The currently airinganime about rock music,Bocchi The Rock!is shaping up to be one of the best new shows this season for its lovable characters and interesting take on a familiar concept: cute girls forming rock bands and creating music of their own. A show that is commonly invoked in conversations about anime of this nature isK-ON!; however,Bocchi The Rock!takes things to the next level through its characters, as well as its beautiful, creative, and out-there approach to the show’s visuals and animation.
With introspective shots, dazzling colours, andvariety in artistic approach,Bocchi The Rock!is an anime that pushes the envelope with its animation, and uses it as a device in the story in very interesting, hilarious and inspired ways. Here’s how.
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Perspective
One of the major waysBocchi The Rock!makes use of visuals to add depth to the story and its events as they occur is through its approach to photography, and use of various “camera” angles to give rise to effects that have contextual, as well as aesthetic value. A varied use of close-ups of the titular protagonist in the very beginning of the show’s first episode create a literal closeness to the character as she introduces herself and describes her experiences as a child who always wound up alone. The closeness to Bocchi, as well as her narration of her life’s most common theme creates an impression ofthe show’s introspective nature.
The focus on Bocchi as a character in this way enables a sense of distance felt between Bocchi and everyone else, and what adds to this feeling in the show’s introductory sequence is the consistent view of Bocchi’s eyes, while the faces of various other people shown in her flashbacks are not seen (except for a single teacher seen eating lunch together with Bocchi in a memory assumed to be some field trip in her childhood).
The show also makes use of wide-angled long shots that often illustrate a literal distance between Bocchi and everyone else, and in these scenes, the camera would be angled behind Bocchi in a way that makes her full frame, as well as the reactions of the people around her, fully visible. This angle is used constantly, in various ways, throughoutBocchi The Rock!; and sometimes from the “perspective” of objects in her vicinity; from corners in the room that give certain moments an almost “isometric” feel. These shots are meant to convey Bocchi’s feeling of isolation and loneliness, and are in constant use due to the centrality of those feelings inthe character’s social anxiety, aversion and difficulty.
At times, these third-person perspective shots of Bocchi are coupled with a low-angle, adding an element of menace in whatever social situation is calling for her attention and giving the viewer a sense of how she feels in the moment. In the first episode, when Bocchi’s first inspiration is shown, the angle of the camera leading up to her handling of her father’s old guitar for the first time is varied, with close-ups, long-shots oscillating between focus on the character herself; versus focus on the character within a particular context. The colour warms up when she discovers her love for playing guitar, indicating the significance of the moment in Bocchi’s journey as the protagonist.
Bocchi’s anxiety is not the only site whereBocchi The Rock!uses interesting animation and perspectives – the musical performances are enjoyable not only because the music is great, but also because of thedynamic approach taken to the performances, with various first-person and third-person angles being used and some varying experimental extreme close-ups of aspects like Bocchi’s guitar-playing.
Backgrounds
On an artistic level,Bocchi The Rock!is particularly incredible for the level of beauty and detail in the series' backgrounds. The show’s variation in camera angles and perspectives enables it to show off the rich and decorated world that the characters inhabit, and it carries with it a particularly realistic feel, especially when it comes to building interiors such as the bar that Bocchi and the other members of Kessoku Band frequent, STARRY.
The richness and detail of the backgrounds give it a rendered feel, and while the characters are stylized towards a more traditional understanding of anime character designs, they do not feel out of place in their world, but feel like true inhabitants. Every single still taken inBocchi The Rock!carries asignificant amount of visual information, and every placement is deliberate and artful, giving the experience of watching the series a powerful dynamic quality one wouldn’t expect from a narrative about music. While carefully constructed, the backgrounds are especially brilliant because of how natural they feel; however, the series does sacrifice the movement of background characters in favour of a focus on the fluidity of the main characters' movement against the beautiful backdrop.
Comedy
One of the show’s biggest sites of experimentation when it comes to visuals is most definitely comedy. A comedy anime at the end of the day,Bocchi The Rock!also makes use of the titular character’s social anxiety to create visual comedy, achieved courtesy of Bocchi’s overactive imagination and tendency to fall into anxious spirals.
Bocchi’s tendency to get lost in her own world also enables the series to create hilarity through changing how characters are rendered, making references to the art styles of classic anime seriesin gag anime fashion, and playing around with other visual aspects. Bocchi’s infamous “Bocchi Time” moments are some ofBocchi The Rock!’s funniest moments for their ridiculous and over-the-top nature, coupled with intense, convoluted, psychedelic and overall surreal visuals to match Bocchi’s often precarious mental state.
Bocchi The Rock!finds new ways to use visuals to convey humour and the emotions of the characters while also paying homage to classics and using modes of animation that one wouldn’t normally come to expect from an anime title, let alone one about music. One of the funniest Bocchi Time moments involves a recurring image of an older, jaded Bocchi surrounded by countless empty beer cans in a dirty apartment, screening her mother’s phone calls. Her ability to fully live within the contrived stories created by her unfortunate combination of low self-esteem and a tendency to catastrophize.
These moments can be claymation, live-action, minimalist,grungy, edgy, wacky, and everything in between– it’s always something new and different reflecting the specific anxiety occupying Bocchi’s thoughts at that point. At times, characters even break the fourth wall by directly addressing Bocchi’s often wildly distorted physical appearance and composition and talking about her tendency to have her imagination go overboard as she imagines the worst possible outcome of a given scenario. Overall,Bocchi The Rock!has incredibly well thought-out approaches to the art and animation which enhance the experience of the story, music and the characters; and it is this inspired approach to the visuals that has helpedBocchi The Rock!become one ofthe Fall 2022 anime season’s best.
