Tune In to the Midnight Heart Anime Series Review

Tune In to the Midnight Heart is such a visual disasterpiece that I'm amazed my eyes could get through it all. And I knew what I was in for by the time the second episode rolled through. As if not being cursed with PowerPoint Presentation-styled animation wasn't bad enough, the anime pours more salt in the wound by having a character play guitar in the most rigid, sterile, and flat-out wrong way I've seen in a long while. The chords look weird, the fingers on the fretboard don't move at all, the guitar neck is too wide, and the strings are so thick and wiry that Ernie Ball would be ashamed to see them stocked on store shelves. As an avid guitar freak, I say this earnestly: this hurt to watch.

There is barely a thing that Midnight Heart does right in the animation department. The VTuber girl's online avatar goes from being completely static to slightly less static in an episode early on. A few episodes later, a bunch of scribbled-up background characters come marked with uneven eyes, uncircular mouths, and one girl with hair in the center that looks...off. The worst frame of the show, however, is right in episode four at the 3:24 mark. It. Looks. So. Bad. The characters look so scrunched up, move to the right to indicate they're walking forward, all while weirdly looking like they're floating an inch or two off the floor. Watching this made me feel like I was Brando in Apocalypse Now. The horror, the horror.

But all right, I've seen enough shows with bad animation. What makes this show different? Oh, wouldn't you like to know, because it gets even worse. Because a good two-thirds of the show is shown through an orange filter. It gives off Dahlia in Bloom vibes. I think it's made to give the show look like it's taking place during sunset, which... no. I don't need scenes to look this way. Especially in scenes that take place outside at a sporting event during the middle of the day. The sky is clearly blue, and it's probably one o'clock in the afternoon at the latest. You can just make everything look natural here. Alas. We already have characters with unintriguing character designs, made unsightly by the orange filter.

I'm sorry, did I say one bad filter? I actually meant two. Yes, two. The anime decides to throw in a second blue filter during a few scenes spent at karaoke. Meaning that the characters are now draped in a tint so blue and unnatural that even Grover from Sesame Street would take offense to it. The songs they sing aren't terribly interesting, so I took them all as an opportunity to play Eiffel's 65's “I'm Blue” over top of these scenes. I had to.

The story itself is just a boring harem, complete with the usual after-school club hijinks and a narcissistic and dominating male lead. He needs to whip his harem into shape so he can make them look more professional. So he does. He's not exactly a misogynist nor that pushy, so I can't entirely antagonize him. Thankfully, he is just enough of a self-absorbed jerk that it makes it easier for me to detach myself from him. Look, all I'm sayin' is that I miss the days of Love Hina when dudes like him got chucked out the window.

The harem itself is...well...it is a harem. There's a shy girl who wants to be a VTuber. There's a tsundere with pig tails. There's the girl who plays guitar worse than the Shaggs, all while looking like a third-rate Natsuki from Sound! Euphonium. And there's another girl who dresses up as a maid sometimes. It's whatever. I really wanted to like the weird VTuber girl, especially since she's played by Sarah Wiedenheft in the dub. Now, we stan Sarah Wiedenheft in this house. I loved her in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid and How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord, particularly because of the expressiveness and hyperactive energy she brought into the roles. She is Tohru to me way before Yūki Kuwahara is, and I can't imagine anybody else playing her. That being said, she's horribly miscast here in Tune In to the Midnight Heart. The anime wastes her knack for emotive personalities by making her into a quiet VTuber who is forced to speak so reservedly. A little less Tohru, a lot more Kanna, topped with a bit too many sprinkles of Yuki Nagato. Sometimes her performance is a bit on the squeaky side, too. Them voice roles can't all be zingers, I suppose.

Before it becomes just another high school harem, Midnight Heart concerns itself with its lead, Arisu, trying to find who “Apollo” was, the host of the midnight radio show he listened to in his younger years. Apparently, “Apollo” is one of these girls, but Arisu doesn't know which one. He does get an opportunity to find out when “Apollo” supposedly invites him into one of the classrooms, lurking behind a shut door and using one of those makeshift phones with the cup and string for communication. Arisu could have checked it out, since he's only fifty feet and one shut door away. But that would mean that there'd be no more story, right? The way the anime weasels out of this is by having Arisu reject the invite, claiming he should find out who Apollo is by himself, whatever that means. If you're not going to have Arisu uncover Apollo's real identity yet, why even include the scene at all? It's so head-smackingly lazy.

This was another show that I really wanted to like. Really, I did. Cute girls, one of them voiced by Sarah Wiedenheft in the dub, and another with a guitar. All of the ingredients were there. But nothing adds up.