The anime was dominated by titanic clashes this week, as all my shows galloped towards their endgames while offering some dramatic fireworks along the way. While My Hero Academia demonstrated that it had indeed been hoarding all its animation eggs in the Deku-Bakugo basket, Revue Starlight showed off with a two-on-two duel featuring some of its most convincing secondary character work so far. And over in Planet With land, this season’s most visually conservative star showed off in its own way, vividly demonstrating the richness of characterization and thoughtfulness of narrative structure that have elevated it all along the way. I had little to complain about and much to revel in this week, and I’m happy to share all my gushing with you folks. Let’s start with the showdown between everyone’s favorite rowdy boys as we run down one more week in anime!
This week’s My Hero Academia was unsurprisingly dominated by Deku and Bakugo’s rematch, which was as dazzling as you might expect, although also a little briefer than you might hope. The effects animation for their duel was absolutely gorgeous on the whole, and the highlight cuts were stunning not just for their fluidity, but for their beautiful unity of martial arts choreography and energetic layouts. I love how the camera is essentially carried around by Bakugo’s energy in this cut, leading into that beautiful feint where his gambit to dash around Deku is conveyed perfectly through the camera’s movement matching the beats of his explosions. And I was as dazzled as ever by Yutaka Nakamura’s masterpiece contribution, a sequence that combined his increasingly signature emphasis on overwhelming effects work with some of the tight physical choreography characteristic of his early work. Really, the way Nakamura conveys incredibly powerful characters simply existing in space will always be a marvel to me – there is such a sense of momentum in how their coiled postures explode into rapid, almost sliding movement, how it seems like they can barely be held by the ground at all. Complaints about pacing or relative medium strengths aside, when it comes to the signature action scenes, My Hero Academia always comes through.
Watching through this week’s Revue Starlight felt like a speedy summation of basically all the mixed-up feelings this show has left me with. The first segment, where we checked in with the various pairs and our main leads went on another aquarium expedition, frankly just felt like dead air to me. Revue Starlight’s storyboards remain excellent, but its dwindling animation, and the necessity of focusing what animation remains on the duels, means its incidental scenes tend to suffer. On top of that, Karen and Hikari just still don’t strike me as compelling heroines – I liked Hikari’s solo material, but when she’s put together with Karen, the two of them just repeat a combination of truisms about friendship and non-statements about Shine until the scene ends.
Of course, when we jumped from that stuff to the actual duels, everything got terrific again. I loved the incidental humor and character-investment payoff of having the rest of the girls watching in the audience, and even though this duel had to rely a bit more on stills than usual, it was still pretty darn dazzling. On top of that, both Claudine and Maya shifting from their haughty public faces to reveal how very much they care for each other was a terrific character turn, and just a heartwarming and theme-affirming sequence in its own right. Seeing Claudine shift from “we shall all be judged by the impartiality of the stage!” to “anything but Maya, let me fail instead of her” felt like Revue Starlight’s soul in miniature, and made me pretty fond of this episode on the whole. Revue Starlight’s shaky overarching narrative and inconsistent dialogue make for a very uneven watch, but god the highlights are wonderful.
Finally, this week’s Planet With just kicked all sorts of ass, and demonstrated yet again what a uniquely ambitious and consistently poignant show this is. It was extremely characteristic of Planet With to give us the classic epilogue “let’s check in with the characters a few years down the line!” payoff with two full episodes left, giving us enough time to actually appreciate how their relationships have developed over that time. I figured the adorable scenes between Soya and Nozomi would end up being the highlight of this material, but in the end, Ginko once again stole the show. Her rooftop conversation with Soya was a thundering validation of her generosity of spirit, as she offhandedly told Soya that he’d long been forgiven, and that he didn’t need to seek a family – he already had one.
Not that many shows center themselves on found family siblings like this, but Ginko has been a wonderful big sister for Soya all series long, and seeing her directly articulate that was a powerful and thoroughly earned moment for both of them. That scene also served as a perfect setup for the show’s overall finale, centering our focus not on “defeating” the dragon, but forgiving him. That in turn made Soya’s role as the one to challenge him all the more appropriate – battle strength aside, Soya is the only one left who can genuinely forgive the dragon for his destruction of the Siriusians. Planet With’s narrative remains as cleverly constructed and emotionally rich as ever as we soar towards its thrilling end.
