MY ANIME OF THE YEAR FOR 2024!

This anime original was directed by Kazuo Sakai at studio Toei based off a script by Jukki Hanada. It came out in 2024 if my subtitle didn’t give that away.

LET’S ROCK!

Girls Band Cry rocks. It’s a show that gets in your face, forcefully dragging you into it’s petty melodrama’s with deathly sincerity, it’s cast defined by big personalities and loud voices, very loud voices that are always preaching about being true to their artistic expressions whilst the pressures of conformity loom in every moment. It’s over the top, aggressive, silly yet serious and quite simply the best and brightest anime has to offer in 2024. This is not a perfect show, it’s ending doesn’t sequel-bait but sequel-necessitate and as western fans there where hoops to jump through to even watch the damn thing back when it was fresh off the presses but there is no doubt in my mind this is a special show that deserves as many eyes on it as possible, please stop reading here and just watch it now completely blind. To those who need a bit more though I will now try to do justice to easily my favourite anime of the year, lets get on with it shall we.

PART 1: LE SUBSTANCE

TROUBLES GOT A NAME, ENTER NINA ISERI

The premise is familiar to anyone who’s seen a music anime as a country girl protagonist, in this case Nina Iseri, comes to the big city to escape the suffocating nature of rural life and ends up running into another girl, welcome Momoka Kawaragi, who ends up forming a immediate bond with a shared passion music at it’s core. Except in this case Momoka isn’t just some rando but an accomplished if slightly washed out musician whose previous work isn’t just known to Nina but a core part of her own love of the artform, Momoka’s potent lyrics getting Nina through the roughest time of her life. That rough time is slowly revealed as the series goes on but one thing is immediately clear, Nina doesn’t have a single person to rely on in this world and so latches on quickly to the older Momoka. Latches on is a very good way to describe Nina as a character because she isn’t just stand out but forceful in her characterization, she’s about as competent in life as she is mature and the first thing you’ll notice about her is that she is very childish, out spoken and headstrong yet not particularly capable at anything. Nina is an annoying person by any standard, nay the MOST annoying person. Your mileage will vary on whether you can handle her extremely grating personality but just know the anime is on your side because basically every other character is left at their wits end by her presence, she’s a walking disaster in society and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Played commandingly by a than 15 year old Rina(I’m going by the VA’s band names) Nina alone can brute force any plotline or development that comes up by the sheer weight of her well everything, need a band well Nina sure wants to be part of one, oh there’s personal issues holding a character back well Nina’s not gonna let that stop them even if in the moment her immediate relationships will be strained, she’s an absolutely perfect protagonist because she holds everything together by her unstoppable force of will on top of being incredibly endearing and not lacking in her own depth. Nina is love, Nina is life.

SUBARU I LOVE YOU!

The basic plot of this series is Nina wanting in on music while Momoka’s tries to get out, their true wants may be the same but Momoka keeps hers second and operates on a cynical fear of failure by attempting to conform, both characters have baggage in their past that surfaces as they get a band together and the push and pull they have brings the absolute best out of this show. This fiery, perpetually raw central duo is aided by their three bandmates to form a quintet of irrististible quality, drumroll please welcome Subaru, Tomo, and Rupa! If there’s one thing all of us GBC fans can agree upon its that drummer Subaru Awa is our queen and we’d all die for her long may she reign. That’s one way of saying I love Subaru the most, she’s paradoxically the voice of reason in the band and it’s goofiest goober, pulling a silly face just as often as she chastises her bandmates(a.k.a Nina) for their petty issues. Unlike the others Subaru isn’t a social outcast but a privileged rich girl of famed lineage, though her increased opportunities in life are but another form of social pressure holding her back from pursuing interests of her own. Subaru’s the only member of the band with initially no foot in the game and maybe that’s why she can act so unseriously but you do get her growing into this musical life and rejecting the perfectly plotted career that her family wished upon her. She’s also really frigging cute and her VA Mirei is absolutely killer with her refined yet tart delivery of every line.

