Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is an oddly-titled tale of four girls trying to make it as… not a band exactly, but a musical/creative sort of group. the biggest issue, of course, is that all these girls have massive issues that need to be worked through if they’re ever to be happy or successful. It’s a tried and true formula, but there’s no reason to hold that against this fairly recent outing.
Our story begins with Mahiru (aka Yoru), highschool girl and traumatized former artist, as she goes about feeling adrift and powerless in her own life. One night in neon-lit Shibuya, she encounters Kano – a girl her age with a drastically different attitude. They bond over the odd coincidence that a mural of a jellyfish Mahiru created as a kid (which became a trauma for her when her friends looked down on it and tagged it, not knowing the author) is something that Kano came to really like.
After they get talking, Mahiru learns of Kano’s idol aspirations – how she was one before, how she was forced out of that space by scandal (about allegedly attacking someone, not the colloquial “scandal”), and how she still continues to sing under a new identity as the mysterious artist JELEE. Mahiro is offered a chance to come back to art in order to draw promotional material for JELEE, but at first refuses due to her nerves and critically low self esteem. A second encounter, however, convinces her that maybe, just maybe, even if she can’t do anything for herself she might be able to with Kano in the picture, in sort of a reverse “Believe in the me who believes in you” kind of vibe (pretty much “I can believe in myself because you believe in me”).
Next to be recruited is Mei, a superfan of Kano’s old idol self who has managed to ID and track her down. There’s some strife along the way, convincing her to accept Kano’s present persona, but that’s overcome and it turns out she’s a talented pianist and also a composer, which is needed since Kano herself can only really do lyrics and sing. Following that we meet an old friend of Mahiru, prep student and vtuber Kiui, who Mahiru taps for expertise with animation, hopefully taking her still drawings and processing them into a music video. Which, after an episode dealing with her secret trauma from a failed high school debut and the continued pressure of living a pack of lies, is exactly what happens.
Next up we introduce Kano’s old idol group – itself returning to the limelight just as Kano begins to launch on her own – which happens to be produced, now as then, by Kano’s own mother. This drives her to compete, and gets the girls to burn the midnight oil to put out a second video, one that rather than just “doing well” goes viral.
Turns out they should have recorded in a studio environment rather than in an apartment with a drunk and complaining big sis in the next room, as the song turned out more “haunted” than compelling thanks to some extra wails and moans. Goof or no, though, it gets a lot of attention, most of which is positive about the music. Mahiru, though, makes the mistake of reading the comments.
Her trauma deepens as talented fan-artists render the character in new detail, leaving Mahiru feeling like JELEE’s weak link. Luckily, after several important talkings-to, she’s able to channel her frustration into a drive to improve rather than shutting down.
After making another big release, JELEE starts to struggle, causing them to take an episode to help an annoying background character from episode 1, writing a song for said 31-year-old single mom Idol and incidentally helping her get her life on track. It’s cute, but doesn’t amount to much in the immediate.
After getting a lower deck episode dealing with some of Kano being adrift as she and Kiui get motorcycle licenses, we launch into the gang putting together an anniversary live show. However, Kano gets doxed thanks to some of her guerrilla performing, resulting in threats against the venue and the show having to be more of a live stream than a proper live show. At least it gets everybody on stage.
This is when Kano’s mom enters the picture properly, making a play to poach Mahiru for an arc that basically takes up the rest of the show. Mahiru agonizes over the situation, and it causes Kano to reflect on her past and the relationship with her mother, getting us at long last the story behind her punching one of her co-workers: the cloying annoyance from her former team we’d met briefly earlier led a double life “exposing” scandals of rival idol groups, and when Kano found out she had too much empathy to let that stand.
Mom has some good reasons why she wants Mahiru, and Mahiru ultimately takes the job, knowing that such a challenge will allow her to grow as an artist. The fallout with Kano, however, would struggle to be worse, as Kano feels hurt on several levels (that her friend is ‘leaving’ her and that it was someone else her mother paid attention to in the end) and says quite a few things that come off as almost unspeakably harsh.
