Bocchi the Rock! Review

On paper this is a cute girls in a band comedy, a genre with a hundred entries, and what separates it is CloverWorks' decision to animate Hitori Gotoh's anxiety as a series of increasingly unhinged visual set pieces: she melts, she pixelates, she becomes claymation, live action footage and a ball of static, and every one of those breaks is a joke that lands. The comedy is precise and the timing is superb.

Underneath it the show has a real subject, which is what it costs a person like Bocchi to do anything at all, and it treats that with a sympathy that never becomes sentimental. The band members are distinct and warm. The concert episodes are animated with a care usually reserved for action, and the songs are good enough to have charted. The story is slight, a series of small steps rather than a plot, and that is the point. It is the rare comedy that is also a work of animation.