×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Sonny Boy
Episode 10

by Steve Jones,

How would you rate episode 10 of
Sonny Boy ?
Community score: 4.3

At times, Sonny Boy seems like the kind of series that could go on wandering and wondering forever, but this week's episode makes it clear that the end—or some kind of end, anyway—is inexorably approaching. If I take a moment to ignore the increasingly finite realities of modern anime production, however, I really would love to see a longer and more anthological version of Sonny Boy. Its structure is both loose and large enough to accommodate a vast variety of stories, and it'd be neat to see more animators take the reins and inject their voices into individual episodes, like Keiichirō Saitō did with episode eight. It's an easy comparison to make thanks to Shingo Natsume's involvement, but imagine a Space Dandy-like version of the series, highlighting a different creative vision each week as it jumps between worlds and trots across different schools of philosophy. I'm not saying that would be a better version of Sonny Boy, and it certainly wouldn't have the same mood and direction of this one. I just find myself thinking about it in defiance of the series' encroaching conclusion.

That digression aside, this tenth episode pushes the narrative's needle forward quite a bit. This is aided in large part by our POV character Tsubasa, whose “Monologue” power provides a peek underneath the rest of the students' collective curtains. I find the first half of the episode to be a mixed bag, though. The plot-focused scenes are at odds with the dreamlike quality I enjoy best from Sonny Boy, even though I do understand this relative straightforwardness is a necessary concession if the anime wants to have something resembling an intelligible conclusion (whether or not it needs an intelligible conclusion is something I'd debate). I also think the gestures towards profundity mostly fall flat here. Tsubasa doesn't reveal anything about Asakaze's desires and insecurities that we couldn't already infer. Furthermore, while Tsubasa's power keeps homing in on all the ways that people can be two-faced, that's neither a novel observation nor a novel way of communicating it. This obsession with phoniness has plenty of precedent in adolescent thought and literature, but Sonny Boy doesn't add anything particularly meaningful to that conversation.

I'm most interested by the limits to Tsubasa's power. She hears people's thoughts “as though they were telling a story,” which implies that even these inner thoughts are filtered to some degree. Think about it. How do you think? Are you narrating your own story, are you hopping from fragment to fragment, or are you doing something else, neither both nor in between? Modernist authors like Joyce and Faulkner experimented with stream-of-consciousness writing in order to better transpose thought onto paper, but even those works have an unavoidable layer of artifice. So when Tsubasa realizes in the end that she didn't know the real Asakaze, she's in effect admitting that she never knew the “real' anyone. Her power lets her see another layer to people, sure, but not the whole picture. Like God says, we “can't even peer that deeply into [our] own heart[s].” If the selves we spend our whole lives with are unknowable, how can we expect to know someone else? And beyond that, maybe completely “knowing” somebody isn't all that important anyway.

Tsubasa's friendship with Nozomi is a bright spot in an otherwise elegiac episode. Although they're ostensibly romantic rivals, Asakaze's petulance ends up pushing the two together. I also like how Tsubasa uses the smartphone as a way to communicate without having to worry about reading the thoughts of the person on the other end. Nozomi, meanwhile, embraces a smartphone when it's a means of keeping in touch with a friend, not a means of keeping tabs on her. Even though Asakaze is what brings them together (and, ultimately, what rips them apart), Nozomi's habit of speaking her mind would make her a perfect match for the otherwise cynical Tsubasa under any circumstances. I think, even if Tsubasa didn't have Monologue, Nozomi's prickly brand of honesty would have still appealed to her.

Asakaze's arc has been long in the making, but Nozomi also finally helps him grow up this week. He was too obsessed with what other people think (not dissimilar from Tsubasa in that way), so his quest for external validation landed him in the ample bosom of Aki and the palm of God's hand. As with most aspects of Sonny Boy, you can interpret his story on several different levels, from personal reflections about insecurity, to larger narratives about how religion exists to fill a hole. At the very least, Aki and God are clearly up to something, so it's difficult to read anything they do in a positive light. Asakaze's decision to stop pining over Nozomi is thus a declaration of independence, both from his unrequited obsession and his emotional crutches. When he “kills” War, it's a mercy, not a holy crusade. This doesn't stop God from getting what he wants, of course, but Asakaze can start being his own person now. He can start figuring out who he is, and maybe Tsubasa can too.

