An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

Not Enough – The Price of Smiles Spoiler Review

On a distant planet, in the mecha-riding future, a princess ascends her country’s throne in a time of crisis, having to take the reins and defend her people against an invading empire while, perhaps, a greater threat to the survival of all looms just out of sight. Along the way, though bitter losses are incurred, we also learn that the Imperial aggressors and the noble defenders may not be so different, ultimately seeing that they’re all just human, flawed and largely trying to do what’s best for them and theirs.

This sounds like it could be really good. It’s reminiscent of shows, books, and games: to me, most pointedly Valkyria Chronicles or Fire Emblem. It’s a timeless framework that can be endlessly revitalized by putting new flesh on those old bones, and at least has the potential to reach a high level of quality. Potential, mind you, not guarantee. The Price of Smiles stands as a testament to the fact that even if you use good ingredients, you still need skill and effort to get a pleasing result.

The first episode starts innocently enough with 12-year-old princess Yuki Soliel ascending the throne of her nation. We’re obviously looking at some sort of constitutional monarchy since, while affairs of state were clearly getting done between the death of her parents long ago and now, she does seem to have the authority to set policy and the final word on it. Her daily life, though, doesn’t seem overly concerned with paperwork, as she has plenty of time to tend her garden and go among the people as a sort of pop idol adored figurehead. There’s also a side celebration as a new generation of the energy producing technology known as Chrars is unveiled.

And no, she never drops the “Princess” title despite being the sovereign. I’m not sure if this is a linguistic difference so I’ll take it, but fair warning if that annoys you.

We also get to meet her inner circle: Leila, a minister who acts as Yuki’s mother figure; Izana and Harold, military leaders; and Joshua, a young knight (and mecha-pilot) who’s Yuki’s childhood friend and vaguely hinted possible romantic interest. They, along with a few minor also-rans, help Yuki along, but seem to be keeping something from her. At the end of the episode it’s revealed that the hesitation Yuki’s advisors expressed is over the secret that war has already broken out with the neighboring empire.

Over the next episode, we see the war front, and get some pretty decent action. The mechs in this show don’t fly, but they do skim over terrain for some impressive stunts, and ones outfitted with the next-gen Chrars (starting with Joshua’s in this episode) can sort of pretend for a little bit with a good jump-and-glide routine. Ultimately, though, the kingdom forces are fighting a losing battle, and Yuki receives the news of war in the form of a dead Joshua, who she cries bitterly over and then kind of doesn’t bring up for most of the rest of the show.

This sequence, just the first two episodes, highlights a few of the core problems of the show. First, the choices the characters make are often borderline insane. In this case, keeping Yuki in the dark about the fact that there’s a bloody war on. In the first episode one character (a younger soldier clearly having trouble keeping the big secret in when Yuki wants to offer aid to the Empire) suggests that the monarchy might be a figurehead, not fit to set policy, but that’s repeatedly shown to be false both in how other characters react to such presumptive talk in the moment and how much agency this twelve-year-old little idiot goes on to have over her generals and advisors (one of which should really still be her regent, but that’s beside the point) going forward. She’s the final authority, and she’s kept ignorant for weeks. The characters do at least treat this case as a troubled choice, but it shouldn’t even have been on the table given what we know of the state of the conflict.

The other problem here is how Joshua is handled. I don’t mind that they bluffed us with the idea that he’d be a lead character (he’s all over the poster, the first two episodes, and the intro) only to kill him. In a sense, that’s actually kind of clever. My problem is with a few of the elements of how they did it. First, he dies in what’s ultimately a minor random encounter – heroically, in a sense, but in other senses there’s not really a big moment, especially since he’s only mauled on the field and expires in transit back to Yuki. True, that’s largely how life would be for a soldier, and it could work in a much more grim and gritty show, but The Price of Smiles is typically more shiny and dramatic. The show tries to pull on big emotions to cover its structural weaknesses and excuse the bone-headed decisions of these characters, which means that Joshua’s death should have been big. Second, it doesn’t linger. Yuki is an overly empathetic child; the reality of war would have hit her as hard as we see here if it was anyone she personally knew, even someone she didn’t exactly know well. They set up that Joshua is special to her, but once he’s buried it’s over. With the tone the show sets, it would have been much better to go the melodramatic path, and have Yuki come back to his death, and the why and how. Keep it in the front of her mind, so she thinks of that when she thinks twice about sending more knights to engage the enemy, or perhaps let it plant a bitter seed inside her, and have her grapple with some part of her that wants vengeance as much as the rest of her wants peace. For the initial weight they gave the character, Yuki bounces from his death too well. This is kind of indicative of the emotional arcs throughout the show. They aren’t the worst, and often have good scenes, but the characters don’t progress as much as they should.

