First Look: Spring 2024 Anime Overview: Train to the End of the World, Tonari No Yokai-san, Girls Band Cry and Jellyfist Can't Swim in the Night (Patreon)

Who knows if poor Whisper Me a Love Song (a cute yuri anime about a girl band with dire animation conditions currently stuck on episode 10 with the last two delayed indefinitely) is ever going to finish, but here’s some quick reviews of the rest.

 Delicious in Dungeon continued to kill it with the second half of the season, kicking into high gear and introducing cranky catgirls, but you can see my general thoughts on the show here.

Train to the End of the World

I love bizarre anime, especially bizarre anime starring loveable weird girls, and Train absolutely delivers.

 A teenage girl named Yoka is bullied by a slimy businessman into pushing a button that activates the 7G celluar network across Japan, but said network warps and changes Japan completely, having bizarre effects on the citizens. For example, all adults in Yoka's hometown have been transformed into animals and are starting to act like animals.

Shizuru is Yoka's best friend, and she said some seriously nasty things to Yoka before her friend left town. Yoka's been missing ever since the 7G incident and Shizuru is desperate to find her and apologize. So when she sees a picture of Yoka in Ikebukuro, she decides drive a train to find her, and her friends Reimi, Akira, Nadeshiko, and also her dog come along. As they travel across the warped Japan, they face many weird encounters and obstacles.

Train to the End of the World is endlessly entertaining, as we see the girls encounter nihiists with mushrooms growing out of their heads, screaming goats that ram into the train, liliputian people and even zombies on their journey. The dialogue is snappy, and the girls all have a fun dynamic and colorful personalities. As a lover of girls doing silly violence, I also adored how everyone besides Akira (who is the smart one) has ridiculous combat skills too, with Shizuru having her own form of martial art, Reimi being physically unstoppable when she's mad, and Nadeshiko, who might come off as the ladylike bow and error wielder...but actually she also can beat the shit out of people with said bow as a blunt object. It's fun to watch them go wild.

An example of how ridiculous the show can get is the encounter with the zombies--the absolutely bizarre logic is that since zombies are supposed to be dead to all sensation, arousal will make them blow up. Instead of the girls acting sexy to arouse them like most anime would do, they just say dirty words, and Akira recites a whole paragraph from Lady Chatterly's Lover that she apparently memorized, and they sing a hilariously bawdy folk song. This episode DOES contain the show's biggest moment of sexualizing teenage girls though- a hyper detailed panty shot that was super jarring considering the show avoided fanservice before then.

And the next episode had Nadeshiko made to don a somewhat skimpy outfit. Those are the only two instances of fanservice, but that episode also had a joke where this character in this children's cartoon come to life's entire gimmick was that she was suicidal. It was probably meant to be "lol look how inappropriate this would be for children" but it still felt fairly mean spirited.

Despite those hiccups to watch out for, the anime works because it never forgets it's core them or friendship--the relationships between the girls are developed at a good pace, and Shizuru's guilt over what she did to Yoka is explored well too. It's not just a ridiculous anime, it has a heart too. So if an anime where a girl punches a bear in the face and another girl turns someone into a delicious sweet appeals to you...check it out!

Tonari No Yokai san

Tonari no Yokai-san takes place in a world where yokai have integrated into human society. The central characters are Buchio, a cat who became a nekomata after living to twenty, and Jiro, a crow tengu who is close friends with a little girl he calls Mu-chan.

This is a very sweet, gentle series that has some heartwrenching and dark undertones occasionally.  Mu’s father has been lost to an eerie void, and a lot of the stories focus on grief. The immediate comparison tone and contentwise is Natsume’s Book of Friends, but it distinguishes itself by presenting a world where yokai are very much part of society, to the point where they have to do paperwork  and pay taxes. (There's also a confirmation that one character is bisexual when his backstory involves dating a guy yokai, so that nice.) There’s also some sci-fi elements mixed in with alternate timelines and what not. I think these elements could be integrated more smoothly, but they are pretty novel. It’s a really solid series.

I do love stories about yokai and I thought it was enjoyable and touching, but it didn’t rock my world the way I wanted it to…it might be that it followed too many characters at once so I couldn’t dig into any of them the way I really wanted to. Still, it’s a sweet, tender and pleasant watch, I definitely rec it.

Girls Band Cry

GBC was definitely my favorite of the season (unless you count the second half of Delicious in Dungeon ofc)…and, for some reason, it wasn’t picked up for streaming. It’s one of the many Girl Band Stories that came out this season, but it was the best one. The characters were messy in a way I loved, especially the main character Nina, who’s a complete disaster, angry and loud and sometimes annoying, but so completely real to my experience as a teenage girl who was bullied.

