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.
The big example of this, for me, is shown by Rajhidani. This is probably my favorite character. He’s eccentric, amusing, barely a character yet still more of one than anyone else on the cast. And what does Sonny Boy do with him? Sends him away only to bring him back and have him ramble about adventures that are far more interesting than anything Nagara and co got. In the span of 5 minutes he compresses not only his own story, but tells us that of Hoshi and others as well. How they, I believe its them anyways, went off and created an ideal society. Only for Hoshi to eventually get fed up with it and invent Death itself, discovering his own brand of Freedom. Can you imagine how interesting this would have been as an episode plot? Or that of the painting world? I can. I want to see them!
Yet despite how interesting these stories sound they still suffer from the same problems Nagara’s stories did: They have no meaning in relation to each other. There’s no common thread tying anything together. Each of them is just Natsume exploring some random corner of Philosophy through Sonny Boy with no intent of creating a cohesive story. I mean… just look at all of the unresolved plot threads! This is the penultimate episode of the show. Despite that, Sonny Boy is not only refusing to answer questions, its asking more of them! What happened to Cap, Hoshi and co? Whats the purpose of the Principle? What about the society created by the lost students like sockhead or umbrella? Is Aki ever going to be relevant or is she going to sit back and say ominous things, tempting Asakaze at every turn with no actual goal in mind? What happened to War?!
Speaking of War this brings me back to episode 10, the episode that I effectively skipped a post about. Why? Because it was tremendously boring. The whole thing felt like a ball of nothing. Oh the idea behind it was sound enough. Give us a 3rd party character through which to view Asakaze, allowing us to learn about him and watch him change. It’s not a terrible idea and it gives us another lens through which to view the characters, Mrs. Aki especially. But the problems arise through its execution: Nothing happens. Sonny Boy spends the entire episode recapping previous episodes through this girls eyes, walking through an empty world and philosophizing. About the only interesting thing that happened was Nozomi’s “death”. Yet because of how pointlessly abstract Sonny Boy is even that feels questionable at the time.
All of this leads me into what may be the biggest issue Sonny Boy has. Beyond its nonsensical story, poor pacing and terrible structure, Sonny Boy’s characters are… bad. I don’t care about them. So when it tries to make me care, when it tries to push Nagara or Asakaze or Nozomi to the forefront everything simply falls flat. None of them have been fleshed out enough, given enough time or content, to really make their mark. The only exception to this is Mizuho and her little cats. They have had multiple episodes either focusing on them or giving them some kind of B-plot related to growing up. Even in this episode the small scene at the end with the chickens was good for her! But she stands alone among the cast in this. And as such I don’t think I will remember any of them when this show ends.
So yeah all in all I can’t help but be disappointed in Sonny Boy. I expected some shenanigans with the story, don’t get me wrong. I figured the show would be a character piece, maybe about growing up in a world that doesn’t make sense and where everyone has their own “This World” with their own little rules. But instead what we have gotten is a mess that, while pretty, has nothing coherent to say. Maybe the last episode can pull some sense out of it all but I’m not holding my breathe. Whatever happens though I get to be done with it next week, so yay.
It is funny, I love what the show has become. I love that it is disjointed and barely coherent, fill in the blanks type of thing, its free canvas, its just like life – its just the canvas and you, he viewer, are the painter. This show is like a realistic version of Glass ocean or Piece of phantasmagoria.
I’m not a rabid fan, nor is this a 10/10 thing for me. It is merely a peace of art I gaze upon momentarily, ponder about things and move on.
Art can not disappoint, because it is not trying to impress. Art is not consumed, it is felt. To have expectations of it, is to misunderstand it. To seek entertainment from it, is to ridicule it. Like art, this show can not be judged, because it transcends the medium. The animation quality or character development, themes, any such thing, is irrelevant. To judge it, means to judge oneself. To bemoan it is to revel at one’s own shallow nature.
I believe this show is a reflection of the viewer more than any other show I have ever seen. If someone wants to be offended by the implication, well, feel free to be.
For me, this is instant cult classic. Anime is saved. Or rather, shows like this show me, again and again, as rarely as they come, that anime needs no saving, people merely need to look harder for the big pile of rubbish advertised and catering to them.
