Spring 2022 First Impressions – Healer Girl

Streaming: Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Original

Episode Summary: Kana, Reimi, and Hibiki are three apprentice healers at the Karasuma Voice Treatment Center, which trains individuals in the art and science of treating patients using the power of singing. This form of medicine developed as a compliment to already-existing Eastern and Western medicine. Kana is the newest recruit of the bunch, and though she was inspired to become a healer due to an encounter when she was a child, she often finds that her ability to adhere to her training regimen (as well as the rules) to be a little lacking. When she uses her abilities to heal a boy’s skinned knee, Karasuma, the main healer at the clinic, puts Kana on notice.

The girls live out their days doing administrative work and building up their endurance through exercise and eating healthy foods. As people who love to sing, their down time is often filled with music as well. When the granddaughter of one of the clinic’s patients rushes over after-hours to get help for her grandmother’s condition, however, the apprentices switch into overdrive to retrieve their senpais from a conference. Though Kana knows she can’t use her singing to heal her patient, she realizes that she can use her skills to ease the patient’s mind, which she does. As the others arrive, they witness Kana’s immense skill, which ultimately calms the elderly woman well enough that she can be taken to the hospital.

Impressions: Musical media is something that appeals to me. While it’s a form of entertainment that’s inherently unrealistic – people in real-life can’t just produce fully-formed songs on a whim – it is a form of storytelling media that does a good job of conveying strong emotions through music, and I like that. Sometimes your feelings are so strong that you just have to sing! Well, that’s the idea, anyway.

Healer Girl imagines a world where this conceit is made real and given the power to manifest physical changes in people. This idea isn’t entirely made up out of whole cloth – the sound frequency of a cat’s purr is thought to help promote bone and tissue healing, among other things. But a consistent vibration at 50Hz is a bit of a different matter than a melodic tune with backing music and vocal harmonies. That said, attempting to dissect this episode based on scientific merit would be a real mistake.

The real feat of this episode is simply how charming it is. On its face it’s not all that different from many stories about cute girls doing slice-of-life things. The characters have different but complimentary personalities, and the de-facto heroine is a little bit of a goof-up with an inherent and mostly-untapped gift in her back pocket that tends to offset some of the problems her personality causes for herself and others. And yet, I’m always an advocate for the position that adherence to tropes is a neutral trait, and the “good” or “bad” of a piece of media is how it works with those ideas. From its earliest minutes, the episode draws from slice-of-life, hobbyist, and even idol anime to create something that’s a bit difficult to categorize – it’s closer to magical realism iyashi-kei anime like Windy Tales or Flying Witch than not, but its spritely and upbeat production feels a little bit to energetic to slate alongside those others.

Whatever you want to call it, Healer Girl seems like it will be a lot of fun. It’s very cute, the music is nice to listen to, and it imagines a world where a certain form of magic is taken seriously (and actually works!).

Pros: This is a small thing, but since small details can sometimes make-or-break entertainment, I think it’s worth mentioning – I like that the lip-flaps during the singing moments are closely-matched to the vocals. I assume this was made easier by the fact that the songs were likely recorded earlier in the production cycle than the dialog. However, it’s something that’s less common in anime production, and that coupled with the expressive character choreography at important moments really gives this the feel of a musical.

Cons: This is also a minor quibble, but I think it’s probably something that fewer people are likely to key into so I wanted to point it out as something I’m ambivalent about. It’s… interesting to me that all of the “healer” characters we’ve met so far seem to be girls and women. On the one hand I don’t tend to mind anime where the gender balance is skewed in that direction – it can sometimes feel voyeuristic depending on the tone of the show, but at its most neutral I enjoy watching series focused on people like me. On the other hand, I feel like healers (and witches, as Karasuma is nicknamed) being portrayed as only women and girls perpetuates a stereotype about the type of abilities and jobs women are said to gravitate toward, and I have some mixed feelings about it. Watching Karasuma and Nagisa speak to a room full of mostly or all men at a medical conference really helps to illustrate just how dramatic this divide is.

Content Warnings: Portrayal of an elderly character in medical distress.

Would I Watch More? – I really enjoyed this episode! I had a smile on my face for most of the second half of the episode, and I always have a soft spot for musical entertainment. I added the show to my list and my (ever-growing, kind of ridiculous) currently-watching queue.