Summer Anime 2021: we take those
As delta awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into Anthony Fantano.
I wasn't a fan of Magia Record, but surmised that S1 wasn't entirely worthless, so I gave S2 a shot. And early on, S2 is definitely the best version of Magireco - while it still struggled to justify its existence, at least it focused on plots that didn't point out the fundamental flaws such as the lore being both overly complicated yet fairly uninteresting, having far too many shallow characters, not to mention being an insult to PMMM. It also looked amazing, so I was ready to say that this time we got consistently entertaining pointless fanservice if nothing else. But in the back half all of the issues came back with a vengeance and the production chops evaporated. It's just a mess: The Magius story is still as bland as ever, and I still only barely care about the new main characters of Magireco, nevermind the extended cast (when I even remember them) - which is a deadly issue when that's all the content, the storytelling is borderline incoherent and even the storyboarding doesn't hold up. I suppose the PMMM cast appears more, but since this show is so all over the place they end up seeming like decoration at best. So yeah, S2 isn't actually any better than S1, even though it arguably has higher highs. 5/10
I gave this a shot because I do like Bang Dream Pico a lot, and Petit Mix is uh... fine? The main issues are that it's not nearly as absurd as Garupico, and D4DJ itself being far more absurd and goofy to begin with. So Puchimiku ends up not providing much of a meaningful contrast to the main show, apart from being (more) slight and (more) random. It's still fairly enjoyable because it's more of an okay thing, but entirely forgettable - in fact, I have already forgotten about it. I guess it's just Pastel Life then. 6/10
So I've been standing up for Idolshi7 for a long time, pointing out that it's probably my favorite idol franchise show overall. But I have to say, as of S3 it seems to be starting to collapse under its own weight. It's just running out of new places to go, and it can't truly escalate because the franchise concept is immutable. This is very apparent in the beginning, when we get to Yamato's story. Not because it's bad, but in a way because it's too good; it goes far harder and cranks up the drama to absurd degrees, which would be great if it didn't end with the most disappointing plot reset I've seen in a long time, when all of this "getting hallucinations and choking a bitch" business is resolved with a group hug and an offscreen phone call. After that, the spell was essentially broken. We get super detailed backstories on Re:Vale, I guess? I thought that whole business was better off as an unexplained twist, but we have to fill airtime here so we get a lot of Yuki being a dick in the past. We get yet another delightfully villanous executive, but that's nothing new and in the end it's just in service to introduce yet another band, this time consisting entirely of edgelords, and it will be interesting to see how the next sequel will attempt to make the audience like these assholes. And we get the rest of the cast just sort of sticking around doing their thing again. Now this all sounds very negative, but i7 still has extremely solid fundamentals and production chops (and it was never great at storytelling to begin with, so you take the highs where you can get them), and it's not that it doesn't try (it's honestly a miracle it even held together as long as it did), it's just increasingly turning into a case study on why Love Live's model of not sticking with a cast too long is probably the smarter way to go after all. Barely a 7/10
So you might be saying "hang on a minute, that show didn't end yet, what are you doing", to which I say "you clearly haven't watched it then". Aquatope's first half most definitely has an ending, and the fact that it continues for another cour is immaterial to that. The second half is basically a sequel, and since we're a fair bit into it now I can also say that it's more different than most sequels are as well - though we'll get to that when it's over. Looked at on its own, this show started as the usual P.A. Works FEEL Team Six jam, maybe just that tiny bit more interesting that made me actually watch it - The beginning is a very standard and very middle of the road "visit the countryside to get healed with magical realism" yarn, but over time it shifts from Fuuka to Kukuru and becomes more of a very concrete coming-of-age story that's actually well thought out and less predictable than expected. It also may or may not be hella gay (early signs point to hahaha yes, later signs point to hahaha no). So yeah, that ending is not only present but also very good and if the show ended right there I would not complain (if I didn't know the second half would be the true sequel to Shirobako, of course, and I'm not even joking). Still, it takes a fair bit to get there - While that path isn't exactly bad, it's also not nearly as interesting as the later stuff, relies a lot on vague sentimentality, and while the hacky fantasy aspect is always less important than you'd think, it's still there. 7/10
