The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - KAMITSUBAKI CITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION

A world where human civilization was devastated by a major disaster that occurred seven years ago. Kamitsubaki City, a research and educational city of cutting-edge science, was miraculously recovered by using technology. However, behind the prosperity, monsters born from human malice and desire, called "Tesseracters," cause strange incidents in the city. Only the singing voices of five girls known as "Daughters of the Witch" can resist the monsters born from malice. In order to protect the peace of the city, the girls challenge the Tesseracters with their magical singing voices as their weapons.

KAMITSUBAKI CITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION is an original project by PIEDPIPER and Kamitsubaki Studio. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

I really appreciated the wild swings that Kamitsubaki City Under Construction took in its first episode. Call me a terminal theater kid, if you want. Still, I can be persuaded to overlook some pacing issues and chaotic storytelling if we've got characters that can sing a catchy tune and kick alien ass with their fancy musical witch powers. That second qualifier is not actually all that prevalent of a trope in typical Broadway theater, but I'll be damned if it shouldn't be.

This week, we see more of the “witchlings” that Pafu has joined in the fight against the Tesseractors. In addition to Rime, there are Haru, Sekai, and Koko, along with all of their cute-boy familiars. You can tell that we're following a cast of digital VTuber avatars, given how distinct all of the girls' designs are, and they work well enough as our team of musical magical heroines. The show's somewhat fragmented pacing stands out more to me here than it did last week, as the team is presented as an established group from the very start of the episode, when you'd normally expect scenes establishing the girls' individual dynamics, friendships, rivalries, and so on.

It's not a critical failure of the show, since you can still follow the story just fine, and we get small inserts here and there that give us insight into the girls' personalities. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's comparable to a middle-of-the-road idol anime, and at least the cast here is limited to just five main girls. Hopefully, we'll get more opportunities for character development as the show continues.

From a visual standpoint, I'm still pleased with the show's unique visual style and its effective use of CGI animation. We're not quite at Studio Orange levels of cinematic expression, but the show effectively utilizes its vibrant colors and cell-shaded textures to create a decent anime spectacle (you're unlikely to see a giant maelstrom of psychedelic tesseract-fish anywhere else this season). The music is also still pretty catchy, which is important for a show that is basically a glorified advertisement for its VTuber stars' talents, though I wish they'd turn the auto-tune dial down a notch.

Kamitsubaki City Under Construction kind of reminds me of those mid-budget live-action musicals that they adapt from anime and video games in Japan. It's kind of scrappy, a little slapdash in its construction, and it's not hard to see some of the cut corners in its production if you're looking for them. Like those shows, though, it's hard not to have at least a little fun when the cast is this enthusiastic and the numbers keep you tapping your toes.

I have to admit, the first minute or so of Kamitsubaki City Under Construction gave me eerie “GoHands” vibes, on account of the distinct use of color filters and backgrounds that often look like CGI model composites. Thankfully, though, that is where any comparisons to a cursed GoHands productions end. For one, Kamitsubaki City Under Construction uses well-rendered and animated 3D models for its characters, so they blend in much better with their surroundings than any GoHands homunculus ever has. Also, the story, direction, music, and editing of Kamitsubaki City Under Construction are all quite good. Thank God for that, too. My poor, battered psyche could not handle another Momentary Lily incident.

Another point going in the favor of Kamitsubaki City Under Construction: It's a musical! I don't just mean that it is some kind of idol anime featuring a bunch of song-and-dance routines, either; this is a Broadway-style, “characters burst into song in the middle of the story to communicate their feelings” kind of musical. Anyone who knows me can tell you that the one thing I will always think could improve a science-fiction anime about magical girls battling eldritch horrors from beyond the stars is a solid collection of musical numbers.

To that point, this anime is apparently a cross-media franchise sort of deal that is meant to serve as a vehicle for a bunch of famous VTubers. To be honest, I couldn't tell you a thing about “Kaf,” “Rim,” “Harusaruhi,” “Isekaijoucho,” or any other e-celebrities whose avatars might have been plopped into the world of Kamitsubaki City, but the good news is that I don't think I'm missing out on much. I'm sure that fans familiar with these VTubers streams and music will be much more tickled than I was about their inclusion in this show, but the girls are all playing actual characters in a story that doesn't just exist to serve as an expensive advertisement for their YouTube channels. The way that this premiere introduces the calamitous Blackout and follows the (more) fictionalized Kaf's journey into adolescence is genuinely well done drama that also functions as effective world building.

