Wit Studio does good work, well, that might be an understatement, let’s look, shall we? I was a fan of Great Pretender, all the Attack on Titan’s leading up to the MAPPA take over, Kabaneri was one of the best-looking shows in my opinion in 2019, so yeah, good stuff. (this is even with me ignoring Seraph series and Magu’s Bride) So when I heard they had an original anime series coming out this Spring 2021 It was the top of my watch list……
Okay, I actually was going to skip this series for Combatant but didn’t because of Jacob over at Side Of Fiction, good-looking out pal.
Vivy -Fluorite Eye’s Song- which I will not be adding the – to anymore because I am lazy is a gorgeous show about a distant future where AI and humans live hand in hand, kinda. Picture a world where AI exists but there is a caveat, they are assigned one task and one task only.
The show follows Diva, uh, Vivy, I mean, both. Ya know what we will just call her Vivy from now on. Vivy was a very early on AI that was built to make people smile with her voice, tasked with the complicated mission to sing from the heart, something she isn’t entirely sure how to do. Living out her life on a small stage Vivy is confronted by another AI Matsumoto that her dream of making humans smile is at risk. And that’s because in 100 years from that point the AI will start a war and kill all humans.
But hey, what can she do? Vivy is a singing AI isn’t her god damn problem, a point she sticks to surprisingly well as Matsumoto does some whack reverse physiology making her realize that it is because humans can’t smile if they’re dead. Granted, he had a point.
Getting on board Vivy discovers that Matsumoto was created specifically to go back in time and recruit her to stop certain events over the next 100 years to prevent that AI war. The thought process being the war only happened because the way AI rights were advanced as equal to humans caused too much angst over the 100-year run. So it is up to Vivy and her new witty sidekick to stop the events from happening, saving mankind.
Right away Vivy gives major original vibes. There is just something about the look, feel, and even sound that comes to the original series. Being no stranger to the idea, coining Great Pretender and Kabaneri I was curious to see how Wit was going to stick Vivy’s landing, to be blunt, originals tend to end not in the best fashion.
Sadly, Vivy also doesn’t quite stick the landing.
Before I go any further I want to take a second to generally discuss how original works. Original anime simply means the anime is the source material. Another really popular one that came out recently was Wonder Egg Priority. When these shows are announced they have a set staff, studio, and budget like most, where it gets kinda weird is, the direction isn’t always clear. I cannot speak to the inter-workings of Cloverworks or Wit or Trigger, all I can say Is if you had the top 10 best original animes ever, 4 of them probably came from the same director, Shinichirou Watanabe.
So with that in mind, certain people within this world can breathe some of the best works out of the original series, however, Vivy fell down the hole many of them do.
First and foremost, Vivy is bold, fascinating, dark, and beautiful, irrelevant to the ending. I feel the same about it as I do most originals that flop, Darling in the FranXX and Wonder Egg are both bold series that deserves to be watched and respected.
If you are in the market for a future world where AI starts killing people, wonderful animation, plenty of combat, and depression, Vivy might be the exact thing one would be looking for, and though I won’t say it was my favorite coming out of the spring line up it was without a doubt not only the best looking show but to me, one of the more interesting ones.
There are only so many ways a story about AI killing humans can go, let’s be real here we have all seen it. But even with that, the typical run-of-the-mill idea Vivy kept me engaged and interested as it blazed through 100 years of AI, explaining how events lead up to the doomsday. I’ve seen a lot of praise for this show in general and hesitate to hold it up to the standards a lot of people have so on that note I will just repeat my general thoughts, watch it.
As always thanks for the read!
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