Reviews

Sep 16, 2017
If you haven’t been living under a rock you’ve probably heard of Love Live!. It’s one of the most popular anime in Japan and for good reason: it has idols and yuri, a great art style, and a story that perfectly caters to the otaku fandom. It’s not quite as popular among a younger female audience as it is among an older male audience, but Sunrise already has Aikatsu for young girls so Love Live! is essentially the late night version of that. This anime has a lot of mixed opinions which is reasonable since anyone outside of the targeted audience isn’t going to see the appeal, but there are enough people in the targeted audience that it’s a perfect anime for a lot of people. The very fact that it is so popular can also be a draw for some people since it has a lot of good memes, fan art, and other media that is all translated for the most part. I will talk about the story first. This is a show about girls who become idols to save their school. It’s really quite similar to Girls und Panzer in that regard, but with the opposite reaction from the teachers. Honoka is confident that becoming idols would save their school while everyone else is skeptical, and rightfully so. After all, not only is not reasonable to expect to become popular simply from trying something you see other people getting popular from, as anyone who has tried created any kind of entertainment would know, but even if they did become popular that doesn’t exactly guarantee that their school would be along for the ride as well. Despite how improbable that would be, these are our protagonists and Sunrise isn’t going to show us some random idol group who failed to do what they sought to do. That would be boring. Naturally this is a success story and considering the way it’s set up this isn’t even really a spoiler. What is a spoiler is the opening theme song animation since it shows all nine of them dancing together which is the entire plot of the first season. It’s a cast building so it starts with an incomplete cast and collects them as they go along so it’s a spoiler which girls end up in the group. My next topic will be the art. The art looks very shiny and sort of 3D like which makes it perfect to make accurate anime figures of but it isn’t so 3D that it would give the cringy 3D CGI effect. There was certainly a lot of CGI used in this anime, especially in the dance scenes, but while the dance scenes themselves don’t look the best the rest of it looks very pretty. It’s too detailed to be drawn by hand but they clearly didn’t just leave everything up to the computers. When you ignore the hair and eye colours as well as the hair styles their faces are all very similar, but they do have some things to make them distinct. One important part of the character arcs of two characters who I won’t name for sake of avoiding spoilers is gaining weight and then having to lose that weight, which wouldn’t have been as nice to watch if the character designs weren’t so good. The problem with their weight was the fact that they wouldn’t be as mobile on stage so the fact that they still looked attractive in their overweight forms wasn’t a problem in my eyes. Not completely art related, but they have a lot of great moments they designed like Nico Nico Nii which this whole review is designed to look like, if you hadn’t noticed. The clothing designs were really well done. The skirts were very much on the short side and Sunrise didn’t have the “idol school” excuse like they did with Aikatsu, but this isn’t exactly unrealistic since most Japanese girls do tend to roll their skirts up. The outfits they use for their performances always fit the song and dance well and are always always very pretty. The music videos that serve to be part of the franchise are also very well drawn and designed, especially the later ones. The next section is the sound, which was definitely one of the anime’s strong points. They hired Pile to play Maki for a reason, as she is a professional singer and has barely done any other voice acting. The songs are catchy and the singing is beautiful. In addition to the theme songs and insert songs being good the background music is also great. The voices are all good. They all fully embody their characters from Rin’s nekomimi tomboy persona to Nico’s eccentric fake cutey personality. The dub’s voice actors are not as good to say the least, but if you actually care about watching this anime to get out of it what you should be coming for then I’ll assume you’re not watching the dub. While the voice acting is obviously not masterpiece quality and the music is fairly standard for the idol genre, it is all above average for slice of life anime. I will be talking about the characters next. As an idol anime it naturally has a large cast and since it introduces them one at a time it does give them all appropriate development despite not being super long. This does a lot better of a job characterizing all of its characters than The iDOLM@STER does despite being the same length and having around as big of a cast. All of the characters have distinct and interesting personalities and it doesn’t feel like they’re just exposition dumping their personalities on the viewers. They’re shown in natural situations and are given the time to develop properly. Despite the fact that the anime wasn’t that long, by the end of it you do get to really feel for the characters, provided you have the correct taste to enjoy it. Obviously as idols they aren’t allowed to have hetero love, but we still do see some of the other kind which is beautiful. A lot of the characters have good chemistry together. Even less important characters like Honoka’s younger sister and her friend are good characters despite not getting enough screen time to be as interesting as the main characters. The characters each cater to their own fans which both part of the reason why it’s so popular and also part of the reason why people argue so much about who the best one is. Best girl is subjective in any series, but in this anime they are all equally well developed characters but are made for different people so it’s even more subjective than usual. I’m sure you’ll find at least one character who you really like from the main characters, which is one of the benefits of there being nine of them and them all being very different. As much as everything sort of contributes to enjoyment, it can come from sources other than the previous four so it gets its own category. I got a lot of enjoyment from everything the show had to offer. I watched it on Crunchyroll without a membership so having watch through two minutes of commercials every episode slightly hindered my enjoyment of it in that way, but that isn’t the anime’s fault. Thankfully I saw this anime earlier on and didn’t have the well poisoned for me. A lot of people say bad things about this anime, which is allowed under free speech, but it still is something that can ruin anime for people since you might go in looking for things to hate. I thoroughly enjoyed this anime when I watched it and nothing about it bored me in any way. A lot of my enjoyment of the franchise doesn’t come from the anime itself and instead from the manga, the songs, and the fanart, but those I all enjoyed a lot more because I saw the anime. Fanbases can affect how much I like an anime and although some of the fans of this do go a bit too far overall they’re good people and it feels nice to be part of something bigger. I’m glad at least one anime about cute girls doing cute things has this devoted of a fanbase. In conclusion I thought this was a really good anime. It certainly deserves its popularity and even if the biggest mark of success for the creators was making it making it very accessible for the otaku community to latch onto I’d consider that to be good enough. Objectively or subjectively it’s obviously doing its job well and for that I congratulate it. I wouldn’t consider it to be the best anime I’ve seen or close to it, but it was certainly one of the most enjoyable. Whether if you like music anime, if you’re already into the idol genre, or just like to argue with other people about who the best girl in an anime is this is a great choice.
Reviewer’s Rating: 8
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