THE OTHER ODD COUPLE

The next two are a duo of their own and also the least developed of the cast so I don’t have much to say. Tomo is the youngest of the band and has her own sense of immaturity in opposition of Nina, she says too little and there’s always a sharp unwelcoming delivery to accompany the few that do pass her lips. She’s a harsh critic with no time for joking around and that bitter coldness stops most before they can even get to know her but in this band she finds a place that while not exactly her vibe does appreciate her honest opinions of their sound, in her own way helping them achieve an enhanced level of craftsmanship and polish. While she takes her sweet time warming up to the others her friend/guardian/roommate Rupa does the talking, using her charismatic extroversion to the delight of everyone around her, she’s a ray of sunshine! Rupa is the oldest of the bunch and is good at facilitating productivity in the band whilst maintaining silly big sis energy, being basically perpetually drunk. She’s of no relation to Tomo and their 6 year age gap makes you wonder how their friendship started but Rupa definitely needs the younger girl, behind that ever present cheer is a very lonely woman who has lost more than you can possibly imagine. She’s underdeveloped as a character and never gets front and centre screentime which is disappointing but eh she’s outspoken enough to always have a felt presence plus having one of the most killer comedic scenes in anime this year so eh it could’ve been worse.

LOVE THE MESS, CHERISH THE MESS

One interesting thing about this specific music anime that sets it apart from it’s peers(I’m confidently conjecturing here, my ass has seen squat and diddly) is that this isn’t a high school band show, ok so most of the cast are in/should be attending high school but Momoka and Rupa are young adults and this mix of age ranges adds a unique flavour to the group, There’s the teenage angst and boundless energy of Nina constantly clashing with the cynical world weariness of Momoka, bringing added depth to the dialogue exchanges. Nina is a ball of emotion without a shred of self control and so when real world issues come up she acts out but never with true malice, even if her words come out wrong her forward facing optimism is a necessary driver in the twisty road to making it in music. Momoka keeps her emotions in check but her defeatist outlook and fear of failure colour even her most logically sound words, giving ample room for Nina to push her own ideals onto a group that than has to contend with the naivete of them. This is one messy band to put it lightly and the times where someone isn’t beefing with another cough cough Nina and Momoka cough cough are few and fleeting. It’s pretty ridiculous how often some form of contrived melodrama makes itself known but that’s a core part of this story, it’s not happy go lucky but rocky, not afraid of showing us the cringeworthy humanity of its leads. This lends a tonal consistency to this whole thing because when your protagonist is a obnoxious brat things are never gonna go smoothly and it’s through all these in your face grating interactions that the characters big personalities shine.

HEAVY HANDED AND HILARIOUS

Those big personalities paired with the on the nose directorial choices makes for a delightfully heavy handed sense of storytelling, where a character with familial issues can be presented with literal physical walls between them or just jumping in front of a truck to prove a point(I’ll let you guess who this character is, you’re probably gonna get it right.) There’s also the boon of this easily being the funniest show of the year which make’s sense because big personality equals bigger laughs. Everyone’s exaggerated persona’s shine through most when they’re pulling a funny bit like say Nina one v oneing a random dude on the street with a lamp or Momoka versus snek(she don’t like snek) there’s so much energy and joy on-screen. On point timing paired with god tier character animation plus stupid facial expressions and you have a perfect display of anime humour that left me in stitches every episode.

FAMILIAR GROUND TO FIGHT ON

The main plotline of GBC is also a familiar one, two rival bands stand in opposition with one(ours naturally) the passionate artists putting out music with meaning while the other plays the popularity game and hogs the limelight, reaping every commercial reward imaginable. What I like about this take though is the deep ties the rivalry is built off of, we never really see the other side from an unbiased point of view so on their own they’re nothing but contextually they’re everything. Our dynamic disastrous duo of Nina and Momoka each have history with the rival band, Nina went to school with its new vocalist and if you didn’t know she’s not exactly attending education anymore despite never graduating, the bullying that went on inside scarring her and resulting in her doing everything possible to run away. That past catches up just when she’s established herself but this is Nina we’re talking about, anxiety can hold her back but it can’t contain her. Momoka has a bit more going on because that rival band was one she was a founding member of and wrote its most famous songs, only to have an ideological split when things got real leading to an actual split. Momoka never stopped loving music but her previous experience in a one in a million successful band also left its scars, causing her to always remain somewhat detached even when her new band starts making a name for itself thanks in large part to her unique lyrical skill.

