In the context of Sound Euphonium, the word “finale” takes on an extra layer of meaning. This is the final act of an anime series that has been around since 2015. We have spent three times the number of years a Japanese student actually spends in high school with this series that is redolent with nostalgia for high school. Today we’re going to look at the other anime this season that came close, but just did not quite nail the landing.

As some of you may remember, I did not like – indeed, actively avoided – this series, until the unbridled genius of Liz And The Blue Bird convinced me that, despite my distaste for the animation, the story would be worth my time. I have not been disappointed…but this series has left me with as much frustration as admiration.

In Sound Euphonium, Season 3, streaming on Crunchyroll, Kumiko is now the band president and once again the band has voted to push themselves to their limit in hopes of gaining gold in the Nationals. This series does not look away from the level of effort that it takes to excel, even going so far to show it as a kind of emotional and physical abuse. Even knowing that young people choose this kind of training every day in a myriad of endeavors, does not make it less horrible for me to watch. I remember the late nights and early mornings of band practice in a band that was never going to win anything but a participation trophy. We still tried. We tried our best, even when the adults around us failed us. I remember the best performance we ever gave was heard by no one but us, as we waited for our dumpster fire of a band director to find keys to let us back in to the band room after a miserable performance at a competition.  We were amazing, playing out our anger and frustration as we stood there, late at the end of a long day. I still hate that song.

It is because of my personal experience with some of the worst band directors ever to have been born on this planet that I loathe and despise Taki-sensei, a man who allowed his capricious and pointless decisions to make the band members question their existence and throw the band into chaos for no good reason. Knowing that the anime is different from the novel slightly makes me want to read that, to fix the crime which we all witnessed.

The crime? Simply that the second performance…was better. Kumiko *should* have gotten the soli part.

You’ll argue that the students picked the winner that time…but Reina calls that into question with her confession. She has an unhealthy obsession with Taki-sensei and knows how he chose.  She even said, repeatedly that they all have to trust his decisions. But I, at a distance want to shout, “No, you do NOT have to trust this man. You should not, he is not on your side.” He’s unwilling to care for the emotional well-being of the band, ignores a very problematic situation with a student and admits he just goes with his guts. You are forced to trust in him, but at no point is he trustworthy.

So the end of the series is bittersweet, in the way so many Japanese high school narratives are. And then we get a coda which almost, but not quite hits the gold. I expected exactly the scene we were given, but hoped it would take place literally anywhere else. It felt too much like holding on to the past and not enough like moving forward.

I would consider this series, like so many this season, to be a deep dive into intimacy and friendship, but I will also acknowledge that Reina and Kumiko’s skinship was a consistent player on the field. Nonetheless, it never once read  – to me, obviously – that their relationship was more intimate than a friendship borne of shared experience, heartbreak and joy. Really, that was so much of what band was. We had crazy ups and downs all four years. In the end, what I remember most were all our parties, rather than the trips for hours only to lose a competition.

So…was this a good series? Yes. Beautifully animated (and we can really see in the flashbacks during the musical performance how much the animation has changed in 9 years) well-written, except for those niggling annoyances that I cannot let go of, and the music is, honestly excellent. Every season the musical performance has impressed me and this season may be my favorite of the three. The fact that the music is not hidden, or truncated, and that we are able to hear what we would normally just have to imagine for the competition, made this series worth watching.

Ratings:

Animation – 9
Story – 9
Characters – 9, but I have opinions about individual characters
Service – The carving up of body parts is less intrusive, but still distracting to me.
Yuri – 0, but 8 for intimacy

Overall – 9

As a person who now seeks out series in which women can be non-romantically intimate and build different kinds of relationships, even with the problems in this narrative, Sound Euphonium is a very solid recommendation from me.

I most especially liked the moment when every single band member, their instrument, position and name are listed out.

Of the several, Yuri, Yuri-adjacent and Yuri-adjacent-adjacent series (which I differentiate internally from “Cute Girls Doing Cute Things Cutely’ series, which is why I keep using phrases as ridiculous as “Yuri-adjacent-adjacent”) we have enjoyed this season, one stands above the rest in doing that rarest of anime achievements – sticking the landing.