Nina was bullied badly in school, and she’s a high school dropout as a result. Her favorite band helped her get through everything and stand her ground, “saved” her when she was on the verge of giving up on life completely. So when she sees that her fave singer Momoka ended up leaving her band Diamond Dust after the band went in a more commercial direction, the two of them decide to start their own band. Nina is ready to get back at all the people who looked down at them, but Momoka has more complicated feelings about her former bandmates.

Nina being powered by spite—and the series valuing that stubbornness, spite and anger—is what made the series stand out for me, especially because the series just let her be extremely obnoxious sometimes without worrying about her “likeability”,--it made her feel ‘real’ and kind of refreshing. This is a series that starts out with girls going around flipping off people multiple times. The dynamic of the whole band, despite them constantly butting heads, is entertaining. All the characters have rough edges and broken pieces, but they end up fitting together.

The dialogue is fun, the music rocks, the cgi animation is actually super good and expressive. The fact the girls they chose are new to voice acting actually led to some offbeat performances I really liked—the fact it wasn’t as polished as other voice acting fit the characters and honestly made them feel a little more authentic.

The pacing does drag somewhat in the middle, but the climax is explosive and exhilarating. It’s also kind of gay, but in the form of a love confession that’s never really followed up on, (probably so they can have wiggle room to be like ‘how ambiguous was it platonic or romantic maybe she meant she loves ~her music~’) so I don’t count that. But at least it’s not followed up by any characters seemingly conveniently forgetting what happened while they crush on guys (coughs in Sound Euphonium) because the only man on the show of any significance is Nina’s father.

Wholeheartedly recommend the show though, I love these charming disaster girls playing rock songs that slap, finding socially acceptable ways to flip people off, and kicking doors so hard they break them.

The Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night

Speaking of gay girl band stuff where romantic tension is never followed up on! I binged Jellyfish while I was sick so I guess it counts. It wasn’t nearly as strong as Girls Band Cry but it had stuff going for it!

The premise of this girl band show is that Kano, a former idol who left her career behind after a scandal where she punched another member of her group, runs into Mahiru, a former artist who stopped drawing after a disheartening experience with a jellyfish mural she created. But it turns out Kano loved that mural, and she wants Mahiru to be official artist for the anonymous internet musician persona, JELEE. JELEE picks up other members along the way, including hikikomori VTuber Kuiu/Nox Ryugasaki and fangirl pianist Kimura.

Jellyfish had a lot going for it. It wanted to explore the competitive idol industry ruining girls’ lives, abusive parents pressuring their children into becoming extensions of themselves, the budding romance between Kano and Mahiru, the struggle of being trans in a society that forces one into a rigid role and objectifies those it perceives as women, and struggles of remaining creative when often faced with negative feedback.

And uh.... It pretty much fumbled everything but the last two. Granted, it fumbles in a fairly gentle way, but still. The writing of the show was often uneven, it could be really good one second, and rushed and forced the next second.

The idol and abusive parents subplots were most egregious—we had the usual plot where said parent doing one act of kindness redeems them and things never have to get messy, and the idol plot seemed like it was going somewhere in critiquing how the industry fosters competitiveness and comes down way too hard on its idols for minor misdemeanors or things that shouldn’t be an issue at all, like dating. But then it just kind of ended with a “well internet harassment and destroying lives is bad, but like, we’re all troubled, aren’t we”

The plot between Kano and Mahiru…basically there was a kiss of the cheek, blushing and touching of lips afterwards, some flirting  “what was thaaat all about” and then a big nothingburger of a finale. But hey, Kano does have a gay pride and trans pride patches on her bag, so there’s that.

Kuiu/Ryugasaki (they seem to still use their original name even at the end but also use another name, so that’s what I’m going with) is great, and pretty much the reason I’d recommend the show. They’re as blatantly nonbinary as can be without actually saying the word (though genderfluid or bigender is also a possibility. I guess definitely trans in some way would be the way to put it). They’re also very fun with their over-the-top superhero fantasies, and it’s interesting how the show explores them using their VTuber persona to be comfortable with themself and present themself in the way they want. There are a lot of really moving moments with them, including them shutting down some transphobic bullies (and I mean blantantly transphobic, basically calling them a trans trender and everything). And their friend refers to them as “a girl and a boy” at one point.

So yeah, it’s a very uneven show that fumbles some things, but I’d say it’s on the whole positive, mostly thanks to Kuiu/Ryugasaki! I’d recommend it for the moments it hits, because in those moments it REALLY hits.