Mejirobana Saku, Volume 4 (メジロバナの咲く)

January 16th, 2025

A pale, blonde girl in a white blouse and green smock school uniform leans over a shorter dark-haired girl in the same uniform, who looks up at her with wide brown eyes.In the fourth volume of Nakamura Asumiko’s first Yuri series, small crimes are on the rise at school, and Ruby is determined to get to the bottom of it.  Is it a ghost, or  curse stealing everyone’s items…or a criminal? The answer is, of course yes, in Mejirobana Saku, Volume 4 (メジロバナの咲く)

First-year Marjorie is saying that the Tarot cards have spoken and the news is not good. Overwrought, she blames Ruby, and another first-year, Bryce. As Marjorie begins to lash out, she and Bryce are implicated in the thefts, but the story turns dark when it turns out that it is one of the older girls that is the mastermind. and her methods of manipulation are unsavory.

That mystery solved, it is  vacation time! Steph, Ruby and Liz all go to the Amalfi coast. Steph, her damaged foot already bleeding from walking too much, literally runs away from someone who seems to think they are friends. One mystery has been solved, but another has begun. Who is this young man to Steph? Ruby tries to understand Steph, but the older girl freezes her out.

This series is one of the gems of Rakuen Le Paradis magazine. I’m always pleased and surprised that it continues. And given where this volume ends, we are going to have to have at least a volume more, which continues to please and surprise. Ruby and Steph have become much more than the sum of their plot points and I look forward to finding out Steph’s undoubtedly emotionally fraught story. ^_^

Ratings:

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8, Marjorie took up a lot of air
Service – 3
Yuri – 7

Overall – 9

Volumes 1-3 of A White Rose in Bloom are out now from Seven Seas, Volume 4 will be out this summer



Momentary Lily Okazu Staff Review

January 15th, 2025

Colorful image of tables in a restaurant, with six girls colorfully dressed, eating and drinking, and smiling with banality.It appears that Okazu Staff huddle together when they encounter a trashfire in media, so once again, we are here to debrief and detox.

Today we are gathered together to memorialize our sanity, lost via Momentary Lily, streaming on Crunchyroll.

 

 

 

Christian LeBlanc

My first impression of the new GoHands joint was that it felt like being grabbed by the shoulders and shaken violently by someone vomiting glitter everywhere. And this is coming from someone who generally enjoys GoHands’ output, in defiance of people who point out the flaws in their animation.
 
Admittedly, I’m not particularly literate in cinema, and so online discussions will often illustrate to me why a scene in a movie works as well as it does. Likewise, people online can point out how GoHands is using an ambitious camera angle or perspective in the wrong place, but I may not always notice something’s off, and simply enjoy seeing the camerawork go absolutely ham for someone walking up a flight of stairs. And why not? Anime is generally exaggerated anyway, right?
 
Well, let me explain in terms of music. Momentary Lily is like a slow ballad where someone starts shredding on their axe like crazy halfway through the first verse. Yes, it’s an impressively face-melting, blisteringly-fast guitar solo, but what is it doing after a line and a half of lyrics? Some people will be open-minded enough to simply enjoy the guitar solo, and won’t be bothered by how out of place it is. Conversely, some listeners won’t understand why the gentle singing was interrupted by a piece of music from a seemingly different tune, and will be taken out of the song because it’s so jarring and distracting.
 
My colleagues will expand on how all the different elements of this show make it less than the sum of its parts, but let me pass the baton with this: one character’s death lacks gravitas because we haven’t gotten to know them well enough over two episodes, while another girl’s breasts defy gravitas even as she’s sobbing over her impending doom. Please learn to read the room, Erika Koudaji’s breasts.
 

Eleanor Walker

I watched this while nursing a tremendous hangover and I’m genuinely not sure if it improved the experience or not. The main thing going through my mind was “she breasted boobily” every time a certain character was on the screen. I still don’t know why these collection of walking stereotypes, sorry, characters are doing what they’re doing, what the “Wild Hunt” is and where they’re getting the ingredients for the random cooking segments. It’s like one staffer wanted to make a cute girls doing cute things cooking show and another wanted to make a monster fighting explosion show and the studio just shrugged and said “eh, whatever, we can only afford to animate one pair of breasts so work together”. The voices are particularly grating, I’m not generally one who notices particularly bad voice acting, especially in Japanese (I didn’t notice Hideaki Anno in The Wind Rises, for example, which was widely complained about online) but dearie me the voices in this one make me want to gouge my eardrums out with a melon baller.

