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Rating: 41/100
Man, you have no idea how much I wanted to enjoy this show. Look, historical fiction has always been one of my personal favorite anime genres. So many of my favorite anime of all time are historical fiction stories, whether they be adaptations of Western children's books or manga/light novels. Sparks of Tomorrow's premise alone sounded really interesting to me, and with this being a KyoAni project finally seeing the light of day after that awful arson attack, why wouldn't I want it and the staff behind it to succeed? I'll repeat this until the day I die, I NEVER go into something wanting to hate it. I really wanted to enjoy Sparks of Tomorrow, as it has all the ingredients for what could have been something good. Not perfect, but fairly nice if it played its cards right. However, in light of reading an in-progress fan translation of the novel, learning more about KyoAni's adaptational decisions when it comes to stuff they own, and seeing just how much was changed from the source to the show...I can't lie to myself. As happy as I am that KyoAni is back in action after the awful arson attack, Sparks of Tomorrow is not just a mediocre show on its own, but pretty much the amalgamation of everything bad about KyoAni's recent modus operandi since probably Love, Chuunibyou, and Other Delusions.
Taking place in an alternate Meiji Era where electricity hasn't caught on and steam still rules the roost, the series centers on two 15-year-old teenagers, Kihachi Sakamoto and Inako Momokawa. Inako is a girl who can't seem to do anything right no matter how hard she tries. Her perpetual clumsiness has caused non-stop problems and resulted in many a scolding from her strict father. Her only relief is praying to the Gods at the Fushimi Inari Shrine. On one such pilgrimage, she runs into Kihachi, who not only doesn't believe in Gods, but is an aspiring inventor who hopes to fulfill his older brother Seiroku's dream of bringing in the age of electricity. Long ago, both he and Kihachi made a book called the 20th Century Electrical Catalog, filled with all their ideas for potential inventions. Seiroku had taken it with him when he was sent off to fight in the Russo-Japanese War, but his whereabouts remain unknown. Not long after their encounter, Inako receives terrible news: In exchange for ensuring her family's sake brewery doesn't be forced into bankrupcy, her father has arranged for her to be married off to Yosuke Mizoe, the wealthiest man in town. Yosuke is also looking for the Electrical Catalog for his own reasons, and he's determined to get his hands on it no matter the cost. It's up to Inako, Kihachi, and their friends to both ensure the engagement doesn't go through, and to find this Electrical Catalog and unlock its secrets.
I'm not going to mince words here: If there's any anime that embodies the phrase "style over substance", Sparks of Tomorrow is it. But in the interest of not wanting to start off completely on a negative note, I want to get the positives out of the way. Yes, the animation looks stunning. That's one thing I'll never knock KyoAni for. They go all out with their animation, both in the backgrounds, the set design, the character motion, the aesthetics, and so on. One thing I admittedly like is how the anime chooses to depict what goes on in Kihachi's mind, such as how his idea of what the world with electricity looks like is depicted in a paper cut out puppet theater style. That's a great way to show what a character's inner world can be like, and there's a lot you can do with that. I also like how in the first half of the show, the visuals for the opening theme are not only different for each episode, but used as ways to explore a character's backstory. That's a great idea! It's an interesting way to show a character's background without going to deep into needless exposition or melodrama and in a way that lets the visuals tell the story on their own. The soundtrack is pretty nice as well, even if its not all that memorable and I admit I'm not a fan of the ending theme, as it's a bit too hard rock for my tastes.
Not to mention the voice actors in the show across both languages are trying so hard to make this material sound more important than it actually is. I really want to give praise to the English dub as that's definitely one that spared no effort. I legitimately never heard of Hunter McCoy before this, but now I want to hear him in more stuff, and after having initially been put off by Audrey Hsieh's performance as Suzu in Medalist, both this and Ai from Draw This Then Die changed my opinion on her. I really hope she'll be allowed to play to her strengths in future dubs, though she could stand to be less shrill when she voices small children. And damn, for as much as a terrible character as Yosuke is, Paul Castro Jr absolutely understood the assignment and managed to sell me on his performance as the hammy, theatrical, petulant villain that you want to see get completely demolished. Honestly, he probably did the character more of a service than even the show itself did.
And...that's it. That's all the praise I can truly muster for this show. Because good lord, the writing in this show feels like none of the staff have ever attended a single writing class in their entire life. It's like the show's staff put all their hard work into the animation and completely neglected everything else in the process. For one thing, the characters either never seem to really change much or when they do, it's because the plot demands it. Motivations and allegiances change on a dime, often for little to no reason, and some characters only exist to just be plot devices to either move the story forward or in Suzu's case, pull something out of their ass just to make things more convenient for the heroes. The most egregious example of the former is Kengo Kuga. He's supposed to be this battle-hardened war veteran with PTSD who really wants to tell Noriko he loves her, but for the first half of the series, he mainly spends his time either chasing people because someone told him to or randomly hulking out like some X-Men villain, often with no real reason for him to do so. It's like the show has no idea what to do with him, and like I mentioned, he's often switching sides because the plot demands he do so. At least in the novel, he has a legitimate reason for going after the two leads! There'll also be times when characters will start off one way and then suddenly change for no real reason. Jinemon starts out as an abusive jackass who looks down on Inako and wants to marry her off to Yosuke, but later on he suddenly changes his tune when everything's all over, with no reason given as to why or how it happened. Whatever character development some people do get, it never feels earned because it either comes out of nowhere, is something the audience already knew or could see coming, or the methods getting there make absolutely no logical sense. I don't think I even need to get into the fact that Yosuke is not only a terrible villain, but pretty much every single offensive gay stereotype made manifest.
