I’m gonna be honest, I feel like there’s a certain kind of popular anime that only gets popular because it’s a lot of people’s first experience with the medium and they don’t have anything to compare it against. If Saiki K was one of your first anime, or even just one of your first anime comedies, I imagine it could feel pretty unique. But as someone who’s been marinating in this medium for over five years now, and has seen more than their fair share of truly spectacular animated comedies, this does nothing for me. It doesn’t have good enough characters to sustain my investment on an emotional level, its production values are barely passable even by the standard of cheap comedy shorts (seriously, even The Way of the Househusband Anime at least had some creative direction), and most of its jokes just boil down to characters SHOUTING LIKE IDIOTS and takingsuperfastsoyourbraincanbarelyprocesswhat’sbeingsaid.
And it’s not like I didn’t have any fun. There are plenty of jokes that work! My favorite bits are when Saiki’s dragged into everyone else’s shonen can-do spirit and all he can do is silenty spew insults while his classmates are high on The Power of Friendship. Also the gag about his psychic powers being the reason that this world is so incredibly Anime(tm). That was great. But they’re momentary chuckles, vanishing as quickly as they spring to my lips with no lasting impact. And when I think about spending upwards of 50 episodes with comedy this un-engaging- especially when that would mean also putting up with the so-called “funny” pervert and the bevy of female characters who’s only personality trait is “has a big fat crush on Saiki”- I can practically feel my brain glazing over from boredom. Sorry, y’all, but there are countless better anime comedies out there (and even plenty of Just Okay anime comedies) that do everything this show does better.
Alright, listen, I just started watching Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, and it’s a show I really want to like. The art style is gorgeous, the fight scenes are wonderfully animated and choreographed, it’s the rare isekai that’s grounded in the tactile sense of a real world instead of dumb video game mechanics, and I love how the protagonists have to deal with all the realistic practical concerns of being bottom-tier adventurers in a backwater Medieval fantasy world, from the exhaustion of fighting to monetary concerns to wear and tear on their equipment to just how had it actually is to drive your blade into another living being of flesh and bone. It also strikes a really nice balance between slow-burn atmospheric iyashikei and its more action-focused elements, and I’m interested to learn more about the mystery of why these people were mind-wiped and summoned to this world in the first place. So much of this stuff is genuinely fascinating, compelling, exciting, unique, and just overall an example of what isekai should be. So I want to like Grimgar so fucking bad.
Unfortunately.
All that good stuff is running up against some of these most aggressively concentrated Gender Bullshit I’ve seen in a long-ass time.
-Male characters are the ones taking charge and advancing most of the scenes, while the female characters are stuck mostly reacting to them.
-Male characters' clothing is all nice and practical, female characters' clothing is all impractical horny cosplay.
-Fanservice angles at every opportunity the show finds to shove them in, regardless of tone, context, or necessity (spoilers it’s never necessary).
-Constant scenes of our protagonists sexually harassing the girls on their team and it's treated like no big deal. Sometimes it’s even eroticized, because of fucking course it is.
-And the first episode in particular has a double whammy of "Ew, gay men are gross and predatory" and "Oooh baby, gay girls are hot and fun to watch fondle each other."
Just... fucking hell, it’s like they were trying to hit Double Standards Bingo. I’m gonna keep watching and hope things improve, but these first three episodes, for all their positives, leave me with a really bad taste in my mouth.
Update: Grimgar turned it around. Once it hits its first big plot twist and gets past the first arc (Episodes 1-4), it develops into a damn good show. It’s all about exploring the meaning of starting life from the ground up, making meaning for yourself in an imperfect world with no set goals or guarantees of fairness. And it introduces a new character who’s one of the rare examples of the ice queen archetype done right and treated with respect by the narrative, which is just... so nice to see. The story basically pivots to entirely revolve around her once she shows up, but she ends up being such a compelling character, and so valuable to the rest of the characters’ development, that it works. Plus, it mostly drops the gag-inducing Gender Bullshit from that first arc, and even kind of interrogates some of it by the end? Sort of? Well, there’s an attempt, at least, and I couldn’t help but appreciate it.
