We aren’t there yet, so it’s an educated guess at most, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Spring 2024 season is remembered in hindsight as that of the yuri-inflected girl band series. You had the return of Hibike Euphonium, you had Girls Band Cry, you had Whisper Me A Love Song, for what little it contributed, but Jellyfish Can’t Swim in The Night was, we’ll remember, there as well. For its first half dozen or so episodes, you could easily have argued that it was in fact the most beloved of all of the new entries here, as Girls Band Cry‘s anglosphere cult following had not yet reached fever pitch. In an even broader view, I wouldn’t be surprised if the long view of history lumps Jellyfish together with an even wider circle of anime; Bocchi the Rock!, It’s MyGO, whatever becomes of the Ave Mujica anime slated for next year, etc. Grouping all of these anime together is, of course, ultimately reductive, but something I’ve learned over the several years that I’ve been writing about anime is this; nothing escapes the context in which it is created.

This is particularly unfair to Jellyfish for a number of reasons, but one of them is that on a basic premise level, Jellyfish differs a bit from its contemporaries. JELEE, the “band” in Jellyfish, is really more of an arts collective centered around a pseudonymous vocalist. My immediate point of comparison was ZUTOMAYO, but really, any of the night scene bands that followed in their wake are a decent point of reference. Like some of those (but unlike ZTMY itself), JELEE’s membership is fairly small, consisting of vocalist Yamanouchi Kano [Takahashi Rie], composer and keyboardist Takanashi Kim Anouk Mei [Shimabukuro Miyuri], visual artist Kouzuki Mahiru, who also goes by Yoru [Itou Miku], and social media wizard Watase Kiui, who is also a VTuber under the name Nox Ryugasaki [Tomita Miyu].

The show is divided roughly into two parts, with the former half focused on JELEE coming together and then attempting to make a name for themselves, and the latter with the emotional fallout of Kano’s former career as an idol under the emotionally abusive management of her mother. Bluntly, the former works a lot better, and while there are a number of threads and subplots here, the ones that are successful share a certain verisimilitude. They focus more on things that seem like actual issues a contemporary pop group would encounter while trying to find a foothold in the uncaring ocean of the modern internet. These are generally simple. Some are pragmatic questions of how to get your music out there, others are more abstract and deal with things like finding artistic drive within yourself, being unashamed to express yourself for who you truly are, etc. The common element is pursuing your passions in a world that may be apathetic or even actively hostile to your doing so.

This takes different forms depending on the character. For Mahiru, who is perhaps the show’s “main protagonist” in as much as it really has one, it’s as simple as a lack of self-esteem and a tall order of impostor syndrome. For Kano, it’s significantly more complicated; she struggles to be noticed as an utaite, making cover songs in the aftermath of her failed idol career, there with a group called the Sunflower Dolls that she left under decidedly acrimonious terms after slugging one of the other members in the face. Mei and Kiui2 have it hard, too. We meet the former after years of burying herself in fandom for “Nonoka,” Kano’s old idol persona, as a coping method for dealing with the bullying she endured in school for being “weird” (read: neurodivergent) and for being biracial. We meet the latter, Mahiru’s childhood friend, constantly lying their ass off through the other side of a computer screen. Kiui spends most of the early show immersed in their VTuber persona and telling tall tales about how popular they are at school and such. (They aren’t.)

Jellyfish splits its time unevenly between these characters—not inherently an issue—with most of the early show focusing on Mahiru and most of the latter half of the series focusing on Kano. It’s not a clean split, as episodes primarily about Kiui are sprinkled throughout. Mei gets the short end of the stick, with only her introductory episode and a handful of stray scenes later on really focusing on her as a person.

For the first part of the show, the main thrust of the plot is the formation of JELEE itself, the arts collective that the girls create as a vehicle for Kano’s singing, Mei’s composition, and Mahiru’s visual art. JELEE finds a fair amount of early success, and this early phase of the show hits its peak during one of Mahiru’s bouts of self-doubt. Admitting that she resents that other artists can draw JELEE-chan—the jellyfish-themed mascot she created for the group—better than she can, she and Kano have a heart to heart in the snow, and Kano kisses Mahiru on the cheek. (Followups to that particular development are indirect, manifesting in such forms as Mahiru gently teasing her about it an episode or two later.)

