Bullied teen Nina Iseri drops out of high school, promising her strict father that she’ll pass the college entrance exams.

After trying to make it on her own as a street musician, Momoka Kawaragi makes plans to return home and leave her dreams behind.

Young actress Subaru Awa appeases her famous grandmother with lies.

Gifted keyboardist Tomo Ebizuka runs away from her neglectful parents, taken in by the kind but lonely Rupa.

These five women make up the band Togenashi Togeari–the Thornless Thorn–and they’re going to rock Tokyo with their heads held high and middle fingers held even higher.

Girls Band Cry: The 3D Anime That Demands to Be Heard

Quick Review

Girls Band Cry is a character-driven drama that pushes and expands the limits of 3D animation to tell a deeply compelling story about trauma and belonging. The animation team applies 2D animation techniques to dynamic 3D animation, creating a symphony that brilliantly showcases what the medium is capable of.

The characters are raw and real, portrayed as beautifully imperfect victims of devastating circumstances. The music is fast and intense with dark, confessional lyrics that will appeal to alt-rock fans.

For fans of messy drama, alt-rock and the craft of animation, I can’t recommend this series enough.

Watch it on Hoopla!

3D Anime Evolution

While Japan is more famous for 2D animation, studios over there have been working with 3D CGI for just as long as Americans have. In 1983, Golgo 13: The Professional was the first feature-length animated film to use computer animation, incorporating CGI into a handful of action sequences. For reference, this was one year after the release of the original Tron, which had the most extensive use of CGI in the world at the time.

By the 2000s, Japanese studios had not shifted to 3D as enthusiastically as American ones, but there were still some noteworthy examples of full 3D CGI films being produced. 2001’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was a joint US and Japanese production, while the 1985 manga Appleseed was adapted into a CGI film in 2004.

Full 3D anime is still rare, but studios continue to incorporate CGI into 2D animation to this day. The techniques and technology have evolved greatly, culminating in gorgeous anime like the critically acclaimed Violet Evergarden and the smash hit Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. These titles blend 3D and 2D animation to create dazzling visual effects, sometimes seamlessly combining the two while other times deliberately evoking the contrast to create otherworldly effects.

Why 3D?

Before we go further, I want to make sure that we’re on the same page, so here’s a heads-up that I’ll be using the following terms interchangeably:

  • 3D animation
  • CGI
  • Computer animation

There is nuance to these terms, and 2D CGI is certainly a thing, but in most cases and especially for the purposes of this article, the three mean largely the same thing: animation that is achieved via digital models that are rigged and moved much like a highly intricate puppet. In contrast, 2D or “traditional” animation is drawn frame-by-frame to create the illusion of movement.

One of the big strengths of 3D animation is that you can use the same filming techniques you would use for a live-action film. Sweeping dolly shots or rotating crane shots can be mimicked with 2D animation, but to do so requires thousands of hours spent drawing hundreds of pictures just to make five seconds of animation. Alternatively, you can use 3D animation software and rotate the camera as much as you like.

In the world of anime, this freedom to move the camera as you wish has been a big boon for idol and band anime. While creating, rigging and rendering 3D models is still a painstaking task, the dynamic camera movements available to 3D animation make for dazzling musical sequences.

In 2020, the animation studio Sanzigen took things a step further when they produced D4DJ First Mix, a full 3D anime about disc jockeys. Like other recent computer animations such as The Bad Guys and The Mitchells vs. The Machines, D4DJ incorporates 2D animation techniques into 3D animation, bringing together the expressiveness of the former and the dynamic cinematography of the latter. And D4DJ would be far from the last anime to combine 2D and 3D ‘s strengths in this way.

Drama Queens

Girls Band Cry is a character-driven drama with indie rock band Togennashi Togeari as our ensemble cast. The emotional core of the series is the hot-and-cold situationship between Nina and Momoka.

Momoka is the former front woman for Diamond Dust, Nina’s favorite band in high school. Nina credits “Void,” a song written and sung by Momoka, with saving her life.

Initially, Nina and Momoka’s interactions are as friendly as you’d expect from a fan and her indie rock idol. Nina’s having a rough first day in Kawasaki–a suburb of Tokyo–so Momoka is nice enough to buy her a meal and offer her apartment as shelter for a bit. In turn, Nina’s love for Momoka and her music inspires her to stick with her dreams and form a new band with Nina. It’s a very sweet, amicable relationship.

