Akanesasu Shojo First Impressions

“Hear us, World of 4:44… and appear before us!”

Akanesasu Shojo is an unusual series in many ways. It is an anime original which is intended to be the first part of a multimedia franchise celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Animax channel. Furthermore, the studio behind it, DandeLion Animation Studio, is a largely untested studio. I have a tendency to go into anime series with relatively little information on hand. This is partially due to the fact that, until I actually see the series, it can be difficult to commit plot or production details to memory. Akanesasu Shojo is something of an outlier in that regard, as I’m pretty sure it doesn’t want you knowing anything about it either. This isn’t an innuendo to suggest a lack of quality in the product. I’m just saying that the plot synopses I saw before my first viewing were hazy on the details. I can’t speak the quality of the multimedia franchise this is apparently envisioned as spearheading, but Akanesasu Shojo’s first episode is decent, if not groundbreaking. Little more than the basic premise has been revealed, and frankly, I’m still waiting for the show to prove to us it isn’t just the anime adaptation of Stranger Things, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Akanesasu Shojo or The Girl in Twilight (This is not the directly translated title. A literal translation would be something like “The Glowing Red Girl”) follows a group of five high school girls who serve as the members of their school’s Radio Research Society. I’m not going to do a full rundown of the girls as most of them have been only characterized in broad strokes so far. Still, even if we have yet to become intimately familiar with their personalities and backstories, each of the girls is distinct, both in terms of visuals and interactions. Our central lead is Tsuchimiya Asuka, and, naturally, she gets the most exploration in this first episode. Despite having a mildly mercurial attitude, she’s shown to be perceptive enough to make connections that may have eluded other characters cut from similar cloth. The girls regularly go to a nearby shrine and perform a ritual involving a radio that is said to allow people to move between worlds. Much to their dismay, a variation on the ritual succeeds and they find themselves in a golden world where they are saved from danger by a girl who looks suspiciously like Asuka. She brings them back to their world, which she refers to as 633.0, but collapses as soon as they arrive.

A group of silly students, a radio club, crossing dimensions, you can see why Stranger Things came to mind. The production on this series is impressive when you consider the limited pedigree. As I mentioned earlier, each of the characters are easily distinguishable, and the art is largely sound. There are occasional hiccups. The show does incorporate some CG animation which can be conspicuous. The biggest issue I had with the aesthetic came when the characters visited the 633.1 world. Gold is a decidedly gaudy color, and the scenery of that world can quickly wear on the eyes. It’s also in this world where the CG is most prevalent, so those two issues begin compounding. If we’re going to spend more time in 633.1, then I hope there is more variety to the locations or that the design team opts to mute the color palette. The episode also incorporates some fan service into its latter half, but it isn’t to a notably excessive degree. There is a bathing segment that features both versions of Asuka, and, if we’re being honest, there is no reason that conversation couldn’t have taken place literally anywhere else. This does serve to invite a question that I never thought I’d have, though. If you take a bath with an alternate version of yourself is that creepy or just a particularly thorough form of personal grooming? That’s food for some very, very weird thought.

Before I wrap up, a few Notes and Nitpicks:

• The names of the worlds are dictated by the setting on the radio that is required to get to them. I’m going to forgo all the music based jokes that are cruising through my mind right now. One of the other rules is that they can only be traversed at 4:44, but, given a reveal that some of the other rules devised by the Radio Research Club were essentially nonsense, that may not be accurate.
• We get a brief glance at another interloper from the 633.1 dimension at the end of the episode. I wonder if she’s also an alternate version of one of our main cast. If so, it’s probably a version of the character Mia Silverstone, since the silhouette appears to also have pale white hair.
• There is a video game that this show was reminding me of, and, for the life of me, my mind was drawing a blank. It’s Oxenfree. I had to open up Steam (and remember my Steam password) to figure that one out.
• The CG effects work was most apparent in how it rendered the weird little golden snow rabbit creatures that attacked our leads in the golden world. It probably would have been a better move to only use those effects during the action scenes as the initially peaceful interactions with the creatures looked the most conspicuous.