Ah, well here we are are the end of this season’s premieres (barring Netflix premieres… which I just can’t bring myself to break the Netflix late-cast embargo to review). It’s definitely been an interesting season, though I honestly could say the same for just about any anime season. After this I plan to post a Winter premiere wrap-up with links to all series first impressions (since they’re combined into various posts with one-another and aren’t as easily-searchable) as well as my own rankings based on those opening episodes.
I just found out about the anime OBSOLETE, and while it’s technically outside the purview of this particular season (it started airing in early December on YouTube) I decided to include it to help round out this post a little bit. Symmetry is pleasing to me (as I expect it is to a lot of people). I’ll also plan to include a post about some of the shorts airing this season, though in a couple of cases they’re not being officially streamed anywhere so I’ll have to improvise if possible. With that said, onto the post!
ARP Backstage Pass
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 11
Source: Based on “Artist Republic Performance,” an augmented-reality performance group
Episode Summary: Nowadays, ARP are a famous performing group, but how did they get their start? The group members sit down for an interview with one of their friends and talk about how they were scouted to attend a prestigious performing-arts school and become members of ARP.
Shinji was already a talented music student, though his skills never quite lived up to his father’s expectations. Despite that, his talents revealed themselves in class and one day Shinji discovered an invitation in his shoe locker. Daiya and Reiji belonged to a rock band which was set to make its big debut at any time… though the two often found themselves with barely enough money to eat. After a street performance they received their invitations and accepted them (after intense negotiations, obviously). And Leon was already a performer through-and-through, dancing in the streets and impressing passers-by. He aspired to be a part of ARP someday. He too got this coveted opportunity. Now that all four are together, they’re an unstoppable force of singing and dancing talent.
Impressions: As an anime fan who doesn’t feel the need to hide it out in public, I tend to be my workplace’s de-facto answer-provider when it comes to things that relate to Japanese popular culture. One time a coworker came to me perplexed after hearing about Hatsune Miku, and how the virtual idol had “gone on tour with Lady Gaga.” I can see why such a thing might seem odd to most people – when they pay money for a concert, they’re paying for the experience of hearing live music produced by a musician who’s physically present on the stage. Virtual idols are just projections, with voice-acted or synthetic voices. While it’s difficult to come up with a catch-all reason for why these types of performers are popular, the fact that they exist and can draw crowds isn’t as weird an idea when you’ve spent most of your life having crushes on anime characters. Virtual singing idols, virtual YouTube stars, and whatever the next trendy virtual characters are, there’s obviously some element of real human emotion that allows people to imbue them with some emotional reality.
This series seems to be an attempt to take such a group of virtual idols, and provide them with a deeper identity than what might be evident to fans during an on stage performance. This is both fascinating and frustrating to me as a viewer; while I think the energy put into trying to develop these virtual hotties as characters is interesting, I’m also not a fan of these characters to begin with (I really had no idea who or what they were about until I watched this episode), which means I’m just not interested enough to engage in what the series is doing. It would be the same if I were watching a documentary about Bruno Mars or Taylor Swift or whatever; they’re talented performers but I’m not invested enough in them as artists to want to seek out stories of their rise to fame.
The CG animated portions of the episode are actually fairly convincing; they’re detailed, don’t try to directly mimic 2D hand-drawn character animation, and feel lively due to the motion-capture dance moves. It’s actually the 2D portions of the episode that suffer the most, because they’re not very well-rendered and take a lot of shortcuts. There’s a scene that opens the episode where it seemed (to me, at least) like the characters’ faces were being deliberately hidden so as not to require animating their mouth movements. This isn’t anything new for anime, but immediately following an energetic song-and-dance number with stilted animation full of shortcuts looks extra-clunky.
This episode really wasn’t my thing; I don’t follow idol groups in general and really don’t know much about all the virtual ones that have been cropping up. But that aside I thought that this episode was fine and did well with its content.
Pros: The CG-animated concert scenes are fun to watch.
Cons: The 2D animation seems lacking in comparison. The show is clearly made for fans of the group, of which I suspect there aren’t that many in the English-speaking world.
Content Warnings: Parental disapproval.
Grade: C
OBSOLETE
Streaming: YouTube
Episodes: 12 (6 currently available)
Source: Original
Episode Summary: Note: This Summary covers material in the first 2 episodes.
One day the Peddlers arrived on Earth and broadcast a decree in five languages – for every ton of limestone provided to them, they would give humanity one piece of their own advanced technology. They would pay no mind to political boundaries or human conflicts; their mechanical exoskeletons would simply be given in equal trade to those who provided the required payment.
Since then, the units have been utilized for all sorts of manual labor. Relatively inexpensive, even countries with few resources are able to afford them. But as with all new technologies, these units seem ripe for being utilized as weaponry. While powers like the US spend millions of tax dollars on military technology – tanks, firearms, and other big-ticket items – it’s the smaller, poorer countries that first utilize the exoskeletons for guerrilla warfare. It’s then that the powers are briefly, starkly forced into conflict at an equivalent level, and the war profiteers are suddenly faced with the prospect of a very different financial landscape.
