SingleH

Be it for better or worse, 2019 is not over yet, but after taking an effort to analyze much of the upcoming Fall lineup, I don’t think it is at all early to claim I have found the single worst anime of the year already. While you may be able to gravely fault things like either second season of One Punch Man or Kemono Friends for being an insult to the creatives behind previous seasons, and while you may also be able to do something similar for Arifureta Shokugyō de Sekai Saikyō for serving as an exceptional low point in the production quality of modernTV animation, you’d be hard pressed to find something as bad as Carole & Tuesday which is as terrible as it is on its own creative rights. While anyone over the age of fourteen has probably long since resolved Studio Bones to the vaults of their embarrassing preteen memory, no one can deny the studio is capable of bringing some seriously impressive works of animation to life given the right collection of staff, proven by their work on Concrete Revolutio, Space☆Dandy, Star Driver, and others, and no such concession needs to be made with award winning, fan favorite director Shinichiro Watanabe heading the project. While the list of talented, capable staff isn’t as long as most top tier anime, his name is certainly nothing to scoff at, and the idea this would turn out to be such a heinous scrap of rancid garbage was a disheartening shock to my system. Hopes and expectations notwithstanding, I’m here to tell you Carole & Tuesday is the worst anime of the year. Carole—who's the black one by the way, I swear to God that was a trap on purpose—and Tuesday are two young girls down on their luck. Carole is a penniless street performer and Tuesday is a runaway rich girl estranged from her family, but they fatefully discover one another through their music and decide to continue their humble craft together, only to soon be swept away by their own untapped well of talent and take the world by storm. It’s a pretty cliche setup as far as western media is concerned, but it’s unique in the context of anime, and it’s not inherently bad. However, everything about its execution is either messy or, more often, downright abhorrent. This show is criminally soulless. The voice actresses don’t sing their own songs and, including all the side characters you meet along the way, are always switched with doubtfully professional vocalists during every musical number. Even if you like the show and characters, you’ll be immersed only until the singing begins, and then you’ll have to sit there for two and a half minutes while two English vocalists who don’t sound even remotely similar to Carole or Tuesday’s Japanese voice actresses take over, and the Japanese animators who don't understand English vowel sounds or mouth movements completely fail to match the English lyrics to the mouth animation, making the disconnect even worse and ruining the experience for anyone who isn’t both blind AND deaf. And even that is only concerning Carole and Tuesday’s English vocalist. Wait till you see some of the side performers I mentioned, like Pyotr for example, who is this preteen Instagram Celebrity who purposefully sounds like 2010 Justin Bieber as some kind of hackneyed joke only to suddenly develop a low-pitched, full-toned man’s voice when singing. And it gets more and more criminal as it goes on. I mean, they bring in Megumi Hayashibara in this one episode, and the replacement vocalist for her silky, dulcet voice is the full, powerful voice of a black woman! The animation production behind the performances—and the entire show for that matter—is just as terrible. You’ll see something like Crystal’s sequence in episode six which has a minimum of ELEVEN OFF-MODEL FRAMES, you’ll see something like GGK’s sequence in episode nine where the character’s entire costume is colored via a still image filling, or you’ll see something like Pyotr’s sequence in episode eight which is just fully, unabashedly rotoscoped. For such a gargantuan joke, this show isn’t even funny. As if I needed to tell you, all the instruments are CG, and if I had a dollar for every time Tuesday’s horrendous digital white outline shading clipped though the 3D shading of her guitar, I could personally fund someone to hand draw this entire laughingstock trainwreck myself. Speaking of character shading, the characters’ hands are all CG too, and the director clearly had no fucking clue how to integrate this well, which itself is generously assuming they even could integrate it well given the PS2 graphics quality of all the CG. When the shot composition is just the hands on the instruments, I guess it’s acceptable. I mean, it’s just ugly CG. Nothing new about that. But when they try to have a character’s entire body in the shot, connecting the CG hands to the hand-drawn arms, it’s laughable. And I didn’t mean to so quickly brush over the rotoscoping in this show, seeing as it’s easily the production’s biggest, most fatal vice. As of episode twenty three, eighty four point seven three percent of all performance sequences are rotoscoped, and this is not including