Hey all, and welcome back to the Week in Review. The summer season is basically over at this point, as Planet With turns in its final assignment and my other airing shows prep for their own finales. This season was ultimately, obviously pretty top-heavy, as the dropoff between what I actually stuck with and what I could have picked up pretty much always felt precipitous, but I still ended up with a fair amount to talk about, and I’m guessing all three of this season’s heavyweights will end up on my end-of-year list. Planet With’s presence on that list is basically assured – in fact, I’m guessing that one will be duking it out with Violet Evergarden and whatever the fall’s best show is for my top pick of the year. Revue Starlight and My Hero Academia are a little more iffy, but both of them have demonstrated great strengths throughout this season, and I’ll be sad to see them go. Starting with the season’s clear champion, let’s poke at the summer season one more time!
Planet With absolutely knocked it out of the park for its finale, demonstrating all the vivid character work, bombastic creativity, and staggering empathy lying at the heart of this production. Planet With is generally at its weakest when it comes to the actual fight scenes, so I was a little concerned about this episode, but it fortunately hung the vast majority of its drama on the relationships and themes we’ve been developing all along.
Seeing all the members of this cast work together to defeat the dragon was itself a very satisfying payoff; not only has Planet With’s cast all been developed into fully realized and sympathetic people, but the show’s tendency to let its cast jump between allegiances meant that their final unity of purpose here was also its own reward. And the scene actually inside the dragon, where Ginko got to thank him for saving her people, ended up being one more vivid celebration of Ginko and Soya’s utterly earned sibling relationship. This episode really didn’t have to introduce anything new to shine; scene after scene simply celebrated our love for this cast while also progressing the narrative to its inevitable end, with beats like the dragon’s final offer to Soya and their eventual return to Sirius feeling like the right and proper choice the moment they were illustrated. Satoshi Mizukami is a brilliant storyteller with endless heart, and Planet With has consistently served as a staggering testament to his talent. I only hope we get another Mizukami show some day soon.
This week’s My Hero Academia adapted a segment that I already loved from the manga, the surprisingly thoughtful and tonally unique Twice chapter. I was somewhat worried this chapter would be either unfortunately abridged, awkwardly slow, or skipped entirely for the anime, but the show actually did a commendable job of bringing Twice’s unique headspace to life, essentially dipping into another genre entirely as it detailed the lived experience of Twice’s true crime existence.
Recent My Hero Academia has had to toe a pretty difficult line in terms of adapting the source material – all these chapters were interesting enough in the manga, but their intrigue is contained in small details of dialogue and moments of uncommon realism that can easily be lost in translation. On top of that, all of this material is clearly much slower and dialogue-based than previous arcs, meaning lots of sequences that feel like natural or even welcome worldbuilding and exposition in comics can come across as tedious in animation. The strong storyboards and all-encompassing tone of the Twice segment helped it escape that fate, but the second half’s classroom lecture wasn’t so lucky. Still, I’m excited for the formal introduction of the Big Three, and grateful the Twice segment played out so well. Keep trying, My Hero Academia!
This week’s Revue Starlight attempted a herculean but ultimately very necessary task for its overall production: making Karen Aijo interesting. Karen has essentially been this show’s fatal flaw ever since the start, as her simplicity of characterization and general lack of any sort of dissonant elements or unique motivation has made her more of a prop than an actual person. Theoretically, Karen should have been humanized through her relationship with Hikari – but outside of that one (very welcome) scene they shared texting about random nonsense, their entire relationship has been destiny-focused “we pledge to shine together on the same stage one day!” That’s not characterization at all, nor a meaningfully sympathetic motive, and so every time Revue Starlight has turned from its (excellent) vignettes to focus on its main narrative and heroine, the show immediately has become significantly worse.
This episode didn’t truly fix that issue, and I’m guessing Starlight will simply be hobbled by that failing all the way to its end, but it was still an engaging enough episode in its own right. I enjoyed the brutal jump to “seven months later,” thought the show did a fine job of evoking an overall tone of distance and malaise, and also felt Karen learning the truth about Hikari through actively translating the original story was a clean enough turn. Revue Starlight remains so strong in terms of its design that I’m perpetually sad it’s not a little stronger writing-wise, but hey, lopsided yet compelling productions are what anime’s all about.
