Anime Review: Girls Band Cry

Musical anime is 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. At first, I thought that the 3DCG animation was going to be bothersome; however, it has come a long way since 2016 Berserk. But, was it good enough to not flatline this show?

Let’s Jam!

The Story

In Girls Band Cry, Nina has abandoned her home and moved to Tokyo. She has no plan, no job, nothing. All she has is this ambition to get away from the life that has caused her so much pain and misery. There, she meets Momoka who is doing a performance on the street. She used to be a part of Diamond Dust but left the band and is now doing a solo act for a pittance. After meeting her, she wonders if the two of them could perform together but there’s only one problem… Momoka is quitting everything and moving away. After chasing after her and convincing her otherwise, Nina has a glimmer of hope to find her true calling.

Of course, she can’t just start a band with two people. Enter Subaru… a girl who is being pressured into becoming an actress by her famous grandmother but she would rather form a band. She knows how to play the drums and with Nina on vocals and Momoka on guitar, they could try and pull off a three-piece; however, things don’t gel well between them and they are constantly getting into arguments, mainly due to Nina’s inability to get close to or trust anyone (despite doing that with Momoka…)

Along the way, two people who have quite the following on social media are looking for a band to join, one is a keyboardist (and a stubborn perfectionist), and the other plays bass and is raid laid-back, carefree, and acts as the voice of reason. Now we have Rupa and Tomo and the band is complete! With five members ready to take the world by storm, they aim to take down Momoka’s former band Diamond Dust, and climb the mountain to stardom; however, their wildly dysfunctional relationship gets in their way!

The Characters

Where do I even start with Nina? She is all over the place and then some. First off, she ran away from home because she was being bullied at school. We don’t know why until the very last episode when the show finally sheds some light on it. I’ll save you the spoilers but once you get to know Nina throughout the show, you will realize that her reason for being bullied fits her perfectly. Because the school wouldn’t do anything about it and nor would her parents, she ran away from home to Tokyo. Because of the bullying and feeling like her parents don’t care, she develops an inability to trust others. She gets through her days listening to Diamond Dust when Momoka is the singer. She idolized her and thought it was great that she could form a band with her. Rather than being a fan of Diamond Dust itself, she’s rather a fan of Momoka, her music, and her lyrics, and believes that her music deserves to be heard by everyone with the logic behind it being since it saved her, it can save everyone.

In a way, dragging Momoka back into the music world against her will based on that logic is extremely selfish. In fact, there were many times throughout the show when Momoka and Nina would be at odds with one another over that very topic. It even got Momoka to temporarily quit the band but each time she tries to leave, Nina keeps bringing her back and this is the one part about Nina that I didn’t like. Nina thinks that she’s doing Momoka a favor and a service by forming a band with her but, in reality, she’s selfishly trying to get Momoka to keep creating music for her sake; however, we have to look at the other side of the coin and that’s Momoka herself.

Momoka is a mixed bag as well. At first, she agreed to form a band with Nina simply because she loved the sound of her voice and she wanted Nina to sing for her. It gave her some encouragement to write music again; however, that wasn’t always there. In the very first episode, despite liking her voice, she decided to leave anyway… heck, she even signed her guitar and gave it to Nina never expecting to need it ever again. For some reason, Momoka keeps coming back, though. On the surface, she’s always looking for an excuse to leave the music world behind because she knows just how unforgiving and cold that world can be but, on the other hand, she has this desire for her music to reach other people all over again and to do it as not a part of Diamond Dust.

Part of the reason why she left the band was because she wouldn’t be able to make her music the way she would like to. After being signed to a record label, they went mainstream, and, therefore, the label was telling them what music to write and play. Her dream of touching the world with her own creativity was shattered and she couldn’t accept it. In a way, that makes Momoka just as stubborn as Nina… and… just like Nina, she was trying to run away from it all. While they harbor different personalities, the situations are so similar that they realize that they need each other. I think Momoka realized this several times which was why it was so hard for her to truly walk away from everything.

Subaru’s story isn’t that deep. She simply doesn’t want to follow in her grandmother’s footsteps. She even admits to lying to her about going to acting school just so she could play in the band. She loves playing the drums and music is her true passion and calling except… how do you tell a world-famous actress who’s also your family that you don’t want to be like them in a culture where that is severely looked down upon and could even get you cut off from your family? Sounds extreme but that’s the way it is sometimes in Japan and that’s the fear that Subaru has.

Rupa and Tomo are total opposites but they need one another. Rupa has a great artistic sense but her drawback is that she loves to drink… like… a LOT. Despite this flaw, she remains level-headed and balances out Tomo… her roommate, and someone who is very cold and direct in her feedback. In fact, Tomo’s harsh criticism is why the two of them are on their own. She tries her hardest to keep it to herself when they join up with Nina, Momoka, and Subaru but it eventually comes out; however, Nina takes her criticism to heart and uses it to improve. When Tomo sees this, it’s like her shell breaks and she begins to see them in a new light.