Part of that is, probably, that the show has a nasty issue with its running time versus its length. Starting with episode three, we alternate between Yuki’s team and a group of Imperials who, once Joshua is dead, take his place as the “other” main characters of the show. So in a twelve episode we take two just to start and then cut the remaining episodes in half, giving us five to work with Yuki and Crew and five for the Imperials. This wouldn’t be that bad – the story has few enough major movements that it does fit in what’s basically five episodes worth of plot, and five episodes should be plenty to develop some characters… but the time is split again by the sheer number of characters we bother with. On the Kingdom side there’s Yuki, Izana, Harold, Leila, a pair of young knights, and Izana’s wife and kids that all get meaningful screen-time for those episodes. The Imperial side also has a crew of five characters that all sort of fight for presence. Now, not all of these characters are created equal: Yuki gets more time and focus than any of the rest of her crew, and the Imperial side has a clear favorite too. But there’s also a lot of fighting in this show, and the secondary characters do need and take time rather than going for the Trigger-style “Give them a good note to play loud” option. There are a lot of ways in which the attention of the show is split keeping loads of balls in the air, and in the end it hurts getting any arcs to reach fulfillment.

So, speaking of the Imperials, it’s time to introduce them, and with them another problem with the show. Our Imperial focal characters are a squad of mecha pilots. They’re basically ordinary soldiers, led by grizzled old father figure Gail Owens. Under his command are pretty boy Huey, and carefree dude Break, who are more secondary, and two others. Stella Shining is the “main character” for the Imperial side, an orphan raised largely by the state and fast-tracked into the military, and she’s joined by her only ‘friend’, Lily. Stella’s arc is that she starts out as cold and unemotional (hence why I put friend in air quotes) and has to learn to be human while also continuing to fight in a major war.

And here’s the big problem: the show tries to set up Yuki and Stella as equivalent. Two young women on opposite sides of the conflict, both grappling with what life and war are doing to them. They get similar levels of focus and primacy in their side’s episodes, and even have some more direct parallels drawn between them as the show goes on. The problem is that they aren’t and can’t be equivalent. It’s not even close. Yuki is her faction leader. At the end of the day, she’s calling the shots and everyone aligned with the kingdom obeys her. Stella, meanwhile, is a grunt. There are countless other imperial soldiers just like her and she enjoys no special privilege in her setting. She’s not even leader in her own squad, she’s just a skilled pilot. I can see how someone along the line would think that the contrast would be valuable on its own, seeing how things are at the top versus how they are at the bottom, but ultimately these stories need to collide and Stella and Yuki need to act on each other. But, of course, they don’t move in the same circles: Stella is on the battlefield at the bottom, and Yuki (not herself a mecha pilot at any point) is in the control room giving orders. I’ll spare you the tension and say right now that the only payoff we get is basically a chance encounter in the final episode. If it were earlier, say episode 6 or 8 of 12 or 12 of 24, you could then work off what it means for them to have met each other, but as it stands, it doesn’t work.

If, with the structure of the story as it is, they wanted Stella to actually serve as a counterpart to Yuki, she needed to have agency. She didn’t need to be a faction leader (we need the imperials to have a sleazy general) but she did have to have an opportunity to be something or someone special. I compared the plot of this show to Valkyria Chronicles or a Fire Emblem game, and to use that as a benchmark she needed to have a role like Selvaria Bles or the Black Knight in Tellius. Keep her an ace pilot who’s going to be on the front, but make her more like poor dead Joshua; someone who is notable, bordering on unique, and who might have the ear of the top-ranked authority figure. Suffice to say, they didn’t do anything like that.

