You know what, no intro this time. The show doesn’t give us one, why should I?
We begin with a school having already been transported. Where? Kind of nowhere. That is to say, absolutely nowhere, a black void that surrounds it and that has bestowed supernatural powers on some of the thirty-some students. We meet quite a few of these folks in short order: lackadaisical boy Nagara and offbeat girl Nozomi seem to be our leads, more or less doing their own thing while everyone else tries to invoke or avoid a Lord of the Flies scenario.
As this shapes up, we find that power or not, Nozomi seems to be able to see some sort of light. She takes a leap of faith, Nagara risks his life to save her, and they plunge from dark void into a bright ocean with a towering island nearby. Thus the first episode ends, and the audience knows to be ready for a head trip.
Some of the other classmates we’re introduced to early are Cap (a student council member and tyrant who kind of loses it when his authority is challenged), Hoshi (the smug snake of the student council) and Asakaze (the space-warping angry rebel). I’ll mention others as they’re needed.
The first of those would be Mizuho, who seems to have the power to conjure any object. She becomes the target of a witch hunt when the supplies she provides seem to burst into blue flames, even though the truth is that the island has a supernatural rule that nothing can be freely given or stolen lest it burn, always requiring an exchange.
That rule makes island life a little harder for the students, though the half-sunk school still offers refuge and has its own rules. Gateways are found to many other worlds, but most of those seem rather inclement to human life.
That ability of Nozomi, which is given the name “Compass” becomes something of the crux of the idea to journey home… along with Nagara, who is revealed to possess a power to Warp between the strange dimensions, albeit not one that he can control. We putter around a little, dealing with social isolation having (fixable) petrifying consequences and a baseball game around seeing magic otherworld monkeys, before a long warp session reveals the futility of it.
All is not quite for naught, though, as a teacher appears when the havoc ends. She doesn’t have the best of news.
The kids don’t treat this as gospel, however, and the core cast of Nozomi, Nagara, Mizuho, Asakaze, and gadget-making scientist Rajdhani continue to explore worlds, even collecting mysterious prizes from solving their problems, drawing the Compass light ever closer.
The teacher, however, is not one and done. She tries to unite the kids behind her, poaching Asakaze while turning them against Nagara and blaming him for the incident.
The resulting two factions go about their business separately, with a third faction following Hoshi to create an “ark” that ends up allied with the Nagara faction. Ultimately, they discover what seems like a way to hack themselves back home, but it turns out to just be a vision of their own potential future graduation, resulting in a disappointing failure and a revelation that, in that future, Nozomi was dead. Along the way we also encounter the school’s Principal (who is conflated with God and does seem to know about this nonsense) and a student from a later class who has been trapped in otherworlds for five thousand subjective years, turning him into a big, black dog.
So, after that failure, the class we know starts going their own different ways. The dog, Yamabiko, stays with Nozomi, Nagara, and Mizuho. Asakaze is there too. The teacher and Hoshi take their factions separate ways, and Rajdhani goes off on his own.
As this goes on, Nagara is shanghaied by a hierarch in a trans-dimenisional society of exiled students for about an episode, but his jailer decides he’s not culpable for the whole “adrift in dimensions” thing.
As Nozomi makes herself scarce, Yamabiko tells about his backstory, how he was a grumpy, angry loner who eventually found peace and possibly love with a simple and kind girl of incredible power, until his paradise was ruined by magic super-cancer. This was spread by a mysterious drifter, who used Yamabiko’s own inner world to manifest it. The drifter seems to know a great deal, and also seems to be some kind of other level of thing.
He’s killed thousands of people and is out to kill god, by the way.
This setting is absolutely insane. In the best ways, but it’s still a bit of “you figure it out”.
We then get an episode largely focused on Mizuho’s cats. It seems that they, as the locus of her power, actually copy things from the original world rather than transporting much of anything. They’re also somehow related to everyone being adrift, with the implication that everyone but Mizuho might be a copy of a real person.
