Reviews

Sonny Boy is NOT hard to get in a general sense. Its “confusing and abstract” reputation is earned purely out of its favour of metaphors and kaleidoscopic visuals over grounded storytelling, really its entire thematic ethos can be summed up with the phrase “coming of age”. That being given, said metaphors are ill-defined on a moment-to-moment basis and as such the show can leave the viewer grappling for a more cohesive allegorical framework. Too much emphasis is placed on the world-building of the abstract situation, especially given how clunky and unintuitive a lot of the dialogue surrounding the setting and premise can be; it would’ve worked a lot better if they’d cut down on the ‘realism’ a bit during the “drifting” instead of trying to make it both ephemeral and grounded, and leant more into the visual expression of the themes. The thematic core is a simple one, and simple expressionism serves it better than convolution.

All of that being said, it generally does a really good job. Each episode is paced fairly competently and each mini arc is decently clear about what it’s trying to get across, though in for example the Tower of Babel episode it bites off more than it can chew with the detail of its metaphors; it gets away with it because we all get what it’s trying to say intuitively, but in several places in the show it gets hard to care about what’s happening because it’s being too damn roundabout in its expression. The characters are solid, not the strongest cast out there but they each serve their purpose. Most of them aren’t given proper arcs (or rather conclusions to their assigned single conflict) but this is obviously meant to emulate how we view our real peers so it gets a pass on that. The story beats are done well for the most part, it feels as if it loses its way halfway through as far as tension and drive go, but again it suits its purpose so it’s not really a problem. One particular beat falls flat though (at the end of episode 9), it’s obviously supposed to be a bit jarring but it doesn’t elicit the intended accompanying shock. It kind of covers for that in Episode 10 and 12 though, so again it’s not a big problem.

*[Non-specific spoilers in this paragraph]*
Now the best thing about Sonny Boy is the last episode. In the first half it directly challenges the hopeful philosophy the anime has obviously been building to (again, this grounded people-drama storyline would work so much better if the rest of the show had been more dreamlike but it definitely works well anyway), then it pulls off THE most impressive audiovisual sequence in the show in the middle as a conclusion to the main storyline, before resolving the challenged message with a mature and sad-yet-hopeful denouement. Tied the whole show together again, really cool ending.

Overall this isn’t a tightly written anime, but it accomplishes what it set out to do in what I’d consider a very elegant way despite its minor shortcomings.
7.5/10, Recommended