The Rolling Girls

Episode 8

This week's Rolling Girls started slow, but built to… well…

Yeah, the finale to this week's Rolling Girls was a rock concert held at a giant temple where a rocker girl and geisha in training performed dueling solos on guitar and shamisen while giant cannons shot anti-air lasers at a hail of exploding buddha statues.

So. There was that.

The rest of the episode was also pretty okay. With all of the characters and most of the conflicts of this arc established last week, the first third of this episode was actually pretty slow, and mostly worked to reestablish the tsun-tsun feelings between the Rockers captain Misa and Maikas captain Chiyo. Chiyo also had a repeated and frankly unnecessary sequence of plotting with the boredom-averse Shuten, and Chiaya's mother's assistant skulked around in the background, keeping an eye on Chiaya but largely letting her have fun with her new friends.

The Rolling Girls spent this time sightseeing and dressing up as maikas, as you do, but eventually remembered there was actually a story going on, and decided to investigate Misa's memories of Chiyo using Chiaya's crazy memory-camera. I loved Ai asking the important questions in this scene, like where the hell Chiaya got a memory-camera and how much another one would cost, but the important takeaway here was that Chiyo and Misa had been friends and co-rockers back in the day, and that Misa had at one point abandoned Chiyo before a big concert, and had been ignoring her since then. The Rolling Girls then promptly fell asleep, as they also so often do, and Chiyo snuck in to steal Misa's moonstone-pick in a scene that also clarified that yes, that scene with the refrigerator in the last arc wasn't just a random event, Chiaya occasionally turns into a tiny octopus for some reason.

The rest of the episode was all buildup to the concert, as The Rolling Girls attempted to retrieve Misa's pick, Misa commiserated with the remaining members of Momi-han about friendship and rock 'n roll abandonment, and Shuten dueled with Chiaya's mother's assistant in order to set off his thousand buddha statues. The ultimate reveal that it was Chiyo's mother who had forced Misa to abandon Chiyo was handled nicely, and once again reflected directly back on Rolling Girls' central obsession with how we choose and come to peace with our goals in life. I liked the idea that Misa was attempting to make Chiyo's abandonment of rock dreams easy on herself - we very often in anime see people reject their assigned destinies to follow their dreams, but the alternate, very common case of people struggling with destiny only to come to peace with it deserves some notice as well. And that last scene…

Yeah, that was easily a show highlight. This week's animation actually seemed a bit more limited than last week's, but the base nature of that last setpiece, the build to each character introduction and new challenge, and the way the music fit and elevated it all made it a wonder to behold. The color work was great, the backgrounds were lovely, the pacing kept energy high, the song itself was one of the show's best... everything just worked, and really sold the fundamental promise Rolling Girls so often makes but only occasionally keeps. Explosions and shamisen solos and friendship and flying buddhas - there's not much more I could really ask for in a scene. That was easily the best arc finale so far.

Rating: A-

The Rolling Girls is currently streaming on Funimation.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.