Wonder Egg Priority. That's a weird title if I ever heard one. When this anime was first announced, there was literally no information on it except for it being about a girl and her friends getting eggs from a gachapon machine. Nobody knew what it was going to be...and nobody expected it to turn out the way it did either. Needless to say, Wonder Egg made a huge splash for its luscious animation, dark, heavy story that was willing to push boundaries, and star very flawed but relatable characters that didn't quite fit into the archetypal anime molds that we're so used to. This is especially notable considering this is the product of a small group of animators, a new director, a creator who mostly had experience working on live-action stuff, and a new studio that only just formed a few short years ago. It wouldn't be a stretch to call this one of the most ambitious anime of winter 2021, and for good reason. That being said, as you can tell by my score, it's...not great, and this is actually due in part to a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff in regards to the staff and animation team behind this project. So let's see if we can make an omelet out of these eggs, shall we?
The story begins with a young girl, Ai Ohto, reeling from her best friend's suicide. Having been previously bullied because of her heterochromia, losing a friend in such a gruesome way has made her shut herself at home, so she refuses to go to school. One night while out on a walk, she buries a dead firefly...which reanimates and leads her to a strange place where she is told to get an egg from a capsule machine. Later, she wakes up in a strange dream world that looks a lot like her school, where monsters known as Seeno Evils run rampant. The eggs she's told to break contain the spirits of young girls who committed suicide due to their traumas, and Ai, along with three other girls—Neiru, Rika, and Momoe—have to not only protect the girls from Seeno Evils, but defeat the manifestations of their traumas, Wonder Killers, in order to save the people they hold dear. Thinking this'll bring her friend back, Ai takes on the challenge, but she and the other girls have no idea what they just got themselves wrapped up in.
Not gonna lie, the animation is absolutely luscious. Packed with movement and immaculate detail in nearly every frame, and all of it is always used for a specific purpose, from the flowers and their symbolism to the dynamic character animation. Everything is just brimming with life, from the fantastic use of color to even little things like the way characters carry themselves really show just how much effort the producers put into this. It's practically at the level of KyoAni's standards of animation...although, it wasn't without cost. Apparently, the animation team assigned to WEP was fairly small, so they didn't have a lot of the resources other companies did. Because of this, the production process behind the show was really, really tough. Like, animators being sent to the hospital because of needing to meet deadlines and biting off way more than they can chew tough. I'm not even kidding. Japan's animation industry isn't perfect, as people work long hours for startlingly low salaries, often times to the point of being stuck at work for literal days without end, glued to their desks, which resulted in one animator being sent to the hospital twice due to overwork. There's a reason the Japanese made up their own word, karoushi, meaning death by overwork. I mean, I love when animators really do their best to make a show look as good as possible, but it should never be at the expense of their physical and mental health. I don't have much to say about the soundtrack. The background music is nice, and the opening and ending songs are great too, even if the latter is deliberately unfitting, being a cutesy, peppy J-pop song in a dark urban fantasy anime.
The characters are where things start to get tricky. For one, a good portion of the main cast are very well developed and have a lot of depth to them. They all have their flaws, strengths, weaknesses, and layered personalities that make them stand above the typical anime archetypes we're so used to seeing. Rika in particular stands out for the better, as although she's mainly on the side of good, she's an insecure teenager and former teen idol who starts off as a mooching little bitch, freely admits to fat-shaming a former fan into starving herself to death (and continues to fat shame her even as a statue), shoulders a lot of guilt because of what her actions caused, and pretty much acts like any teenager in her situation would. That being said, other characters aren't so lucky. Neiru starts off as an aloof girl, but some aspects of her character stretch my willing suspension of disbelief, like the fact that she, a 14-year-old, is the president of a big company. More is revealed about her character later on that...don't make a whole lot of sense. Plus, Momoe's situation is really vague. Just what is her deal? Is she transgender? Does she not like constantly being mistaken for a boy, or girls confessing their love to her? If she doesn't want to be mistaken for a boy, why does she wear a suit and keep her hair short? The anime doesn't really explain what Momoe's issues are all that well.
But I can deal with a lot of this. The story for the first half of the series was intriguing, I liked the mystery aspect, and the idea of these teenage girls becoming friends and helping each other through their issues was definitely very appealing to me. But then everything after episode seven happened. The series started to get really shaky in the eventual reveals that came later, and the final episode...dear God. Derailing is a really big word, but that's exactly what Wonder Egg Priority does in episodes 11 and 12, and I'm not going to lie, Wonder Egg really shit the bed. HARD. No, seriously, I have never seen a series go from so good to just so incredibly BAD in such a short amount of time, especially in the finale, which need I mention, was delayed by two months because the animators were overworked. Aside from the animation and the first half of the story, I honestly can't bring myself to say anything good about the last half of it, from all the piss-poor writing decisions it makes, to the really important plotlines it randomly introduces and then just completely forgets about or straight up ignores in the very next episode
God, I really wanted to like Wonder Egg Priority. I really did. It's really sad that the anime turned out the way it did, because had it not been plagued with production troubles, or even had better writers or planning, this anime could have been a masterpiece. It seemed like it was really going to be something different and ambitious. It certainly tried, but in the end, it just fell off a cliff and didn't stick the landing. Wonder Egg Priority, you deserve better. But with the way it is now, I can't bring myself to recommend this anime in any conceivable way.
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