Sonny Boy’s reputation notwithstanding, it’s pretty evident from the first episode alone that this anime is, to say the least, unconventional. Its visually provocative setting is juxtaposed by its comparatively grounded characters, ranging from the aloof MC, to his go-getter sidekick, the holier-than-thou class president… the list goes on and on. Throughout all twelve episodes, the viewer is consistently presented with extraordinary environments navigated by an exceedingly ordinary cast. What makes Sonny Boy stand out, then, is not its characters, but how they weave through and search for themselves through such an abstract presentation.
The episodic formula wonderfully compliments the seemingly non-sequitur nature of its visual ambition — in nearly every episode, there lies a deluge of yet-explored worlds, settings, and places — but it wouldn’t be entirely truthful to say that its episodes are disparate stories. To put it at its most simple, Sonny Boy is a story about life. It is life itself, and this is where the power of its confusing non-linearity comes in. The main metaphorical hook is the fact that its world is unpredictable, unfamiliar, in an attempt to parallel how life is similar. This idea continues to be contrasted by its cast searching for predictability and familiarity; of course, this is pretty evident by the fact that they’re trying to get back to their world, but there’s further layers to it.
For the first half of the show, the cast behaves in rather “expected” ways. Fighting the novel with the habitual, characters regress to almost caricatured versions of themselves. The student athlete wants his prowess to be recognized again. The ordinary student with newfound power wants to be respected and followed. The non-confrontational MC chooses to run away when he’s counted on. In a world that could not be further removed from their own, the familiar is as far as its characters get when it comes to truly searching for themselves. With familiarity comes a sense of control, the idea that you know and expect whatever comes next. Even the plots within the episodes themselves hark to constants in the everyday, such as movies, sports, and, most blatantly of them all, school life. Routine life. This contrast of a beyond-belief setting with stagnant characterization is intentional, serving to emphasize themes of change and unpredictability, the prospect of exiting one’s comfort zone.
Thankfully, this show doesn’t overstay its welcome when it comes to such a harsh dichotomy of concepts. Eventually, something has to give; evidently, it’s not going to be the confusing, ever-changing complexity of Sonny Boy’s newfound universe. It’s an exceedingly simple message, one that is supplemented by its endlessly free-flowing visual abstractions — life is unpredictable. The connection between its seemingly unrelated episodic tales is the differences between such, the idea that there are no constants, how we can’t expect the familiar in an unfamiliar world. Once the viewer realizes that this is just one big, stream-of-consciousness depiction of confronting new horizons, the rest of the picture paints itself.
The MC, too, soon realizes this prospect. It’s almost frustrating to watch how immature he acts at first, but that’s the point. Sonny Boy at first highlights the pursuit for control over our lives to lend value to the embrace of the inherent lack of such. If the first half of the show was one big metaphor for unpredictability, the second half is one big metaphor for coming to terms with that. It takes its ordinary characters and ordinary concepts and injects them to a setting where the only constant is change, and the output is a nuance that betrays the absolutes its cast once held, needing to go back to their world or staying as they once were. Instead, they accept what comes next, not out of a desire to carve out tinges of familiarity on the uncertain path, but through reconciling their powerlessness it comes to the grand scheme of things, and taking on the uncontrollable all the same.
This is precisely why the episodes become more abstract as things progress, and where I think this show earns its reputation of being needlessly confusing and pretentiously arthouse-y, but again, the whole idea of Sonny Boy is the effusive, stream-of-consciousness realization that life is constantly novel and unpredictable, so the progression of its avant-garde presentation is simply the visual and narrative representation of such. The world that its characters navigate only continues to become more bewildering, but armed with the idea that this is to be expected, they find a solace in places full of disarray and removed from any notions of familiarity.
Of course, as I’ve mentioned, these episodes aren’t confusing to the point of lacking a vision. Most of them have a narrative within a narrative, all touching on a set of ideas that culminate in the ideas of “life” that I’ve repeated over and over throughout this review. In the first half, sports are a representation of predictable social dynamics, graduation is a rather explicit metaphor for the inevitability of an uncontrollable future. The second half calls upon tales such as the Tower of Babel to add further nuance to the concepts of control and the pursuit of such, while enhancing these themes with showdowns and partings that hammer home the fluidity and unpredictability of life, in all of its variables.
Once it’s all said and done, Sonny Boy’s themes aren’t really that groundbreaking. They aren’t anything that hasn't been explored before or will continue to be explored. But what separates its coming-of-age conflict from others is its harsh juxtaposition of the familiar with the unfamiliar, the ordinary cast with the extraordinary setting. The sensational precision of Sonny Boy’s presentation is exactly what elevates the tonal stage of its ideas, its places and colours and mechanics creating an audiovisual hodgepodge of chaos, all linked by the exceedingly simple idea that this is a metaphor for... life. The catharses offered by this anime aren’t revolutionary, but supplemented by the avant-garde context — a true-to-life abstraction of the unfamiliar — they become precious and poignant takeaways. Invaluable for navigating such a life yet to come, full of novelty with no roadmap to follow.
Sonny Boy is one big confrontation of this confusion. It is a coming-of-age plea for parting with the familiarity and the control you have in your world, and facing the world in earnest. It takes concepts, social dynamics, and walks of life we take for granted, rips them apart, and unrelentingly demonstrates how life has few constants; the tomorrow we take for granted may never come. But tomorrow will come nonetheless, and we all have to face it. There lies uncertainty in not knowing what may come next, but this anime does well to demonstrate the merits and value to a life that has the chance to offer something different each and every single day. It’s very much an abstract story, but it’s far from impenetrable — rather, its chaotic simplicity is its greatest strength, mirroring the stream-of-consciousness perplexity that both us and its characters face when shown the prospect of a life and a world that’s only just begun.
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