3ET: Wake Up, Girls

This is not the greatest song in the world. Seriously.

Studio: Tatsunoko

Director: Yamamoto Yutaka (Lucky Star, Fractale)

Writer: Machida Touko (The Idolm@ster, Ookami Kakushi)

Main Cast:

Asanuma Shintarou as Matsuda Kouhei

Eino Airi as Hayashida Airi

Okuno Kaya as Kikuma Kaya

Yamashita Nanami as Hisami Nanami

Aoyama Yoshino as Nanase Yoshino

Yoshioka Mayu as Shimada Mayu

Tanaka Minami as Katayama Minami

Takagi Miyuu as Okamoto Miyuu

Character Design: Chikaoka Sunao (Kyou no Go no Ni)

Music: Kousaki Satoru (Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu)

Wake Up, Girls takes place in Sendai, in what I'm sure is a well-intentioned attempt to promote the area of Japan still recovering from a 2011 earthquake and tsunami. The story is about seven girls who join a failing promotion company to form the titular idol group. It begins after their first concert, which takes place Christmas Day 2013, where they dance around to exactly one song and jump to flash their panties. The girls and their producer want them to become successful idols, and the audience is along for the ride. In short, it's the plot of the Idolm@ster anime.

What made Idolm@ster watchable despite its standard premise is that it had strong characters. Now, I didn't like all of the charaters,but they stood out. That variety meant that if I had a type of girl I wanted to root for, I could likely find one (I did, Team Chihaya for life). The failure of any girl in Wake Up, Girls to have that kind of strong personality means that there is no one for me to latch onto and root for. And in a show that isn't doing anything new or interesting in the "girls want to be idols" subgenre, that's a fatal flaw.

Same-face is just the first of the problems here.

Another fatal flaw would be the way this show looks, which would be described in a polite way as cheap. The girls all have the same face, a failure of character design that makes them even harder to tell apart given their bland personalities. There was also no budget for how anyone moves outside the concert scenes. Even then, the movements are robotic and unnatural. I'm sure this would be even more jarring if I had seen the movie, with the usual higher production values. However, that isn't even necessary, as it's easy to pick up on its basic plot from the first episode.

The last thing I'll say is about the actual content, which shows off the creepy underbelly of the idol industry. This could have worked, but it doesn't because of the aforementioned failures in characterization. I could have forgiven the shoddy animation if I had seen characters I gave a damn about going through some horrible circumstances, which would have made the show's best scene where the company president busts in and beats up a shoddy promoter even better. As it is, Wake Up, Girls is a forgettable entry into the idol market and a fail from me.