Oshi No Ko

It’s often believed that the supernatural only exists in our imaginations and in the world of fiction, but in reality, small occurrences that defy rational explanation happen every day right under our noses. Small miracles, events with astronomical odds of occurring, are more common than you might think. One of these events comes to pass on the day that a famous young idol named Ai Hoshino strolls into a remote hospital to give birth to her secret twins. Her doctor, Gorou Amemiya, has been a huge fan of hers ever since catching the idol bug from a terminally ill patient of his who found inspiration in Ai’s performances before passing away. He dedicates himself to the job, until a mysterious stalker catches him alone outside of the hospital and murders him, leaving his body to rot at the bottom of a nearby cliff, to never be found again.

However, as fate would have it, this is exactly when one of those small miracles was about to occur... Gorou is suddenly reborn, with all of his adult memories, as Ai Hoshino’s child! Well, one of them, and coincidentally his new twin sister is also a reincarnation. His new name is Aquamarine, and hers is Ruby. Going through his formative toddler years with his favorite Idol singer as his mother is a surreal experience, not only because their existence has to be kept secret, but because he soon realizes that Ai is not the brightest bulb in the shed. Still, she loves her two babies with all her heart, no matter how creepy they are, talking and acting like full grown and fully articulate adults. But then, fate deals him another cruel hand, as his mother is murdered in cold blood by the same man who killed him previously! Vowing to exact revenge on the mastermind behind the attack, Aqua enters his teenage years with a target in mind: The only man who could have possibly arranged both attacks. His and Ruby’s birth father!

It’s been three years since I reviewed an anime from Doga Kobo, when I shredded Himouto Umaru-chan. Anyway, some things have changed since 2022. Back then I hadn’t seen very many anime by this studio, and I didn’t exactly love any of the ones I had seen. Nowadays, however, I’m a huge fan of Koihime Musou, and Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle is pretty special too. What I’m noticing now more than then is that there don’t seem to be any real specific trends between the anime released by this studio. If anything, it feels more like one of those studios that gives enough creative freedom to their directors that the style of their output varies greatly depending on who specifically was in charge of it. I also believe I said at the time that Himouto Umaru-chan was the best looking anime I’d seen from them up until that point, but boy howdy is that not the case anymore.

From what I have seen that I think I can say with some certainty, Doga Kobo is way more likely to give an anime production a generous budget than it used to be. Most of their early work tends to range from cheap looking to average, and before you call that an insult, that description applies to shows I very much like, such as, again, Koihime Musou. It does appear that they were able to modernize their output successfully... Sleepy Princess looks great, Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings looks great, and Oshi no Ko looks absolutely phenomenal. It takes a classic shojou aesthetic, but infuses it with the kind of rich, immersive coloration that you’d see from certain younger studios, the kind where characters have deep rainbow y eyes for no real reason. Aside from some of them having your typical wide, expressive anime eyes, most of the characters are anatomically realistic, with more or less believable hairstyles and hair colors.

On top of all that, the animation is basically flawless. I can’t tell for certain, but the idol dancing seems to be using a blend of rotoscoped-2D and MMD 3D that comes off as perfectly smooth and not even remotely distracting. The backgrounds are immersive and complex, and it’s directed extremely well. I know this is easier to do in animation than in real life, but there’s some real, genuine depth to the cinematography, and the visual style only becomes obscure or avant-garde when a character is really going through something in their inner monologues, so it never feels excessive or pretentious. I don’t have a lot to say about the music, but the performances accompanying it are downright breathtaking, so as far as the visuals go, high marks all around.

I can’t say a lot about the English dub, because not only is the cast made up primarily of names I’m not familiar with, even the ones I have heard of are ones I’ve never spent a ton of time thinking about. The highlight by a mile is Jack Stansbury as the lead role, playing Aquamarine Hoshino. Not only does he pull off the cold and calculating side of the character exceptionally... Basically portraying this the same way Brad Swaille did as Light Yagami, albeit with a lot more subtlety... But he also has no problem turning on the charm whenever his character is forced into a situation that requires a false smile. Chaney Moore deserves her flowers as well for doing something very similar while playing his smaller child form. It's also really nice to see that Marcy Bannon is still working. The singing is done in Japanese, which I’m not a fan of, but whatever, that’s just the way it goes. It’s a great dub, I have no complaints, but I also have no other important comments.

One thing the medium of animation is known for is that you can use it to bring any bizarre, abstract, or dare I say even original idea to life. Whether it’s a fully animated feature, or just a CGI animation intermingling with a live action film, there’s no idea too out there for animation to bring it to life. This gets even more true when you venture over to the anime medium specifically, which is deservedly notorious for throwing out the most insane premises humanly possible. From the darkest horrors in the corners of the most twisted minds, to the craziest gimmicks attached to the new shonen hero, there is no idea that can’t work in an anime... But that doesn’t guarantee it will. An insane story concept tends to be high-risk, high-reward, because when executed successfully, it can result in a story that will be all the more memorable for it’s originality... But if it fails, that concept will render it a million times more embarrassing.

