Summer 2021 First Impressions – Sonny Boy

Streaming: Funimation (the version I watched was a limited-time free preview on their YouTube channel; the “real” release date is July 21st)

Episodes: 12

Source: Original

Episode Summary: Due to an unknown phenomenon, a school and several students have been transported into a black void. Without their teachers or the outside world to dictate what should happen, the student hierarchies begin to manifest themselves more strongly with the student council attempting to take control of the situation by creating rules and doling out punishments. Complicating this is the fact that a sub set of the students also developed super powers after arriving in the void world, and many of them aren’t inclined to listen to orders from their former peers.

As the void slowly consumes the building and the power struggle between the student council and the superpowered students plays out, Nozomi, a transfer student recently returned to Japan, and Nagara, a quiet, somewhat aimless guy, play out a very different, more emotional power struggle among themselves. Nozomi’s inclination to take risks and walk her own path may turn out to be the key to helping the group navigate this strange, new world.

Impressions: I recently read an interesting article on Anime News Network regarding the ways in which Western anime companies have, in the last few years, worked to have a more active role in anime production. The article specifically focused on Crunchyroll and its (apparently) troubled Crunchyroll Originals framework, but one piece of information that seems to be applicable across the board is that overseas streaming accounts for a larger and larger proportion of anime revenue as the months and years march forward, providing companies like Crunchyroll and Funimation the leverage to get onto production committees and thus have more rights (and more of a stake) in specific anime productions. Thus, this surprise preview of one of Summer’s highly-anticipated new anime series has been allowed out of the gate for a brief time. While my feelings about the state of the anime industry at the moment can roughly be described as follows – 😬 – I’m also excited to be able to dip into a series I’ve been really looking forward to a bit early.

A little bit Drifting Classroom with a sprinkling of Lord of the Flies, the best brief description I have for this episode is that it’s both tense and exhilarating in turn. I think the bigger question it might be posing is whether or not school is actually valuable preparation for living in the world. School tends to be an environment of rigid rules and social hierarchies, and while I feel that there’s some twisted comfort in knowing the exact definitions of “right” and “wrong” at all times and knowing what to do and where you stand among your peers, living in the world has taught me that existing in a meaningful way is rarely so cut-and-dry. Life is full of choices and gray areas that aren’t served well by turning people into obedient drones and churning them out without actually providing them critical thinking skills.

Of course, the world also can’t function when everyone’s intent on breaking the rules, whatever they happen to be. The growing conflict between the student council and the delinquents throughout this episode is compelling because they navigate their roles in a seemingly black-and-white way until it suddenly becomes clear that their definitions of right and wrong, rules and punishments, are anything but absolute. I think “Captain,” the student council member who ends up serving as enforcer, is extremely interesting because of how quickly his actions devolve into a perfect representation of the horrors of authoritarianism and the police state. He has the power to enforce the rules and punish rule-breaking by others, and then eventually decides that those same rules don’t apply to him. Only in this case (unlike the real world a horrifyingly frequent amount of the time), he soon discovers that he’s incorrect in his assumptions and faces consequences like anyone else.

I think the obvious “hero” here (if there is one) is Nozomi, though, because she chooses to exist outside of the two dueling factions and drags the uneasy Nagara along with her. She’s unwilling to participate in the Student Council’s monitoring (she doesn’t have a smartphone like the other students and violently refuses the one offered to her) and doesn’t defer to their authority. Anime is definitely not a reliable cultural education and I wouldn’t ever try to claim it as such, but one thing I’ve gotten a sense of over the years is that the student council in a Japanese school seems to wield a greater authority than whatever we have going on in the United States (I don’t even know who was on the student council in my high school, to be quite honest). So it’s perhaps more of a “big deal” that Nozomi essentially tells them to F-off, with a smile, of course. I’ll be interested to see how this attitude serves her going forward.

Pros: This is a very intriguing series, and honestly that’s not only due to its sci-fi premise. I think the setting serves as a great way to examine the education system as a microcosm of greater society. I think the school system lends itself to very dramatic, allegorical storytelling, but Battle Royale and its style of blunt and graphic commentary about the ruthlessness of the Japanese school system, for what its worth, has spawned just as many shallow copycats as it has prompted insightful think-pieces about what kids are put through as they compete with one-another to get good grades. I think that this series has the potential to frame a similar topic in different way, and I’m here for it.

There’s a lot of personality in the animation. Folks might recognize the creator, Shingo Natsume, from his other directorial and animation work (One-Punch Man and ACCA-13 will probably be the most familiar). While I wouldn’t call the look of this episode “polished” in the sense that everything is perfectly on-model all the time, the characters have a very organic look and feel that grounds the supernatural action in a satisfying way. There are some cool, unsettling effects used to represent one of the students’ superpowers that I really liked – the imagery looks like warped and broken glass.

Cons: This episode is a bit disorienting because the viewer is dropped right in without any concrete framing details. This isn’t a “con” in the sense that I think it detracts from the episode, but it does mean that it takes a little while to really grasp what’s happening and what the first little glimmers of the story might be trying to convey.

Content Warnings: Bullying/violence (mostly mild, but one character takes a baseball bat to the head and there’s blood). The “punishment” system causes rule-breakers who are called-out to perform some task unwillingly until their punishment is done; mostly this is just doing exercises or long-form math, but in one case a character is forced to strip naked and do squats and I found that to be a little out-of-line.

Would I Watch More? This episode is a strong start to what ought to be a compelling story, and I can’t wait to watch more (but I’ll have to, since the series doesn’t actually start on Funimation until later in July).