Off the hook busy anime-wise for a weekday, so it’s digest time for some of these premieres.
Summer Pockets – 01
It’s a funny thing about these Maeda Jun Key anime. On some level they’re all basically the same thing. Yet my enjoyment of them has a pretty wide range to say the least. I really like Little Busters and Kanon (the latter is partly due to Hisaya Naoki being the main creative force behind it, though). Angel Beats is a complete whiff with me. And the most beloved of them probably, Air and Clannad, elicit largely indifference.
Summer Pockets first came out in 2018 as a VN, making it a recent entry for Key-Visual Arts (it’s also unusual in having no 18+ version as far as I know). Superficially the premise bears a similarity to Air, enough so that Maeda recused himself from scenario writing on it. We have a very experienced director in Kobayashi Tomoki (he actually directed Hisaya’s original anime Sola, interestingly enough) and a studio in feel. that’s proving itself quite interesting as a creator-driven operation. As such Summer Pockets looks very nice, and the overall production has a quite elegant air (no pun intended) to it.
Plot-wise, well – it’s Maeda. A kid named Takahara Hairi (he has some sort of unpleasant swim-based event he’s fleeing) goes to a small island to help the family go through his late grandmother’s massive collection of oddities from her travels. There he meets four different girls, each of whom has their own slot in the trope catalogue. There’s also a future bro and an older female relative. Weird stuff happens, magical realism drops hints of its presence, and the moon gets a lot of screentime. It’s nothing we haven’t seen before.
For all that, my first impressions (it’s in the title line) are overall pretty positive. Given how much carryover there is between these adaptations the execution matters a lot, and here it’s clearly going to be excellent. None of the girls particularly grated on me (even the loli, mostly), the setting is atmospheric, and Hairi comes off as a fairly likable player-character. I’ll give Summer Pockets at least another episode or two and see whether it can successfully build on any of that.
Chuuzenji-sensei Mononoke Kougiroku: Sensei ga Nazo wo Hodoite Shimau kara. (The Mononoke Lecture Logs of Chuzenji-sensei: He Just Solves All the Mysteries) – 01
Mysteries are all over the place this season. And here’s another one based on a novel, although those that know of Chuuzenji-sensei Mononoke Kougiroku: Sensei ga Nazo wo Hodoite Shimau kara. mostly do so from the manga adaptation. This time around the setting is 1948, at a high school somewhere in greater Tokyo. Second-year Kusakabe Kanna has a passing interest in the occult, it seems, though otherwise is a fairly normal high school girl. Her life gets a reshuffle when a new Japanese teacher named (you guessed it) Chuzenji-sensei arrives at school.
There are a couple of mysteries at play here. The first is the matter of who actually owns the purse Kanna finds on a bus. It winds up being the most suspicious-acting of the three, and it finds its rightful owner thanks to Chuzenji-sensei being on the bus. The meatier one is back at school, where a girl named Sachiko has spotted a ghost entering the library while on the way for an illicit nighttime intimacy exchange with a boy in class. That turns out to be Chuzenji-sensei, and the reason he disappears is that he’s popping into a secret “book preparation room” set up to hide banned books from government sensors.
Neither of these was especially compelling, but the overall vibe here was pleasant enough for me to check out at least one more episode. The other major mystery series of the season involve actual detectives, so as a school mystery at least this series is distinct from them. Nothing special so far, but we’ll see how things look after next week.
