 So yet again, is this the second Geek Nights in a Row where we're talking about an anime from Science Saru? Science Saru is too powerful for this earth. Yeah, they're just making too many goddamn animes for everyone. If you don't know, Science Saru is the studio of Masaki Iwasa and Friends that has produced many great works. What was the Weeb Simpsons meme where it was Mila's dad is like, I got fired because I said that Science Saru was being too productive. Yeah, if you listen to the last episode, we did on Ride Your Wave. You can hear us talk all about them, so we don't need to repeat ourselves on that. But they have a TV show that is coming out right now or just came out. I don't know if it's done yet. If it did, if it is done, it was done very recently. I watched the first four episodes. Rim watched some more than that probably. I actually only watched the first four. I started the fifth one, but then I stopped because Emily and I are going to watch the whole thing together. All right. So the first thing we had to talk about in this show, keep your hands off, Isoken, is the beginning, the fucking opener. Oh, yeah. Jesus Christ. Okay. So this opener comes on, right, with this easy breezy song. Easy breezy. It's already stuck in my head on permanent loop. Immediately, I basically have 100% deja vu back to Korocha. Yeah. It's the same fucking song and it's a dance and it's almost very similar dance. The song is like the same instruments and the same key or whatever. I don't fucking know music theory, but it's the same goddamn song, the same chord progression, the same everything. And the, and the opening itself, like the animation is just great and weird and funny. And it gave me a lot of just like, it gave me that feeling of a lot of the anime I really liked during like anime club eras. Exactly. I mean, there is no guarantee that, right, that a show that has a dance opener or closer will be a good show. Mahoromatic, for example, had the Mahoromamba was the closer, not a great show, but, you know, the tradition is still long and, you know, good, right? As you got the, the Korocha, I think is the oldest one I know of. Obviously, the Harahara, you guys, probably the biggest one. And now this is the new one, the easy breezy. So that's already, you turn the show on, you already, you see sign sorrow. It's like, that's good sign, number one. Then you see a dance as the opener and you're like, that's good sign. Number two, this guaranteed good anime. I don't even need to tell you anything. I'm going home. And then the characters in the opener are gooney and weird and move weird. And I got a lot of the vibe. It basically set off an instinct that has not set off for a long time, an instinct from back when we ran the RIT anime club. My brain said, we have to show this at the club. Oh, yeah. This show would have been one of those shows. So here's the, the summary of the plot of this show, right? So there is a high school, but it's sort of a, it seems set much like Madoka Magica in a near future. Yeah. It's definitely a sort of the architecture and the, the geography of the high school is weird. Like this water nearby. It seems like almost like a fantastic, a semi fantastical anime town, right? Where it's like, you know, the high school is in the town. It's not just like a high school separated from everything else. Yeah, it's not a town. Right. Yeah. There's definitely town scenes and things like that. It's not all in the high school, but the architecture of the high school is strange. It has a lot of buildings. They're all stacked up vertically. It feels like near future, like post some climate change problems. Yeah. It's definitely unique in some ways. And there's a lot of environmental storytelling around that. Like just one random thing that I want to point out, like to the schools, like the teachers in the school, their offices are clearly in what used to be a pool. Yep. Like specifically they've turned this pool into office space. Yep. So anyway, then you've got as the architecture is weird, the social environment of the school seems pretty typical Japanese high school with a little bit of anime craziness. It's not as crazy as some other anime is out there where high school doesn't even happen and no one goes to class. Yep. Right. But it definitely feels like, you know what it feels like, especially this episode where we saw the student council for the first time, it feels like the way it felt to be running clubs in a college or high school. It feels to me more like what you see in El Hazard, or even though the school there, the school scenes are brief or the which one. There's a lot of anime that could apply to the one with the three witches. My whole sky tie. Yes. Right. Where the school, it's still a high school environment, but it's just a little bit crazy. It's not Chromarty crazy. Nope. It's just like regular high school with a dash or Chromarty like a little sprinkle. So there's a dash of crazy. There's a dash of like goon characters like background idiots doing background idiot stuff out like the club that's asked like the club that was asking for the weird thing. Right. So you know what it's like? It's sort of like studio trigger with the witches, a little witch academia. Yes. Only without the fantasy. Remove the fantasy from little witch academia, but same sort of social aspect to that school. Yep. But couple it with an environment that is clearly set in a near future where things are different for future reasons, but not that far off. Alright, so there are students at the school, but really we only care about three of them. The three of them. I forget all their names. The main the main ish one because that's like the first one you're introduced to even though they're all sort of equally main. They're all girls. Alright, is sort of like this crazy anime nerd, right? Who loves drawing mechs and is totally nuts and is really good at drawing into weird shit like likes to explore the weird town and has a wild animation imagination. Right. And that's like the main character. Their best friend is the tall, skinny, serious character who's sort of serious. They care a lot about money. Yep. Right. They have a more of a head on their shoulders, but they're also sort of greedy. Yep. They remind me of the manipulative. They remind me of a lot of the there's characters like this in