Forum - View topicSuper Cub (TV).
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Stark700
 Posts: 11762 Location: Earth |
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Super Cub (TV) Genres: slice of life Themes: school Plot Summary: Koguma is a high school girl in Yamanashi. She has no parents, friends, or hobbies, and her daily life is empty. One day, Koguma gets a used Honda Super Cub motorcycle. This is her first time going to school on a motorcycle. Running out of gas and hitting detours become a small source of adventure in Koguma's life. She is satisfied with this strange transformation, but her classmate Reiko ends up talking to her about how she also goes to school by motorcycle. One Super Cub begins to open up a lonely girl's world, introducing her to a new everyday life and friendship. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4158 |
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Episode 1 The Girl With Nothing
That was impressively depressing yet every time Koguma let her goofy smile fly, I always cracked up. It's a slice of life show about existential nihilism personified by a Honda cub... that apparently has three deaths somehow tied into its history. Best first episode I've seen in quite a long time. I don't want to know more, to know why she's the Girl With Nothing, I'm just here for the ride. |
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bonbonsrus
 Posts: 1537 Location: Michigan, USA |
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Not sure this show is one that I'm going to love a lot, but looks ok...ish. If it stays this slow moving all about her learning to ride a bike it's really going to drag for me, but I figure it's probably going to introduce other characters as friends for her soon so maybe it'll perk up a bit.
I was surprised to see what the show was like as I swear I kept reading the title as Super Club, not Super Cub. Tell me I wasn't the only one. |
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15576 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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I... am kind of really into this.
At least the first episode felt like something that really spoke to me, over some of the more flashy first episodes. I understand a lot of it just feels like an ad, telling people to go get a Honda scooter. But there was something to like about this girl that gets along the idea of a sad person who doesn't feel like she has any connections to others, and nothing really to look forward to, stuck within the bounds of where she can ride her bicycle. And then on some whim she follows some events, and now her world opened up a little. I am curious if there will be some elements of depression that will be explored, beyond what might usually be done. Not really the same thing, and I won't be holding some big expectations, but it kind of reminded of the quiet mundane melancholy of Wonder Egg Priority. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 10025 Location: Virginia |
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Back in the mid 1960s when I was in college, I owned a Honda 50 (the US version of the Super Cub). Not the bike you would want for a long road trip but just the thing for bopping around campus. The main difference from the Japanese version was that it had a long two person seat instead of the back rack.
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4158 |
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I had to go back and watch it again, to full capture the subtleties I didn't fully realize, from the color gradient differences to its allusions to Western Media; I did catch Hopper's "Nighthawks" painting right from the start with how the Convenience Store was conveyed but I had to watch it again as certain things were nagging me.
From the moment Koguma first woke up, the entire soundtrack consisting of a solo piano was eliminated so that only some sound effects, muted and dull, came through. I did notice that the music started back up when she hopped on the Super Cub but what I didn't notice was that the instrumentation changed to piano, bass and drums. And the fuller sound should have been livelier but wasn't because what they were doing was mimicking the Vince Gauraldi Trio, more explicitly, the soundtrack of Charlie Brown and the Peanuts. And that's where the smile comes from! The soundtrack kicks back in again at night, back to the solo piano. And what remind me of "Nighthawks" wasn't the use of nightly storefronts but more so how life/light were used. In the painting, we saw people and people in the light but no door connecting them to the outside world but here, we saw light and we heard the various passing car but saw no life until that lone trucker at the end. And even if "lone" is pretty much what this show is founded on, it's still pretty disturbing that the first thing Koguma works out about her scooter is how far she could get on a full tank of gas... without stopping. But as she has no anchor, it comes off less as an expression of freedom but more like escape. If it gets to much, she can just up and leave, alone, from nothing to nothing. I don't expect the rest of this series to keep up this level of artistry but it's nice to be able to gush about an anime that doesn't just look nice but uses its animation and design... including sound design.... as commentary on its themes. Also, it has themes; I went into this expecting something more like Bakuon, got "Shopping Trip to Yokohama" instead somehow. |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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I wondered if she started with a full tank of gas. Given the sorts of mileage these scooters have, I didn't think she covered enough distance to use up all the gas in a full tank. It made me wonder a bit about the dealer. He didn't ask her to drive around in the lot a few times and show him she could shift gears and steer properly. He just let her drive out the front gate.
