LogFAQs > #910270213

Okay, time for a serious revue (starlight).

This show had a lot of cool things going for it. The feel is fairly unique, with a kinda cool atmosphere. The way the dialogue is written makes it feel fairly unique. I liked the instrumental music a lot. The vocal songs were mostly kinda meh, but the BGM is where the show derived a lot of its emotional power I think. The animation was also really good at times. The fights had some crazy fluid combat, and the transformation sequence looked quite nice. I think the show was mostly pretty effective at setting out what it tried to accomplish. Unfortunately, I hated everything about it.

Let's start with the characters. All of them sucked. None of them were particularly original, and most of them were annoying, especially Karen and Hikari. Lots of these types of series will have a character who's obsessed with another character to the exclusion of everyone else, and while that works sometimes, it doesn't here. Karen seems to be living a full, fulfilling life before Hikari comes back, but after she does it feels like she stops caring about all of her other friends and only Hikari matters. I could maybe accept that if there were romance in this series, but there isn't, so it falls extra flat. Hikari's even more annoying. It really doesn't make any sense why she's so cold to Karen early on. They kind of try to say later that it's because she's worried that Karen forgot about her and their promise...but then we learn later on that Karen wrote letters to her constantly for the last 12 years? Which Hikari never responded to because??? I dunno, maybe the show had a bunch of different writers who never communicated or something. The rest of the class was mostly quite shallow and felt like they were just ripped off from other series or something. Trying to have 9 main characters in a 12 episode show can be too much. They probably should've just left the others as minor characters to maybe give better development to the mains. The only one I actually liked was Mahiru. She was super sympathetic for the most part, as she got the shaft from both Karen and the show itself. Nana's first episode was pretty good, but her storyline was resolved in a totally half-assed way that was kinda blah to me.

I also despised the setting and the premise. I heard a lot of hype for the show, even before it aired, since apparently the animation was going to be super special and it was going to have some cool Utena-esque twists, but even then I was skeptical about whether I'd actually like it, because the theater-training school sounded like a lame place. And it was. I don't like the school at all, or the focus on theater, especially in such a shallow way (I like Glass Mask a lot, which focuses on theater in a much more interesting way, partly because it focuses more on acting itself...why didn't the girls ever have acting training scenes anyway? It was all fancy dancing and jumping and tap-dancing and Starlight never had any of that). Their idea of performing Starlight three years in a row was super stupid. The show never really showed why all of them were willing to participate in the Revue, considering what was on the line. And the Revue itself never ended up having much thematic depth, nor actual sense-making depth. It really just felt like the show was aping Utena without understanding what made that show so good (it does manage to avoid some of Utena's flaws, but not enough to be a good show). Because I never really cared about the characters or the setting or anything, the fights didn't have much of an impression on me despite the good animation. I don't think the choreography was the best either.

Finally, the last episode was just plain bad. For most of the show I can see why others would like it as it does come down to personal preference. The finale sucked though. How does Karen idolize Starlight so much that it changed her life but not like that it's a tragedy... Also augh amnesia. Also Hikari is so dumb. Also it should be the 101st festival.
---

All the stars in the sky are waiting for you.