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.
Speaking of story, a metric shit ton happened this week! I mentioned before that Sonny Boy introduced just as many questions this week as it answered. Questions such as: Are they alive or dead? Real or copies? Is Aki a student in the future like the dog? Is this all some kind of Lost style “Cork in the wine bottle of Evil” bullshit? Who knows! And if I’m being honest, I’m not sure Sonny Boy does either. The whole episode sort of feels like a “Stop trying to figure this out and just experience it” thing. A friend of mine described it as a splash of cold water for those treating this like a puzzle, that the whole thing is just about learning to deal with people/each other. But this is what we are going to talk about this week! Starting with whether or not they’re alive.
So, living or dying, there’s a lot of weird information for this and my best guess is that they aren’t real. They are just copies of themselves thrown onto this island/worlds in some cosmic experiment. After all, as we see during the episode they still exist in the real world! They graduated, are still living their lives, etc. On top of that we also know that they aren’t the only class to have been brought here. Either from the future or the past, other students exist on this island and yet they hadn’t heard anything about disappearing students before now. Meaning that every other student who disappeared was either completely forgotten about… or never stopped existing in reality to begin with. Whether or not this was caused by the film editing is ultimately irrelevant as well because the end result is the same: No one is coming for them.
As for why I think they are the copies and aren’t actually real? Nozomi. We see in film reel, when they flash to our world, that she’s dead. Everyone, their own class to the teachers, are mourning for her during the graduation. So if that version of her is dead, what does that make our Nozomi? This also calls into question what exactly the light she has been chasing was. Until now I thought it was their way out, their salvation. But now I wonder if it was her death. That the light Nozomi was chasing was actually the moment she died, the lightning strike from the very first episode, and isn’t actually her power at all. This is starting to sound like a stretch I know but Sonny Boy isn’t giving me much to work with here. Suffice to say though, shit just got weird for her.
This brings me to another new question of the episode: The principal. Who is he? Sonny Boy talked a lot about him this week without actually telling us all that much. It implied that he was responsible for what is happening to them, or at least in control of it in some way. However this runs contrary to the claims that Mizuho, Nozomi or Nagara were the ones to originally set them a drift. On top of that we can also tell, based on both his voice and what Sonny Boy told us, that he is the voice who spoke to both Hoshi and Mizuho. Combine that with a look reminiscent of Dr. Strangelove and you have a character oozing mystery and hidden meaning. All in all I like his inclusion, I like what he can possibly bring to the table. I can only hope Sonny Boy uses him well.
Finally lets talk a bit about some philosophy. Throughout the episode we see two major strains of thought compete against each other: Fatalism, championed by Hoshi and Mrs. Aki, and Indeterminism, championed by Nozomi and Co. It’s a pretty classic “Free will vs predestination” conflict, framed as a question about Japanese society and the youth. Do they just accept their current place in it and mold themselves into the system, trying to fit in as best the can under the assumption that they can’t actually change anything? Or do they believe that the current system is not monolithic and that their generation, and ones after them, can effect change? I think it’s an interesting idea, a conflict I usually enjoy exploring. But with how thin Sonny Boy has spread itself I don’t think it will be able to answer any of these philosophical questions satisfactorily. I hope I’m proven wrong.
So yeah all in all I think this was a good episode, a good audio-visual experience. But as far narrative goes? Sonny Boy has asked a lot of big questions and laid down an ambitious story. And this is where my cynicism kicks in because I don’t think it can pull it off. It’s reaching for so much, bringing in so many different elements, that I don’t think it will be able to bring them all together in a satisfactory manner. Don’t get me wrong, I expect Sonny Boy to be a one of a kind visual experience. A kind of arthouse mind-fuck similar to Children of the Sea, making no sense narratively but sticking in your mind regardless. Maybe that sounds like a good time to you! I know some people love that shit. But personally, ill take a solid story any day.
P.S. Just in case I forgot to mention it, I was reminded while going through for screenshots just how creatively shot this show is. While I may have qualms about the narrative Sonny Boy is, without a doubt, the most uniquely shot and animated show of the season. It’s use of focus, 3D backgrounds, image wraps and colors were just… ridiculous this episode.
I like the idea that Aki’s a former student – she was shown in the alternate graduation, so she’s also a teacher at the very least.
I pretty much agree on the visuals being great and the story-telling being messy.
Principal might be an older Hoshi. They introduced those “old person glasses” for a reason, and as dog-senpai said, there are only students here
Very interesting idea… But I’m not sure we can have two instances of the same person? And what about the star symbol on his face? Regardless I hadn’t though of this, nice.