Impressions: I’m typically not interested in stories about military tactics; I have my feelings about warfare and all its messy ethics and I’m not really into the glorification of military-style violence. That said, it’s an institution that hovers in the background noise of our daily lives and affects a lot more than we might be aware of, so it’s worthwhile to consider this every once-in-a-while. This series, written by fan-favorite “butcher” Gen Urobuchi, examines some things that could happen if the world was suddenly blessed with a new form of technology, and how the military’s intervention might corrupt its usefulness.
The episodes (at least the two that I watched) seem to be snapshots in time. The first episode follows a US military mission to quell some kind of rebellious activity in South America using mechanized suits, while the second rewinds to tell the story of how humanity obtained that technology, and how having access to it provided a way for citizens of poorer nations to strike out against richer ones. That’s really the only continuity there seems to be so far, so while there isn’t necessarily much of a plot, the common element is more about the ways in which the exoskeletons integrate into these operations. The characters (mostly soldiers thus far) express a lot of cynicism about the situation – it seems that humans acclimated quickly to the fact that they’d been visited by aliens and UFO’s, and now that stuff’s old news. People also seem pretty jaded by the military machine and the profit-based model that drives the military (especially the US military, which is called-out specifically). It’s fascinating to hear this kind of discussion in an anime, and it aligns fairly closely with some of my own beliefs, too; kind of a rarity in this form of entertainment. While there’s certainly a lot of action (at least during the first episode), it’s backed-up by some really intriguing ideas.
Aesthetically, this is one of the better examples of CG animated anime I’ve seen lately. It eschews the typical “anime” cel-shaded look for something that’s very textural and gritty. The character animation is decent, and the mecha animation (which makes up the bulk of the action) looks very good. The background artwork is nice too, though it’s mostly unpopulated tropical areas so it’d be interesting to see more urban settings.
This is really the first time I’ve watched a first-run anime series on YouTube, and this one seems to be available for free on Bandai Namco’s YouTube channel, which is actually pretty nice. The one thing to be aware of (assuming you don’t pay to subscribe to YouTube) is the ads, which I’ve started to find really irritating. I think maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the subscription services I pay for (but I don’t watch content on YouTube enough to want to pay for that as well).
These couple of episodes were a pleasant surprise. They’re about half the length of a typical anime episode, too, which makes it pretty painless to watch all the episodes that are out at the moment. Right now there are 6, and I hear there are another 6 on the way this Winter. In any case, if you’re interested in vignette-style stories, mecha, or military action, this seems like it might be a solid choice.
Pros: Interesting premise. Nice quality CG animation.
Cons: Storytelling style can be difficult to follow.
Content Warnings: Military violence (bombing/shelling, gun violence). Human death.
Grade: B
A3! Season Spring & Summer
Streaming: Funimation
Episodes: TBA
Source: Game
Episode Summary: The Mankai Theater and its resident troupe are in deep trouble. With a debt of ten million yen, an absentee general director, and a lack of actors to play the roles required of a theater company, their challenges seem insurmountable. Sakuya, the troupe’s newest (and only) member, makes his stage debut one afternoon, only to learn that there’s a backhoe outside ready to start tearing down the building. As it turns out, however, the lone audience member for that fateful performance is Izumi Tachibana, the daughter of the former owner of the theater.
Izumi, Sakuya, and the troupe manager Matsukawa, are given until sundown to convince just two more actors to join. After they manage to do so against all odds, they’re then given a more dramatic task to fulfill. Within the month they’ll need to put on a successful performance, and by the end of the year they’ll have to fill the performance roster and pay off the theater’s debt. This challenge seems completely out of the group’s league, but Sakuya’s enthusiasm and Izumi’s determination might be just what the troupe needs to pull itself out of the hole.
Impressions: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…” or so proclaims Sakuya through the immortal words of William Shakespeare. This episode asks whether or not determination and drive are enough to offset amateurism and lack of resources. Whether or not the characters are able to pull off such a feat, the idea is that just by making an honest attempt they’re leaning into the entertainment value inherent in human life itself.
Or, at least that might be the message if the series were anything but a tie-in to a game. I commend game-based anime that doesn’t broadcast the fact of its own origins. Game mechanics make games entertaining to play, but they interfere in the natural progression of a more typical, passive narrative. Magia Record is a good example from this very season that, despite being based on a cell phone game set in the Madoka universe, feels very much like an anime narrative. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that it was based on a game, I probably wouldn’t have been able to guess. On the other hand, this episode of A3 is nothing but a glorified fetch-quest and a precursor to a much larger, more extensive one; the protagonist is put in the position to gather a bunch of characters within her sphere of influence, each one to be woo’d and enticed in a manner particular to their personality. There are immediate goals and stretch goals to be achieved, and there are deadlines to meet. It all feels very surface-level.
There’s nothing else terribly wrong about the episode; it looks fairly decent, at the very least, and a “rags-to-riches” story can be really entertaining. But one can never truly shake the feeling that the series is selling a specific product. While it’s true that the majority of anime is created to sell something – manga, books, figurines, various tie-in products – I much prefer being able to buy into the illusion that an anime series is just storytelling rather than sales pitch. This episode feels very rote and uninspired.
Pros: Colorful. Fun to hear Shakespeare translated into another language.
Cons: Feels too game-like.
Content Warnings: Some forceful arm-grabbing late in the episode.
Grade: C-