If you couldn’t tell from my plot synopsis, Oshi no Ko has one such concept. Not only is it one of the most original and insane ideas for a story that I’ve ever heard, it also comes off on the surface as one that is immediately questionable. Reincarnation s a premise does seem to be enjoying some second-hand popularity thanks to it’s association with the isekai genre, but it is possible for a character to be reborn into their own world... Although, being reborn as the baby of your favorite Idol? That’s a new one. The closest anime that I’ve seen come to that was Dog X Scissors, where the main character was reborn as his favorite author’s puppy, and yeah, nobody ever wants to be compared to that piece of shit. Unfortunately, Oshi no Ko does carry some of the same red flags. I think about how the author in Dog x Scissors wanted to lose her virginity to a fucking puppy, and I immediately expect a concept like the one from Oshi to lead to some severely fucked up mommy-baby play fetish content.

But that’s not what happens.

On the other side of the bizarre idea dichotomy, I absolutely adore when an anime presents a unique or out-of-the-box concept and puts all possible effort into exploring and even analyzing the hell out of it. I’m sure at some point we’ve all asked, hey, what would it be like to start life over from infancy with our memories intact? How would the physical limits of early age affect our ability to retain memories? Would our advanced early vocabularies make us come off as creepy? What are the ethics of breast feeding with an adult brain? This anime puts way more thought into the idea of an adult being reincarnated into a baby genius than Saga of Tanya the Evil and Jobless Reincarnation did, and for the record, I loved both of those shows. Granted, you only get to see the main characters as babies for the first episode... Which is an hour and a half long for some reason... At which point we get our second inciting incident, the murder of Ai Hoshino, which kicks us into the time skip, and starts the series proper.

I don’t want to get into too many spoilers beyond this point... Honestly, spoiling the first episode was probably too much, but I couldn’t think of any good way around it... But the true magic of this series lies in the siblings themselves, and I mean that in more ways than one. First, thankfully, they fall on the more realistic side of sibling dynamics. They bicker, but they get along. They have opinions about each other’s love lives, but they’re not obsessed over it in any sort of unhealthy way. They see the best and worst in each other, and they have exceptionally strong chemistry. More importantly, they complement each other in ways that massively benefit the series. There’s this psychological concept called right-brain, left-brain, which says that the different sides of our brains determine different aspects of our character... If you want more information on this, there’s a pretty catchy Bo Burnam song on the subject.

This concept is complete bullshit, an old wives tale along the lines of “We only use ten percent of our brains,” but it can be really useful in character writing. Going by this concept, Ruby is a right-brained individual. She’s socially conscious, artistic, expressive, sensitive, compassionate, a true dreamer. Aquamarine is more of a left-brained individual, as he’s calculating, mathematic, practical, a true realist. More importantly, though, is in how this affects the tonal balance of the show. Aquamarine carries the plot of the series, with his desire to exact revenge on his birth father giving us a long term goal that we want to see him achieve, as he works his way through industry obligations and his own calculated plans to get there. Ruby carries the emotional side of the show, chasing her dreams of Idol stardom, and giving us a bright, warm smile to get lost in whenever we need a break from Aqua’s sociopathic social climbing. Her sincerity does a lot of heavy lifting to balance out Aqua's duplicity.

And sure enough, they both have backstories that reinforce their twisting paths, with Aqua’s connection to his mother’s murder, and... Okay, I’m not going to spoil Ruby’s past life, but it’s very similar to the second best episode of Angel Beats. Anyway, the writing uses the two of them to create a strong balance between two very strong tones that should not work together, but do, thanks to the bond between them. Having said that, there is a third character whose presence is integral to the narrative, even long after her death, and that’s Ai. Ai Hoshino was a very strongly written character, with explicitly defined positive and negative qualities, neither deified nor idealized, a believable inspiration for multiple characters. Her presence never fades from the series, even after her death, as she stands as a sort of motif connected to the anime's multiple different themes. It is true that Aqua kind of has an Oedipus complex about her, but thankfully it’s neither romanticized nor sexualized, rather the writing seems self-aware enough to just stand back and observe/explore this connection, which is how this sort of subject matter should be handled.

As for everything this show has to say about fame and the Japanese entertainment industry, it really is just a means to an end in the story, but it still does deserve to be analyzed. I’m going to be honest, I don’t personally know very much about this subject... Hell, I don’t really know anything about the American entertainment industry, aside from what I’ve gleamed from various tell-alls and memoirs... But it feels authentic? This could just be my ignorant American ass being gullible, but just going off of vibes, it feels like the series knows what it’s talking about. If it is an honest portrayal, then it’s a fascinating one, and the story that the Hoshino siblings have been weaving through it have been absolutely breathtaking, full of emotionally resonant high and low points, several heart-stopping twists, and a mystery that’s slowly being unravelled in the background, I haven’t seen an anime that kept me this far on the edge of my seat in a long time.

Oshi no Ko is available from Sentai Filmworks, with a second season forthcoming on physical release, and a third season set for release later this year. The original manga by Aka Asaka is available from Yen Press.

I love Oshi no Ko. They say you can make any strange idea work in an anime, and with it’s clever execution, sophisticated writing, strong heart and creativity, this anime definitely proves that statement to be true. I’m not going to say it’s perfect, or a masterpiece, because if I went over it again with a fine toothed comb I’d probably find a bunch of small flaws and shit, but that kind of doesn’t matter, because there’s nothing about it that I don’t like. It looks great, it sounds great, it’s engaging, it's funny when it wants to be, and it has so much genuine depth to its ideas that I feel like I’d learn something new about it if I ever come back to it for a second or third viewing. I haven't seen the second season yet(As of this writing) but there are so many intriguing direction this story ould be taken in, and I can’t wait to continue watching the Hoshino siblings pursue their goals, and hopefully, find something worth living for beyond them.

I give Oshi no Ko a 10/10