Anime Review: Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai

The Summer 2024 anime season is filled with shows that have historically been just peppered here and there; however, we have not one, not two, not three, but FOUR anime based on music and/or creativity. Since this is a genre that I love, I picked up three of them. One of those is Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai (Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night.) Given my guilty love for this genre, did it deliver enough high notes after everything was all said and done?

Let’s Jam!

The Story

One of the nice things about Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai is the fact that its story doesn’t center around just one or two people. Here, we primarily follow the story of four girls, each of which are treated equally in terms of importance. There is Mahiru, a girl whose art was laughed at, thus causing her to lose her confidence, Kano, a former idol who was disgraced after she got into a physical altercation with a group member, Kiui, a high school dropout who turned into a V-Tuber to try and find an identity that made her happy, and Mei, a superfan of Kano’s who has an affinity for music who finds difficulty in being true to herself.

Things get set into motion when Kano spies Mahiru’s mural on the side of a city street wall and falls in love with it. She just so happens to see Mahiru there and discovers that she is the artist who painted it. By this time, Kano is trying to restart her “career” by posting songs online under the name JELEE. She compliments Mahiru and wants her to draw for her so that JELEE can have a mascot character. Mahiru is very reluctant at first but eventually agrees.

Mei enters the picture when she follows (aka stalks) Kano and confronts her. When they discovered that she could compose music, they wondered that if they paired that with Kano’s singing and Mahiru’s art, they could create music videos under the JELEE brand name. The only thing that is missing is the technical knowledge to make the video happen. Mahiru just so happens to know a person who can help, who is Kiui, a friend of hers from school. Even though Kiui has become severely introverted, she reluctantly agrees to produce the videos. The four of them complete the online group; however, they begin to wonder if they can keep things up due to things such as school and other life commitments.

This bothers Kano because one of her desires is to fulfill her mother’s wish. Her mother, Yukine, is a producer who originally used Kano in the idol group Sunflower Dolls to make her own wish come true… selling out the Tokyo Dome. Even though Kano has a rough relationship with her mother, she wants to sell out a 50,000-seat venue… both to fulfill her mother’s wish and to do it in spite of her!

The Characters

First off, we have Mahiru Kouzuki. She won an art competition when she was really young and had the honor of painting a huge mural version of her winning art piece on the side of a wall on a city street in her hometown. She was so excited about winning that she wanted to show her friends the mural. When they saw it, they laughed and made fun of the artwork but did so without knowing that Mahiru was the one who painted it as she was keeping it a surprise. Embarrassed, she placed her hand over her signature and laughed with them so as to not draw any suspicions. Ever since that day, she questioned her own skills and sought validation for her artwork. When she became part of JELEE, she faced online criticism… especially when some people who submitted fan art did a much better job drawing her characters than she did.

I think every creative person can relate to Mahiru no matter what their profession is. When you put your heart and soul into a creation that is born from your mind, your creation becomes an extension of you. When someone pokes fun at it or harshly judges it, you can’t help but feel that they are attacking you personally as well. That’s how it was for Mahiru and it caused her to lose confidence in her ability. That is until she decided to stop running and get better. She practiced and practiced and did improve which eventually did get her noticed; however, she faced even more adversity which led to her ultimate defining moment.

As a creative myself (light novel author), I completely understand where Mahiru is coming from. I have people telling me how much they love my work and I’ve had my fair share of critics who didn’t like a single thing that I had written. It is very discouraging when you put your hard work into something and it gets torn down by another person but the important thing is to recognize where you went wrong and use that to make the next one better and silence the critics as much as possible. That’s what Mahiru did and that was the journey you were taken on with her as a character.

Kano Yamanouchi is the daughter of Yukine, a producer whose desire is to sell out the Tokyo Dome. Under the stage name of Nonoka Tachibana, she was gifted the lead singer position in the Sunflower Dolls idol group, bumping the now former lead singer Melo Setou from her position. Melo was peeved at first but she became enraged when she discovered that “Nonoka” was really their producer’s daughter. Seeing it as blatant favoritism, she held a grudge but used that anger in a completely different way. Still showing loyalty for Yukine, the two of them conspired in some underhanded tactics. Melo went online and posed as a leaker and exposed all of their competition’s dirty secrets, getting them bumped from shows so that the Sunflower Dolls could take their spot.

Kano discovered it was Melo behind the information leaks and became so mad, she struck Melo in public. This made the news and it caused her to be ejected from the group. Melo got her lead singer position back and Yukine was scorned because her meal ticket to the Tokyo Dome when and did something stupid, screwing her over. This is when Kano went online under the name JELEE and began singing. She missed the adoration from the fans but knew that she needed to rebuild her career from scratch. Her desperation to do so was her driving force and even though she recruited Mahiru, Mei, and Kiui, she knew that everything she was doing was for herself and, in a way, for her mother. Kano’s journey is to figure out just who she wants to sing for and to find her true love and passion for performing once again.

Despite Kano’s story being the foundation for most of the series, it felt equal in terms of importance versus the other characters. Kano came off as genuine; however, when she threw fits about the other members’ inability to fully commit to JELEE’s future, you knew that something was up… there was a reason for her outbursts. Of course, it was a personal conflict between mother and daughter but how Kano eventually handled it showed how much she had learned and grown proving that you can overcome adversity in your past and find success in your own way!