 

Erica Friedman

This project is infamously animated by GoHands, a group that takes their work as animators VERY seriously, as everything in this anime moves, constantly. Even things that do not actually ever move.

In a post-apocalyptic world in which humans have been hunted by “The Wild Hunt” – over-animated kaijuu – a girl with a mysterious ability to call up a magical, science fiction-y, mega weapon finds a small group of other teenage girls with similar abilities.  Whether you consider these girls to be special forces, or refugees or just plain child soldiers, don’t worry about the details…their misery and trauma will be mined for laughs and pathos and boob jiggles. And cooking lessons, so even at the end of the world, we can make a nice meal of rice and canned mackerel. We got to get our priorities straight.

As for the service – to quote the great Pamela Poovey, “Inappropes.”

Grab a Dramamine and watch Momentary Lily, with a cast of girls with verbal tics that stand in for a personality.

 

Frank Hecker

Fans of the anime Shirobako may recall a scene in which two animators are discussing a new technique for making reflections off eyeglasses look more realistic, followed by a shot of one person’s glasses illustrating that very technique. Watching Momentary Lily is like watching that scene on infinite repeat, but without the self-reflexive humor. After viewing the first couple of minutes of episode 1 in the conventional way, I turned the sound and subtitles off so I could appreciate Momentary Lily for what it really is, a SIGGRAPH demo with fighting girls. (I originally wrote “magical girls,” but they don’t have transformation sequences—more’s the pity.)

Watching the show this way helps make sense of some of the shot and plot choices. Why does one of the girls show off her moisturizing regimen in the first scene? So that we can see how well GoHands can model shiny skin (presumably using Phong shading or some more recent technique). Why do the girls take a break from fighting monsters to have a meal? So that the animators can take a break from animating kaijū and relax themselves, modeling various foods, plastic packages, tin cans, utensils, and so on. (They even show a cousin of the famous Utah teapot.) And most notably: why does the girls’ hair fly around so much? It’s simultaneously a plea to the production committee and a boast to the viewer: “If we had a bigger budget, we could animate every hair.”

I guess there’s a story here somewhere and presumably some attempts at characterization, but really the girls are to GoHands what the Madonna and child and other Biblical scenes were to Renaissance painters, a conventional set of stock images used to demonstrate mastery of their craft. (My using the word “craft” and not “art” is deliberate; there is little art here.) Watching Momentary Lily like I did highlights those demonstrations: the omnipresent lens flare that shifts position depending on which way the light is coming from, the focus pulling and bokeh, the way the clouds constantly moving across the sky are reflected in the windows of the buildings in the background. For me, the emotional climax of episode 2 was not the foreground scene of a girl in extremis, but rather the background shot of a tree with all its leaves rippling in the wind.

I especially loved the shots of buildings shown in dramatic perspective, whether during the day or at night, viewed clearly or enshrouded in fog. Which brings me to my recommendation to GoHands: forget plot, character, and dialogue. Ditch the monsters, include more scenes with buildings and benches, erase the girls from every shot, and create what the world has been waiting for: a true masterpiece of “yuri of absence.”

 

Luce

Well that sure was an eye workout. Ow.

Setting aside the camera for now, this is distinctly mediocre. Sci-fi and post-apocalypse isn’t my thing, but this wouldn’t sell me. The five characters we see initially are unmemorable, apart from ‘onee-chan’ with the big bouncing boobs that are totally unnecessary and look like they’re about to float her off to space. (One character says ‘too much jiggle’. Don’t call it out and flaunt it at the same time.) Renge, the ‘main’ character, is screechy, then apologising for the weirdest things, like ‘imposing’ on the group with a awkwardly cut cooking ‘segment’, as they refer to it. Wow, she’s amnesiac, has a cool weapon and can one shot the big robots. Great, sure sounds like a plot thread right there. Too bad I’m not interested.

