Pascoite gets bored and reviews anime, vol. 54 · 11:06pm Jul 11th, 2023
Yay, the summer season has begun! In addition to several things picking back up with added seasons, I started on 5 new shows and expect to grab 1-2 more. But for this week, features are an older horror series, Another, and a slice of life that just concluded, Insomniacs After School. Those and several other shows, mostly also just completed, after the break.
Another is about a decade old, and I found it through oddly roundabout means: I was doing a Sporcle quiz where you try to identify 100 anime characters, and I looked up the ones I missed to see if they were ones I should have gotten. One was from this show, which I'd never heard of, and the premise sounded intriguing, so I added it.
Like a fair amount of horror, there are some parts of the premise you just have to accept without thinking about them too much. Koichi is a boy from Tokyo who's transferred to a somewhat rural area for his final year of junior high. His mother died a couple years back, and his father is some sort of traveling researcher who's never around. So he's moved in with his aunt in the town his mother is originally from.
He misses the first few days of class due to being in the hospital, so some class reps go to visit him there. Both then and when he actually comes to school for his first day, he gets a very cold reception. This would seem to be related to what the series' opening voice-over says: 26 years ago, a popular girl, who was a member of 9th grade class 3, died. For some reason, everyone at the school decided to act as if she were still there for the rest of the year.
Also like most horror, it's hard to talk about without giving important things away, but I'll try. It's never revealed why, but a curse has resulted from this. The girl didn't die under suspicious circumstances, for instance, where her spirit would be looking for revenge. You just have to accept that there's a curse now. Whenever some specific set of conditions is met, which happens irregularly, but usually every few years or so, the curse will activate, and members of class 9-3 or their families will be subject to gruesome deaths at random. It also varies from year to year how many deaths there are.
That brings me to another thing you just have to accept: it's played both ways as to whether there's widespread knowledge of this curse, but there are real, verifiable deaths occurring, and enough of the triggering circumstances are known that the school administration should know better than to allow such conditions to occur, yet they play dumb. (No, it's not because they want it to happen.)
Not only does Koichi get a cold reception, but there's a girl in class named Mei whom everyone seems to ignore. It's ambiguous at first whether they're deliberately ignoring her or if they can't see her. Either way, it draws a nice parallel to the opening exposition. Koichi can see her, though, and he befriends her as much as he can—she skips class a fair amount.
Side note: why do 99% of the important characters in a school anime sit either in the back left near the window or the back right near the door? My best guess: so when the camera is zoomed/focused on them, they don't have to animate very many other characters.
When deaths start to occur in class 9-3, people are immediately upset with Koichi. Koichi has no idea why, and Mei isn't telling. Of course all will eventually come out, and it's an interesting story, along with the history of it all happening before and Mei's origins. (Speaking of Mei's origins, the special episode is a prequel that covers more of that, but I'd advise watching it after the series because of major spoilers.)
There's some degree of control the students have over things (at least they think they do), but the deaths start piling up, and it looks like it might be one of the worst years ever for this.
This is very effective horror, more of the suspense and mystery than the gore type. The deaths themselves are often somewhat gory—I'll go ahead and say that was one tick against the show for me. Not that they were gory at all, but several of them, especially in the early going, were so over the top and exaggerated that they almost felt like dark comedy, veering into parody.
Next issue: this year's class essentially has access to a superpower that none of the classes before them ever had, and yet it doesn't get used, for nebulous reasons, until oh, okay, we'll use it now, after things have gotten incredibly out of hand. It bordered on a deus ex machina.
It's not too surprising, based on the nature of the show and it being clear from the outset that the situation causes conflict between various students who have different feelings about the situation, that some students will eventually turn against each other. This comes as they finally figure out what the driving factor is behind the curse, communicated to them by someone who had inadvertently figured it out years ago but forgot (which actually makes sense—the series justifies the various instances or absences of memory loss, at least mostly, though one at the end was pure narrative convenience). The way it gets communicated doesn't make sense, though: it'd be hard to notice. And then the solution is only something that will affect the current year's curse, leaving them to use the same dumb means for communicating the "solution" to future years in a post-credits scene of the finale.