If this premiere suffers from anything, it's the “Episode 0 - Part 1” part of its title. This very much feels like the first half of a whole beginning chapter, with all sorts of exposition and buildup introducing the concepts that will eventually lead to a cast of witches fighting scary monsters…but no follow-through. Thankfully, it still accomplished the one job that any premiere has to get right, which is convince me to watch the next episode. Hopefully Kamitsubaki City Under Construction will continue to impress.

Laplace, the complex mathematical concept. Agni, the Hindu god of fire. Anemos, the Greek word for wind. Hastur, the Lovecraftian horror. Kugel…the noodle pudding? Maybe there's another meaning for the word out there, but as someone whose culinary traditions include kugels of both the noodle and potato variety (and one amazing carrot one an uncle makes), I started cracking up the minute this all-powerful young man was named and didn't stop. It's still making me giggle. I don't think that was the intention at all, and it probably won't take everyone out of the story the way it did me, but there it is. At least I can point to this name and say definitively that this show is not aimed at me.

That's really just a convenient excuse, though, because while this episode is a bit better than the first and makes rather more sense, it's still not particularly enjoyable. I do appreciate that it makes the Blackout a little clearer – a Tesseracter who goes on a rampage was set on his course because of the event, when he witnessed the solar-ish flare and then glanced over to see his wife and son dissolving into ash. Since Kafu wasn't looking up when it happened, we didn't have that explanation in episode one. The fact that Tesseracters are people whose despair overwhelms them until they become monsters is a valuable piece of information to have, as well. This episode is much less interested in gratuitous gore, which is a welcome change.

But the rest of it feels just as obtuse as ever to me. Why do girls sing and boys transform? Why do witchlings' songs work – is it some take on “music soothes the savage breast?” (Or beast, as Bugs Bunny would have it.) What, for the love of all that's holy, is with Kafu's eyes? Admittedly, those latter two points are perhaps not particularly important; lore has long been interpreted to say that only girls and women can be witches, so it's really not that surprising that there'd be this gender divide. But what is important is that none of this feels all that compelling. It's not a true musical, with songs serving as narration. It delights in traumas, but likely for a plot purpose. But none of it quite comes together for me, and the very awkward walk cycles detract from the otherwise interesting visuals. It's trying so hard, but without measurable results.

But hey, it could be worse. Kugel's name could be Kegel.

Welcome, friends, to the show that features a heroine with more upsetting eyes than UtaPri's Mountain Dew laser eyes. At some point in the development process for this multimedia franchise, someone decided that giving Kafu (and another, as yet unnamed girl) blue and red eyes with a bonus yellow pupil was a great idea. I must be allowed to politely disagree with them and to note that it's remarkably unsettling, especially when added to the vaguely undead skin tone everyone has. While giant blue goldfish swooping through the air are neat, overall one of my biggest complaints about this episode is the way it looks; between uncanny coloring and mildly off-putting animation, this just really didn't work for me on a visual level.

It's also not amazing from a storytelling perspective. That's a major disappointment, given that the first five-odd minutes are remarkably effective. Little Kafu watching her friend turn to ash right in front of her and then racing home through a crumbling city to find that her parents have also fallen plague to what comes to be called The Blackout is very well done. It's scary on a visceral level, drawn and animated so that we really get an idea of how scary this is to Kafu personally. Until her neighbor Erika bursts in, she has no way of knowing she's not the only person left in the city.

Regretfully, things go downhill from there as the plot leapfrogs over itself in a bid to reveal major plot points without taking the time to explain them. Proper nouns are thrown around with wild abandon – The Blackout, Witchling, Tesseractors. Some are explained. Many aren't. Kafu manages to accept everything with almost alarming aplomb, from the sudden appearance of a weird kid calling themselves Laplace (who might be the fish?) to moving on from Erika's hideous death with striking ease. It's possible a lot of time passes between Erika's demise and Kafu suddenly living with someone else, but unlike with the earlier seven year time skip, the episode doesn't bother to tell us. It feels like we're just expected to know.

