LogFAQs > #968560325

95. The Price of Smiles
https://myanimelist.net/anime/38544/Egao_no_Daika
Winter 2019 (12 episodes)
My Score: 7/10, MAL Score: 6.05/10
Best Character: Soleil Yuki

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYvE-BBXg08

Premise: Princess Soleil Yuki is the young leader of her Kingdom after her parents died in a tragedy many years ago. She's idealistic and hopeful for a bright future, but her advisors are hiding just how strained relations with the neighboring Empire have become.

The Good: The Price of Smiles is a mecha battle anime about a war between a Kingdom and an Empire on another planet in the distant future. The story does a lot of things I found compelling. Princess Yuki is the main perspective from the Kingdom, but Stella, an Empire soldier, is given almost equal prominence. By showing both sides, typical themes like "war is bad" gain addition weight. No one is being evil simply for the sake of it. The war has complex motivations like scarcity of resources or new discoveries which threaten the balance of power, making conflict all but inevitable. It often did a neat thing where one episode would show characters fighting faceless goons... and then later we'd see the battle from the other perspective and realize they were actually fighting a character we knew and kinda like. No matter who or what they were fighting for, these are all people with hopes and dreams. Some parts of TPoS were legitimately difficult to watch because it told the tragedy of war so impactfully. I also really liked the setting, including some of the later sci-fi twists.

The Bad: I talked a lot above about how having perspectives from both sides gave weight to the themes. However, the sides aren't as equal as they should be. Yuki is great, as I'll cover in her write-up below, but Stella is cold and full of PTSD. Most of the Empire soldiers in her unit took a long time to grow on me, if they ever did. They're the invaders, which puts them at a moral disadvantage for the viewers right away. I don't think the story does enough to overcome that. It also doesn't help that we never see what life in the Empire is like, which would've helped sell the necessity of the war to gain resources.

Overall: I enjoyed The Price of Smiles, even when it wrecked me emotionally. That said, I often feel like I appreciate it more for what it was trying to do rather than what it actually accomplished. Having perspectives from both sides added depth to everything, but Yuki's side is far more likeable than Stella's. It wasnt enough to ruin the story for me because I saw what they were going for, but some tighter writing and a few small changes could've made this a lot better. At least the mecha action scenes were always good, and Yuki was a solid character.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/3/9/5/AAcDcBAADwVL.jpg

CHARACTER: Soleil Yuki (The Price of Smiles)
https://myanimelist.net/character/167632/Yuuki__Soleil
Voiced by: Hanamori Yumiri
TOP 100 RANK: 89th

(I couldn't find a good video for her)

SPOILERS FOR THE PRICE OF SMILES

The war in The Price of Smiles is a first episode twist, mostly because Yuki's advisors have been keeping things from her due to her young age and the hope that they can fix things for her before it gets out of hand. I appreciated the story opening this way, because it shows Yuki at her most idealistic and hopeful. She has a huge group of trusted advisors, including her childhood friend Joshua. Thanks to technological advancements, including a seemingly impossible new power source, the Kingdom is thriving. She even wants to send food to the struggling Empire, not yet realizing how bad things have gotten between them. Yuki is a good person, but holding onto that becomes a struggle after Joshua's body returns from the first engagement and she learns what's really going on.

Yuki eventually overcomes her shock and grief. She surprises everyone by proving to be a capable defensive commander, too. The Kingdom's advantage in technology and training can overwhelm individual units of Empire soldiers, and she smartly maneuvers everything to hold them back for months. The Empire's sheer numbers eventually break through, however, and defeat seems all but certain. I found Yuki compelling through all of this. She continues losing her advisors, people she's known and loved all her life. They're whittled away, one by one. Yuki even decides to be the one to tell a little girl that her father is never coming home, even though the girl lashes out at her and it breaks Yuki's heart. For a young girl, Yuki shows surprising strength and realistic vulnerability. She keeps fighting too, never losing her hope for a brighter future.

The problem is, how can there be a brighter future when conflict seems inevitable? Even if the Empire wins this war, what they gain won't last forever. The planet itself seems to be turning desolate, and they only managed as well as they have been thanks to an advanced energy source no one quite understands. Near the end of the season, however, Yuki learns a startling truth. That new energy source actually comes from destroying the terraforming nanomachines in the air that were keeping the planet habitable. These ancient miracles of technology, long forgotten by the current population, have dwindled to the point that the planet is dying. I remember a lot of people in the Crunchyroll comments for these episodes really hated this twist. They called it a dumb allegory for climate change. Which, yeah, it's obviously alluding to that, but I don't mind when the message in fiction is applicable. I really liked the twist that the advanced energy source they've been relying on was actually the cause of their misfortune in the first place. It's a neat sci-fi idea.

I also liked how Yuki responded to it. While the remainder of her army distracts the enemy with a last stand elsewhere, she and a small force push into enemy territory to reach an experimental research base. There, they can destroy the sci-fi energy source for good. It's a risk, as even without their mecha the enemy has occupied most of the Kingdom. Disabling everything will still put them at the Empire's mercy. Stella also winds up being part of the unit to respond to Yuki's force. She's the one holding the princess at gunpoint hearing an insane story about healing the world. Stella has no way of knowing what this will do. It could even be a last-ditch superweapon from the Kingdom to turn the tide. Indeed, Yuki's advisors initially encouraged her to find a way to only disable the enemy's technology. Yuki knows they all need to sacrifice, however. She makes a compelling argument for peace and the need to finally trust each other, and Stella allows her to proceed. Even a broken soldier who earnestly believed in what they were fighting for is willing to take a chance at peace when it's offered to them.

The plan works, the energy source is destroyed, and the nanomachines will eventually return to normal and heal the planet with it. Yuki's refusal to abandon her ideals leads to peace. It'll be a hard future as everyone returns to a lower level of technology. However, Yuki has more than proven herself to be a capable leader, and I was left with the impression that she would build a brighter future. Her sorrow made me care about her, and her refusal to let it break her made me love her. Despite everything she had lost, I was glad things mostly worked out in the end.