Winter 2021 Anime

It’s anime time!

Anime time hasn’t occurred since all the way back in the summer of 2019, but there were some interesting-looking shows in the preview guides for winter 2021, so I decided to give the first episodes of a few of them a whirl. Here are my thoughts on them.

Sk8 The Infinity

I like to occasionally indulge in a good sports anime. Watching spirited teens claw their way to success via their burning passion is always a fun time, whether the sport in question is something athletic like volleyball or baseball, or a more intellectual pursuit like Go. 

Or in this case, skateboard-racing down an abandoned mine while wearing zany pro wrestling outfits and throwing firecrackers as weapons!

This is “S”, a hip-hop infused illegal skate-race that takes place on the sub-tropical region of Okinawa. Our main character is Reki, a hot-blooded seventeen year old who’s been unable to defeat the neon clown skater currently dominating the S scene, and also has been unable to find anyone to share his passion for underground rollerball skate competitions with.

All that changes when a boy named Langa(?) joins his class, moving back to Japan to live with his estranged mom having spent most of his life in Canada. Langa is bummed that there’s no snow in Okinawa, which means he won’t be able to partake in his favourite pastime, snowboarding...but then Reki badgers him into coming along to an S...race, or whatever, and Langa discovers that his snowboarding experience translates surprisingly well into downhill skating against a violent clown man!

As you can probably tell by that plot description, this is completely fucking absurd, and that’s before I even get to the mysterious shirtless villain guy who might be a vampire. It’s basically taking the well-worn cliches of the sports anime genre--hot-blooded beginner with more passion than skill, aloof pretty-boy character, someone whose talent in other areas makes them unexpectedly good at the sport the show is about--and applying them to a bizarre cartoon scenario instead of a real sport.

It turns out that results in a lot of fun! This episode is mostly played for laughs, as you’d expect given how silly the premise is, but the bit at the end where Langa totally shreds the fuck out of his first race while an amazed Reki looks on in awestruck admiration (and possibly something a little less platonic as well) was actually, genuinely effective. Langa’s situation also seems like it could be mined for some drama; we don’t know exactly what’s going on with him, but I assume his return to Japan hasn’t been prompted by positive circumstances, given that he doesn’t seem exactly enthusiastic about the move.

Despite how much fun I had watching it, I can’t see myself sticking with this one thanks to a major flaw: the visuals. The character animation during the race segments is your usual TV anime low-framerate jank, and coupled with the ugly brown backgrounds this means that the race that should be the centerpiece of the episode is unattractive and kind of sucks the energy out of the whole thing. 

Still, it seems like a fun ride, and I’m hoping the implication that Reki wants Langa to be his sk8er boi who he can say see you later boi to isn’t just the show queerbaiting like a lot of sports anime and manga do.

2.43: Seiin High School Boys Volleyball Team

Speaking of sports anime and possible queerbaiting, here’s one about volleyball. Not zany fantasy volleyball where the balls explode, just ordinary volleyball.

Yuni Kuroba is a talented but unmotivated member of his school’s volleyball team. Like all of his team-mates, he only participates because his school requires some sort of extracurricular activity. All that changes when Yuni’s childhood friend returns to town following a scandal at his school in Tokyo. Yuni is initially dismayed to learn that Chika has turned into an edgelord during his long absence, but they rekindle their bond while slapping balls and soon they’re planning to take their team to the national tournaments...until Yuni finds out exactly what Chika did to get kicked out of his last school, that is.

This show has several things going for it, chief among them being that it looks gorgeous. It’s set in Hokkaido, Japan’s rural northernmost island that has a landscape and climate more similar to northern Europe than the mountainous, temperate terrain you usually associate with the country; this has long been one of my bucket list destinations, and 2.43 lets me vicariously experience it via lots of achingly beautiful twilight snowscapes. I was also impressed by how many of the interior locations look realistically dingy and lived-in, as opposed to typical anime backgrounds which can often look very sterile.