the two scenes in the show which are rotoscoped for character animation totally separated from the music. Bones’ 20th Anniversary Production, ladies and gentleman, this is it. And if you’re holding onto hope the few hand-drawn performances are animated by Yutaka Nakamura or something, like the legendary Viva All dance sequence from Space☆Dandy, you’re lying to yourself. No, no, no. Didn’t you know the second anime original My Hero Academia movie is coming out this year?! They’ve gotta chain that poor, weary soul to a chair so he can animate some more lifeless, mindlessly directed pieces of barely on-model sakuga, for which his genga is getting more and more scribbly as the years dredge on. And keep in mind the show is well aware the hopeless mice animating the few hand-drawn performances aren’t worth their salt at all, because they only let them do it for the nobody filler characters and let the digital camera do the heavy lifting for the characters who actually matter. Every. Single. Performance. Of Carole and Tuesday, the losers who are supposed to be the main fucking heroines of this god awful excuse for an anime, are fully rotoscoped. I’m not even kidding, and I urge you to go visit the cringe comedy image gallery for this show which I personally compiled and posted on my profile page, because a significant amount of those repulsively hideous screenshots are from these ROTOSCOPED SCENES. Like, Jesus Christ, people! Are you not already rotoscoping this?! IS IT THAT HARD TO TRACE A FUCKING PICTURE SOME DIGITAL CAMERA ALREADY DREW FOR YOU, YOU UNTALENTED SWINE?!?!? And forget the rotoscoping, honestly, because the rest of the show is immeasurably worse. Even having just taken the week off between seasons, they had to delay episode fifteen a week back. It’s no surprise considering episode fourteen was one of the ugliest episodes of TV anime I’ve finished in recent memory without dropping the show immediately afterwards, but it’s still utterly disgraceful. The show’s background art is some of the ugliest I’ve ever seen—forget about how generic, choppily colored, blatantly overlapped, and abundantly digital they are—simply because the characters don’t look like they belong on said backgrounds at all. There wasn’t a single person animating this farce who knew a single thing about depth of field, so even the endless scenes of our cast of wholly uncharismatic washouts blabbering on about banal bullshit look like garbage even though the only thing needing actual animation on screen is their mouth movements since they look like they’re FLOATING ABOVE THEIR SEATS! And God knows the bodily proportions are never anatomically accurate. I remind you this is Bones’ 20th Anniversary Production, so happy fucking anniversary. I keep wanting to roll on to my next complaint without elaborating on the sheer depth of each element’s individual failure. Since the show sure didn’t, I’ve got to give some attention to those side characters I mentioned, because everyone outside the main rival is, in literal context, a joke. The show is so eager to construct worthless challenges and undefined hurdles, but every single artist Carole and Tuesday face off against is a walking meme. The cold open of the show reveals Carole and Tuesday are, indeed, going to become an international phenomenon, but for half the show they’re treated like little babies with no talent who need to do as they’re told and respect the greats, but they’re being told this by a bunch of old losers out of their prime whilst the only young people on the same level as the girls are, again, ALWAYS blown off as joke characters who were never even a competitor to begin with. In the one proper tournament arc the show bothers to set up, the initial audition itself displays no one but idiots the judges all unanimously scoff at. You leave the scene wondering why you even watched it, seeing as it set up no potential challengers and only managed to make fun of black people, Indian people, Chinese people, and European people all in the span of seventy two seconds. I remind you this is the same so-called competition in which our girls really had to give their all against such staunch competition as a trio of black transgender women—or at least male crossdressers—who come on stage only to sing the lyrics, in English, as follows: -Fucking bullshit. -Fucking bullshit. -Fucking bullshit. -Holy shit, oh fucker. -Fucking bullshit. -Fucking bullshit. -Goddamn bullshit. -Son of a bitch, what the hell? -Oh, motherfucker, goddamn bullshit, holy shit. -Oh, holy shit, bullshit, goddamn motherfucker. (Motherfucker.) -Oh, fucking bastard, goddamn fucking shit. (Oh, fucking shit.) -Son of a motherfucking bitch. (Oh, shit.) I’m sorry, but if there’s a joke here, I’m not getting it. I’m not five years old like whatever retard wrote this disgrace, and I’m not going to giggle just because someone says a naughty word, and moreover, HOW DID THESE ASSHOLES EVEN GET PAST THE AUDITION WE JUST SAW WHERE THE JUDGES DISMISSED PEOPLE SEEMINGLY JUST FOR HAVING FOREIGN ACCENTS?!?!??!? Which is a great segue into this show’s delightful