Sonny Boy

Sometimes anime creators let success go to their heads and their next project ends up being a self-absorbed mess that nobody likes. Shingo Natsume and my favorite illustrator Hisashi Eguchi were supposed to be a dream team with their Japanese fantasy take on Lord of the Flies. Instead of a masterpiece, we got a self-indulgent mess full of pointless blabbering. Sonny Boy is a prime example of how even the craziest anime needs a solid foundation for the fictional world to work. Otherwise, all the over-the-top fantasy elements just become a weakness and the whole thing gets boring fast. The creators thought that the "random" feel of the show would appeal to viewers who wanted to figure out which superpower caused what, or who combined their powers to create a spectacle like the last part of Kubrick's 2001. But because the show's own set of rules and physics for the supernatural powers are so vague and unexplained, it feels like the creators didn't even need to put in the effort to explain anything, and could have just turned Sonny Boy into a psychedelic eye-candy without any substantial storyline. The characters, led by the main protagonist, are all boring and there's barely any social commentary or psychological depth after the first couple of episodes. And that twenty-minute long talk about monkeys in episode four? Traumatizing. 1 star. (11.04.2022)