In any case, the Imperials are introduced on a covert ops. We find that the old father figure has a soft spot for orphans, and is in fact the patron of an orphanage, while the whole spy group kind of bonds with the people they’ll unfortunately have to hurt along the way with a raid on a hydroponics lab. Though some of what they’re ordered to do is trouble (like prioritizing stealing a Chrars over keeping food production active) we do get the sense from this that SOP for the Imperials is… about as humane as an invading army could be expected to be. Remember that.

After more ineffectual spirit-breaking defenses on Yuki’s part, the Imperial army is poised to strike at the capital, and Yuki seems liable to be forced to the treaty table to surrender. At this point we’re treated to another bit of “random extreme choice is treated as the most natural thing in the world” when the only term of surrender that we are made aware of is that Yuki herself must be executed.

Now, this is something I went back and forth on. Initially, I rejected it as kind of insane, but then I came around to seeing a point, only to turn back away. Speaking historically, executing the leader of a conquered people wouldn’t be entirely unusual (though on the other hand someone like Napoleon got exile not once but twice)… but the degree to which it’s treated as matter-of-fact really doesn’t apply to the setting and scenario of the show it’s in. First, international politics in Yuki’s world seems a little more advanced than that, especially since her own level of authority is clearly… complicated. If she were captured in battle I could see her being put down, but less so when she’s willing to bend the knee and give up the fight in order to spare her people any further damage. I could see a leader in this setting being tried for war crimes and executed, possibly even on trumped-up charges, but the Imperials don’t look to be fostering that kind of hate in their ranks. And if we really cut to it, she’s a twelve-year-old idiot girl with little knowledge of how the world works but massive appeal to her people. Dangerous to let her run free, perhaps, but also prime “State marriage” fodder. Hand her over to some male administrator who’ll take up the running of the occupied territories while Yuki herself can work to smooth over unrest, since of course she doesn’t want to see her precious people hurt.

The point remains that the excuse for us not getting a kingdom surrender when they’re being beaten on every front is jarring. Yuki tries to go with it, though, offering herself up, only to be stolen away by her top advisors, dragged along in the evacuation of the capital. Izana stays behind to be captured, and ultimately dies breaking out of his imprisonment and stealing some vital information for Yuki on the way, prioritizing transmitting the data to her over escape (in another arguably bone-headed moment). On Stella’s side, we actually get a lot of character building and backstory, and start to see why she is the way she is, while on Yuki’s side she keeps making bad decisions that, in trying to get no one killed, get tons of people killed for no reason.

An example of that is how, after reestablishing (with a greater resolve to lead) at her fallback location, Yuki handles the provinces under Imperial attack: she has them fully evacuated of all civilians. The evacuees in turn are kept in a moving megaconvoy which scurries out of the way of imperial advances like a roach when the lights are turned on. This is… absurd. I won’t say there’s never a reason to evacuate a major population center in war: some battlefields can get horrible enough, or some treatment from occupying forces bad enough that it would be justified. But the Imperial forces are never shown to act dishonorably regarding the territories they do seize. Those places and people are under occupation, and that’s surely not pleasant, but at the same time they are largely surviving. By working the way she does, Yuki both denies herself effective resistance cells (which could disrupt the Imperal supply lines) and creates the ultimate logistical nightmare for herself with her refugee convoys going everywhere. And of course there’s always the possibility of a convoy being hit as a large-scale transport operation. And you can also consider the forces diverted to defend the convoy and the supplies to maintain it… But, once again, other characters treat her wishes as if not entirely natural than at least something to humor her about. She seems to have an alright head for tactics, but when it comes to strategy and logistics she is a moron.

