Love Live! (School Idol Project) is the new idol show from Sunrise, specifically Sunrise Studio 8. I gather that these two facts put it entirely within the wheelhouse of things I’m supposed to post about here.

Which is pretty much the main reason why I’m posting about it – honestly, I’m kind of luke-warm on the show as of the first episode. There’s a lot of things I appreciate about it – I think the music is pretty catchy, and whilst I don’t think the writing is particularly sharp, I do think there’s at least a degree of intelligent direction going on. There’s some degree cleverness to the way some sequences cut together at the very least. I’ll probably end up watching the whole show anyway, though, mostly because there’s precious little else that’s caught my attention thus far this season. Infact, there’s been a few shows I’ve not even managed to survive half an episode of.

Anyway, just a few quick thoughts about the shows first episode…

1) I spent half the episode wondering why this show reminded me of Tari Tari…

Even though, in reality, there isn’t really that much in common between the two. Ultimately, I decided it was probably this typeface used for the credits.

See what I mean? Kind of? Maybe?

2) Hang on, isn’t that an all-girls school?

Or, at least, I didn’t see any male students hanging around. I only mention this because, well, it kind of seems like a wee bit of a flaw in this entire “school idol” plan of theirs. I mean, surely the only people who’d be interested in attending a school that spawned a popular idol group would be kind of creeper guys?

3) This would almost be subtle if…

It’d almost – almost – be subtle that this girl on the right there attends the same school as our heroine, given that you only see brief glimpses of the hem of the skirt of her uniform under her coat, if she wasn’t dancing along with her in the OP sequence. I would make a comment about how OP sequences have this annoying habit of otherwise undercutting directorial intent, but I guess it’s hardly a surprise given they’ve been making music videos for this property for a while now.

4) I’ve still got no idea…

What’s up with the sudden song-and-dance number which pops up at the end of the episode, though it kind of makes me curious. I can’t imagine the show going full-out musical, but if the show does have one of these music-video like sequences in every episode, it would at least be something neat that differentiates it from a few of the other shows with a similar feel to them of recent times (if not necessarily some of the US TV of late).

5) Speaking of the song and dance…

Or at least specifically the dance, I have to say, the CG doesn’t come across as being quite as egregiously bad (or at least obnoxious) as in some of the other idol shows around. This isn’t to say that it’s not obvious, but the visual gulf between the appearance of the hand-drawn and CG-rendered girls doesn’t feel quite as wide as that in AKB0048 or Aikatsu.

What does end up making it a bit more jarring that it might have been, though, is their habit of frequently intercutting handdrawn stuff into the dance sequences, particularly when they jump to a close-up of the girls – and the hand-drawn stuff still looks nicer and better animated.

6) And one final thought.

What’s with the inconsistency in the character art? Or, at least, they sporadically seem to start deciding to draw in moderately detailed lips, like they’re using some kind of weird Buriki-inspired designs, only for them to disappear a couple of cuts later.