Revue Starlight is a 12 episode anime. It follows Karen, who attends a prestigious performing arts school in Tokyo. As part of the 99th graduating class, they are to perform the play Starlight. The anime has a big cast so it can be hard to catch up on who is who. Karen is easygoing but tardy, while her best friend Maya lives in the same dormitory and helps her out. Karen’s childhood friend Hikari transfers into the class and is a prodigy but is cold and distant. And then there are the rest of the students in the class.
The anime goes along as you’d expect except that at the end of the first episode, there’s a weird plot development and it makes the whole thing kind of weird. There’s a sort of secret audition happening that Karen accidentally stumbles upon and here is where the unique songs play (which are pretty decent) while the characters are dressed up and “battle” against each other. They literally fight using weapons, and it is supposed to reflect a performance of a musical theatre revue. It’s a weird concept and one that doesn’t quite fully make sense, especially with the talking giraffe.
The secret auditions at night, the talking giraffe and the physical combat accompanied by the insert songs is not really something that’s properly explained. All we see is that these auditions are a way for the characters to get things off their chest against each other, and also understand themselves. As a result, the structure of the anime can be quite typical as it cycles through each of the ensemble class, going over their backgrounds, their motivations, and their current situation.
As most episodes take place during the normal everyday of the characters’ school lives, the plot boils down to ordinary problems. Karen’s best friend Mahiru may get jealous at having lost Karen’s attention and doesn’t see any worth in herself. Or the pair of good friends Futaba and Kaoruko have an argument after having settled into a routine for so long. Through these interactions, we can soon get familiar with each character and recognise their individual strengths and weaknesses. This makes it all the weirder whenever the auditions continue as it clashes so significantly with everything else.
The structure of the anime and even within the episodes can be confusing. It’s messy and seems to jump all over the place, physically and temporally. However, about just over halfway into the season, we finally get the first real explanation of the secret auditions (which at first seemed pointless being kept a secret given that everyone’s participating in it anyway), and it goes a long way into putting things into perspective with that one simple sentence.
There’s surely some sort of allusion or hidden meaning behind all the events, but on the surface of it, the anime is confusing and messy. The pacing is off, and the general gist of it is a simple premise. Basically, Karen and Hikari had a promise from when they were little to perform the play Starlight together, and this is a story of them fulfilling that promise. The ending is as expected, but rather unsatisfying all the same due to how it played out and how convoluted it ended up being. It’s melodramatic too.
Overall, Revue Starlight is a mediocre anime. You might go in expecting a typical idol type of anime, but this is not it. Instead, it has a sort of abstract element to it that doesn’t quite work. The pacing suffers as a result and the editing makes it feel choppy, skipping from here to there to all over the place. The characters don’t particularly standout, especially since with the short amount of time and the large-ish number of characters, it couldn’t flesh out many of them.
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