Anime 55102 Girls Band Cry Reviews Filter Check 1

If you're wondering if GaruKura is worth the watch, it is! If you're asking yourself if you should watch this or the other Idol anime airing right now, the answer is watch both!

The animation is extremely good even if you dislike CGI, the characters are realistic enough that it's easy to relate to them, the music is great, there really isn't any reason for not watching this show.

There's an on-going issue right now with the subtitles being of a pretty low quality but once someone picks this anime up for translation please try to give it a watch and don't let it go under the ... radar, you wont regret it!

Girls Band Cry is one of the most grippingly realistic anime I've seen in a long time, and I don't mean that visually. What I mean is that this anime can and will make you feel things. It's quite similar to BanG Dream MyGo in its style of drama, with a dash of Love Live's presentation (many of the staff worked on Sunshine) and a heap of Bocchi the Rock's charm and relatability, all without outright ripping off any of them. Each character is extremely relatable, and the writer pulls off a cool trick by making them quite flawed people emotionally-speaking, but ... not doing so in a way that's infuriating. The main character in particular, Nina, is one who I think a lot of people would find annoying on first glance, but I honestly find her incredibly endearing, and this is coming from someone who is very much her opposite in personality. The anime also does a masterful job of playing all the characters off each other - they all have wonderful chemistry, and if shipping is your thing you'll undoubtedly have a field day here. The plot itself, while perhaps a bit cliché as it's the tried and tested story of forming a band, is well-crafted and enhances everything around it very well. It manages to take a cast of flawed characters and create an optimistic story about communication and growth.

The vast majority of potential viewers who took one look at the 3DCG visuals and immediately left didn't do so without good reason. The stigma against these visuals is quite well-earned and is accurate in most cases. Ironically enough for a style that is often considered more realistic in, say, video game contexts, 3DCG models often look embarrassingly unconvincing and frankly just bad in the vast, vast majority of anime that use them.

Thankfully, Girls Band Cry looks nothing short of fantastic. The characters are all wonderfully expressive in ways a viewer would expect from 2D animation. For example, facial expressions are ordinarily quite stilted in 3d shows in a way that just doesn't feel right. Whereas in Girls Band Cry, each face is created to perfectly fit whatever the character is experiencing, the end result being an anime that delivers on an extremely memorable experience, oftentimes with character's expressions rapidly shifting through them in a wonderfully convincing way in some shots. Now imagine the care shown to the faces being given to the visuals as a whole, and you can begin to understand why I say that the visuals are genuinely one of the best parts of Girls Band Cry. Yes, they are actually *that* good.

Visuals are only part of the presentation, of course, particularly for a music anime. Thankfully, the music is all great, too. This is the kind of music that, while it initially seems good but unremarkable, you'll want to listen to more and more each time you hear the song. It's very, very good, and it's dominated my playlists these past 2 weeks.

You may have noticed that you don't recognize any of the voice actors. That's by design. When production started way back in 2021, Toei scouted five musicians, one for each band member. These musicians are the ones actually performing the music, and none of them have ever voice acted professionally before this. Despite this, the voice acting itself is quite well done, and if you've already seen the show you probably haven't even noticed this if you weren't already aware. It's honestly an impressive bit of directing, and I think it adds a bit of charm and homeliness to the show. Particularly impressive is Nina's VA, who is just 16 at the time of airing, quite similar to her own character's age.

Girls Band Cry is overall one of the most unique yet still good experiences I've had in anime, even just 4 episodes in. Honestly, all the dismissals I've seen of it as a ripoff of something else are closer to compliments than I think these same detractors think - this show really is on par with the excellent shows it's being compared to! It's a shame many won't give it a chance due to the lack of localization, unless or until it blows up like I think (hope) it will. In the meantime, you'll need to get a bit creative to see this one in most parts of the world until localization reaches you, but it's definitely well worth it.

Girls Band Cry is about staying true to yourself, not letting others get you down or hold you back, and the sense of freedom that comes from expressing yourself. It's far from the first anime to have these themes, but it sets itself apart from other similar shows with a display of raw, visceral emotion and passion, a unique cast of characters, and a very grounded approach. Girls Band Cry is about a group of flawed individuals stumbling into a band, and isn't afraid to show the reality of how messy and difficult human interactions can be.

The character drama is incredibly raw, the band butt ... heads, argue, fight, scream, cry, make up, and go on. Girls Band Cry isn't afraid to show characters be rough and insensitive, it never tries to portray the characters as perfect, right, or anything other than human. The MC in particular is masterfully written - she's a shy, insecure teenager out on her own, and she gets no pity from the show. She's an angry, wounded animal, she lashes out at others, she lashes out at herself, she lashes out at the world, and is often doing so unfairly, to the detriment of both her and everyone around her. Through her, the themes of the show take on a different color.

It's about staying true to yourself, and not letting others get you down or hold you back, but not due to some lofty dreams or high ambitions but as a pure, unbridled show of spite to everyone who's wronged you. It's about the sense of freedom that comes from expressing yourself, and the incredible catharsis that comes from understanding yourself and flaunting your flaws to the world. It's about flipping off the world and saying "I'm right, you're wrong, and you can't hurt me anymore".