like every old anime. But not stupid and still has, you know, good, mostly good intentions, right? The similar they come across a lot like Susie from Little Witch academia, the poison one. How do I finally remember the character's name? Yeah. What's her name from Ronbo one half? God, I've just been a while feeling old here. We're the old men. Oh, who is the character in that show? Was that Tenshi Moya? I think that was Tenshi Moya. Okay. And the third character is the plot of the first episode is sort of those two characters bringing this third one into their fold, right? They're at the anime club and this third character gets chased out of the anime club by men in black, sort of a, you know, ridiculous scene. And this third character is like a famous celebrity child model actor person who's at the school and loves anime and is mad rich and has mad rich parents and is like famous and, you know, whatever. And they care they like anime a lot and they're good at drawing, but their parents don't want to let them join the anime club. So like their personal security guards who are like, you know, taking care of them, you know, came after them, right? You have to get them out of the anime club. Right. So these two other main characters are at the anime club saw this and ended up through stuff, ending up teaming up and making the three person team that forms the main three characters of the show to artists, animators and the level headed and perfectly reasonable producer pulling it all together. Yes. The three friends, their relationship and their character aspects, right, perfectly match what's going on in an animation studio. One person represents the management, right, needing to get things done on time, needing money, needing to stay in budget, wanting to actually get shit done. And the other two people are imaginative creative types, right, who need to be, you know, they have a lot of drive to get things done, but they want to do it their way, right? And they have two different ways, right? One is the crazy sort of Mecca artist and the other one, the rich one, the character artist, right? Is the character artist, right? Who wants to, you know, make the animations really detailed and have lots of frames and, you know, draw like real life. Or is the crazy one wants to draw mechs and backgrounds and environments, right? And basically the first four episodes, like the arc to get you started on the show is just they form the club. If there's club politics to form clubs, they work hard and they basically make that their daikon animation, right? They couldn't form an anime club because there was one. So they formed a film club. The anime club in the show is really just like our anime club. It was about watching anime. Yep. Their club is about producing anime, right? So that and their club is the Azo Ken. Yep. They, they lie and say they're a generic film club to get their club license. And now the clock is ticking to be so impressive that the school can't just like revoke their charter because they're not making films, right? Cause even though one person is rich, they need the, they can't really use that money. They need the school's money to produce the anime they want to make. And what the real conceit of the show is not that main plot. The real conceit of the show is that much in the way that say Inutena or other shows have a episodic structure where there is sort of like a battle in each episode, right? In this show, basically in each episode, there is sort of a point at which the characters cross over into the animation that they are making. And though it's like, it's all anime. You're watching an anime, you at home, the real person, right? But the anime that you're watching, those characters in their world, their world crosses over with the world of the animation that they're making or have already made, right? And that is sort of like the dual, right? That happens in each episode. Clearly representing on one hand, usually the third character being dragged into their imagination and then kind of implicitly getting excited about the idea, even if they ostensibly aren't. But also other people being dragged in, right? And they're trying to demonstrate the power of like, this is what animation is. You're inflicting your imagination and upon others and you make it real for them with the power of many drawings. But coupled with like the actual, but the actual process they show in the show like gets pretty detailed and pretty realistic, right? So usually you seal this a lot in pretty much every medium of art, right? Paintings of people painting things, right? Songs about making music, right? I want to rock and roll night and party every day, right? Movies about making fucking movies, singing in the rain, right? Books about fucking authors. It's too many of those. Video games about video games. There's actually not as many of those as there could be, but there's still more than zero. But a lot of the anime about making comic books about comics. Don't even give me fucking started manga about manga. I just read one the other day, but a lot of them focus a lot more on the actual character drama and they kind of gloss over or put very scant detail into the actual like thing that they're addressing. Anime about anime. This animation runner, Karomi, right? No, there's these tons of these. So if you're going to do one of those, right? A thing about the medium that it is in, right? There is a high bar to get over to, you know, make that acceptable and not just be another one of those. And the one way you can do it is just by executing on such a high level that it's like, oh, you're the best song about songs ever. So it's okay for you to be a song about songs. This is a tribute. Right. The other way to do it is to do what's going on here. This isn't, you know, it might be the best anime about anime. Maybe it's Takuno videos up there. I don't know. Regardless of that, the angle on this is different. It's only slightly meta, you know, detailing about the production of anime, right? The message is like, you know, how animators feel about anime, right? Yeah. But also it is. It's good about the like the nuance of the animators want to do one thing. They don't even fully agree with each other. And then there's budget and other constraints. And how does the finished idea that comes to a screen evolve and