Sadly, even if I was interested, watching this feels like an attack on the optic nerve. Aside from over-animated hair and one set of boobs, the animation is middling, but not awful. But it’s like someone heard ‘dynamic camera angles’ and decided this meant ‘camera must move every two seconds’. It’s at odd angles, or moving, but in really jarring ways that almost follow characters but not quite. There’s more lens flares than Star Trek. And what is with the split screens?!

If you have a tendency to migraines, or any visually triggered illnesses, avoid this. I promise it’s not worth it. I’m off to have a lie down.

 

Matt Marcus

When my friend and cohost Sibyl sent me the trailer for Momentary Lily, my first thought was “someone must really like RWBY.” As the announcement began circulating in my online spaces, I had only seen dismissive, but not illuminating, comments about the studio that made it. It wasn’t on my radar, but between my friend’s excitement and the reactions from the folks in the Discord after episode 1 dropped, I figured I would give it a shot.

Y’all, I was not prepared.

I could go on about the visually chaotic and cacophonous opening, but that’s just where it begins. From opening to ending, watching Momentary Lily is like reading one of those giant posts of text with three emojis after every sentence, but also the font is Wingdings.

The script feels like it was written by ChatGPT trained using the dialogue of every lady-led shonen show, but dumber. There’s the gamer girl who chugs energy drinks and calls them her “buffs” in every sentence she speaks. There’s the chipper leader with a verbal tic. There’s the serious dark-haired girl with glasses with a verbal tic. There’s the “big sister” archetype with absurd breast physics. There’s the gyaru girl. And, of course, we have the overpowered amnesiac lead who is so obscenely shy that half her dialogue is in pantomime. The characterization is so thin I’m surprised that their models are not literally transparent.

But we’re not here for deep ruminations on the human soul, are we? No, we’re here to see some overly-stylized teenagers do some high-flying ass-kicking! So that part must be good right? I got bad news for you: the action is messy, hard to follow, and extremely headache inducing. The characters don’t match the garish, hyper-saturated 3D backgrounds in both visual style and, worse, in framerate. Even in shots where the background isn’t moving as if the camera is being controlled by a drunk crane operator, the point of view zooms in and out and bounces around like a nap-skipping toddler on caffeine. It’s as if GoHands was afraid that if they didn’t jangle every key in front of our face for the entire scene, we’d lose interest mid-sword swing.

But beyond all that, the biggest sin is the pacing. Characters only have space to do schtick between the barest of exposition. Tone shifts rapidly from “badass” action to cutesy cooking segments where Amnesia Girl shows her new pals how to make otaku struggle meals. (Each episode is named for the dish said girl makes, so I guess this was The Thing GoHands decided the show should be About.) Scenes are smashed together with no sense of time passing. A character is killed in episode 2, and the previews of the next episode suggest that the show is going to tell us why we should’ve cared about this girl in the first place. It’s jarring and exhausting and boring at the same time.

And don’t get me started on the worldbuilding. Almost every human on earth has been vaporized yet social media still functions! Can’t wait for the plot to hinge on the crew posting their 7-Eleven survivalist stews on the ‘Gram. GOD this sucks.

The thing that strikes me the most about the show is that there is clearly effort and skill on display, and yet it is applied in the most artless way I have ever seen. It’s fascinating in that way: a show ostensibly about cooking that lacks taste. For all the “flavor” tossed in, this is very thin gruel.

Ratings:

Story – eh
Characters – verbal tics and trauma
Animation – LOL
Service – too much jiggle
Yuri – no thank you

Overall – canned fish



Sorairo Utility, streaming on HIDIVE

January 13th, 2025

On a turquoise background, girls and golf equipment are scattered about.Who could have possibly imagined that I’d be writing about yet another golf anime. And yet, here we are.

After the breakaway Gundam AU, gay and breathtakingly outlandish Birdie Wing, after which most of fandom understood that what we wanted was more gay and outlandish women’s sports drama, what the old men who run entertainment conglomerates decided was that we needed more anime about golf.  Not the Dinah Shore kind of golf, either. I’d be down for that.

