Musical anime are typically pretty good. Bocchi the Rock, Your Lie in April, Ao no Orchestra, Anonymous Noise, K-ON, and several others come to mind so when Girls Band Cry showed up, I knew that I had to check it out since I typically enjoy shows from this genre. The day it came out, I went to Crunchyroll, and… it wasn’t there. Hulu? Nada. Amazon Prime? Nopers. Netflix!? Nuh-uh. Where the hell is this show? Oh, okay, it’s in France. Wait. What? South Korea!!?? NANI THE F…? Ok… fine.. I’ll have to board my ship and brave the waters then and… oh… no groups picked it up but there’s an… MTL? Oh, boy… I guess it’s better than nothing, right?
….right?
Let’s go… (pray for me)
First Episode Synopsis
Iseri is on her way to Tokyo with 17 years…
Yep. This is going to be rough…
Anyhoo, even though it’s not outright stated, things aren’t going so well at home. She feels as if she doesn’t do anything wrong; however, she gets blamed for anything anyway. She moved to Tokyo with her 17 years after dropping out of high school. No dream… no ambitions… nothing. She was able to score herself an apartment at a 50,000 yen rent price tag but she doesn’t exactly have a job to pay for it. Plus, she missed her stop and by the time she got to the office, they were closed. No problem… she’ll just call and… oh, her phone is dead. Welp.
She heads to her apartment anyway in hopes there is a spare key lying around. Instead of taking her generous and friendly neighbors’ offer to use their phone and/or charge hers, she just runs away and goes to a café to charge her phone and enjoy a nice parfait to the humble sounds of getting chewed out and demeaned by her family over a lovely phone conversation. After the typical “you’re breaking up, k thx bai” line, she notices her favorite singer is performing at a station nearby… right now! She leaves her completely full, completely paid for parfait behind (what a waste) and goes to see her perform.
Enter Momoka… a sassy girl whom Iseri adores. A couple of street performers get in her face about taking their spot, she flips them off and ropes Iseri into it. They run for it and lose them but Iseri still has no place to go so Momoka invites her to stay at her place… but just for the night because she’s quitting everything and moving back home tomorrow! She leaves Iseri her guitar; however, Iseri can’t let things end like this! She gives chase and hijacks some street performers’ (the same ones from before… a least I think they were?) microphone and after making a public display of herself, convinces Momoka to stay and… cue credits!
Worth Watching?
YES – Okay… let’s talk about the elephant in the room. This is a full CG-animated anime. To be honest? Some of the movements are a little janky but, overall, it looked pretty nice. Some scenes did kind of take you out of the immersion but the story pulled you right back in almost immediately. So… that’s challenge number one…. This will be a personal challenge… whether or not you can stomach a full CG animated series. If you can, you’re halfway there!
Challenge #2… avoiding the FBI because there is no legal way to watch this show. Unless a late license pick-up comes in and scoops it up, you’re going to have to rely on the underground portions of the internet to get your fix and, so far, we’ve only got some random people on Reddit using MTL to sub this… no groups have even picked this up. That could be bad… It could also mean that to legally watch this, we’ll have to wait for the Blu-ray once the season is over and pray it has English subtitles then Japan Rabbit that stuff to your front door.
Hey… where there’s a will, there’s a way, right?
I’m not even sure if the internet will come through and finish the rest of this series. Heck, I don’t even know if I can review it when it’s done… but… my hope is that something happens so I can because this first episode was incredible and I think we have something special on our hands!
If you can overcome the hurdles and set aside your morals, you should at least find a way to check out the first episode. An anime fan sometimes must do with what we’re given. Sometimes, the hand of fate must be forced.
*wink*
