Our first few years of adulthood are some of the most important years of our lives. It’s at this point that most of us taste true freedom for the first time, to chase our dreams and explore who we are... And for some of us, we may be unknowingly biting off more than we can chew. Meet Super Sonico, a peppy, cotton candy haired teenage girl with a heart full of sincerity and ambition. You may know her as the mascot for a Japanese software company, but the side of her you don’t know is the side that’s going to college to study marine biology, playing guitar in a rock band with two of her best friends, and taking whatever modeling jobs she can to pay for it all. Living in a tiny apartment above her Grandma’s restaurant with her five cats, Sonico greets everyday with a cheerful smile and a giant heart to prove that there’s nothing a manufactured corporate mascot can’t do!

SoniAni, or Super Sonico the Animation, was produced by a fairly well regarded anime production company named White Fox, who have quite a few well known and popular titles listed on their resume. Their most popular title by far is the Steins;Gate franchise, but if you were to toss out the names Jormungand, The Devil is a Part Timer and Girls Last Tour, I wouldn’t argue. And that’s not even mentioning the endless list of anime that they’ve performed key and in-between animation on. Just sticking to their own primary production work, though, I’ve seen quite a few of their titles, and while I haven’t watched Akame Ga Kill recently enough to remember how good or bad the visuals were, out of the ones I do remember, I think my only real complaint is that they’ve employed some pretty dodgy CG work here and there, most noticeably in Goblin Slayer.

SoniAni is guilty of this too, but it’s mainly reserved for the cheesy music videos that conclude each episode, and I’m pretty sure they were leaning into the Uncanny Valley with those. I don’t have solid proof of that, but come on, when you have CG bikini-clad Sonico doing the Thriller dance with a bunch of zombies, they had to have known how goofy it looked, and it was either part of the plan or they didn’t give a shit... Which I refuse to believe, because the people producing this show definitely had plenty of shits to give. I don’t want to bury the lede here any further, this show looks fantastic. I don’t know if it had a high budget, but whatever money they had was managed flawlessly, and in exactly the way that I like... Actual movement is graceful and fluid, and the frozen key frames are incredibly easy on the eyes, smartly layered, tonally appropriate and often accommodated by a pleasant slow pan.

The color palette is bright, primarily built around the very gentle pink hue of Sonico’s hair, and while some of the designs for side characters and one-off guest stars can be a bit on the generic side, the characters who are close to Sonico’s orbit have thoroughly memorable designs, which more often than not match their energies to a T. Okay, I guess there’s one design I don’t like... Sonico has this one loli coworker whose overall look is garish and poorly coordinated, but I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to like her anyway, considering the amount of jokes she’s the butt of, so that’s fine. Backgrounds are intricate and immersive, despite the fact that there are about a million different locations we visit throughout the series. They’re obviously just drawings on paper, fictional backgrounds for the characters to exist in, but they often feel like real places you could actually imagine yourself in.

I feel kind of obligated to talk about the music, since this is a show about a musician, but as I’ve confessed before, I don’t have an ear for the quality of music... That’s a skill I just don’t have, and I’m ashamed of all the reviews I’ve written in the past where I tried to pretend otherwise... But Sonico plays in a rock band, and yeah, it sounds like a pretty cool rock band? I dunno, someone with better ears let me know your thoughts. As for the dub, this is the one and only anime appearance of Jessica Nigri, a cosplay influencer who has only had a few voice roles. She stood in for Tara Strong on a couple of smaller Lollipop Chainsaw projects, she plays one of the main villains in the webtoon RWBY, and she’s pretty damn good as the official voice of Sonico. Like, I know I haven’t heard enough of her to judge this, but I get some serious Emily Neves vibes from her... Super Sonico and Cinder Fall couldn’t sound any more different, and yet she brings a really complex and nuanced performance to each of them and their unique ways of speaking.