writing, because if you thought this show’s nauseating audio/visual presentation was all it had to worry about, you’ve got another thing coming. The writing behind it all is equally, stupefyingly abysmal. The character writing and dialogue is downright infuriating and made me—for lack of a better term—rage quit certain episodes which I had to pause and come back to just to stay calm and away from objects I might’ve hurt myself with. I seriously forgot what it was like to get so vehemently angry at a fucking screen. For example, in consideration of Tuesday’s status as a runaway teenager, Carole asks, “Are you okay being on camera?” ARE YOU OKAY BEING ON CAMERA?! Bitch, you FILMED YOURSELVES and uploaded it to the internet to get famous and went out of your own way to make an Instagram account with pictures of both your faces, TAKEN PERSONALLY BY YOU, to attempt to build your fanbase. There is such an overwhelming sea of lines which should be totally nonchalant throwaway piece of dialogue which end up breaking a character or the entire eternal logic of the narrative like a twig. There’s this other time they meet this musical legend guy, and his backstory is that he was in love with this other guy, that guy died, and the future legend consequentially “lost the ability to sing.” He then SUNG SONGS and GOT FAMOUS SINGING, became beloved, and only then did his fans’ support allow him to “find the strength to continue singing.” But you just got famous by singing…RIGHT?! There’s so many lines that contradict themselves, WITHIN themselves. Like this other, other time when the girls muse over their rival, Angela, having a larger social media presence than themselves, “Ehh!? Look how many follows she has!” What happened to her being internationally famous as a model before even holding a microphone? Did the show just forget a main character’s backstory, BECAUSE I SURE DIDN’T! Like this other, other, other time when Gus, Carole and Tuesday’s manager and alleged comic relief character, suddenly starts categorically claiming everyone from Texas—yes, the actual state of Texas in actual America—is populated entirely by wild western cowboys in, I remind you, THE MIDDLE OF THE SPACE AGE. I must say, though, as someone from Texas myself, all I could think of while first attempting to process the ridiculousness of that scene was, yup, this fat deadbeat cuck whose wife left him for a woman is most certainly from the good ol’ Lone Star State. God, this show made me sick. Like this other, other, other, other time when Carole, a drifting orphan, finally gets to meet her father who tracked her down after seeing her on TV after he inserted himself into the story by buying a ticket to Mars, FROM EARTH, after just having got out of his SEVENTEEN YEAR PRISON SENTENCE. Like this other, other, other, other, other time the squad is brought in by this music guru to…I don’t even know, honestly, but this guy invites them over, and given his enigmatic social perception, Carole decides to ask, “Um, are all those rumors true? Like, that you’ll die if you’re exposed to sunlight?” Good question, except she asks this while THEY’RE STANDING IN A FUCKING AAAAHHHHHHHHAHAHA OH MY GOD A FUCKING GREENHOUSE!!!! Alright, I was about to wind down here, but I must discuss this show’s attempt at theming. At this point, this review has been nothing but taking candy from a baby. This show obviously wasn’t trying, because how on Earth could you ever turn out this product if you were, so me railing on it just came off as vain. Luckily, this show really tries on its themes, and while I could’ve spent this time steepening the mountain of scripting flaws from the last paragraph like the fact the character Roddy finds Carole and Tuesday’s exact location from their Instagram in episode two in exactly eighteen seconds documented on screen, remarking how careless they were for not disabling that functionality, yet Tuesday’s mother and brother with infinite funds and a later established information gathering network can’t find their runaway family member for the life of them for five whole episodes, I think taking the time for this is necessary so this review actually has a sense of back and forth. Carole & Tuesday does entertain a disproportionally large number of ideas, but again, it’s all vapid, surface level bullshit trying to distract you from the fact anything else your attention could possible fixate on is uglier than roadkill and worse written than Sword Art Online. But the one concept they genuinely tried to make meaningful…was their copy of the Cowboy Bebop universe. For those of you who forgot (or for those of you who for some reason haven’t seen Cowboy Bebop), the Earth has suffered from a cataclysmic event ruining the landscape almost entirely and sending whatever factions of the populace with the means to other planets. But really only Mars, Venus, and the Moon, since technology has advanced that far, but not far enough to leave the solar system. The difference, however, is in Cowboy Bebop the demographic groups left behind on Earth were those who you’d realistically expect to