The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio

Episode 3

I have not read the source light novels for The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio, yet I still feel like I'm seeing its seams in this anime adaptation. There's a sense of disconnection to the proceedings of these first few episodes—vignette-styled approaches that can't fill out full episodes but must be stitched together with some semblance of ongoing story and character arcs. This can work if an adaptation and its sensibilities are solid or the material is entertaining at the baseline. But as Voice Actor Radio has already shown, the anime can barely manage flashes of potential in its best moments. It doesn't have much to carry it through this awkward freshman stage.

If you're just here for the adversarial yuri-teasing, then at least you're still being catered to…kind of? The first part of this episode features a shared bath session between Yuhi and Yasumi that I think was meant to be endearingly awkward but instead comes off as regular awkward. Yuhi's bizarre backhanded pseudo-flirting with her radio show partner is eventually clarified to have been poorly executed attempts at insults, which honestly could have been an entertaining escapade if handled deftly. Moe Toyota has shown that she has the nuanced vocal chops to pull it off. Instead, the scene and performance are directed and paced so awkwardly that it winds up as confounding until, as usual, the characters have to blurt out an explanation for how the audience was supposed to interpret things.

It's emblematic of that gutted potential that already characterizes Voice Actor Radio. That bathtub browbeating begins with Yasumi noting the heavy-handed nature of such a setup compared to the more restrained handling audiences usually expect from yuri-bait setups. That's a neat wink at the nature of anime as a product and the fandoms fed by the industries that orchestrate it all. But then it can't follow through to demonstrate this story's specific distinctions. This episode's closest thing to a through-line is Yuhi and Yasumi's clashing personalities rubbing up against their begrudging professional respect for one another. If the presentation can hardly maintain that chemistry, what's left beyond some stalling, sketch-comedy storyboards?

The professional aspect that's forced the two voice actresses to work together and learn about each other powers much of the character movement in this episode. It is less of them hashing out their feelings about their jobs and more simply them iterating them. Yasumi explains to Yuhi why she became a voice actress. Yuhi talks to Yasumi's mom and reconfirms the family's feelings on that situation. Both characters regularly relitigate the gaps between their skills and star power. But it never pushes beyond ideas that can be explained to the audience rather than having these actresses, you know, act out those feelings. The climactic conflict detonated late in this episode is predicated on Yasumi's self-loathing that she has carried around this whole time, except she was never allowed to lean into that.

Some inherent character chemistry lets Voice Actor Radio skate by on the surface of its thinner moments. As awkward as the sudden cut of Yuhi running away from listening in on her mother and Yasumi's conversation is, her atrocious fake sleeping and Yasumi's reaction to it a moment later is pretty funny. Even if the show fumbled the invocation of the double standard of heavy-handed yuri, Yasumi's blushing reaction to Yuhi's begrudging praise is endearing in how it gets you hoping she'll figure it out eventually. Her cruel denigrating of Yuhi in the episode's climax, overlaid with internal monologue begging herself to stop, is an effective choice, not to mention an instance of this anime effectively using narration, for once. That's another scene that finishes with Yasumi simply having to exposit her mindset, which led to the events since the show couldn't find space to communicate it emotionally.

These recurring communicative struggles and smaller directorial awkwardness can seem kind of baffling. Hideki Tachibana's hardly an amateur, and I know people enjoyed the DanMachi anime well enough. It might be a case of the production hobbling the presentational options or any other factors that can afflict the construction of a seasonal anime. Regardless, it means that Voice Actor Radio remains a series I mostly want to like, in theory. But at the always-crucial three-episode mark, its scattered structure and execution mean it feels like far less than the sum of its parts.

Rating:

The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

The many sides of Chris include reviewing anime, playing rhythm games, and treating himself to too many Transformers toys. You can find him posting about all of these and more over on his Twitter, or occasionally going more in-depth on his blog.

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