Animisery – A Blog About Living Miserably with Anime (Among Other Things)

School idols? More like school idles hahaha I’m so not funny

What is it?

Love Live School Idol Project is a multimedia project combined between several companies in Japan including publisher ASCII Media Works, music label Lantis, and the animation studio Sunrise beloved and widely known for their Gundam franchise. Love Live School Idol Project in particular is the very first entry in the anime series which included sequels such as Sunshine!!, Nijigasaki High School Idol Club, and Superstar!! (the exclamation points are because Sunshine and Superstar are just really excited to be here).

What’s it about?

The first season of the Love Live anime is about the school idol group (school idols being idols who go to school as the name kind of implies) known as μ’s (pronounced muse) and its formation by the perky but slightly annoying, in my opinion, Honoka Kosaki and her friends, Umi Sonoda and Kotori Minami. Honoka’s school is threatened with closure due to a lack of students applying so Honk (I’m calling her that now) decides, after seeing a popular school idol group at another school, that a school idol group will absolutely definitely totally get everyone interested to apply for her school so she sets out to form a group and meet a colorful cast of characters who it is okay to ship because the show is going to kind of do it for you.

Is it good?

This is, in my impressions, the beginner idol show. You can go in with little knowledge of idols as what they constitute in Japan’s pop culture and Love Live will carry you along just fine. The bones within of this anime skeleton are primarily comprised of fun fluff with the girls being cute and silly while you might get a very obviously CG juxtaposed within regular 2D animation dance numbers. The songs themselves probably won’t immediately stick with you lyrically but the sugary sweet layers will satisfy your a music sweet tooth especially with some of the more fun dance numbers within the show. There drama within the show is at best a solid 3 out of 10 of the “AND THE PROMS TOMORROW!!!!” scale with it all hinged around the school being closed or the girls being unable to communicate with each other i.e. “WHY DIDN’T SHE TELL ME THE THING I DIDN’T ASK ABOUT THAT WOULD’VE BEEN HARD TO TALK ABOUT!!!” and so on. You will surely find it easy to gravitate to a girl or two and long for her to get all the screen time in the world because the girls almost appear scientifically engineered in a lab to fill some demographic. You have Honk who is perpetually in a state of reckless genki abandon doing the unthinkable like being a slice of life anime character and doing stuff in the rain or you have my favorite girl Nozomi Tojo who pretends to be a fortune teller and is also a weird pervert that fondles the other girls and their breasts. The fact is that these girls almost seem patented to peddle their personalities to you and the show is fun enough that I forgot that the entire thing was essentially a product to make me buy gacha rolls on the now defunct phone game and the CDs that would’ve crammed my local CD store if I was a resident of Japan. The point I’m trying to make is that this is a piece of media in a franchise that wants your hard earned yen and Love Live is actually does a grand job of seducing you into a comfortable seat to buy in what the literal song and dance is trying to sell you. I found myself guffawing with gusto at several gags and getting legitimately mad with the idiocy of Honk and not in a “this character is badly written” sort but a “this character is doing things that are bad to others and I’m writing about how mad it makes me” way. I like idols and idol shows (though admittedly I’ve only seen a small handful) so take everything with a grain of salt because that might be the only seasoning you’ll get with Love Live in some episodes unfortunately.

What’s the final review? Give me an arbitrary number!

The first season of Love Live is just a huge dollop of bright pink anime whipped cream with waifu sprinkles that has no substantial caloric value to it but by God is it sweet and kind of pretty to look like. What’s within the metaphorical anime whipped cream may not be something you serve to even a dog that you hate but you don’t need to think about that too much. At the end of it all, Love Live is a nice treat with a song and dance that’s fun in the moment but it won’t stick with you for long outside of the waifu sprinkles that will inevitably fall off and get stuck in a corner of your house. I say that as I gaze over longingly at my Love Live clock with my beloved Nozomi on it. I know what I’m about, friends.

7/10 – Good but not that special