Haibane Renmei – 9 [Water Well/Rebirth/Riddle] – Throwback Thursday

Welcome everyone to another week of Haibane Renmei! This is a rather uplifting episode compared to the last few, a sort of breathe of fresh air. Rakka has an eye opening conversation while Reki takes her place at the bottom of the metaphorical well. What do either of those things mean? Read on and find out!

Before we get into all the narrative mumbo jumbo though I want start with some praise for the music. I haven’t talked about it much until now because I wanted a larger sample size. But at this point I can comfortably say that Kou Ootani has made something special. There’s a specific style to Haibane Renmei’s sound, one that’s almost reverent, riding that line of feeling almost religious. Yet Kou Ootani manages to create music that is both happy and sad, quiet and adventurous, hopeful and resigned, all the while keeping the same Haibane Renmei style. My only complaint with it is that occasionally the sound mixing appears to be off. For instance in this episode there were a few scenes where the music, though good, overpowered the dialogue. I’m unsure how much of this is just BD remastering vs original audio problems but they exist regardless.

Now lets head into the break so we can talk spoilers!

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Sonny Boy – 10/11 [Summer and the Demon/11]

Welcome back everyone to another week of me missing my deadline and merging two Sonny Boy posts together! I have no excuse this week I’m afraid. Sonny Boy has simply fallen apart and I had no desire to write. However I refuse to go two weeks without doing anything so here we are. Now how about we jump into it!

This week I came to a conclusion about Sonny Boy: It’s not good. It’s not that the show has fallen off though. That would imply that it had built something up from which it could fall off of. I watched Sonny Boy with the hope that it would all come together! That all of the disparate plot threads such as Rajhidani going out to sea, Hoshi leading the other students away or Asakaze and co effectively joining the military, would all connect back into a singular statement about how we raise the next generation and the choices that lay before them. Instead what we got was Natsume rambling philosophical for 11 episodes. He clearly has something he wants to say, a lot of somethings. Yet he has no idea how he wants to say them and no one was around to tell him no.

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Haibane Renmei – 8 [The Bird] – Throwback Thursday

Welcome everyone to another episode of Haibane Renmei! This week’s episode is one of the more unique ones, though the solo title alone probably gives that away. Is this a good thing? Bad? Lets dive in and find out!

First up, what do I mean by unique? What makes this episode different from the rest and how does the title factor in? Doing my best to explain it, I think it has to do with the episodes focus. Previous episodes of Haibane Renmei seemed structured in three acts, acts that corresponded to the three titles. And each of these acts felt like the progressed the episodes story in some way. A clear beginning, middle and end so to speak. Yet this episode, with only one title, feels almost… stagnant. Like it’s one long act. One where the last episode introduced us to Rakka’s depression, this episode carried it through and fully explored it by giving it the time it needed, and next episode will begin to resolve it. Or maybe I’m just letting the singular title get to me and seeing differences where none exist. I liked it regardless.

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Haibane Renmei – 7 [Scar/Illness/Arrival of Winter] – Throwback Thursday

Welcome back everyone to another episode of Haibane Renmei! This post accidentally got deleted so I had to rewrite it, so apologies for being slightly late. Last week was good but this one is even better. Rakka is figuring out her emotions, Reki is dropping lore and my emotions are being tugged all around. So without further ado lets dive in!

Right out of the gate I want to say that Haibane Renmei was really good this week. I was invested from beginning to end, hitting all the right spots. This was exactly what I was looking for. I loved how the episode didn’t try to speed-through anything. Rather, it kept the same slow pacing Haibane Renmei has always had but filled it with the material I’m really interested in. The episode focused on the aftermath of Kuu’s disappearance, not in a technical sense like I feared but an emotional sense. Giving us, and by extension the characters, time to process everything that happened and react while still moving everything forward. Using that time to show how they are different from each other and then explain those differences in ways that don’t just feel like info dumps. Which is great because Rakka had a lot going on this week.

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Sonny Boy – 8/9 [Laughing Dog/This Salmon Chazuke Is Missing Its Salmon Nya]

Welcome all to a very late post about Sonny Boy! I haven’t been very good at my job recently, this internet one not my real job, and for that I apologize. We have a lot to talk about this week though so enough about me, lets jump into it!

Right off the bat I want to talk about my feelings about Sonny Boy as a whole. I went into this show with high hopes. It looked visually interesting and Natsume has worked on some pretty great stuff in the past. But 9 episodes in I can comfortably say that Sonny Boy isn’t for me. Visually I still love it! Sonny Boy is doing things no other anime has in a good while, leading to some very memorable scenes. But this visual diversity has led to the show becoming narratively obtuse. Like there’s no structure, no set idea, behind what is happening. This leads to the visuals and the story feeling at odds with each other to the point of, often, incomprehensibility. And 9 episodes in, it feels like Sonny Boy doesn’t care enough to fix that.

