English Dub Season Review: Sonny Boy Season One

Overview:

Thirty-six students find themselves and their school building suddenly adrift in a void-like dimension. When supernatural powers awaken in some of them, a sense of detachment begins to divide the group. Despite the student council’s attempts to impose order, they clash with the students possessing special abilities, who rebel against their strict control.

Our Take:

Sonny Boy aired in the Summer 2021 season and its dub just recently wrapped up. Sonny Boy is an original anime by Madhouse dealing with super-powered students getting set adrift. The idea of a drifting classroom isn’t all that odd a thing when it comes to Japanese media. There’s a manga called The Drifting Classroom which was extremely popular and even inspired the famous mangaka, Junji Ito. So Sonny Boy has good inspiration, thought-provoking ideas, and a great studio to bring it all together. Does it succeed or fail?

That’s a hard question to answer but let’s get the technical stuff out of the way first. The animation is the hardest subject to tackle because it goes from being really well done and modern to extremely minimalistic. At first, I thought it was just bad animation but it happens throughout so much that I feel it’s intentional, at times characters don’t even have faces. Though that is from far away so I think the point is that it would be hard to make out their face. It definitely gets experimental but I really enjoyed it.

The voice actors are great. I would say the show-stealer awards go to Luci Christian and Tia Ballard who play Nozomi and Mizuho respectively. I personally prefer Mizuho but I get that Nozomi is supposed to be the “main” girl. There comes a point in the story when Mizuho seems to get more screentime even so I just preferred her but both voice actresses do fantastic.

Now on to the story of Sonny Boy. I honestly don’t know what to put here. I still don’t think I understand what happened and the point they were trying to make. But I will say that to me the ending is bittersweet. I have definitely seen worse endings to anime and this one is not bad. I just felt like Sonny Boy was trying to be too complex for its own good.

In closing, Sonny Boy is a fun ride especially if you like stuff that makes you think and involves superpowers. But don’t expect to be fully satisfied because it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. I definitely think that it’s worth your time and you won’t regret watching it. Plus who knows maybe it will make more sense when watched in a binge session?