It is pretty brutal, though, what they had to do at the end, and what future classes will have to do, particularly without the special ability available to them.
Effective psychological horror, definitely creepy, and since the true nature of the problem isn't revealed until fairly late, there's little danger of doing the old "ruin the detective story by figuring out who the murderer is on the first page." Art was very good, atmosphere was a strong point, and the music was pretty good, too, though I hated the opening song.
Rating: very good.
12 episodes + 1 special, relevant genres: psychological horror, thriller, drama.
Insomniacs After School is yet another of the slice of life shows from the spring season. It just ended. As totallynotabrony pointed out, the manga is still going and has spanned 13 volumes, so the odds were low that it'd reach any sort of resolution, and it may be intended to last more than one season.
Now that the season is over... I think it's finished. I'm a little surprised—I wonder if the manga had this much closure already, and if so, what it's been doing since then? Though being slice of life, it doesn't have to do much, I suppose. But it didn't leave any plot threads dangling, and it did have the kind of ending that makes it seem like it's all the story they intended to tell.
High school student Nakami suffers from insomnia, leaving him wide awake at night but very drowsy during the day. He takes whatever opportunities he can (study hall, lunch break, etc.) to grab a nap, but there aren't too many private places for that. Only his best friend knows.
At first, that struck me as odd. I couldn't see why insomnia would have any sort of stigma attached to it, so I didn't understand why Nakami was embarrassed about it. But this eventually gets explained in a satisfactory way.
In his search for a good nap spot, he's heard rumors that the school's observatory is haunted, so nobody goes there. It's disused, and that's another oddity, that a high school would have such a nice one. Anyway, he sneaks in there to find it already occupied by a girl named Magari. Turns out she has the same problem and has sought out the same solution. They strike up a friendship and agree to sneak out after dark while they're both wide awake to go do stuff.
Of course they eventually get discovered using the observatory, but the school nurse, who knows about both of their health issues, agrees to let them continue using it if they form a legitimate Astronomy Club (after very bluntly asking them if they were using the room for sex). A lot of what follows are all the activities they do to establish the club, host events, and get funded by the student council. And I ended up having very mixed feelings about that.
On the plus side, all of that makes the story hang together well. Obviously they need to do all that stuff, and it might have felt like the series was lacking context if they just relied on summarizing all that and never showing it. That's the only time they interact with their other friends, too, so that's when those characters get developed. It did make the story feel more complete.
On the minus side, none of that was terribly interesting. The charm of the show was seeing these two directionless people find each other and the wonderfully atmospheric aesthetic of them deciding on odd things to do in the middle of the night under beautiful starlit skies. The Astronomy Club angle necessitates a lot of that time to skew toward doing official club photography. I wonder if it would have been better to play it as them having a mutual interest in astronomy but skipping all the stuff about the observatory and club. Hard to say, since we'll never see it done that way and be able to compare. It might have made the story too thin. I just know that the late-night wanderings were the parts I found the most engaging.
There are a few other arcs thrown in. I've already mentioned a romance one, and a slice of life show is particularly easy to draw out romantic interests as long as the writers care to, so I was pleased to see an actual arc here instead of vague hints and an open ending. The other, which is telegraphed early on, is that there may be something more to Magari's health problems than simple insomnia. I was not looking forward to the reveal, since animes almost universally make that into something over-dramatized. Such a thing certainly can be dealt with well, but I was just not in the mood for this show to do it. But again, I was very pleased with the way they handled it. It was about the most elegant treatment of the topic I've seen. So, big points for those secondary arcs.
The music was pretty good, but the art... off the top of my head, I would be hard-pressed to name an anime that had more beautiful art. Magari's character design was wonderful, and Nakami had a nicely realistic look. It's a very pretty series.
Rating: very good.