THE END… NOT

Most of the show is a delightful rush to build the band, not shying away from some of its more disappointing realities and relishing opportunities for character drama within the group before they inevitably shape up and get to work, not wanting to be left in the dust by their sworn rivals. It’s a peppy plot oozing with personality and presented with just all the style but there’s just one teensy issue, the last 2 episodes aren’t very good. By its own standards that is, I liked both of these episodes and there’s tons of good moments here and there but there’s a distinct feeling of the wind being taken out of its sails. Maybe this was on purpose, it makes sense that spoiler alert getting signed would necessitate a higher degree of professionalism and our girls do shape up but that ever present big personality is left behind and everything feels a tad flatter. This isn’t helped by how quickly things start to move, it starts to feel less like us the viewers are part of the band and more like we’re just getting peeks behind the curtain here and there as they make rapid progress towards their goals. In easily the most devastating twist though is the fact that this show does not have an ending, nothing, nada. It just ends on a musical performance that isn’t even particularly significant before hard cutting to black leaving us with only a parting glance at the characters we’ve grown to cherish so dearly, it’s rude as hell but hey that’s rock so what do I know. Without a final say Girls Band Cry leaves me feeling down in the present but hopeful for a sequel that while nonexistent as of now basically needs to exist eventually, thankfully unlike Nina I’m a patient fellow.

You really do experience a rollercoaster of emotions with this series be it the plentiful genuine moments of heart or the even more liberal comedic sequences, the joyless rush of the final act or the heart rending loss that comes with a story without a end, it’s one heck of a journey that has all the best and worst feels imaginable. But we’re not judging this as a story in a vacuum here oh no, the x factor was never even there to begin with…

PART 2: LE STYLE

EVOLVING THE MEDIUM

Girls Band Cry is a great story but that aspect is no masterpiece yet you’d be forgiven for feeling that level of high when watching it simply because of the way it’s told. This shows production values and style feel revolutionary in quality because as you might’ve been able tell, this do be a 3D CGI anime and that does mean something in the current zeitgeist. Now wait before you run for the hills let me just say this, the 2D anime aesthetic has never been transformed into 3D so successfully nor has any anime used CGI’s capabilities quite as robustly as this, I use the words revolutionary very purposely because that’s what this show honestly should be.

THE TRAGEDY OF 3D IN ANIME

I don’t need to preach to you the tragedy of 3D CG in anime because you’ve experienced it for yourself, at best it’s implementation is acceptable if unwelcome and at worst it’s a distraction that threatens the very shows it’s put in. Common criticisms are poor models, janky animation and bad compositing all issues stemming from a lack of polish that understandably comes up when they’re afterthoughts in already strained production schedules. That said those issues also show that most people implementing them aren’t thinking of using the unique opportunities this tool can provide and while Studio Orange for example can make the best of them they stand alone amidst a sea of mediocre outdated 3D when the bar for 2D animation continues to get pushed. 2D animation is an expensive time consuming process tgough, every movement on screen needing to be laboriously hand drawn which paired with tight schedules makes for a medium of limited economic movement. Unlike say live action where actors can just move around whenever they want animation can only be used when necessary which in most cases means characters aren’t allowed to be naturally lively or particularly different in their physicality, they exist as inherently janky representations of humans. Hey though, if you don’t have to redraw a character every time they move than as long as your focus on smooth natural animation couldn’t you make a show with all the nuances real human physicality brings to the table.