Let's get straight to the point: Vanitas has one major upside and that is that it's intensely sexual. It's not only horny as fuck, but outright erotic at points, and that's not something I see often in anime. Of course sexual vampires is nothing new, but Vanitas shuffles the concept around just enough to drive the point home even harder (for starters, casual necksex among vampires is a thing here). So that's great, but what about the rest? Well... most of the time it's pretty good, with a bombastic presentation that gets a lot of humor out of absurd hamminess. But on the other hand, it also has a tendency to indulge in rote shounen plotlines, and when it does that, it just becomes a weaker Fire Force (a show that's already not great at shounen template nonsense), and its very anime humor is not always on point, an issue it also shares with Fire Force. I do like the characters (in particular Vanitas and Jeanne), but not enough to make them bickering while walking down a hallway of midbosses entirely worth it, if you know what I mean. And just in general, it tends to work better in single scenes than it does as a whole. Vanitas is wacky, wild, sensual and generally a good time, but it has structural issues that hold it back and may or may not doom it in the long run. 7/10
So. How about some capital-A Arthouse? The astute reader might remember that while I approve of headier stuff in principle, in practice it seems to not work out most of the time and I was particularly dissatisfied with the recent works of Messrs. Ikuhara and Yuasa, who embody this type of work ca. 2021. Now Shingo Natsume is throwing his hat in the chinstroking ring and he definitely takes no prisoners. I will say that the list of adjectives one could apply to Sonny Boy is very impressive: I'd call it clever, visually stunning, bold, unique, creative, artistically consistent, unpredictable and confident without any hesitation. But here's the thing, despite all of that I don't think I actually like it very much. I certainly don't dislike it, which is already a massive step up from what I think about the aforementioned clowns, but I never felt a close connection to the material. This is pretty funny, because for all the coming-of-age sentimentality Natsume packs into this, it still comes across as a pretty austere and intellectual exercise to me. Of course, that's not an accident; the storytelling is intentionally vague and at points wilfully obtuse to the breaking point - Which has a surprising amount of charm by its own, but it still prevents me from relating to the characters on a more personal level, and the other avenue of appreciation (writing kiloword-length analyses of the deepest deepities at display here) is also not something I'm into. In fact I think that the latter would be outright detrimental, because Sonny Boy works far better as an abstract mood piece than any truly profound statement, which is easy to see at the occasional instance where the meaning is eyerollingly obvious. In the end, Sonny Boy actually comes with a strong recommendation from me, especially for something that could so easily have gone very wrong given the first impressions of a bunch of highschoolers Living In A Society - Though I respect it more than I like it, even if I do respect it a whole lot... so make of that what you will. It's all in your head, maaaaaaan. 7/10
And again with the shows that only really have one selling point, but what a selling point it is. The main character of Kageki Shoujo, Sarasa, is such a fluffy, lovable and T A L L (like, so tall) goof that nothing else in the show hardly even matters. Well, she's not on screen 100% of the time, so I'll have to look further anyway. So incredible lead (and her sidekick Ai, an almost-Adachi whose dork tendencies are also adorable most of the time) aside, what is there to Kageki Shoujo? Eh, it's alright. A Marimite-lite mixed with a generic competition slash doing ur best storyline that's perfectly functional but pretty shallow and held back by tonal missteps. In particular, early on the show goes to a couple of fairly grim places - which I don't necessarily have an issue with, but it treats them so superficially that all it achieves is needlessly harshing the buzz. It also curiously insists that the school is a cutthroat hive of scum and villainy which isn't really borne out by much of what we get to see. Plus, it also has a spectacular non-ending (the least ending of any show this season, especially compared to Aquatope's dark horse "most ending" title), which may be fixed in a potential sequel but doesn't help at all right now. But hey. Sarasa. SARASA. (And also Ai). 7/10
Heyyyyy, it's Love Live. Yeah, it's the winner by default. Who'da thunk it? The focus on a smaller cast, general disregard for the mobile game roots and focus on the "core" appeal of Love Live as a narrative may make Superstar the best iteration of Love Live yet, but make no mistake: Even if it is, the difference is negligible. This is exactly what I said about Nijigaku, because Superstar deviates from "baseline" Love Live just as much (or rather, little) - just in the opposite direction. But again, this is all minutiae that only people who already watched this would ever care about. The characters are still really nice (and the smaller cast leads to more interplay, which is even nicer, especially when it's Keke and Sumire antagonizing each other), the comedy antics are still fun as hell, and the big sappy drama is still impossible to dislike. But there's also still a number of curious plot dead ends like the school being in danger of closing after all (which is anticlimatically resolved by Dad Ex Machina, making the whole subplot a distraction at best), and none of this is anything remotely new. The one thing that's not opposed from Nijigaku is sadly the production value, since Superstar is also surprisingly cheap for an allegedly premium product (apart from the CG music videos, which still continue to get better and better). I will say that Superstar is probably the best starting point for someone new to the franchise, because it just looks the most respectable on paper and seems somewhat easier to get aboard with, even if that doesn't make much of a difference to the end result. The ultimate question is: Can Love Live ever exceed the 7? I think it's possible, but not this time. 7/10
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