Of course, she’s flanked on each side by two of the industry’s most respected veterans, each playing one of her main best friend supporting roles. The Legendary Luci Christian plays Suzu, who comes off as the leader of their band despite playing Bass and not being the vocalist, and she pulls the rarely seen move from her arsenal where she lowers her register to an older and more mature level, but still uses the energy and mischief that she’d apply to a much younger character, creating a hybrid that radiates confidence and control. Monica Rial, on the other hand, plays the slightly lazier, ditzier and hungrier Furi, and while she doesn’t do a bad job by any means, she’s using a voice she’s used with possibly hundreds of other characters, which I have no issue with, it does fit the character, but she kinda pales next to the effort Luci is giving. David Wald is also strong and dependable, yet also perfectly lovable, as Sonico’s manager. There’s a bit of dated slang in the script, but I’ve heard a lot worse, this is a really strong dub.

So you may be asking yourself, why Super Sonico? Why review this series, which came out ten years ago, and lost all relevance nine years ago? What would draw me to this particular anime? Well, I’m just going to rip the bandaid off right now, we are one week removed from the day the world changed for the worst. America isn’t burning down yet, but the fire’s been set, it’s going to start spreading rapidly in only a couple of short months, and a lot of people are having a difficult time with that. I’m doing okay right now, but all tuesday night I felt like my heart was going to burst out of my chest, and in the days that have followed, I keep slipping into brief pockets of depression every time I remember some important cornerstone of Democracy and American cultural progress that they've promised to take away, and I know I’m not the only one, so while the future is looking darker and more uncertain by the day, there is one kind of anime I think it helps to turn your attention to: Chill, easy-going slice of life anime with a pleasant vibe! For that reason, I think this obvious 12 episode commercial that everyone has long since dismissed actually deserves another chance.

To explain why, I’d like to go over a few of the individual perspectives I’m choosing to analyze it from, and the first one is, comfy shows. I’ve used this term in a few previous reviews, and while I highly doubt I’m the first person to bring it up in a critical context, here’s how I define that term. A comfy show is a piece of media that’s pleasant, uncomplicated, and probably kinda slow, that appeals to you personally in such a way that you can just vibe with it and relax when you really need to. In most cases, there are a lot of other anime fans out there who don’t see what you see, and just consider the title in question to be boring and/or vacuous. Obviously every opinion is valid, but you can’t really enjoy a comfy show and defend it at the same time, you just kind of have to acknowledge that it’s not for everyone. For example, I really liked Glasslip, but I would not recommend Glasslip to very many people.

As for why Super Sonico appeals to me personally, the next perspective I’d like to discuss is personal taste, which is a gentle way of warning you that we about to talk about fetishes. Skip this paragraph and the next if you want to avoid some TMI. Now, a fetish doesn’t necessarily have to be sexual. The term ‘fetish’ is a bit more broad, and can also just mean elements of a situation or story that appeal to you aesthetically and lighten your mood. To quote my favorite anime reviewer, "Quentin Tarantino has a sexual fetish for feet, but he also has an aesthetic fetish for pulp media of the 1970s. Both descriptions are useful and accurate." Either way, if you HAVE a fetish of any kind, you are going to form biases towards pieces of media that cater to said fetish, whether it's sexual aesthetic or both, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Media is meant to entertain you, and if it is directly appealing to you in the way you wish to be appealed to, that is always going to be a good thing.

Now for me personally, I am asexual, and a weird detail about asexuals is that for those of us who have an active libido, we tend to develop very intense fetishes very early in life that we can never get rid of. I have a fetish for seeing people in embarrassing situations. I didn’t choose it, I’m not proud of it, and I’ve honestly had it for as long as I can remember, dating all the way back to my childhood. I’m not kidding. When I was around twelve or so, I saw the movie Fly Away Home, and there’s a scene where Anna Paquin freaks out in the shower for some reason, and her Dad’s friend winds up seeing her naked. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I spent the next 20 years being in love with Anna Paquin, which is the only reason I stuck around with TruBlood as long as I did. As an extension of this, I have a strange tendency to form intense, parasocial emotional connections with shy fictional characters(and sometimes the actors playing them) who often have to deal with embarrassing situations. I’m talking Mio Akiyama, Princess Ayeka, even Fluttershy, and while I have no desire to fuck any of these characters, that sort of material is a convenient shortcut to favorite character status.