how it often ends up radically different from what the animators actually wanted? And that's just how things work. Well, but also it's, you know, but that's, that's there, but it's about the power of the animation itself, right? Which the other anime about anime are not about the power of anime. Animation runner Karomi isn't about the power of animation. Takuno video isn't about the power of animation. What makes that medium strong and effective. This one, the first arc builds up to here's our fucking die count animation and we're just going to watch it in the show, right? In the context of the show. But then it's great. This anime is literally illustrating animations, you know, having literal power, right? To sort of inflict their, you know, worlds upon people, right? In a, in a fantastic and supernatural possible way. You trigger someone's imagination and they're off, right? I am really enjoying watching the producer get sort of dragged into this nonsense reluctantly, but not as reluctantly like they protest a lot, but they're kind of into it in the end. I'm actually kind of liking how when they bring in, so I thought that like they were mostly good because the war, the other stuff outside of the three characters is not brought in very much, right? It has not a lot of screen time, but like they're actually giving it more than I thought. And like the teacher seems like he's like the teacher's really trying to help them. And that's going to be like the beard teacher. My beard is heavy again. Yes, that beard teacher like I thought he was just going to be like there and gone. It's like, no, the beard teacher actually seems like he's a thing. He's more than, he's doing more than the club advisor in yo petalas. He's doing more than any club advisor we ever had did, right? The club advisor in yo petalas and do jack shit. He's like just there because they have to have one or like the student council. I hope they come back because they're great. It's like the fact that they decided to make character designs for the student council shows me that they're going to be real characters, right? Yep. They have meaning and whatever. And also like the show is just really well like the animation is great. The voice acting is great. Of course. The show is funny. We're going to do but like this show I have laughed more at this than most comedy anime I've seen in a while. You can tell what's happening in this show is that the imaginations of the real animators working on it, right? Through this mechanism that they have created are able to take their completely crazy, you know, out of context ideas and insert them into the show as the character's ideas. These characters then draw those ideas which are then brought to life in the show, right? Not really brought to life, right? And so it's like, haha, we have created this structure by whereby we can do all this crazy stuff that we want to do and it's as it's but pass it off as crazy stuff. Someone else wants to do and then we get to draw what we want to draw. But like one of my favorite scenes, I think it's even in the second episode is they do the whole like into the other anime world thing and they draw all this stuff and they're flying around and then it zooms back out like very carefully to they're standing there and they literally have one piece of paper with one image on it just sitting on top of another piece of paper with another image and all that in their imagination came from them looking at this one picture, right? But it like, you know, another high school anime that say wanted to have a tank in it would have to have, you know, be like, all right, well, there's a their train, their students are training for this war right here. They can have one episode can have a tank and the next episode can have, you know, planes, the producer one points even like, look, we're cutting the plot just draw the tank and the machete girl. Yep, no plot. But it's like, but it's like the point is every episode of this show going forward, they'll be able to draw whatever crazy shit they want, right? Whatever those characters are imagining and whatever they want to draw in their anime, right? The people who are making the show in real life can now draw all sorts of crazy stuff. They can draw some romance, they can draw some comedy, they can draw anything because they've made a, you know, the thing that's consistent. They've made a frame of these three characters in this school and that frame is around a blank anime canvas because the characters are making an anime and now they can just put whatever they want there, episode to episode. But it helps that the three characters are just great. Like they're really good, distinct, unique, quirky characters that I enjoy a lot. Despite being, you know, characters you see in a lot of anime, right, they're well, they're done. Well, they're crook slightly. So they have a lot more subtle bits going on that made them much more complete than similar characters from other shows. Like the fact that the main girl, when she gets nervous, kind of talks like an old grandpa and like things like that. The voice actor definitely is, is not what you would typically assign for, you know, a female high school girl character. Like I'm into the show and after I'm just going to watch the whole thing. Like I do not need any prompting to finish this show pretty quickly. No, it's not even all out yet. Nope. Oh, how many episodes is it going to be? I'm not sure. Actually, I want to say it was like a typical 26th show. There are 11 out so far. Okay. I don't know how many there's going to be total. Yep. I don't know. I've seen four. So it doesn't seem like a reason not to watch the rest. Yep. An episode 11 just came out two days ago. All right. So it's on crunchy roll. It's probably on somewhere else too. But crunchy roll seems like the place. If you haven't been watching a lot of anime lately, like you could do worse to come back into anime. You're gonna be stuck at home. If you're really so bored and you really have nothing to do that you're listening to fucking geek nights. Holy shit. What a waste of your time. You could have watched one or two episodes of this and the time it took you to watch Eek Nights. Mistakes were made. Go correct your mistakes now. Watch them at the same time. Do not listen to another geek nights. Instead, watch this show.