Good thing she had a reserve tank. Having run out of gas myself in a few difficult situations, a reserve tank would be a nice feature to have in a car. I'm enjoying the ambience of this show even if the story-telling is a bit meh. |
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Alan45
Village Elder Posts: 10025 Location: Virginia |
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She couldn't have had a full tank of gas. I could drive for hours on a half gallon of gas on mine.
A reserve tank can be a mixed blessing. I had a 1953 vintage car that didn't come with a gas gage, just a wooden stick you stuck in the tank marked 1/4, 1/2, etc. It did have a reserve valve that opened the last part of the tank for use. Unfortunately I found out the hard way that it was just as easy to forget you turned it to reserve as it was to run out of gas in the first place. |
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Kabuby 77
Posts: 21 |
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Despite the simplicity of the plot, in the end it left me with a good impression. I see an attention to detail, I hope an interesting story develops.
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ACｘS
 Posts: 961 |
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1:
'Girl Meets Scooter'. Brought to you by Honda: Power of Dreams. What am I watching? An advert of Honda? An unremarkable girl with a scooter? A slice-of-life about a girl with troubles getting up a slope and her life changes when she bought a scooter where three people died on it? All the above. I know it's a slice-of-life, but even for the genre it really feels like nothing is happening. I know the muted ambiance is part of the appeal, but it feels more like dead air to me (there's a subtle difference between muted ambiance and dead air). What's happening here? That's the question I ask for every slice-of-life show; even if the genre is about everyday life, there has to be something that happens. Anything worth story-telling. I like the realistic art of Hokuto and the Honda motorcycles. I can tell that the animators put in a lot of effort capturing the realism. But I want something to happen in the story. I'm giving this another episode. Just one more, before I decide whether to stay on or not. |
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DuskyPredator
Posts: 15576 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Episode 2
This show is so much my thing. And I connect to Koguma in some way more relatable than many other characters. Like that point where she was thinking about what if she just announced to everyone in the class that she rode a motorcycle to school, that perhaps everyone would suddenly give her attention. That it would probably be an exaggeration, and she is too shy for something like that. I don't know how many introverts can relate to that feeling, the also wondering if other people would be as interested in something as you are, which they probably won't, but maybe one other person who also happens to know more than you do, I know some probably think nothing is happening, but I continue to find it super relatable. |
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ACｘS
Posts: 961 |
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2:
On the contrary, this is not my thing. The show is just too dull. More so for Koguma: in the quest to make her deliberately unremarkable, the show made her uninteresting instead (ironic, really). It feels like the show is just subtle marketing entitled "Why Should You Own a Cub (Super or not)". It gets you up a slope, it gets you friends, it gets you places, it gets you a sense of freedom, etc. Dropping it. |
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Beltane70
 Posts: 3972 |
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I'm personally enjoying it myself. I actually find Koguma pretty relatable since I was a lot like her at that age. I love seeing her world expand little by little. It almost wants to make me go and buy a Super Cub, which incidentally was reintroduced into the US market back in 2019.
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4158 |
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Episode 2 Reiko
This time, I had to watch it twice even before reaching my own opinion on it. It's a slice of life show with an unreliable narrator, from her outright delusion in class to the more subtle issue of the toppings for her lunch- she knew she was running low but getting more from the local supermarket was a spur of the moment thing? The soundtracks continues to confound me as it's all piano based but with differing accompaniment to mimic other genres. The opening piece was piano and a Casio keyboard to sound like typical visual novels like Key's Kanon and Clannad. Cheep but bright and cheery. Then it went into some weird dissonant part in the middle of the episode which was markedly less so, ending on a big sour note when Koguma reached that absurdly built intersection for a seemingly rural location. When I saw how large it was I thought "I can easily imagine a car coming out of nowhere and sideswiping her like what happened in Kanon" just as the music ended on that sour note. That stood out to me on the first viewing, as well as the English sign later seen at the same intersection of "Support Your Life"... not very subtle with the metaphors as that was when she randomly decided to go shopping for stuff she knew she needed. What I noticed on my second viewing was that the atmosphere is so stuffy because the background audio is recorded twice I think which makes it layered as well as unique to the location; scene transitions feel more like teleportation as everything changes. And Reiko's license plate is "8888" because of course it is. I find everything about this world to be unsettling... and is that always the same Sport Cub that goes by Koguma's school window? |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24157 |
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I really like this show. The little smile that Koguma - the girl who has nothing - made when looking at her scooter absolutely healed my blackened soul. *adores*
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