War's appearance in this episode opens a big can of confusing worms. For one, the student they identify as War looks and acts nothing like the person we saw in Yamabiko's story. To further confound things, the name “War” is used to refer to both a person and the specific world they find him in. This latter point, however, is probably the most important idea broached here—that there is congruity between the student copies and the many This Worlds. War the place reflects War the person. War the place is War the person. Here, a dead, calcified landscape marred by a giant bottomless scar seems like an apt visual metaphor for the mentality of a person (or peoples) hollowed out by a constant pursuit of war. Perhaps the student we see here is just what War became 5000 years after Yamabiko saw him. Further supporting this congruity is the power holdover left behind when Asakaze “kills” him, which we previously saw as a phenomenon only when worlds were “solved.” Was War solved when Asakaze decided to show him mercy? Was Nozomi solved when Asakaze realized he had to stop pursuing her ghost? Or did God kill Nozomi so he could obtain her Compass power? The nice thing about Sonny Boy is that all of these could be true, or neither.

Nevertheless, I did raise the possibility that these other worlds were manifestations of the drifters' psyches, so I can't deny feeling smug and vindicated by that bombshell. And regardless of its canonicity, it's still a valid way of interpreting the show so far. The other big revelation about Mizuho's power also helps explain more of the questions behind the drifting. However, the genesis of drifting remains a huge unknown. It's like how particle physics research in the past century has provided an ever more granular understanding of the universe's foundations, down to the first fractions of a picosecond of existence, but the precise instant of creation remains a mystery. It'll be interesting to see what and how much Sonny Boy explains in its final two episodes. Like I've said before, I don't need it to make perfect logical sense (and I'd say we're well past that point anyway), but it is important to consider how those explanations will dovetail with its thematic explorations.

I'm of two minds about Nozomi's (presumed) death. In one sense, it's how Asakaze's arc had to end. In the real world, Nozomi died before Asakaze got to say anything to her, so here, Nozomi is a ghost that only prolongs his self-flagellation. Letting Nozomi go is the right move. However, Nozomi is also her own character and person, and it kind of sucks that her role in the story has focused so much on helping two sad boys grow up. She was their Compass, but when Nagara promised to reciprocate her guiding light last week, I was hoping for something more substantial than pointing her back in the direction of Asakaze so she could be rendered into a literal object. I wanted to see more of her personal reckoning with her existence as a person both dead and alive. Nonetheless, this being Sonny Boy, it's probably foolish of me to assume that she's fully gone now. 

Presentation-wise, Sonny Boy is still in a league of its own. This marks the fifth episode that Shingo Natsume storyboarded himself, and assuming he does the same for the finale, that means he'll have boarded at least half of the show. Like I said in the introduction, an anthology-driven Sonny Boy would be neat, but this is Natsume's baby, and he's definitely created something special. This week's highlight is the big beige purgatory of War, which uses topography in lieu of color to make its statement. I also enjoy the placement of the insert song by rock band Kaneyorimasaru. In retrospect, it feels like an appropriate swan song for Nozomi, and it highlights how perennially fantastic Shinichiro Watanabe is at finding music.

Per usual, Sonny Boy makes it difficult to put together a cohesive “review,” and I could definitely continue rambling about various details or implications—narratively and thematically—but I'll stop here. In the interim before the next episode, we have to consider how a gunslinging deity is going to interact with the deathless existence that Mizuho unconsciously imposed on everyone. Is this the big conflict that the series has been building to, or will it be just another bump on the road? Right now, I'm thinking about the happenstance of the drifting. It was just random chance that Nagara's and Mizuho's (and her cats', and probably others') powers interacted in such a way. There wasn't a purpose or intent behind or for it. Like so much of human history, it just happened to happen, and people dealt with the aftermath. We possess more power than control, and maybe we'll always be nipping at our own heels.

Rating:

Sonny Boy is currently streaming on Funimation.

Steve writes bad jokes weekly for This Week in Anime, and outside of ANN, you'll be able to find him making Sonny Boy aesthetic posts on his Twitter.


discuss this in the forum (34 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

this article has been modified since it was originally posted; see change history

back to Sonny Boy
Episode Review homepage / archives