Now, does that forgive the first arc for being so crappy? No, it was still a struggle to get to the point where Grimgar actually gets good. Plus, it never fully leaves the leering camera behind, and that shit’s just not okay. But it really does get exponentially better once it reaches that turning point. And the fights still kick ass, and the art style is still beautiful, and it still has that lovely sense of grounded tactileness. If I was just judging it by the last eight episodes, it would be an easy 7/10. As is, though, that crummy first arc drags it down to a still respectable 6/10. Give it a shot, and if you can make it past its initial crappiness, I think you’ll have a good time.
(Now to wait in sorrow for the second season that’s absolutely never coming lol)
...so apparently season 1 of Thunderbolt Fantasy is actually just the prologue to the entire rest of the series.
holds head in hands
The fucking balls on Urobuchi, I swear to god.
Anyway, that was incredibly fun! I don’t know shit about Taiwanese puppetry, but even I could tell the artistry bringing this show to life was incredible. Distinct personality in each character’s movement, gorgeous practical sets that get impressively and believably messed up during action, dizzying camerawork that covers well for puppets that I can’t imagine are mobile enough to perfectly pull off the ridiculous stunts their characters do, and impressive integration of CG effects animation that gives every fight the same kind of deliriously mythic over-the-top spectacle as the battles of Fate/Stay Night. Combined with Sawano’s epic soundtrack and a typically dense, expectation-flipping script from Urobuchi, and this was a wild ride from start to finish. I do think the female characters were pretty underutilized; it almost gets funny near the end where the protagonist breaks out of prison on his own but tells his female companion to stay in jail while he sorts everything out... only for her to be rescued by someone entirely different anyway. Like, come on, there had to be a better way to plot that sequence of events.
But hey, like I mentioned at the beginning, we’re just getting started. Urobuchi’s work always takes a hot second to really hit its stride, and I think by the end of this first season, we’ve reached the point where it’s really gonna take off. So I’m greatly looking forward to where this show goes form here. Until then, call this season a solid 7/10, here’s hoping it keeps it up!
Kyoto Animation is my favorite anime studio of all time. I know I’ve said that plenty of times over the course of writing for this blog, but I can’t help but repeat it whenever it comes time to talk about their work again. Especially in the aftermath of the unfathomable horrors they endured last year, it feels more important than ever to re-iterate just what an incredible group of artists they are. They’ve consistently lead the industry on spectacular, high-quality animation. They’ve proven you can crank out profitable masterpiece after profitable masterpiece while still treating your employees with respect and dignity. They’re the rare studio that can actually make real life feel as magical, meaningful, and massive as it honestly is. In an industry that’s too often bound by its worst vices, they represent everything about what makes this medium so goddamn special. Kyoto Animation is a god among men, a shining beacon that defines the best of what anime is capable of. And while I don’t think A Silent Voice is the best work they’ve ever put out (hell, it’s not even the best thing its own director has spear-headed), that only serves as further evidence of just how fucking high they’ve set the bar. For any other studio, this film would be a crowning achievement; for Kyoto Animation, it’s merely one stellar A-tier accomplishment among many. That, my friends, is why they get to be the King.
The story centers around the relationship between two high school students: Shoko Nishimiya, a deaf girl, and Shoya Ishida, who bullied her back in elementary school. To be fair, many of Shoko’s classmates used her disability as an excuse to bully her; Shoya was merely the first and most prominent among them. But when the teacher caught wind of what was going on, the rest of the kids were content to let the crimes fall on Shoya’s head alone. Suddenly, he was the one being ostracized, picked on, isolated and left behind. And the stigma stuck with him all throughout elementary and middle school, to the point where he grew scared to even look his fellow classmates in the eye. Flash-forward to high school and Shoya’s grown up into a depressed, reclusive kid, riddled with guilt over the harm he caused and starting the film by almost jumping off a bridge. Suffice to say, he’s in a bad state. And more than anything, he wants to make amends for all he’s done. So he seeks out Shoko, who’s since transferred to a different school, and offers her the one thing she always wanted from him back then: a friendship. Thus begins a tale of reckoning and redemption, as Shoya brings together all their old elementary school classmates- those who joined in the bullying, those who simply watched from the sidelines- to find closure for the lasting scars they’ve all carried with them all this time.
