Summer 2019 – Virtually Every First Episode Retrospective
I’m pretty excited about this season, you guys. By the end of spring, my active anime roster had diminished to basically just JoJo, leaving me wondering whether it was a genuinely weak anime season, or that I had simply lost my capacity for joy. But based on this summer’s fantastic slate of premieres, the problem definitely wasn’t me. Screw you, spring! How dare you make me doubt my sunny disposition!
Anyway. The spring season’s crimes aside, this past week has offered a satisfying array of anime premieres in a wide variety of genres, leaving me with much to watch and much else to recommend. Big shonen titles like Fire Force and Dr. Stone had premieres ranging from solid to transcendent, while high-profile adaptations like Vinland Saga and O Maidens have deftly captured the strengths of their source material. From idol shows to space adventures to cop dramas and beyond, the summer season is brimming with worthy anime – and having marathoned my way through nearly all of them, I’m eager to pass my findings on to you. My work on Anime News Network’s preview guide means I’ve already written extended reviews of basically everything, and it’s time at last to condense those reams of text into a highly reductive and hopefully informative breakdown, starting with the season’s most brightly glimmering gems, and running down to its most odorous piles of garbage. Let’s get to it!
Tier One: The Seasonal All-Stars, the Proud and Glorious Few
Vinland Saga was both one of my most highly anticipated titles coming into this season, and also the one I had the most concerns about in terms of its adaptation. Makoto Yukimura’s original manga is a poignant and intricately detailed masterpiece, combining the fiery sociopolitical themes of his earlier Planetes with a narrative that brutally conveys the horrors of war. As Attack on Titan’s 3D action director, I didn’t have all that much confidence that Shuuhei Yabuta could capture either the beauty or the solemnity of this story – and indeed, the extended action scene that opens this premiere, while impressive in a technical sense, is both awkwardly reliant on CG movement, and also out of step tonally with the actual message of the manga.
Fortunately, once that action scene is passed, Vinland Saga blooms into an urgent meditation on the senselessness of war and the tragedy of man, carrying over all the poignancy and tragedy of Yukimura’s work. Detailed background designs, expressive character acting, and a smartly understated soundtrack set the stage for thoughtful reflections on the cyclical nature of human violence, ideas given human texture through this story’s rich and sympathetic cast. Vinland Saga is thoughtfully written, thematically rich, and confidently executed. Don’t miss this terrific production.
Fire Force is one of this season’s more lopsided productions, though its highs are so high that it still earns a place near the top of my list. In terms of its narrative, Fire Force is pretty much your standard shonen adventure, presenting a world full of fiery “Infernal” monsters and the heroes that fight them. But in terms of execution – holy shit.
Fire Force is directed by Yuki Yase, a highly talented ex-SHAFT director, and this premiere demonstrated both the purposeful creativity of Yase’s vision, as well as the profound strength of this production’s absurd animation talent. Scene after scene is elevated through evocative layouts, clever color work, and utterly gorgeous animation, each scene bringing both the terrible beauty of fire and the thundering powers of these heroes to life. Yase’s passion for visual experimentation fuses brilliantly with the quirks of his talented animators, resulting in a thrilling visual feast from start to finish. If you’re looking for well-executed action, Fire Force is undoubtedly this season’s most visually impressive production.
O Maidens in Your Savage Season
At last, we arrive at a top prospect that comes with no caveats whatsoever. O Maidens is based on a manga by Mari Okada, whose talent for illustrating the messy intricacies of youthful emotions (Anohana, Toradora, Anthem of the Heart, etc) has made her one of the few widely recognized anime writers. I expected O Maidens to be Utterly Unfiltered Okada Madness, and Utterly Unfiltered Okada Madness is what I got. O Maidens focuses on a group of five girls in a high school literature club, and opens with all of them cringing their way through a steamy sex scene during their regular literature readings. From there, O Maidens explores how each of these girls grapples with the preeminence of sex in their teenage lives, and how their perceptions of themselves must adjust to deal with this newly horny reality. O Maidens is incredibly frank, highly sympathetic, and goddamn hilarious – the show clearly has great fondness for its central cast, but is also not above giggling at its heroine after she catches her childhood friend in the throes of autoerotic passion. In terms of character dramas, O Maidens is absolutely this season’s crown jewel.
Tier Two: The Genre Heavyweights, Stellar Examples of Their Form
Based on a well-regarded five volume manga and adapted by the distinctive Masaomi Andou, Astra’s premiere offered an engaging and altogether well-executed scifi adventure. The show’s double-length premiere gives it the time necessary to build up its cast of young and unsuspecting astronauts, before flinging them a thousand light years away and telling them to figure out how to get home. Astra seems to simultaneously embrace two poles of science fiction storytelling – the grounded, tense drama of hard scifi, and the starry-eyed wonder of old-fashioned adventure serials. Andou’s sturdy direction and Astra’s fundamentally propulsive narrative make for a very entertaining ride.
Masaharu Watanabe made a serious mark directing 2016’s Re:Zero, and Granbelm sees him bringing his keen eye for action choreography and obvious love of the color purple to a story that combines mecha and magical girls to dazzling effect. This premiere offered the best non-Fire Force action of the season, along with some generally distinctive art design and a premise ripe for more explosive drama. I felt this premiere was a little heavy on exposition and a little light on characterization, but otherwise greatly enjoyed my time watching girls slam giant robots into each other.
