(Too Much) Spring 2024 Anime Season Impressions - Renegade Animation #145
It's time once again for Captain Kaye, The Animation Guru and Teresa to share their thoughts on the various new anime that premiered in Spring 2024!
What’s going on, everyone? This is your Captain speaking, alongside my co-hosts The Animation Guru, and Teresa! I alluded to it in the title, but lately the anime industry has become too bloated. Much like last season, the three of us decided to talk about the season as a whole, in lieu of going over season of the 32 new series that premiered this Spring. So without further ado, please tune into the podcast to hear the full discussion, and keep reading to see our collective top 5 recommendations.
Whisper Me a Love Song
This season, HiDive didn’t have too much to offer compared to Crunchyroll, but the two shows they brought over will both be represented in this top 5! On the surface, I had a feeling I was going to enjoy this anime based on what little information I knew going in. After the first three episodes, however, I didn’t realize just how perfectly this series demonstrates the different kinds of love one can experience. Not all love is romantic, and even if it was, is there really such a thing as “love at first sight?” That lingering question is what makes the dynamic between Himari Kino and Yori Asanagi so fascinating, and I really can’t wait to see where things go from here.
Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night
As disappointed as I am that nobody wanted to bring over Girls Band Cry, HiDive made up for that by acquiring the other anime focused around music, and rediscovering one’s passion for creative expression. Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night follows a group of four girls, a former idol, an illustrator, a VTuber, and a composer, who form the anonymous artist group JELEE. I found Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night to be inspiring, with characters that are easy to root for, and arguably one of the best soundtracks of the season.
Go! Go! Loser Ranger!
Look, if Disney’s not going to bother to advertise the anime that’s currently on their streaming services, then I guess it’s our job to do it for them! Anyway, Go! Go! Loser Ranger is awesome, it’s the best kind of genre deconstruction cut from the same cloth as Watchmen or The Boys, but for tokusatsu. The first three episodes tell a mostly complete story about Fighter D’s attempt to infiltrate the Dragon Rangers, in order to learn how to defeat them once and for all. I won’t spoil the twist at the end of episode 3, but I will say that it was brilliantly executed, and it made me want to continue watching the rest of the series.
Wind Breaker
One of my takeaways from Spring 2024 was that the action/adventure genre was the strongest, and shows like this are exactly the reason why. Wind Breaker is somewhat of a subversion of the typical delinquent anime, which follows Haruka Sakura, an outcast who’s about to join Furin High School. This is a CloverWorks production, so you know the animation is going to look great, but what I loved about this anime is how much each character is overflowing with personality. The over the top blend of action and comedy has earned Wind Breaker its place in the top 5!
Kaiju No. 8
Kaiju No. 8 is just a blast right from the start, an awesome blend of blue collar workplace comedy and science fantasy action, in a world where kaiju run rampant in the streets. Our main protagonist, Kafka Hibino (great literary reference btw), has the ability to transform into a kaiju after ingesting one, which is a great inciting incident for his character arc. Every time we do one of these big anime season impressions podcasts, we always end up discovering the show that will become the biggest hit, and it’s not hard to see why this one took off the way it did.
That’ll do it for this episode! Thank you all for joining us! We have provided resources for those who wish to support the victims of the Israel-Hamas war: https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/, https://www.ifnotnowmovement.org/, https://itch.io/b/2120/games-for-gaza, https://www.instagram.com/palestineredcrescent/, https://buildpalestine.com/2021/05/15/trusted-organizations-to-donate-to-palestine/, https://www.npr.org/2023/10/13/1205235922/help-israel-gaza-humanitarian-organizations.
