Anime Review: Sonny Boy — Overambitious and Needlessly Complicated

Sonny Boy
Genres: Mystery, Isekai, Super power, Psychological
Rating: PG13

As an anime, Sonny Boy has all of the tell-tale markers of a “deep” anime: an artsy animation style, a dreamy soundtrack, and the perfect sort of plotline to have deep personal impacts on the characters’ lives. And yet, after making it over halfway through the show, it became apparent that this story, like the characters set adrift in various alternate worlds, was going nowhere.

Sonny Boy is a retelling of the 1972 Manga The Drifting Classroom, which in itself is already loosely based on Lord of the Flies. In Sonny Boy, all the third years of a local middle school are set adrift. They and the school building enter what they call “This World” (a black void). Without teachers or adults, they have to establish a set of rules that they are all willing to follow, as well as a leader they can look up to. And just to make things a little more chaotic, some of the kids begin developing supernatural powers.

Now, if the entire show followed this premise, kids without adults entering a power vacuum and struggling for control and survival, the show would have been okay. Nothing new (again, a Lord of the Flies-esque story), but coherent. However, instead of sticking to this plotline, the whole story tilts sideways after only a few episodes. When the main character develops the power to flip through different worlds he uses it to attempt to find the way back to the world all of the kids call home. In his search, he shifts them through various worlds that might have originally served the purpose of teaching the children a lesson, but ultimately just confuses the audience. Some worlds only receive one episode of coverage, some even less than that, while others are given three (only to find out later that it was two different worlds the whole time?).

There’s the smallest hint of wisdom that each world is trying to give to the drifting students, but considering how it doesn’t affect the behavior of any of the kids, it feels pointless.

Ultimately, I did drop this anime at 8/12 episodes. It was almost painful to watch the characters barrelling through and learning nothing. They gained no depth, there is no emotional connection between character and audience, and the world is constantly shifting so that what might barely count as a plotline has no foothold.

2/10 for this anime, and it’s only getting that because it had some really cute animated cats.