This Week in Anime

What the Heck is Going On in Sonny Boy?

Jean-Karlo
Nicky, they call them the "Dog Days of Summer", but I'm extremely not looking forward to the onset of September and Autumn. I just hate the cold that much. I just wanna be on a beach forever.

Sonny Boy is a strange beast, and ranks right up there with Otherside Picnic as one of the most interesting and thoughtful takes on the isekai genre that we've seen since the whole blasted fad got pushed into overdrive. It makes me feel like I'm watching one of those old, weird shows Adult Swim would air in between Inuyasha and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex; talky, heady, maybe a little full of itself, but genuinely fascinating.

Oh yeah, and it's got a baseball episode too. This already elevates it beyond your ordinary anime.

So that's why this 2020s anime is referencing a specific ancient Shonen Jump series from 1982!

So, the story starts in media res: a certain high school has been adrift in a void for several days, with only the student body on campus. There's no way to communicate to the outside world, although thankfully they don't have to worry about food running out. Think The Drifting Classroom, only not horrifying and gruesome.

Right away, I'm amused by the weird powers people are developing. It's not basic stuff like "this person burps fire" or "is a teenage edgelord who blows stuff up", but heady stuff like "I can make weird spatial folds" or "my cats are my Amazon deliverymen".

Oh right, how could I forget. The "cat" part is very important. They may not get your order right—but they are cats. They're all, like, "nya". And then you're all, "Don't turn your back on me!" and they're all, like, "Nya".

At any rate, the rule of law starts to break down when people realize that you can't be found in violation of the rules if you never agreed to follow them in the first place, and Nagara finds himself hotfooting it from the student council—when he and his entire class find themselves on a mysterious island. They've found what they call a new "This World", which is specifically different from their home world in that it has its own weird set of rules it follows.

Many of these rules are unfeeling and uncaring, forcing students to return to a form of living not unlike when they were back home. For example, the island they're on has a rule that any object given must be properly compensated in some capacity, say, by bartering or by exchanging currency. Failure to do so causes the object to immolate within a certain timeframe. To resolve the issue, the resident computer expert... ugh... creates cryptocurrency based off of daily activities so that the students can utilize a basic economy to ensure their stuff doesn't go up in flames. So congrats: your lost students now have day jobs mining crypto.


Also, seemingly as a follow-up to the last two shows I watched for this column (RE-MAIN and the Reconguista in G movies): kudos to this anime for introducing Rajdhani, who appears to be of Indian descent. Here's hoping there are more POC in anime going forward!

And how! Ryu-Hyo-Coin came about because Mizuho up there (who is the lady with the Nyamazon cats) was relied on for free stuff for the students, only for everyone's stuff to immolate after a few hours. The student body was convinced her power was behind it all and she was trying to hose them all over. It didn't help that the student body had an axe to grind for her in the first place...

Nagara is quickly pulled out of his apathy, however. After weeks of people assuming he didn't have a power, it's revealed he does, and it might be the most important one: he can travel between worlds, and may be the key for the students leaving their "This World" and returning home.

It helps that each of these students is their own world, as it were. Take Cap! When we first see him, he's the somewhat draconian stooge of the student council, enforcing their rules and punishing students who violate them. When we see him next, he's just a big, goofy guy who's really excited about baseball and the invisible monkeys that play it.

Gotta say, I don't like Nagara that much. He comes off as too much of a potato for me to like. And even when the full weight of his power is upon his shoulders, it's like all he can do is shrug helplessly. He never stops feeling like a tremendous sad sack until he sees a guy get eaten by cave bugs (long story). Sonny Boy may not be a conventional isekai, but its protagonist sure is! He's almost like the Senpai from Nagatoro; you expect Foghorn Leghorn to show up and slap his shoulders telling him to stop slouching!

An oddly capybara-esque fellow—he keeps attracting people to him. Maybe he's just friend-shaped?

Compare with Asakaze, a much more volatile student who has an easier time (at first) bending the student body to his will. He can manipulate gravity and has shown amazing feats. He's also oddly short-sighted and most of his motivation seems to be purely based on hating Nagara.

Sadly, this also means Asakaze is easy to manipulate. When Mrs. Aki, allegedly a teacher, shows up and starts riling up hatred towards Nagara, it's easy for her to posit Asakaze as her would-be messiah.

