The Rolling Girls

Episode 7

The Rolling Girls entered a new arc this week in glamorous, historic Kyoto. As has become the custom, we were introduced to the local vigilante groups, got a small slice of daily life in the city, and then quickly rolled into a new conflict. Rolling Girls has arrived at a comfortable neutral now, and this episode offered many small rewards while doing little to mess with the overall formula. Pretty colors and silly gags abound.

We started off this week with a small roadside intermission, as the girls spent some time hanging out in a hot spring, singing on the highway, and comparing dreams at their campsite. The characters are still a little too thinly articulated for material like this to really be its own reward, but nice details like the deer helping out by holding a camera on its head, or Chiaya openly stating that she no longer needs a moonlight stone, gave the sequence at least some reason for existing. Things quickly picked up once the gang reached Kyoto, the “holy land of rock,” where we were introduced to two more rival vigilante groups - the Kamogawa Rockers, who manage the city's many concerts, and the Maikos, We Are, who hold the peace within the city's streets. After briefly stopping in at the Rockers headquarters, our heroes headed out to see a concert, leading to the episode's easy highlight.

In the middle of Kamogawa Rockers' captain Misa's final song, her concert is interrupted by Shuten and his gang, leading to a fight between the two Bests that briefly rivaled the show's first two episodes. There were glorious multicolored explosions, busy, evocative smears, and even a punch that erupted in a spinning musical staff. The whole scene came off as very FLCL in an extremely good way, and the absurd ending, where Misa is trapped in a ridiculous helicopter-box and flown off to Mount Oe, was the perfect capstone on a sequence that captured Rolling Girls at its madcap best.

The episode maintained its energy through the next scene, as the Rockers and Rolling Girls chased Shuten back to Oe. I'd initially felt that the fact that our heroes were kind of useless was a weakness of the show, and their ineffectiveness can still be a narrative problem at times, but this sequence used that to great comic effect. Ai attempts to run at Shuten and gets immediately tripped, Nozomi and Yukina manage to knock each other out, and Chiaya sleeps through the whole fight. There was no undercurrent of pathos to complicate this sequence - it was pure silliness, totally embracing the fact that our heroes are easily the least important characters in their own story. If you're going to make a show about useless heroes, you might as well get some great jokes out of the deal.

After another strong fight sequence that introduced the captain of Maikos, We Are, the rest of the episode was largely dedicated to setting up the pieces for next week's arc resolution. The Maikos and Rockers have beef, this largely comes down to some conflict between the two leaders in the past, the Maikos leader clearly wants to embrace rock but is held back by her sense of duty, etc etc. It's all pretty obvious and reminiscent of material we've already seen, but I don't think anyone's expecting particularly nuanced storytelling from Rolling Girls. The fun here is in the visual highlights and silly details, and this episode had a fair helping of both.

Rating: B

The Rolling Girls is currently streaming on Funimation.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.