Adding to the extensive and mostly excellent list of series Yuri fans were watching this year was  a pretty amazing look at the obstacle course of demands young, up-coming voice actors are asked to navigate. Management, rivals, the demands (often incoherent and or dangerous) of fans, and their own lives all pile up here in a tumultuous tale of what it takes to be a star as a Japanese voice actor.

The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio, streaming on Crunchyroll, follows two young women who are rivals in the job market, classmates in their real lives, completely opposite types as humans and destined to be great together. It’s a classic case of people who cannot stand each other being amazing as partners. Satou Yumiko (professional name Utatane Yasumi) and Watanabe Chika (professional name Yugure Yuhi) are working together on a online “radio” show in which they play cute high school students, chatting about daily things. Their ratings are not great, but they are trying their best.

The series is honest (in some cases brutally so) about the life of an actor, always running after new roles, and rarely afforded stability. As the series progresses scandals, both real and manufactured, cause the pair to reassess how they are doing things…and why…and for whom. The series does not shy away from fan-driven hysteria and over-posessiveness or, like Jellyfish Can’t Swim In The Night, a rival sabotaging a career. I find it interesting that two different series used that same plot complication in the same season. I don’t pay attention to idol news, but this seems like it must have been related to something in real life.

These scenes come with an emotional cost for the characters, but they are both dedicated to their jobs and try to find ways to succeed. Maybe a little too much of everything that might happen happens, but that’s to be expected in a fiction.

That said, I once again find myself beating a drum that is well-worn this season.  Because in the second half of the series, it is not the actors, their rivals, fans or their own limitations that need to be overcome…it is once again the adults around them who fail them. Let me tell you, I yelled at the screen quite a bit.

Watanabe’s mother’s “bet” that she forces on her daughter was just stupid and pointless, but watching Satou excoriating herself for not performing up to a standard which is never stated absolutely enraged me. I literally shouted “You’re the DIRECTOR, direct!” out loud. More than once. 

Of course I understood that I was supposed to be watching Satou grow and mature, but from my point of view all I saw was a teenager desperately in need of a single adult to *teach* them what they needed to know. And it really pissed me off that until the verryyyyyyyyyyy end, no one did and none of the adults stepped up to be that person. No. Fuck that. If your teen doesn’t know how to change a tire – teach them. They won’t learn it by osmosis when you don’t do it, either. And don’t work with directors who say things like “We gave you the role because we felt you would give us 120%” without ever telling you what that means.

The opening and ending themes were very good, surprisingly. The animation occasionally reminded me of early-career drawing in which three-quarter faces are oddly flattened. I’m not sure if that was meant to echo the manga or animation was being done on the cheap as it seems to always be now.

Overall, I genuinely enjoyed The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio, and the relationships – and, yes, intimacy, both personal and professional that we see between not only the young women who are voice actors, but also different kinds of affection from their managers and mothers. I liked the not-friendships, professional relationships and mentor/protege relationships that are presented to us between peers. I liked that both Watanabe and Satou managed to find their own solutions to other people’s problems. I loved that their true fans protected them from the shitty people who call themselves “fans,” and I liked that they worked out their own relationship between them.

Ratings:

Art – 6
Story – 8
Characters – 9
Service – Meh, but the late use of “Yuribait” was quite good. ^+^
Yuri – 2, in Mekuru’s obsessive admiration of Otome

Overall – 8

As an insight to the life of a voice actor…I think it’s pretty good, too. Of course not every actor has to deal with all of these situations, but anyone following English voice actor news in the last few years will see that this can be a really fraught career.

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.