Key Takeaways
- “Girls Band Cry” is a top anime of 2024 with expressive 3D animation and engrossing characters.
- The series takes a realistic and more cynical approach to music-focused original content than its peers.
- Despite using primarily 3D animation, “Girls Band Cry” successfully combines elements of both 2D and 3D visuals.
While 3D animation and its use in the production of anime is something for which many fans have developed a vehement dislike, the visual style has had various moments of success, and one of those is Toei Animation’s musical drama about a young girl leaving her family behind to pursue a musical career in Tokyo.
Girls Band Cry, with its incredibly expressive approach to 3D and engrossing characters, is one of the best anime of 2024, and for a while, it wasn’t even available to stream outside of Japan. Here’s why Girls Band Cry is a must-watch, and why it’s different from peers like K-On! or Bocchi The Rock!
What is Girls Band Cry About?
You Guessed It, It’s Music
17-year-old Nina Iseri is determined to figure out what her purpose in life is. She leaves her hometown to take a trip to Tokyo, where she gets lost and locked out of her apartment on her first day. Her fortune turns around because as she wanders around the city, she bumps into Momoka Kawaragi, one of her favorite musicians and the force that inspired her to come to Tokyo in the first place.
Nina joins Momoka for a street performance, after which Momoka asks Nina to form a band together with her, she’s hesitant at first, but as they gather more band members, the dream begins to take form. Hidden from view, Nina deals with having a toxic relationship with her family which affects how she shows up for the band that they named “Togenashi Togeari” (Thornless Thorn). Each member of the band is a dropout in some capacity, and each has their reasons, which makes the journey of Girls Band Cry not only about the formation of Thornless Thorn but also about the psychological well-being and histories of its members. The series ran for 13 episodes from April to June this year.
On the production side of things, Girls Band Cry is directed by Kazuo Sakai, with scripts by Jukki Hanada, who has immense experience with a series of this nature as the scriptwriter for multiple iterations of the Love-Live! School Idol Project anime and even worked with Sakai on one of them. The series also has music by Yūsuke Tanaka, character designs by nari Teshima and the highly experienced key animator Chika Yamazaki as animation director. Toei Animation is credited as the original creator of Girls Band Cry, the cast of which includes Rina as Nina Iseri, Yuri as Momoka Kawaragi, Mirei as Subaru Awa, Natsu as Tomo Ebizuka and Syuri as Rupa.
A Much More Realistic Approach
Girls Band Cry Is Much More Cynical Than Its Peers
When series producer Tadashi Hirayama joined Toei in August 2019, he was approached to produce a music-focused original series, which prompted him to enlist Sakai and Hanada because they’d worked together on Love-Live! Sunshine!!. Since he’d already done stories about idols, Hirayama directed his focus on the Japanese rock scene, and the economic impact of the pandemic was cited as a reason to make the series more grounded in reality and more focused on depicting the hardships faced by musicians than some of his earlier work. For instance, the characters still have to deal with the tenets of everyday life like finding and keeping work, and contesting good spots to play for street performances with other performers.
Aside from the familial expectations she left home to escape, Nina learns that living alone isn’t really a great time when she goes a whole week without talking to anyone, but when given the opportunity to meet someone new she acts cold and disinterested. In moments where Nina feels the discomfort of remembering something from her past, there’s a visual effect where red thorns start to emanate from her, with varying levels of intensity depending on the trigger, which is a nice touch. One great moment is when Tomo and Rupa are trying to record in their apartment and we catch a glimpse of the padded cardboard box Tomo puts on her head and over the mic in an attempt to soundproof and make the best of trying to record in a place unfit for that purpose. Studio time is expensive, after all.
CGI Done Right: Girls Band Cry Looks Great
What Makes 3D A Good Choice For This Series?
It’s easy to completely dismiss an anime series because it doesn’t have the kind of visuals that we commonly associate with anime, but if the animation production showcases skill and respect for the story and characters, shouldn’t that be enough? What makes 3D so unpopular in the first place is the fact that it gives a completely different feel to the cel-shaded, 2D animation style that we understand to be “anime”. Where a lot of modern anime use 3D or CGI to augment the 2D, the use of primarily 3D in the production of an anime can feel like divorcing the medium from its core aspects.
There’s a lot of problem-solving involved in 2D animation production – from designs to colors to the actual movements themselves; the idea that drawings are moving and can do so in a way that either wonderfully exaggerates reality, or finds a “believable” way of simulating movements that may not be realistic is one of the most enchanting things about animation in general. Generally, 3D can feel awkward, but when it comes to titles like the various works produced by Studio Orange, there are many moments that showcase the value of such productions.
When Toei adopted the use of 3D animation for the sake of one of the Dragon Ball franchise’s films, it was different but ultimately a visual success, especially when it came to the fighting and photography. Girls Band Cry is a great experience visually, not just because of the immense detail put into the series, but just how expressive it is in a way that we commonly associate with 2D anime, so it appears to combine elements from both sensibilities, to the point where the brief moments of the opening sequence that more closely resemble the animation style we’re used to, look even more impressive because they have a “renderedness” that makes them even more striking than they would’ve been if they were just the more details parts of an otherwise completely traditional anime approach to the visuals. The 3D is especially great during performances, evoking a “music video” or live concert kind of feel that elevates those scenes and using the three-dimensionality in a way that works well to emphasize the music.
A Good Sense of Humor
Just Because It’s Grounded Doesn’t Mean It’s No Fun
While it can get very tense as each band member has their own circumstances, and there can be a lot of friction between the band members themselves, Girls Band Crygets a lot of jokes in. From Nina being told that holding up both of her middle fingers means “thank you” and then pulling that move at the staff at a restaurant after a hearty meal (probably the series’ most famous image), to Momoka listing nothing but awful aspects of being part of a band in a speech that was supposed to inspire Nina to form one with her, or even a pigeon bobbing its head to the beat Nina made instead of studying (and later having her write “the pigeon was on the rhythm” in her notes while at the library), the series times its humor very well.
It creates a great balance of the optimism inherent to a show like this; its own more grounded approach; humor and the characters’ personal circumstances. The humourous parts are also not sparse but are almost as frequent as the various rock beats and riffs that fill most of the silence from scene to scene. While it wasn’t available to watch outside of Japan for some time, but it can now be streamed on Fandango at Home, Microsoft, Hoopla, and Amazon Prime Video.