The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Classic Stars

At Gloria Private Academy, rising stars in the music, arts, and sports fields gather. In the school's music department, the "Gift" of famous musicians of the past are implanted into the bodies of compatible students who can match their talent, and those students are then called by the names of those past masters. Beethoven finds that he is compatible with Beethoven's "Gift" and is admitted to the school.

Classic Stars is an original anime project by UNISON and King Records. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

It used to be that the phrase “media mix project” was one of the greatest harbingers of mediocrity in upcoming anime. These days “originating from Shōsetsuka ni Narō” strikes much greater fear into my heart, but media mix projects are still worth regarding with great suspicion. These designed-by-committee shows are made to be marketable first and foremost—and any consideration of quality is secondary. Their bloated casts are made to sell merch and the writing is clunky and inhuman.

And yet, every so often one hits real gold. The greatest example of this is Hypnosis Mic, which was so bizarre and over-the-top with its central conceit of literal rap battles via hallucinogenic microphones that I couldn't stop watching. Classic★Stars could potentially be weird enough to achieve this same level of quality—or at least come close. (I got this feeling when the episode opened with a shadowy band singing a visual kei rendition of Beethoven's 5th symphony, eventually sprouting wings on their backs.) The other three main characters—Chopin, Mozart, and Liszt—all slot neatly into gacha game archetypes and don't talk remotely like humans. There's discussion of a surgery being a success. I don't want to describe the episode's finale, because getting blindsided by it had the room howling with delight. Suffice it to say, everything is beautiful and nothing makes sense.

...Metaphorically beautiful, that is. Classic★Stars hurts to look at. Literally. It's one thing that the characters are constantly off-model and their dances in the ending were hilariously awkward. I don't mind that the sense of scale was so off that Beethoven and Miharagi looked enormous standing in front of the music department. It's not a big deal to me that the school uniforms, ill-fitting blazers, are designed to be mass-produced out of cheap material to sell to swarms of cosplayers. But the white radial gradient added to every shot, combined with the washed-out backgrounds, was outright painful on the eyes.

I have a feeling Classic★Stars could be something really special. Not something good, to be clear. Oh no, not even remotely. The first episode was a hot mess, but my fascination with unhinged music anime will keep me watching for at least two more episodes… as long as my eyes don't succumb to the strain first.

I think it was when the rock band of over-stylized anime boys with freaking angel wings performed a deliriously screed against fate set to the melody of Beethoven's 5th Symphony that made me realize that Classic Stars is the best kind of stupid. Much like this season's excellent Rock is a Lady's Modesty, Classic Stars pairs the world of stuffy, aristocratic academia with the boundary-pushing guitar solo anthems of rock and roll. However, where Rock is a Lady's Modesty goes for a distinctly punk-rock edge in the ways it is actively pushing back against stifling social norms, Classic Stars is much more of a hair-metal production. It's bright, it's loud, it's campy, and it is first and foremost concerned with showing its crowd a good time. Interesting themes and fiery relationship dynamics are not the top priority at Gloria Academy, is what I'm saying.

Even if Classic Stars feels a lot more corporate and calculated than this distaff spring season counterpart, that doesn't mean it can't put on a good show. If you're a boy-band idol anime fan, you'll definitely enjoy the proceedings. This premiere has all of the usual trappings of an idol anime premiere, where we spend the brunt of the runtime introducing all of the different music boys and their fancy hairdos, all while our reluctant protagonist eventually gets persuaded to dive headfirst into the world of music, even though his skills come from the violent battleground of the boxing ring. Unlike a lot of middling idol anime, however, we only have a scant five characters to worry about establishing here, instead of, like, two dozen, and that makes a lot of difference for a viewer like me.

Also, I won't lie, it is so much easier for me to get on board with the glitzy, overproduced aesthetics of J-Pop when there are some drums and bass-guitar injected into the sound mix. My biggest gripe with most idol anime that I've seen is that the music just doesn't sound very good. Still, I've always been biased towards Japanese music that exists more in the rock sphere, anyways (you don't want to know how many times I have already replayed the recent BABYMETAL/Poppy single). The music in Classic Stars isn't going to blow any minds, but they make for good end-of-episode music video fodder, which is really all they need to do. At the end of the day, I prefer Rock is a Lady's Modesty; it has better characters, visuals, better use of motion-capture, and a more interesting premise. Still, Classic Stars makes for a perfectly acceptable B-side.

Who is this trying to fill the shoes left by ClassicaLoid? I'm so sorry, Classic Stars, but the role of goofy, pretty boys with classic composer themes has already been filled, and rather better than you manage. Even if we ignore the fact that it uses many of the same composers as its older sibling (there are other 18th and 19th-century European composers, you know), this doesn't quite have the level of insanity it needs to work. Not that it doesn't try – Beethoven's Fifth turned into a rock anthem is funny no matter who does it, and that goes double for Für Elise, especially when they come with gigantic wings and ridiculous boxing ghosts.

But part of the problem here is that Classic Stars plays it a bit too straight. The setting is one of those ludicrously posh private academies with ugly uniforms we've seen in at least a dozen shows, and the characters all slot nicely into established types–the nitpicky one, the brash one, the womanizer, and the snooty one. Rivalries are pretty pat, too, with red and blue set to fight (or possibly kiss) in a bid for supremacy. Even Liszt's tropical bird hair can't quite make up for otherwise bland designs, giving these boys very little to stand on.

A piece of me wonders if this is just sour grapes – I did love ClassicaLoid, and this feels like a very faint imitation of it. But more than that, it simply isn't doing as much with its premise as possible. Why create the “emosion” system, which apparently pulls people's emotions right out of them if the music is right, and then use it in a setup that's otherwise a fairly rote male idol story? I'll admit that the boxing angle is interesting, especially since poor Beethoven wants nothing to do with singing and just wants to go back to his beloved sport. Despite his obvious musical skills, he doesn't show any signs of backing down from that. Honestly, I'm more interested in that story than the rest of the episode.

Classic Stars' first episode is fine, but as a friend remarked to me recently, saying “this is fine” may be the single worst thing a reviewer can say. It means it's not good enough to be remarkable nor bad enough to be enraging, it just is;. That, sadly, is where this lands.