The Rolling Girls Debut Episode Opinions

The Rolling Girls is set in a post-apocalyptic future of sorts, and it starts with the best introduction to an anime I've seen in a while. To summarize the opening summary of events: Stuff happened and now Japan is split into their old prefectures again, which develop into individual nations.This promotes a sense of individuality and freedom of expression , and the new nations grow to be exclusive. They begin to war with each other, like a future Sengoku Jidai. Instead of large-scale wars like those during that era, future Japan's split nations fight with Super-powered vigilantes.

Honestly, I'm far more interested in seeing the anime about those years of change rather than the aftermath, which is where the actual story picks up.

Enter the main character: A normal girl who is just old enough to join the military/police/civil servants of this world, a ragtag group of people who help their defending super-hero through civil duties. She joins out of admiration for Matcha Green, the hero of her prefecture's nation. She is supposed to stay in town to help with the running of the city, but she is drawn to the battlefield to be closer to her hero. Upon the insistence of the protagonist being normal throughout the episode, I began to think of many protagonists from many mech anime who are introduced with the same insistence.Through one superficial watch of the first episode I have crafted a baseless theory about the entire show: This is a mech anime, just without the mechs.
Directed by the virtually unknown Kotomi Deai, this anime has a unique style. The animation flows very well, the girls are drawn cute, the backgrounds and effects are full of vibrant colors, and each character seems alive with a unique disposition.

Both Matcha Green, and the invading nation's super hero are seen wearing similar-looking stones, each conspicuously saying that it's their "good luck charm". If this is the key to their powers, I could realistically see the protagonist obtaining her own heart crystal at some point, giving her super-powers. This would conform to my idea of this anime being a mech anime in disguise, the heart crystal being parallel to the mech.
The online description of the anime seems to reveal that Matcha Green eventually sends the protagonist with other girls to travel Japan to mediate battles between rivaling clans. The way I see it, the anime could go one of two ways from here. Either the protagonist and the girls she travels with each obtains their own heart crystal somehow, to stop battles and fight on their own as a sort of Japan-traveling Sentai, or the girls just enter into normal, fun hijinks on their travels that eventually leads them to save the world. The latter scenario seems much more plausible because all the promotions for the anime are intent on suggesting that the main characters are entirely normal girls. I will be extremely let down if my trust is betrayed with a super-powered protagonist, or if the show falls into mech anime conventions.

In any case, I have high hopes for this series. The music is charming, the animation's interesting, and the plot seems fun. It's lighthearted and fast-paced, and I'm happy to be watching it. Mech anime or not, I'm excited for episode 2.

It's a dummy.

Yuri Kuma Arashi Debut Episode Opinions

A few days ago, I began to dive into the bounties of the new anime season, and I had the pleasure of viewing the first episode of YuriKuma. Directed by the illustrious Kunihiko Ikuhara, this anime looks like it's going to grow into something big.
There's an interesting wordplay going on with the constant use of the word "Yuri". This translates directly to "Lily", and the flower appears throughout the show as a symbol of purity. Girls are introduced as "Yuri" themselves, which denotes a sense of purity among them, while also pointing at the fact that these girls seem to be lesbian. The director, Ikuhara, has stated that he likes to make yuri relationships in his anime because it's fairly unassuming, and a relationship between male and female always seem to overpower and over-complicate other aspects of the show.

The only instance of characters with a male-like appearance show up in a dream-like court session towards the end of the episode.

Unless it's something I'm really excited about, I usually go into the new season's anime without looking them up, save for short descriptions. So, when I first turned on Yuri Kuma Arashi, I had not known anything about the show, and I marveled at the cute girls and interesting direction. The romantic imagery coupled with a constant focus on yuri made Ikuhara's previous anime, Revolutionary Girl Utena (1997), spring into my mind.
At first, I had thought it was this season's SHAFT anime because of the minimalistic but romantic art direction. The director seemed to me to be trying to make this anime into a moe Utena, and I didn't mind it at all. When I discovered that Ikuhara himself was behind YuriKuma, I was not in the least bit surprised, but I was infinitely excited.
Somehow, I had not known that Ikuhara would be directing something this season, which is a momentous occasion: After he finished Utena, he stopped directing anime until Mawaru-Penguindrum (2011), 14 years later. As a fan of his work, I'm relieved he decided to continue.

After Junichi Sato left the project, Kunihiko Ikuhara  became the series director for Sailor Moon. Later, he also left the position to pursue a career with more creative freedom, which is when he put together Utena.

The story is silly fun. It opens on a high school filled with seemingly lesbian girls, and we meet the love interests of the show. Bears are then suddenly introduced as a species from another plane of existence who eat girls because "That's just what they do." Two bears appear to pose as High School transfer students in order to get close to the girls and eat them. At least one of the bears seem very interested in the main girl, who was shown to be in love with another girl in a previous scene.

It's not clear as of yet if the bears actually eat girls, or just eat them out. Here, they lick the honey off a main character's lily. I assume they eat out the ones they care about, and actually consume the others.

Something called the "The Invisible Storm" is exposited by the characters to "Destroy pure and gentle things", and it starts with the character's favorite bed of lilies. It seems the bears are a part of this Storm, who eat girls in order to theoretically destroy the purity of their yuri love. I have no idea what all this is building up to, but I'm very excited to experience what Ikuhara has lying in wait for episode 2. The second episode aired last night on Tokyo MX, just after midnight, so I'm eagerly waiting for [Asenshi]'s subtitles.