The drama between Yuni and Chika has the potential to go interesting places. It’s mostly very understated and realistic, save for the ridiculous amount of time they spend gazing into each other’s eyes and blushing, as are the interactions between all of the side characters.

But...overall, I thought this episode was kind of a snoozefest.

Part of it might just be that I like sports shows to be on the somewhat more energetic side of the spectrum. Not full-on Sk8 or one of those football anime where the players are summoning ghost tigers every time they kick the ball or whatever, but a bit more heightened. I have zero interest in any sport in real life, so a story that’s focused on actual sports as they’re actually played is going to have to work mighty hard in the drama department to hook me.

2.43 doesn’t do that. Yuni and Chika get over their awkwardness very quickly, and from there on out the main source of drama is this weird situation where Yuni doesn’t want to be seen taking volleyball too seriously in front of his older cousin, which I had trouble even understanding, much less caring about. I guess the revelation about the truly reprehensible thing that Chika did to necessitate moving away from Tokyo could lead to a lot of drama, but that only happens right at the end of the episode.

Still, if you’re looking for an attractive, low-key story focused on relationships and maybe ball-related romance, this is a definite option.

Horimiya

Speaking of romance, this is based on an apparently beloved manga (Hori-san to Miyamura-kun), a romantic comedy that seems to be leaning more heavily towards the romance angle than the comedy. The show is about two high school students, Hori and Miyamura, who have never interacted due to their different social stations: Hori is the most attractive, most popular girl in their class, while Miyamura is a gloomy, long-haired loner who everyone assumes is an otaku who spends all his time obsessing over anime figurines.

But then, through happenstance, the two meet outside of school and discover that neither is anything like the way they present in class; Hori spends all of her free time taking care of her little brother due to her workaholic parents never being home, while Miyamura is a heavily-pierced, tattooed Cool Guy. As Miyamura starts coming over to Hori’s house at the request of her brother, the two discover that they find these hidden personas extremely attractive, and you can guess how it goes from there.

I occasionally like to dip into romantic anime of a particular nature: the laid-back, casual kind that’s relatively low on serious drama or emotion. This isn’t a kind of storytelling I gravitate to in any other medium, but for some reason when anime does it, I find the results charming instead of dull, and Horimiya seems like it fits right into that particular category. Hori and Miyamura basically make their feelings to each other known by the end of the episode, which means there won’t be an annoying will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic dragging down the plot, and a character who seems like he’s going to be a romantic rival goes in an unexpected direction when he just tells Hori how he feels and then gets turned down by her.

The comedy part of the rom-con formula does come through--the “It’s egg time!” scene pictured above had me laughing out loud--but this is mainly one of those vicarious friendship shows that you watch to simulate the experience of human connection without having to risk rejection or emotional pain, or, you know, literally fucking dying. If ever there was a time for this sort of low-key escapism, it’s right now.

All that said, I do feel like Hori kind of gets the short end of the stick given that her secret, hidden face that she never shows to her classmates is...being a stay at home mom, basically. Compared to Morimaya’s status as a secretly-hot, tatted-up Cool Dude, that’s a little bit of a let down, although it’s amoleriated somewhat by the fact that this more casual, laid-back side to her is what Miyamura finds attractive about her.

Also, there’s a joke early on about Hori and Miyamura’s teacher making pervy remarks to the girls, which no one seems to feel is a particularly serious issue. I’ve seen variations on this joke in so many anime and manga that it’s making me wonder what’s going on with the Japanese school system.

Wonder Egg Priority

Speaking of egg time, who’s ready for our first show about depressed girls fighting psychological horrors in an eerie, misty otherworld?

Yes, that’s right: there’s more than one of those this season.

