Let's Go! Anime in 2023

Welcome to ANIWIRE! Today we're running down the highlights of 2023 before moving on to whatever 2024 might bring. Before that, though, here's the news from the past week.

News

• “Steamboat Willie” is now in the public domain. Next time on Super Smash Bros...?
• Quanticat of indie manga publisher Glacier Bay Books has been uploading individual stories from their back catalog to Twitter for fans to read. Here’s a favorite of mine, “Wolf of the Woods” from Kusahara’s story collection Mothers.
• Trigger put out a great new piece of art by director Akira Amemiya teasing the new anime adaptation of Delicious in Dungeon (with a cameo by Dynazenon.) Just a few more days…
• A teaser was released for the third season of Sound! Euphonium, Kyoto Animation’s beloved series about band kids. If you haven’t seen this show, definitely check out the first season at least. Then watch the beautiful but very odd film Liz and the Blue Bird.
• A second trailer was released for the upcoming anime adaptation of Witch on the Holy Night. If you’re curious, the source material was recently made available for purchase in English on Steam.

Bookmarks

• Full Frontal and Matteo Wattzky published a blockbuster interview with the animation director of The Boy and the Heron, Takeshi Honda.
• Games composer Lena Raine did a big list of her favorite game soundtracks of the year over on Cohost. Good stuff as usual.
• For Sakugablog, Kevin Cirugeda wrote about Overtake! represents a culmination of the anime studio Troyca’s output over the past decade.
• Games studio NOVECT (of The House of Fata Morgana fame) published an update about the past, present and future of the company.
• Indie Tsushin interviewed Giichi Totsuka of the doujin circle qbert regarding their past critical and archival work, as well as about their upcoming game Retro Game Aliens.
• Daniel Dockery wrote about 2023, The Year of One Piece.

AMV of the Week

Here’s “Information High” by maboroshi studio.

It’s the start of the new year! In that spirit, here’s a list of memorable moments from last year. Where has anime been? Where is it going? We're about to find out together.

Skip and Loafer

Skip and Loafer’s ninth episode begins with a trip to the airport. The heroine Mitsumi wakes up early, dresses in silence, then rides the train by herself. The airport is sterile. On the plane, the sound of the jet engines drowns out the voices of the passengers chatting next to her. Mitsumi is adrift between the bustle of the city and the quiet of the country. She can only anticipate the future. When she arrives home the opening credits play. Mitsumi has crossed an important boundary, but she can’t put it in words.

Later, a frazzled Mitsumi wakes at her parent’s house and eats a bowl of watermelon for breakfast. The “camera” drifts from shot to shot: a tinkling wind chime, power lines, a tanuki statue. Meanwhile, cicadas cry and birds chirp. Mitsumi goes crunch, crunch, crunch. It’s a mirage of summer conjured through sheer sensory overload, and it works no matter the weather or season.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End isn’t necessarily an action series, but there’s an action beat in the otherwise frustrating “demon arc” that’s one of my favorites from the year. As apprentice magician Fern battles the demon Lugner in the towers above, the warrior Stark faces Linie and her arsenal on the ground. The camera zooms out, and the viewer understands intuitively that these fights are not just happening at the same time–they occupy the same space, and the duelists below can see the lights in the sky above. Evan Call’s music stitches the sequence together without missing a beat. It’s an unbelievably decadent moment that could only work in a meticulous show like this.

Overtake!

The heaviest emotional beat in Overtake! has nothing to do with sports. In fact, cameraman Kouya Madoka is drawn to sports precisely because it’s far removed from the incident that scarred him for life. But this is a story where everybody has to face their demons eventually. So Kouya, together with his young friend Haruka, returns to the small town in the Tohoku region where he once witnessed a young girl die in the 2011 earthquake. He reunites with the girl’s dying grandfather, who shows him a picture of the three of them together. Kouya and Haruka return to Oyama after the funeral. The story continues.

Overtake! was a story about a sports community: the small-town racers, journalists, restaurateurs and hangers-on surrounding Fuji Speedway. It makes perfect sense, then, that another community was always there in the shadows. We only spend an episode in this small town in Tohoku. Even so, I imagine that these folks had at least 12 episodes of drama to call their own, which Kouya and Haruka only caught a glimpse of. There’s more going on in the world than just racing, after all.

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

Scott Pilgrim is missing, so his high school student girlfriend Knives goes to hang out with Scott’s ex Kim Pine. Kim offers to jam with Knives, but she’s uncertain. After all, she’s never played bass before. “How do I know which notes to play?” she asks. “It’s up to you,” Kim says. “That’s why they call it play.” Knives strums, Kim hits the drums. The world around them dissolves until it’s just bass, drums, stars, notes, a single beating heart connecting two souls.