THE REVOLUTION HAS ALREADY BEEN TELEVISED

Huh, bet you’ve never thought about that before and hey neither have I until I watched Girls Band Cry, a show that somehow marries the nuances of ever shifting body language with the expressiveness of the anime artform that I love above all else. It’s such a simple concept of having our characters always on the move in a given scene be it just 2 or the whole band of 5 but when you see it in action it begins to dawn on you that there’s a whole dimension added just by our characters swaggering about the place like any normal real person does. This show does one better by ascribing consistent traits to its cast, be it Nina’s energy showing through her buzzy comedically jerky animation to the refined gait of upper crust rich girl Subaru, I wouldn’t say it’s something always noteworthy but it is there and it’s a wonderfully immerse effect. But real life is lame so who wants to see cute anime girls act like us, no we want the over the top expressions very specific to animanga and GBC has you covered. None of those stiff faces that characterise anime quality CG, no these faces are just as malleable as their 2 dimensional counterparts in fact this show makes history by being the first anime to ever make me go why are they using 2D drawings when the 3D models look better. Yeah that was weird, especially because the 2D art that pops up here and there looks good but it’s inclusion is the janky less pretty version of this artstyle, it’s 2D models looking significantly less detailed than the 3D ones and the fact we’ve reached a point where 2D not 3D is the unwelcome cheaper looking aspect of a show is absolutely wild.

KEEPING IT REAL(AS AN ANIME)

Back on track though yeah you’ll get the full range of motion and more from these pretty faces, they go wacky, they go cutesy, they can ugly cry like the overdramatic queens everyone is, GBC without a shadow of a doubt has the best character acting animation of the year(Not that I’ve EVER seen anything on this level) and that’s what sold me on it so completely. The fact that it doesn’t just beat the stiff face hurdle but emotes with and even above the best of them means that when done right 3D anime doesn’t have to feel like a different medium entirely but just a novel way to express the same style and story we’re familiar with, the anime aesthetic is a main selling point to me and many others and with GBC‘s comprehensive translation of it into 3 dimensions it feels like a huge hurdle for this technologies acceptability has been cleared. The bouncy character acting is the main reason why I find this show so funny it should be noted, nothing gets me like a exaggerated physically impossible face and when it’s paired with  on point timing the laughs just write themselves.

MOTION CAPPING IT OFF

It’s doubly important that there’s no jankiness even when the animation is complex and fast paced and impressively this show never misses a beat, I can only imagine how much time it took to make sure every movement was natural and smooth, made even better when the animators purposely skip frames to have characters hilariously jerk in exaggerated signs of defeat or basically teleport into jumps of joy, it’s so playful and shows that they knows exactly what they can do with this style of animation to give it this flair. I’ve probably mentioned this is a music anime, maybe who knows and that’s where it being 3D really becomes a core feature because baby we get mocapped band performances! Musical instruments are pretty hard to draw already and when suddenly you have to animate someone believably playing them it becomes a feat to pull off so a lot of 2D shows do the next best thing and rotoscope it, drawing over someone’s actual playing to deliciously smooth effect. As far as my ignorant ass is concerned that’s the best way to convey realistic instrument playing in traditional animation but that can’t be easy and while motion capture technology is way more expensive and necessitates a lot of tweaking by trained technicians if Girls Band Cry is anything to go by I want more, much more! The movement is unparalleled in its many play sessions to the point that unless a face is in frame it looks completely real, in episode 11 to be specific Subaru is asked to test her drums and the next 25 seconds are probably the most realistic looking instrument playing I have ever seen in an animated series. While there’s none of the more creative effects work or shiny colours just the pure act of banging the drum and hitting the pedals looks like magic and of course the whole show just looks this good.

MUSICAL MADNESS

The big performances are where this show truly makes it’s own stylistic swing and they’re universally showstoppers, showcasing both cinema level compositing and vibrant flashing light shows that melt the mind. Director Kazuo Sakai(damn only getting a mention now) knows his way around a music anime having directed Love Live Sunshine no less and he takes the heightened CG quality here to its fullest potential, using harsh moody lighting in every sequence while whipping the camera through the performances at rocket speed on top of maintaining a visceral tempo and good focus on every member though Nina understandably hogs the spotlight. If any part of this show could be described as in your face its these sequences, they’re overwhelming spectacles of noise, colour, and never-ending movement and it feels like you’re there, like no other anime I’ve seen these performances immersive you in the chaos even when they cut away to stylized drawings and glorious impact frames. You can just feel the passion that went into crafting every one, their visual glory screams at you and make for the most exciting minutes of anime from 2024.