So instead of gay and outlandish rugby anime (I imagine an anime version of Ilona Maher and start praying for  women’s rugby anime immediately) or gay and outlandish guts and tears softball anime, we get more golf. Okay, we work with what we get. I wrote a review of the second season of Tonbo! for Anime News Network and here we are today, talking about Sorairo Utility, streaming on HIDIVE. This is not the same as the Sorairo Utility movie on Crunchyroll.

For once, we begin with a true newbie. Minami is a girl who likes gaming and truly does want to be good at something, anything, but just does not have the skills needed to find a club or sport that she takes to. When she helps an elderly gentleman in town, she finds herself introduced the world of golf… and to the cool onee-san whacking the balls at the driving range. Taken by this older girls’ form and skill, Minami is introduced to the world of amateur golf, with a foursome that is helpful, encouraging and doesn’t mind that she sucks.  Did I mention that the older girl is cool? Haruka lends Minami equipment and advice and encouragement and is very, very cool when she golfs.

This…is very refreshing.The two old dudes have old-man humor, but are very chill as far as their playing goes. And Haruka genuinely seems to want Minami to *enjoy* golf, more than be good at it. It is this last that imbued Tonbo! with its watchability and here, it continues to be the driving force of an anime that is otherwise about learning golf.

Since golf courses in Japan are probably watching their clientele of old dudes in the corporate world aging out and young people skipping things like over-spending in order to get into niche circles of access to power, the recent flight of golf anime probably isn’t that surprising. Anything to get young folks to keep up the old traditions, like shogi, go, and bankrupting one’s self to golf with the boss’s boss.

And fanservice. Because clearly if you’re making an anime about a wholesome sport for “ladies and gentlemen,” that doesn’t have to be for old dudes only, you definitely want to make sure there is a long conversation between the two young females in the shower as that is the only place young women have heart-to-heart discussions. So, yeah, that kinds of sucks the sincerity right out of the series, which is otherwise really kind of nice.

Tiresome service aside, Sora-iro Utility is a shockingly nice anime. About golf.

Ratings:

Art- 7
Characters – 9
Story – 8
Service – 5
Yuri -1

Overall – 7

 



Red Sonja: Consumed, by Gail Simone

January 12th, 2025

Here’s a fact about me that you may not know – I was a huge fan of Robert E. Howard’s Conan The Barbarian series as a tween. Even had a Frazetta poster on my wall. My dad has first editions, which sadly did not survive to be handed down to me and I read those over and over.

It is a miracle of timing and joy that this year has two very decent human beings who I quite like as people as well as creators working on Conan properties. Jim Zub’s Conan the Barbarian and The Savage Sword of Conan both were on many best comics of 2024 lists. Jim is a genuinely nice guy,who gives advice freely to people in his #ComicsSchoolTutorials posts and online. He *gets* what I want from Conan and it is such a genuine pleasure to read his work.

In even more righteous news, today we are gathered together to discuss the miracle that is Gail Simone writing Red Sonja. If you follow American comics at all, you’ll probably have read a character she’s written for. Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, Deadpool, Secret Six, and currently, Uncanny X-Men, which along with Zub’s Conan, are dominating comic sales figures right now.

Simone is a pro-level troll of mediocre brains on social media and an incredibly pleasant person in real life and online. Here, she channels her red haired mischief, her trolling, adds a dollop of “fuck you” and gives us Red Sonja. 

Red Sonja comes from a harsh country in Howard’s series. Hyrkania has little about it of interest except it’s horses and horsecraft. In his books, Sonja is a mercenary like Conan, from as harsh a life as he. They bang heads and other body parts in several novels, but they live parallel lives that only occasionally cross. Here Sonja has broken her lover’s heart to steal a precious item that catapults her into a cursed adventure of demons, gladiator matches, horror and death…just like Howard used to make. This Sonja is going home for the first time in years and will be forced to reckon with her past, as she deals with a new terror.

