The Fall 2014 Anime Preview Guide

Wolf Girl and Black Prince

Theron Martin

Rating: 1.5 (of 5)

Review: Oh, the awkwardly unexpected places that a lie run amok can take one to!

Such is the central theme of this shojo manga adaptation, which features Erika, a newly-christened high school girl and habitual liar (the Wolf Girl in the title and the wolf ears she is occasionally adorned by are references to the fable about crying wolf) who is willing to do just about anything to make friends in her new class, especially with her long-time friend in a different class. That ends up meaning lying about having a boyfriend and doing some fairly outrageous things with him just to keep up with a couple of girls she befriends. When they start to suspect that she really doesn't have one, she frantically snaps a picture of a male hottie on the street to pass off as her boyfriend, not realizing that he is actually one of her own school's princes. When she and her friends encounter him in school, she manages to talk him into going along with her deception, but there is a cost: she essentially has to be at his beck and call, like a dog, for “boyfriend” Kyoya. While he might seem nice and pleasant on the outside, he definitely has a sadistic streak, much to Erika's dismay.

That the artistry, courtesy of TYO Animations (the producer of Tamayura), is actually attractive is the entire reason this one does not get a minimum score. Kyoya is the kind of unpleasantly fake character all too common in shojo anime, the “yeah, he's a cad, but he just might possibly have some hidden pain or sympathy or other characteristic that I can emphasize with and correct to make him more lovable” kind of guy that is every bit as obnoxious on the male side of the spectrum as over-the-top tsundere are on the female side. Erika is not any better, as she is just as irritating as the liar who gets trapped in her own lies in a way she doesn't expect while trying to avoid being trapped in her lies in a way that she does expect. Granted, telling lies in order to establish oneself in high school social settings is hardly unusual – in fact, high school graduates who can honestly claim that they never did any of this are probably few and far between – but Erika's case just seems so forced and manufactured that it is a chore to sit through, and what passes for a sense of humor is not enough to offset that.

The comments above should be taken with a grain of salt, as I have a long-standing personal distaste for both character archetypes represented here. Even so, surely this season has something – anything! – better to offer for shojo fare.

Wolf Girl and Black Prince is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Hope Chapman

Rating: 2.5

Wolf Girl and Black Prince seems to be selling itself on its "shocking" romcom premise, but it's anything but shocking. In fact, it's impossible for me to list all the anime, manga, movies, and romance novels this show reminds me of, for they are as grains of sand upon the beach of womens' media, but I can easily think of the most recent anime this show reminds me of: Blue Spring Ride. In fact, even though it has a fraction of the budget BSR had, and its pacing, humor, and characterization are at best equivocal, I would compare it favorably to Blue Spring Ride even inside of one episode. You see, Wolf Girl and Black Prince makes no pretense about how icky it is. It revels in its own icky-ness, with no attempt to paint it as (hetero)normalcy and what should be "the dream of any young girl." This is a twisted nightmare, and it assumes that if you embrace its lead couple, you're a little twisted too. At the end of the day, it's all the exact same creepy ideas about relationships and gender roles that Blue Spring Ride, Twilight, and hundreds of other teen-girl-aimed fiction titles do, but it's got more chutzpah about it, and I guess I don't mind that as much. A snake is a snake, but this one has the decency to rattle at me and not try to pass itself off as a garden hose.

So what is this "shocking" premise? Well, small-brained and people-pleasing Erika has accidentally found herself in the company of slutty two-faced bitches, her only new high-school friends, and feels as though she is forced to pretend to be someone she's not to maintain their approval. She takes a surreptitious photo of the hottest boy in school and claims he is her super-kinky-but-awesome boyfriend, before being nearly caught in the lie when the boy, Saya, walks right into the conversation. It turns out he's more than happy to pretend to be her boyfriend, but it comes at a price. She will have to be his "dog," by whatever definition he decides, and it becomes more and more obvious as he describes the condition that Saya is secretly a sadist with deep-seated issues. And yet there's just something about him...well, you can see the problem here. It's the standard bodice-ripper setup for the fearful-yet-questioning virgin, and you can balk at it or laugh at it, but it's sadly not as "shocking" as it seems to think. Water it down a little, and this is exactly how Blue Spring Ride began, right down to the timing and delivery of the "maybe I can change him since he saved me from my awful friends" last-second twist.

