If I’m honest, I’m probably guilty of taking Boku no Hero Academia for granted a little bit. That sounds funny when you consider that I’ve ranked every season in my year-end Top 10 (and S3 the highest of all), and an overwhelming majority of my commentary on the series has been positive (justifiably so). But both the manga and anime have been so good so consistently that it’s easy to get a little dulled to just how difficult it is to do that. And when I note that the upcoming manga material may not be the series’ best, I should always amend that statement with the fact that it still ranks among the very best shounen out there.
As Season 4 proper begins this week I’m put in mind of all that. Why? Because I think we’re seeing the first real stylistic change in the series’ entire run. The shift from Nagasaki Kenji to Mukai Masahiro isn’t theoretically a big deal – we’re still snugly and safely in the warm embrace of Bones, as good an anime studio as TV has. But while less renowned than Nagasaki (who’s still supervising) Mukai-sensei is a quite different sort of director. Nagasaki played it very straight with BnHA – he adapted the manga’s visual and narrative style quite faithfully, with a large budget and exceptional skill. Mukai is much more adventurous visually than Nagasaki, known as much as an animator as a director. The question was, would that make a perceptible difference this season?
While the first episode was effectively a recap (albeit one with mostly new footage) and a pretty seamless bridge between seasons, I think with this episode we saw a very different-looking Boku no Hero Academia than we did in the first 63 episodes. In sum, I think Mukai is adding some overtly “comic book” touches, mostly in the visuals but even some narrative ones too. That’s actually faithful to Horikoshi Kouhei’s source material too, an element Nagasaki didn’t use much. And if you look at some of the work Mukai has done over the years at Bones, his default style seems to be somewhat moody and even creepy. We could talk about how that will fit with this seasons’s material, but that’s probably a topic best left alone.
In a funny sort of way I think we’re going to see HeroAca play as more of a recognizably “Bones” show than it did in the first three seasons. I for one am excited about that, though some die-hard manga readers are not. In any event the plot steams ever-forward with this series, and things are happening on both the villain and hero side of the ledger. Twice brings a yakuza mid-boss named Overhaul (Tsuda Kenjirou – nice to see him finally get a gig) into League of Villains HQ, where he rather imperiously declares that he has a plan and that Shigaraki should put the organization in his hands to execute it. This goes over as well as a lead Zeppelin, and hot-blooded villain outrage is the result. With one dead on each side, safe to say this proposed partnership is not off to a good start.
Meanwhile, the focus at Yuuei is on the internship program. Most of the staff (including the principal and All Might) believes it should be cancelled under the circumstances, but Eraser informs the students of 1-A that it will be allowed to go ahead if the student can land a gig with a hero agency that has a solid track record in the program. Having been shot down by Gran Torino (who has unspecified “other matters” to attend to) Deku is directed to Sir Nighteye, who we met briefly last season. A former sidekick to All Might, Nighteye seems like a natural fit – but things are not quite that simple.
There are a lot of undercurrents to All Might’s refusal to introduce Izuku to his former sidekick, but he’s not going into any details. He does, however, agree to bring Mirio into the mix. As an intern with Nighteye’s agency for a year, that makes sense. My favorite moment of the episode comes when Tintin-kun asks Izuku what sort of hero he wants to be and Izuku starts to give his usual answer, then thinks about his mother and checks himself. “The sort of hero people don’t have to worry about” is such a classically Deku answer in that he just breaks your heart by saying it – both because of what that answer says about him, and because he has no idea that he’s asking for the impossible.
It’s no secret to say that Mirio is going to be a very important part of the next arc, as is Sir Nighteye. There’s a peculiar dynamic that exists between Deku and Mirio, and between both and Sir Nighteye – and it all revolves around their connection to All Might (I could dig deeper into that, but it’s probably best if I don’t for now). On Tintin’s advice Deku tries to make Nighteye laugh on their introduction by using the only comic bit he has in his arsenal – a well-rehearsed imitation of All Might that goes over as well as Overhaul’s self-introduction. As one gets deeper into HeroAca they begin to realize that “quirks” fits heroes in more than simply the superpower sense, and Nighteye is no exception. Learning to manage that reality is another aspect to Izuku’s education, and not an unimportant one at that.
