The Summer 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!

Plain, boring, and friendless Kazuhiko Nukumizu has witnessed something completely baffling: popular girl Anna Yanami was friend-zoned by her childhood friend and crush. In fact, all the popular girls around him are getting similarly rejected by the boys they like. Without realizing it, Kazuhiko becomes entangled in the relationship drama where all the leading heroines are losing out on love.

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! is based on a light novel series written by Takibi Amamori and illustrated by Imigimuru. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

This first episode of Losing Heroines is fantastic. What we have here with Kazuhiko is a genre-savvy protagonist. He's an avid reader of romance light novels—to the point it's his main hobby. He knows all the clichés and tropes—all the character archetypes and associated scenes. Because of this, he can see as clearly as we can the romance stories going on in his periphery—like the supportive friend/transfer student love triangle and the sporty girl/smart girl love triangle. He also knows which of them will fail to capture the object of her affection—i.e., the childhood best friend. That's just how the story goes after all. Of course, the trick is that, despite being an outsider, he finds himself pulled into the stories happening around him. It's like the observer effect in physics: simple observation can disturb the results. Because of this, Kazuhiko finds himself as the “losing heroine” Anna's confidant. Due to his loner nature and lack of relationship with all involved with her love story, he is the perfect person to vent to—who's he going to tell, after all? Thus, the two form a reluctant kind of proto-friendship. While he doesn't want to be involved, it's not like he hates her—and she does owe him money, after all. Although he is reluctant to overtly help her, he does when faced directly with an easy chance to do so. This makes him feel like a decent person while allowing for friction between the two. It leaves the possibility for a stronger friendship or something more as the show goes on. It also helps that Kazuhiko has quirks beyond being an avid romance fan. His obsessive way of choosing specific water fountains to drink from and his relationship with his little sister make him seem more fleshed out in this first episode than many rom-com protagonists. And lastly, we have the visuals. I admit I never expected this kind of care to be taken with Losing Heroines. The blocking and directing are fantastic and there is a level of detail told in visual storytelling that just adds so much to the anime. Half of Kazuhiko and Anna's personalities come not from the dialogue but from what they do in the background. It makes the show fun to watch even if you're not fully immersed in the story. When it comes down to it, I'm just so happy one of my most anticipated picks for the season is looking to be even better than my wildest expectations. I can't wait to watch this one each week.

Leading up to this episode, I tried to explain to my husband, who watches most episodes for preview guide with me, the difference between the English word “heroine” and the Japanese wasei-eigo word “ヒロイン” (hiroin). To English speakers, “heroine” is simply the feminine form of “hero,” implying a woman of strength and resolve who leads a narrative. “ヒロイン” (hiroin) can hold several different connotations but often refers to a female character made to be cute or desirable to a male audience or a female support character to a male lead. It's one of those meaning shifts that rankles me a bit and makes it so the title of Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! doesn't make sense without some extra context for anglophone audiences.

It also made me suspicious of Makeine going in, since I tend to bristle at light novel “heroines” made for male consumption. They tend to lack humanity which I find essential, instead leaning on archetypes as narrative shorthand. To my surprise and delight, Makeine is self-aware of those archetypes and deliberately plays with them, giving the story a lightly satirical edge. Nukumizu is an ordinary, boring guy who loves light novels. When a light novel-esque plot starts to play out right in front of him at a nearby booth in a diner, I wondered if this was a fantasy show where only he could see what was happening—or if characters had just stepped out of a light novel a la a romance version of Re:CREATORS.

It turned out, however, that he's just the kind of guy who's a background character while some of his peers live like main characters. Any main characters are inevitably self-centered. If you're a girl with poofy blue hair who gives speeches to your childhood friend about how the girl he likes is waiting for her, living in a world where your peers have drab black hair and hang out in the diner drinking bottomless fountain drinks, you'd be self-centered too! She could easily have gotten obnoxious but the supremely self-confident script by seasoned veteran Masahiro Yokotani keeps things zipping along. If you found Re:Zero's Subaru charming in his bluster, this will be up your alley. At the same time, the episode's climax reveals a sincerity at the story's heart.

All this is bolstered by the excellent standards of animation quality (if not storytelling quality) that A-1 has come to be known for in recent years. This has been a great season for high-quality character animation in grounded settings and Makeine continues the trend. The way different characters move further enhances the juxtaposition of reality vs unreality, living in gestures like how Yamina bounces down the stairs or Chika's hand shaking as she holds up her phone. The sense of light and shadow in their run-down rural school is also stunning.

I wonder if Makeine can maintain its delicate balance between satire and sincerity. Too far in one direction, and it turns mean-spirited. Too far in the other, and it shifts to maudlin. I hope it can continue walking this tightrope.

The opening shots of Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! feature some decently composed depth-of-field and even a rack focus! Maybe it's because we're nearly forty premieres into this Preview Guide, or I'm simply a hopeless dork nerd for filmmaking techniques. Either way, I'm inclined to feel favorably toward any show that remembers that cinematography still matters in the medium of animation. I was delighted to see the show continue to be playful and excellently produced even when it jumped out of Light Novel World and into the reality of its hero, Kazuhiko. There is a moment early on when Kazuhiko is chatting with the recently rejected Anna, where the show gives us this whole POV shot where Kazuhiko watches Anna struggle to decide which of her two dips to use on her last french fry, only for her to have this little lightbulb moment where she proudly breaks it into two so she can enjoy both dips. It's the kind of silly but charming acting choice taken for granted in live-action but costs an inordinate amount of time and effort to produce for an anime. I respect that Makeine cares enough to throw in those not-so-little touches.