Lynn Minmay: A soldier's life

Spoilers 

Immediately upon witnessing the battle in episode 27, when Minmay is singing to the destruction of an entire species, I suddenly became drawn to a theme. It's not really addressed in the series itself, and the show barely does anything with the idea, but it is an existing aspect to the story that I personally find fascinating. That is, while Minmay is singing on her stage at the front of the battle, culture becomes a weapon; Minmay's mech is the entire fleet, and heartstrings are her controls.

Space war makes for a really great laser and pyrotechnics show.

Humanity's culture became Earth's most powerful weapon. When Minmay first debuted with "Watashi no Kare wa Pilot" during the battle between Macross and the Zentradi in episode 10, it was the first attack by humanity's ultimate weapon. The final battle's "Love Drifts Away" was the final charge, culminated from 27 episodes of building and charging it up. Minmay's songs could then be considered the military's ammunition for mass genocide, which ultimately discredits Kaifun's preaching of an entirely peaceful society in place of any militarization.

It was, in fact, culture that tore these people from their world, caused mass death and betrayal, and forced the survivors to adapt to an entirely new way of life. War simply kept that culture at bay.

The show, however, did not decide to go this route with Minmay, and instead invented the true theme to Minmay's character arc: The hard life of a performer, and how it relates to and parallels a soldier's life.
Minamy was an obnoxious little girl. She was a troublemaker, too young to understand how she affected people, and too young to understand how important she was. The entire series, including after the time-skip, had Minmay in a constant hustle as she fought for people's hearts on stage, all the while dreaming of simpler, less busy times.
During her assault on the Zentradi main fleet in episode 27, she might have realized her all-important role as general of humanity's culture. She may have then understood the terrible reality of her career: She had been unknowingly drafted into the front lines of humanity's war against non-existence.
Whether she glimpsed this truth or not, after the time-skip, she had become distraught about her career, which had become depressingly difficult to maintain. Her life as a singer took her to emotionally dark places. Kaifun is her only manager left, and, since the time-skip, he's developed a drinking habit with his growing hate for the military. He decidedly never gives her a concert in Macross City, the heart of the military's influence, and he never accepts any aid from them. Minmay's songs support the two, but they barely get by: Her venues get smaller, and people can only spare so much in terms of payment on the post-apocalyptic world. Kaifun's stress as her manager builds, and his subsequent bursts of anger and lashing out at the military has Minmay question why she is even singing anymore. The lonely girl thinks of Hikaru and those childhood times of innocence, before either of them became soldiers in adulthood.

In the final episode, "Farewell to Tenderness", A threat to the remainder of humanity appears in Quamzin's army. Macross flies in front of it's civilians and fires it's canon with the very last of it's energy. This final lurching of the giant who stood as the protector of mankind and the symbol of humanity's culture and cooperation inspired the people watching, among them, Minmay. On that stage in the sky, the military expressed it's necessity, and perhaps this is when Minmay understood the significance of Hikaru in his Vakyrie fighting for humanity, and similarly her own significance as a singer. In the next scene, she resolves to leave Hikaru and Misa because she now understands that, as an artist, she cannot be part of the military's world, who destroy themselves to protect artists.With hope that she'll find the songs she really wants to sing, Minmay sets off for an unknown city for an unscheduled performance, giving up on her dreams of innocent love and a life with Hikaru as a civilian.

They fight to protect humanity, so Minmay had to realize that she must sing to do the same.

When I first saw the ED, "Runner", I assumed the photo album next to the helmet on the desk to be Hikaru's, or at least I knew it belonged to the image of a battle-worn soldier, for him to look back onto more innocent times in his life. I wasn't wrong, as evidenced in the episodes after the time-skip, where that album made an appearance, property of Hikaru. When the final episode completed Minmay's arc and resolved the end of the series, we hear Mari Iijima, the voice of Lynn Minmay, come in with the vocals instead of the usual Makoto Fujiwara. This was a beautifully-done book end to how Minmay's career made her feel battle-worn just as heavily as Hikaru, who had also accepted the life of a soldier.

The episodes after the time-skip has Minmay have to accept the burden and separation of a soldier's life, mirroring how Hikaru had done the same at the end of the first portion of the series.

In the film, "Do you Remember Love?", Minmay's arc and character was shafted in comparison. Most of the focus of the film is dedicated to Misa's arc, and in the film version of events, Minmay was portrayed as almost an entirely different person. Here, Minmay began as a singer, with no small city girl backstory to give her character an arc. She was never really friends with Hikaru, and only met him after he saves her during a Zentradi attack. She's more like an unwilling performer, tired of the celebrity life, and she wanted to escape that life with the relationship she found in Hikaru. When he chooses Misa over her, however, she is forced to give up the relationship and the hope of the escape she sought with it.

The final shot of the movie; A portrait of Minmay's hard work, heartbreak and separation a part of it.

Minmay, as the face of humanity's culture, represents the life of an artist and civilian in a wisened society. Her life is by nature separated from those in the military, and more life might be separated from her because of the military's wars. However, Hikaru gave up his life as a civilian so he can protect Minmay and culture as a soldier. In return, her duty is to go war with him by fulfilling her role as a performer and fighting through the fields of love, sorrow, romance, and pain for the good of mankind. This is the same sense of duty all artists should have in a society intent on survival, because without the arts at the front line of humanity's endeavor against death, we might realistically destroy ourselves with the impulse to war. Minmay carries the weight of an entire species' future with her when she steps onto the greatest battlefield against humanity's end: the stage of culture.

The duty of a performer is equal to the duty of a soldier.