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<\/center>\nYamakan sure did go and make the Fractale of idol cartoons.<\/p>\n
Which isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t to say that Wake Up, Girls is a bad show – it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actually pretty entertaining and<\/i> has a traditional 2D animated dance sequence, and at least one of those things is more than you can say about most idol anime these days, but watching the movie which begins the franchise is an experience not-unlike watching the first episode of the directors most infamous of prior works.<\/p>\n
That is, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all cynical as hell, and it sure enjoys pointing it out on a regular basis.
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\nWake Up, Girls centres around Green Leaf Production<\/i>, a small entertainment management group working out of Sendai, whose boss is rendered a whole ball of frustration when yet another one of their acts decides to leave them and head off to Tokyo in order to make their fortune. She then, however, sees super-popular Tokyo based idol group I-1 Club<\/i> (which you may as well read AKB48) on the television, and decides to lumber her sole underling with the task of assembling a new idol unit in order to launch Green Leaf to fame and fortune.
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\nIdol career status: Ruined<\/i><\/b><\/center>
\nThen, after forty minutes of girl-herding effort, having assembled a unit including a ribbon-less Amami Haruka, a chripy moe-moe-kyun<\/i> maid-cafe worker, a former I-1 Club member and the token 13 year-old, and three others of presently-less consequence, the boss leaves them in the lurch just before their debut performance by disappearing with all the companies money, leaving them with bills poor mister Producer has no way to pay, a stack of CDs and nowhere to perform. Oh noes!<\/p>\n
One does have to wonder if Mr Producer (actually called Matsuda Kohei) is something of a self-insert for Yamakan (as in, director Yamamoto Yukata, to use his actual name) himself, lumbered with having to meet the expectations of his production partners in less than ideal circumstances. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s earnest but realistic about the whole affair, but his boss takes an incredibly traditional<\/i> approach to the whole idol group production thing. Part of the audition process even has her asking the girls if they are virgins<\/i>, as you do, but she is forming the group purely to try and jump on the popularity bandwagon of what others are doing, and is looking for very specific in the groups members. She calls the group \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Wake Up, Girls\u00e2\u20ac\u009d because truncating it to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153WUG\u00e2\u20ac\u009d makes it sound like the British pop group \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Wham\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, though, realistically, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s probably because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rather reminicent of Morning Musume<\/i> when it comes to real-world marketing. It’s an idol group forged from elements of other popular idol groups.<\/p>\n
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<\/center>\nWhich kind of makes the production feel really rather disingenuous. Social commentary is fine and all, and disregarding any possible reading of the show as a commentary on it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own actual production, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot in there which is specifically nailing the anime and idol fandoms. Yeah, I think the fandoms supposed obsession with their idols virginity is pretty dumb, as is the kind of talk that they sometimes get into on internet forums. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a stage performance which is reused between the movie and the TV show and is full of panty shots, which seems to be in there entirely as a gotcha for the audience who pervs over them having seen the TV version before the movie, which reveals them to be an entirely cynical and pandering part of the stage performance.<\/p>\n
This would be fine if the whole production was set up as being a biting piece of satire, but at the same time, they are shilling merchandise of these characters. They want you to buy tie-in CDs. They want you to buy pin badges featuring your favourite girl and\/or their associated animal. They want you (well, those of you in Japan) to go to concerts. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s like they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re simultaneously telling you that you are kind of disgusting for being an obsessive idol and\/or cartoon nerd at the same time as really, really hoping you become an obsessive idol and\/or cartoon nerd over the characters in this particular show. The fact that they keep telling you and pointing out how they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re trying to make you that obsessive nerd doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really excuse it from the fact that it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s doing these things.<\/p>\n
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<\/center>\nAll of which could be a gross misjudgment of the intention, I guess. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s honestly hard to read whether they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re deliberately playing on the audience, or simply throwing in things that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d assume would make a popular idol show. It was the same with Fractale – as easy as it was to point and laugh at all the things in that shows first episode which looked like they were lifted straight from Nausicaa or Laputa or Nadia, it was difficult to tell if that came from Yamakan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s rhetoric about making something that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be really<\/i>, genuinely<\/i> popular and industry saving, or if it was a deliberate commentary on the perceived database animal<\/i> nature of the audience and\/or their unhealthy obsession with purity. The show didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really help with the way it fumbled it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own messaging, either, or that it failed to deliver on any other the more interesting elements it established.<\/p>\n
