Blue Box Season 2 ‒ Episodes 1-3
Getting to cover the first episodes of Blue Box's brand new season for this Fall's Preview Guide was a real treat, because it ended up reminding me of why I loved this show so much in the first place, which I really needed after getting a bit worn out by the end of that first season. I don't know if this is the result of the story finally moving to a phase where Chinatsu and Taiki are on a more even playing field, narratively speaking, or if the change-up in director and personnel has given the anime the kick in the pants it needed. Maybe it's both! Either way, I'm feeling more excited about The Exceedingly Schmaltzy But Nonetheless Endearing Romantic Misadventures of Taiki and Chinatsu than I have since the series first got started.
This week, we're picking up with the nasty conflict that Taiki has gotten into with Yumeka ever since the latter slithered onto the scene in the season premiere. Of course, Yumeka's bitter and cutting attitude is a mix of self-loathing and deeply buried concerns for her former basketball teammate, but that doesn't make it any easier for Taiki to stand by and let this stranger talk smack about his almost-kind-of-sort-of-maybe-someday-girlfriend. Thankfully, the sharper and more complicated pain of these emotional teenagers is exactly the injection of juicy drama that Blue Box needed after wallowing for a bit too long in the love-triangle blues of Season 1. I am begrudgingly coming to terms with the fact that it's probably going to take Taiki and Chinatsu another several hundred episodes to start holding hands or whatever, so we might as well revel in the melodrama in the meantime.
The show looks and sounds as good as it always has, but I'm still convinced there's something snappier about the pacing and editing this time around. We linger on all of the usual trivialities and unspoken exchanges, but there isn't quite the same sense of overindulgence that crept into the later episodes of the first season. Perhaps I'm just imagining things, but the result is a show where it is much easier to luxuriate in the lovely artwork and subtle character animation, because you're never stuck luxuriating for long enough to start checking your watch.
We get more opportunities to flesh out Chinatsu's side of the story, which continues to be very welcome, even if the scope of her dramatic arcs can seem almost comedically insular. I know, I know: She is the embodiment of the naive wünderkind who has seemingly never had a single aggressive or competitive thought enter her pretty little head. Still, it is funny to see how an extremely minor confrontation with a stressed-out teammate who doesn't want to be invited to more practice sessions counts as an “intense” moment for the girl. Chinatsu eventually finds herself face to face with Yumeka again because of this, which is a huge step in the right direction. I feel like Chinatsu's speech where she admits to being terribly lonely after Yumeka quit basketball is the most emotional insight we've gotten into her character since...well, since the show began.
It's maybe easier to find the emotional throughline of Taiki's half of the story, which boils down to, “Sweet Merciful Anime Jesus, how can this Matsuoka guy suck so goddamned much?” It's frustrating, it's funny, and boy howdy if it isn't all too relatable. Every person on Earth has known at least one of these pieces of work. Matsuoka is just a perfectly poisonous combination of “too hot to pretend that he isn't” and “too selfish and stupid to stop pathologically weaponizing his hotness against every other person that he meets.” I know that Blue Box is probably going to remain a painfully earnest and wholesome coming-of-age cartoon for the remainder of its run, but is it too much for me to hope for an arc where Taiki and Chinatsu bond over killing this dweeb and then figuring out how to dispose of the remains?
Rating:
Blue Box Season 2 is currently streaming on Netflix.
James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.
discuss this in the forum |
back to Blue Box Season 2
Episode Review homepage / archives
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.