Summer Pockets – Episode 1

What’s it about? Hairi’s eccentric grandmother just passed away, leaving him to look through her stuff and spend the summer on the rural island she lives on, Torishirojima. He meets plenty of local girls, and hijinks ensue.

Watching Summer Pockets during an economic meltdown felt like I was put in a time machine and transported back to the late aughts. George W. Bush was president, I was in middle school, the economy was in ruins, Clannad and Haruhi Suzumiya were all the rage, and moe was inescapable. While over the last twenty years moe has receded into the background as more nuanced representations of girlhood have come to predominate even the “cute girls doing cute things” genre moe used to be associated with, every so often a show like Summer Pockets comes around to remind us that Key are still putting out visual novels.

And GOD are they boring.

The first half was mind-numbing. For the first five minutes after having declared himself a “wounded bird of passage” (whatever the fuck that means), Hairi walks around Torishirojima island and the music screams at us that we are supposed to feel things. Now, there are shows that can get away with just panning across landscapes to beautiful music and remain entertaining and watchable–Aria, Sato Junichi’s beautiful utopian show, comes to mind as an exemplar of this. But what distinguishes Aria from Summer Pockets is that New Venice is a beautiful, otherworldly landscape unlike anything in anime before, while Torishirojima is generic. And while the music in Aria is some of the best in any anime soundtrack, with acoustic guitars finger-picking in perfect harmony, in Summer Pockets you can literally hear the electronic MIDI string packs straining to contain all the emotions that the show wants us to feel about this island.

After this, we get innumerable shots of Hairi motoring around the island, what are supposed to be cute interactions with various girls and one boy but instead come across as vaguely sexually menacing, and…that’s it. All of the girls look like they were generated by the factory-made moe girl machine, with nothing that really makes them look distinctive, and they act like it too. The shy girl who doesn’t know how to swim, but you catch her secretly practicing in the pool at night. The sister-like distant relative who is incapable of playing rock-paper-scissors because she telegraphs her moves–who you later make sexually suggestive comments towards. The girl who is sleeping on the tree who is mad you accidentally touched her boobs when you tried to keep her from falling over. (Whoops!) I say “you” because there is no way that this show is made for women—the boy is literally a self-insert character for horny men. 

For some actually good iyashikei stories featuring cute girls with actual personalities in beautiful environments, there is not a shortage of options. Aria, Laid-Back Camp, and Super Cub all come to mind. Unless you were really longing for a return to the 2000s, this show is not worth it.