Throughout all of this, the traumatic fallout from Kano’s previous career as an idol remains a lurking background element, but it’s only when her mother, Yukine [Kaida Yuuko], is properly introduced as a character, a fair ways into the anime, that it really becomes a central focus, and the anime shifts gears to reorient around this. It’s hard to call this change in direction a mistake, exactly, since it leads to some of the anime’s best scenes, and probably its overall best episode in its ninth, but it’s definitely a stark change, and the show handles it unevenly.

Throughout the ninth episode, we get flashbacks of how Kano came to be the original center for the Sunflower Dolls and how she was eventually kicked out of the group. Here, Kano becomes “Nonoka.” Her mother controls her style and manipulates her talents for her own ends in a plainly vile way that paints a very clear picture of her as an old-school slimeball record exec. Really, the moment that seals the deal in hindsight is when she lays out her goals to Kano. “I want to one day nurture an artist who sings to 50,000 people.” (Jellyfish floats a lot of numbers around over the course of its runtime, but that one, the 50,000 associated with the maximum seating capacity of the Tokyo Dome, is the one it runs back most frequently.) Unfortunately, Kano’s time with the Sunflower Dolls comes to an unceremonious end when she discovers that Mero, one of the other girls in the group, has been running a Youtube page that spreads gossip and inflames scandals about rival acts. Enraged, Kano punches her—the incident we’ve known about for the whole show, but only then get the full context for—and her career in the traditional idol industry ends in an instant. She’s so overcome with shame and emotion that the show actually switches art styles. In a compelling, lightly experimental touch, the visuals seem to turn into something like a burning oil painting, as though Kano is physically igniting under the harsh, dispassionate glare of her mother.

All of this portrays Kano as a victim in an industry that is certainly no stranger to victimizing even its youngest performers, and paints Yukine as, at best, deeply callous about her daughter’s suffering, and at worst, an outright abusive figure, a gender-flipped version of the archetypal sinister record executive-patriarch. It’ll make you want to scream “leave Kano alone!” at your TV, if you’re anything like me.

It’s worth noting that all of these flashbacks are broadly from Kano’s own point of view, but there’s relatively little evidence of some kind of unreliable narrator thing going on, and the trauma Kano endures from all of these events is obviously very real. This is unfortunate in its own way, because it feeling so raw and so emotionally resonant means that when the show tries to tie Kano and Yukine’s relationship up with minimal fuss in the last episode it really doesn’t work, as we’ll come back to. And as a further side note; we have no reason to directly suspect that Yukine was encouraging Mero’s little side activity in running the Youtube channel, but it so clearly seems like the kind of thing she’d do, given what little we have to go on, that I have a hard time imagining at least some of the story here isn’t trying to imply that.

Back in the show’s present, Yukine approaches Mahiru with an offer to do some visual work for the current incarnation of the Sunflower Dolls. (One with Mero as the center, mind you.) Yukine certainly seems to have ulterior motives for doing this, and when Mahiru tells Kano about her plans to take the job offer—pushing back a release of one of JELEE’s own songs in the process—Kano absolutely blows up at her, calling Mahiru a liar and ranting about how she’s the only reason anyone knows Mahiru’s art in the first place. It is legitimately hard to watch, and in the moment, it made quite the strong impression on me. (Especially when coupled with the absolutely diabolical editing decision to have that episode’s outro mostly be a montage of the two calling each other’s names.) With hindsight though, I actually think this is where Jellyfish starts to fall apart. Kano and Mahiru don’t really get many scenes together in the episodes after this, and those that do are brief and feel unsatisfying. Is that realistic? Sure, maybe, and if the series wanted to lean in to the emotional hurt there, and make it seem like these two would never be close again, that would also be a valid artistic decision. The problem is that it doesn’t really do either of these things, as we’ll circle back to.

Not every plot the show tries is derailed in this manner, of course. Kiui gets a great arc wherein they manage to overcome some of their severe social anxiety. The work with JELEE brings them out of their shell somewhat, but they really begin to undergo some proper character development during a small arc where they’re attempting to get a motorcycle license, staying at a driving school for a time, with Kano, in pursuit of that goal. There, they meet an older woman named Koharu [Seto Asami]. Koharu is an interesting, if minor figure in Jellyfish, an all-but-outright-stated-to-be-trans woman who’s an implied former yakuza and who hits on Kiui basically as soon as they show up. The two hit it off, and their budding romance is a very small but legitimately sweet part of the show, and the few conversations they have over the course of the series feel very lived-in, especially when they get into nerdy areas of discussion like denpa visual novels and the like. (Even this isn’t perfect and I might rewrite some of Koharu’s dialogue, to put it mildly, but you take what you can get with these things.)

