WONDER EGG PRIORITY
This season of anime that has just ended featured several original projects that, with their diverse visions, tried to achieve the glory of being the best anime among all its competition, thus apparently giving a solid start to this 2021. Among all these peculiar works, one that caught my attention when I saw its promotional poster (a quartet of girls in the soft grass).
Its Madoka aura in the first episode appealed to me to continue watching the series to see if it would be another failed attempt to follow the dark magical girl genre proposed by the previously mentioned one. And it ended up becoming an anime with its own identity that delivered much more than I expected to watch, thus giving place to a work of an ambitious production as not seen in a long time. With 12 episodes broadcast so far, planning to premiere its thirteenth and final episode on June 29, 2021. We present you the review of this beautiful work so far.
Ohto Ai is a young student who has stopped attending classes or expressing herself openly to her family after the suicide of her best and only friend. Wandering aimlessly through the night, seeking to clear her head or simply distract herself in solitude, a strange presence begins to guide her to a machine where she obtains a so-called "Wonder Egg.”
Later that night, while sleeping, Ai finds herself in a dream world where her egg transforms into a girl. The mysterious voice that initially guided her to the egg tells her that she might win the chance to get her friend back if she can defend this girl until dawn. Under the possibility of such a miracle, Ai decides to fight to protect these eggs. Encountering companions along the way and the mysterious entities that run the egg system, she begins a story of fears, past traumas, and self-improvement.
Wonder Egg Priority is one of those stories where through a fantastic scenario, its protagonists fight to reach a goal, while their battles reflect their inner conflicts as they search for answers to their inner doubts. Belonging to the kind of stories where the specific details of the story and how the whole world works don't really matter, as the focus of the story is the journey of emotional self-discovery that its heroines go through, we find a drama that doesn't hesitate to touch on topics that are usually feared to be explored, I mean the reasons around suicide.
Without romanticizing things, nor leaving them only as ambiguous symbolism for the sake of appearing to be artistic, the story does not hesitate to be crude or honest with some of its themes when confronting them in a dreamlike world to these girls and their duty to protect the unfortunate souls.
They took death as an option, being now haunted by the manifestations of their personal tragedies or fears. Overall it has the potential to be an emotionally powerful work, and at its best, it is, even though its themes are sensitive and might be a punch to the stomach for some people. You're probably wondering if the series does have the potential to be great, where does it fail, and the answer is surprisingly simple to scale.
WEP, an ambitious production studio eager to mark its name in the memory of its viewers and the industry, its animators decided to put all the ideas they had on the table. Starting with a slice of life drama with a dose of magical realism to talk about internal conflicts, pseudo-magical girls fighting traumas in the dream world, these suspicious ambiguous figures offer a possible Faustian bargain, magical pets that protect those they see as their mothers.
Science fiction in the form of genetic experiments, research on the line between life and death, or the accidental creation of a technological singularity and. .. I think you already get an idea of how overloaded it can feel in only 12 episodes or less since one is a recap. By the end, you feel like you still have unanswered questions and untied threads. I'll wait these next few months to see how they manage to close all the series plot threads in the special episode they announced.
I loved the characters; usually, as the story progresses, I try to determine my favorite character. But in this series, I couldn't most of the time, as they are all fascinating. We have Ai, Neiru, Rika, and Momoe, and it is through these characters, the world of Wonder Egg Priority becomes more complicated.
A well-defined female cast with enough personality that part of the series narrative decides to focus on the chemistry resulting from their interaction; in the day-to-day life of strangers with much in common who end up becoming friends. Each of the young women carries with herself a burden related to the person around her who took her own life, entering into the unusual "egg game" to reverse the situation.
In the end, they are nothing more than four teenagers blinded by a promise that who knows if it will ever be fulfilled, dealing with the problems linked to one of the most complicated stages of life and struggling with the direct consequences of the death of someone close to them. Their desires are the driving force behind the narrative of the series, but also the business around some eggs that are extracted from a gashapon (a kind of vending machine widespread in Japan) owned by two strange talking mannequins that monopolize the whole thing and which also have a story of their own.
As far as the technical aspect of WEP is concerned, this is a work that, in its best moments, rivals productions that one usually expects to see in animated works aimed at the world of moviemaking. However, the ambition to maintain that standard throughout the series was paid for in sweat, tears, and blood. I'm not exaggerating too much, with rumors of animators leaving the studio in an ambulance because of overwork only to return hours later to finish their passion project—the result of the unhealthy practices of the anime industry.
In general, when it comes to their timing to produce a work and CloverWorks studio trying to do three simultaneous projects where each of them ended up suffering from some sort of problem was miraculously solid from start to finish. However, they had to resort to an unplanned recap and hire Twitter artists as backups to get everything just in time.
The series is colorful and full of personality, changing style according to the tone of the moment to the point where different scenes may seem to belong to totally different series with the usual splurges of animation crowning the episodes either with their composition, movements, or use of lights, resulting in a visual spectacle.
Probably my favorite anime of the year, and I say "probably" because I still can't give a final verdict since there is still no conclusion of the series. An anime that plays with fantasy presents us with a highly crude reality that Japanese society does not usually talk about. To really cover all its elements would require an extremely long analysis, but I think everyone should draw their own conclusions. I absolutely recommend it.
