Bocchi The Rock! — The Singularity That Breaks Animation
Bocchi The Rock! is a singularity this season, scratch that, this decade. Already quite a few anime fanatics have it on their radars, and one of the fundamental reasons is certainly because of the way Bocchi The Rock! actively breaks animation. The Sakuga Blog already covered splendidly the show a few weeks ago with enthusiast words in a very pertinent piece, and so this article will try to complement its content rather than to parrot it.
Bocchi The Rock! was first and foremost a manga published in Manga Time Kirara MAX back in 2017. But the title isn’t Hamaji Aki’s first time working with the magazine, since her Kirari Books Meisouchuu was serialized from 2015 to 2017. The manga is a love letter dedicated to the magazine, as its name suggests, and features a certain amount of referencing — thus denoting a keen eye for the genre where legendary titles like K-ON! (keep it in mind!) were born.
In a few aspects does Kirari Books Meisouchuu evoke what would then become Bocchi the Rock!: the workplace where the plot is staged is a bookstore, and the literary industry undergoes parody (in Bocchi The Rock!, the action is staged at STARRY, a live house, and the management of a band is well-detailed, with gags centering around the music industry and “lifestyle”). It also follows the 4-koma format that is characteristic to both the lightheadedness and lack of striking progression of the story. What’s more, similar character traits key to the comedy are found, such as the rich girl that overspends with a deficiency in common sense, or the use of social media to be popular.
The reason K-ON! was directly mentioned previously is because the resemblance is sparkling. Though Yui might have a lack of common sense, as a protagonist she is far less dysfunctional than Bocchi, and this is why Bocchi The Rock! also doubles as a coming-of-age story in the progatonist’s growth. Both main characters feature moe personalities, and go on to bond with other girls through music as a shared interest. Additionally, both girls play the same instrument, the guitar — an instrument that befits more their central roles as it plays the melody rather than, say, the bass, that is more concerned with harmonics and befits more Ryo as a support character.
If Yui in the moe setting of K-ON! has appeared to some critics as a character that raised some questions about gender, a very enlightening piece has been written to act as a counterpoint, deeming moe as representative of the experience of neurodiversity by women. The piece’s conclusion, “Moe is also arguably evolving. Perhaps […] we will also continue to see innovation within moe as well: from Hitoribocchi’s genuinely sweet and notably on-the-nose representation of social anxiety[…]”, feels like it’s prophesizing what Bocchi The Rock! would bring to the table.
To break animation, you need to know its rules. And the constant trip back-and-forth between a more conventional (and thereby immersing; instilling a sense of normalcy) and a more bizarre and out-there style requires a great deal of consent from the viewer. The suspension of disbelief is impossible to maintain from beginning to end. And the eerie mood, the sudden tonal shifts and the heaviness of Hitori’s social anxiety will also dampen the lightheadedness of the comedy… The reverse being true, as the comedy will shine brighter and the dark moments being a part of the gags.
Great comedy requires great timing, and timing in animation can be shown through many ways. One of them being smears, and you find a lot of those in Bocchi The Rock!’s character acting compared to the usual limited animation of the medium, giving it a more vivid sense of motion and an impactful snapiness.
In episode 7, the latest to have aired, Hitori suffers two more times what Sakuga Blog called the show’s “willingness to distort its titular character”. At some point, overwhelmed by the two most sociable girls of the band, Hitori shuts off her surroundings and ends up surrounded by dolls walking in a circle. She has become a real doll, as the dolls have a distinct materiality. The technique in use is called stop motion, and the distinct materiality might engage the viewer’s empathy more, or the brutality of the scene might create a strange play with a sense of textures. The way the anime went from two-dimensional to three-dimensional introduced a shift in perception that has much potential.
The same episode also had a part where the main character turns into a small ball of matter, with a distorted physicality that reminds of the moe blob. However, the scene goes on with a tragedy unfolding as every member of the band present ends up dying. The fact that it ends up in a tragedy might remind of what Sakuga Blog also says about the artistic direction: “They were willing to turn up her dysfunctionality to eleven in spectacular ways, but only because that would increase the contrast with her quiet moments of solitude, because they’d make the rare instance where she gets to be proactive look more heroic”. Indeed, tragedies are stories that inherently revolve around heroes pitched against a despairing and cruel fate. Animation is broken here because of the inconsistency of the protagonist’s volume, which also ends up being a deformation.
But Bocchi The Rock! is a treasure trove of glitches in the Matrix, in the sense that every episode is full-packed of such oddities involving animation, seamed in a narrative that somehow works because it is fundamentally dispatched, with the different 4-koma chapters being reorchestrated in non-linearity. And this article shall conclude by strongly encouraging you to embrace the storm that makes up the soul of this anime!