Following that, the next episode is centered on Asakaze, as seen through a mind-reader girl with a crush on him. He has an unrequited crush on Nozomi, who is willing to go with when God tasks him with taking down War (and “creating Death”). War’s domain is a world of white-gold stone with a gorge that leads down forever to a line of red. On their way down, the evil teacher instigating, a few things come out: the mind-reader’s power, and Asakaze’s crush. Nozomi reaffirms turning him down and gives her reason. Shortly after, the ledge she’s standing on gives way. Asakaze reaches out but declines to save her from falling into the abyss, even though it would be trivial to do with his powers, which horrifies the mind-reader who thought she knew the “real him”
Despite the implication that the gorge is bottomless, this Nozomi’s demise. It’s quiet, understated, and fairly quick. Which, given the nature of this show, is pretty appropriate. There’s no big moment, she just falls, leaving Asakaze questioning why he didn’t save her.
Most of the next episode is spent processing this. We see Mizuho and Nagara hold a memorial service for Nozomi. In its wake, Rajdhani arrives (it’s now been two thousand years for him) and agrees to help them with their final plan to return to their original world, but much of the running time is spent going over philosophy of death in the otherworlds, the compass that was left behind when Nozomi died, and everyone’s feelings in a sort of abstract way, including a touching flashback to Nozomi and Nagara establishing that if they were to step back into their former lives, they’d have to be sure to become friends again.
A lot of this show is understated. It prefers to be quiet and strange, and watching it often has a more meditative feel than one that’s as exciting as the idea of wandering through bizarre worlds and wielding superpowers would indicate. That’s true of the romantic entanglements as well. There are a couple explicit crushes, but even those aren’t treated like the end of the world, and it’s never really made clear if Nozomi and Nagara were really anything other than friends… but it’s very clear that at the same time they cared for each other deeply and that Nagara, flat affected and quiet though he often is, is absolutely devastated by her death.
Anyway, the plans to get back home have ranged from planeswalking to magic schoolbus to film editing. What’s this big final plan?
A Saturn V rocket. Well, at least they’re riding in style. Nagara and Mizuho board, with the former bearing Nozomi’s remnant along with. Rajdhani stays behind, along with Yamabiko and the cats who can apparently no longer make it to the other side. It’s said they can’t get back the time they’ve been away, but that’s a mere two years for our two remaining leads.
They blast off into space, and bring us to the final episode. In the mortal world, they’re graduated from high school, an unspecified amount of time after they stepped back into their lives. Nagara is going to a technical school and working a soul-crushing sort of job, Mizuho to an all-girls college where she seems to not remember him at all. Nozomi is alive and dating Asakaze without the character growth of her other self, and Nagara doesn’t try to connect. But for the compass, Nagara would even be doubting those two years adrift in a mad multiverse ever happened.
We flash back to the final transit. Beyond the speed of light, at the edge of dimensions, Nagara and Mizuho step out, only to be confronted by Asakaze. In a quiet, solemn scene, he challenges them, revealing that all seems to be dust in their wake: the mind-reader gone over to Hoshi’s faction, the island they first arrived at sunken beneath the waves, the corrupt teacher vanished, Rajdhani turned into a forest. They pass him by to reunite with their original selves. Principal God confronts them on their way. They pass him as well. Everything gets sort of “End of 2001 in a kaliedoscope” styled.
Finally, as the space becomes more ordered, they reach the light Nozomi once saw, and their way back to the original world.
Back in normalcy, we see things from Mizuho’s point of view. She regrets brushing Nagara off and reconnects with a code phrase from their time adrift in the cosmos. They share some vaguely melancholy words, but Mizuho asserts that she believes in Nagara if any of who he was back then is still around. With one last quiet encounter with Nozomi centered around a bird (a motif throughout the show), we depart thinking that maybe things will be alright.