All of this isn't even getting to just how bad the actual writing for the plot is! The show never seems to have its priorities straight most of the time, which is especially prevalent in the early episodes, mainly because rather than take the time to explore its characters and flesh them out, the show would rather start out with bad episodic vignettes involving Kihachi making a machine of the week to solve some problem. Most of the time this involves shoehorning in bad comedy that completely clashes with the show's tone and just drags the episode out for no real reason. Like...did we really need an episode involving a college guy lusting over a teenage girl shouting "LIEBE!" at the top of his lungs all the time? Did we really need a whole sequence where Inako and a bereaved widow go through this overlong, over-the-top running sequence straight out of Looney Tunes? Did we really need an elaborate cartoon chase scene that ends with a random baby smelling Kengo's visible shoe odor? Did we really need an entire episode dedicated to the girls making up their own rock band, which anybody with half a brain can see is just there to pander to the K-On fans and literally serves no other purpose? Do we really need constant shots of Yosuke's ass and the seams of his underwear showing through his pants every single time he appears on screen (I'm not even exaggerating about this. They do this even in his character reference art!)? It's the same problem that shows like Elusive Samurai have: The show doesn't trust that the story or characters can create compelling drama on their own, and feels the need to just randomly shove in unneeded slapstick comedy even when it's completely inappropriate for them to do so. Like, I'm pretty sure even my high school writing teachers can tell you that writing a story about a group of teenagers helping a woman and her family deal with the loss of the patriarch won't benefit from having Looney Tunes style spin sequences where an adult man is shouting "MOMMY!" constantly because it would clash too much with the tone! Not to mention I honestly have to question why they even felt the need to make the story into some alternate Meiji era-verse to begin with. It feels like they only did this so they can have an excuse to throw in technology that wouldn't become possible for several decades, and when you continue to have stuff like teenage girls being put into arranged marriages and still adhere to the customs of that time period, why not just keep it in the regular Meiji era to begin with?!
On its own, all of this is already bad enough, but do you want to know what makes everything about Sparks of Tomorrow even worse? None of what happens in the anime is in the novel at all. A Tumblr user going by the username Thefinalcinderella took it upon themselves to translate the novel. I've been reading it...and I was utterly shocked by how different it was compared to the anime. And you know what? The novel is better in literally every way. Everything I mentioned the anime did completely wrong, the novel managed to do properly. All the characters are given their time in the limelight and actually develop, their actions make sense even if you don't like the decisions they make, the plot is much more coherent and streamlined, there's no constant slapstick comedy shoved in every other scene, and it actually understands its own themes. From what I've heard, from the 2010s onward, KyoAni's adaptations of existing source material haven't been the most faithful, as they've gone on record saying they prefer to use it as inspiration and do their own takes on it rather than simply recreate them in anime form. While this has worked for some stuff they've worked on, this absolutely did NOT work for Sparks of Tomorrow, and in my opinion, they utterly botched it by changing it into something completely unrecognizable. Characters' personalities, backstories, and motivations were either left out or completely changed (With Yosuke being the biggest victim of this. Seriously, his novel counterpart makes for a MUCH better villain and he's not the buffoonish gay stereotype the anime turns him into), lots of unnecessary new characters and subplots were added to the anime, and even the overall plot was bloated to the point of absurdity.
I almost question why KyoAni felt the need to do all this when just faithfully adapting the novel's plot wholesale would have been better, especially since the novel on its own is perfectly fine! It's a straight forward historical fiction adventure romance that's pretty down-to-earth, all things considered. It's no masterpiece and not winning any awards for originality, but it manages to execute its premise decently enough and is perfectly endearing for what it is. It's especially infuriating because had KyoAni bothered to adapt the characters' backstories and motivations from the novel, they would have made much more sense and made them feel more like characters and less like living props who only act when the plot demands it. It's like KyoAni thought the novel was terrible on its own and felt they could do it better by adding all this unnecessary stuff to it. Man, no wonder the whole show feels like a bunch of ideas haphazardly stapled together and written by a high schooler discovering fan fiction for the first time. Oh, and if you think I'm the only one who doesn't like how the anime approached adapting the novel, I've got news for you: Hiro Yuuki, the author of the novel himself, has tweeted that he doesn't like the anime. Granted, the tweets got deleted, probably due to KyoAni demanding he delete them, but someone on MAL managed to preserve them for public viewing. Creators not liking how a company adapts their work to other mediums is nothing new, as there have been plenty over the years, but I think in this case, Yuuki-san is completely and utterly justified.
But even with the baggage of just being a completely botched adaptation of the novel, taken on its own merits, of which there are very few, Sparks of Tomorrow is a bloated, convoluted, overambitious mess of a series whose staff were just too immature and inexperienced to handle something like this. Seriously, KyoAni needs to hire better writers. They've already refined their animation game, but I think it's time for them to focus on other things. All the ambition in the world won't mean a damn thing if it's ever going to hit a brick wall like it did here. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad KyoAni is back to working after the arson attack. No one deserves to go through something like that, and I want KyoAni to succeed. But this doesn't mean they're immune to criticism, and I think Sparks of Tomorrow is the perfect example of how their recent modus operandi of completely changing everything from the source material can fall flat on its face when not handled or approached properly. When that Tumblr user finishes translating the novel, expect a review of that in the future, because I'll be a LOT more complimentary with that one, if only because it's just better in every concievable way.