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Haibane Renmei – 6 [End of Summer/Rain/Loss] – Throwback Thursday

Welcome all to the halfway point of Haibane Renmei! Or close enough to it at least since it’s thirteen episodes. We have a lot to cover this week and I’m running late so lets dive right into it!

Right off the bat I have to say that this was exactly what I wanted. Last week I said that I was afraid of Haibane Renmei becoming like every other SoL. That we would follow their daily lives but that nothing would meaningfully change and thus no one would grow. And as if in direct response, we got this episode next. This feels like a turning point, the exact kind of thing I asked for last week. An event that causes things to start to unravel. Where characters shift from reactive, like Rakka has learning about the world, to proactive, where she can start to search things out for herself. Now while I doubt that Rakka, and be extension Haibane Renmei, would be that overt about it I do expect things to change. And I’m very excited for that.

In the meantime though lets talk about why I like this episode.

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Haibane Renmei – 5 [Library/Abandoned Factory/Beginning of the World] – Throwback Thursday

Welcome back everyone to another episode of Haibane Renmei! This week we are once again following a new character in Nemu. Is it any good? Was it as engaging as the last? Lets jump in and find out!

And what better place to start than the theme of the episode? Haibane Renmei is a very dense show, lots of religious symbolism and the like. Should make for a good jumping off point! The problem though is that Haibane Renmei covered so much that I’m not sure what the theme is. Is it about making mistakes and living with them, eventually learning to see they aren’t actually mistakes like in Nemu’s story? Is it a general creation myth about the town? Or maybe the whole thing is about the many paths life can take, I don’t know! What’s nice though is that Haibane Renmei doesn’t feel like its struggling with its messaging. This doesn’t feel like the shows fault, if that makes sense. Rather it has earned enough trust from me by now that its more likely I’m just not connecting with it.

So lets try to fix that, explore a few of these, and maybe piece it together along the way.

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Sonny Boy – 7 [Road Book]

Welcome all to another (late) episode of Sonny Boy! Some of you may wonder why these take so longer for me to put out but the answer is rather simple: I don’t know what the hell to write until I sit down and just wing it! So without further ado lets do just that and dive into the episode.

Once again I want to start with my overall thoughts: It was pretty good! Sonny Boy felt a lot more… focused? Compact? What I’m trying to say is that everything in this episode felt more connected. That it all filtered back to the same concept, the same idea, and worked to support it. The visuals were often still art-house-y of course, that’s just Sonny Boy. But they were restrained enough that they didn’t take away from what the episode was trying to say. Compare that to last week, or others before, where the visuals were so abstract it was often difficult to tell how they fit the story that was happening. As for the subject of the episode itself? Lets talk about that.

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Haibane Renmei – 4 [Trash Day/Clock Tower/Birds Flying Over the Walls] – Throwback Thursday

Welcome everyone to another week of Haibane Renmei! This is another slow one like the last, yet for some reason I can’t help but like it more. Is it the characters? The subject focus? Read on to find out!

So like I said, this week was another slow episode with the primary difference being the focus character. Where last week focused on Hikari, visiting the temple and her time at the bakery, this week is about Kana. And just like Hikari, Haibane Renmei shows us a day in her life. We visit the clock tower, the shop, do morning chores etc. Yet despite how mundane all of this was for some reason I liked this one a whole lot more! Something about Kana’s day to day was just more… satisfying? Engaging? I suspect it’s because of the message, the “theme” of Kana as a character. Or perhaps it was the concepts which Haibane Renmei introduced this week, building off of the last. Either way though one fact remains true: I really vibed with this episode and I’m once again looking forward to more.

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Sonny Boy – 6 [The Long Goodbye]

Welcome everyone to the big event, the big twist, the turning point for Sonny Boy! Did it work? Was the episode good, does it all make sense now? Lets find out!

Lets open this post by immediately giving you a tl;dr for my thoughts on the episode. And the verdict is… I think it was good, as far as turning point episodes go. Everything about Sonny Boy this week was unexpected and took the series in a new, interesting direction. It both answered a lot of questions while asking many more and was an all around dense episode. My only issue with it is that Sonny Boy, once again, was needlessly abstract about it. Visual ideas, creative scenery, etc, it’s like someone decided how they wanted the episode to look and fit the content to it rather than fitting the looks to the content. In that way a good portion of the episode kind of just feels like art-house fuckery. Abstract images devoid, or at least porous to, meaning. And I can’t ignore that despite liking the actual story.

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