SPOILER-FREE!
In 2007, famed British neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks published a book through Knopf called Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. In that book, Dr. Sacks tried to establish the connection between the human brain and music, examining several case studies in which music has a perceptible physical or physiological effect on people and, more specifically, medical patients. The book itself is a fascinating glimpse at trying to figure out the interplay between music and neurology, and argues in various ways that music is a legitimate form of healing and therapy, and is worth further study. It does not call for replacing modern medicine or other therapeutic techniques, but rather says that music can be a quintessential ingredient in the comfort and healing process, especially for those whose minds are ill or troubled in some fashion.

But even so, we don’t necessarily need to be mentally troubled to witness or experience music’s gravity. We sing lullabies for children because we know that on some physiological level, it comforts them and helps them fall asleep. We attend karaoke nights at bars with friends or play music in groups because they contribute to a communal something that allows us to experience a soothing happiness we can’t attain by ourselves alone at that moment. Music’s force seems to operate on a level so inherently tuned to the human experience that its possibilities are endless.

So then, why do we sometimes tend to resist musical entertainment? When I teach my class on music and media, the musical as a genre always seems to be the one week of the semester that students dread the most. When I press about why this is, they insist that they find it so hammy, so ridiculous, and so over-the-top that it defies all sense of entertainment value. The idea that people can just burst into song or break out into dance numbers that hijack the story for a few minutes? What’s supposed to be entertaining about that? On the other hand, the students I’ve taught who adore musicals insist that it’s precisely because of those things being possible that musicals, and musical entertainment, is fun to experience. Given, there are plenty of more dramatically inclined musicals where tragedy and high melodrama are at the forefront. But nevertheless, the idea that music takes over and either helps the story along, or puts it briefly on hold, allows a moment of repose, or simple comforting happiness. To put it another way, musicals allow for moments for healing.
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It’s within that realm of comforting, happy, healing possibility that Healer Girl resides. Released in Spring 2022 by Studio 3Hz and directed by Irie Yasuhiro (because after you’ve made Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, you can pretty much do whatever you want), the show’s existence almost seems like a miracle. Its production was actually finished before the first episode started airing, which is too much of a rarity in the anime industry, yet its concept on the surface can sound like a bit of a hard sell – a 12-episode series with the occasional happy musical number that is meant to make its characters feel better in the medical sense? Its easy to take a cynical stance on a show selling itself on a premise like this. It just sounds so…happy.

Despite its positioning of music as healing, the show is not focused on trying to make the case for music in our lives or in our health. Since we recognize inherently that that’s already true, it doesn’t waste time arguing that. Instead, Healer Girl wastes no time in announcing the tone of its content, as the spirited, cotton-candy-hair-looking Kana uses her lovely sound to help heal a boy’s injury. As she rushes over to her two friends and fellow healer girl trainees Reimi and Hibiki, we already are given all the information we need to know – vocal healing has a hierarchy of certifications involved with exams, and that it’s both beautiful to witness and not an easy thing to do. As such, the ability to sing one’s problems away is not just something that the everyday layperson can do, but it can in fact be honed and trained into a learned art and actual, practical medical usage that Dr. Sacks would surely smile at.

Since performing music is such a given in Healer Girl’s world, it leads by example. What better way to advocate for your own show’s power of comforting presence than to have all of its performances and performers be full of a comforting presence? The three main characters, Kana, Hibiki, and Reimi, are starry-eyed for their sensei and their own dreams for becoming certified healers. The rivalry they have with each other is playful rather than antagonistic, with their friendship and respect overriding any potential negativity that exists. They’re all such pleasant people on the screen, it gives the impression that essentially anything that they choose to do will involve pleasant times as well. Situations almost-completely divorced from music still manage to declare that the exuding warmth is never far away. Even Sonia, a C-ranked healer who declares herself the rival to the main characters’ sensei, is herself not an antagonistic presence, becoming a fixture of the cast so quickly.

It’s the lack of an antagonist that makes Healer Girl such an intriguing little series, even for cute girls doing cute things or an iyashikei – because of music’s abstract quality to fill space emotionally, the show allows its art direction to adopt, or insinuate, similar abstract spaces. Senou Sou’s hand fuses music unfurling its melodies to parallel the girls unfurling their own evocative imagery – whether it be green valleys and grasses to soothe the soul or Murakami Yuusaku’s compositing helping to wash away the dark and dreary fears and apprehensions of the patients or audience, Healer Girl strives to accomplish nothing less than to have oneself feel cleansed.

However, it’s also true that music’s use in this universe is not just for healing the medically-afflicted, but is also a means of coping, and the show is careful to make the few times when the happiness gets put on hold matter a great deal. Healer Girl remembers that, while the main characters involved are all healers and tasked with making their patients feel better, they themselves are also the ones who sometimes must undergo their own healing or rely on music to convey and communicate what it is that they need. Moments like this manifest not only during times where the actual musical healing occurs, but even in their day to day. This allows the show to hold the mirror up to itself and diagnose its own inner structure to determine when songs are needed to heal whatever needs healing to achieve that happy feeling again.

And part of that happiness also comes from the fact that the series is quite self-aware about its own conventions and dramaturgy. Series composition writer Kimura Noboru seems to have an affinity for musical entertainment and is not afraid to point out the fact that, well, musicals can sometimes be incredibly silly. Whether it be Reimi gushing over virtually anything that the Karasuma-sensei does to the point where it’s a bit much, or the characters asking why the hell they’re even singing in the first place when it doesn’t quite behoove them, or whether the girls just burst into song when it’s flat-out unnecessary, it makes for a quirky time. In holding the mirror up to both its own characters and its own genre convention, it manages to succeed comedically for the purposes of jokes and as a metanarrative.

As an iyashikei series, the sense of drama is limited and therefore does not quite lead to what we would readily-identify as “character arcs” in the most-dire sense. The show is sometimes static when it comes to building to a series of defined, clear end goals. Yet, I feel that the material doing so better complements the tone overall. Music, and musical entertainment by extension, need not necessarily be grandiose or ambitious to be comforting; it doesn’t need to be profound to be precisely what one needs to heal. Music can sometimes be purely that – just music, nothing more, nothing less.

And more or less, that is precisely what the show aims to be – simply…itself. There are no seedy, dark thematic underpinnings waiting to be unearthed, no hidden macabre twists even when characters are in the operating room seeing bodies be worked on, and no cynical snide remarks secretly critiquing the audience. The show dares to simply ask, “We’re here to make your day a little brighter, so will you join us for 23 minutes at a time? And do you mind if we sing some songs while we’re at it?” It’s a surprisingly honest series in that respect; drama is always in vogue, but the ability to just stop and put worries on hold for even a little while can do wonders for one’s spirit. In that sense, we are all patients waiting for our dose of the music’s spoonful of musical sugar.
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Healer Girl is, more than anything, a commitment to good, pleasant feeling and uses music as the primary device for communicating that sensation. At once acutely aware of its wholesome message while also not being afraid to poke fun at its own ridiculousness, it manages to situate itself in anime’s optimistic, twinkling space. It freely incorporates the abstract and the colorful, and the sound mixing and performances by the actresses exudes a warmth that lingers. It may not argue with the same sort of rhetoric that Dr. Oliver Sacks would use in his Musicophilia, but Healer Girl understands that music’s power is quite real. Its message is at its most resonant when the characters draw in their breath and sing.

And the message is, indeed, resonant – music, and musical entertainment as a whole, is a very good, comforting, necessary thing.