English Dub Review: Revue Starlight “Revue Starlight”

Sometimes a dream isn’t enough.

Overview

After Karen enters the mysterious underground door, she finds Hikari in a daze. She is continually building up a rock wall to reach the top of a tower where two stars hang from the ceiling. Each time the wall reaches a certain height, however, the stars fly down and destroy Hikari’s efforts. Meanwhile, she won’t stop reciting lines from “Starlight”. Karen eventually snaps her out of her trance, but Hikari then insists that she is where she belongs. For trying to steal everyone’s shine, she deserves this eternal recurrence. Karen disagrees and the two begin one final Revue. Hikari wins, but through sheer force of will, Karen manages to bring Hikari back from the brink. The season ends with the entire company performing an amended version of “Starlight” with a happy ending.

Our Take

I was pretty interested in talking about aura last week because I think that Revue Starlight is a fascinating piece of media in all of its multifarious forms. Unfortunately, though, this saccharine ending really didn’t do it for me in the way that I wanted, so really any talk of Benjamin or other thinkers feels a little out of place. I just don’t think that Revue Starlight put as much thought into this as I did

It is a Karen and Hikari-centric episode. How could it not be? The childhood promise must come to pass, in accordance with anime law. I was just bored for most of the runtime. I already knew that Hikari was going to bring Karen to an all-is-lost moment, but that in the same way she jumped in during the pilot, she would continue to meddle in the affairs of fate to save her friend. What I didn’t expect, however, was what the giraffe’s ideology would be and how the show was unafraid to bastardize its own premise.

In this episode, the giraffe calls himself something akin to the ultimate spectator and that he does the Stage of Fate as a theater fan, first and foremost. He then tries to implicate the audience by looking into the animation equivalent of a camera and say that those of us watching are co-conspirators in this teen girl meat grinder. I don’t think so. Not only is this not well set up at all, but it’s such a cop-out. The giraffe doesn’t ever get a backstory or explanation. I’m not even looking for something plausible. My bar for this was pretty low, but Revue Starlight doesn’t just get to not answer the question. Furthermore, what is the giraffe trying to implicate me in? The Japanese theater system’s cruel and exploitative practices? No, for at least a dozen reasons.

The show then ends with a syrupy-sweet sanitized version of “Starlight” performed by the 99^th Class. I’m not sure how copyright law works in Japan, but it’s weird to think that you could do an adaptation of a book that completely changes the message and ending by tacking on an extraneous epilogue. It’s also not even good within the context of the story. This show has always tried to work on two levels, the school of Seisho academy and a “Starlight” within the show, starring all of the girls. Bringing them together was something Revue had to do, but it feels as if the creators hand-waved away the whole of the mythology they spent the last eleven episodes building.

It wasn’t a total loss, though. We get a nice little B-Plot of the rest of the girls making dinner together. It has really nothing to do with the A-Plot and totally throws the episode off in terms of tone, but it was nice to get a proper send-off for the characters I actually liked on the show. It’s good that Revue Starlight remembers that there are no small parts, only a pair of very small actors at the helm of their production.

It’s genuinely disappointing that the show ended like this. This is definitely one of the weakest episodes in the season, and having it come at the end like this is going to leave a pretty bad taste in my mouth about the whole experience. It’s unlikely the show has another season in it, or if it does it would have to be drastically different. I think if we see any more anime from this franchise, it’ll probably be one of the other manga series that was green-lit. I can’t say that terribly interests me either. It’s hard to applaud for a show when the closing number is this weak.