Winter 2022 First Impressions – Cue!

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 24

Source: Game

Episode Summary: AiRBLUE is a newly-established voice acting agency whose primary claim to fame is that it’s starting from the ground up with a roster of talent who have no training or experience in the industry itself. Haruna is one such hopeful who’s aiming to get her big break with AiRBLUE; she wants to emulate a voice actress she idolizes from her favorite animated film.

But Haruna isn’t alone; she’s one of fifteen girls on the starting roster. As soon as they all arrive at the AiRBLUE offices they hit the ground running with their first lesson – to pair up with a partner and enact a scene from Hamlet. As each group portrays the scene the actresses inject a little bit of their own personalities into it. When Haruna and her partner, Maika, portray the scene, however, they bring it to life in the most anime way possible. Each of the girls is talented, to be sure. But can they survive their first real test – an actual audition?

Impressions: Voice acting, at least in the Japanese anime sense, seems like a very grueling process. Not only are the actors stuck in a room together where they ebb and flow from the microphones as the lines dictate, but they’re also often expected to act against unfinished (or barely-started) animation. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to try to embody a character when all you have to go on is an animatic composed of stick figures. In any case, there have been several anime over the years which take place in this very specialized world; this one is only the most recent to attempt to capture the intensity of the industry, doing so through the eyes of complete newcomers.

This seems like as good as any a place to start a story of this type, because it provides the storytelling opportunity to explain industry-specific details to the audience (via the characters) without making it seem too stilted and unnatural within the dialog. If the characters are as clueless about the ins-and-outs of voice acting as us bozos out in the audience, then there’s no harm in blatantly telling and showing things as the narrative requires. Win-win.

That said, while this set-up is convenient, I’m not convinced that it’s realistic. I’m often amused at how many absolutely wild things we’re willing to suspend our belief over in order to navigate the experience of watching media. But the caveat with that is that those suspensions depend very heavily on the tone and genre of the story being told. A floating heads-up display showing off a character’s statistics in a fantasy series that feels like a video game? That checks out. Characters in a series about voice acting who have literally no idea what they’re doing? Eh… I might possibly have a few philosophical issues with that.

I think what it boils down to is a sense of professionalism, and what that entails. I’ve commented in the past on TV anime series that take place in business environments where new recruits seems to have very little or no idea about what the company they work for actually does (I think the one I’ve picked on in the past is New Game! where the protagonist is hired at a game design studio while knowing literally nothing about what she’s supposed to do). On-the-job training is certainly a thing, but beyond a certain level of ignorance I have a difficult time believing that these characters have somehow stumbled randomly into their jobs with the ability to perform them effectively. Perhaps this is just an American mindset of mine.

Cue! has a ton of characters and there’s only really one we know anything about as of yet; at the very least, Haruna has a specific desire to be a voice actress because she idolizes one from a cherished childhood movie. But do these other characters have any reason to be there? I suppose time will tell.

Pros: Voice acting is a realm which I think makes for some interesting drama. Girlish Number proved this pretty well with its protagonist’s thinly-veiled bad attitude and certain plot events that seemed to allude to real-life events. I think this episode captures the drama well simply by how fast-paced it is and how it directly ramps up into an actual audition. It’s a pressure-cooker situation in which not everyone can succeed, and the characters are pitting themselves against actual professionals, which raises the stakes and makes for an exciting story arc. The only disappointing thing about it is that this episode ends on a cliffhanger before AiRBLUE’s hopefuls get their chance.

Cons: This is another of those series that buffets the viewer with an unfair number of character introductions right off the bat. While this episode focuses mostly on Haruna, it’s clear that most if not all of the other characters will be important at some point (this series purports to have 24 episodes, after all, so I’m sure each of them will get their due at some point) so the pressure to try to remember who’s who is definitely real. It’s also a factor that reveals this series’ origins, as this is an aspect that reads very much like a game with multiple selectable characters. It breaks the illusion a bit for me.

Content Warnings: None

Would I Watch More? – I’ve had very little success trying to keep up with series that front-load characters like this (it’s one of the reasons why I tend not to watch much idol anime), so I doubt that this will be the series that turns things around. I’m glad for more media that looks at the inner workings of the anime industry, but that alone won’t keep my interest.