Cue!

Attachment 1952

"* Based on an idol-training mobile game produced by Liber Entertainment.

The brand-new voice actor office "AiRBLUE" has no track record or experience. Aspiring voice actors with rich individuality are signed on to the office. They do their best to achieve their dreams, but it's a tough world out there. No matter how much they practice, not everyone will pass the audition.

Source: ANN"

Genre(s): Working Life, Entertainment, Slice of Life

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1,2

"Aspiring voice actors with rich individuality"... that's rich, all right. Lets see... Cute girls doing... *shuffles paper* voice acting. Another season, another ensemble story of young lady performers. Voice acting is a tougher sell for me as I don't appreciate the nuance of acting in a foreign language, obviously, so the trimmings are extra important. The girls are cute, mostly of working age, and not haughty enough to jolt me out of a relaxed viewing, but there is also little tension or friction.

The best compliment I can make is that the second episode went by faster than I expected, and that must mean I was enjoying it. To be fair, I was more interested in the fake dodgeball anime than the auditions themselves, but it was still fun and glimpsed success early on which suggests we won't be waiting all season for catharsis. Did I mention the girls are plenty cute, and vary within the standard deviation of archetypes, so nothing ventured and nothing gained there? That being said, plus 1 point for the criminally underserved 'female chunni' inclusion.

My hope is that without the burden of elaborate singing scenes, we can get some more dramatic meat on the bones during the non audition training segments. I'm ready to drop at a moment's notice, but I'm still hanging on for now.

3,4

So far, this has just been the girls getting grouped into separate projects while living in a communal appartment for the agency. Strange. Is that a normal Japanese thing, to have shared living for performers, or is it a shortcut to having cute anime girls interacting in an intimate space for prolonged periods, not that there would ever be a market for that sort of thing...

So, the idol group- what was learned here? One of the performers/girls struggled with both competency and confidence. Her teammates try to help, sort of, and they are told that they should be all trying to change themselves and suddenly are able to meet standard after stuffing a few sushi. I think a few scenes got left out by mistake. What good does having character designs for an animated idol group do when the voice actresses are going to be performing in the flesh anyway? Sure, it's convenient that the real life we're talking here is also anime, but I can't help but feel that was somewhat contrived. <--What a sentence to write. Always find time to enjoy the little things.