have been. They weren’t a specific race or ethnicity, it was just a vague mix of third-world citizens, like South Americans, Balkans, Southeast Asians, and Africans who would’ve been too numerous for international powers to reach out to when evacuating the planet in a real world crisis scenario. Ed’s last name wasn’t Williams, or Johnson, or Brown, or Jackson, or Davis, it was Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV. There’s a reason that name contains a comically ridiculous amount of ancestries, as well as a reason my example names were the Google search results for “most common black last names in America.” It’s because in Carole & Tuesday the people left behind on Earth are specifically—and as far as the show lets us know—exclusively black people from first-world countries. Yes, that’s insurmountably retarded given black people’s relative population spread and resource wealth on the planet in today’s present age—forget the future age of this show—but this contrivance most importantly serves as the foundation for one of the most backwards attempts at sociopolitical thematic commentary in the anime medium. So…Earth is screwed along with its populace who is apparently comprised entirely of black people from first-world countries who—AND THIS IS REAL FUCKIN’ IMPORTANT—the show insists on explicitly calling “refugees” at all times despite its technically incorrect denotative implications, and the stage is thusly set for Valerie Simmons. Valerie is the upstart Martian presidential candidate whose big, bold idea to change the pace of society is to ban any and all “refugees” from Earth from entering Mars under all circumstances since they’re perceived as lower class, under educated, uncivilized, and a general pollution to Martian society, and her supporters are exclusively white skinned, blue eyed, blonde haired people who show their support for Valerie’s campaign and patriotism towards their state by dawning bright red hats with the candidate’s slogan on them—OKAY YOU SEE WHERE THIS IS GOIN’ YET?! Seeing as we’ve already taken the liberty to excuse the dumbass contrivances behind this farce, this should be all fine and dandy until you learn all of Valerie’s blatantly racist and classist political propositions were orchestrated behind the scenes by Jerry, the infamous political advisor, and Valerie herself actually has a heart of gold, is a strict but ultimately loving mother, and was largely manipulated by Jerry into her current level of corruption. I’m sorry, WHAT?! Why instate such astronomically feigned plot devices like asserting all of Mars is united peacefully under a single governing body, use such politically charged and inflammatory labels as “refugees” even when the word isn’t even logically applicable since the migration in question is not involuntary, and paint such racially suggestive portrayals as making one hundred percent of the discriminated blacks targeted exclusively by whites to concoct such a boldfaced Donald Trump parallel only to turn around and assert that very same parallel is a totally upstanding person?! Is Carole & Tuesday trying to tell me the sex offender running my country is actually a totally chill guy I just have the wrong idea of being sat ignorantly behind a TV screen EVEN THOUGH WOMEN HAVE BEEN ACCUSING THE GUY OF TOUCHING THEM SINCE BEFORE HALF THIS SHOW’S VIEWERSHIP WAS EVEN BORN!?!?!?!?!???!?!? I contemplated censoring my hatred towards this show considerably for this review, seeing as an obtusely negative review may come across as toxic and bad for the community, but after coming to terms with the fact saying anything other than exactly what I did would’ve been outright dishonest, I realized this was the only way I could’ve gone forward in good conscious. Carole & Tuesday is just that bad and with that few redeeming qualities. The bits and pieces of Watanabe’s personal direction were nice if quaint like the laundry mat beatbox scene, but he was Chief Director, which for those of you who don’t know, is effectively an oversight producer who audits the actual directors’ work, so any personally directed scenes from the man himself were few, far between, and hard to appreciate or even identify given just how ugly the show looks on a second to second basis. I honestly don’t blame him at all for distancing himself from the production as much as possible though. Back when MAPPA was still a healthy studio under Masao Maruyama’s sound leadership, they worked their asses off to bring he and Yoko Kanno’s vision to life with Kids on the Slope, a show which actually innovates on and brings to life rotoscoped artwork and which actually has high-quality musical numbers to accompany its instrumental storyline, so I can totally see the horrendous work Bones was doing this time around killing any and all motivation he could’ve possibly had going in. One thing’s for sure, though, it most certainly killed any and all motivation I personally had to put myself through any one more god damn second of it too. I’ve seen thousands of anime, and this may just be my least favorite one. Thank you for reading.

