The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Acro Trip

Chizuko Date is an otaku girl who lives in a city in Niigata Prefecture and is obsessed with Berry Blossom, the magical girl who protects the city. However, Chroma — the leader of the local evil organization Fossa Magna — is inept and weak, so hardly anyone else cares about Berry Blossom and Chroma's frequent battles anymore. Chizuko vows to shine a light on the magical girl's exploits — and this fervent desire takes this seemingly shy middle school girl down a dark path filled with strange folks...

Acro Trip is based on the manga by Yone Sawata. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

What if Gushing Over Magical Girls ran in Ribon? That's not the most accurate way to describe this show, but it's still surprisingly close. Heroine Chizuko lives a bleak existence until she visits her grandfather and discovers that his town is home to magical girl Berry Blossom and her arch nemesis Chrome (of the evil organization Fossa Magna). Her obsession quickly grows…which Chrome, a self-described "bad adult," is eager to take advantage of. But rather than indulging in questionable images of middle school students, Acro Trip leans hard into the comedy angle, with Chrome turning out to be a guy named Kuroma who is just desperate to recruit Chizuko to his side because he's not just a "bad adult," he's also a pretty poor villain as well. When Chizuko takes him to task for his lame battles against Berry Blossom, he interprets that as "would make an excellent villain." I almost feel sorry for the guy.

Rather than a magical girl parody, Acro Trip is a comedy with magical girl elements. Chizuko's newfound love of Berry Blossom simply seems to be due to her never having encountered a real-life magical girl before, and she's clearly disappointed with the enemy her new favorite celebrity is forced to fight because he makes the bad guys in Scooby-Doo look competent. His kaijin bears (toothy, walleyed bear monsters) hate him, his magic is uninspired, and Berry Blossom half the time just punches him…plus his idea of "evil" appears to be things like "flipping over nonslip mats in front of restaurants." He also follows an awful lot of rules for a minion of evil, explaining to Chizuko that he and Berry Blossom can use magic against each other but not against civilian baddies. So, when Berry Blossom is present during an armed robbery of the convenience store where Kuroma works, she has to physically hit the robber and call the police because it's out of her jurisdiction. The throwaway line about how the police don't like her speaks volumes about how the whole magical girl thing actually works in the modern world and implies lots of possibilities.

This was a surprise two-episode premiere, and unlike many other shows, I think it works for this one. The first episode is primarily set up, while the second gives us more information about the characters themselves and how bizarre the entire situation is. The revelation that Kuroma's secret base is under Chizuko's house because her grandpa took him in and offered him the crawlspace to sleep in (who's evil here?) is something that both says volumes about the show and is also pretty darn funny. I may not have laughed aloud, but I definitely chuckled, and I love the weird designs for the bear monsters. I'm much less fond of the way eyes are drawn; the angles and sharp shapes are very distracting, especially when Kuroma somehow avoids them, but that's my only major issue with the art. This stands to be a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to seeing more.

For years, it's felt like the magical girl parody series was the sole domain of shounen/seinen magazines. While I can't deny liking Madoka Magica and am looking forward to Magilumiere in a few days, most of these have left a bad taste in my mouth. When there's a magical series published in a format aimed at male audiences, there's an acrid undertaste of co-option, mockery, sexualization, or some combination thereof.

That's part of why I'm so glad to have Acro Trip, a gentle satire adapted from a manga running in the thoroughly girly Ribon magazine. It's not quite a traditional magical girl series, as the main character, Chizuko, doesn't end up recruited to be a magical girl when she encounters Berry Blossom. Instead, she draws the attention of Chroma, Berry Blossom's nemesis, who makes up his mind to recruit Chizuko to the evil organization with the promise that she could bring out Berry Blossom's full power far better than mediocre attempts at villainy.

What follows is some of the greatest fun I've had watching a magical girl series since Card Captor Sakura. The first episode does an excellent job foreshadowing events to come, with characters appearing in the background who I assume will be important later. It helps that the humor is primarily at the expense of Chroma and his incompetence, rather than humiliating the female characters. However, as pathetic as he may be, there's a hint of insidiousness as he more or less grooms Chizuko toward joining his evil organization that creates some tension… without ever making a gag out of calling him a pedophile! Imagine that.

This is the first production by Voil, a brand-new animation studio with little to their name but a handful of key animation credits. It's competently put together, mostly fine with a smattering of striking shots. There are some interesting design choices going on, with jagged outlines on their irises that look a bit like bear traps and geometric pupils. Mostly, I want to note that Berry Blossom's magical girl look is cute as a button. As we all know, strawberries are the cutest fruit, and her look made me nostalgic for the Strawberry Shortcake of my childhood.