13 episodes, Kimi wa Houkago Insomnia, relevant genres: slice of life, drama, romance.
To a bunch of other recent shows (and one older one)!
A Galaxy Next Door (Otonari ni Ginga, 12 episodes)—recently ended series. In the opening scene, a girl named Shiori is shown leaving a funeral, then getting in a boat and setting out from home. She meets a guy named Ichiro who happens to be the author of a manga she enjoys, so partly out of fangirling and partly out of needing a way to support herself, she goes to work helping him draw it. Also, she might be an alien. Or something supernatural. That never becomes clear. She's a princess among her people, and here she is living in the building her employer also runs as a landlord. Ichiro's mother left years ago, and his father recently died, leaving him in charge of the building and two siblings who are significantly younger than he is. And then they pull the "you just did something that my people would consider a marriage proposal" plot point. Of course they do come to care about each other, and of course her parents become concerned that she's attached to a commoner, much less a foreigner. This also never gets resolved. The manga just ended a couple weeks ago, so not enough time to adapt its ending into the anime, making me wonder if there'll be another season, but I've seen no indication there will. Really, there's not a lot to recommend here. The kinds of conflicts brought up don't have anything uniquely to do with her status as an alien/non-human/whatever, and there's nothing else to distinguish it, either. It's just a thoroughly generic romance plot. If you like romances, it's certainly not a bad one, just average. If you don't, there's nothing here that will win you over. Art is very good, and the music was above average. The closing credits have a cute and unusual animation style. Rating: decent, relevant genres: drama, romance.
Kamichu! (12 episodes + 4 OVAs)—the title is a mashed-together phrase meaning "middle school student god." A girl named Yurie shows up at school one day looking depressed, and when her only friend Mitsue asks her why, she says she's a god. No explanation is ever given for what gives her that sense, how it's possible, whether she's always been one or just became one, or what implications that has for her life (like whether she's immortal now). Her friend is dubious but plays along, yet another classmate Matsuri, whose family runs a shrine, immediately believes her. Matsuri asks what kind of god Yurie is and what powers she has, but Yurie doesn't know, so they begin to experiment. Soon, not only is it evident that Matsuri is indeed a god, but it's public knowledge and the first manifestation of her powers doesn't go well. There are a lot of interesting philosophical questions that could come from this, but the series mostly takes a slice of life tone that has Yurie deal with a Problem of the Week. There are a couple of minor romance arcs, one involving Yurie herself, but there's really no plot to speak of, so no conclusion for it all to come to. That said, Yurie does get put upon at times, and one episode in particular was pretty heartfelt. Some others approach that, where Yurie wrestles with her purpose, but I really liked the one where she has to temporarily transfer to another school. In contrast to her home, where everyone knew her as regular old Yurie first and a god much later, the way she's received at the new school as primarily a god was a nice contrast, leading to some good character exploration. Art is pretty ubiquitous for its time, though fortunately in a style I like. It shows a lot of attention to detail and is rather smooth. The obligatory beach episode gets a bit fan service-y in odd contrast to the rest of the series' tone. Music was just okay. Rating: good, but low in that range, relevant genres: slice of life, supernatural.