In any case, the data that Izana left his wife and kids (including newborn he never saw) husband and fatherless for is pieced together by Leila into a picture of the truth: the Chrars systems are slowly burning out the terraforming nanorobts that make the planet livable for humans, and the new model of Chrars is doing it extremely quickly instead, explaining the fall of a former nation that developed the forerunner of the next-gen system, along with the reason behind the crop failures that have driven the Imperials to war seeking the kingdom’s fertile lands. Given everything, the stakes change from finding a way to save Yuki’s kingdom to finding a way to save the world, even as the Empire, Stella and friends among those at the front, bears down on Yuki’s last bastions. In this process, several more characters die, including our overdue old mentors.

For our final movement, Yuki and Leila hit on the idea of using an abandoned instillation to create a pulse that will knock out (permanently)… every Chrars on the planet. As they race to do it, Stella and co encounter the team and give chase, leading to a battle between what remains of their squad and what’s left of Yuki’s personal guard, unknown to the rest of the world. It ends up with Stella on foot, first in a confrontation with Leila (who realizes, as the audience did earlier and Stella never does, that Stella is her long-lost presumed-dead biological daughter) and then, after Leila dies pushing Stella out harm’s way, standing off against Yuki. Yuki gives her best stupid little friendship speech and Stella – without any good reason given or the evidence of the whole world in danger thing – opts to not shoot the annoying princess in the face and instead lets her completely wreck the power infrastructure for the entire planet.

Seems like a happy ending, right? The show treats it as one. With all the war machines disabled the Imperial and Kingdom forces are able to be the best of friends, and by the epilogue scene the world is getting along just fine with alternative power sources like internal combustion engines.

With all due respect, no. I’m not saying that Yuki made the wrong choice. In fact, destroying the Chrars may have been the least wrong choice Yuki made this whole show. But the problems that were brought up don’t evaporate like smoke.

First, the war should still be on. We’ve seen Chrars used to operate hydroponics bays, indicating that their power was part of food production, which when the Empire is already starving means that their reasons for war should be no less strong. True, they’ve lost a lot of ability to carry out combat but where there’s a will there’s a way and somewhere between guns and pointy sticks there should remain the will and way to push Yuki over and take her fields and supplies for the benefit of the Empire. Sure, Stella (shaken by seeing her mom that she didn’t recognize as her mom die for her) accepted Yuki’s hollow little speech about how everyone is suffering, but remember what I said earlier about how Stella is not a person with any kind of authority. She’s a grunt. An elite grunt perhaps but not really empowered to speak for her people.

Second, it’s never addressed that Yuki just reduced her entire planet to the stone age. Imagine Earth if every engine, generator, and power-plant on the planet suddenly and dramatically ceased to exist. A number of people would die instantly. Many more would die with the breakdown of logistics and industrial society, even as they struggled to drag themselves out of the ashes by rebuilding basic steam engines and power generators. Again, long-term it was probably the right choice, but Yuki’s action should render her setting post-apocalyptic for a little bit since they literally don’t have anything that doesn’t run on Chrars.

Third, the emotions are all wrong. To get the ending the show wants, both sides need to be war-weary and suffering… but all the Imperials do is win. Yuki has lost friends, compatriots, and subjects over and over, and while we had at least a couple meaningful deaths in the Empire, nothing even really came close. They’re still at a stage where “That’s war, I guess” not one where “war is hell”.

Fourth… yeah, that is all the time we get with Stella and Yuki. Stella fails to realize that Leila is her mother, and then doesn’t shoot Yuki. This after running into her not with a “Get the Princess” mission but on a random flank scouting operation. Nothing built up to this, and nothing pays off.

Finally, speaking not to the ending but to the show as a whole… Yuki’s stuff is hard to watch. Stella’s material is by far the better stuff; she and her squad handle their development better, and Stella’s emotions and humanity are handled much better as a growth arc than Yuki’s maturity.

All in all, this is a D+ show for me. The mech fighting, especially when Stella is in the cockpit, is pretty darn decent, and there is a lot of it in here, but the plot is insipid and forced, with few movements that are good the whole way through. On the whole, I’d avoid it; you can get good action with much better stories underneath.