In the original graphic novel, the main connection between Knives and Kim was a one-off gag where Scott found them kissing after getting drunk. Here, though, we see them build a connection that likely never happened in the comic. The colors and music rocket this sequence into the stratosphere. It’s a perfect fit for the third episode of the series, which establishes definitively just what kind of story Scott Pilgrim Takes Off will be.

The First Slam Dunk

Near the end of The First Slam Dunk, time slows down for just a moment as color drains from the screen. We are there with Ryota Miyagi for just a moment at the climax of the game. Then the world comes to life once again, and we plunge headlong towards the final point. Original comics artist Takehiko Inoue called this shot in the source material, where he similarly stretched out the final moments of the game across pages and pages. Now, as the director of the film adaptation, he and his crew brought the story home. It’s just one example of how The First Slam Dunk rewards long-time fans even as it takes big risks with the adaptation.

The Boy and the Heron

My favorite scene in The Boy and the Heron is also the one I find the most bewildering. Mahito is led by the fire-girl Himi deep into the tower where his step-mother Natsuko is kept. They find her in the birthing chamber, a bedroom shrouded in paper charms. Mahito begs Natsuko to come with him. Natsuko, who until this scene has only ever been kind to Mahito, flies into a rage. She even tells him that she hates him. Flying paper nearly chokes Mahito to death as he calls Natsuko his mother for the first time. 

Why does Natsuko suddenly hate Mahito? Did she choose to come to the spirit world, or was she possessed? Are we seeing a manifestation of Mahito’s fears or the cold reality he’s unwilling to face? I love The Boy and the Heron because it challenges the audience to come to their own conclusions. The qualities that make it incoherent are also, for me, what make it so difficult to shake.

Heavenly Delusion

My local anime club had no idea what they were in for with Heavenly Delusion.  “Of course that boy wasn’t injured when he fell off a balcony,” they said. “It’s anime!” Watching the show set up their expectations and then knock them down over and over was a revelation. It’s tough enough to tell an effective mystery story. The Heavenly Delusion adaptation faced an even greater challenge in compressing several volumes of manga into just 13 episodes. Yet it delivers a roughly equivalent experience to the manga, even as it tweaks countless small details.

Returning to the series also meant being caught off guard when Kiriko’s backstory (it’s complicated) was introduced in just the third episode. Would I have preferred that the anime take more time with Kiriko and Maru before descending into that whole mess? Yes. But I think the series otherwise does justice to Kiriko’s wild origin story. While my friends all had questions after watching the first three episodes, they also wanted to watch the rest of the series immediately so they could find out what happened next. 

BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!!

The seventh episode of BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! features two full-length songs performed live by the band CRYCHIC. The first begins as a trainwreck. The musicians make multiple false starts, their lead singer whispers the lyrics because she’s nervous, and the audience trickles out the door. It’s embarrassing. But CRYCHIC pulls it together, and they just about salvage the song by the end of the performance. Then they play their next song, “Haruhikage,” and they blow the roof off the auditorium.

This by itself is a great moment, even if Bocchi the Rock pulled a similar trick just a year ago. This is MyGO!!!!! we’re talking about, though, so the real action takes place off the stage. Who should be standing in the audience but former CRYCHIC member Sakiko? As she shakes with rage that CRYCHIC might perform “Haruhikage” without her, band member Soyo mourns on stage. Sakiko runs from the concert hall and dials her friend’s number. “I want to forget everything,” she says. CRYCHIC’s music isn’t half bad, but it’s the whirlwind teenage drama that makes MyGO!!!!! go.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury

The Witch From Mercury ends with its heroines Suletta and Miorine wearing engagement rings and living together with Suletta’s AI sister. You don’t see them kiss or exchange vows, but the implication is clear as day: they’re married. Or are they? Just a few weeks after the finale, an interview with the voice actors in the digital September 2023 issue of Newtype was edited to remove a mention that Suletta and Miorine were married. Bandai Namco went on to release a statement that “it was better left to the viewer to decide if the pair were married or not.”

Needless to say, this is very silly. The characters are clearly married. The director Hiroshi Kobayashi was quoted just over a week ago to say that the characters were married. Why not just admit it? After all, Bandai Namco greenlit Witch From Mercury to appeal to a younger audience. It’s typical that when the series became a roaring success with both old and new fans, the company’s representatives chose to run screaming in the opposite direction rather than acknowledge what their artists made.