Four episodes later, these two are screaming at each other and tossing ice-cold drinks into each other’s faces.

The band quickly becomes a family for the five girls, with all the good and bad that entails. Emotions between them are volatile and deeply personal, so fights are inevitable. Nina loves Momoka, but that love makes her frustrated by the way Momoka bottles up her own feelings. Nina’s inability to deal with this in a constructive way causes the two to fight.

This flaw extends to the other girls, as well. Subaru’s habit of lying to appease others makes it difficult for Nina to trust her, while Tomo’s high level of talent and low social skills cause her to be needlessly harsh in her critiques of others. Even Rupa–the oldest and most mature of the five–keeps her pain concealed even more than Momoka does.

The girls are messy in an authentic way, their past experiences causing them to struggle with expressing themselves in a healthy manner. But it’s that shared character flaw that makes them such a great rock band. When they play music together, they can finally let it all out.

Appropriately Named

While I’m not knowledgeable enough to speak to Togenashi Togeari’s musical influences in the J-rock scene, I was able to relate their sound to the emo, nu metal and punk music I grew up with in the 2000s. Togenashi Togeari’s songs–written in-universe by Nina and Momoka–feature confessional lyrics that bear the band members’ scars. These intensely emotional songs have appropriate titles such as “Void,” “Emptiness and Catharsis,” and “I’m Nobody.”

Girls Band Cry itself is appropriately named. It is a series very much about trauma, recovery and belonging. It’s about these girls crying out as loud as they can after a lifetime of silent suffering. The music reflects and enhances these themes, and the music in turn is enhanced by the dynamic cinematography of the anime’s musical sequences. As Nina’s voice rings out, the environment is seemingly altered by her feelings. Her voice is strong enough to turn the world upside down.

Dripping with Personality

The cast has strong characterization, most prominently seen with Nina and Momoka, since they’re the two we spend the most time with. But even characters with brief appearances leave strong impressions, such as Nina’s estranged father and Momoka’s indie music idol, Mine. Their short appearances hint at hidden depths to these characters and their relationships with the main cast.

In terms of the main cast, I was especially intrigued by Rupa. She is sadly the only member of Togenari Togeari who doesn’t get a character-focused episode due to the show’s limited 13-episode run. Perhaps because the crew knew they wouldn’t have time to shine the spotlight on her, Rupa ends up asserting herself strongly as soon as she and Tomo join the group. As the most level-headed and mature of the main characters, she often pushes the others to speak their feelings and sort out their conflicts with one another.

Girls Band Cry: The 3D Anime That Demands to Be Heard

Nina is her polar opposite. Her strict upbringing and experiences with bullying have turned her into a pushy brat with little patience for the nuances of social interaction. She’s not the likeable, easy-to-digest sort of character that would make Girls Band Cry more marketable and palatable to a wider audience, which makes her the perfect main character for an anime about an indie rock band. The tension between wanting to be heard and wanting to be authentic is felt by every indie artist, and that tension is expressed expertly through the show’s characters.

The expressive animation reinforces and enhances all of this, the 3D models’ facial expressions featuring the same sort of fluidity and elasticity as 2D animated characters.

Conclusion and Further Reading

Girls Band Cry: The 3D Anime That Demands to Be Heard

Rock is a Lady’s Modesty vol. 1

Girls Band Cry is a unique series that hopefully leads to a rise in similarly dynamic and expressive 3D anime. The songs rock, the characters are messy yet charming and the novelty of a character-driven drama rendered in 3D animation is fascinating. The animators didn’t rest on that novelty either, expertly producing awesome music videos and breathtaking dramatic moments.

This series comes from animation juggernaut Toei Animation, the company famous for grand epics like Dragon Ball and One Piece. It’s a pleasant surprise that Toei was willing to produce Girls Band Cry, as it is drastically different from their bread and butter. There are no classic heroes and villains here. Girls Band Cry is a little more indie, a little more off-the-beaten-path from Toei’s usual output.

Let’s hope Toei continues to invest in creative and ambitious projects like Girls Band Cry, because the gamble paid off and gave us something simply awesome. Give it a watch!

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