Enough about animation minutiae, though. The real question is whether Makeine holds up as a story. With what we've got to go on based on this premiere, I'd say that it does! The idea of a romance novel fan making friends with a bunch of girls who made for second-string romantic leads in their own stories is already fun on its surface, and the excellent production values just make it that much easier to enjoy. Most importantly, the girls who suddenly start barreling into Kazuhiko's life are all charming and likable. They all fall into the different "types" common in comedies like this, but that doesn't keep them from still feeling like real people (except for Nazuhiko's over-attached little sister, who was pretty much guaranteed to feel like a silly cliché). We only get briefly introduced to most of the girls here, though, which means Anna is the standout of the bunch by a good margin. This is not unearned, though. She's the exact kind of weird but charming goof that can make for a great romantic co-lead.

Overall, I loved the first episode of Makeine, and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. It's not likely to revolutionize the genre or shake up the industry, but I'm not about to complain about a simple and well-executed story. There are plenty of coming-of-age romances to choose from this summer, but if you're having a hard time deciding which one to go with, I'd say you can't go wrong starting with Makeine.

I liked this premiere. I found a lot to enjoy about it, from the animation and overall production to some really solid character moments. Yet across this episode, I kept running into one particular speed bump: the show's eye-rolling insistence on being meta about the fact that it's a light novel rom-com.

It's right there in the title: the various girls in this show are Losing Heroines, aka the girls who get rejected in a romcom or harem anime in favor of another girl. In our protagonist's opening monologue, he wistfully wonders what it would be like if he were the main character in a light novel. He seems to view any and every person around him as a collection of tropes, and much of the humor is derived from him standing off to the side of others' conflicts and reacting as the embarrassed bystander. He's a bit like Kyon from the Haruhi Suzumiya series, but instead of a snarky dude who's unwittingly dragged into high-concept adventures, Nukumizu reluctantly listens to Anna's vent sessions because she still owes him 20 bucks. It feels like the writing is trying to be clever, but it actively detracts from the show's strengths.

Anna, at least, is pretty fun. She can be a bit much, especially with how repetitive her lunch sessions with Nukumizu get, but she brings much stronger comedic energy along with her. She's barely coping with seeing her long-time crush with another girl, trying to save face and be a supportive friend while nursing her heartbreak. She knows she's supposed to go quietly into that goodnight and let the happy couple rejoice, but reality is rarely so comforting. It takes the entire episode for her to process that hurt, and in the meantime, she goes through the five stages of romantic grief with some great jokes and a metric ton of expressive reactions. It's what makes Nukumizu so frustrating – he spends the episode avoiding eye contact and treating her as a nuisance, which constantly stymies the humor of it all. It was only in the final moments when the two started to actually connect, that our protagonist stopped feeling like a weight around the show's neck.

What ultimately tipped me to the favorable side is the production. The direction and cinematography are excellent, working in concert with robust, expressive character animation to give these kids – and all the kids around them – a natural, grounded vibe that works really well. The script might be preoccupied with talking up how this is all just like a light novel, but the visuals are there to remind us that they're more than their obvious archetypes, and that's way more satisfying.

I'm still a bit skeptical of this show – it wouldn't be the first time light novel fans have hyped up a story only for it to wind up with a poor delivery of good ideas – but those closing minutes give me hope that this show can follow its better nature. I hope it does. I also hope it gets rid of the unnaturally precocious little sister because god damn is she awful.

First, there was one. Then two, three, and finally, there were four. No, I'm not talking about the eponymous losing heroines; I'm referring to the number of ribbons some lunatic put on the girls' uniform shirts at the school in this series. Were they trying to make the uniforms stand out? Have they never had to put on a shirt with too many accessories before? Or were they just really obsessed with the 18th century's robe à la française and wanted to try to translate it into a modern Japanese schoolgirl look? I don't know, but I honestly thought I was seeing things as more and more ribbons appeared on Anna's blouse over the first four-odd minutes of this episode.

That may be the most irritating aspect of it, but it's not the only one. The basic premise here is that light novel enthusiast Nukumizu tends to look for light novel traits in his everyday life. When he witnesses Anna acting out a fraught scene from one with her crush and childhood friend Sosuke, he realizes that she's a classic trope: the childhood friend who inevitably gets thrown over for the transfer student. Wisely, he decides to have nothing to do with it, but Anna spots him, and the next thing he knows, he's become her confidante. Shockingly enough, it turns out that even when life imitates art, it's still going to be a slightly different version: Anna is a total mess. And just think, she's only one of the losing heroines! We also have the senpai who's into BL, the girl so shy she can barely speak and spends all her time on her phone, and the sporty girl with a crush on her childhood friend.

I'm aware that I'm being way too harsh here. This isn't a terrible episode, and some moments of Anna being herself are genuinely funny; she makes some great faces, and the art direction is excellent, far outstripping the episode's content. Nukumizu is our typical blank(ish) slate, and in his defense, he knows that the losing heroines aren't actually characters in a light novel, and he doesn't want them to be. He's even a little weirded out by his little sister Kaju, whose interest in his life feels like it comes close to crossing a boundary or two. But despite these positives, I felt like the episode dragged in a very self-conscious way like it knows what it's doing and is leaning too hard into it. It's hard to put a finger on exactly what my problem is, but I believe it comes down to a few too many winks and nudges about the subject matter.

Or maybe I just really hated those uniforms.