Review

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Boarding School Juliet - Episode 5 [Review]

Boarding School Juliet's fifth episode takes us into a multi-week sports festival storyline, introducing us to new foes while giving Romio and Juliet more opportunities to develop their relationship and experience all of the traditional woes of being forced to hide their relationship, lest their reputations be ruined and the school be enveloped in a bloody gang war. This amounts to a parade of the usual anime romcom clichés, such as the episode's first story, which sees Romio wanting Juliet to make him a bento, except there's just one catch: Juliet just happens to be a terrible cook!

This is one of the most overused anime sitcom plots that I can think of, and the only thing BSJ brings to the table is its usual mix of madcap Dahlia Academy shenanigans. Juliet gets the dorm cook to whip up a passable meal for Romio, but Char steals it for herself, until a passing branch catches her boob (because why not?), and the errant bento flies into the hands of Scott. Scott challenges Romio to a duel for it, everyone goes a little mad over the boxed lunch, and everything resolves exactly as you might expect. I don't necessarily fault Boarding School Juliet for playing it safe with familiar story beats; this is cotton-candy comfort food, after all. What drags this segment down, along with much of the overall episode, is how uncharacteristically janky the show's animation and direction turned out.

Throughout “Romio and the Sports Festival”, the main cast are consistently off-model, and their movements are noticeably stiff; extras are stuck frozen in place while the camera pans across static backgrounds, and several scenes go out of their way to hide characters' mouths (though one of these instances was admittedly setting up a joke, with Char faking out Romio to snag the aforementioned bento). None of these aesthetic issues are glaring enough to ruin the show's visual presentation completely, but many gags do suffer from some wonky timing, and the brief action beats don't fare any better. When it premiered, Boarding School Juliet stood out because of its pleasing production values, along with Romio and Juliet's adorable chemistry, and the show struggles to make a case for itself when one of its two central pillars starts to crumble.

Thankfully, Romio and Juliet remain as cute as ever, which is what saves this episode from feeling completely ancillary. While I didn't dig Romio's pushy insistence on having Juliet feed him a homemade lunch (and the tacky way the episode presented his request as cornering Juliet for sex didn't help either), I was relieved to see him reassure Juliet that she can be comfortable in her own skin around him, which means she doesn't have to be a good cook to make him happy. The bit with him repeatedly eating and spitting out Juliet's burnt cookies was one of the jokes that landed this week, as was his reaction to being invited to practice running a three-legged race with her, which was to scream in delighted panic for hours.

This practice session also shows Juliet and Romeo bonding over Romio's failure in the big race at last year's sports festival. Not only does Juliet want to win this festival for the sake of her own ambitions, she also wants to instill some confidence in her boyfriend – she tells him that she cares as much about him having fun and enjoying the festival as she does about winning glory for herself. It's a really sweet scene, probably the most well animated/directed sequence of the entire episode.

The big plot point that looks to be carrying us to next week involves two new rivals from the White Cats, Aby Ssinia and Somali Longhaired. Groan worthy cat-breed names aside, (“Ssinia” isn't even a word!) the characters are perfectly fine - they're the kind of pompous rich-kid antagonists you'd expect to see planning a hostile takeover of the dorky summer-camp from across the lake. While I don't appreciate their tomfoolery as much as Char's, next week promises plenty of snobby treachery to go along with the sports and romance, and I think I can get invested in that, provided the show reclaims some of its visual mojo first.

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Bloom Into You - Episode 5 [Review]

One of the best moments of this episode of Bloom Into You was when it suddenly became Skull-face Bookseller Honda-san. It opens with Yuu working at her family's bookstore and recalling all her friends' book-buying habits. One loves manga; others are more "serious" and prefer literary magazines or academic journals. It culminates in Touko approaching the counter with a lesbian romance title, with Yuu worrying that Touko is judging her reaction. While we knew that Yuu's family worked at a bookstore before, this really digs into how working there has shaped her as a person. This scene finally does a little something I wish Bloom Into You had done episodes ago: give Yuu a personality.

