A rare mid-year update? Wow…

Anyway, it’s Scotland Love Anime season once again, and it’s the last day of the Glasgow weekend. Generally speaking, I’m very enthusiastic about a lot of the movies that have screened this year, though I doubt you particularly need me to wax lyrically about The Colors Within given how many words have been spilt over it by far smarter people than me already.

That being said, I saw Trapezium yesterday. This has already been on a one-day release in the US already, so I’d imagine a lot of folks (or at least a lot of the folks interested in this kind of thing) have probably seen it already, but I did kind of want to spill a few words over it in a fashion that’s a little too spoiler-laden to take to Social Media.

I will say that, going into it, the two impressions I’d heard were (a) someone on Twitter saying that it’s one of the worst things they’ve ever seen, and (b) Gerald saying it was some variety of charming on a recent episode of Anime World Order. For my part – I really enjoyed it, but I can absolutely see where both viewpoints come from.

But just to establish the framework before spoiling most of the movie, I’ll stress that the presentation is absolutely that of an otaku-centric idol show – it lacks the superlative sense of slapstick of a Love Live, but it’s not a thousand miles at least masquerading as that kind of thing. The movies heroine is charming, funny, dangerously charismatic and is frequently a joy to watch.

She’s also kind of a sociopathic monster, which is the real crux of the movie. The movie strikes a really curious tone with this, as whilst it’s always pretty clear that some of the things she is doing are not exactly positive (and some of the later Japanese marketing for the movie really leans into this), it tends to shy away from actively criticising her for these things even as other people point out that she might be being a bit of an ass. Infact, ultimately, everything ends up working out for her.

Anyway, to outline the movie, Yuu Azuma is a girl who really wants to be an idol. Like, really wants to be an idol. Infact, we meet her in the middle of infiltrating another school in order to try and find a cute girl to scout for the group she wants to put together. You see, her city has four major schools at covering the North, East, South and West of it, and she figures that forming a friend group comprising of one member from each of the cardinal directions will prove to be a most fabulous marketing gimmick.

And this she does – partially through luck by encountering an old childhood friend (Yuu spent the years between Elementary and High School in Canada), partially through gross manipulation by feigning interest in Robotics just enough to start a conversation with a cute-but-shy girl Kurumi, who she saw on TV once and pegged as a boon to her ambitions.

Of course, she’s not actually letting any of her friends in on the fact she’s trtying to form an idol group, but she still moves on to stage two of her plan – taking advantage of charity groups. I mean, it’d look great for there to be a bunch of photographs out there on social media of them being good, helpful teens even before being famous. Yuu does get a little surly when an activity helping a bunch of disabled kids doesn’t quite go to plan, but ingratiating herself as a tour guide at a local tourist attraction that’s gaining foreign attention thanks to having been a videogame setting hits paydirt (in an entirely calculated way) when it features in a TV news show, and its producer likes Yuu enough to enlist the friend group as outside reporters for a variety show she’s working on. At this point Yuu starts blowing off all her charity work since it’s no longer of any use to her.

This does slowly lead to the girls being roped into a feature about becoming an idol group, much to the delight of Yuu. Her friends are happy to go along with it initially, realising that it is something that means a lot to Yuu and generally being, you know, good people. That said, Yuu gets increasingly irate when others don’t necessarily have the same degree of buy-in as she does – one of them is caught having social media photos with a boy, another isn’t that great at singing, and Yuu turns downright abusive these things. It all comes to a head when things get a little too much for Kurumi, a girl who from the start we are told does not like attention, and has a full-on breakdown after weeks being slowly ground down mentally.

Ultimately, the group collapses and Yuu stops seeing everyone, and work dries up for Yuu to the point where she also quits her talent agency contract. She does eventually reconnect with her childhood friend, wanting to know how she used to see Yuu – it’s funny because the story told about how she used to see her as heroic in elementary school actually kind of paints her as always being a bit of a self-serving jerk, just in a way which had a positive outcome back then.

Anyway, in the end, the one song which they happened to record as part of their stint on TV ends up getting put on a compilation CD, which leads to Yuu both reconnecting with her former bandmates, and TV producer they used to work with. Yuu never really apologises, but I think everyone just gives her the benefit of the doubt when it comes to being a decent person. It’s not actually clear if her friends realise exactly how much she’s been manipulating them, if at all, honestly.

The movie ends with a flashforward to a few years later, where Yuu has managed to pivot reconnecting with the TV producer friend into actually becoming a famous idol. She meets up with her friends to go to the photography exhibit put on by one of Kurumi’s classmates, the sporadically-appearing male character who is fully aware of Yuu being kind of an ass but goes along with it anyway because she’s an intense bundle of charisma, and the movie ends with them looking at the one photograph taken at the single point in time when maybe they were actually all having fun during all of this (a photo booth at a school festival where Yuu was actually being surly because her friends blew off her attempts to get them interested in musical performance in order to be nice to a disabled girl).

That’s the movie, and it’s honestly a weird one – it ends devoid of any of the normal moralistic messages that these movies normally have. It’s honestly unclear if Yuu ever actually thought of any of these other girls as friends – she’s shown as being perfectly capable of cutting other people off as soon as they’re of no particular use to her. It’s a peculiar way to cap the movie that has lead to some kind-of violent reactions given the way these things normally end, with some kind of actual message about respecting others, or how your attitude towards others will ultimately end up reflecting back at you, or just how it’s generally a good thing to not be a self-serving manipulative jerk. It’s a movie about a girl manipulating a bunch of well-meaning people into helping her towards her dream, dressed-up and disguised in the upbeat, peppy clothing of a happy-go-lucky idol cartoon. It’s weird and it’s fascinating and I honestly kind of love it.