The main problem is, honestly, that the cynicism is pretty much the main source of character the show currently has. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the only significantly noticeable flavour. I mean, Love Live is perhaps even more cynical in construction than WUG is, calculated for broad nerd-pandering appeal with just a pinch of audience participation, but it also literally vomits personality<\/i>, making it real easy to overlook. <\/p>\n
WUG isn’t like that. WUG is rather more grounded, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s humour is dry, and, maid aside, whilst the characters are still mostly genre stereotypes, they aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really exaggerated in any specific way, yet they fail to do anything particularly interesting or gripping with them in eighty-odd minutes of content. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actually kind of nice that when a character pratfalls onto the Producer, they apologise for landing on top of him rather than going into a forced comedy routine about how much of a pervert he is. The girls even flash their knickers without the usual screams of embarrassment in accompaniment. I generally think that Yamakan\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s sense of humour is pretty good, but without the idiosyncrasies of the original work or Kurata\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writing as in Kannagi<\/i>, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actually pretty spread sparse here, mostly leaving ineffective drama and talking heads to build interest in characters. It kind of makes you appreciate how effective the use of humour in other idol shows like iM@S<\/i>, Love Live<\/i> and Aikatsu<\/i> was in establishing character.<\/p>\n
That all kind of leaves most of the show feeling a little bland and empty – a pastiche of other popular works like Fractales opening – aside from the aforementioned cynicism in regards to the anime audience and the idol industry in general. Which might be fine if I had any real confidence in the show to actually follow through on any of these themes in any significant fashion. I mean, the first TV episode ends with what looks like, for all intents and purposes, it leading into a skeezy Yakuza-affliated producer type trying to squeeze in and lure the girls into equally skeezy Junior Idol Bikini videos. That could go into really dark, gross but kind of interesting places, but more likely it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll actually be nothing of the sort. There’s hints of nefarious idol industry activities<\/i> in the backstory of the one character who has been given one, but it’s yet to be seen if they’re as interesting as they could be.<\/p>\n
Honestly, though, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m coming across way too harsh, and way more negative on the show than I actually am, but, hey, a guy has to vent sometimes. Yamakan is going to Yamakan is all. As I said right up back at the start, Wake Up, Girls is actually pretty entertaining. The animation seriously needs a bit of work – the movie is mostly fine, if increasingly janky as it progresses into it’s final third, but the TV episode is really rough in places – but I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quite<\/i> as bad as some of the pictures you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve probably seen elsewhere on the internet, aside from a few cuts of really awful background composition.<\/p>\n
Also, not really directly related to quality or anything, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s real nice that Crunchyroll managed to swing getting the movie, which only just opened in Japanese theaters, to coincide with the broadcast of the first episode (and, honestly, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s kind of essential to follow it).<\/p>\n
(Also, Tiger is best girl)
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![](\"piccytures\/wug\/wug_1_6.jpg\")
\nTwo consecutive cuts which beg the question – Where did the pancakes go, Tiger? Where did the pancakes go?<\/i><\/b><\/center><\/p>\n
(Also, Also, yes, I realised I used the word “cynical” way too often. Kind of unavoidable, alas)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yamakan sure did go and make the Fractale of idol cartoons. Which isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t to say that Wake Up, Girls is a bad show – it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s actually pretty entertaining and has a traditional 2D animated dance sequence, and at least one of those things is more than you can say about most idol anime these days, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3912","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wake-up-girls"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3912","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3912"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3912\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3928,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3912\/revisions\/3928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3912"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3912"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.beta-waffle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3912"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}