Bermuda Triangle ~ Colorful Pastrale – Episode 1

What’s it about? Sonata and her friends are mermaids living in the small village of Parrel, where days pass quietly. A girl named Canon’s arrival from the big city sets changes in motion, including the discovery of an old abandoned theater.

This is the first premiere of the season where I left with absolutely no idea of what this show was going to be about. Is it an idol series? The cold open in Magallanica involves cheering fans at a concert. Is it a “save the town” plot, where the girls will revitalize the theater they found and bring attention and revitalization to Parrel? Is it just a low-key, slice-of-life shenanigans series? All of the above? I honestly do not know.

Maybe that’s because, in spite of its title, Bermuda Triangle is a rather colorless affair. Its color-coordinated characters all hem to basic archetypes, nice enough but not particularly memorable. Gun to my head, I could not tell you anybody’s names except for the two listed up there in the summary—and that was solely because they were the “shippable but unlikely to be confirmed as a couple” ones.

The world-building is halfhearted, swinging between neat ideas like a seaweed farm and “coral sugar” and lazy slice-of-life archetypes like an underwater cake shop that’s somehow able to pour water for tea. There are a few cute touches, like the otter mascot (in a cute little hat~), but mostly it lacks polish and finesse. It’s the kind of show one could sit through for twelve weeks and then forget entirely by week fourteen.

Mostly it’s just really, really boring. The first half of the episode involves the girls running errands in a way that made me wonder if this was another mobile-game adaptation (it isn’t; EDIT: apparently it is a card game spinoff which…yeah, that tracks), and the art leaves a lot to be desired—particularly in the faces. It’s not quite My Sister, My Writer bad, but there’s a decidedly melty look to some of the shots that makes me preemptively worried about the animation team’s health.

I am actively unsure what to say here. The opening theme is okay? The closing one is bizarrely un-cute, with the little chibi characters blinking like they’re holding back tears? There’s some nice verticality in the building designs? What on earth does the Bermuda Triangle have to do with this, and will the series go into urban legend territory?

If you want a show to put on for young kids, there’s probably nothing wrong with this. But there’s nothing in it to recommend over just about any other aesthetically cute series this season.