Sonny Boy

Episode 5

Sonny Boy's fifth episode opens in a way that made me think I had accidentally skipped an episode. That's not really a criticism on my part, but it is another acknowledgement of the series' drive to disorient its audience—unmooring its viewers in parallel with The Drifting Classroom. Instead of greeting us with a warm handshake each week, it's dumping a bucket of ice water over our heads and forcing us to count the spilled cubes. I don't begrudge anybody for giving up on its messy obtuseness at this point; I, however, am a literary masochist, so I continue to relish in its nettle of slow-blooming conceptual vagaries, eager to tease what meaning I can from the metaphor and technobabble. In that regard, this week adds plenty of fuel to its allegorical fire, heightening tensions and emotions as the class drifts towards serious conflict.

The opening scene acts as a microcosm within Sonny Boy's microcosm (a nanocosm?), throwing us into a bloody two-dimensional struggle between voracious blue Pac-Men and their cute mouse victims. Nagara and the others are there to save the mice, but the important part is how they save them. The gang refutes Asakaze's blunt superhero approach, which is consistent with how wary the show is of individual exceptionalism. Their chosen solution is more elegant and requires teamwork, corralling the Pac-Men so they can relocate the mice somewhere safe. But the show is similarly wary of saviorism, so they single out a mouse revolutionary and let the little guy handle the rest after their work is done. I like that this rodent parable is so open to interpretation: Are the students simply benefactors acting out of the goodness of their hearts, or are they Machiavellian manipulators propping up a convenient puppet regime in order to get the reward they want? Both situations can and do happen!

At the same time, Sonny Boy drops a lot of new contextual information about these other worlds, which further muddies any clarity to their symbolism. What is clear is that some time has passed since last week's cliffhanger (and I do like how the growing surrealist opulence of Rajdhani's laboratory serves as a barometer for how long they've been on the island). Central to the group's motivation is the concept that these worlds have “solutions,” and finding the solution yields a “reward” with some kind of power embedded in it, like the hairball they found after the baseball game. Well before Rajdhani's epiphany at the end of the episode, these ideas suggest that the other worlds are not just random parallel universes, but specifically designed constructs. To what end, though? Nozomi and the others act like they're being tested on the correct way to save the mice, and maybe there's something to that. Or maybe they're just searching for structure in a random and chaotic universe, as we all do. I don't think we need an answer to that yet either. So far, Sonny Boy is less concerned with solving these mysteries and more preoccupied with the students' collective and individual struggles to adapt to them. To me, that's the much more interesting angle of attack.

And that angle is heated to a boil this week as frustrations split the students further into factions. Unsurprisingly, Ms. Aki is the main catalyst of this unrest, although the shroud around her true nature and motivations makes it difficult to speculate who and what she is supposed to represent in this story. Like Hoshi, she invokes religious imagery and terminology to pull the rest of the class in line, but her approach is more outwardly fire and brimstone than Hoshi's benign façade. And for the time being, her approach works better and on more students. She homes in on Asakaze as her messianic patsy of choice, easily manipulating his low self-esteem (exacerbated by his diminished role in saving the mouse kingdom). To that end, she orchestrates the class' imprisonment and exodus from the pumpkin world in order to prop Asakaze up as a Moses-like figure. Or at least that's my best guess about the random skateboard, which is presumably another totem like the black curtain or the computer mouse.

I definitely want to find out what Ms. Aki's whole deal is, but I'm less enthused about her presentation so far, which has focused on her sexual and matronly characteristics. While I like deliberately nasty femme fatale characters, Sonny Boy's allegorical context means it's that much easier to read misogyny into creative decisions like this, even if that's not the intent. And in general, Sonny Boy's big picture nuances remain thought-provoking, but it stumbles when it makes these cursory gestures towards thornier and more specific issues like racism and gender. In a show as ambitious as this one, I understand the temptation to try to cram as much social commentary into it as possible. However, there are plenty of topics that require a depth and/or delicacy that can't be achieved when so much is being squeezed together.

On the other side of the coin, I appreciate the development that Nagara receives this week. It's easy to “get” what Sonny Boy has been doing with him – forcing the awkward antisocial kid to reckon with the responsibility we all have to society and our peers – but emotionally connecting with Nagara himself (and with most of the main cast) has been more difficult. Sonny Boy's priorities have by and large been too lofty to do deep and compelling character work. Before this week, only Mizuho had stood out, thanks to the speed with which she wears her emotions on her sleeve at all times (and not coincidentally, she's still my favorite character). However, when Nagara's mumbling and standoffish teenage front finally cracked to reveal a scared and sobbing kid underneath, I genuinely felt for the guy. It hurts to be lost, and it hurts to be rejected. More positively, it was heartwarming to see Rajdhani, Nozomi, and Mizuho reach out and find Nagara, pulling him out of his depressive episode just by being his friends. It's a little sappy and trite, to be sure, but it's a step in the right direction. And of course, Sonny Boy can't hold itself back from pairing this happy reunion with a landmine revelation.

I'm glad the show flatly refutes the possibility that Nagara's power was just a supernatural manifestation of his desire to run away from his problems. That'd be way too corny, and the truth is much more fascinating. If he's creating these worlds himself, then maybe all these rules and stipulations are reflections of the laws of civilization imprinted on his subconscious. Furthermore, this deliciously contradicts the premature sigh of relief taken at the end of the second episode—turns out they actually can change the world. The fear of becoming an adult and shouldering more responsibility is a universal adolescent anxiety. One way to cope is recognizing/believing/accepting that you're just one person and can only accomplish so much, for good and for bad. Even with the burden of these superpowers, if the world always reverts back to its usual state, then nobody has to worry about the long-term consequences of anything. Now, however, they know better. A single person can make or unmake the world, and that's scary. That's exactly the thing Nagara wants to run away from. However, it's only by confronting that torrential well of possibility that he'll be able to reckon with his power and find a way home. It's only in the acceptance of our mutual responsibility to each other that we truly become adults.

As always, this episode of Sonny Boy provides plenty of other topics I could talk about, but I need to reserve this final body paragraph for further praise toward its aesthetic. The cold open is a brilliant and dizzying introduction, integrating computer and traditional animation together in a striking and novel way. It looks downright ugly at times, but arrestingly so. Back on the island, the show wields color and lighting like an oil painter. A dark pall falls over characters when they sink into destructive thoughts. A school of minnows illuminates Nagara and Nozomi like a marine Milky Way. There's a crescendoing sense of danger, but there's still something beautiful and exhilarating about the class' journey into the unknown. Nozomi says it herself. We don't leap in spite of our fear. We leap to face it.

Sonny Boy remains a deeply weird experience that I am deeply here for. If you haven't read it yet, Lynzee's interview with Shingo Natsume has some neat insights. It's not like we needed confirmation that he imagined Hoshi as a politician, but it's satisfying to read all the same. Also, Natsume more or less confirms he had the freedom to do whatever with this anime. If any summer show has the words “passion project” scribbled all over its compellingly lumpy face, it's Sonny Boy.

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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.