Train To The End of The World, streaming on Crunchyroll, absolutely stuck the landing. 100 out of 100 points to the writers who knew where they were going through the entire season and never let us down.

In a story that was ostensibly about the many ways humans can lose their humanity, this story unerringly gave us a clear path to remembering what makes us human. Kindness, intimacy, teamwork, shared purpose, and above all friendship, were the keys to making this series end exactly where it had to.

But oh my goodness, how we got there was such an incredibly journey. Everything about this series was fantastic. From the Ikebukuro owl kidnapping Yoka, that initiated the entire story, to a crack force of deranged manga artists in Tezuka-style berets, using genre tropes as weapons, this story plumbed the weird and wild of otaku fetishes and genre cliches, strung them into a Theater of the Absurd horror/scifi story so deftly, that I was constantly amazed that this was an original anime and not adapted from some award-winning sci-fi novelist’s work.

Ratings:

Art – 9
Story – 10
Characters – 10
Yuri – 0/ Intimacy – 10
Service – Yes, and no in equal measure mostly at the same time.

Overall – 10.

An absolute must-watch for experienced anime watchers. Not sure I would suggest it for someone new to the medium. Like Chainsaw Man, it requires some contextualizing within the medium for full enjoyment and understanding.

In a season of anime in which emotionally intimate relationships between young women are shown through multiple ways, some more realistic that others, Train To The End of The World stands out as a series that both remained utterly true to telling a deeply satisfying story about those kinds of relationships and simultaneously, gleefully embracing the most surreal way of doing so.

We are coming to the end of another surprising season of anime with a number of Yuri, Yuri-adjacent and Yuri-adjacent-adjacent series. Most of these anime were interesting to watch,  One was outstanding – we’ll talk about that one shortly, some were overall excellent with fatal flaws – weirdly, two of them shared much the same flaw, IMHO. Today we’re going to look at one of the latter.

As I watched Jellyfish Can’t Swim In the Night, streaming on HIDIVE,, I was once again reminded of Bee Train being asked about the Yuri in Noir at Anime Expo 2002, a panel that for reasons, I moderated.  When asked about the Yuri in Noir, Bee Train members replied “If you want to see it, it’s there.” That was 22 years ago. In 2024, that same cavalier attitude toward Yuri has very much colored fans feelings about the ending of Jellyfish, an otherwise good story about finding people who help you accept yourself and whom you can accept in return. It’s a pretty standard cute-teen doing cute stuff, on a larger scale than just a high school club, so I hesitate to call it “slice-of-life.” It’s a rare life that is writ that large. And good for those folks who do get to that scale. They work hard to get there, as our group utilizes the skills they each uniquely bring to the whole.

On the one hand, this is a glossy story of outcasts making a place for themselves…which becomea a little complicated if you read it “You should find friends that accept you,” instead of “When you accept yourself, it might be easier for you to find a place for yourself in the world.” But these outcasts do learn to love themselves, and each other and they take their moment in the limelight to do their very best. It doesn’t matter whether it was good or not, honestly. They embraced their chance.

For many fans the major problem of the series is the staff’s comments about potential Yuri in the series.  Like that Bee Train comment, this is another example of a bunch of people with no emotional skin in the game, using Yuri as a tactic to create engagement within fandom. As a person who has been watching companies do that to fandom for literal decades, I’m more surprised at the series that do stand up for their characters, like the folks involved with Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, than I am at those which do not and don’t much care about the consequences.

Fans have been pretty vocal about their disappointment in the use of a kiss between two characters as a throw-away, “This is something that might happen, but no matter, it has no meaning” moment. Especially in a series which did have a solid plot line about gender identity. I hate to paint myself as jaded, but given the overt Yuri of Whisper Me A Love Song, I felt that loss less keenly than the one real problem I had with the anime. That last song disappointed me. Music is subjective of course, but I was hoping for something more epic. On the positive side, the story did avoid an obvious pitfall in which our leads are pitted against one another, but I am convinced we have limited budget and time to thank for that, rather than pure-hearted storytelling. Had the series been 24 episodes long, I have no doubt it would have gone there

The phrase “Yuri scam” seems to have been coined by some portion of fandom online for this series, when Yuri bait doesn’t quite strike the same chord. The sentiment expressed by those people are “we were set up, and let drop. Just to see what happened.”

