Sonny Boy is drama, mystery, sci-fi anime in the summer 2021 catalog produced by studio Mad House with a surreal and abstract premise that is incredibly immersive.
The series begins as a survivorship struggle that intensifies into an internal conflict before evolving into a general battle of one's self determining their meaning of life as being able to return to their original world becomes increasingly more difficult to do. It premieres a large and intriguing cast of students with diverse and unique supernatural abilities that dictate natural phenomena itself (i.e. the ability to instantly change one's setting from the world they reside in to another world, or to create replicas of objects that exist in their original world), rather than act as part of natural phenomena (i.e the ability to manipulate elements, universal forces, or matter). The surreal experiences the students undergo as they continuingly influence the sporadically changing reality around them provoke the viewer's curiosity as it becomes clear that everything, including the laws of the universe and concept itself, can be altered.
A compelling story concept equipped with a creative, raw animation and an absent soundtrack that can drive the feeling of being lost and isolated along with the experience of determining one's meaning of life, Sonny Boy has the capacity to unveil itself as the best anime of summer 2021. However, following the airing of the series, many flaws that drastically hinder the story from being cohesive and impactful arise.
The first flaw that quickly develops is the characterization. Something that frequently appears in animes with large casts is the lack of characterization. Especially for animes with a season of only twelve episodes, many series lack adequate characterization as often times, because of the story direction, the characterization of the cast is cherry-picked to compensate for the limited screen-time. Consequently, a majority of the cast for a series feel irrelevant to the plot, insignificant to the impact of the writing, and even downright boring. The main characters in Sonny Boy receive interesting, adequate characterization in the start of the series as the plot builds up with its story direction, but quickly after the first four episodes, it becomes obvious that the main characters other than Nagara, Nozomi, and Mizuho have very loose characterization, especially the side characters, who are negligible and matter only to remind the constantly forgettable understanding that the cast drifted from their original world as a group rather than a select few.
The second flaw that builds up throughout the series is the overambitious surrealism. With the highly ambiguous surrealism that Sonny Boy begins with, it builds up to the point where, following the shift in plot due to a plot twist, the surrealism becomes largely confusing, and at its worst, nonsensical. All the phenomena shown after that point undermines the feel of the surrealism introduced in the beginning of the series, especially as the plot twist vaguely introduces three new characters, which widens the scope of the story from trying to return home to existentialism itself. As a result, all the mind-blowing surrealism demonstrated at the start of the series up until the plot twist weakens in impact as the series continues, until it loses all impact, making the seemingly-living reality around the cast feel as a simple, poorly made virtual reality. With the story direction that the plot attempts to follow after the plot twist, the surreal phenomena becomes entirely unnecessary to the plot and the cast's abilities, making things happening for the sake of them happening.
The third flaw that arises in Sonny Boy, as an unintended consequence of the progressively hindered writing throughout the series, is the animation and absent soundtrack. With the plot direction and unimpactful, many times boring writing in later episodes, the animation, of especially interesting surrealism, comes across as bland. Along with the absent soundtrack, many later episodes feel like nothing is really happening as there is no soundtrack to drive any of the lackluster drama.
To end this review, Sonny Boy starts off as a thought-provoking, riveting series with writing that can surpass the boundaries of its premise, but with a mostly insufficient, boring cast and weak emotional impact due to extremely inadequate characterization, confusing, nonsensical, and incoherent plot development due to overambitious surrealism, and creative, raw animation and absent soundtrack that unintentionally deepen how boring the series rather than how interesting it is due to its writing.
If you're someone like me, who enjoys completing anime, even if I did not enjoy much or at all the series, then the beginning of Sonny Boy will have you on the edge of your seat. If you're someone who only enjoys watching the good parts of an anime, or drops anime after not enjoying the series for a majority of its season, then I'd recommend watching episodes 1 - 3, episode 6, and episode 12.
What rose as the potential anime of the season, and even anime of the year, ended up falling to a disappointing anime where I thought more about what the series could have done better than what the series did good.
I score Sonny Boy with a 5/10
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