All of my reviews contain spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning. Rolling falling scrambling girls. For others for themselves. Even if theyre destined to be one of the rest Caption under the title card that opens each episode. With something like Rolling Girls it is perhaps best to take things in order. Despite the shows tagline trumpeting its themes at you openly at the start of each episode it takes a while before it becomes apparent what this series is trying to do. I say with no exaggeration that watching Rolling Girls is something of a humbling experience. Its a show that flips your expectations around enough times that it keeps you guessing until the very end. To be admittedly extremely reductive Rolling Girls is a sort of reverseshonen. A flashy colorful action animethink something like Kill la Killtold from the perspective not of its ostensible heroes but a quartet of unpowered side character types. In almost any other anime our leads would not be our leads. The main character would be Masami a Best thats what this show calls its superhumans. Everyone else is a Rest. On the nose ainnit? who likes to play Power Rangers dressup under the name Maccha Green. 880http://i.ur.com/FVVM0pX.png Seen here. Masami is in fact introduced that way. She is the leader of what the show terms a Vigilante Squad a group of peacekepers headed by a Best who keep the order in the shows setting. That setting being a Japan defined by a yearsintherearview event called The Great Tokyo War that fractured the nation into dozens of competing tiny countries. Masami is an archetypal action anime heroine and the show really seems like its going to be her story until about two episodes in. She is injured loses the Heart Stone that gives a Best their powers and is promptly sidelined. 880https://i.ur.com/g5SSANU.png Our Cast. Chiayi Yukina Nozomi and Ai. Left to right. Enter Nozomi. Introduced an episode prior as Masamis sidekickofsorts despite apparently being the only one who hadnt caught on long ago that she was Maccha Green and now volunteering to take up Greens secondary responsibility that of a travelling peacebroker. One who helps solve conflicts between rival vigilante groups. Shes joined by three other girls Yukina who is clumsy gets lost easily and likes to draw Chiaya who is mysterious terse owns a magic camera and somehow knows all the others childhood nicknames and lastly Ai who seems to think shes the protagonist of a shonen manga and is introduced with one of the alltime great oneliners of the medium. 880https://i.ur.com/GcY7LnM.png The pun is apparently even dumber in the original Japanese if you can believe it. The series first two thirds are about on one hand these four girls and on the other hand their adventures throughout the fractured Japan. This is where the traveler story elements are strongest. Theres an awful lot of colorful set design flashy animation and smallscale stories of love and conflict. The actual content of these stories varies wildly. In the first nation they stop at our girls are accused of stealing a heart stone and have to find it before the local vigilante captain executes them. In of itself thats not a particularly crazy story. That it takes place in a Tokyo transformed into an alwayson cosplay and anime capitol of the world is what gives it its character. The real reason the stone was lost? Turns out to be because it fell in the bushy afro of a lifesized shonen action figure. This is just how Rolling Girls operates. Casually resolving plot threads through bizarre twists that make an internal logical sense but sound completely ridiculous out of context. On top of that the show likes to drop casuallyinsane worldbuilding like this drawing zero attention to it at all: 880https://i.ur.com/I7rKmPy.png Whats the Tokyo Tower Robot? We do find out but its not really relevant in any major way and seems to mostly exist to remind the viewer that the world this is all happening in is one vastly different from our own. In one particularly amazing case a story about two conflicting towns and their respective vigilante squads seems to be an oddball meditation on how to peacefully resolve international conflicts and responsibly building a national identity around peaceful things like sport and food as opposed to pure power dynamics. Because this is Rolling Girls that arc also involves a group of motorcyclebound delinquents who talk only in unintelligible grunts and bike revs a statuebuilding old man and his daughter who doesnt think she can live up to him and about a trillion other things. That the following arc about a starcrossed geisha and pinkhaired glamrocker almost seems tame in comparison until its climax says a lot about the sheer amount of stuff Rolling Girls heaps on you. 880https://i.ur.com/wWq5iU4.png Not to imply that any arc that could give us this screencap could in any way be less than stellar. We should nod to the shows audio and visual work here too. Rolling Girls style is not quite wilfully unique it does definitely look like a television anime from the mid2010s but the thinline drawing provides a unique charm. The backgrounds on the other hand look like little else. Check out the castle of arc villain Kukino Ura just as an example. 