Make Believe Mailer #122: Promotion And Catharsis
"Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night" And "Girls Band Cry"
It’s foolish to use anime as any sort of guide to life in Japan. Yet while one shouldn’t expect to unlock the secrets of the country from binging Demon Slayer, anime absolutely can offer a glance into what is happening in Japanese culture. It’s art after all.
In a bizarre coincidence, two anime from earlier this year offer a fantastic snapshot of modern Japanese music. Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night1 and Girls Band Cry2 both ran from April to late June, sharing a focus on young women forming music projects while dealing with their own identity issues simultaneously. It’s almost freaky how similar the two shows get, down to both featuring scenes about racial discrimination in modern Japan and…I’ll keep it vague for spoiler reasons…similar explorations of potential romance between characters.
The anime industry loves girls in bands. K-on! still looms quite large, while it’s totally possible that this sudden rush of music-centered series is a result of Bocchi The Rock!! Yet these two 2024 offerings are the first (to my knowledge, at least) to reflect the sound and shape of Japanese rock music this decade. Most immediately is the sonic elements within the original music dotting these series. The bands central to both Jellyfish and Girls Band Cry play music in the mold of post-Vocaloid groups such as YOASOBI, Zuto Mayo or even Yorushika, with keyboard melodies serving a central role rather than accent. At one point in the latter, it’s even implied two members spend most of their time creating music with Vocaloid, instantly providing a distinct time period where this all plays out (now).
Yet it goes beyond just song structure. Both series offer a realistic look at how the modern Japanese music industry operates…with two distinct perspectives on just how to navigate it.
It’s truly impressive that Doga Kobo’s original anime series Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night manages to avoid inspiring cynicism despite ostensibly being a show about content creation. Music ends up being just one part of a story really about making it in (and finding yourself) in the social media age. There’s scenes in this show of characters staring at a site clearly supposed to be Twitter, watching whatever likes and retweets are called going wild.
This would be cheesy and borderline “how do you do, fellow Gen Z-ers” if the world of Jellyfish wasn’t so reflective of Japan in the 2020s3. The story revolves around four young women — an aspiring artist, a fallen idol, a depressed composer and a shut-in VTuber4 — forming a musical project. Unlike the after-school rock outfit of K-on! or the livehouse-centric band in Bochi, the group here exists online. They embrace anonymity, use social media to promote independent works and, most dead on, use the power of avatars and animation to grow a following that probably wouldn’t stick around if they were just humans standing on stage.
Even the video the girls in the show make for their big viral song looks like every lyrics clip uploaded to YouTube now
Some of the biggest J-pop acts of the 2020s have followed this very template. Sure, YOASOBI are happy to show themselves IRL, but every video they’ve done lacks them. Ado and Natori among others exist as anime-style avatars. Even a band like Zuto Mayo choose to represent themselves through cartoons, and live go to great lengths to obscure what they look like. It’s a natural development coming out of an era defined by the internet, the very-online Vocaloid community, the boom in anime globally and the not-so-new tendency for Japanese artists to prefer obscuring their identity in the service of art.
Jellyfish wants to capture the feeling of being a young artist in the 2020s, and the only accurate way to do so is by being tuned in to what’s playing out on social media. The act of promoting one’s art proves to be just as (if not maybe a little more) important as the creation itself. And again, music is just one part of a larger package. JELEE, the project becoming the center of the plot, features two members with no musical background whatsoever. Yet they are just as vital in an age where mixing media is essential to breaking through, and fans place an equal amount of scrutiny on a high school girl’s drawings as they do the pop song it represents.
JELEE is presented as an independent project, one meant to offer a counter to the big-bad mainstream industry that tries to wrap its tentacles around it later in the season. Yet the approach the characters takes is what every corner of the J-pop market — indie to Sony Music Japan — has embraced.
None of this really matters in the world of the other show.
Urgency defines Girls Band Cry. The Toei Animation creation centers around women for whom music offers a way to deal with the challenges the world has thrown at them. Our protagonists aren’t happy-go-lucky high schoolers, but rather dropouts and young adults staring down various emotional trauma. Togenashi Togeari, the band they form, provides catharsis as they try to navigate the real world. Series writer Jukki Hanada hit on what makes it special in a recent interview for anime magazine Otaku Souken.
“Life does not end at the graduation ceremony,” he says, referring to the decision to not center this original series in a school. “There comes a time when one must face society with nothing to protect you with.”
Opposed to Jellyfish’s online vantage on modern Japanese music, Girls Band Cry provides a viewpoint from the ground. I appreciate Bocchi The Rock! because it sets it story amongst Tokyo’s livehouse ecosystem, touching on what trying to be a band in this world is like. I love Girls Band Cry because it emphasizes how fucking difficult it is to actually progress within it. The combination of rock economics (the inability to sell merch, the difficulties of playing a gig a few prefectures away, balancing a part-time job with all of it) coupled with the emotional rollercoasters the members go on, which constantly put the project in peril, makes this whole undertaking tough for the group.