Next up is Mei Kim Anouk Takanashi… yeah, that’s a mouthful. Mei loves music and began learning how to play at an early age. She won numerous awards in various competitions as a result of her exceptional talent. However, she was often reserved and this caused her to drift away and become a loner. She became a fan of the Sunflower Dolls and, one day, got to meet Kano as Nonoka. Nonoka offered her some words of encouragement and they were just the words that Mei needed to hear. She became a super fan of hers from that day and vowed to follow her everywhere.

Never in her wildest dreams did she realize that following her would allow her to work alongside her as part of JELEE. Through working with Kano, she learned to find her true self. Of course, Kano didn’t want to be known as Nonoka anymore, and when she told Mei that, it was as if her world shattered. She almost felt betrayed but after coming around, she learned to accept Nonoka as Kano and that was when she began to realize that she couldn’t just rely on Kano’s words to help her through life anymore. It got to the point where she met someone who was the same as her before she realized that things needed to change and passed along the same advice she learned.

While Mei’s story wasn’t the most impactful of the four, the lesson here is that if you’re struggling to find an identity for yourself or if you lack the courage to be yourself, it’s fine to find inspiration to uplift you but you shouldn’t latch onto that inspiration and treat it as some sort of guideline to live by. Instead, use it as a base to find your true self and then live by your standards.

Lastly, we have Kiui Watase. She was outgoing and rather colorful in school, always drawing attention to herself. The problem is as she moved on from elementary school to middle school her little outbursts weren’t cute anymore. In fact, she got made fun of for calling herself a superhero. It got to the point where she had lost all confidence in herself and dropped out of high school. She just couldn’t stand to be around other people who didn’t take her seriously. She developed the online persona Nox Ryugasaki and became a V-Tuber. She gained a pretty good following as a gamer but then when she became part of JELEE, she used her platform to advertise the group.

Of course, she wanted to do all of this work remotely because she didn’t want to be seen in public. Through Mahiru’s friendship and encouragement, she slowly came out of her shell and started meeting the group in person. Despite that, she was still very hesitant about going out in public. Eventually, when Mahiru needs to go back home to dig up her original mural to confront her past, she brings Kiui along with her. There, she witnesses Mahiru stand up for her against some of her former bullies. Something snaps inside of Kiui and she learns to accept herself for who she is and decides to tell off her detractors.

Kiui was my favorite character of the four. She’s the one that you could feel the most sympathy for and the one that you just wanted to hug the most. In a way, a lot of people are introverted for one reason or another and I think Kiui is a great example of how you don’t have to abandon being an introvert but find comfort in your lifestyle despite others who may look down upon you.

Art, Animation, and Sound

To be honest, the art of Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai was nothing to write home about. It was all pretty basic and something you would expect from a slice-of-life anime. One thing that I am thankful for is that when you normally get a performance in an anime where music is involved, the show will switch from hand-drawn art to blatantly obvious CG and it sticks out like a sore thumb. Jellyfish doesn’t do that here but there is CG involved. During two of the shows near the end of the series, they use CG to show holographic projections as art decorations to enhance their performance. The nice thing is that this CG blends in nicely with the traditional animation and doesn’t take you out of the immersion. In short, this is a great example of CG done right in an anime.

Other than that, the character designs were unique across the board. Every character was designed in such a way that matched their personalities. Plus, the facial expressions were done purposefully throughout the show to match their personalities as well. Despite conveying the characters for the individuals they were, everything else seemed like standard fare.

As for the music, you would think that this would be where the show would shine because it’s all about putting on performances but that even fell kind of flat for me. Maybe it’s because I’m a metalhead and pop isn’t my style of music but I can enjoy a good pop song if it stands out enough to sound unique. Nothing about the music produced for this show sounded unique. All of it sounded as standard as it could based on what’s being produced out in the world today. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it felt like a step below what you could get anywhere else.

It was clear that a show about creativity wasn’t about creativity. It was mainly about the journey of its four characters with a creativity theme wrapped around it and not the other way around. I know if you’re a fan of this style of music, you will wholeheartedly disagree with me and that’s fine. I can only go by my opinion here and it didn’t deliver something that I felt was unique enough to stand out.

Overall Thoughts

As I mentioned a few times throughout this review, Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai is all about the characters and their journeys. It’s all about finding acceptance and validation or righting the wrongs of their past. Each one has their goals and they all play into one another’s. Coming together as JELEE isn’t just a collaborative effort for them to express their talents, it’s a form of therapy for them as well.

The show did fall into a bit of a slice-of-life pitfall where the beginning was great, the middle was okay, and it didn’t pick up again until the end. I think by the time it came around to solving their problems, the show rushed things a little. That’s the problem with these shows with twelve or thirteen episodes… you can spend a lot of time developing the characters but, in the end, it doesn’t leave as much time for the resolution. Although, I don’t think that this is one of those cases where it needed 25 episodes to accomplish this. If it had a 13th episode, I think that would have sufficed to truly bring out the drama a bit more and wrap things up more neatly.

To get technical, they wrapped this up in 11.5 episodes since the back half of episode 12 was more like an epilogue than anything.

Overall, while the character development was excellent, the music (for me) fell just a bit flat and the ending could have used one more episode to set things up in a way where it didn’t feel a bit rushed. While Jellyfish was premised on finding your creativity in various forms, it was more about the characters’ journeys with creativity playing second fiddle to it. For what we received, it was pretty good but it did leave me wanting just a little bit more from it.