'Sonny Boy' Review

This is a thing that I wrote just after watching the series, which was actually about a year ago to the week, now that I think about it. In any case, I'm working on a different post that is taking much more time to research than I thought it would, so in order to have even a somewhat regular post schedule, I'll release this now and that will hopefully ease my mind.

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When I was very young and enjoyed things like the Alice in Wonderland remake, I remember I asked my mom what made something (I’m assuming that I asked about movies but for the purpose of whatever this is I’ll say all media, even though that is absolutely not something a child would say) “good.” I asked her because I had noticed that she usually wasn’t very fond of the movies that I liked, which I said were “good,” and I couldn’t really find much value in the old movies that she would talk about. In response, my mom said that she thought the way to tell was if the movie made you feel something. As I was, I took that definition and stored it in the important section of my brain and I’m sure I parroted it off to people who did and did not ask- this was before I recognized my own opinions.

In any case, the divide between knowing what most consider to be objective quality in any media versus just knowing that it made you feel something has become something of great import in my content-addled brain. I can say that a camera angle or shot is really cool or difficult to pull off while secretly holding the knowledge that I watched a video about something mildly related on youtube, and I had miraculously become a connoisseur of film after falling down an internet rabbit hole of people with all their own opinions, presenting them in a carefully crafted or just very loud manner. I can absolutely tell you a fun fact about a script in some movie that is considered “good” by the masses (that absolutely must be above my age- if the piece is popular among my peers, that is a big no-no) that I can’t tell if I actually enjoy or not because of all of the armchair cinema genius I have consumed over the years of lying on my stomach, arms draped over a pillow with a phone in hand.

This is not to say that I have learned nothing from the videos I have watched, in fact I hold a great respect for their creators in all learning domains- it is much more a Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of a young Asher- my younger self (but older than in the first paragraph- you get the idea) was due for a bit of a reconstruction in terms of my ability to form my own thoughts about the media that I present to myself. Even now, though I have more faith in my ability to actually know whatever the fuck I’m talking about, if i tried to fully separate my thoughts from the part of me that yearns for pop-culture centric admiration, I would have trouble finding the line between what I know because I know it myself and what I know because it relates to something that someone else said at me. I have not fully rid myself of the epigonic urge.

Anyway, I just finished watching Sonny Boy. As I’m writing this, I’m worried that I may have written more in the introduction than I will have written in this whole-ass thing because the surge of motivation to write after watching will have faded by the time I get to the godforsaken point; the point being: Sonny Boy is really quite good. I could say that the animation is beautiful and the music is powerful and the story is impactful but there are an extraordinary amount of anime like that that I haven’t bothered to watch, and if my goal is to get people to actually watch Sonny Boy and not just put it on their “plan to watch” list to die of neglect, I want to take a different route.

A haiku~

I don’t understand

What the fuck happened at all

But it made me feel.

I will also say that I actually understood the plot more than the friends who watched some of it with me, so there’s that, as well. Another thing: I’m usually not a fan of shows or movies that are incomprehensible- I tend to think that one of the most important challenges of the creation of these things is relaying information to the audience with as few barriers as possible (which, I’m now realizing, is super ironic, considering I’m an American who regularly watches Japanese television in Japanese with English subtitles, not to mention the state of the translation of the show in question, which I’ll get to later), while it may have been one of my favorite shows at the time, it is difficult for me to look back fondly on the last few episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion because I don’t really feel smart enough to either form a satisfying interpretation or piece together the jumbled information, gorgeous as it may be.

Sonny Boy, like many anime, is about high schoolers. The similarities with the other anime that I have seen mostly end there. One day the school is transported- actually, no. I think, honestly, it’s best if you go in blind. The sheer number of concepts -ideas that I hadn’t thought anyone would have the literary courage to expand upon- that are introduced is immense. Each episode feels like, at their least intense, an invitation to look back at your mind and your comfort zone- a philosophical stroll where you can choose how deeply you want to explore the themes through your own level of engagement. At most intense- a stupefying accusation where, in my case, my sentence was to sit in silence for several minutes after the episode ended, mind completely caught up in that painfully perfect outro song.

In all honesty my personal high school experience, externally, wasn’t that bad- there wasn’t really any social hierarchy at my school, I had a lot of good teachers, I found some really wonderful friends; but if I’d had bullies or social trauma or if most people actively disliked me instead of just thinking I was awkward and leaving me alone- I think Sonny Boy would have made me bawl my eyes out (it did get pretty close regardless). I don’t usually cry that often, but if you do, tread with caution.

It’s difficult for me to judge the show by comparing it to others, though, and I think that has something to do with its structure. Each episode is layed out/edited, it seems, not with narrative cohesion or continuity in mind, but with the flow of the emotions that it attempts to evoke. Scenes happen one after the other, but the first may be in the “present” and the next may be a memory, or a shot from the future. Honestly, using the word “present” doesn’t feel quite right because there often isn’t a continual flow at all- past and future and middle occurring side by side in seemingly random order. But it isn’t random. Somehow, I have no idea how, the editors or storyboard artists or whatever -I don’t know how it was made- put the whole thing together without making it feel jarring or really that disorganized, there’s just a shift from perceiving the show as a sequence of events to a strung-together series of feelings where, at the end of the episode, sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t.

It has some problems. Usually I can’t really comment (thankfully- I’m conceited enough with scripts in English) on anime scripts and dialogue because I can’t understand Japanese aside from your usual anime and manga phrases/words that are repeated ad nauseum. In this case, I will only say that the official English translation (for the subtitles- the show probably wasn’t popular enough to warrant a dubbed version) is not good when compared to the ones for most other seasonal anime. You can usually tell what the subtitles mean, but it’s a puzzle for the audience, not the creators- words are jumbled up, there are typos and grammatical errors, many phrases are just off enough to make you think about how they were probably translated by someone who just mostly understood English, and by that point there have been two more lines of dialogue.

Also, sometimes the editing does bug me. Maybe I would benefit from a rewatch, but there were definitely a couple times when I got to the end of an episode and just had even less of an idea of what was going on than what is required to get the desired emotional impact.

Sometimes I will read a review of something, and, as a human, I tend to most heavily remember the negative things that were listed, so I’ll say this: I adore this show. It hit me like an emotional truck. It has one of my favorite soundtracks in any piece of media. It has taught me things (not entirely sure what yet, but I’ll figure that out in time- I know that I learned) about the nature of will and familiarity. One of those shows that I will absolutely recommend, but it affected me so much that I might not want to watch it with you.

I don’t know. Maybe it just hit me harder for whatever reason. I realize that a lot of this analysis has just been me writing about my own experiences, but that’s what this show did to me. I was left with not just emotion, but the desire to look back on my own life. It made me actually create something, which, for me, is the ultimate compliment. If you can get this box of raw spaghetti to willingly get up and write, you have achieved more than the majority of my thirteen years of schooling.

It also has the best soundtrack of any I've ever heard.

In short, Sonny Boy was a very fulfilling drug trip of a show. I feel like I’ve undergone a change and had an intensely meaningful experience, but trying to wrap my head around how I got there is too much for me to handle. What I mean to say is that, though its inscrutability may be a deterrent to some, it happened to give me a clearer view of the show as a whole. I can’t tell you exactly why I love it so much, I can’t tell you why it was created or what definitely happened in the story or even what it’s really about, but for me I know, without a doubt in my mind, that it’s “good.”