So not only is the Super Sonico anime a comfortable show with a pleasant, relaxed vibe, but the main character is an ultra shy woman working as a bikini model, clearly this show was made specifically for me. That means we can wrap this review up, right guys? I just wasted your time establishing how this anime series discovered the secret formula for my heart, while completely neglecting to relate it to you, right? No. Everything I just said is true, or at least a matter of my personal opinion, but just because I have a heavy bias towards this series, that doesn’t change the fact that this show is still, on it’s own merits, pretty fucking good. For starters, Sonico is a good main character. I know I probably gave you a certain mental image when I called her a corporate mascot earlier, but her actual depiction is a lot closer to an idol. Instead of shilling the brand and spouting cool catchphrases, like a mascot in the west would do, she’s a kind of character you don’t see much outside of Japan... She’s a bright-eyed, sincere optimist who’s chasing her dreams, so that her legions of fans can support her by cheering her on... “Do your best, Sonico!”

We don’t really have that in the west, which is one possible explanation for her failure to catch on over here, but I still think it’s well done for what it is. She has several interests, all of which feel believable and authentic in the way she talks about and pursues them, and there are a handful of flashbacks that do a great job fleshing them out further. I won’t pretend she doesn’t have some Mary-Sue like qualities, but it’s mostly in relation to her flaws, which I will admit are less character defects and more the kind of lame shit you’d pull out if you wanted to make a character charmingly ditzy. Oh, she’s kinda clumsy, can’t wake up on time, and is easily overwhelmed... Yeah, could be more interesting. But that’s as far down the Sue boulevard as she goes, because she is not ultra-capable, deified or anywhere near perfect. If anything, the supporting cast is just as strong as she is, and they’re given more than a generous amount of time to shine and be reliable in the narrative. They complement her, and vice versa.

Speaking of the narrative, it is a bit sit-commy. It’s your typical episodic array of thirty minute scenarios that are resolved in short order and then returned to the status quo for the next episode, and I know a lot of people wouldn’t go for that, but speaking as someone who has fond memories of even the worst TGIF shows, I don’t mind so much. There’s nothing really deep or challenging about the writing, but the slowish pacing is put to good use here. When it tries to be funny, the jokes land most of the time, because the timing is on point more often than not. When it’s trying to be heartfelt and emotionally resonant, it takes its time to earn those payoffs. And of course, when it wants to be goofy and creative, it fucking WILL be. There’s a zombie horror parody episode where Sonico’s agency gets wrapped up with a snake oil weight loss cream saleswoman, and the cream works by sucking nutrients out of your body, which leads those wearing it to shrivel up and chase anyone carrying food... And one of sonico’s friends is always carrying a bag of snacks. That’s pretty fucking funny.

Super Sonico is one of many anime that I’ve heard referred to as “A show where nothing happens,” and not only do I completely disagree in regard to this show, I don’t honestly believe that term applies accurately to ANY anime. Even the most boring anime I’ve ever seen, Smartphone Isekai, I could not in good conscience say nothing happens in. Shit did happen in that show, just like shit happens in this show. Not every anime needs to be exciting and/or eventful. There’s a good reason you’re not likely to see some slice of life highschool melodrama interrupted by a fucking alien invasion. My favorite episode in this show is the one where Sonico goes on a random bus trip, just meeting new people, and it's so fucking chill. Sometimes you don’t need an inciting incident, or an epic battle of good versus evil. Sometimes you just want to watch likeable characters chase their dreams, even as the world burns down around you.

SoniAni: Super Sonio the Animation was originally available from Sentai Filmworks, but has since gone long out of print. Several manga and game titles have not been released stateside.

The world is a dark and scary place, and it’s only going to get worse over the next four years. The future of America... Hell, the world at large, in so many ways... Has never been bleeker, and while the most ideal course of action would be to figure out something active to do about it, that’s not always a feasible option. I’m no therapist, but in times like these, I don’t think there are any wrong answers when it comes to coping. Comfort comes in many forms, and if we’re talking about the anime medium, I think the Super Sonico anime is worth checking out. My very real personal biases aside, I think it’s a very gentle, light-hearted, uplifting show with a likeable main character, a sharp sense of humor, and way better writing than you would expect from the outside looking in. In case you were wondering, no, I have no idea why she wears headphones all the damn time, nor do I know why nobody in her orbit ever points this out, but frankly, I don’t really care.

I give SoniAni: Super Sonico the Animation an 8/10