Me saying that Healer Girl is about high school girls singing as a means of healing people medically is not an exaggeration. Basically, three young women—Kana, Reimi, and Hibiki—work at a medical clinic in a small town as apprentice healers alongside their famous mentor Ria. In this world, singing and music can be used as medicine and has been officially recognized as a valid medical pursuit. Kana in particular is eager to become a healer after having been saved by one as a child, and is determined to follow in their footsteps. But so far, she and her friends are trainees and still have a lot to learn before they can earn their licenses. They also have to deal with a rival healer from another clinic, Sonia, who is determined to beat Ria at her own game, and their own personal flaws if they want to grow as healers.
So...yeah. Healer Girl is basically an anime musical in the vein of Sing a Bit of Harmony, complete with characters bursting into song at completely random times, even when it's not needed. I mean, when your whole premise involves having magic healers work side by side with surgeons, pharmacists, and traditional medical doctors, and leaning very heavily into the musical themes, it's kind of inevitable. Now, the premise by itself is actually pretty interesting, and Healer Girl does manage to do things with it, from showing the main trio actually learning the ins and outs of healing with song, having them actually partake in singing while an actual surgery is going on, the limits of what they can do at their current level, and so on. Plus, Healer Girl also manages to smartly avoid going the pseudoscience route in the vein of "You can cure cancer by singing!" by empathizing that healing with song isn't without its drawbacks, and that even in the show's universe, advances in medicine still can't cure everything. On that note, I can definitely respect Healer Girl for going all in on its premise and having a more nuanced, holistic approach to health care. The colorful, smooth animation also helps with this, making for some great visuals and imagery...though, whose bright idea was it to have the main girls have two-colored hair? It just looks weird!
Of course, that doesn't always mean Healer Girl sticks the landing, and if you couldn't tell by the rating, there's lots of areas where the show really stumbles. For one, Healer Girl as a show is extremely cheesy, treacly, and saccharine. The whole show is a bright, candy colored piece of fluff where any and all conflicts are resolved pretty easily, leaving it without much in the way of tension, and any resolutions it does offer are pretty anticlimactic. The middle section especially suffers, with the sports and cultural festival episodes being the most egregious offenders, what with having the characters sing-talk for 80% of the former, and somehow being able to flawlessly play instruments while wearing full body animal costumes in the latter. Both were completely ridiculous and really dumb. There are also times when Healer Girl seems to have very little regard for following its own rules. In one episode, when the main trio sing to soothe a surgeon's nerves, which has all the complexity of your typical Disney fairy tale wave a magic wand and get your happily ever after, they sing in a closed room, but in another episode, the girls sing WHILE in the operating room, not wearing any masks or scrubs or anything of the like, just three feet away from the surgeons and the operating table. Uh, hello?! Did the staff behind this show just forget that hospitals have strict hygiene rules, especially when surgeries are being conducted?! Say what you will about Gray's Anatomy, at least that show didn't feel the need to have surgeons and nurses not wear scrubs and masks while in the operating room! I'm pretty sure anyone who doesn't wear masks or scrubs while in the operating room would get fired for putting a patient's life at risk for infections if they did that. Basically, at times Healer Girl goes all in on its premise, but also makes serious missteps and undermines itself at times to the point where your suspension of disbelief is broken and you can't take the story seriously anymore.
The characters by themselves are perfectly fine. Nothing groundbreaking, since they start off as pretty blatant archetypes at first, and their character development is pretty predictable as well. Most of the side characters don't really do much, with Shinobu being the biggest victim of this, though I do appreciate that the anime put in the effort to give Sonia more depth to her over making her another typical alpha bitch stereotype. If there is one thing that the show does manage to nail, its the chemistry between the main trio. By themselves, Kana, Reimi, and Hibiki are pretty stock standard, but their interactions and banter do feel genuine and organic, and they actually feel like a close-knit group of gal pals who do everything together and truly cherish each other...though Reimi's whole exaggerated, obsessive, crush-like worship of Ria is pretty creepy and annoying. Plus, the show also gets some points for having plenty of adult women as respected leaders in the medical field. But as it stands, the characters have about as much depth as the cast in every Love Live series ever, which is to say...not much.
Plus, for a series that banks itself on its music, the actual songs are pretty...dull. I mean, I liked most of them, but many of the songs are the exact same boring acapella ballads but with different lyrics, with very little in the way of variety. On one hand, I could understand not wanting to have the healers sing or play heavy metal music during an operation on a patient, as that'd probably ruin a surgeon's concentration to the point that they'd put their patients' lives at risk, but nowhere does the series make any mention of this in-universe. Every single song is just plain generic, well sung as they are, and feel copy-pasted from other ones that came before it. It says a lot that the actual background music feels more inspired than the actual songs. Then again, I do listen to the opening theme song a lot, so I'm a complete hypocrite, and other shows have done far worse than Healer Girl has, so I don't want to be too hard on the show.
Basically, Healer Girl is sweet, saccharine, treacly, nice and fluff. Nothing groundbreaking, but nothing really bad either. It stumbles a lot, but it does have its heart in the right place. Healer Girl as an anime is perfectly wholesome, though doesn't have much to offer than that, but it could be a great anime you can use to get your preteen relatives into anime for the first time. The show feels like it was made specifically for girls, so it'd be a nice gateway anime for your daughter, kid sister, niece, or what have you. It may be a little too overly sweet and sugary for me, but Healer Girl is better than most if you're into anime about cute girls singing wholesome ballads and want a nice musical to bop your head to. Also, can you believe this is directed by the same guy who directed Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood and Kurau Phantom Memory?