Given that this already has several pieces of its multimedia empire out in the world, that's not entirely unfair. But rather than making me want to experience the games or listen to the music, it's driving me away from them. The confusing plot is a detriment, not a feature, and while I like the sound of Kafu's songs, I'm not engaged at all. Maybe episode two will be able to sort this mess out.

In a lot of ways, this feels like a second premiere episode. The show has gone full magical girl and little from the first episode remains relevant—beyond the backstory it lends to Kafu and the world at large.

The basic idea here is that when a person in this post apocalyptic world becomes to obsessed with their personal desires, they turn into a monster and warp the reality around them—producing more monsters. When this happens, witches and their partner familiars (who are somehow different from the normal monsters) are dispatched to take them out. It is the familiar's job to defeat the main monster in combat and the witch's job to purify their soul by singing a song that emotionally cleanses them.

Of course, none of this is told to us outright. We're just supposed to pick it up as the episode moves along. Honestly, it feels like we're missing an episode somewhere. Where are the scenes showing Kafu's recruitment, her orientation, and her first meeting with the other witches and their familiars? Where is the explanation about the organization they have joined and why it's seemingly run by monsters as well? There is a lot left up to interpretation in this episode and that's without even getting into the plot.

From the bits and pieces we are given, it appears that much of what our heroines have been taught is a lie—that their city is actually protected by a mysterious barrier and the rest of the world is a monster-filled hellscape. Moreover, it seems as if the monsters on the outside have discovered this fact and are specifically targeting the machines powering the barrier—and the people(?) apparently inside them.

Unfortunately, as we know little about the world so far, it's hard to understand the stakes and implications of this information. The most we can really gather is that if the barrier goes down, bad things will happen.

So while the story is obtuse at best and confusing at worst, this anime has one thing that massively offsets its issues: the presentation. The music is just full of bangers—which should be expected as this show is in large part a vehicle for the V.W.P (Virtual Witch Phenomenon) virtual singer group. Kafu's songs in particular stand out—though the others certainly aren't bad in any way.

Visually, there is a lot of good stuff being done here with the surreal animation—and not just in the action scenes. My favorite shot in the episode has the camera rotating around the witches as they ride an elevator—and each time the shot is obstructed, one of the various familiars appears \in the instant we can't see. It's direction like this that makes the show captivating even during scenes of pure dialogue.

In the end, I have to admit, even after two episodes, I'm not sure what to make of KAMITSUBAKI CITY UNDER CONSTRUCTION. However, while I may have been constantly trying to figure out what was going on, I was never bored. And that counts for a whole lot.

I'll say one thing for this anime, I was completely captivated this whole episode. When the credits started to roll, I was surprised to see how quickly the time had past. However, while this premiere had my attention, it wasn't always for the best reasons.

This episode feels like three different episodes in one. The first is a disaster anime—a vast number of the population suddenly turn to ash and the survivors struggle to keep society running as they deal with the trauma of what happened. The next is a dark magical girl anime with warped spaces, ultraviolent deaths, and—given that the monsters used to be human—child killers. The final part is a slice-of-life of an orphan girl struggling to deal with how much her life has changed and what she now accepts as normal.

While I wouldn't call any of the three parts bad, they are wildly different in themes and tone. It feels like not only are they three separate stories that just happen to share a main character but have separate directors as well. This lack of cohesion is the episode's greatest flaw—and the only major one when it comes down to it.

In both character designs and the visual style, the episode manages to look both normal and otherworldly (which is I really enjoy). That said, the use of music is the real highlight. From the discordant sound as Kaf's song clashes with the background music during the disaster, to the earworm she sings while walking through the tunnel, it's fantastic.

In the end, I'm more than interested enough with this anime to happily come back for more next week. Despite its foibles—or maybe because of them—I'm interesting in see what this show turns out to be once it establishes a status quo and starts to move the story forward. If nothing else, this show leaves an impact—which I'll take any day over the blandness which many anime premieres turn out to be.

Subscribe to Crunchyroll here!