The first episode of Wonder Egg Priority starts with our heterochromatic protagonist Ai burying a dead firefly--making a kind of Grave Of The Fireflies, if you will--which promptly comes back to life and starts talking. The firefly leads her to a cave with an escalator in it, where Ai acquires a “wonder egg”. The next day, she finds herself transported into a foggy, surreal version of her school where a talking roll of toilet paper commands her to crack the egg open; upon doing so a girl comes out of it, which is a good thing because a horde of faceless, murderous “Seeno Evils” start chasing them and

So this is basically what a Haruki Murikami novel would look like if Kunihiko Ikuhara adapted it into an anime, mixed in with a dollop of Serial Experiments Lain and just a smidge of Silent Hill. If you got all of those references, you already know whether this is something you’re interested in or if it’s more liable to give you a migraine. 

When the episode decides to start making sense--which to be fair is pretty soon, I’m exaggerating the weirdness slightly for comedic effect--we learn that Ai has been staying home from school after her best friend jumped off the school roof following a vicious bullying campaign that Ai blames herself for not stopping. Via the wonder egg, Ai is given a chance to bring her friend back to life if she enters the other world and rescues other dead girls from the Seeno Evils, essentially atoning for her sins, but this is made trickier by the fact that while Ai is semi-immortal in the otherworld, any wounds she picks up will begin manifesting after a time once she comes back to the real world. 

If you’re a long-time anime watcher, you pretty much know what you’re getting into here. Shows about kids dealing with heavy issues via psychological or sci-fi/fantasy allegories are a dime a dozen, and even this specific brand of “it looks cute and colourful but actually it’s depressing as fuck” take on the subject has kind of been done to death ever since Madoka Magica came out. 

Wonder Egg Priority had a few things going for it, though. First off, it’s way stranger than most of the other shows like it, which again might be a turn-off for some people, but is right up my alley. I made a Serial Experiments Lain comparison earlier, and I’m convinced someone involved in the production had that now-forgotten gem in mind when they worked on this; the faceless classmate who Ai fights (by crushing her with a giant ball-point pen) is right out of Lain, as is Ai dressing and acting noticeably younger than she should for her age.

The scenes dealing with the more grounded subject matter are melodramatic, but there’s a raw intensity to them that cuts through the cheesiness. Despite at times being cute and heart-warming, based on this episode I can see this show getting into majorly dark territory. In particular, while Ai has all these rose-tinted memories of Koito, during a flashback to their first interactions Koito acts really strange in a way that sets off all sorts of red flags, but which the very immature Ai doesn’t seem to have picked up on. Clearly, either there was more going on with Koito than just the bullying, or their relationship wasn’t what Ai perceived it to be (she seems to be utterly desperate for friendship in a way that would leave her wide open to being taken advantage of).

Wonder Egg Priority’s last and perhaps greatest strength is that it looks gorgeous. Seemingly a “prestige” studio original, there’s clearly a lot of budget and talent at work here. The colour palette pops with bright primary hues, the designs of the surreal dreamscape are haunting, and the brief bits of action we get are fluidly animated. Add in detailed and expressive character designs, and you’ve got a feast for the eyes (and ears actually, the music bangs).

My only big misgiving is that I hope the show doesn’t just devolve into SAD GIRLS DIE AND GET SUPER FUCKED UP AND CRY AND IT’S SO DARK AND EDGY MAAAAAN. That particular style of grimdark in anime was played out years ago, and this episode already strays too far in that direction by showing the bloody aftermath of Koito’s suicide in a way that feels gratuitious. 

That concern aside, this is easily the best thing I watched this season, and I’ll be checking out the next few episodes at least to see where it goes.

Otherside Picnic

Speaking of depressed lesbians fighting psychological horrors in an eerie parallel dimension, Otherside Picnic opens with protagonist Sorawo contemplating her own death, which she expects to come very soon due to encountering a surreal creature called a “wiggle waggle” in the empty, foggy otherworld she’s been visiting after discovering a doorway that leads into it from our world. 

