So on the surface level, the premise is pretty rote: A young boy, Saku Otonomiya, has just returned to his old hometown after several years, and he's not in a good place. His parents are dead, and his older sister Nozomi is in the hospital due to having an unnamed soap opera disease that's obviously there just to wring sympathy from the viewers. He transfers to Tensho High School and reunites with a childhood friend of his, Hinata, who is a member of the school's singing club. Hinata wants Saku to join the singing club, but due to his sister's illness, his job, and needing to pay living expenses, he declines. The singing club does want to sing a particular Vocaloid song he found online for the upcoming singing competition, but the song's creator, Sosuke Kagura, won't let them sing it because he doesn't feel as though the members of the singing club have enough range to be able to cover the song. Sosuke does, however, come across Saku singing the song he made and is so in awe of his talent that he approaches Saku to form a band with him alongside his other friend, Uta. The three of them spend their days together singing their hearts out and having fun.
...Or so it actually seems. The truth is, there's actually a huge twist that occurs in episode 5 that completely changes the entire genre of the show, but I won't spoil it. However, I will allude to it in my review and keep details under spoilers, because I actually do have a lot to say on said twist and how it affects the story and narrative. First off, the animation is decent. Nothing special, and the character designs are woefully overly colorful and generic, not different from other male idol anime with similar aesthetics, with one character looking like he walked out of a Yu-Gi-Oh rip-off (Hi, Mike! He's the red haired dude). On the other hand, the actual animation work is smooth and the backgrounds are nice. Near the end of the anime, there's a bit of action that isn't very well choreographed, with a lot of shortcuts and speed lines to make it look like the characters are moving when they actually aren't.
Being a music based anime, it obviously can't afford to have its music be bad. Well, the soundtrack itself is fine, but nothing to really write home about. Plus, many of the songs in the anime are covers of existing Vocaloid songs sung by the characters' seiyuus. Some of them are genuinely good, with many of them being well sung, but other songs are just generic boy band fare and technically unremarkable. I will say though, the opening song is a banger, as are Saku, Mike, and Mitsuki's image songs (Even though the context in which Mike's song is used is friggin confusing as hell!!). Those ones are the best, while the rest of them range from okay to plain generic. But that's not the end of it, and I mean this in a good way: FUNimation got the license to this show, and get this, they were actually given the go-ahead to dub ALL OF THE SONGS INTO ENGLISH! And they all sound really, really good! You can thank Sound Cadence Studios, the dubbing company, for that one. Seriously, watch Actors in English, because not only are all of the voices impeccably well cast, the dubbed songs actually sound amazing and not at all like the badly dubbed songs from the 90s and early 2000s! It also helps that Amanda Lee aka Amalee and her posse were involved with a lot of the music production on the dub. Seriously, I cannot shill this English dub enough. Please watch it!!
That being said, the characters are a mixed bag. Most of them just follow one archetype and border on being cliche as hell, but several of them do get some decent amounts of development, like the main trio of Saku, Sosuke, and Uta, along with one other character, Ryo. Everybody else just stays the same, and like Lapis Re:Lights, it does suffer from trying to throw in too many characters on occasion, many of which either serve no purpose other than to advance the development of other characters' or take away time the anime could have given to flesh out the more important characters, like Mike and Kai. The last episode in particular even throws in cameos of characters from the main franchise that we'll never see do anything in the show, but they're shoved on the screen anyway! Though unlike Lapis Re:Lights, which came out after it, Actors: Songs Connection does make a solid effort to build chemistry between the more important cast members rather than have them putz around doing nothing and have them move the plot forward without sacrificing their development. But even with that, the characters still fulfill generic bishounen archetypes, so they're still not the most three-dimensional characters out there. Also, I want to see more of Ushio!
For the first four episodes, the anime does seem like it's just going to be a cute, pleasant anime that shows off a bunch of pretty boys, but in episode 5, a huge twist is revealed. I won't spoil it, but it does change the entire genre of the show and force you to see it and the characters and world from an entirely different perspective. But in all honesty, I think the twist hurt the show more than helped it, because said twist only brings up a lot of questions that remain unanswered, and since the anime only has 12 episodes, it doesn't devote enough time to really exploring the ramifications of said twist. I wish I could talk more about the twist and why I feel it hurts the show, but MAL doesn't allow spoilers, understandably, so I won't.
But at its core, Actors: Songs Connection isn't necessarily a bad show. It just bit off way more than it could chew, and I certainly like it a lot better than crap like Lapis Re:Lights! That's for sure! If you want to watch a bunch of pretty boys sing and interact, along with listening to some really good songs, feel free to give this a shot. But if you want three-dimensional characters, a well developed setting, and a compelling story, give it a miss. It gets credit for trying, but it falls flat on its face where it matters most.