From that description alone, you can probably get a sense of how powerful this film can get. Bullying, ostracizing, living with disabilities, depression, suicide... there are all topics that most anime don’t dare touch except to exploit them for maximum shock value. But there’s no exploitation to be found in A Silent Voice, just a tender, often painful reality. It peers into the ways people can hurt each other, especially at such young and vulnerable ages, and how seemingly meaningless acts of cruelty can leave lasting trauma in their wake. None of Shoko’s former classmates are truly free from sin, whether they bullied her themselves or just sat back and let it happen. And as they’ve grown up, the full weight of what they did to her, and what they subsequently let happen to Shoya, has left them all scrambling for some justification or defense mechanism to avoid facing the full weight of what they’ve done. Even Shoya, for all his sincerity, can’t help but grapple with the question of whether he’s reaching out to Shoko just to selfishly assuage his own guilt, and not for her sake. It’s far from a tragedy or misery porn, and there’s plenty of light throughout thanks to the lovable camaraderie of the central cast (Shoko’s tomboy little sister in particular is frigging incredible, god bless Aoi Yuuki as always), but it’s steeped in a very real sense of melancholy and anguish
And the film takes its time getting you invested, building its emotional tapestry over the course of a lengthy slow-burn. In a way, it’s almost like a movie-length remake of Anohana, with a depressed loner protagonist bringing together all his old childhood friends so they can reckon with the memories of a wronged girl they haven’t been able to leave behind them. It lets you live with these characters, understand the ways they’re all suffering, see how much they’ve grown and how much they’ve stayed the same. It’s almost too much at points, which is the film’s one real fault: some scenes and sequences go by so abruptly that you can really feel them trying to squeeze the manga’s entire story into a deliberately paced two-hour package. But it’s a testament to the talent on display that they even pull it off as well as they do. For all its shortcuts, no character really feels shortchanged, no idea given the short shrift. It just lets you simmer in the complicated feelings the characters share, the ways they try to absolve themselves to hide from their guilt, how incapable they are of addressing their own hurt without hurting everyone around them all over again. It’s messy and uncomfortable and difficult in the way life so often is, and almost everyone has their own inner darkness to confront. It’s not always easy to like all the characters, but you can never not feel sorry for them.
But it’s the ending that truly pulls A Silent Voice together, that justifies all the densely packed character drama and slowly rising tension that dominates its lengthy second half. I wouldn’t dare spoil any of what happens, but suffice to say, when all that pain and desperation finally bursts to the surface, there won’t be a dry eye in the house. It’s gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, utterly devastating, but also beautiful, sublime, achingly hopeful. It tore my heart right out of my chest and left me a puddle of tears on the floor, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Christ, this is what makes Kyoto Animation so fucking spectacular. Their work is so human, so empathetic, so capable of reaching into the deepest parts of your soul and awakening your ability to feel. And their staggering talent is on display all throughout A Silent Voice, with stunningly nuanced character animation, evocative direction from the eternally amazing Naoko Yamada (her passion for displaying character through leg acting is on full display), breathtaking scenery and environmental storytelling, and a consistently captivating sense of place that grounds you in the reality of the world in all its watercolor wonder. And you can tell so much thought was put into how sign language and writing allow Shoko to speak when her own voice is too haphazard, how Shoya sees shimmering Xs across the faces of his classmates that keep him from connecting with them, all the myriad ways communication can succeed and fail when you’re speaking in such tentative, mismatched voices. This film is beautiful in so many different ways that I can’t even begin to quantify them.
And that’s really a perfect descriptor of Kyoto Animation as a whole isn’t it? This studio is beautiful is so many different ways that you could never list them all. All you can do is marvel at how consistently, and how extraordinarily, they let that beauty propel them to greatness. So while the truncated story beats might be enough to keep A Silent Voice out of the true upper echelon of KyoAni classics for me, they’re not enough to keep it from being yet another masterpiece from a studio who’s earned my love a million times over. It’s a heartbreaking, heartwarming, utterly breathtaking testament to the power and terror of forgiveness, and I know I’ll carry it in my heart for a long time to come. And I give it a score of:
9/10
Fucking KyoAni, man. No one does it like them. See you next time!