AndoCommando

Imagine, if you will, a moment of bliss. The dazzling array of lights illuminating the hall, radiating along the stage. Glimmering golden flakes floating down from above like snow upon two girls pouring their hearts out in the performance of their lives. Their eyes are transfixed on the spectacle of it all as the narrator bellows that “it would go down in the history of Mars as the miraculous seven minutes”. This is the moment that Carole & Tuesday wished to define itself by. A celebration of music and the power it holds consummated in seven special minutes. But behind these seven minutes is the journeythat set it all in motion. Carole & Tuesday is a tale steeped in the past, now set in the gleaming terraformed future of Mars. The story of rags-to-riches between a pair of talented women: Tuesday, who sneaks away from her wealthy sheltered lifestyle and takes a train to the big city, and Carol, an ex-refugee and orphan constantly looking for work with no clear direction in her life. In their world, music has been studied, dissected and repackaged to perfection through the use of artificial intelligence; the popular human artists now acting as merely fronts for the artistry. They both feel isolated and melancholy, needing some way to express it. In this, the two have a fateful encounter as Carol plays piano atop a bridge. She hums along to the music, but Tuesday insists she can hear the meaning of her song despite the lack of words. Carole and Tuesday, two musicians from radically different socioeconomic backgrounds, are able to understand each from through their music. Considering the nature of this series being centred around music, the anime puts a lot of attention towards the music incorporated within the show. Carole & Tuesday holds some clear similarities with other works by director Shinichiro Watanabe; not only does he use a variety of diverse character designs and art styles, but here he employs different genres of music and artists to coincide with the Western accessibility of the show in general. Flying Lotus, Alison Wonderland and Denzel Curry and just some of the names associated with this project. Most importantly, the music acts as a natural means for development between the two leads. When the two begin playing together, the flaws in their sessions are apparent: they aren’t in tune with each other, Tuesday is a step behind Carole and both continually have to restart the song. The session is a work in progress, but once they start finding their rhythm, it’s as if their souls have slowly begun to intertwine. Their unity, passion and emotional release creates a world of their own, free from the gloomy feeling around them. The worldbuilding details constantly echo the technology-driven culture of today, giving it a sense of believability amidst the more fantastical elements. Instagram, Google and YouTube are all featured in some way during the duo’s attempt to break into the music industry, before eventually entering a talent competition that parodies the likes of The Voice and American Idol. This is where the most diverse musical genres of the series are showcased, from a profane barbershop quartet number to an operatic hip hop hybrid piece that really shows the range of musical styles present in the show. While the pacing is slowed down significantly for this purpose, it also introduces an antagonist to the pair in Angela, a model turned singer on her own journey that acts as a clear juxtaposition with Carole and Tuesday. Unlike the lead duo, Angela embraces the influence of artificial intelligence and is pushed as the industry’s next big star, however her struggles are as real as the two protagonists. Angela as a former child star carries her own share of baggage whilst being used as a puppet of the industry and given no creative control over her art. But she is passionate about her career and has to work tirelessly in order to stay relevant. She provides an insight into what can happen when business takes priority over pleasure. All of the contrasting styles and motivations serve as foils to the stripped-down singer-songwriter ability of the titular duo, representing the traditional side of music with warmth and authenticity that cannot be replicated. At least, that is what the intention was with each of their performances. But the series only achieves this in theory. Their opponents in the talent show seek to treat music as a commodity first and foremost in contrast to Carole and Tuesday, who want to deliver a more intimate experience with their songs as down-to-earth musicians. Except that the music they play seems counter-intuitive, coming across as the kind of melodramatic pop that would not be difficult to find nowadays. It might not be surprising to see how the judges love the pair whose music you would expect to find in every talent show in the last decade, but consider how the series is trying to, in a sense, rehabilitate music, with some of the most generic pop tunes of our time. Lyrically the song