880https://i.ur.com/qL9I65x.png Audiowise the show is obsessed with classic rock. A fictional rock bandThe Momiage Hammersare a recurring plot element and a big deal is made out of how a good song can make you feel like you can take on the world. This is probably the closest the show ever gets to wearing a semiobvious if you look for it FLCL influence on its sleeve. So thats the gist but where does this all go? Well many places. The shows final third drops some trademark outthere revelations Chiayi is a space alien Heart Stones dont actually do anything on their own but more importantly its where the actual point comes in. Rolling Girls main theme seems to be that not everyone can beor more importantly has to bea hero in the traditional sense. Our leads never engage in traditional action anime heroism. The flashy sakugaladen fights are always between other people. Only Ai whose character is defined by desperately wanting to be an action heroine even gets to do anything close where she manages to stop a fight between two Bests in one of the shows best scenes. 880https://i.ur.com/F7O7s9O.png To be fair she has help from a cute dog. But they do in a manner of speaking save the day. The final arc of the show concerns a brewing war between two nations and to greatly collapse the details its neither a recovered Maccha Green nor any of the other actual heroes who end things. Nozomi and friends deliver a crucial package at the right moment because this is Rolling Girls its a wooden carving that powers a giant robot and the conflict is ended before it can spiral out of control. Chiayi ends up having to return to her planet but shes immensely grateful to Nozomi for the times they shared together and in this single line the show sews together its subtext and plaintext foregrounding its themes exactly once in its entire 12episode run. 880https://i.ur.com/AIupPuG.png Because it holds out on this for so long Rolling Girls is admittedly a bit of a frustrating watch. At the same time theres a secondary theme running here about to use a cilche how its the journey not the destination. Maybe it really doesnt matter that much that it takes Rolling Girls so long to get to the point when it only needs a few seconds to make it and when getting there in the first place was so fun. Rolling Girls does not slot comfortably into any major artistic movement in anime of the 2010s. Even the FLCLindebted conceptaction anime category its sometimes lumped into which includes the aforementioned Kill la Kill as well as FlipFlappers PUNCH LINE and a few other things doesnt quite fit. Despite all this Rolling Girls is something of an ultimate anime for anime nerds perhaps the anime equivalent of recordcollector rock simply for riffing on so many ideas without engaging in much explicit reference the glam rocker in episodes 7 and 8 a clear nod to FLCLs Haruko aside. That its from Wit a studio with a vast repertoire that contains nothing else at all like Rolling Girls just makes it feel that much more special. I dont say this lightly but more than simply being something you dont see much of a phrase broad enough that it can ironically be applied to many anime and still be true Rolling Girls might straight up be one of a kind. Its a little strange to be saying this about something thats comparatively recent but time passes and the mid2010s are already far enough in the rearview that shows a few years old deserve a second look. The show managing to thread that final needle when it most needs to pushes Rolling Girls from a curiosity to an honesttogod hidden gem if a somewhat flawed one. This is a series that if you have interest in the wider ways that anime interact with each other you really should give a look because its among the best at cleverly dancing around audience expectations while still nailing that allimportant emotional hit in its finale. Rolling Girls may never find itself being considered an alltime great but thats surprisingly apropos given its themes. Director Kotomi Deai has not helmed a fulllength TV series before or since but perhaps she doesnt need to. Maybe somewhere right now Rolling Girls is some aspiring director or animators very own Maccha Green. I think if that means we get another show as smart and peculiar as Rolling Girls in the future thatll make it all worth it. After all everyones a hero to someone. And if you liked this review why not check out some of my others here on Anilist?https://anilist.co/user/planetJane/reviews