Whenever you browse a seasonal chart, it’s inevitable the majority of shows will be adaptations. Manga, light novel, visual novel, video game, music CDs, etc. It’s just less of a hassle for studios to tackle media proven successful elsewhere, and these works often provide a very clear path to follow as far as where their stories are headed or what key moments should be highlighted for the maximum oomph. Anime originals don’t have that same expected trajectory. They’re closer to western cartoons, in that they mainly get made because their creator attained clout within the industry and then was given the space by a studio to bring their new original animated concepts to life. This creative looseness can be a strength, avoiding publications that have specific molds they want to be filled for successful products, but it can just as often be an excuse to create something that wouldn’t easily find an audience within pre-established work.

That often felt like the case when watching Sonny Boy. A show with loosely defined structure, loose animation tricks, and a loose core in trying to hit the target audience.

You see this immediately from the first episode. Main character Nagara lies on his back staring at the ceiling, downbeat and dejected, approached by a girl with a similarly moody disposition. Focus quickly shifts to other characters in their own groups. A total of 36 characters are stated to exist within the show’s school, and, apropos of nothing, everyone has some sort of superpower.

Every dynamic is suggested to be re-established. No music plays the entire episode; the sky is often pitch black, or evenly split between blank blue and cloudy. A jarring CGI carousel appears in the middle of a gym auditorium. Main characters are suggested to exist, but their screentime is balanced out with several others arguing over some sort of dominance. It’s overwhelming for a start, but created distinctly as Episode 1, not chapters that fill in for an Episode 1. This serves as an easy way to stand out and an early indication of Shingo Natsume’s talent with using animation to create a distinct feel.

As the remaining episodes go on though, any actual intentions Sonny Boy might have become harder and harder to define. Characters hop between places in separate worlds practically instantaneously. Scenes are placed in non-chronological chunks. Infighting is shown, and then gives way for more existential comprehension of what it means to evolve and live where you are. Entire sections of exposition are stated to present subjects invisible in the moment. Some characters will have focus for entire episodes and then be discarded from relevance. Growth will be suggested through dialogue, but all the introspection is reserved for the show’s main mystery. Amidst all of these very particular choices, the main takeaway I had was that amongst every character with some sort of grab bag superpower, two of them serve as hypothetical prophets, able to broaden new horizons and topple the domain of multiple worlds. One of them uses this power in service of trying to solve the mystery, and the other is tempted to use the power by a walking pair of boobs that serves a similar purpose to the snake in the story of Adam and Eve.

This is the most consistent plotline I could find among the show’s roughly 4 hours of runtime, because the show likes to do something new every episode, yet ardently refuses to provide an anchor for the audience to take in the info before switching to another scene. The sense I get from Sonny Boy’s plot is that it WANTS to be a coming-of-age story. The world beyond highschool could be mysterious, unknowing, and in constant flux with deadly situations making headlines every day in real life now. Sonny Boy’s main characters are primarily near the end of high school, and the show uses their powers to represent some form of change they will or have undergone. One character’s power is deliberately ironic relative to their anxiousness at what life actually has in store for them. One episode ties the thread between school and concentration camp in a similar but more subdued vein to Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Twice amidst all the exposition, it’s paraphrased that having the opportunity to decide your own future, and not have it manipulated by others, is the best way to hope to make it through life.

I understand the intention for that demographic, but as I currently see Sonny Boy, much of the characterization is too loose and confusingly dolled out for any growth to be truly meaningful.

Take Nagata himself, the main character. At the start, he feels downbeat and dejected, content to lie on his ass while staring at the ceiling. He continues to be confused and depressed as the show trudges on, but the whole time I was wondering….why? What happened to make this character be so dour at the start of the story, which was conveniently left out? Midway through, it’s said that something happened to his mother, that may have caused him to kill a bird, but that doesn’t really explain anything. His main role in the show itself is to ask about their situation, complain about being used, be unable to use his power properly, or convey more exposition. His loose personality suggests he might be an audience insert character, but he doesn’t feel like he’s there to clarify anything. Even his growth feels inconsistent. Halfway through he gets incredibly enthusiastic about certain subjects, but it feels less like earned character development and more like he had to act a certain way to propel a certain episodic narrative. If this were a show like Tatami Galaxy, Nagata would feel like the centerpiece of everything, to ground events in a way the audience can understand and emphasize with his goals and ambitions in a limited cast, but the show opts to hot potato the screentime focus among several characters.