Wolf Girl and Black Prince is trashy, but it revels in its own trashiness, plays it for laughs rather than sentimentalism, and strikes raw at a niche that always wants the same-thing-but-different anyway. Well here it is: more of the same but different, complete with leash and collar, and compared to the doldrums of garden-hose shoujo, the snake version is a lot more entertaining. It doesn't mean the show is any good--it isn't, really--but when it comes to deeply uncomfortable shojo romances, this is far more honest than most about the dark fantasies it panders to, and I can respect that just a little while still shaking my head with a sigh.

Wolf Girl and Black Prince is available streaming at Crunchyroll.

Nick Creamer

Rating: 2

Shoujo romcoms involving weird, kinda abusive relationship dynamics seem to be a thing these days. Wolf Girl and Black Prince slowly builds up to that, starting with our protagonist Erika as she frets over the possibility of her high school career being a “life in hell.” She doesn't deal with this fear by actually attempting to make earnest friends, or by being herself - nope, she deals with it by lying her way into a false friendship with two mature-looking classmates. She lies about understanding relationships, and she lies about having a boyfriend, and soon enough she lies herself into a corner. When she ends up having to beg classmate Sata Kyoya to pretend to be her boyfriend, he accepts - on the condition that Erika act as his “dog,” and do everything he asks of her. And the seeds of a wonderful, totally healthy relationship are sown.

I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed this show. The production isn't much to speak of (standard stringy shoujo character designs, floppy hair, lots of pastels), and it isn't really that funny, but there was something about Erika continuously tumbling her way through terrible decision after terrible decision that endeared me to her. She's not a nice, smart, or generally good person, and she never learns from her mistakes, but her fears are very human ones. Nobody wants to be the odd one out, and many people spend their high school careers pretending to be someone they're not - Wolf Girl and Black Prince just takes that idea to a fairly bizarre extreme. In the end, she's created a “life in hell” far worse than anything normal loneliness could offer, but her road to hell is paved with, if not good, at least genuinely understandable intentions.

What will make or break this show is how the relationship between Erika and Kyoya develops. Right now, Kyoya isn't really much more than a sociopath - his actions aren't in the least sympathetic, and aren't based in understandable anxieties the way Erika's are. He's just a huge jerk - but by the end of this episode, we're already getting the shoujo sparkles and “maybe he's not so bad after all” swoon-moments from Erika. Hopefully that finale's just supposed to be reflective of Erika's terrible judgment, because if legitimate romance is going to blossom out of this craziness, the show will have to work harder than it is to earn moments like that. No matter the framing, the show won't be able to spin lovey-dovey climaxes out of straight-up abuse.

Wolf Girl and Black Prince is available streaming at Crunchyroll.

Zac Bertschy

Rating: 2

Erika's going to high school! Holy cow! And she doesn't want to be unpopular, so she's gotta figure out how to fit in. She befriends two catty girls who talk endlessly about their college-age boyfriends, and decides she'd better have a boyfriend too, but there's one problem: she doesn't have one. So she does what any plucky teenage girl does and makes one up, complete with ribald tales of their kinky sex life together. Eventually her "friends" want proof, so she surreptitiously snaps a photo of local hunk Saya, but he's locally hunky enough to get recognized by her mean girl buddies - which means it's time to escalate.

She approaches Saya and comes clean, and he agrees to pretend to be her lover, in exchange for one thing: Erika has to be his dog. Like, bark for me and fetch me things, that sort of dog. Saya reveals he's "in love" with the black eyes of stupid dogs that stay and wait for you no matter what, indicating he has abandonment issues that turned him into a weird, conventionally attractive sociopath, but it's all good with Erika, who's mostly just concerned that he's going to try and get in her pants. Erika's bitchy friends show up and grill Saya about his (fabricated) S&M fetish, and he shows them what for, leading us to the usual "but maybe they could find love together~" scene that sets up the rest of the show.