Kiui even gets what is probably the last great moment in the series. In episode 11, they and Mahiru are at an arcade and run into some former classmates of theirs. Jellyfish takes a moment to get extremely real here, as the kids hate Kiui not just for how they’re generally “weird” but also for their apparent lack of conforming to the gender binary.

Kiui, in a minor moment of triumph, gathers the inner conviction to tell them off by tapping into her own VTuber persona, which, they seem to realize in doing so, is in some ways more “real” than their outward physical self. That kind of thing, with a constructed persona that feels more in tune with “who you really are” than your actual body does, is extremely common among a certain kind of internet-native queer person. I’m speaking from experience here, and I think this plot is probably the best single thing that Jellyfish pulls off. Making people feel seen is valuable.

Mahiru and Kano’s ongoing tension, meanwhile, goes largely unaddressed during all of this, and they appear to forgive each other in the final episode—after the big, emotional finale, which, with a few days of hindsight behind me, feels quite flat—based on….vibes, I suppose? They don’t really talk anything out! And I’m not the sort of person to demand lengthy on-screen Healthy Emotional Communication, but something a bit more substantial than the little we get here would be nice, and that really is my central problem with Jellyfish. It has all of these moments that are good to great, but they don’t cohere, because the show either can’t make them fit together in a way that feels holistic or it simply drops them entirely.

If I had to guess, what Jellyfish wants to do is use this act of simply stopping at a certain point as a statement unto itself. In the last moments of the show there are clearly still some unaddressed problems. Kano, for instance, obsesses over her performance in the finale being seen by over 50,000 people—that magic number her mom planted in her head as a kid—and the rest of JELEE are rightly weirded out by the whole thing. But we’re clearly also supposed to feel that this is essentially a happy ending for them, as the show’s last real scene is JELEE banding together to paint over the jellyfish mural—an old piece of Mahiru’s art—that inspired their endeavor to begin with. It’s beautifully drawn and composed, and it tries so hard to sell these big emotions, but it feels almost perfunctory, regardless. As though Jellyfish is doing this because it can’t stomach showing us an actual unhappy ending, or because it thinks we’d be angry if it did so.

Whether one wants to see Jellyfish as an anime that is sabotaged by this flaw or one that manages to work in spite of it is largely a matter of perspective. Can you ignore Yukine’s abuse going unaddressed? Can you ignore that the show never circles back around to Mero torpedo’ing the careers of the Rainbow Girls? Can you ignore the unshakeable feeling that this whole thing really needed another six episodes or so to really breathe? That it really clearly does not have the space to do everything it wants to do? All of that is going to depend on the person. For some, this is going to come off as extreme nitpicking and I will seem very shrill. I must again stress however that I’m fine with these things not being solved on-screen, I just want the show to follow up on them, any of them, in some form.

For me, the clearly stitched-together nature of the writing in the show’s latter half kills much of the emotional resonance I felt in its best moments. Some anime are camp enough, strange enough, or challenging enough to get away with ending on what’s essentially a shrug. If it clicked enough with you, you can say “well, the show is messy” and declare its flaws ignorable. Unfortunately, the emotional math involved here just doesn’t work for me. The fact that the Rainbow Girls are not characters in this narrative because we’re just supposed to write them off after their single appearance does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mero never even really directly talk, but that we’re clearly supposed to assume they’ve somehow reconciled does not work for me. The fact that Kano and Mahiru are, in fact, entirely kept apart for most of the show’s final third does not work for me. The fact that Kano’s lack of forgiveness to her mother is signified by nothing more than playfully brushing her off in the show’s closing minutes after she sends a goddamn limo to Kano’s school does not work for me. None of this works for me! That’s really frustrating!

Let’s circle back to the term “messy”, in fact. “Messy” is often used, as a descriptor, to smooth over the rough edges of art we love. A way to excuse conflict and problematica because the art resonates hard enough with us that we have cause to explain its uncomfortable aspects away. You could call Jellyfish “messy,” for certain, and there are parts of it I’d apply that label to (Koharu and Kiui’s relationship, perhaps), but for the most part there’s not a lot of what I’d call messiness in Jellyfish. All of these aspects that don’t work are not messy, they’re just some shit that happens that the show gets in over its head in trying to address. This is why it feels unsatisfying on the whole despite a number of strong moments. The actual tone the show is going for gets lost somewhere in the shuffle.

