It struck me in reading the feedback to the first couple of eps of Wonder Egg Priority that it could instead have been called “This Reminds Me Of”. Seriously, I’ve seen everything from Shaft (generally) to FLCL to Kon Satoshi (seriously?) to Persona. That sort of thing can be read two ways. Of course there’s something grabby about a show that can plant all those seeds in viewers’ heads. But it could also be an indication that it’s a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster of influences without a core identity of its own.
As FxREEE noted in the comments last week, series writer Nojima Shinji is actually a long-standing (30 years) writer of TV dramas, something I was only vaguely aware of. A little digging reveals that opinion on his work in that medium is quite heatedly mixed, but that too is one of those things that be taken two ways. For me, I appreciate that there’s something sort of off-center here, not plumb – but I’m not sure I actually like it. And while WEP definitely most reminds of Madoka Magica (I can see the Persona thing too, now that I’ve heard it) it does seem to have patchwork quality to it stylistically.
This episode was less engaging than the first for me on the whole, though it still had some interesting visual moments. Now that the premise has been more or less clarified it actually played out in pretty broad terms and didn’t strike me as all that interesting. It’s where Nojima goes with that premise that will matter of course, but one of the things that made Madoka Magica work (though TBH I’m not sure the me of 2021 would respond as well to it as the me of 2011) was that Urobuchi Gen is capable of some quite subtle psychological musings. He punted the ending of course, but he always does that so par for the course.
The other issue I have with Wonder Egg Priority at the moment is that none of the characters really pops for me. Ai is the most crucial of course, but at the moment she’s a pretty standard plucky anime girl who’s had a dark past shoehorned on top of her (and there’s something puerile in the way the camera treats her which I find a bit distasteful). The most interesting girl so far is Kurumi but it seems like she’s the MacGuffin more than a character proper, so I’m not sure how much we’ll get from here. There’s enough here to tease the curiosity, but that’s the extent of my interest at this point.
DP
January 21, 2021 at 12:33 amI guess Wonder Egg reminds me more of Flip Flappers than anything else, with maybe a bit of Utena sprinkled in. While the animation and direction are lovely, the overall package of “bullying is bad” is probably a bit too on the nose for my taste, though I’ll certainly see it through, as there’s enough talent on display in these first two episodes to warrant at least that much. At a minimum, it’s not a cookie cutter show.