would treat her normally, the quiet, bookish girl who would normally hate someone like Beauty Queen on principle, but they're very blunt with each other and hit it off... it's full of great interactions like that. It could have easily been one of those shows that balloons to a huge cast and made it work, but I think they wisely let it focus more on just a few, since that means all the mains get some sort of development arc. All is not roses either, as there are some fairly bad people who get involved later on.
For that matter, Sousuke may well be the main character, even though Mitsumi is more of a perspective character than he is. He's got some elements from his past (nothing too sordid) that he'd rather keep secret, and that's handled really effectively. It's touching how much of a familiarity those two develop.
It's natural, then, that such a show could turn to romance, and it's a little frustrating in that regard for the people with shipping goggles. It keeps playing around the edges of romance but never quite goes anywhere, content to leave it as an undertone. The manga isn't finished though, so they didn't have much choice.
Art was very good, and the music was mostly pleasant yet unobtrusive, though the opening song is really cute, and the visual was one of the more adorable ones I've ever seen. If you don't mind slice of life and like to see some surprising character dynamics, this is a good one to watch.
Rating: very good.
12 episodes, relevant genres: drama, slice of life, light romance.
Let's mix up the genres a little better. No slice of life in these reviews.
Bibliophile Princess (Mushikaburi-hime, 12 episodes)—series from last year. This strikes me as a lesser version of a show from this season, The Reason Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion (I would have posted a review of it here, but it didn't conclude, and at this point I'm assuming there will be another season). I'd recommend that one more highly, unless you don't like isekais. I tend not to, but it was a different enough application of the genre so as to overcome my aversion. Here, the prince approaches the daughter of a somewhat nouveau-riche family, who's actually far more publicly known than it first seems. She's got a reputation for always having her nose in a book, but Prince Christopher wants Eliana (yes, she even has a similar name to Raeliana) to act as his fiancee. He'll allow her unlimited access to the crown's vast library and leave her all the time she desires to read if she agrees. So she does, assuming he has an ulterior motive but not being too concerned about what it is. She does help out with the matters of diplomatic intrigue that pop up, and those get a bit complex even while most of them end up having barely any importance to the plot. I'm not too good at keeping up with tangled politics like that, which is why I never liked any of the Gundam series much, but I could at least sort out the important ones. Even at 12 episodes, it feels a little stretched out at times, and I was a bit disappointed in not seeing some of the interesting secondary characters get developed much. Still, it had a good enough romance arc. Art was pretty good, and the music stood out as rather good, mostly classical. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, romance.
BIRDIE WING: Golf Girls' Story (25 episodes)—show from last fall that got a second season this spring and just ended. In this age of "every sport, even the obscure ones, gets an anime," here is an entry for golf, which is by no means an obscure sport, but one you still don't see turn up as more than an occasional inclusion, much less the centerpiece. I do like golf, but that alone wouldn't have gotten my interest. But the premise caught my eye. A girl named Eve, who's basically a hustler, encounters an up-and-coming teen junior champion named Aoi, leading to them striking up a close friendship and rivalry. Eve's origins have her hanging around the edges of unsavory goings-on; while she'd promised herself she'd never directly interact with the yakuza, it's getting incredibly hard to avoid. As golf is the method of choice for resolving mafia disputes, her talents are in demand. But that connection to Aoi is drawing her to the legitimate golf world, so she tries to attend the same school as Aoi, join her in tournaments, and so on. But you can never truly leave the yakuza. The first season deals with all this intrigue, and it made for an engaging story. It's largely absent from the second season, however, which is more a very standard series of tournaments. Every golfer has a signature move that borders on magic, which is never a terribly interesting gimmick to use in a sports anime. Having certain strengths, fine, but Naruto powers? (I exaggerate, but still.) Not so much. It all leads to a finale that's incredibly rushed with a very pat ending. Art is very good, and music is pretty good as well. As I understand it, they marketed a rather successful line of golf apparel based on the outfits worn in the show, too. Rating: good (S1 toward the upper end of that range, S2 toward the lower end), relevant genres: sports, drama.