In Red Sonja: Consumed, Simone gives us the perfect Red Sonja. She is angry. Consumed with rage for losses she has endured, Sonja puts up with no one’s bullshit. Consumed with ill-timed curiosity, Sonja gets herself into and out of trouble constantly. Consumed with hunger – this Sonja has strong carnal appetites. Even reading Howard’s books I assumed Sonja was bisexual at the very least. This Sonja is bisexual and polyamorous and it is handled beautifully. Simone’s Sonja is a master of horsecraft and fighting, as one would expect and she’s fantastic at tactical thinking and kind of shitty at strategy, also as you might expect. Sonja likes meat and doesn’t want to have to decide what kind, just give her some meat to eat.

This last is an ongoing gag in the novel, one that is played just close enough that you might not notice, but it made me laugh every time.

Simone absolutely *gets* Red Sonja in a way that I have spent a lifetime hoping for. Sure, the 1985 movie with Arnold Schwarzanegger and Brigitte Nielsen tried, but it was pretty standard b-movie stuff. What I wanted from Red Sonja was exceptional b-movie stuff! This is the Red Sonja I have been waiting my whole life for.

Ratings:

Overall – 10

Grotesque monsters, hardcore action, and beer maids asking confusion questions about what kind of ale. Red Sonja: Consumed is a fantastic read and the queer as fuck Sonja we knew was in there. The link above goes to Amazon, but I read this through my local library on Libby for free. Libraries are amazing – use your local library!

 



Yuri Network News – (百合ネットワークニュース) – January 11, 2024

January 11th, 2025

In black block letters, YNN Yuri Network News. On the left, in black silhouette, a woman with a broad brim hat and dress stands, a woman in a tight outfit sits against the Y. Art by Mari Kurisato for Okazu

Yuri Manga

Yorita Miyuki has launched the Kickstarter campaign for her next volume of「Her kiss, my libido twinkles and it has already passed the initial and first stretch goal!

Odoriba ni Skirt ga Naru, Volume 5 (踊り場にスカートが鳴る) hit shelves last month.

Via Comic Natalie we have a couple of Yuri-ish items: 

Love ka Like ka Wakaranai! (ラブかライクか分からない!) by SasaKuma will begin serialization in the February issue of Managatime Kirara. This is after 3 stand-alone chapters of the series about the relationship between two best friends have previously run in the magazine.

In Danshi Koukousei, Otome Game no Akuyaku Reijou ni Tenseisuru.Volume 1,  (男子高校生、乙女ゲームの悪役令嬢に転生する。) A boy is reincarnated into an otome game as the villainess and pursues a “non-existent Yuri route.” Check out sample pages in Japanese on Bookwalker.

Gatchi Koi Count 2.9 (ガチ恋カウント2.9) follows office lady Rico who becomes “Heel Maiden Toriko” in the wrestling ring after meeting her favorite wrestler at a home center . It looks absurd, but also fun in the 46-page sample on Bookwalker.

And Dengeki Daioh is running yet another story about a guy reincarnated, this time as the only man in a Yuritopian world
 in Danshi Kinsei Game Sekai de Ore ga Yarubeki Yuiitsu no Koto Yuri no Manihasamaru Otoko toshite Tenseishiteshimaimashita. (男子禁制ゲーム世界で俺がやるべき唯一のこと 百合の間に挟まる男として転生してしまいました).

Via YNN Correspondent Cryssoberyl, Twinstar Cyclone Runaway, Volume 1 is on sale on Bookwalker.  I read this volume, but apparently never got around to reviewing it. ^_^;

 

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Anime News

As mentioned when I reviewed Volume 10 of Sasayakuyouni Koi wo Utau this week, the official news is that there will be no Japanese Blu-ray release for the anime. After delays and news of poor working conditions, this new is a bitter, but not unexpected pill.

I sincerely doubt we’ll get the kind of Yuri we had with GWitch, but Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuux certainly has a bunch of girls, which will undoubtedly cause shipping. Interestingly, Khara and Sunrise, who are teaming up for this series, are releasing a movie first, before the television series. Check out the trailer on Youtube.

SugoiLITE’s SUGOI BINGUS account on X notes that Miss Kobyayshi’s Dragon Maid: A Lonely Dragon Wants To Be Loved, movie sequel from Kyoto Animation will have new info announced this coming week.

 

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Other News

Via Sr. YNN Correspondent Sean Gaffney, loveandladyjustice on Tumblr takes a look at Modern Yuri/BL and Queer Identity.

 

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