All the same, Mahiru works furiously to not give up on JELEE just because she took an outside job, and seems to understand how Kano would be hurt, especially as we lean into it being mostly about Kano’s mommy issues. Kiui and Mei do their best to hold things together, and even save JELEE from disbandment due to Kano’s emotional low.
Thanks to gaining an epiphany helping Kiui work out her issues, Mahiru manages to deliver. She’s even able to extract a bonus from Kano’s mom: allowing JELEE to perform alongside her old group. This takes up the first half of the last episode with the true ending being, I guess, seeing the credits roll (with Kano deeply moved that her mom credited her with her real name and not her old idol name), getting the squad to graduation, and having them have a little fun redoing the old tagged-up mural of Mahiru’s that got this all moving. Thus with JELEE presumably still a thing, the show doesn’t really end so much as stops. I get it, we’ve had enough.
There are three shows that I think need to be referenced talking about Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. The first is Call of the Night but that’s only because I and probably many others first learned about Jellyfish from various sources likening it to Call. Honestly, the two shows don’t have a lot in common. I think the most shared factor is the city nightlife environment and the animation of vibrantly colored darkness… but that’s the main attraction and indulgence in Call of the Night while here, it’s just a little bit of seasoning, not even for that many scenes in the grand scheme of things. Thus, no more will need to be said about that point of comparison.
Next would be Oshi no Ko. Both shows look at least somewhat at the idol and entertainment industry through a disenchanted lens, and deal with the struggles and strife of up and coming young talent. Oshi no Ko owns the theme with more dramatic flair (and a way harsher outlook), taking just about everything further than Jellyfish is willing to go, against the backdrop of what is essentially a murder mystery for our lead. However, if you like that element of one of these two shows, there’s a good chance the other will click with you.
The most relevant in my mind, however, is Saekano. They’re pretty similar – get together a group of troubled high school students on a dream project that feels big, but not impossibly big, dig into their hangups and issues while stumbling forward, and then just when it looks like they’ll make the next level, grapple with a vaguely antagonistic industry pro poaching some of the talent and what that does to the group dynamics. Jellyfish does in one clean sequence what Saekano awkwardly does in two arcs smeared across three outings. And, critically, the characters in this one are way better. My biggest hangup with Saekano, a fair part of why it got a pretty low grade, was that the characters were generic 2D archetypes in a show where there was supposed to be a line drawn between 2D archetypes and real people. That line isn’t an issue in Jellyfish, since it’s dealing with a different creative sphere, but the characters are still rounded people with complex inner worlds even when they do have familiar archetypes to fall back on. At least, moreso than that other show.
Thus, to an extent, Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is the show that really kills Saekano by being better than Saekano at everything Saekano wanted to be. It tells what’s shockingly close to being just the same story, but with more investment, more pathos, and better pacing.
But… does that mean Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is actually great in its own right?
Well, there certainly are faults. While it handled its big talent poaching final arc better than its predecessor did the same, it still had an issue where it kind of became something else partway through. It’s not at all for the same reasons, but this is once again a show that started stronger than it finished. The characters are much more rounded and real than the Saekano characters, but that left a worrying low bar, and there is an extent to which Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night abandons doing character study once it has its establishment, following a safer and more comfortable route rather than actually showing how experiences beyond their introductions change most of these characters, with Mahiru as the most notable exception.
In the end, while I have to give credit where it’s due for managing flawless victory against its nearest rival, Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night is… a standard sort of good, with plenty of strengths but also the flaws you might anticipate. It stumbles here and there, and never really achieves greatness. There wasn’t really anything in this show that wowed me, that convinced me I’d come back to it years later, that I’d remember these characters or want them to be real. Its plot is fine, its cast is fine. It’s good… but not great.
I don’t want to take too many shots, though, because this show is still good – I’m giving it a B+ – but if you hope for more this isn’t where you’re going to find it. It colors inside the lines and delivers a very solid but not exactly thrilling performance. Check it out if the genre sounds up your alley.
Post Script: While jellyfish apparently do sleep despite not having a central nervous system, I could find no evidence that they are actually incapable of underwater motion when the sun isn’t out.