So this is from the "abusive relationship between two boring, kinda fucked-up high schoolers" subgenre of shojo (that at this point is such a commonly told story it can't really be called a subgenre anymore) and it's as typical of the form as you could possibly expect. We have the willowy, lanky character designs with duck lips and carefully drawn tousled hair, pastel backgrounds, pink flip-phones with cutesy charms dangling from them - you know the drill. The premise isn't any more or less off-putting than your average Katherine Heigl romantic comedy, even if it is predicated on the notion that two kids with wildly unhealthy attitudes about romance, relationships and most importantly each other might find some dysfunctional version of "love" together. The key to making one of these shows engaging on an emotional level is imbuing either your male or female lead (or both!) with some manner of empathetic or otherwise lovable character trait. Unfortunately, I didn't find either of these two headcases to be worth following - I don't really care if relentlessly shallow Erika finds true love with her twisted weirdo faux-beau, and that's kinda the death knell for shows like this. It could turn out to be a fun, disposable binge watch one day, but I can't see it rising above that.

Wolf Girl and Black Prince is available streaming at Crunchyroll.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 1.5 (out of 5)

I love shoujo, so I was really looking forward to this series, but it is definitely a case where going in blind (as I try to do unless I've already read the manga) turned around and bit me. Wolf Girl and Black Prince is not, as the title implies, a fantasy, but rather a high school romance with two of the least likable protagonists I've encountered. Erika is about to start high school and she's terrified that she won't have any friends and will be left on the (social) outside for all three years. Her best friend Sanda is in another class, and is clearly worried about what Erika will do to avoid her anticipated fate. It turns out Sanda was right to be afraid – Erika has a bit of a lying problem. Immediately upon entering her new class, Erika lies about having a boyfriend (who is into kinky bondage sex) in order to become friends with class bad girls Marin and Tezuka. She thinks she's getting away with it until she overhears that they suspect that she's lying – after all, they've never seen a picture of her mysterious BF. So does Erika confess all and learn her lesson? Of course not! She goes out and takes a picture of a random hot guy, who turns out to be Kyoya, the heartthrob of Sanda's class. When confronted with this unfortunate reality, Kyoya agrees to be Erika's “fake” boyfriend...only the relationship he has in mind is more like (bad) owner and dog.

So as you may have guessed, the “wolf girl” in the title is less “girl with wolf ears” and more “the boy who cried wolf.” Erika has some harsh lessons to learn about lying to make people like you and the creepy guys who agree to go along with said lies, and it looks like Erika will be learning the hard way...if at all. That's what's so irritating about her – she has already been presented with several opportunities to learn from her mistake and has instead chosen to make the problem worse, to the point where she is now involved with a total jerk who is not above physically intimidating her. Yes, there would be no story if she figured things out so quickly, but Wolf Girl and Black Prince looks to be setting up an example of what is wrong with the current model of shoujo romance – the abusive boyfriend and the not-too-bright heroine. That Sanda is worried about Erika is a good touch that gives me some hope, and there certainly are indications that Kyoya has the requisite heart of gold, or at least soft spot for dogs, that may redeem him as a character, but as first episodes go, the plot looks like it is setting us up for some uncomfortable moments.

There are some interesting things done with the visuals, such as images of Erika's walking legs superimposed over the areas of the school she is traveling through and the changes to Kyoya's facial features when he's in transition from “prince” to “evil guy” are subtle and interesting, as are the small changes to Erika and Tezuka between the start of school and the point where the story picks up. Character designs are pretty basic LaLa or Hana to Yume style, but they do make a decent transition to anime.

Wolf Girl and Black Prince isn't all that shocking if you've read this type of shoujo romance before, but it is on the uncomfortable side of the genre. If Erika gets a clue sooner rather than later and Kyoya tones it down, this could be fun, but right now this is not a representation of shoujo at its finest.

Wolf Girl and Black Prince is available streaming on Crunchyroll.