Healer Girl – The Spring 2022 Preview Guide

What’s this?

Those who use “voice medicine,” the ability to heal wounds and cure illnesses with song, are called “healers.” There are three apprentice healers working at the Karasuma Voice Treatment Center. Kana Fujii, an energetic girl who sets the tone, the strong-willed lady Reimi Itsushiro, and Hibiki Morishima, who is caring but firm. These three first-year high school girls are training after school to become full-fledged healers. With the addition of Sonia Yanagi, a returnee who is a certified C-level healer, the girls sing songs of healing as they work toward their dreams.

healer girl is an original anime and airs on Crunchyroll on Monday.

How was the first episode?

We get a lot of music related anime, mostly idol shows, but it’s extremely rare that we get a full one. West Side Story-Anime style Capital-M Musical. Time healer girl it doesn’t quite go into that territory, it gets pretty close, and the result is a vibrant and serious little pleasure. You’re just going to need a stomach for unfailingly cloying sentimentality to get through it.

Make no mistake: if you’re the kind of person who starts wincing when characters stare into the middle distance and start singing their feelings, you’ll find nothing but pain here. healer girl it’s a show so bubbly in tone, aesthetic, and presentation, that it has no room for a concept as cynical as cringe. He’s dancing down the street, humming a pop ballad too loud with his airpods blaring, and you can jog to his tune or rush across the street to avoid him.

I love musicals, even if the listening sensitivity of this show is not my thing. But that is more than made up for by the wonderful, colorful and constantly expressive animation that brings these characters and their songs to life. The way each one moves, especially in their flowing “Healer” robes, is simply a delight to take in. The characters themselves are likeable enough, though not particularly deep or novel. But the way they are characterized through movement, how they physically interact with each other and the world around them, is so charming that it overcomes any writing shortcomings.

And because there’s not a hint of cynicism in her body, all of that makes Kana and her friends really fun to watch, whether they’re healing the sick or goofing around to avoid filling out paperwork. My favorite scene is easily the one where Kana asks her fellow apprentices why they chose to be healers, and they all spontaneously start chanting her motivations. It’s corny, silly, and culminates with Hibiki so caught up in singing about her admiration for her teacher that nothing can stop her. It takes what could be a bit of character exposition based on the books and turns it into something with a lot more personality, and if the rest of the show can add touches like that, I think it’ll turn out to be a wonderful little one. Show.

There are no doubt people who will be put off by the chord that this show is amazing, and I totally understand that. healer girl it’s capering right on the line between serious iyashikei and irritating pabulum, and no amount of stellar production is going to make you like something you find annoyingly powerful. But at least for this first episode, I’m happy to sing along with this sweet, sugary gum.

It’s not exactly a secret that singing can sometimes help calm you down or affect your mood, and I’m not just saying that because my mom took The King and I tips on whistling a happy tune to literally forget you’re scared. (Because who doesn’t want terrible musical accompaniment on a harrowing boat trip?) healer girl However, it may be taking the concept a bit too far, with its fancy third branch of medicine and an apprenticeship program to train girls to become full-fledged musical healers. Male voices don’t work as well? Aren’t there accredited musical medical schools? Who knows? It’s a musical, annoying things like serious questions are not necessary here.

And this really is a pretty classic musical. While there are songs to cure a variety of ailments, we also have a couple of instances where people just break into song to explain things like why they got into music healing in the first place, and before we know what’s going on in that opening scene, Kana walking down the street singing at full volume and the stunned facial expressions of the people on the street certainly looks like a self-aware musical. Even the basic plot of Kana’s inability to wait until his training is complete before healing people feels a bit like Broadway material, or at least the disney channel, especially since there are no real repercussions for him doing it twice in this episode. It’s lucky that she has both talent and enthusiasm, because otherwise the whole thing with Yui’s grandmother could have gone downhill quickly.

How much you like this will absolutely depend on your ability to suspend your disbelief. Not that it’s any less ridiculous than any argument we’ve seen over the years; it’s more the way it runs. I really appreciate that we don’t get a lot of long-winded explanations about what the whole music curation thing is, and that Karasuma and Shoko (the girls’ trainees’ teachers) go to what is clearly an academic conference. an important part of world building, because it establishes music medicine as a real and serious profession in the world of history rather than a fringe belief. But at the end of the day, it’s still a story about a very cheerful, almost TSTL, high school girl who sings to people to make their boos go away. And it’s worth mentioning that all but one of the cases we see in this episode appear to be scrapes and scrapes, even those treated by Karasuma. Possibly this is to save the drama of Grandma’s breakdown at the end of the episode, which isn’t a terrible plan, but it does feel a bit strange, since normally a scratch is more of a trip to the pharmacy than the doctor.

I’m not sure I’d be interested in seeing more of this. Kana’s naivete is a bit overdone, watching Reimi gasp behind her teacher isn’t as funny as I’d like, and the episode didn’t really sell me on the appeal of musical healing. But I’m not really a music or musical person either, so if those things are more appealing to you, I think this could be quite fun.