Mizuho is similar, being described as “having a moody personality and refusing to interact with others,” and shouldering the blame for a problem affecting the group, but before too long, she’s fawning over cute animals and talking about the plot in a significantly more chipper way. Once again, it’s hard to see what aspect of teenage life she’s meant to specifically relate toward when her characterization feels more in service of plot than anything else.

Characters like Cub seem fairly important at first but gradually fade from relevance. One character is basically a background character with a power given major relevance as an excuse for why they were shoved in scenes at random. Another character comes from a completely different context and has an entire episode narrating portions of their backstory, and is…..probably the most rounded one in the show because of that extensive focus. The “false prophet” loses any of their own motivation in favor of taking naps in the busty temptress’s chest. Rajdhani is probably the show’s best character, the most committed to solving the mystery angle and a fun presence in general; the dub version even has him voiced by someone with Indian heritage, but he still mainly exists as smart guy^tm

The point I’m trying to make is, given the inconsistent handling of the characters and loose definition of what constitutes character development, I think the target audience would find it difficult to connect to any of these characters in an impactful way after the show concludes.

The expected prompt from the shows’ most ardent supporters would be:

“You completely missed these tiny moments all adding up. It’s deep, actually, the characters don’t have obvious growth because they aren’t obvious archetypes! Look at all these metaphors you’re ignoring!”

Yes, this is a show where a lot of context is very blink or you’ll miss it. Every episode is more or less its own story with a distinct message. You never know what you’re gonna get and I don’t intend to spoil that here. It can be pretty fun trying to break the individual messages of episodes, but a lot of these focusing choices, which I know exist the way they are because of Sonny Boy’s anime-original status, are easy to be overshadowed by the influx of lore, as well as Natsume’s visual direction.

Sonny Boy’s at least a show that’s easy to appreciate on a stylistic level. Eguchi Hisashi, who hasn’t designed anime characters since the turn of the millennium, created a very distinctly designed cast in spite of their similarities from the head down. The way characters’ faces look avoids following the lazy expectation for modern anime art direction. Most episodes have some sort of impressive visual flex, like Episode 2 with the atmosphere established by the paper-looking blue fire, though particularly Episode 5 and Episode 8 for their specific style of animation and shading when distinguishing the mental realms. The mental twisting of many dimensions of pattered color is a particular animation highlight whenever it comes up, the bus flying through it in Episode 9 like it were The Magic School Bus’s serious YA adaptation. It does tend to shortcut with several static shots of faceless characters, but it has an especially unique choice for background characters in them being shaded like the type of “anime minimalist wallpaper” you can easily find on Google Images. There’s this scrapbook uncanniness to some of the scenes while avoiding the scrunched-up outlines often seen on characters out of focus, adding to the many wallpaper worthy shots appearing throughout.

At times the visual direction could be dull when not much was happening on screen, when it just hard cut between cast members starring into the screen trying to comprehend the tangle of plot with music missing, but it feels like that freedom of design is what Shingo Natsume saw with this entire series.

This might sound negative, and as far as personal investment in the choices made with the runtime that exists, it is, but I implore you to check out this show if you think its distinctiveness appeals to you. What I’ve been saying about how loose and overambitious the writing feels in light of the visual pizazz is something that only could’ve come from an anime original, a longtime animator writing a script for the first time with that rawness and passion radiating forward at the extent of understanding how to meet the audience halfway. That freedom is worth cherishing. I’m grateful that shows like Sonny Boy are allowed to exist. I appreciate the light hints that the show leaves for people to ponder well after an episode ends. But in its current state, I believe the looseness of its execution precludes me from coming out as infatuated as Natsume wants me to be.