That Mrs. Aki is the textbook "MILF teacher"-type running a successful cleavage farm might be a factor, but never mind that.

Hoshi was suspicious from the word "go", pushing Cap to be the rule enforcer just to see what would happen. And so far, we have no idea what his deal is. He's always one step ahead of the other students, and of course he wants to go home, but he's as inscrutable as they get.

Also, God kinda gives me Dr. Strangelove vibes what with his wheelchair and single glove.

Also, he doesn't need the wheelchair, because as we all know... he can walk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSaZpdaFHRs

Okay, so like... yeah, there's a dog.

Also, fun fact: he's voiced by the narrator from Cells At Work! Code BLACK and To Your Eternity, Kenjiro Tsuda. Put them together, and we get a black immortal dog who deals with diseases! And I wish I was kidding, but that's actually part of his backstory—as it turns out, Yamabiko was also an adrift student who happened upon another commune of students. They all tragically succumbed to an epidemic that turned them into crystals, and his experiences with them turned him into a dog.

Have you seen VTuber fans lately?

Sometimes, all a talky show needs is to look good to compliment the vibes. Yamabiko's episode perfectly encapsulates that. Told as a flashback while Nagara, Mizuho, and Yamabiko hike to some location, we see the tragic downfall of Yamabiko's old community as he watches the people he's come to love slowly succumb to a disease that is too far gone to cure. It could have been handled quite melodramatically; here, it's given a somber tragedy that nevertheless holds its head high.

The show is in a position where it could end comfortably. While Nagara's world-hopping still isn't quite understood, it's revealed that he doesn't have as much control over it as people think, and it's tough to say whether it's making new worlds, making new "This Worlds", hopping between worlds, or only hopping between "This Worlds". But everyone's seemingly accepted the truth that going home isn't going to be the result of some final climactic epiphany, and so they've made do. A bunch of the class boarded an ark and set off for other worlds; Rajdhani made himself a boat and decided to sail off in an attempt at understanding the ocean they're on; and Nagara, Mizuho, Nozomi, and Yamabiko just... chill out in their world, waiting for... something. What exactly? Even they don't know. But they have each other—and that is enough. Meanwhile Asakaze stands by, still not the messiah he wanted to be.

It doesn't help that these students are all, as Nicky put it, adrift. What meaning does society hold when it's yanked out from under you? What's the point in the social thresholds held against you when the entire system has bottomed out? When the show begins, many students are keeping up with their studies in the hopes that they'll be back home just in time for finals. By episode 8, only one remains who points out that they would have graduated on that day had they been at home.

It's a good comparison to modern-day students—even the complete decimation of the world economy hasn't stopped the rat race for students to do well, graduate from an expensive college, and somehow get a good job, even though we all know the job market these days consists of a fart sound and a middle finger. But sometimes plying to that old system, completely useless as it may be, is the only thing that can give you purpose.

We see this with the colony of students at Babel, a mysterious tower that Nagara finds himself warped to. They're building the tower of Babel in an attempt at reaching Heaven, but some students have been working for upwards of a millennium with no sign of stopping. And yet, they make do.

It's the old Nietzsche yarn: "With a 'why', you can survive almost any 'how'." You just need that 'why' in the first place."

It's a twist I also appreciated from one of my favorite Shin Megami Tensei games: those who can't care enough to take a stance on the world will never have the power to change it. But in the meantime, what we have is a guy, his two classmates, three cats, and a dog that was once a man.

I enjoyed Sonny Boy, but I don't know if I can recommend it. It's weird, somber, and very heady. It doesn't even have an intro sequence, and its musical stings are insanely rare⁠—it'll be a long time before you notice that you've been listening almost entirely to environmental noises and there hasn't been a single song playing. I like this kind of thoughtful, navel-gazing approach... but I don't know if other people have the patience for this kind of existentialist pondering.

This is a strange beast of a show, and I apologize for not being funnier about it. But I do hope it finds an audience. I'd like to think it'll stick with viewers. Like the ball of baseball monkey fuzz, the most magical thing about it is that it is what it is, and it cannot and will not be anything else.

Nyeah.