Review of Listeners
HEY! Listen! “Listeners” is fucking garbage, and in most cases, I’d say you’d have to see it to believe it but I pray no one besides myself has to lay themselves bare to this level of unfiltered drek. If the litmus test for a half-decent anime screen-writer is having listened to the musical stylings of Jimi Hendrix, Prince, and Pink Floyd (among many...many others), then you can consider most dads in the continental United States accomplished enough to pen something equal to or better than Listeners. This isn’t a show for music nerds or people who can appreciate the hallowed halls of surface-level dad-rock, no, no,Listeners is a bit more sinister than that. Listeners is 12 straight episodes of some smug prick patting himself on the back for having listened to the most bare-essential “classics” in the history of popular music. You like Nirvana? So does the rest of the world, dude.
Besides its flashy concept and presentation, Listeners is one giant nothingburger of an anime. Its intentions are pretty damn transparent, to the point where its disjointed narrative throws caution to the wind in order to fulfill the fucking reference quota in any given episode. The dialogue in this script simply acts as a placeholder for more fucking references. I shit you not, entire sequences of conversation in this show can be boiled down to two Talking Heads (see, I can make references too) reciting famous song lyrics to each other in place of substantive discourse, exposition, or character interaction. I’ve seen some call this “impressive” for sheer virtue of the fact that you have to frame this in a manner that both visually and narratively fits the story… PUHLEASE!
Mu, of course, the mascot character and strong female deuteragonist. Another mysterious Mary McGuffin who lacks social graces, sports a bitchy attitude, and is generally unlikable by most standards. Complete with a nebulous past that is somehow directly involved in the plot, lovely, haven’t had enough of those. But she wouldn’t be complete without “Echo”, what a lovely character. An intrepid young lad with an appetite for (reconstruction?). These two may as well just be Kamijou Touma and Index but even they had better chemistry than these two buffoons. Your average character interaction between them will generally involve Echo regurgitating essential world-building and Mu calling Echo a weirdo for doing so, brilliant.
I get that this show is supposed to be some kind of kitschy tribute to artists of old but there’s little to no consistency in terms to what it chooses to riff that the references at best come off like a Spotify playlist of rock essentials. The world of Listeners suggests a reverence for rockstars, but the references wouldn’t lead you to believe so. This makes me question references to MBV and Robert Johnson, I mean does the type of music Kevin Shields produces exactly scream “rock star?” People under the supposition that this show has consistency in terms of what music it chooses to pay tribute to are gravely mistaken. Additionally, artists like Kurt Cobain who famously repudiated this degree of blind idolatry have flagrant references strewn about like kitschy decor, which is stunningly ironic.
It would be one thing if all these on the nose winks and nods to popular music acts from back in the day were for the sake of aesthetic (take Jojo’s for example), but it couldn’t be that simple, this shit is intrinsically tied to the narrative. Everything from “Teen Spirit” to “The Wall” has some form of off-the-cuff functionality in the world-building that lives and dies with whatever episode it was mentioned in. Also, I have to question the rationale behind making the Jimi Hendrix (widely recognized as one of if not THE single most important black musician in the history of music) stand-in, a generic pasty-skinned rock god catch-all. What kind of optics are these? Who the fuck co-signed this shit? The same dude who tried to cast Julia Roberts as Harriet Tubman?
The CG models for the mechs are chunky and distractingly out of place which makes for some of the most awkward action sequences I’ve seen come out of an anime in this year. Give this concept to Trigger or David Productions and I’m sure they’d at least be able to cobble something together with the visual panache to distract from its cliched sensibilities.
Yeah...so...Listeners, that was a thing, I guess? Alright, listen (okay...I’ll stop), perhaps this show wasn’t made for someone like me who is cognizant of most if not all of the musicians it proudly flaunts, but I have to question if this show even really has a target audience I could recommend it to. If you’re someone who is completely oblivious to all or most of the references, what leg would this anime have to stand on? There isn’t a compelling story, not a single noteworthy character, or even just a brief cut of decent visuals that isn’t just lazily aping the music it pays tribute to. It’s just utter nonsense and sci-fi gobbledygook.
Needless to say, this anime made me foam at the mouth, and not in a good way. This show is so eye-roll inducing that my sockets have ballooned by at least a centimeter over the course of its 12 episodes. Fuck you Jin.