Recap

Kanye butts heads with Moffle as he takes some drastic actions, including closing the park for a day to clean and lowering the price of admission to 30 yen. The situation worsens between them when Kanye decides to use the girls, including Latifah, in a racy video.

Jel’s thoughts

This episode was disappointing in several ways. I’m sure the main thing everyone wants to talk about is the amount of skin they decided to flash. I think it would have been OK, if maybe just a tad pervy, had it been a fun “let’s put on a show since we had to close the park!” rally put on by the girls themselves. But carting out the girls against their will was one of the skeeviest things I’ve seen in a Kyoto Animation show, especially since they historically keep things classy and are known for having a lot of female talent in-house. You could almost feel the staff being uncomfortable with it themselves, slipping in the “#sexualharassment” and “I wonder what the male versions look like?” lines to passively make everyone aware they don’t agree with what they’re animating.

What’s even more disappointing is Kanye’s stunt really didn’t produce much in the way of results. You better bring more than an extra 20 visitors and 8,000 YouTube hits to the table before your break out a hearty “Evil Genius” laugh. I understand they want to illustrate the lengths he will go to in order to get visitors, but surely there was something better he could have been doing with all the time it took to produce the video. I also thought it was odd that he has an amazing super power and yet that was not even mentioned once, let alone put to good use. I do appreciate how they are keeping the powers in check, like this week’s severely limited supply of memory erasing bullets, so there’s something to be said for not overusing the magic angle either.

This was not the most encouraging direction for Amagi Brilliant Park as I feel like they squandered a lot of the cool things they established in the first two episodes. It’s still early though, and I think the show still has a lot of potential. I particularly find the “plight of the service worker” angle interesting as Moffle does what no doubt millions of other workers have wanted to do to an obnoxious customer. Sadly magic memory erasing bullets are not a real thing, but that does make the cast considerably more sympathetic. Here’s hoping the series gets back on track next week.

Marlin’s Thoughts

At the start of this episode, I was still feeling pretty up on this show. I did like the bits where he was actually talking business with the different department heads. Some of it was a bit ridiculous, I mean obviously no amusement park in its right mind would be closed on Friday. Still, parts of it had some real business sense to it. I liked the idea of cutting fares as a good start. I find it hard to believe this place is very solvent to begin with, so trying to up visitors by taking a temporary loss is definitely the smartest move to begin with. However, as the episode went on, I started to like it less and less. Sure, these are the first few days of Kanye’s leadership, but I was hoping he’d be making some bigger plans than making viral videos in order to rake in more customers. There’s still a long way to go, but I felt that much was a stumbling block.

On top of that, the fanservice scene made everything uncomfortable. I think I can see the staff’s annoyance and sense of self awareness in the swimsuit scene, but in a slightly different way from Jel. Thinking about it, I’d say the “I wonder what the male versions look like” joke was a nice prod at KyoAni’s previous series Free!, which was a show about nothing but several handsome men in skin tight swimsuits. That said, it still doesn’t prevent the scene from feeling completely gross and out of place. No family would ever be persuaded to bring their children somewhere just because of some skin, or at least I can’t imagine the mothers would. The bikinis were so revealing they weren’t even that sexy to me, but I guess someone high up was thinking go big or go home. I hope we can quickly pretend that never happened by next episode.