Wit Studio have garnered quite the reputation for an animation studio that has been active for only three years (not withstanding that it is a subsidiary of animation powerhouse Production I.G.). With only Hoozuki no Reitsu, film Hal & of course Attack on Titan to their name, I was certainly interested to see what the first original animation from a studio that has certainly shown itself to have a flair for animation would come out with.
On first appearance Rolling Girls seemed like everything I could have wanted & more. A visual feast for the eyes, the first two episodes were an almost constant colourful, explosive set of action sequences fought between the two rival Bests of Saitama state, Masami Utoku & Kuniko Shigyou. It's frantic. It's exciting. The Bests & the Rests motif for how Japanese society post the Great Tokyo War operates is compelling, as is the apparent friends turned rivals relationship between the two Bests. I wanted to know more. More about this mad world & the colourful chaos it has descended into. What would come of the fight between & would Nozomi, Masami's sister from another mother, so to speak, find a place for herself as a Rest in a world where only the Best seemed worthy of note?
However, two episodes in both Masami & Kuniko end up hospitalised & the shows direction changes to that of a bike riding road trip of self-discovery for Nozomi & three other girls: boisterous Ai who wants to be a Best herself; clumsy Yukina who lacks any sense of direction but wants to be an artist; & the strange moeblob Chiaya who wants to collect the heartstones that all Bests wear & also somehow knows the other girls despite their apparently having never met. Not that this should necessarily have been a bad thing. Their journey, undertaken ostensibly so Nosomi can fill Masami's role as a peacebroker in various disputes around Japan, should & to an extent does serve as a way for us to go on a Gulliver's Travels type journey through various places which serve as allegories for different elements of Japanese culture & society, while our quartet of bike riding heroines learn more about themselves, each other & hopefully find whatever is really at the heart of the wanderlust that set them on their journey.
The places the girls visit on their journey are certainly a varied & interesting bunch. Their first stop is the state of Always Comina, where post war society has become one of constant conventions & cosplay, watched over by a cosplaying Best named Thunderoad. The story in each place tends to be about two groups, each represented by a Best, who are in some form of conflict with each other. The Rolling Girls roll in (pun fun) & in some way help the main character of each story arc to resolve whatever problem they're having in return for payment in the form of their heartstone, though as often as not said stone never manages to find it's way into their hands.
While the stories themselves during this part of Rolling Girls are pretty simplistic - a conflict between friends say, or in Thunderroad's case her learning that sometimes getting something you want is not worth the price you have to pay to get it - they none the less for the most part are told well enough & perhaps most importantly facilitate the visual extravaganzas that make Rolling Girls unique among the other shows airing in Winter 2015. However it does often rely on a convenient convergence of events to bring everything to an end, which can feel rushed & somewhat anticlimactic even with all the fireworks going on around it.
Unfortunately, The Rolling Girls fails in one crucial respect: it fails to make you care about the main characters. A good road trip is not really about the places people go but what they learn from going there. A movie like The Motorcycle Diaries isn't interesting because we see some places & events happening in South America. It's interesting because we see how the mind of the man who would become Che Guevara was shaped by those things. The Rolling Girls fails to achieve this. Yes, each girl in the group has their own thing that's the reason for their embarking on this journey, but it rarely if ever has any connection to the story being told at each stop. Indeed, it's really only in the in-between episodes where the girls spend any real time thinking about their goal & acting as the friends they're supposed to be becoming, all their focus otherwise being spent on what really should be of secondary importance to their story.
The best example of why this is a problem is in the character of Yukina. Her "quirk," as it were, is that she has a terrible sense of direction & often gets lost. This really is just meant as a funny joke & perhaps reflecting her own feeling of her life not having any real sense of direction. The problem is, each time she gets separated from the group I'm left wondering if it would make any real difference if she didn't find her way back? That shouldn't be how the viewer is left feeling about a nominally important group member in a series like this, & in truth the same can be said of all the characters. This is supposed to be their journey of self-discovery, but instead The Rolling Girls just uses that journey as a lazy way to string otherwise unconnected events together. The result is a set of minor characters whose stories are too short to get involved in, & a quartet of main characters whose story is too undeveloped for anyone to care about.