The end.
So, at the risk of a pun… Sonny Boy was a trip.
And I mean that in more ways than one. It was strange, with bizarre imagery and bizarre concepts. Brilliant, in its own way, with bits and bobs of Planescape or Flatland, mind-bending in a really nice and effective way. But it was also just kind of a road trip through that. The show avoided the idea of a real antagonist. Asakaze, evil teacher, and Principal God all flirted with the idea, but ultimately seemed to just have their own agendas completely skew to anything that the leads cared about. War was hinted at being some sort of greater scope villain, but he ultimately only really appears in Yamabiko’s backstory; we never even encounter him in his world (or the world that is him) where Nozomi dies, leaving any real antagonism to fall by the wayside.
Also fallen by the wayside is any idea of a consistent theme or solid picture. Sonny Boy sometimes seems like it has a good deal to say about humanity and reality, but ultimately shies away from that – to its benefit. I don’t think this is a meaningful show, perhaps in a way even more profound than a Trigger production that revels in not making sense because of how Sonny Boy’s quiet and cerebral strangeness would normally invite meaning. War is a character, Death is heavily built up as a special idea in the otherworlds, but you won’t find a cheap Four Horsemen motif or a heavy-handed discussion about what War or Death mean. Well, there’s some talk about death, but that’s in the context of trying to process Nozomi’s passing, and it seems more like organic talk from the characters than high-minded messaging.
And again, I think this is a good thing. Sonny Boy achieves, seemingly without effort, what many strive and fail to achieve: coming off as art for the sake of art. It’s somewhat hard to access at times, but it’s not trying to be inaccessible like Texhnolyze. It goes big places, but without the desperation to be big that you see in lesser productions attempting to be greater.
There are ways in which Sonny Boy falls short. The ending, particularly the parts back in the real world, lacks closure. I guess it’s nice that some version of Nozomi is alive; she didn’t die in third year middle school or fall into an endless abyss. Sure she’s dating Asakaze but this version of the dude is innocent of all the jerk things his empowered self did, a self that seemed to get his comeuppance in the slow decay of time from being one chosen and exalted to becoming the one who had lost everything.
Also on a negative note, most of the characters are pretty hard to get behind. Nozomi can come off as a manic pixie dream girl since we don’t get to see a lot of her inner world for most of the show. She’s just marching to the beat of her own drum and inspiring Nagara by doing so. Nagara himself is rather dull. We get some hints about what his backstory is like or why he is the way he is, but it’s not a whole lot. For our main character, that’s kind of lame. It feels like this was sacrificed on the altar of showing us more weird stuff. I think the best character in this is Mizuho. Fitting, seeing as she’s ultimately the lynchpin of everything (for some reason) but then she becomes a notable character late and is often out of focus; she just gets enough time and respect to feel more rounded.
The art is also… honestly, it’s hard to rate.
On one hand, it often comes off as downright tragic. Characters become faceless color blobs like someone forgot to do the linework pretty often, and while we get some environments that are gorgeously realized strangeness, others are just visual noise – clashing and swirling colors that fill in for actual otherworldly wonder. But at the same time, Sonny Boy does kind of own its cheapness as a style, like Rajdhani’s creations all being flat color with heavy white outlines. And when it needs to show something in sharp detail, it does, even if you do wish it decided it had the need more often.
This isn’t exactly a laundry list of issues, and none of them are fatal either, but I do think this drags Sonny Boy away from the pantheon of the true greats. If I look it next to a similarly slow and quiet masterpiece like Serial Experiments Lain or Haibane Renmei, Sonny Boy can’t stand where those shows stand.
All the same, for being this surreal road trip that’s comfortable as just that… I’ll grant it an A-, and say that if they’d been level closer to the peak of their visual wonder rather than having such deep valleys, it would have been a generic A. If you haven’t seen this one, check it out – it’s a bizarre dive to remember.