Incendiary in its impenetrability, and pugnacious in its pretentiousness, Sonny Boy stands as this season’s weird anime experiment for weird anime watchers. In other words, I’m once again in my element. The premise is, in its own way, simple to explain: unknown forces grant a high school class unique superpowers, at the same time whisking both them and their entire high school building away to a black alien void. The premiere thus blends wry speculative sci-fi with existential horror, as the kids grapple with their new abilities alongside their cosmic marooning. While there’s plenty of narrative and thematic meat on that bone, this still belies much of the deep and disorienting clockwork ticking away under Sonny Boy‘s surface. There’s a lot going on here, and as of episode two, I’m extremely eager to dig into it.
As with any story about an isolated group of schoolchildren, I…