I think that's key to why I've struggled to connect to Bloom Into You's central romance so far. Yuri anime characters can sometimes feel more like ciphers than real people. Arguably, that's part of the appeal; as with BL, the reader needs to be able to project onto the protagonist to a certain degree, which is harder to do the more distinctive you make their personalities. But Bloom Into You feels like it wants to challenge itself with a more realistic slow-burn romance, where its characters struggle with a different set of teenage feelings than the usual "BUT WE ARE BOTH GIRLS!" melodrama. The problem is that slow-burns require both characters having interesting personalities. Both Touko and especially Yuu just feel like too-perfect archetypes. Thankfully, that's starting to change; on Touko's end, with the slow reveal of how nervous and hollow she feels outside of her Type A class president role, and with Yuu, smaller touches like her love of reading and connections to other friends are beginning to show. I hope Koyomi's writing aspirations go beyond this episode, since that's definitely a way we can see Yuu outside of who she is with Touko.

We also get more and more clues that Yuu does indeed return Touko's feelings on some level. Maki's continued role is the most obvious one; there's no trope quite like the "friend who sees what's happening before you do" to put wind in the sails of a romance. Even if Yuu hasn't realized what she feels yet, Maki's observations ensure that the audience does. The fact that Maki seems totally disinterested in romance, still insisting that's not really who Yuu is, pushes this point further. I think what Yuu struggles with is is related to "love languages"—affecting how she feels love as well as how she expresses it. Not everything will feel like the pounding, doki-doki, passionate love, but it's clear the way that Yuu is always thinking of Touko means something. I wish at this point she'd realize what that is though, because five episodes in, this particular plot is starting to drag.

I also struggle with if I'd find Touko's behavior creepier were she a boy. She seems to have accepted that Yuu feels differently than she does, but she continues to push for the possibility of a relationship. At the same time, there's also an aspect of her that feels achingly familiar if you were ever a crushing teenager, especially this week, when she goes to Yuu's house and gets to sigh over her crush's pillows. When Yuu says her sister bringing her boyfriend over shows how serious they are, you can feel Touko's excitement at the implications for her and Yuu. This is a lot of what sells Touko as a character, since she's been a bit of a cipher so far too—even if that's changing faster than it seems to be with Yuu. At least Bloom Into You gets the feelings right, even if I sometimes wish I cared more about the result.

I talked a little about the music last week, but I really want to discuss it further, since it's a key part of what makes this show work so well. Also, its absence from the first part of the episode gave it a weird over-seriousness, while its bouncy, playful return made the second half feel all the more fun and refreshing. Bloom Into You has a pretty prolific anime composer working on it: Michiru Oshima. Oshima is likely best known to anime fans for her work on the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime, possibly her most eclectic anime score, and more recently for the Little Witch Academia soundtrack. She also worked on the recent Masaaki Yuasa film The Night is Short Walk On, Girl and its TV predecessor The Tatami Galaxy, which are the scores that Bloom Into You's music reminds me of most. For someone with an extensive catalog in both anime and live-action Japanese film, Oshima's scores often sound similar across different shows (again, with Fullmetal Alchemist being a notable exception). Despite that, she shapes them to each individual show's world. It makes sense that Bloom Into You would sound like another slice-of-life series with a slight romance focus, but Oshima's music still fits into the show's gentle world more than Tatami Galaxy's madcap one. She varies it just enough to fit it in, and the result is a score that elevates what could be a more pedestrian yuri series into something more special.

Still, Bloom Into You has a long way to go before it can be truly great. It needs to do more to develop its main characters, especially Yuu, beyond genre archetypes. That will make the moments when they do get more affectionate all the more satisfying. Yuu and Touko already feel like far more realistic teenagers than many other yuri characters, but the story just needs to go that extra mile to become a great romance in its own right.

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SSSS.Gridman - Episode 5 [Review]

SSSS.Gridman is an extremely indulgent show. The very first second of this episode is dedicated to Akane in a bikini, as lovingly-drawn as other instances of fanservice in Studio Trigger shows. But beyond that surface presentation, this opening scene also shows off how much the staff of this series seem to love animating their characters in general. The socially-maladjusted villain of the series has consistently gotten next-level character acting animation, and her resigned backwards flop into a pile of garbage as she talks about how much she doesn't want to go on her school trip is just another instance of the artists' care. It's that kind of quality that contributes to these characters becoming so endearing already.

