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.

Getting into the actual episodes, I need to play catchup with Episode 8: “Laughing Dog”. And my overarching thoughts are that, as a self-contained flashback, its… fine? If I’m being frank I don’t totally understand what it was about and that’s part of what delayed it until now. I think it’s about dependent relationships and how one sided they can be? How you can push all of your problems, all of your burdens, onto someone else without ever taking anything yourself. And that in doing so you sort of… load that person down until they break? It feels like an exploration of how we can put people on pedestals and, in doing so, start to see them no longer as people. Sadly though Sonny Boy didn’t support this all that well with its visuals.

Throughout the episode we got these strange cuts and mismatched scenes, like things were being shown out of order at times. This makes sense knowing that this is a flashback, a story being told, from the Dog. But as a viewer it makes the whole thing hard to follow. Combine that with some obtuse dialogue and a fair amount of red-herrings/multiple plot threads and the whole thing becomes a mess. Like seriously, what is up with this War character? What did he add to an episode about dependent relationships and a world where inner pain showed as boils on your body? Because for me all he did was distract from the topic at hand and introduce an “antagonist”, as much as Sonny Boy can have one, for later. It feels like Sonny Boy just tried to do to much to fast here.

Luckily there is one part that came across rather clearly: Nozomi and Nagara. The whole story was meant as a parallel to their relationship. A possible future/outcome if they keep going the way they are. We see this not just in how they are separated at the start or the telling shot composition of the two but also how, at the end of the episode, Sonny Boy connects them via their phones. Both literally and metaphorically “syncing” them back together so that they are on the same page again. My only question about the whole thing though is: Who is the dog? Which one of them is dependent, is treating this like a one-way relationship? I want to say its Nagara because of how placid he has been. But Nagara has sort of been leading the way while Nozomi has been the one providing the support. It’s unclear.

This brings me to episode 9: “This Salmon Chazuke Is Missing Its Salmon Nya”. Or as I like to call it “One giant pot of what the fuck”. I honestly don’t know what to make of this episode. Is it about self-consciousness and how we judge or view ourselves? Is it supposed to tie back to Asakaze and his growing discontent with his place in the world? Does it have any meaning whatsoever? How do the cats and Mizuho’s whole B-plot factor into this? I honestly don’t know. And just like the episode 8 I don’t think Sonny Boy knew either. Or at the very least it had no idea how to support these ideas visually. The split between the two brothers was fine but the sumo match, along with how the rewind was depicted, felt ill-fitting for the whole thing.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t like anything from the episode. I actually enjoyed Mizuho’s whole B-plot quite a bit. I liked how the cats are revealed to have been coddling her, almost like overprotective grandparents who think their child can’t survive without them. Juxtapose this with how Mizuho is actually taking care of them, like how younger family members take care of the older, and how she has grown up without them noticing and I think it makes for a cute side-story. Definitely more affecting and well thought out than that of the twins. I almost wish that this was the main plot of the episode. It’s certainly the only one that matters to the only character I still care about.

So yeah all in all I find my self accepting that Sonny Boy simply isn’t for me. It’s dived to deep into art house bullshit and returned to little in actual substance. I think I could get behind it were it an episodic sort of anthology. Where each episode was a standalone conversation about some topic young people face. But that isn’t what Sonny Boy is. It’s trying to reap the benefits of an anthology, the considerations, while still having an overall narrative and consistent characters across the whole thing. And its falling apart because of it. Outside of Mizuho and Raj, none of the characters are good. Outside of some one-off B-plots, none of the story narratives are good (Excluding the salaryman, I still quite like that one). About the only thing it has going for it is visuals and I can just watch those on Sakugabooru.