She’s rescued from this fate by Toriko, a gun-toting fellow otherside explorer who banishes the wiggle-waggle by throwing a lump of rock salt at it, discovering in the process that it leaves behind a cube made of an unknown, apparently physics-defying material. Thus, the two women embark on an otherside-exploring partnership in order to both find Toriko’s missing friend and amass enough sick-ass cubes that they can sell them and pay off Sorawo’s student debt. What could possibly go wrong?

Old school sci-fi heads might recognize the “picnic” part of this show’s title as a reference to Roadside Picnic, the story that would go on to inspire the movie Stalker and then the game series STALKER. Otherside Picnic takes the idea of an abandoned area haunted by reality-warping anomalies and adds in Japanese urban legends and internet folklore for a combination that’s interesting in theory, but not in execution.

From a pure writing perspective, there’s a lot of promise here. We don’t get to see exactly how Sorawo discovered the entrance to the otherside or why she keeps going there, but early in the episode she’s upset to the point of tears when she thinks her only entrance has been lost; clearly, there’s something bringing her back despite how obviously dangerous it is. And of course, the fact that Toriko is looking for someone lost in the otherside is its own can of worms, as is the not very subtle foreshadowing that our two leads are going to end up falling for each other.

The problem is everything around the writing. From the character designs to the animation to how the character’s emotions are expressed, this is all very standard anime: kind of janky animation (especially some very ropey uses of CGI), over the top emoting and voice acting, goofy reaction faces and a very plain visual pallet borne of a limited TV budget. Which is fine, but I feel like none of it effectively captures the surreal, eerie tone that the series is clearly going for.

In fact, it’s kind of a shame that Otherside Picnic happened to start airing in the same season as Wonder Egg Priority, because that show both nails the feel that this is attempting to capture far more effectively, and has way better production values to boot. If you’re specifically jonesing for a show about girls overcoming surreal dangers together in a spooky parallel world, the only thing Otherside Picnic has over Wonder Egg is a lesbian romance element...and the first episode of Wonder Egg made me suspect it might be going in that direction as well, so really, there’s no reason to watch this unless you just want an excuse to say “wiggle waggle” all the time.

So I’m A Spider, So What?

Speaking of both wiggling and waggling, So I’m A Spider, So What? is about…well, guess.

After a high school class gets blown up by a mysterious explosion, all of the students are reincarnated in a fantasy world as trainee heroes enrolling in a prestigious hero academy. The only exception is our unnamed protagonist, who awakes an unknown time after everyone else as a somewhat large--but not, like, really large--spider, the kind of enemy you’d cut down within minutes of starting an RPG. 

Speaking of RPGs, like every other fucking isekai anime, this show’s fantasy world runs on RPG mechanics; this is a good thing, because Spider-chan was a major MMO addict in her previous life, and once she figures out how the game mechanics of her new world works she goes about min-maxing herself into an all-powerful spider god. But first she needs to survive her first day in the dangerous, monster-filled labyrinth she’s found herself in.

There is one reason, and only one reason, to watch this show, and that’s for the ridiculously cute and funny main character, a hyperactive weirdo who’s oddly hyped about this whole spider thing and makes that known by talking non-stop, doing spider-cartwheels, dancing and engaging in other hilarious antics. The show’s absurd opening theme is a song about being a spider, which includes the line “Spider pride beats in my chest now.” How can you not love that?

Unfortunately, So I’m A Spider is only half about its arachnoid protagonist. The other half follows her classmates and teacher as they engage in generic fantasy adventure nonsense, and once the episode switched to them I quickly got bored out of my mind and stopped watching.

The Isekai genre is so played-out that even the parodies have their own sub-cliches, so why anyone thought pairing the funny spider stuff with utterly dull human fantasy characters was a good idea is beyond me. Judging by some of the scenes in the opening credits, we’re actually supposed to care about those characters, and I can tell you right now that that sure as hell isn’t happening.