EDIT OUT THIS SECTION

They say good editing is invisible and as someone who never notices it I’d agree but this show flexes that aspect as a core part of its compositing, showcasing lavish backgrounds that through expert cutting become completely interactive by the cast, comedic scenes heightened by on point timing and those big musical bananza’s having their own electric yet readable style, I genuinely noticed the great editing for once and thought that hey that’s a worthy praise point, thanks Tomoki Nagasaka. The only thing I can’t compliment for the first time in my anime reviewer life is the score because honest to god I dunno if there was one, the insert songs got used in very effective manner so there was no need for a banger score anyway but it’s still funny that I the soundtrack enjoyer can’t recall a single one.

POLISHED TO A SHINE

Overall though polish is the main word of this production, it’s so overwhelmingly well put together and never cracks even as it pushes its own capabilities to the limit and that’s only thanks to the long-term schedule it had, something unfortunately most anime don’t get but something that always shows through on those that do cough cough Eupho cough cough Dandadan. This anime was treated like a big deal, heck in terms of commercial art it’s a masterstroke of self marketing because the band Togenashi Togeri isn’t just fictional, it’s a real thing that’s been dropping bangers almost a year ahead of the shows air date and while I never listened to them at the time it did keep the brand in my mind, building hype for the actual show. Heck the band is the same across mediums because the real singers voice the character’s too and are like really frigging good, Rina should be a voice actor full stop because she’s got a crazy unique energy to her Nina role and absolutely owns that character as does Mirei(Subaru), Yuuri(Momoka), Shuri(Rupa) and Natsu as Tomo, favoured in that order.

MISSING OUT ON THE FUN

Of course the god tier marketing starts and ends in Japan because infamously GBC was not licensed in the West as it aired which resulted in me watching and enjoying Jellyfish can’t Swim in the Night instead. While available now Girls Band Cry wasn’t exactly easy to watch as it aired and that’s really its main flaw, we all wanted to watch it but Toei shot themselves in the foot at the last minute and relegated it to hidden gem over here with only initially dubious fansubs to its name. But this show shouldn’t just be seen as some niche hidden gem like say Heike Monogatari but the overwhelming artistic mastercraft that it is, this anime puts to bed any grievances I could have about the future of 3D CG anime by showing what those series can look like with they’re treated with care and flair. Studio Orange has been basically alone in pushing this craft with titles like Land of the Lustrous and Trigun Stampede being of exceptional production quality but now they have an equal, a better even in Toei and I pray I’ve seen nothing yet, as a 2D fan first and foremost even I say bring on more 3D anime.

TIS THE END!

Girls Band Cry is a riot, there’s a youthful energy to its plotting and a genuine angst to its characters that make it always in your face and deafening but that fits, it’s rock down to its very bones. You’ll love the cast and their quirks that give rise to the ample comedic and dramatic beats, no matter how over the top it gets you’ll be on it’s side because it’s never presented itself as anything but heavy handed. You’ll probably be let down by a not up to standard ending too but that’s part of the journey, a cost to all the joy this show will assuredly bring you. It’s messy, it’s beautiful, it’s painful, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before and stands tall amidst its peers, asserting itself as the new queen of its genre. GBC will also make you a believer in 3D anime through its thunderous success in transferring the anime aesthetic to that dimension and if not than I genuinely don’t think anything could, this is THE most impressive anime production of the year and an absolute must watch because of it. Most importantly though it’s the only anime with Subaru Awa in it and y’all should be running off to bare witness to her glory, long may she and Togenashi Togeri reign!

FINAL RATING: 9/10

Girls Band Cry can currently be streamed on Crunchyroll thank god, took them long enough.