Wake Up, Girls! Shin Shou

The animation in this season is incredible. Incredibly bad. Like, it's actually impressive how bad it is. I can't believe that a show went to air in this condition. You've probably seen shows with bad animation before, but this is on another level. I don't remember the first season being especially well animated or anything, but it was nothing like this. This is like the show was given to people who tried to cover up the fact that they didn't even know HOW to animate. I didn't notice it as much in the first couple episodes, but once you start to notice it, it's impossible tostop noticing. Shots will linger for 30 seconds or more on static shots of random things so they didn't have to worry about animating the characters. It happens VERY frequently. As a result, if you aren't very familiar with the voice actors, it's hard to tell who's even speaking sometimes. They often neglect establishing shots, so you won't even know who's in a scene until you hear them speak from somewhere out of frame. There are also a lot of very bizarre shot choices which all seem to be done strategically so that they won't have to animate anything, like only showing a character's head from their eyes up. Imagining what the storyboards looked like is depressing since all of their choices seem to have been based around doing as little animation as possible. The artwork is terrible. Backgrounds look blurry and gross. Characters are often drawn off-model. Sometimes they look like they were drawn by people who don't know how to draw humans at all. It's weird. The animation is at its "best" when they have performances with 3D models. You've definitely seen better 3D animation, so don't get me wrong. But at least the characters are moving. I can see how going full 3D could make production cheaper, since they wouldn't need to manually draw and color each frame. If that's the case, it makes me wish the entire season had been in 3D. Bang Dream switched from 2D to 3D and I don't think it suffered terribly for it. It's hard to comment on the story because the animation is just that distracting. However, I can say that it feels like it has its eggs in too many baskets. One of its plots focuses on a virtual idol called Machina X. (It seems like it's supposed to be a synthesized voice like Hatsune Miku rather than a character voiced by a real singer, but that isn't made clear.) I think the show is trying to suggest that this virtual idol is a threat to the jobs of real idols. As someone who's been religiously keeping up with Hatsune Miku since 2008, I know that this wasn't true and especially wasn't a real concern in 2017 when this show came out, so it feels like this particular plot was written by someone who wasn't very familiar with virtual idols and/or saw them as an easy topic to fearmonger about. I felt like the first season of Wake Up Girls was a hidden gem among idol anime. It was very, very good and deserved better than this. I'm shocked that anyone gave this higher than a 5/10 because it's THAT bad. I definitely wouldn't recommend this to people who liked the first season, but I might recommend it to anyone who wants to see just how amateurish a supposedly "finished anime" can look.

I'm fascinated by this show. I want to know how many workers rights violations it took for this show to come out looking this bad. I need to know what kind of time crunch they were under and how bad they blew their budget. There is no reality in which the production of this show wasn't an absolute disaster, and it is a car crash I cannot look away from. Truly transfixing. It's a little sad to see things end up this way, honestly. Wake Up Girls felt like it had decent potential as an anime project, and I do honestly like a handful of theideas present in this season, it's just a shame that it's execution is so sloppy. Wake Up Girls was no masterclass in storytelling and deep themes beforehand, but it's still frustrating to watch them drop the ball like this. Getting the obvious out of the way, this show looks horrendous. It's actually astounding how many errors there are and how many time-saving methods they had to employ to just get this thing out the door. Most of this show is static shots, and yet the artwork still ends up being horrifically sloppy. Anything that moves outside of episode 1 usually looks like it had to be done within 20 minutes to meet an impossible deadline. Compositing often tries to compensate for how little animation the show truly has by cheaply sliding parts around, made even better when they frequently disregard how 3d space works. Editors sometimes have to stretch out shots to add a few seconds to the runtime, so panning shot framerates get fucked up and choppy. It's entertaining if you're enamoured with trainwrecks like I am, especially if you have experience or understanding of how animation works behind the scenes, but otherwise pretty unacceptable to air on TV. Can't exactly say the story earns much praise from me either, this show feels down-to-the-wire in ways that make me think the scripts probably weren't allowed much time to bake either. There's one episode involving Minami and Nanami getting into a fight and Yoshino having a weirdly out of place melodramatic outburst at Mayu that feels particularly suspect to me - like was this episode a casualty of a rushed rewrite, or was it just always poorly written? Alongside the wonderfully cartoonish evil AKB48 parody idol agency, the new opposing force this season ends up being a virtual idol anime character named Makina who is very clearly based on Hatsune Miku and possibly VTubers (Kizuna Ai would've been active for about a year at time of airing). She's not an exact equivalent of either, just a kinda poorly thought out and underbaked representation of current trends in idol culture. I assume Makina's presence here was intended to ask slightly more lofty questions about what it means to be an idol in the sense of being a role model, and what certain fans actually want from their idols - if all you want is a cute girl to sing and dance in cute outfits, isn't this good enough? Can a fictional virtual idol be a role model and inspire someone in the way that a real human can? The presence of Run Girls Run backs that theory up, because frankly otherwise they're pretty useless additions to the cast, and it matches up with the shows criticism of how the I-1 Club girls are treated like disposable objects by both management and certain entitled fans. The problem here is that she's so under-utilized and has so little presence until the very end of the season that none of those ideas ever connect to one another. She feels like a useless addition at best, and an extremely lame bad faith boomer-ass criticism of Hatsune Miku at worst. And of course there's absolutely no back and forth here in the way that I-1 Club gets - there are no characters to represent the human artistic talent behind her, only the capitalists who seek profit. She is only ever a villain and a threat to be defeated. I like that we get to see the girls do more solo idol work. Shiho is still the best character and I'm pretty happy with her arc overall. Shiraki repeatedly shooting himself in the foot is admittedly pretty fun to watch after all the bullshit he's put people through. I don't understand how WUG keep booking concert dates on the same day as I-1 Club, seems like they're self-sabotaging at this point. Sucks that Wake Up Girls had to leave us on such a low note (at least in anime form), but that's just the world we live in. The seiyuu unit disbanded in 2019, Run Girls Run disbanded in 2023, studio Ordet has been absorbed into Ultra Super Pictures. This is how it all ends, not with a bang, but a whimper... Objectively extremely funny show to own on blu ray, I want it.

This is the second series, and third installment, of the "Wake up! Girls" story. Not to bury the lede, it was not quite as good as the first season, but I still don't quite understand why it's ranked so low. Alright, the animation wasn't great. I'll admit that. There was a point in the end where the CGI was actually choppy, and it was clear that they took as many shortcuts as they could. That is why I didn't rate this a ten. But the story was still really good, and the ending, while not perfect, was very satisfying and Ithought it was a fitting end to the series. I found the interplay between the different idol groups to be very interesting, and I think one of the great messages of this series is that even though the groups were rivals and at odds with each other, they still supported each other, because at the end of the day, they became idols for a reason. That reason may be different for every idol, but the theme seemed pretty consistent - they became idols because they loved how they could make people smile. This may be a somewhat idealistic representation of idols, and in some ways this series is a love letter to idols and idol culture, but in other ways it's a stinging indictment, and I found that fascinating in its own right. I don't regret having watched this. Truth is, even my cold, critical-of-idols heart was a little taken in by the kirakira, and that's not an awful thing. Recommend from me. But if you're looking for a work of art, well animated cute idols, and don't care about the story, you might as well skip it.

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