also come across poorly, with the melodies and rhythm having to compensate for instances of laundry being used as a metaphor for example. The song writing here speaks volumes about Tuesday’s lack of life experience to draw from, yet they are still showered with overwhelming praise after each and every one of their performances. As the series continues, there’s a concerning lack of character development going forward for a character-driven show such as Carole & Tuesday. The characterization starts off strong with establishing the differences in both leads, before the script changes to emphasize the commonalities between them and more nuance is added to their actions. However, their bond as a whole feels unnatural, as they become such close friends after a short amount of time and their bond is never challenged going forward. Chemistry between main characters, especially in dramas, tends to grow little by little through each of their interactions with each other. Because of this, viewers are able to see their relationship develop gradually for themselves, thus coming across more naturally. This does not happen with Carole and Tuesday. Instead the two are shown to be great off the get-go, putting on good to excellent performances together that garner high praise from well-known artists. There is hardly a struggle they face that is shown in their journey. Add to that how predictable and light-hearted the tone of the series is, Carole and Tuesday feel more like avatars than their own characters for the remainder of the show. From the offset Carole & Tuesday, despite its shortcomings as a music drama, was based around the two leads coming together and making a name for themselves in the music industry. But after the talent show, the narrative begins to shed more of a light on their backgrounds: Carole’s friends who are refugees and, more importantly, Tuesday’s family ties to politics. This is where the story transitions from the tale of two women chasing their passions in an age of AI-produced music to an allegory of current-day American politics that takes itself seriously. Politics in an anime is not an inherent issue and make no mistake, Carole & Tuesday wanted to be a socially conscious series from the beginning. But the sudden change in plot and focus causes most of the key events that occur to feel forced and inorganic, not to mention even more predictable than before. The execution is clumsy at best and incompetent at worst; it imitates the United States’ immigration policy yet holds a childlike perception of the debate that would only lead to more dissention. The show portrays it as simply a societal bad mood without any further nuance to the discussion, to where the audience is never told why Earth has refugees coming to Mars in the first place. The story becomes so concerned with being a social commentary on the world today that it does not bother to justify the political actions that happen within the story. And regardless of how much the story has shifted, the anime continues to revolve around Carole and Tuesday. The two musicians who at first strived to be a success in the music scene have had their journey side-tracked by the overt political agenda that, coincidentally, renders their previous journey obsolete. The AI-produced music that initially acted as a commentary on how pop music panders to the trends of today instead of creating something “meaningful” is tossed aside. The sub-plots unresolved from the talent show remains unresolved. Instead the series takes the overly-idealistic route that coming together and singing an inspirational song has the power to change the world, with music’s power lying in the ability to make one's own voice heard. Only a vague solution to the real-world crisis the show intended to reflect. There’s an air of cynicism to the series that feels crafted out of naivete, which is certainly odd when Shinichiro Watanabe’s name is at the helm of the project. For an esteemed director as himself, it feels as if he was phoning it in here, not overly concerned with how the show ended up looking. Obviously, external factors like scheduling and budget play a larger part than ever trying to gauge effort from a director, but comparing Carole & Tuesday to his previous work (Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Space Dandy, etc.) should highlight how underwhelming this most recent project is. Carole & Tuesday was ultimately a tale in two parts: the first enamoured in the original journey of its two protagonists, their pursuit of passion acting as a love letter to the art of music. While meandering in parts and feeling a tad bloated, it’s hard to deny the show had a genuine love of the craft on display. But its second half was burdened with misguided ambition, aiming to encompass every angle of drama the series holds without regard for their impact on the writing as a whole. Unwilling to commit on its initial story and core values, we can only imagine what could have been a true moment of bliss.