Do I think this was a Yuri anime? No and I don’t think it was trying to be one.

I do think this was an anime about intimacy and friendship – something I apparently can’t get enough of. But as for what we wished to see, we’re going to have to get directors and producers in anime who have some need to give us representation, in the way the staff of She Loves To Cook, She Loves To Eat, does, before we’ll see anything change.

Ratings

Art – 8
Story – 8
Characters – 8
Yuri – 4
Service – 5 There were some seriously unneeded ass and crotch shots that make me worry about the future of humanity, but then so does the massive money being poured into “AI” that tells people to eat a rock a day.

Overall – 8

Will Jellyfish be something we come back to year after year? Probably not. Nonetheless as an ultimately “feel good about yourself” anime, Jellyfish did what it set out to do, did not do things it had no intention of doing, and told the story that it had to tell. 

Watch Jellyfish Can’t Swim In The Night on HIDIVE and let me know what you think!

What makes good science fiction?

This is a question that I have been asking a lot as I watch Train To The End Of The World, streaming now on Crunchyroll.

In the near future, a young woman, Yoka, is scooped up by a famous Japanese sculpture of an owl and deposited in the middle of a huge gathering. She is clearly unwilling to be the center of so much attention, but is forced to click a giant “7G” button that will enable something something. As she hits the button, reality is scrambled and nothing on Earth is ever the same again.

In a small, provincial town west of Tokyo, Yoka’s friends are now living among wild animals who used to be the adults of the town. Shizuru, the leader of Yoka’s friends, is obsessed with finding Yoka, as they had parted on bad terms. With the help of a transformed railway employee, she enables a single train car to try to try and find her friend. With too little preparation, Shizuru and her friends Reimi, Akira and Nadekko are heading to Ikebukuro, 30 train stops away from their town and into some of the best science fiction I have encountered in anime.

In my opinion, dystopias are far too easy. We, in 2024, can understand exactly how we got to Blade Runner, Mad Max, Akira, or even Silent Mobius. But in Train To Nowhere, the dystopia makes no apparent sense. Some things work, some do not. People are changed from town to town in unpredictable ways. The unpredictability is, for me, one of the key features of this series. This isn’t just about getting somewhere attacked by persistent gangs or capitalists or even demons. There *may* be gangs, but why and how they formed will be more interesting than just hoarding gasoline or water. 

Secondly, I have decided as I watched, good science fiction ought to make me feel slightly uncomfortable. And not just “oh gosh, will /some pointless violence that probably feels very rape-y or just be rape/ happen to our female protagonists?” (Again, I think of that female character in one of The Saint novels who asked out loud, exhausted, bored and annoyed at the threats being made at her, “Why does it always have to be rape?”) No, good science fiction makes you uncomfortable because even if you understand what might happen, you may not understand what the consequences are.  In Train To Nowhere, the girls’ movement through subsequent towns may have repercussions we cannot imagine. What might happen when they arrive in Ikebukuro – what has become of Yoka? Neither we, nor her friends know or can guess.

And then, there is what readers of Okazu will undoubtedly see as either Yuri or Yuri-adjacent. Shizuru’s friendship with Yoka was close and the loss of her friend weighs heavily upon her. That loss compels her to learn how to drive a train through an unimaginably bent reality. That’s certainly a level of intimacy that I find compelling.

There is a manga adaptation of the anime that is currently on Kadokawa’s Comic Walker in Japanese (which is down, as I write this, so check back later.) It really surprises me that this an original anime first and is not adapted from a novel or LN. This is exactly the kind of science fiction I would have imagined came out of the SF genre in Japan.

Ratings:

Art – 8, especially when it comes to the newly configured landscapes
Characters – 8 A good ensemble, but I relate best to Akira, the person least likely to walk into the creepy bath
Story – 9 The episodes favor visual impact over narrative coherence, but its still very decent
Service – Mild, and ignorable
Yuri – As I see it, 6

Overall – 8

We haven’t had the time the characters have had to learn to accept this new reality – and many of the viewers are indeed responding as if they have been thrown into it. “WTF am I watching?” was a common response to Episode 1. As for me, my response was that Train To Nowhere is good science fiction, and whatever happens, I’ll be watching.