It's hard to talk about this show, because almost all the elements anime are typically judged upon are fairly lacking here. The story is superficial in the first half, and then just kind of a mess in second. This reminds me a lot of Terror in Resonance, another ambitious Watanabe-directed effort that has a few beautiful moments while feeling very uncanny due to the lack of proper buildup or follow through. The characters and dialogue are also extremely basic, and many of them could have been done away with entirely (for example, Roddy, possibly the most omnipresent yet non-essential anime character I have ever seen, apart from, well, Risa from Terror in Resonance). There's a terrorism plotline, a presidential election, a one episode detour where Carole meets her long-lost dad, two stalker subplots, and a couple of mental breakdown/drug overdose plots -- it's just too much, and when the characters are as perfunctory as the ones here, it just gets exhausting. It doesn't help that a lot of these plotlines are picked up and dropped across the course a single episode. The only thing a typical anime watcher would have to grab onto in this show is its sometimes excellent animation (maybe the character designs, backgrounds, and outfits, which I thought were all very cute, but I don't know much about the topic). And while this show does have some of the most beautiful rotoscoping sequences I'm sure you'll ever find, it also does heavily use limited animation and falls back into typical Netflix anime mediocrity for long stretches.

And that's all the bad things I'm going to say about the show. Because despite all these very obvious flaws, I enjoyed this show and I very much appreciated what it was going for. My thoughts on this show are the very definition of giving an A for effort.

First, Watanabe has always made it a point to work diversity into his shows, whether that be in terms of different ethnicities or gender orientations. Carole and Tuesday may just be the most diverse anime I've ever seen. That might not matter at all to you, but I personally am sick of Japanese high schools in anime, and I found it incredibly refreshing. Watanabe has always loved music and western culture in general, and of all his work, this series has got to be the peak of his unique style of idealistic cosmopolitanism (though of course, as we see, not everything is perfect on the terraformed Mars where the show takes place). What I really love about Alba City, and other similarly diverse settings in Macross Plus or Bebop, is that it really doesn't just look like New York or Singapore. It's got a distinct look and a distinct vision of a true post-Earth melting pot. The attention to detail in some shots is really nice to see, though there's enough reused shots of the sprawling city that you might get sick of seeing some of it. As for the representation of queer characters, I think it was leaps and bounds beyond anything I've seen in an anime before, even if I could be convinced that some of the examples are a bit strange and maybe in bad taste. Seeing nonbinary characters like the Mermaid Sisters (Desmond?), the bisexual judge, Gus's lesbian ex, I mean, you just don't get such a vast array of non-straight characters in a cartoon pretty much ever. Watanabe has always been ahead of the curve here.

A few words about what I think most people seem to be missing here, which is that Carole and Tuesday is about music (I know that's obvious, but no one seems to give the music in this show enough credit). I have never seen, in any music related media of any kind, such a skillful homage to so many styles and artists, while almost never devolving into pastiche. No music anime has ever encapsulated an entire genre like Carole and Tuesday (that genre is pop, but even then it goes farther beyond). I say this while being a huge fan of how Champloo and Kids on the Slope broke new ground on this front. Nothing those shows did compares to what we have here. First, the collaboration with well-known western artists like Thundercat and Denzel Curry, which alone would be enough to make me watch an anime, not to mention that Denzel especially wrote some incredible songs for this show. Apart from that, all the (mostly) English-language music in this show is widely varied in style while still sounding faithful to what pop music is today, from Angela's fight songs (and one very Charli XCX sounding song that I love), to Pyotr's funk nu-disco, GGK's take on FKA Twigs-esque experimental R&B, Flora's on-the-nose homage to Whitney Houston (down to her tragic backstory, though I am delighted to see this time we have a happy ending), Krystal's mix of Beyonce and Ariana Grande, and of course Desmond's painfully sincere tribute to David Bowie. In particular, Desmond's episode was very clearly a remix of David Bowie's final 2016 album, and the choice to interpose his song with a speech by a fictional Donald Trump surrogate showed that Watanabe (or whoever was in charge of the music of this show) is keenly aware of the modern context of western music.

The core duo of the show, Carole and Tuesday, are if anything the blandest act in the cast. Though there are some truly great singer-songwriter type jams in the first half, I started to get bored by their songs in the second, apart from the 2nd opening (which I think is an excellent Peter Gabriel-esque tune that is a bit disorienting at first with all its polyrhythms). The best parts of this show were the music festivals as well as the tournament arc (which is a parody of American Idol). During these episodes, I was always excited to see where the new contestants would go, and was rarely disappointed if not outright shocked. The touches are sometimes subtle, like the bubbly percussion and PC music-like synths in Angela's "All I Want", or the reverb on GGK's breathy vocals, but it always feels like a lot of heart was put into these songs rather than just making you go "oh hey, that's supposed to be this musician." To top it all off, the music sequences are generally beautifully animated, with an attention to detail and fidelity to what playing music is actually like that I can't help but admire. I'll admit, I'm not as blown away as I was by some of the sequences in Kids on the Slope or Space Dandy, but I think that may be partly because those shows already raised the bar so high beyond anything I had seen before. Watanabe knows how to put a great music sequence in his shows, we all know this, but it doesn't make it any less of a treat to see it done with a new genre or ten.

As for the overall message of the show, yeah it's a little ham fisted. It's a direct response to Donald Trump and his racist rhetoric. I'm not sure it really fits with the setting, and I'm not sure it's handled in a subtle and intelligent enough way to be truly great, but honestly, I don't really have a problem with it. Like I said, A for effort. I commend Watanabe's ethos and his idealism, and even if I did cringe a bit when Carole and Tuesday decided to sing We Are The World to protest against ICE (sorry, it was just too on the nose), I'm glad that a show like this was made. I agree with the (perhaps a bit banal) message, and it doesn't hurt to see it in anime at all. You're a good guy, Shinichiro Watanabe. Keep doing you.

I'll be returning to some of these songs a lot, some of these less. I'll be returning to scenes of this show for sure, and the fuzzy feeling it gives me will definitely last a while. It shows that the crew of this show, or at least a few people involved, were true fans and students of pop music, and that passion and respect for the craft shines through in everything from the meticulous compositions to the episode titles (all named after a pretty wide sample of chart-toppers of all sounds and eras, complete with showing the accompanying photorealistic vinyls during the eyecatches). As a huge fan of the genre, I couldn't ask for anything more. It's pretty rare that a show like this comes along that appeals so much to my specific interests. Even with all its faults, I am very glad to have experienced this show.