If there’s a common thread that connects all of Trigger’s vastly different shows, it’s the theme of triumphant individualism. The spirit driving this studio is a spirit that values what the individual can accomplish with their own unique talents, both in terms of the characters within the story and the people making the shows themselves. Trigger heroes will rise above adversity and stake their claim upon the world, refusing to be tied down by any system and charting their own blazing path through the universe. Meanwhile, the animators and directors bringing their story to life are allowed to go as hog-wild with creative ideas and unhinged animation cuts as they wish, willing to take big changes and goofy steps in whatever direction suits them. Yu could never accuse them of cowardice or cheapening out, and at its best, the Trigger/Imaishi aesthetic is able to accomplish such uniquely powerful achievements in storytelling that you can’t help but respect the balls on every single person working there. Space Patrol Luluco isn’t Trigger at its best, but it doesn’t really need to be. It’s an anniversary project of 7-minute episodes celebrating the spirit that’s driven this studio to such acclaim since its recent founding, a rapid-fire barrage of iconic shots and homages and direct references that triumph the individualist bravado behind the likes of Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia, Gurren Lagann, and so on. And on that level, it achieves exactly what it sets out to do.
The story all this homage is built around centers on the titular Luluco, a normal girl in an abnormal city where aliens and humans live side-by-side. She’s repulsed by the weirdness and abnormality in her life, obsessed with living the platonic ideal of an ordinary middle-schooler experience. Of course, this being Trigger, she’s in for a hands-on lesson on the importance of deciding your normal on no one’s terms but your own, and a chance accident gets her swept up as a member of the Space Patrol, the intergalactic police that keep the peace in this interstellar society. Throw in a bunch of Imaishi-branded weirdness complete with his typical sandpaper-jagged animation, a metric buttload of references both direct and subtle to works of Trigger past, and a plot that zips ahead at the speed of light to cover a entire two cours worth of content over less than two hours, and you have yourselves a hard-hitting, fast-moving joy ride of enjoyable little action and character bits that breeze by pleasantly enough and rarely cease to entertain. Weirdly enough, the overriding sensation I get from this show is Inferno Cop if it were played straight. Well, straight-er; the overall tone is still very irreverent. But it’s got that same sense of nonsensical, blisteringly fast fun, speeding through the cliffnotes version of a much longer anime plot and hitting all the big fun beats along the way for no other reason than this is the kind of shit they like over at Trigger Aech Cue.
As you might imagine, this swiftness inevitably leads to a certain shallowness in the actual story that’s just here to serve as a fanservice vehicle. You won’t find much in the way of emotional depth of nuance in the broad characters, nor much in the way of surprises in the way their arcs play out. But that’s not why you’re here in the first place; you’re here for colorful fun times with colorful fun characters that reference all your favorite colorful fun shows from this colorful fun studio. And Space Patrol Luluco delivers on exactly that about as well as it needs to in order to stay light and entertaining throughout its run. It’s lively and bouncy and off-the-walls in the way Imaishi’s work always is, light on its feet and packing every scene with enough exaggerated, contorted animation and dynamic framing to put lesser studios to shame. There’s no shortage of goofy, fun ideas to be found in its world, like the idea of a city being sold in an Amazon package or the way the Space Patrol members all turn into guns like they’re Transformers. I especially enjoyed the antics of Chief Over Justice, Inferno Cop’s emo brother, who arrests and releases people at the drop of a hat with the exact same zeal. And if you’re a Trigger affictionado, this show will give you plenty of Easter eggs and references to drool over. There’s an extended jaunt in what I can only describe as a literal Trigger Cinematic Universe that’ll especially be catnip for anyone who’s enjoyed their previous work (and if the hints I got there are any indication, I suspect I’m really gonna love LWA).
In the end, Space Patrol Luluco is a light, airy breeze of a thing, not long or deep enough to reach the heights of Trigger’s previous triumphs. But it does its job as a love letter to what this studio’s best can be, and I can’t ask for much more than that. So in the end, I give it a score of:
6/10
And with that, the Summer of Suggestions continues! Thank you for joining me, and I hope you stick around for the actual next show that will take its place:
Konohana Kitan
Fare the well, and see you next time for the start of a new adventure!