The show attempts to do right by its queer audience in spite of all this; mostly in terms of Kiui’s subplot, but I think people have been a little unfair in labeling the show ‘queerbaity’ in the fairly subtle way it handles Mahiru and Kano’s relationship, as well. This, and the other more general ways the series fails to come together, creates a situation that practically begs for baseless, conspiratorial thinking. Did some suit decide the show was Too Gay, prompting a last-minute rewrite? Was there some kind of cut in episode number that impacted the narrative? Did network censors object? There’s no actual reason to believe these things, but they are the sort of theorizing that tends to pop up in the wake of an anime ending like this, because it’s an explanation. An explanation, no matter how convoluted, seems to make more sense than what appears to be the actual case; the show just faceplanted in its final stretch without a single specific cause. It happens. My personal theory is that primary scriptwriter Yaku Yuki, best known as the novelist behind Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki, had trouble adapting to the switch in format. There’s not really any more evidence for this than any of these other theories, but it would make sense, and would account for the show’s sometimes cramped and overstuffed writing. (In fact, I have somehow gone this entire review without mentioning the weird little side plot of Miiko [Uesaka Sumire], the 30-something idol that JELEE butt heads with a few times and eventually become friends with. The whole plot is actually pretty much fine, if not necessarily a highlight of the show. But a longer anime could have things like that without it feeling so incongruous with the rest of the series.)

I’ve spent a lot of time wracking my brain about what exactly my takeaway from Jellyfish has been without simply turning in basic qualitative assessments. It’s true that it’s probably always going to be considered in the broader “girl band anime” context, and that it isn’t the best series in that subgenre by any means. (I will also quickly make the point that, on the other hand, this is not a Metallic Rouge situation where hindsight makes it clear that the show never had any idea of what it was doing.) But putting it in those terms feels incredibly reductive! I’ve said a lot that’s negative about the show, but there is a lot to like as well! Visually, it’s pretty damn incredible! I’ve already mentioned its shift into a moving oil painting during one of Kano’s flashbacks, but it uses quite a few interesting tricks throughout, from video effects like a simulated VHS tape in the first episode, being drawn as though shot on a smartphone in the last, to rapid animation cuts to signify time passing quickly (often because Mei is enthusing over something), there’s a good amount to enjoy here in the visual dimension. The soundtrack is great, too! While I wasn’t enthused about JELEE’s music for the most part, the actual BGM is a weird, synth-heavy, analog-sounding thing that burbles and strains and hums expressively throughout essentially the whole show.

Generally speaking, the show is very stylish! The first episode in particular is a masterclass in visual storytelling! And even back on the writing end, the series’ portrayal of the suffocating smoke of having a controlling parent be absolutely furious with you is spot on! Kano pecking Mahiru on the cheek seriously does matter even if the followup isn’t as strong as we may have wanted it to be! Kiui’s complex gender identity is some of the best representation of its type I’ve ever seen in an anime! All of this is just as true as the show’s more frustrating aspects, and I think if the series develops a cult following in the years to come (and I would be unsurprised to see that happen) it will be off of these strengths. Those people will watch Jellyfish in a different way than I did. It’s true that nothing really escapes the context it’s created in, but we often only have a clear picture of that context in hindsight. Maybe, somewhere between all the aspects that frustrated me so much, is a better show that is only visible with some remove.

So that’s where we’re at. I wanted to like Jellyfish more than I did, and that’s admittedly an annoying position to be in. Because I simultaneously feel like I’m giving the show more of a pass than I should be and also being way too hard on it. But that’s the way things go sometimes! If any part of Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is truly encapsulated by the term ‘messy,’ it might be that very relationship that I, and many other viewers, have to the series in of itself. It’s obvious, but, sometimes art is not strictly good or bad! Sometimes it gets in your head in a way that causes you to spout a gushing torrent of thoughts that only barely cohere and sometimes outright contradict each other. I have said things of this nature many times on this blog, and I’ll probably say them many times more. Maybe, if all Jellyfish wanted to do was leave an impression—to shine a little, to borrow Mahiru’s own words—then my big judgy opinion about whether it’s peak or mid, man, matters less than the fact that it made me think this much about it at all. Jellyfish can’t swim, night or day. But sometimes it’s nice to just drift in the currents of the ocean and let them take you where they will; you can’t complain too much about choppy waters.