Summertime Render firstly hooks its viewers and glues them to the show's mystery, setting, and tone in an enthralling fashion. The first three episodes or so do this extremely well in showing this through Shinpei Ajiro, a former resident of Hitogashima Island returning for the funeral of his deceased childhood friend: Ushio Kofune. During the funeral, however, Shinpei quickly discovered strangle marks around Ushio’s neck before the closing of the coffin of her laying body. As expected, he became suspicious and doubted that the cause of Ushio’s death was drowning as the rumor goes. This reveal was the first instance of murder mystery that Summertime Render was destined to be but never was. Substantially, the episodes that followed deliberately heightened the suspense when we see others around Shinpei began to act suspicious. They were questioning and watchful of Shinpei’s doings, giving the implication of distrust and secrets which they wish to withhold; as if they were trying to prevent Shinpei from discovering the cause of Ushio’s death.
At this point in the show, I was on board. It was delivering everything I want in what I thought was a murder mystery thriller. But the exact breaking point was in the same episode when Mio Kofune confided to Shinpei about similar deaths and disappearances that had been occurring due to a phenomenon called “Shadow Sickness”. A phenomenon derived from the island’s folklore where these entities called Shadows kills their targets before they copy the said target and act as them. It’s then implied by Mio that Ushio’s death is somehow linked to the Shadows.
Naturally, the plot then revolved around the Shadows and became everything to Summertime Render. The Shadows are the catalyst for its narrative and uncovering Shadow’s relation to Ushio’s death was the driving force of the plot. The introduction of the Shadows also served a second purpose: a way for the show to continue the suspense but in physical threat to Shinpei and the rest of the cast alike.
To do this, the Shadows were presented to have assimilated into the larger human population of the island. Additionally, their known ruthless killing and copying of people naturally provided a constant sense of danger to Shinpei and the rest of the cast. Cause from then on, they have to be wary of who were and who were not Shadows. However, I think Summertime Render made the first grave error when it actively chose to reveal Ushio, the plot’s driving force at this point, to be alive in Shadow form.
Not only was Ushio revealed to be alive and well in her shadow form, the Shadow retained Ushio’s memories and personality; meaning that she was not a threat to Shinpei. This also sets the precedent that Shadows like her, who retains the memories of the people they killed or copied, would not be a threat to the cast either. The existence of Mio’s Shadow later in the show is the proof. But what I want to get at is that the existence of Ushio’s shadow completely threw away the essence of Ushio’s character in the show. Her death was the sole driving force for the plot of Summertime Render and its characters. Bringing her back with no reasons other than to be the reminder that she’s the main love interest to Shinpei and that she can fight with her new hair powers just completely crumples the show.
This is where Summertime Render begins its comical contrivances to justify the existence of a plot.
With the abandonment of its original objective and frankly, the narrative and the elements that defined Summertime Render in the first place, the show has to resort to the less exciting, more predictable methods that further require contrivances as it goes. To justify the Shadows’ existence, the series first made the impression that these Shadows are invaders. Their sole purpose was to serve as a superficial threat in the series for Shinpei and others to have conflicts with. Then, through the reveal of Haine, the Shadows' reason for all the havoc, killing, and copying are so they can go to the land of “eternity”. This, however, was never expanded on because the show proceeds to abandon it as soon it was introduced and favored a more tragic manipulation route: Contriving sympathy for Haine. Haine, over the course of an episode, went from a literal feared being among the Shadows to a sweet little innocent girl who was the victim of the curse that she unwillingly obtained from a Shadow Whale that happens to lie on a coastal beach hundreds of years ago. Summertime Render then uses this to pinpoint the real evil on Haine's righthand man who turns out to be manipulating her for three hundred years for his selfish gains.
The plot progression that Summertime Render undertook is exacerbated when all the meaningless fights, conflicts, and drama are sandwiched in between. The conflict and drama served no purpose whatsoever.
So what’s left of Summertime Render? Nothing. For one, its sole original captivating element was the murder mystery, which the show forsook. Two, the shift in focus on the shadows and their reveal felt flat and shallow; it lacked the anticipation and tension that the series entailed in the beginning. I would say that Summertime Render could’ve easily just stuck to the path of a murder mystery without justifying the shadows' existence. It had everything and every reason to do so.
This series isn’t even worth a second of your time given that the characters are just as flat, boring, and skimpy as the narrative in itself. Summertime Render has a large assembly of casts and each of them gets the bare minimum character archetypes and relations in the grander landscape of anime tropes. In a series like this, tying the characters to specific anime tropes is not the problem, the problem lies in how the series utilizes the trope and further develops the characters associated with it. But of course, Summertime Render chooses not to invest much into its characters but more so into an already heavily contrived narrative.
The product of that choice is the main character whose original goal is shifted from finding out the causes of Ushio’s death to saving the Island to learning about the shadows and whatever the heck the plot needs him to be. That’s not interesting. That’s not something for me to get behind. For the entirety of its runtime, there’s not a single ounce of depth that’s naturally developed in Shinpei and the rest of the cast alike. We learn little to nothing about his relations to the Island and Ushio besides the surface-level “family” and “love” that the creator wrote it into—it goes to show how little the creator thought about this. And any “depth” that the series loves to remind people of is the poorly contrived ones like the relationship between Hizuru and her long gone but still exists in shadow form brother.
I simply can’t understand the praises for Summertime Render no matter how I look at it. The series is full of dull moments, weak characters, lackluster directing in action sequences, and artificially created drama. The captivating element from the beginning of Summertime Render was the mystery surrounding Ushio’s death. And Shinpei, the series protagonist’s relationship with her. It’s safe to say I was utterly disappointed with how it was all played out. The shift in direction prompted the series to take on a path that’s less about its original element that hooked the viewers in the first place, but more on the side of mindnumbing exposition dumps and boring action drama.
