2019 starts us off with some big hype shows and some sequels to already huge shows. I never got around to watching Mob Psycho 100 and so I won’t be paying attention to season 2, I wasn’t initially thrilled with the plot of The Promised Neverland, and I can patiently wait for season 2 of Kakegurui to come on Netflix…so I’m sorry I’m not paying any attention to the major franchises, the big-name shows, or the ones with the biggest hype. I suppose I never have been one for big-hype shows or the huge franchises. There’s just something about them that turns me off straight away.

I will start with the first show I watched of the season: Girly Air Force…and I wasn’t exactly impressed by its first episode, which can only be better described as an advert for the Japan Air Self-Defense Force:

The show’s setting isn’t really that impressive, our protagonists and heroes aren’t that exciting to watch, and there is precious little wanting me to tune in next week. Our boy Kei plays the orphan who (of course) finds himself being some kind of savior type person, apparently brought in to ‘boost the morale’ of these supernatural pilots that are assigned/created/designed to save the world from…whatever these Xai things are. Nothing original about that at all; I mean we only need to look at Shinji Ikari who was dragged in out of nowhere to save Tokyo-3 in his opening episode. Except this guy isn’t the one piloting…

When I mention how this has turned into an ad for the JASDF, I meant it. We are told (via our protagonist) about how great the benefits are for signing up (good salary, free dorm, free tuition), we’re shown all sorts of fighter planes, we’re shown where airbases are in Japan…I could go on, but I’m sure that, as this show will progress, we will all be given more incentives to want to join. Should we be calling Girly Air Force some dressed-up propaganda show? Still too early to call that one, but from the looks of it so far…

Meanwhile, the development of each character hasn’t been done very well, leaving this opening episode giving us not much to cheer for. Our male protagonist is a rather dull kid looking for revenge after these Xai creatures killed his parents, and his sidekick childhood friend is just as dull, seemingly wanting to hang on to this guy because she knows no-one else. I’m sure the core of the show will start up in future episodes, but this opener hasn’t really impressed me so far. First impressions mean a lot, and here in Girly Air Force, it’s almost as if the studio just got bored at some point, and maybe thought “oh, let’s just advertise the JASDF some more to fill space”.

*sigh* I just hope this gets better. At least I have one ‘flying girl’ show to enjoy this season.

The plot of The Magnificent Kotobuki‘s first episode doesn’t give us a lot to go on, but there is an awful lot to make up for that. While people will be put off by the CG that is frequently used in the show, other little things like sound design and plane detail shine here, and give the show a real charm. I got the impression that this first episode was just to show off how well these 5 girls could pilot ancient (oh sorry…vintage) fighter planes as a part of a private fighter corps, since precious little in the way of character design was applied here, aside from that they all appear to have a nice dynamic between them, and that one of them like pancakes.

It is these dogfights in the air that will get me to keep tuning in. As this is an original anime, none of us have any advance as to what could happen here, but I certainly hope that they keep a good balance of plane dogfighting and slice-of-life here, because I think too much of one would ruin this.

So let’s move on to Domestic Girlfriend, that other HIDIVE show I’m watching, and it’s…okay…I guess…so far?

I’d call its opening episode a bit too cliched, but then again, this show’s plot is a bit too cliched anyway. Our guy Natsuo has a crush on his teacher Hina, but he knows he should be finding someone his own age, and so finds himself spending the night and losing his virginity with another girl, Rui, after meeting her at a mixer and so it seems so desperately cliched how, only a few days later, Natsuo’s widowed father decides to remarry, and for Natsuo to learn that not only will he have Hina as a step-sister, but Rui too.

I liked Rui straight away. She fits the role of that emo/not-quite-emo girl that you’d see in high school. I can easily picture her as the type who secretly had a Livejournal (like me), listened to weird European post-rock bands on her phone (also like me), and filled in ‘photographer’ in her career guidance form at school (also…umm…yeah…). Thing is, though, she really does seem like a fish out of water in Domestic Girlfriend. While Natsuo acts like the regular schoolboy, her older sister Hina is upbeat and positive to the point of irritating, and the parents are both a rather jolly couple, Rui is gloomy, moody and cynical, but you can see that there is more to her than just that. She clearly wants the best for her mother, and so supports the remarriage, but everything else to her is just noise. It’s not so much that a character design like her doesn’t fit compared to the others, it’s more so that the others are relatively weaker. Anime shows need more characters like Rui, who appear (so far) to be more multi-dimensional than the people around her. Natsuo is a good guy, and wants good things to happen to the people he knows (his father, his friends, etc.), but there’s just something about him that feels…off. Meanwhile Hina is the kind of woman we see in so many rom com shows; bubbly, cheerful, talkative, emotional, etc. Having not read the long-running manga, I don’t know whether we’ll see more dimensions in either Natsuo or Hina. I certainly hope we do, although I wouldn’t mind Rui stealing the show.

Domestic Girlfriend has a lot of potential to be a good show that people will really like, but the cliches that appear here put the show in danger of making it just another dime-a-dozen rom com. Amazon/HIDIVE put out two romantic drama shows (Scum’s Wish and Love & Lies) that I enjoyed for their refreshing approach to school romance. Not sure if I’ll see anything like that here, but you know, wishful thinking and all.

So those are the shows that I (didn’t) pick. Am I moaning? No, of course not. If I treat Girly Air Force as what it is (potentially a propaganda tool for the JASDF), then I should have no problem with it, and if I don’t expect anything stellar from Domestic Girlfriend, then I won’t have any issues with that either. But you guys picked Kemono Friends as my classic/out-of-season show. I understand that this show has now become some kind of post-modern icon of a show now; not exactly the kind of anime others look up to and aim to be, but the fact that the show generated so much charm and popularity despite being so incredibly low-budget shows us that an anime doesn’t need to have heaps of CGI, a bunch of high-paid voice actors and a huge budget to impress the audience.

Episode 1 was the intro episode, where we meet our two main characters, Serval and Kaban, for the first time. We learn quickly that Kaban has amnesia, and has no idea what her name is, where she came from, or even what she is. We as the viewer all know that she’s a human, but in this bizarre and immense world of Japari Park full of anthropomorphic animal girls, you can understand how she can struggle when there’s not a single human to be seen.

By the way, I absolutely love this show already, and am kicking myself really really hard for not watching it sooner and I don’t even care how little it cost to make, its OP theme has been stuck in my head for days, which is something that very rarely happens to me…(and so I’m treating that as a positive).

The show’s sequel comes out this season, and there are a lot of people who are choosing to boycott it, purely because its director and nearly all of the staff aren’t coming back. I still have this first season to watch first…and I will probably join these boycotters, but not for the reasons they have, but even after only watching episode 1 of this, I’m pretty convinced that any future seasons of Kemono Friends won’t live up to this. The fact that it was made by 10 people in the space of 500 days adds an awful lot of charm to it. This Medium article written in April 2017 (when the show was ending) explains a lot more about it:

Kemono Friends Has No Budget, and That’s Okay (Medium)

With the big franchises and popular shows now getting worldwide trends on Twitter, do you think we’ll see our favourite shows expand their reach to a larger market? I mean, just wait until My Hero Academia and One Punch Man return…that’ll end up becoming something everyone will be talking about. Should I feel bad that, while it’s been so long since it first came out, that I have only ever seen one episode of My Hero Academia?

…but how did this new season start for you? Have the shows you picked to watch delivered? How long do you think we’ll have to wait until season 2 of Kakegurui arrives on Netflix? Feel free to hit that like button and air your opinions in the comments below…