The anime is mostly CGI, with 2D for backgrounds and background characters. The animation is incredibly expressive at times, especially during the performances, but often also during normal character interactions. The worst of it still ends up looking pretty great, though it's not always very exciting. The VAs for the main cast are all rookies in both voice acting and music, they were put together in a band specifically for this anime. You can definitely feel they're rookies at times, but it feeds into the setting very well.

At the time of writing this, the anime is not licensed in the West, something that feels genuinely criminal for the insane quality of the show. Do yourself a favor and find a way to watch it, and make sure you don't stumble on a machine translated sub.

For the contrast with another review here: This girls are toxic and utterly insane. I absolutely love them. A masterpiece of a dysfunctional group dynamic that drives the show making you crave for the next episode. The fights and bounding are the spirit of it.

For the animation, I got to say that is one of the best I have ever seen. The studio was able to make the CGI not a negative, but a positive for it, and I couldn't enjoy it more in any other way.

And the music, it rocks. The hype makes me spin in my chair.

This anime seems to be in a sweet spot between the big comedy of Bocchi the Rock and the big drama of MyGO!!!, both great shows focused on 'Cute Girls Doing Music Things'. Girls on Girls Band Cry has grounded backgrounds and issues that are realistic, and the chemistry between the three of them we've seen so far is very good. The music, as important as it is for a show like this, delivers great J-rock songs. Series composition is in charge of Jukki Hanada, man behind this role on series like Steins;Gate and A place further than Universe, so it seems that this anime ... is in good hands.

Since this is a music-based anime, the music of Togenashi Togeari (the band that the girls are forming) is powerful J-rock. If you are a fan of the genre, you'll be pleased to know that the band has already released 10 very good songs before the anime starts. The opening (which visuals start with great 2D versions of the cast leading to the 3D versions) and the ending are performed by the band as well. Regarding the voice cast, all the actresses are new, and this is especially noticeable in Subaru's voice, but it makes the character's conversations more realistic and "normal". As a curiosity, the voice actresses are the actual members of the band Togenashi Togeari, who play their instruments live, like some Bang Dream bands do.

The CGI in the show is well executed. Despite some minor details (for example, the texture of Momoka's cat is a bit weird), the show fully embraces the medium and uses it creatively, especially in the two performances shown. The facial expressions of the main cast are very expressive, giving a good amount of movement to the mouth and adding little movements to the characters that seem to move like real people. This may seem a little strange to some people, and the whole CGI aesthetic might alienate some others, but you have to give it a chance. It's not just acceptable CGI; it's actually good CGI and good animation.

One of the big problems of the show is that it is not available legally at the moment in the West, so the subtitles are an issue, and not being licensed on any major platform may cause the show to go under the radar of many people. This has the potential to be one of the best musical shows of the year, and it deserves to be seen.

The first three episodes was a pleasant surprise. It’s hard not to compare when there are two girls’ band anime in the same season; so far I enjoyed Girls Band Cry more due to its polished screenplay and vivid characters.

Ep.1, serving as an intro, was quite rushed, a bit exaggerated, and somewhat clichéd. I understand that conflict is the heart of drama, but this 24-minute episode crammed in too much! However, the merit of efficient storytelling emerged in ep.2, with a much better viewing experience. The screenplay was so developed that a short dinner scene revealed the distinct personalities of three characters naturally, including new ... character Subaru.

Undoubtedly, main character Nina was the most impressive. I saw the unique vitality of adolescence on her - strayed, naïve, hysterical, yet filled with a contagious power. Her backstory wasn’t uncommon in anime characters, but Girls Band Cry was able to convey the "volume" of her trauma, rather than glossing over it lightly. Her paranoid and sensitive personality made her a "troublesome" character, but this vulnerability was exactly what adolescence looks like. Yelling at a random stranger while flinging a lamp? That’s quite rock’n’roll for a high school dropout. She needed to vent; she needed to make her scream heard. She needed to join the band.

There are some lesser satisfactory (but not detrimental) aspects. First, 3D animation wasn’t that enjoyable - the characters’ movements were unnaturally smooth, and there was always a greasy lighting on the characters. Secondly, Nina’s voice when singing lacked the rage and loneliness as shown in the anime; it was not bad though, I still enjoyed most of the singing scenes.

Hopefully Girls Band Cry will never turn into another “cute girls doing cute things” anime. According to the screenwriter Hanada Jukki, the anime aims to explore the story of young people floating between dreams and reality - and I hope it ends that way.

This show grows on you.

Once you get used to the CGI, and if you view the show with proper translations, it's not bad. The music is pretty good, but it doesnt quite fill the void that bocchi the rock left.

First few episodes I watched were with the AI automated subs, and was like wtf is this. Went back and watched it with more accurate translations, and the viewing experience improved. i think the MC can be at times a little annoying, but teenagers are often bratty and immature. the writing is a bit lazy, and characters are w/e, but im just here to ... see some people jam.

BTR left some big shoes to fill, and while this show falls short by every measure compared to BTR, it still landed better than i had thought. I think it's worth watching couple episodes, and if you can't get into it, then its nbd. not a big commitment. Once you accept the show's flaws and get used to the CGI, you'll find the show to be, at times, pretty charming and endearing.