Flash Review: “Girlish Number"

My expectations for Girlish Number could hardly have been lower. I started up the first episode expecting that, within the first few minutes, it would show itself as a mess of cliches, clumsy dialogue, and otaku pandering, like Eromanga Sensei or Show By Rock!!, which I turned off about ten minutes into the first episode. I knew it was about voice actresses in the anime industry, and after all the articles I’ve read recently about working conditions in the anime industry, after noticing that voice actresses I loved just seven years ago have completely dropped off the map due to their ages to be replaced by newcomers, and knowing that anime about the anime industry always goes light on the anime industry for obvious reasons, that sounded like the makings of a disaster.

Luckily, Girlish Number found a way to be about voice actresses and go light on the anime industry while still being interesting. I never made it past Episode 3 of the much beloved Shirobako, because there was something about it that just failed to hook me. Girlish Number, on the other hand, hooked me immediately because it has two things right off the bat that Shirobako didn’t: an unlikable protagonist with so little going for her that I just had to see what would ultimately happen to her, and a villain, a slapdash anime producer more interested in spending company money on hostesses and yakiniku than making a good anime.

Chitose Karasuma, the main character, is stupid, lazy, and extremely arrogant. She refuses to read the source material for any of her projects, believes herself to be talented far beyond any available evidence, and blames her manager and brother, Gojo, a former voice actor himself, for not getting her any starring roles. She ignores advice on how to improve, and even though she complains about the industry’s corruption, when incompetent producer Kuzu feeds her a spiel about handpicking her for a role because of her great potential, she swallows it hook, line, and sinker. I don’t like her, but she is a compelling character: I kept watching, wondering when she was going to get her comeuppance, and whether she would ever become a better person. Towards the end of the series, she does get her comeuppance, but she doesn’t exactly get better afterwards. Gojo manages to get her back in the game by rebuilding her baseless confidence and arrogant bravado, mainly because, as he tells her, she’s not suitable for any job other than acting with her terrible personality.

I call Kuzu the villain because he primarily creates roadblocks for the other characters that have to be overcome, but he obstructs them not from malice, but from laziness and utter incompetence. He’s equally as lazy, stupid, arrogant, and petty as Chitose, more focused on vacations and drinking than his work. Thanks to him, the anime the characters work on turns into a disaster and sells terribly, but it somehow manages to get a second season, which benefits early on from his lack involvement. Like Chitose, he falls into a depression, but gets back into the game only because he wants to beat a rival of his from another company, who starts seeing his favorite hostess at the hostess bar. (I liked when he spouts off how he’s going to get her back in front of the hostess and the rival, and the hostess says “I don’t belong to you.”)

These two unlikable characters really drive the show, but the other actresses working on the project also play a part. There’s a sidetrip where we explore Momoka Sonou, a high schooler whose mom was also a voice actress and whose dad is an anime producer, and Kazuha Shibasaki, an intense and serious voice actress whose family runs an onsen in Yamagata. These two come off like they’re going to be villains, or at least antiheroes, in the beginning. Momoka seems slippery and deceptive, and Kazuha cops a serious diva attitude towards Chitose. As the show goes on we start to understand that these are defense mechanisms they’ve developed to get by in the industry and avoid unpleasant tasks like entertaining socially inept light novel authors or filming swimsuit cheesecake for Blu-Ray special features. My favorite episode of the show is Episode 8, which explores and contrasts Momoka’s and Kazuha’s lives and upbringings. Momoka grew up in the industry, and her parents have long treated her as a professional who can make her own decisions and always leave everything up to her. Kazuha’s parents, who are traditional and live in a small town, don’t quite understand her profession, and they worry about her and whether she’s happy and doing well. Episode 8 has two parallel story arcs where Momoka watches Kazuha’s parents worry about her and feels a little bit envious of that kind of normalcy, while hearing from Kazuha how she wishes her parents would trust her a little more, the way Momoka’s trust her. In the end, both learn to appreciate what they have, and Momoka exercises the power to decide that her parents allow her by turning down a role alongside her mother, who would have played the villain to Momoka’s hero in a Pretty Cure-like show that had also been her mother’s breakout role.

The three other voice actors, Yae, Koto, and Nanami, don’t do a whole lot. They play the part of the more earnest and sincere voices, even though Koto is about to be kicked out of the industry because she’s already 26 and hasn’t had a big role yet. Nanami is earnest and innocent in such a stereotypical way, always spouting cliches like “I’ll do my best!”, that I expected her to turn out to be evil, or at least unpleasant, but apparently she just really is that earnest, which makes her kind of annoying and mars the later episodes a bit. The cynicism of Girlish Number is its strength; even though it pins the failure of the show squarely on Kuzu and portrays everyone else involved as hardworking and sincere, it’s unusual that it even admits that people like Kuzu and Chitose exist in the anime industry, and it took a fair amount of creative courage to put someone like Chitose in the center of the show. It’s hardly Wall Street, but it’s not bad for an anime about making anime.