AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond looks at a new film streaming on Crunchyroll about a plucky group of female singers that tells a familiar enough story… with an intriguing twist.
This week, I’m reflecting on a new anime film that’s just become available on Crunchyroll called Trapezium. It tells the story of a plucky group of female singers, a familiar enough story in anime, but we’re given an intriguing twist here. For most Western viewers, this is the film’s debut, though it opened in Japanese cinemas in May 2024. It was also screened at last winter’s Scotland Loves Anime festival, whose name’s misleading now. The festival screens in Glasgow and Edinburgh but also in London, which is where I first saw the film.
The film opens with a schoolgirl called Azuma, travelling around her corner of Japan and encountering three other girls, one by one. Two are girls that she’s never met before; one is an old acquaintance from elementary school. All four become friends, hanging out together and partaking in community activities. At one such activity, they’re seen by a local TV crew, and one of the staff is impressed by the girls’ bubbly cuteness. She makes an exciting offer: would they like to appear on television, singing a pop “idol” song?
For anime fans, this will appear as a completely typical set-up. However, there’s another side, and we’re privy to it from the start. Azuma, you see, wasn’t travelling around haphazardly; she was always obsessed with being a pop singer. She’s been secretly scouting the girls for their looks and charisma (barring her old friend, who she just met by lucky chance and deemed pretty enough to join).
Azuma planned their activities to maximize their chances of being noticed, as they have been. Now she’s on the edge of fulfilling her dream. In Azuma’s mind, there’s no question the other girls will grasp the opportunity she’s handed to them. After all, what girl wouldn’t want to be an idol singer?
I’ll spoil no more. Actually, anyone watching the film for sensational twists will be disappointed. The interest of the film is rather in the irony of the situation, and the contrast between the three innocent girls who think they’ve come together by chance and the scheming Azuma pulling their strings. It’s also a small story. The film is only 90 minutes long – ending conclusively - and the girls don’t even get invited to be singers till nearly the halfway mark.
It’s also intriguing how Trapezium wraps up. It gives the illusion that just desserts have been served, and everything “put right”… except if you think about the ending a moment, no they haven’t, and justice wasn’t done. Many pundits, especially those in anime’s main demographic of youngsters, will say it’s a terrible ending. Rather, I’d argue, the absence of a pat lesson is one of the best things about the film, laying adult ambiguities on teen emotions. As Azuma reflects in the last minutes, she’ll always have a nasty, selfish side, and it might not always be a bad thing.
I don’t want to give the impression that Trapezium’s especially good. As a film, it’s more interesting than accomplished. The first half often drags. All the teens’ faces are very samey, even among the main quartet. (As in many anime, you can sometimes only distinguish them by their hairstyles or eye colors.) The animation is largely workmanlike, though there’s a forceful moment when one girl has an explosive breakdown. There’s also some nifty bits of storyboarding, as when an argument is followed by a series of desolate-feeling pillow shots of twilit scenery, with the girls conspicuously absent. The animation is produced by the CloverWorks studio, which made another “idol” anime, the hugely popular comedy, Bocchi the Rock.
Trapezium’s worst animation is in the girls’ sole extended dance routine as idols, which involves some painfully mismatched, mechanical CG. But it doesn’t ruin the film, which confirms that Trapezium is only marginally about singing performances; nor has it much to say about the deeper idol industry. (That’s despite being based on a bestselling novel by Kazumi Takayama, who was an idol singer, in a thoroughly manufactured group called Nogzaka46.) The film is much more about teen ambition and selfishness: it’s comparable to another 2024 film, Look Back (covered in my debut column), though that was far better.
Animated irony
However, I came away from Trapezium with another question. If I found the film modestly successful, how much did that depend on me having watched more straightforward “idol” anime, anime about youngsters coming together to form music bands?
That’s not my favorite kind of anime, but I’ve seen a fair few over the years. A recent one was last year’s Tokyo-set series Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night, available on the HIDIVE platform. Some reviewers were underwhelmed, but I thought it was delightful. I’d also highlight the 2021 idol-adjacent film Hula Fulla Dance, available on Crunchyroll, which is less twee than it sounds. The film’s light-hearted story is shadowed by references to the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in 2021. It’s written by Reiko Yoshida, who’s handled musical teens from K-ON! through to The Colors Within, both directed by her frequent collaborator Naoko Yamada. Again, I found the film very charming, though it deflates badly in its third act.
Does Trapezium depend on viewers knowing that kind of anime? (There are many, many more, including sprawling multimedia franchises such as Love Live! and BanG Dream!) It’s a tricky question to answer. Take an American analogue. How much would a complete newbie to superhero media get out of the outstanding film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse? A lot, maybe, but perhaps less out of the frantically referential Across sequel, and less still from a genre spoof like The Lego Batman Movie. The question’s also relevant to the Shrek blockbuster franchise. Not that you need to get the anti-Disney jokes – many kids must have seen Shrek before the Disney films that it spoofed. But it may explain why the Shrek films never did that well in Japan, where Western fairy-tales aren’t dominant.
On the anime side, I’m reminded that Western fans, especially in America and Britain, met the Japanese animation midstream. Take one of the earliest prominent anime imports of the 1990s, in the wake of Akira. That was the action-comedy film, Project A-ko, about a superpowered schoolgirl battling aliens and love rivals. Originally released in Japan in 1986, it was one of the first videos released by Central Park Media in America and Manga Entertainment in Britain. Amid the film’s madcap comedy, did it matter if Westerners missed, for example, the jokes about older SF anime, such as the original Macross (the giant alien spaceship crashing to Earth) or Captain Harlock (the model for A-ko’s drunk and lethal spaceship captain)?
Not a lot, maybe; the madness was funny either way. But 1990s online fan bulletin boards were also exercised about Neon Genesis Evangelion, the original TV series. As I remember the discourse of that time, much of it suggested that in order to “get” Eva, you needed to understand decades of history of Japanese shows about big robots. It was an opportunity for fan elitism; back then, you could only see this heritage through hard-to-find bootleg tapes. It also led to the word “deconstruction” being thrown round a lot, as fans grappled with Eva’s baffling aspects, especially its original ending.
Decades later, it’s safe to say much of this discourse was bluff. However, I think it is true that it’s hard to “get” some bits of Eva – for instance, the final film in 2021 – unless you know they’re metaphorical confessions of its often troubled creator, Hideaki Anno. To put it another way, Eva’s baseline conflict is between the thrilling-tragic fantasy of a boy defending the world, and the “true” confessions of Anno, a fanboy enthralled and trapped by his fantasies.
Which, in a strange way, brings us back to Trapezium. Except that in the film, the protagonist trapped by fantasy is a girl, and she dreams not of giant robots saving the world, but rather of singing her heart out to the world.