PS: It is common decency to at least judge a thing by its own lens. To judge a shoujo anime, one does not use checklist of shounen stereotypes and complain there are none of them to be found. If something is by design, thats the function by which it should be judged. Lots of the complains and questions in the OP are intentional. Stop asking who War is. Why do you need to care about characters? And so on. Stop expecting external to come from these meaningless concepts and look within you, through whom the show is projected. What would you do if you were a character in this story? Would you find ever found peace in such meta world? Would you seek a specific This World? Or would you try to escape out of it into Real World? Why. What does it say about you?
I think the OP is missing the whole point because of a narrow perspective he is used to.
The point of Nozomi’s death was that it showed how much we cared about her, in that she wasnt there so we can be dependent on her (emotionally or whatever, like several characters), that our life is and must remain separate from Nozomi. She died and we move on. Were you in denial she was gone – well I sure was, but that’s the point – let go of it for a second and seek a broader perspective. Like Nozomi. Nozomi was a deeply honest individual, living true to herself, with great perspective, unafraid of eve death. She was basically the 70 year old wise person attaining everything, content with anything life throws at her. That’s why it was here that s gone – she was the strongest link. This is such a powerful concept. She didnt die for viewers to go through tear-jerking catharsis, it was something else. Abandon shallow notions and tune youself to look at it with you in the picture. Put yourself on stage and viewer’s seat. Embrace the free canvas and paint it with your life.
“Anime needs no saving, people merely need to look harder through the big pile of rubbish advertised and catering to them.”
Based and true.
Jesus Evafan, Glassy Ocean and phantasmagoria, I no longer feel alone here in having watched them, I don’t think firechick has seen those and she’s into allsorts of obscure stuff.
Sonny boy is admittedly a difficult show, but I definitely think it needs to be just taken on its own terms, letting it wash over you.
I like that this is like some kind of old 60s arthouse thing.
So if I give you a blank canvas and call it art, thats ok with you? Because I can’t agree with that. Throwing a bunch of paint on a canvas, or leaving it blank, and telling the viewer to come up with their own meaning doesnt speak to me. It just tells me the artist in question had no idea what the hell they were doing and that you bought into their bullshit. If I want to look at myself, think about myself, ill go stand in front of a mirror. I’m much more interesting in what the author or artist who made the piece think.
Hello, Philosphy 101 called, it wants it meandering bullshit back. This whole thing is basically “You can’t judge art, so you can’t judge this” when thats simply not true. People can judge art. We do it all the time. From modern art like blank canvas or toilet seat bullshit to the classics. This whole statement is about as vapid and meaningless as Sonny Boy itself.
Am I not judging it through its own lens? What is even the point of this? Your basically saying “The author intentionally asked a lot of questions and refused to answer them and that makes them OK” when that simply isn’t how writing works. Why do I need to care about the characters? Because if I dont I have no reason to watch the show. This whole thing is, once again, an appeal to novelty. Theres no argument about what makes Sonny Boy good. Just a critique of why someone finds it bad. You aren’t trying to raise the show up, just tear down someone elses position.
For instance: In the paragraph right after this you say “The point of Nozomi’s death was that it showed how much we cared about her, in that she wasnt there so we can be dependent on her (emotionally or whatever, like several characters), that our life is and must remain separate from Nozomi”. Yet right before this you ask “Why do we need to care about characters?”. You don’t get to use the argument that her death was about how much the viewer cared for her while simultaneously arguing that whether or not we care for her is irrelevant.
Tl;dr this whole thing reads like masturbatory bullshit. You completely sidestep the argument of if Sonny Boy is good or not by instead trying to turn it into an argument about Art at large. You completely avoid any and all criticism of the show by attempting to say that Art can’t be criticized, which is simply not true. All the while failing to realize that Art at large has become a giant money laundering scheme and isn’t this ideal you believe it to be.
If you get meaning out of it great. I’m legitimately happy someone did. But you don’t get to tear down other peoples opinions of the show while at the same time saying that what each individual gets out of the show is what really matters. Because I got nothing out of it. I watched this show and every episode I left it thinking “These people have no idea what the fuck they are doing”. And according to your own arguments, thats just as valid as what you got. So either respect that people value different things in anime than you or leave, because I don’t want to deal with this kind of elitism.
Spoilers, but the final episode that aired pretty much drives home the fact that in the end, despite all of our attempts really, “You Can’t Go Home Again”, which is something that Nagara and Mizuho realize themselves when they reach “home”, especially as they saw the other students struggling to “go home” in the second half. And really, that’s something that all of us need to realize as well growing up. Which is something I’m glad Sonny Boy chose to take ultimately, as this basically was the main theme of the series: You can never go home again.