Sonny Boy

Abstract art faces an inherent double standard. It must both earn its right to be non-literal in the first place, and is expected to eventually “make sense” to its audience. It’s an impossible task, to convey truths through symbolic language alone but to do so so clearly that it cannot be accused of pretension.

Sonny Boy has only just ended, so it is hard to say where, eventually, it will fall, in the public consciousness. Some abstract anime are eventually acclaimed as classics, others are derided as nonsense. Either way, the series stands as one of the most compelling of the year. Enough so that simply saying such can feel rote–or even worse, dogmatic. But sometimes the reason so many people think something is interesting is simply because it genuinely is. Sonny Boy stands as a rare moment where a truly out-there piece of art has managed to capture the imagination of the public at large. Even by itself, that is a huge achievement.

On a production level alone, Sonny Boy speaks for itself. Its character designs lean more realistic than most modern TV anime, making it immediately stand out, with characters being distinguished by face shapes and so on. Its backgrounds are painterly and convey, as needed, a sense of surreality or depict vivid, natural landscapes. Accompanying all this is a bold, sharp directorial approach that knows precisely when to fully cut loose, scored by a well-curated soundtrack of synthesizer pieces, indie rock, and, sometimes, dead silence. To some point, mentioning these things at all feels like box-ticking. It is obvious from watching even any few random minutes of the series that it looks and sounds fantastic. So the big question is not one of production then, it’s one of theme. What is Sonny Boy about?

In a very real sense; nothing less than our lost generation. Sonny Boy centers on a classroom of high schoolers sent, per their own words, “adrift.” References to The Drifting Classroom and Robinson Crusoe abound. The nature of the anomaly that shifts our cast from the mundanity of modern Japan into the chaotic randomness that is the Matroyshka Doll worlds-within-worlds land they end up in is never explained and is not really the point. Nor is the nature of the superpowers they get (no quirky name here, they’re just called “powers”) examined either. Sonny Boy is an exploration of what young people would do, given all the time in the universe to do it, and of the social systems that shape them into who they are.

Our ostensible main character is Nagara, a somewhat unassertive and otherwise unremarkable young man. But much of the cast get put under the microscope, always to interesting effect. Take for example Mizuho, whose principled nature clashes with the remnants of the student council. An entire early episode revolves around her unwillingness to apologize for a wrong she didn’t commit, and for this part of the series, Sonny Boy seems like it may conclude that any group of people, isolated and given enough time, will reinvent the worst aspects of the society they originally come from.

But, Sonny Boy abandons this comparatively straightforward, political strain of thought early on. (Consequently, there is a certain crowd who will be displeased that the show is not an effective handbook for revolution. So it goes.) As it marches through its twelve episodes, the series becomes increasingly big-picture and existential. Political themes give way to religious ones, which finally give way to the philosophical. So whatever one might think of Sonny Boy, they absolutely cannot fault it for lack of ambition.

Because our generation (Millennials, and, increasingly as they reach majority, “Gen Z” as well) is often derided as overgrown children rather than real adults, Sonny Boy earns its right to use an all-teen cast in this scenario even more than most would, given that it is us–the literally immature, and the spiritually immature–at whom Sonny Boy is directed. It feels deliberate that the only adults in the series are respectively an imposter playing at an authority they don’t truly possess (Ms. Aki) and someone so far removed and incomprehensible to the rest of the cast that they may as well be divinity (the Principal).

In this sense, Sonny Boy is that old metaphor, a ball of confusion. If it’s sometimes hard to tell quite what’s going on, well, it’s even harder to tell what’s going on in real life. I would say “especially when you’re young”, but it’s easy to argue that part of Sonny Boy‘s core thesis is that, in the grand scheme of things, we’re all young.

That, of course, could still feel to some like a cop-out. One might want to know what all of this is building up to. And while the series certainly settles well into a role, in its midpoint, as a mint for surreal parables of the modern age, anyone wanting a broader, singular “point” might feel a little left in the cold.

If there is an overall message, it is what the character Rajdhani states in the penultimate episode and Nagara finally internalizes in the finale. The world–all worlds–are chaos in motion, “an endless exercise in vain effort”, as Rajdhani puts it. But in this seeming meaninglessness, there is beauty.

Call Sonny Boy, then, a treatise on optimistic nihilism. Life is, and then it isn’t. It is a hectic, meaningless thing, to hear Sonny Boy tell it. The other side of that, of course, is that that doesn’t have to be a bad thing.

The final words of the series, spoken by Nagara, are “Our lives are only beginning. What lies ahead will take just a little bit longer.” It’s a simple, almost prayer-like coda to a series that is otherwise anything but. Yet, a truth is a truth. Like some of its peers that have aired this year and in the recent past, all Sonny Boy asks of us is to take care of one another and do our best. All we can do is make the most of what we have, and all we have is ourselves and each other.