Anyway, it's time for an obligatory swimsuit episode, though in this case we get a slightly-more original river rafting trip rather than a simple beach sojourn. Aside from seeing the show's now memetically popular female leads in revealing bikinis, this whole episode seems to be dedicated to the crew showing off in various ways. The forested mountain area the trip takes place in provides distinct scenery from the oppressive cityscapes the show has reveled in so far. There's some recursive acknowledgement of atmospheric appreciation, as Yuta and Utsumi remark on how the omnipresent frozen Kaiju feel just like part of the background at this point, only to have a part of this episode's background actually turn into the Kaiju they fight this week!

That Kaiju is the source of plenty of its own spectacle by the end of the episode. First of all, the detail of the creature's size is incredibly clever, given this show's origins. In tokusatsu shows, most of the monsters and robots and heroes that fight have to be around the same scale, a necessity of using human actors in suits for everything. But SSSS.Gridman, being an animated production, has no such restrictions, so it can drop a truly massive Kaiju down to fight and then ask how Gridman would deal with it. It shows how the series works both when it's paying homage to its source material and also when moving past it in ways that only this production can.

So it's a bit disappointing when the answer to how Gridman would deal with the massive monster turns out to be simply “equipping a new toy and shooting it a bunch”. Don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic to see Borr finally join the fight, and there is some truly gorgeous animation bringing all this together. That theme of the crew showing off what they love drawing in this series continues to come through, with the combination scene and the Macross-esque missile barrages from both Gridman and the recurring Anti being particular highlights. From a pure spectacle angle, it's all a blast to watch, watching the animators indulge themselves as much as the audience. But narratively, it is frustrating that the question posed by the unconventional Kaiju wasn't answered in a more fulfilling way.

That seems to be the main issue holding this episode back, as it winds up being more style than substance. It feels at times like the crew was spending so much time drawing cute girls, cool monsters, and sexy robots that they neglected to move the plot or characterization forward enough for a serial story. Akane gets the lion's share of the small amount of character work this week. Combined with the care they take in animating her, it often seems like she's coming away the true focal main character of the show. It might beg the question of how she can work as an effectively detestable villain when the staff clearly love her so much. However, as the episode goes on, her standoffish nature even toward classmates who are trying to include her, her use of any chemistry she has with Yuta or Rikka simply to ply information from them, and especially her callous treatment of Anti (who clearly has his own attachment to her) all work to hammer home that she's the bad guy in spite of her appealing points.

Unfortunately, the same attention to detail doesn't seem to have been afforded any of the other characters this episode. Utsumi has been frustratingly underutilized for several episodes now, and Yuta and Rikka's potential romance is limited to some furtive glances and pining by Yuta. It threatens to cast a shadow over the show with a nigh-obligatory development carried by two characters that don't have much chemistry yet. Yuta and Rikka generally strike more sparks in their dynamic with Akane; perhaps it's in the same grand cartoon tradition that the villain just turns out more interesting than the heroes. There also just isn't much movement on the overall plot this week, limited to Akane confirming her suspicions that Yuta is Gridman in a nicely understated way, and some portents about future events are seemingly teased with an effective “What the heck is going on?” explosion at the end.

Alongside the spectacle, the other point this episode succeeds at is conveying many appreciable little details. For all the franchise's embracing of how technology enhances our everyday lives, the inconveniences of working it into an extremely analog countryside are demonstrated here. Yuta can't transform without Junk, so the Neon Genesis Junior High Students have to actually buy the computer from the shop and transport it to him. The briefest shots of them carting its components around on dollies is an understated highlight, and the Gridman Alliance all pooling their pedestrian talents to make a simple phone call was an amusing touch that showed how they worked well as a team, even as their own character development was still lacking this episode. But fun as these parts were, they still felt like simple snippets of the crew behind the show having fun, while there was no time for themes and deeper character work this week. That's hardly a bad thing once in a while, but I hope the crew behind SSSS.Gridman haven't set aside this show's potential richness just yet.

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