Based on a story by Shoji Gatoh, the writer of Full Metal Panic!, Cop Craft offers one more example of that classic “cop meets sword maiden” narrative, as grizzled officer Kei Matoba is forced to team up with Knight of Mirvor Tilarna Exedilica, in order to track down an abducted fairy in a fantasy-slash-80s-film world. Gatoh’s excellent script swiftly builds a strong dynamic between these two leads, and talented director Shin Itagaki ably evokes the sights and sounds of a hard-boiled buddy cop film. I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I enjoyed this one.
Dr. Stone stands as this season’s second high-profile shonen adaptation, and though it doesn’t come close to matching Fire Force’s visual strengths, it makes up for that by actually feeling like a story worth adapting. Dr. Stone is essentially “shonen science world,” as its post-apocalyptic premise forces its heroes to reinvent human society. This premiere fell somewhere between a charmingly upbeat shonen training arc and a satisfying game of Minecraft, with a story more than engaging enough to make up for its relatively plain visual execution. I genuinely want to see where this narrative goes, and for Nick “plot is details” Creamer, that’s actually saying something.
Tier Three: The Mid-Tier Mob, Fair Offerings for Genre Enthusiasts
How Heavy Are the Dumbbells You Lift?
Dumbbells is some intensely stupid nonsense, and I love it for it. I knew this show would be the gag comedy wild card coming into this season, and this premiere more than followed through on the promise of its muscle-bound previews, offering plentiful silly expressions and lots of preposterously buff dudes. The show occasionally tripped into overexplaining its jokes, and there’s not really anything here beyond the silly gags, but if you’re looking for some absurd visual comedy, Dumbbells is the pick.
As that unwieldy title indicates, Re:Stage! is this season’s requisite idol drama, and it’s actually a pretty good one! The show combines the gentle appeal of a slice of life club show with the dramatic momentum of a tournament-minded idol drama, with each of these two halves complimenting and elevating the other. Re:Stage! likely won’t convert any idol naysayers, but it’s a perfectly reasonable example of the form.
Kochoki is Yet Another Nobunaga Show, but it too is a pretty good one, with this episode’s tightly written story of Nobunaga’s early days offering both punchy drama and a convincing demonstration of Nobunaga’s courage and wit. This season’s too stacked to really recommend it unless you’re on the hunt for a historical drama, but this was a fine premiere on the whole.
Lord El Melloi II’s blah blah blah blah
Continuing the Fate tradition of preposterously overwritten titles, Lord El Melloi II’s Grand Zeppelin Electric Boogaloo follows up on Waver Velvet’s adventures in the wake of Fate/Zero, as he solves mysteries or maybe crimes with a team of merry mage associates. If you liked Waver and want more of him, this seems like a pretty decent show on the whole.
Tier Four: The Not Technically Terrible Seasonal Dregs
to the abandoned Sacred Beasts
To the abandoned Sacred Beasts clocks in as this season’s requisite self-serious action drama, combining a vaguely American civil war-reminiscent setting with MEN THAT TRANSFORM INTO GIANT SNAAAKES. If that whole sentence sounds appealing to you, caps and all, give it a shot.
If It’s For My Daughter, I’d Even Defeat the Demon Lord
If It’s For My Daughter stands as a significantly lesser entry in the dad plus daughter slice of life subgenre, and is basically just pleasantly bland in all respects. The characters are pleasantly bland, the worldbuilding is pleasantly bland, even the art direction is pleasantly bland. This show is the buttered toast of anime.
Ensemble Stars bears all the narrative burdens of media mix mobage adaptations, from its convoluted premise to its too-large cast, but is at least willing to differentiate itself through charmingly nonsensical beats like an “idol battle” where one guy does flying kicks as another attempts to beat him with a guitar. Ineptitude is a given at this tier, but I always welcome novelty.
Tier Five: Certainly Bad, but Not Actively Painful
Magical Sempai is low-rent Dagashi Kashi, trading Dagashi’s focus on candy with a focus on magic tricks, and Dagashi’s strong atmosphere and likable cast for… well, basically nothing. Crotch shots, I guess.
I can’t think of any way to write this blurb that doesn’t begin with “speaking of crotch shots,” and I don’t want to finish any sentence that begins with that, so you’ll just have to figure this one out for yourselves.
The Ones Within offers one of the most terrifying premises of the season, as its “let’s player survival game” conceit implies I might soon be suffering through an entire wave of anime that ask me to actually care about youtubers. Also the show is bad.
Tier Six: Rightful Punishment for our Anime Crimes
Demon Lord, Retry! emphatically demonstrates that being pleasantly bland is perhaps not such a bad thing, as its own take on the dad plus daughter genre involves both hilariously inept visual design and a whole bunch of tedious isekai worldbuilding. We’re almost through, I swear.
Create two wooden stick figures, attach balloons to the chest of one of them, and bang them together. Congratulations, you have created a romcom with more personality and character chemistry than the entirety of Hensuki.
Arifutera stands as a firm affirmation of the Buddhist cycle of reincarnation, as no just or caring god could ever have allowed for the existence of modern isekai, and shows like Arifutera can only mean I am being forced to pay off some profound karmic debt.
And I’m done! With that, we’ve run through everything I’ve caught so far, hopefully leaving you all with at least one or two new shows to check out. As I said, this is looking to be quite the season – I’m planning to at least check out the second episodes of everything in my first two tiers, and I think basically everything through the fourth tier is worth watching for the right audience. I wish you all luck in finding some new cartoons to enjoy, and am looking forward to sharing my variably heated takes with you all!
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