It's such a shame, too, because The Rolling Girls really does have some good things going for it. I enjoyed the weird worlds the girls visit & really do wish more effort had been made to connect each one with the journey of personal discovery the girls are on. I liked how the heartstones they're trying to collect are ultimately only a symbolic object to show that it's really strength of character & resolve that marks a Best from the Rest. I really wanted to like Nozomi, Chi, Ai & Yukina, who were different enough both in character & motivation that it should have been so easy to make their story of four girls searching for answers & finding friendship so much more compelling than it ends up being.
Things only get worse towards the end, when The Rolling Girls changes gears again to try & form a final story arc that brings together all the different subplots going on through the series into one big finale. Sadly, it's a complete mess; with three supposedly connected storylines involving, among other things: yakuza, pirates, mechs, spaceships, a kung-fu emu & an out of nowhere story about aliens. The whole thing climaxes in a giant, visually confusing battle that makes absolutely no sense to anyone involved in it. It really almost feels like a case of director Otomi Deai saying screw it, it's an ending kind of like Fooly Cooly's & that's enough. It isn't enough.
The visuals on which The Rolling Girls so heavily relies are a more mixed bunch than I'd hoped as well. When it works, it's stunning, with fast, fluid animations coupled with a softer, more varied colour palette than is standard for animation makes for some utterly gorgeous sequences. The already mentioned fights between Masami & Kuniko are a highpoint that comes too early, but there are other scenes, such as the final bike race in Kyoto, which are also well directed visual treats.
The choice of using watercolours for the background art at times further enhances the vibrant colourfulness that runs throughout the series. The character design has a decent variety to it & the use of thinner borderlines & softer, pastel colours for them helps to avoid that problem animation sometimes has where characters seem to pop out of the background as though they're standing in front of a screen.
However, for every good thing about Rolling Girls art & animation, there's something bad. When they work, the action scenes are fantastic. But just as often they can feel overwhelmingly chaotic & hard to follow, the anime equivalent of a Michael Bay Transformers fight. The climactic final action scene I've already mentioned is a case in point, a cacophany of explosions, fights & flying objects (including one rocket impact cut that is reused two or three times in five minutes) that lacks any sense of focus or disciplined art direction. Stuff just happens & keeps happening, apparently for the sake of it.
Those backgrounds too, are a mixed blessing. At times, particularly indoors, they can become so busy, in the sense that they're trying to paint a lot of small, different coloured objects, that they seem almost muddy in appearance. The art direction, again, falls short in a lot of scenes where there are characters not doing anything. Often as not, they will be staring with a gormless expression directly at the audience, rather than whatever action is happening in the shot. It happens often enough to become distractingly noticeable, not least because it's something that would surely be so simple to correct. Equally, while the simpler nature of the character design makes for more fluid action when animated, when static it can often look, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, almost cheap; as though they didn't have the time or budget to draw in enough detail.
Finally, the music of The Rolling Girls feels like it's trying a both to stand out as one of those OSTs that make the series while at the same time being restricted to music the voice actresses can sing to. For all the rock & roll mentality that permeates the series, this isn't a soundtrack like The Pillows composed especially for Fooly Cooly or Michiko & Hatchin's eargasmic journey through Brazillian jazz, samba, hip hop & rock. Instead, while some of the tracks are enjoyable to listen to they all feel either forgettable or meant more as songs otaku idols can sing along to rather than something meant to really capture that feeling of rock & roll. It's not bad, by any means, but neither does it feel like the soundtrack that The Rolling Girls needed to match the visual style of the show.
It can feel bad to watch a show with all the promise of The Rolling Girls & be forced to conclude that not only does it fail to live up to the hype but doesn't even manage to be good. It had real promise to be one of those shows that really stood out as something memorable, that even those who might not necessarily enjoy it none the less recognize as something that doesn't come along very often. To The Rolling Girls credit, it certainly feels like it's trying, at least at first, to be just that. But knowing that just makes it all the more disappointing, almost heartbreaking, to see it fall so flat. I certainly hope this doesn't stop Wit Studio, Otomi Deai or writer Yasuyuki Muto from attempting further projects like it. I so wanted to like The Rolling Girls & it almost did enough that I could look past its failings & say that even with its flaws it was still worth watching. Almost, but not quite.