More Than a Married Couple, But Not Lovers (Fuufu Ijou, Koibito Miman, 12 episodes)—series from this past fall season that grabbed my interest some but not enough to watch it as it was coming out. The setup sounds like a bunch of other romance series with one twist. I've heard of similar things happening in real life, where high school kids have to pair up as couples and take turns caring for an egg or a baby doll or some such. Here, they pose as a married couple and are graded on things like how supportive they are of each other and how they split household labor. There's a lot that doesn't make sense about the situation, but you just have to roll with it. Like you actually have to live together in a dorm, but you have separate bedrooms that can only be opened by your fingerprint, ostensibly to prevent hanky panky, but nothing prevents you from letting someone else in your bedroom or just doing that out in the living room, so... yeah. If it's not already obvious, this is full of fan service. Gamer guy Jirou gets paired with super-fashionable girl Akari. He'd rather have been paired with Shiori, his childhood friend he has a crush on. Akari would have rather been paired with Minami, the hot guy she's been lusting after. But there's a catch: the couples who finish in the top ten at the midpoint earn the right to switch partners. Seems counterintuitive—the ones who get along best are the ones who can cut ties? Anyway, Jirou and Akari pledge to earn that prize. Of course you can see where this is going. Does Shiori harbor a reciprocal crush? Will Jirou give up on her in favor of a shot at Akari? Well, you don't get to find out. There's a resolution possibly implied, but nothing's spelled out, mostly because the manga is still going, so the anime can't spoil the ending (or get it wrong). And because the whole point of this kind of story is drawing out the "will they or won't they?" as long as possible. Usually, as is the case here, that leads to noticeable lulls in the plot where it feels like the same conflicts keep getting rehashed to stretch it out. So the plot's nothing too special and feels pretty close to wish fulfillment. And yet I get the feeling this won't get a second season, hence me already posting a review of it. How about the rest? Characterization is definitely a plus, and I liked the way Akari and her popular friends were usually genuinely nice to others. What really got me is the dialog, though. It's cleverly written, and the best part to me was the banter between various characters, especially Jirou and his best friend. It's a lot of fun. Art is very nice and done in a really saturated color palette that gives it a different look. Music was good, and the closing had a cool song paired with a funky change in the animation style. Rating: good, relevant genres: romantic comedy, drama.
Ranking of Kings Season 2: The Treasure Chest of Courage (Ousama Ranking: Yuuki no Takarabako, 10 episodes)—I was not expecting to see another season of this. It started up for the spring season and just ended. It's not a continuation, though. Each episode consists of two or three shorts, and they all take place before the original series or during it. They're somewhat slice of life, and they're just side stories that give a little more context for things that happened in the first season, but really nothing consequential. Not bad if you want a little more of this world and its characters. That is until the end. One of the two arcs from the ninth episode shows a nice window into Miranjo's childhood, and that ends up being important for understanding the finale, which is a single arc that resolves the major dangling thread at the end of the previous season. And wraps it up really well, I might add. Art and music are the same quality as the original. As a rating, I'd say most of it was just okay but nonessential, yet that finale! It alone makes the whole thing worthwhile. As there's no continuity, you could simply watch only the last two episodes of this, and you wouldn't be lost. So... if you liked the original, definitely at least watch the last two episodes of this, and if you just generally liked the atmosphere and people anyway, you may also enjoy seeing all of it. Rating: decent for most of it, but those two episodes pull up the overall rating to good, relevant genres: action, adventure, fantasy, drama.
Seen any of these? Did I convince you to try any of them? I'd like to hear about it in the comments.
Last 10:
vol. 44 here
vol. 45 here
vol. 46 here
vol. 47 here
vol. 48 here
vol. 49 here
vol. 50 here
vol. 51 here
vol. 52 here
vol. 53 here
That's a really interesting point about classroom seating, because... Yeah, they're kind of always in the back corner!
Even the live-action stuff I've seen, the main character is always like... Two rows up from the very back, then against the windows if they're a loner, or if there's an ensemble cast, main is a row or two in from the windows with their friends directly to their side and their antagonist usually right behind them. :O Maybe there's also something about being able to frame a character against windows for better dramatic shots.
I've always wondered this myself
We've already discussed Insomniacs After School at length. A Galaxy Next Door bored me. I read quite a bit of the manga for More Than a Married Couple, But Not Lovers, and so I knew there was no way one season was going to wrap it up. The anime wasn't enough of an upgrade from the manga that I considered it worth my time.
5737760
Galaxy is definitely boredom bait. I at least liked the art, so I could admire that while hoping something distinguishing would happen, which it ultimately never did. Married felt like it was trying too hard and ended up being a little unfocused. I think it would have been as potentially boring as Galaxy if not for the sparkling dialogue, but since the manga presumably has that too, yeah, there's nothing here to make you want to jump over from the manga.