The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes (Natsu e no Tonneru, Sayonara no Deguchi, movie)—from late 2022, an adaptation of a 2019 light novel. The opening voice-over tells of a rumored tunnel that can grant any wish, but you'd emerge from the other end 100 years older. Minor spoilers, but it turns out the opposite is true: time passes more slowly there, so you could potentially come out having aged very little whereas years have passed outside. I could excuse that as the rumor just being wrong, except the main characters say it's accurate, so... I dunno. High school student Kaoru meets a girl named Anzu at the train stop on the way to school, and she'd been caught in the rain, so he offers her his umbrella. Yet she's very standoffish about it, and then of course she turns out to be the new transfer student in his class. And immediately comes across as a major thug. She has a reason for it, though, which gets explained soon enough, to a degree. But Kaoru has discovered the tunnel, and Anzu figures this out. They each have something they'd like to wish for, and they spend a while experimenting with the tunnel to understand how it works, all the while growing closer. If there's one word I'd use to describe it, it's rushed. Maybe they were given a strict time limit and this was the best job they could do of adhering to it. I don't know. Somewhat, the plot of them figuring the tunnel out and deciding what to wish for develops overly quickly, but more so is the romance arc between them. There's really no definition of what makes them click together. There's just each learning what motivates the other and developing some mutual respect, but love? It's a stretch. And the ending... it hinges on essentially a deus ex machina, something they'd already shown to be impossible, and then also... well, I don't want to spoil it, but I had the same issue with the ending as I did with the ending of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time. You can look up the review I did of it to see why, if you don't mind spoilers. And yet I can see what they were going for and it's a fairly heartfelt moral. Even the way it was delivered—I've seen other shows and movies do this, where the fantasy/dream/wish world is self-aware and knows what effect it's having on the characters, which can be cool. Art was beautiful, and the music was pretty good. I doubt what I saw was the official sub, as the translation quality was poor, female characters were almost always referred to as "he" (which got rather confusing at times), and following the plot relied on reading text messages and emails which weren't translated, so you had to guess a bit. I'll likely want to watch it again if a dub or a better sub becomes available, though I doubt it'd edge it up to a higher rating, so I'll go ahead and give it one. Rating: good, relevant genres: drama, romance, supernatural.
Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon (48 episodes)—from last year, and I won't belabor it much, since it's just a continuation of sorts of a series I already reviewed, Inuyasha. It's the next generation, where Kagome and Inuyasha have a daughter Moroha and Sesshomaru and Rin have twin daughters Towa and Setsuna. That would make Moroha quarter-demon and the twins half-demon. Oddly enough, this works out for Moroha better, as the dilution of demon doesn't seem to reduce her powers any, yet not being half-demon means she's immune to the loss of powers one suffers during a new moon. Suffice it to say it's a plot about slaying demons in a historical era, with a few flashes to the present day. I'll just leave it vague like that—if you've seen Inuyasha and liked it, this is pretty good and more of the same, and if you haven't seen it, then this isn't a good entry point. I do find it amusing that one critic voted this the worst anime of 2021 solely because, as near as I can tell, the fact that Rin met Sesshomaru in the original series when she was a child and now has children with him must imply that he'd been grooming her all along. Art and music are pretty good, same quality as the original. Rating: good, relevant genres: fantasy, adventure, action, drama.
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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Birdie Wing is way better than you make it sound, my friend. Seriously, the show is practically the peak 'anime' anime.
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It's definitely full of anime tropes, like everyone having a signature move, people declaring each other rivals, the assertion that you can do anything by just working harder, endless tournament arcs, etc. And it does all those things well. I mentioned Naruto, and it does really strike me as a similar show, just replacing ninja combat with golf. Though I liked it a lot more than Naruto. To a degree, it'll depend a lot on whether you like tournament arcs. I typically don't, so I liked S1's mafia intrigue better, and that's where a lot more of the characterization was developed. S2 is more about the game action, and aside from the "magic" powers, it was actually a good depiction of golf strategy and gameplay. Someone more into sports in general or a big fan of golf may well prefer S2. I didn't like S2 as much, but I didn't see it as a step down in quality, except for the rushed ending and pat denouement.
My Clueless First Friend was really enjoyable. My only real complaint is that the episodes start feeling a little samey after a the mid-point and the last episode feels a lot like filler. Weird that they ended it that way.
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It did get to feeling a little repetitive in the middle, but I appreciated when they threw in the wrinkles, like Taiyou getting genuinely upset about Akane's mother. As to the end... since the manga hasn't ended, the anime has limited options of what to do. They can make a vague thematic point or just stop, but they're not going to guess at an ultimate disposition. Yeah, it can make things unsatisfying, but there's not much more they can do. I wouldn't mind seeing more, but it seems like the kind of show they don't bother continuing, since there's not a plot to leave suspended. It's almost like atmosphere is the whole point, and adding more won't change that.
Seriously, though. Tank tops.
I'm very firmly:
In the "subtitled" camp when it comes to anime for the very reason that you mention here. The English language actors never seem to quite get the characters right. The great exception to that rule for me is Richard Ian Cox, known to folks around here for playing Snails and Grampa Gruff, who was so much better as Inuyasha than the original Japanese actor.
Mike
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If you go back 20-25 years, dubs were often lackluster efforts. I find that it's pretty rare anymore for a dub to be bad, in terms of the VAs sounding like they'd rather be doing anything else or the translation being poor. I think the VAs pretty universally do a good job anymore, but whoever decides to match which VA with which character doesn't always make a good assignment. A lot of times, it doesn't make a lot of difference, but for a good example, take Lycoris Recoil. They chose the perfect English-language VAs for all the prominent roles. It's rare that I think the choices weren't very good, and My Clueless First Friend is one of those. I'm even willing to endure a somewhat subpar dub just so I can pay attention to the plot and art more than having to read, but fortunately, even that is pretty rare. These days, if I choose a sub, it's more often because they're taking too long to dub it.
Though one other issue is that dubs are less likely to translate text, which can be important to the plot.