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Mar 26, 2025
Consistently well-paced and clever enough in its treatment of the basic problems of adolescence, of the way in which maturity limits what one can be, of compromise in love, and of the conflict between personal weakness and the necessity of pride and integrity in a life where one's agency can't be relied upon to provide certain outcomes, that one is willing to forgive the fact that it's (qualified) apologia for the kamikaze and makes hard oneeloli a fundamental part of the plot. Are the interstitial slides canonical, did they actually do it?
Kind of stunned at how well-developed each of the characters was this time around,
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considering the absolutely massive ensemble cast. By necessity, the main couple feels a bit less distinct from the group in terms of screen time from the rest of them as one would expect, but this is thematically appropriate; they're less important in and of themselves than they are in what they mean to other people. They're a source of joy and memory and comfort, all of which the series regards as necessary for the maintenance of ordinary life. Where so much anime about maturity is about the casting off of sentimentality, the Gainax-y insistence that one put away childish things, Simoun is grounded in the idea that no adult life is possible in its absence, that the basic tragedy of living in a limited world is something people must work to manage daily. Being a himejoshi is a kind of religious practice.
The series also serves as proof that strong character designs and art direction can compensate for a series done on almost no budget. The highly static, simple and reused watercolor backgrounds clash with the early-digipaint character animation and the minimally shaded polygonal CG; each of them, though, is charming enough in its own right to make up for it. The voice cast is quite good as well, with some real outsider seiyuus here and there playing roles that aren't totally archetypal.
It's a show in which the fundamental gimmick of magic skytrails is so underexplored that we never see them do anything but cause a big explosion with them, and that it works as well as it does in spite of this is the highest compliment I can give. It's also perhaps the only anime that will ever feature multiple, plausible designs of older transgender men.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Mar 15, 2025
It's testimony to the fact that good art can come about from a lot of mediocre elements; the series isn't successful because it's well-written or tightly plotted, or because it deals with any ideas that hadn't been done to death in anime and visual novels for at least a decade before its release. In spite of this, though, it knows how to pace itself; the first three episodes form a compelling arc of their own that does a lot to hook viewers through the duller and more conventional beats to come. The show is, here and elsewhere, selectively underwritten; it's easier to read Mami as
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a complex character when it's not made clear that she's purposefully dooming Madoka to secure her company.
Where that lack of specificity, the evocative broad-strokes portraits of characters that let the viewer fill in the gaps herself, really shines is in the last three episodes of the series. Madoka Magica would've been consigned to the seasonal anime memory hole long ago in their absence; I can say without exaggeration that the show is MadoHomu and MadoHomu is the show. It's an aspect of the show that relies on a lot of the series' best qualities: good voice performances, in particular that of Yuki Aoi, supported by really expressive character animation, and aokiume's strongest character designs, which themselves account for so much of why these two have been fanart staples for more than a decade now.
The quality that really distinguishes them from the usual shonen-seinen yuribait couple, though, is the recognition that making these characters too individual, too grounded in the premise of the show or the details of their own lives, would only limit their appeal. We don't actually see much of what a relationship between these two would look like. Homura's backstory is all compressed to a twenty-minute sequence mostly focused on high intensity scenes of loss and need. What's shown in its place is a volume and depth of feeling, a more abstract sense of the purity and emotion that forms its foundation. Anything else can be filled in, and people eagerly do; spend ten minutes on the Pixiv tag and you'll see fluffy, idealized young love alongside the agony of unrequited adolescent pining, alongside Homura consigning herself to a life apart from her and the world, and the two of them as young mothers, and Homura as Madoka's captor. All of these are basically supported by the show, and this goes a long way to explaining its afterlife as a lesbian cult series despite its demographic target.
In a less fannish sense, though, the best part of the show is Junko and Madoka's relationship. It's so rare in this medium to see familial relationships not built on the performance of a role. Junko's doing her best to communicate with a girl in a very alien position, and Madoka's doing her best to convey what she's experiencing in her own limited capacity. Junko's the model that Madoka's following in becoming an adult, in taking on a role in which she's relied upon by others, but there's only so much guidance she can give her, and they both feel that limitation acutely. All the best individual scenes in the show are between them, those which have the most purpose without being didactic, and ending the show on a scene between Junko and Homura's probably the best call it could've made.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Jan 3, 2025
A lot higher energy and more varied than one would expect; what looks like a kind of bland fanservicey seasonal-yuri of another era is in fact a disjointed, rich, highly individual piece that often feels like three different shows stitched together. It's never exactly substantial, and its characters are neither consistent nor complex, but there's never a wasted moment, the cast is consistently charming, the drama is high and the show is shocking frank and yet not leering in the way it represents sex. Ultimately works as a kind of cocktail of every yuri trope which yet existed in the genre's early-aughts infancy, composed in
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a spirit of fun in which it's constantly asking the audience to share.
I think Tamao should've been allowed to kill someone after that ending, though.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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Nov 14, 2024
In the introduction to Piero Camporesi's The Juice of Life, Umberto Eco talks about the kind of disgust elicited by the carnal morbidity of the former author's scholarship on the medieval conception of the body; he compares binging on Camporesi to swimming in a pool full of human waste, or a pool full of cake batter, both of which, after a time, would be equally repulsive. If Happy Sugar Life has any unique contribution as a piece of media, it's in the way it can elicit that latter kind of disgust, of being overwhelmed to the point of nausea by something cloyingly sweet.
Approaching the show
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as a standalone piece, the criticism comes pretty easily. It takes the now-trite image from Nabokov of the solipsistic pedophile constructing a fantasy which does immeasurable harm when it intersects with the real world and applies the least challenging anime plot formula to it: the main character encounters rival solipsistic pedophiles and battles against them to keep her status quo. There's no real attempt at character exploration, no psychology, no engagement with the idea it implicitly raises that categories of sex object and objectifier are porous. It's pure exploitation, and the best one can say for it on that front is that the appeal is largely in the exaggerated menhera personalities of the cast and not really in vicarious access to the younger of the two principal characters.
As an adaptation of a preexisting manga, though, I can't think of any better approach to doing Happy Sugar Life. There's a focus on keeping things light and fast-moving, on maintaining a tone of high-energy absurdity. It's pop where it could have been overwrought, and my only really complaint is that it doesn't go quite pop enough, isn't that free of an adaptation, when it really could've supported something along the tonal lines of Re: Cutie Honey or Gainax's other work of that era.
The best way to experience Happy Sugar Life, though, isn't really watching the show or reading the manga, it's watching the OP: pretty much everything you might get out of the full package is there. Bringing a cheeky mug to the office that says "This Anime Could've Been a Vocaloid MV".
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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Nov 14, 2024
Must be watched dubbed. The most manic, tonally-confused show I've ever seen. Perfect pacing, not a moment of wasted time, simultaneously hits every conventional anime narrative beat and yet manages to feel wholly unique. Proceeds less like a plot than a series of thematically-linked ideas, every scene and character that might have occurred to writers is worked in. I spent most of the show in disbelief that the main couple was, in fact, the main couple: they're such an intense aesthetic mismatch and no clear motivation for their feelings beyond Yuki Ice-T's offer of gratitude-sex. Oh, to have been the fly on the wall when
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they told the AKB48 idol that she'd play a character throwing herself at a reticent butch supersoldier who wields both a gunblade and a six-foot railgun, to the annoyance of her yandere goth sister who graphically beats her.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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