It’s realistic5, down to certain truths of even living in the Kanto Region…the story doesn’t play out in Tokyo, but rather the southern city of Kawasaki, a 10-minute train ride away from the capital but a place that might as well be a million miles away culturally from it, yet that drastically cheaper rent is hard to pass up. I’m avoiding spoilers, but the masterstroke of the whole first season is that there is no true finish line for the band…just ups, downs and the determination to keep moving forward.
The modern music industry and the need to promote oneself online do appear — there are indeed scenes of the characters checking Twitter-esque follower counts — but whereas Jellyfish treats them as vital, Girls Band Cry sees them as a blip. The magic of the series comes from its focus on why anyone would make a band in the first place, and why music is such a powerful force for anyone in the world today. It’s pure passion trying to bend around crushing reality.
While offering different perspectives on how to approach it, Jellyfish and Girls Band Cry share a common conflict. Both groups start out as independent acts, and at some point grind up against the big bad mainstream music industry. It’s in this tension between art versus commerce that both series, to me, really shine via nuance.
Both series present an image of what “selling out” looks like in Japan…it looks like idols. In yet another coincidence between the two series, one member in each project previously operated in an idol-ish group, either pure pop from the start (Jellyfish) or a traditional rock outfit pushed to become an “idol band” in order to actually move units (Girls Band Cry). The latter anime, in particular, finds Togenashi Togeari scoffing at the idea of going kawaii to suddenly make it.
Yet oddly, neither group is vilified for its sound. Even in Girls Band Cry, which draws a bold line between “idol” and “rock,” the actual music that Togenashi Togeari’s rival Diamond Dust makes sounds…like rock music. Maybe a little less distortion, but that’s hardly a distinctive mark between “commercial bait” and “earnest rock.” This sort of subtlety is absent from all Western examples of “selling out” I can think of…since offering up a song for commercial purposes is now seen as career survival rather than bowing to the man, attempts at showing this play out entirely through songs themselves, often presented as vapid.
In Japan, it’s all about aesthetics. You can play more or less the same music…but put on a uniform and you have changed.
In the end, though, neither show ends up judging idols6, or even feeling superior to those who chase mainstream success. In Jellyfish, idols just represent an old-fashioned way of business (plus some family drama) that JELEE don’t jive with. In Girls Band Cry, the main characters come closer to being disgusted by Diamond Dust’s choice to embrace the cutesy image…yet as the show goes on, they learn that it wasn’t as easy a choice to make, but one that could ensure they could keep going.
By the end, it’s not a binary choice…mainstream compromise works for some, fierce artistic independence shines for others. And here’s the 2020s Japanese music industry captured perfectly — there’s no longer one set way to do things. You can link up with a major label, you can become a YouTube darling, you can go fully independent and try to make your own path. The choice is yours. Both these series excel at showing the freedom one has in deciding how they do it…while underlining how animating music itself can be.
Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies
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Yoru No Kurage Wa Oyogenai, though I’ll just stick with the translation for clarity here.
Which is arriving on a handful of platforms in North America this week, hence the timing of this post (not procrastination, I swear).
I will say here…I enjoyed the series as a whole, but found the first episode to be an absolute slog. The folks behind it wanted to make a splash, so it adopts Makoto Shinkai-esque wonder, which I found a bit over the top…while still finding a way for grating fan service, an instant “hmmmm, no thanks” for me. Episode two drops both of these extremes…and hooked me in.
Who, in a nice twist, is presented as a huge America-boo, clearly obsessed with the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC comics, a nice twist on a style dominated by people cosplaying as anime girls.
Including in the places the characters go…owing to what I imagine is this being an original anime with no manga or previous merchandise to lean on, the show embraced sponsors, resulting in the sight of familiar brands and chains dotting the city Togenashi Togeari navigate. This includes what I believe is the most realistic depiction of Yoshinoya beef bowls in animation history.
Jellyfish’s best episode might even be the one that focuses on the plight of a 30-something idol still trying to make it, which manages to both work in great critique of the idol industry while also highlighting why it can be so liberating for performers themselves.
this was great! now i’m going to be on the lookout for these.
I really enjoyed this write-up! These two anime have been sitting dormant in my watchlist for a long time now but after reading this I think that will change. You write very eloquently about the current music industry in Japan (which fascinates me a lot) and how it is portrayed in both shows. As a predominantly Japanese music listener who kind of fell out of love with most anime, you've really sold both shows to me! Thank you for the interesting and informative write-up ☆