It’s tough to say who my favorite character was in this show… they all had their endearing quirks and their flaws. Maybe Rupa because she always seemed chill and laid back. The only harm she ever did was to herself with her excessive drinking. Outside of that, she never really caused trouble for anyone. Seems like the type of person you can just be whatever is around and still be accepted. The rest are just way too dysfunctional for me to put up with on a regular basis so yeah, Rupa wins. Congratulations!

Art, Animation, and Sound

Okay, so the elephant in the room is here going to be the fact that 99.99% of Girls Band Cry was produced using 3DCG animation. I say 99.99% because there was an episode where we did a flashback and a brief moment in the final episode where the show used traditional animation over CG. I never thought I would see the day when I would say that the traditional animation stuck out like a sore thumb and broke the immersion but yet… here we are.

But that statement should speak to the overall quality of the 3D animation. Now granted, there were some parts that looked a little janky but for a good majority of the time, everything was fluid and believable, and nothing looked robotic. Toei Animation knocked it out of the park in this sense and while it wasn’t super perfect, it is probably one of the best 3DCG anime I have seen in a long while.

Facial expressions were done amazingly and when you abandon traditional animation, you can do certain things that bring more life to the show… trust me, Girls Band Cry was filled to the brim with little nuances, movements, gestures, and split-second animations that you would never see in a traditionally-created anime. Because of these quick microsecond moments, the anime was given this truly random feel to it. Add in spontaneous and seemingly random lines from the voice actors and you get an anime that seems more realistic than scripted and the animation matched that feeling perfectly. It’s hard enough to do this in a traditionally-created anime but to pull this off using CG is even more impressive.

I was very apprehensive to learn about the show being in 3D but after watching it, it didn’t bother me one bit. In fact, I’ll dare to say that I couldn’t imagine this show any other way.

Now, as far as the soundtrack goes… this is a show about music so it has to have a banger soundtrack, right? Well… yes and no. The only music I could recall from the show was the insert songs created for their band… which is a good thing because that’s what you want. You want to have those songs stick in people’s heads so that they go out and buy the soundtrack and, if they decide to tour in real life, buy tickets to the concerts, merchandise, and everything else. In that sense, I think Girls Band Cry did its job and did it very well.

Ask me about the rest of the soundtrack and outside of that one piano version of the opening theme song (which is also a massive banger, btw), I couldn’t tell you anything. A lot of the time, the show will use ambient background noise or nothing at all which gives the show a rather unique feel but when there needs to be a moment that’s backed up by music, it’s there… sadly, again, outside of just one song, I can’t recall anything they did.

But seriously, the insert songs were phenomenal. Buy the OST.

Overall Thoughts

To be honest, I kind of got scared when it came time to review this show because Girls Band Cry and Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night have had two very similar premises. They both contained girls who were looking to overcome their own personal adversities and make in the entertainment world. One just deals with creating a band while the other wanted to create an online media group. Thankfully, in the end, I wasn’t as confused as I thought I would have been because Girls Band Cry does enough with a similar premise to be completely different.

The one thing I loved the most was something that I touched upon in the animation section and that was the realism of the show. By that, I meant how conversations were carried out, how spontaneous some of the dialogue and matching animations were, etc. Even with some of the most spontaneous characters in anime history, a lot of them felt forced or scripted. The conversations here seemed pretty natural and matched how people their age in today’s world typically communicate.

The story felt as if it was all over the place at times, though. People randomly quit the band, come back to the band, and just argue with each other, one moment the band works, the next it doesn’t and heck, even in the last few episodes, they get presented with an opportunity, take it, change their minds, change them again, they want to do it, then they don’t… it’s chaotic. It’s both a positive and a negative for me because while it made it seem like nobody in this show could ever make up their mind, you also realize that this is how it is sometimes in the real world and this show doesn’t try to hide it or glamorize life to where you think that this is how it should be or any of that nonsense.

It’s sloppy for a reason and it just works. It gives the show a certain charm and makes it stick in your head… and that works, too because despite the fact that the show wasn’t on any U.S. streaming service, people went out of their way to find a way to watch this show because it did something very few shows do… capture your imagination and make you want to see more. Not because it was good (it was) but because it did something different, it stood out, and it grabbed your attention that way… and then made you realize it was good and that created the perfect storm.

But, as perfect as the storm seemed, there were some imperfections along the way. Despite the attempt at realism in the dialogue and story, sometimes, it seemed a bit too outrageous. Some of the reasoning behind Nina’s bullying kind of made everything they built it up to seem like a waste… and, oddly, the usage of traditional animation in parts just felt weird in a show that was purely meant to be 3DCG (again, never thought I would say that.)

It was a tremendous effort by Toei Animation that produced a high-enjoyable show that I think anyone who loves music or slice-of-life Girls Band Cry is a show you should go out of their way to watch!