Lemon Angel Project

I finished Lemon Angel Project just yesterday and I noticed that it didn't have a review yet, so I thought I'd do the honours <3

STORY

Lemon Angel Project is set in the year 2017, and is about Tomo Minaguchi, a girl who's close friend and senpai Yui recently died due to "unknown causes". While she was still alive, Yui told Tomo that she felt happy and full of life when Tomo sang, and she was also the creator of the popular all-girl group called the "Lemon Angel Project", who mysteriously vanished shortly before Yui's death.
A year and a half later, Tomo, along with other girls, tries ... out to become a member of the new and revived Lemon Angel Project.
Basically, it sounds dull, simple and recycled, right? Haha. That is so wrong. Lemon Angel Project is far from mindless and it actually covers a lot of things rarely seen in shoujo anime, such as bullying people from other countries.

ART

The art was beautiful! I didn't notice the backgrounds very much, but the people were pretty much always drawn beautifully. Especially Erika; her hair was done beautifully. I think it deserved a 9/10. Nothing to complain about ;3

SOUND

Heck, I loved the OP song, Angel Addict. It fitted the series just perfectly and was one of those songs that made me just want to stand up and dance, and that doesn't happen all that often ;3 there was a great number of insert songs and songs used in the auditions, and each of them was beautiful and fitted what was going on perfectly. 10/10!

CHARACTER

I thought that the characters were going to be simple and standard, because I shamefully based my initial thoughts on this series on Kirarin Revolution. Oh how wrong I was. One or two characters are standard and recycled, such as Fuyumi, but others stood out so well. The one who was the most unique was Erika Campbell. I won't describe her here since I think you need to watch the series rather than read this to fully understand how she is different.

ENJOYMENT

Let me just say, this is the ONLY series that has kept me up watching until gone midnight. I marathoned the first 7 episodes because it was just so darn addicting; I wanted to see more and more!
I don't like idol series, or series about girls trying to become famous singers. But this one was so different, I can't understand why it's rated so lowly here on MAL ;3; I enjoyed pretty much every minute of Lemon Angel Project, and I'd gladly watch it all over again.

OVERALL

Overall, Lemon Angel Project was fantastic. It had lots of things in it that I really wouldn't have expected, and it was pleasantly surprising in that sense. I would recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind a all-female main cast <3

While perusing my preferred anime download site one spring morn, I stumbled on an odd sounding series called Lemon Angel Project. I scoffed at the title and decided to click the link and read the synopsis just for the sake of a cheap laugh. And just like that, on a whim, I subjected myself to Lemon Angel Project, possibly a hidden gem that got lost in the unforgiving trends of the anime season.

Before I rip it to shreds, I’ll just get it out in the open that I liked LAP despite its shortcomings, of which there are many. It’s a short feel-good series that’s hard ... to dislike, with heartwarming moments and catchy J-Pop tunes abound.

With that said…


There are many good reasons why this was likely forgotten by everyone, and most likely doesn’t deserve a high place on anybody’s To Watch list. It’s a show that lacks subtlety and finesse, barreling straight on into a clunky mess of a story without any warning. Aesthetically, the animation isn’t great. It was a series from 2006, but even by those standards it doesn’t look like a fresh face.

It isn’t terrible, but the appearance is just so mundane that it’s hard to keep watching for the aesthetics alone. With the animation and art style alike denounced as mundane, it’d better have a story to make up for the lackluster visuals. After all, Welcome to the NHK didn’t look too good and that’s a classic in my books. [C] is looking hilariously off model most times, but it’s too interesting just to be held up by that.

Fortunately, there is a story in there. It’s just so predictable and obvious that the show almost doesn’t win points for it. The synopsis is essentially as follows: Tomo, oddly enough the only girl with an odd hair color in the universe aside from the foreign girl (Who’s made painfully obvious is foreign, but more on that later), witnessed the disappearance of her favorite pop supergroup, Lemon Angel, over a year before the current time.
She learns that the former leader, the elusive and aloof Miki, attends her high school and so begins to stalk her.

What begin as time honored Shoujou-Ai clichés quickly and thankfully change to Tomo stumbling on the dark secret of Lemon Angel and auditioning for the revival group. Along the way, she becomes more confident, makes friends, deals with her and her friends’ pasts and yadda yadda yadda. This has all been done before, and done better in Mahou Shoujo shows.

To be perfectly fair though, the drama is quite effective in some places; the tsundere being humbled by an old lady being a prime example.

Despite the occasional gold specks in the depressing dank of the story, these alone don’t save it. There isn’t a single challenging thought or deed, which I think has been done to attract and keep as many viewers as possible. However, it’s easy to see just how this managed to become such an obscure flop with such an approach.

Okay, so the story’s a big piece of shit, but what about the characters? Surely they can hold a show on their own if they have interesting enough personalities or backgrounds. Well, hypothetical inquisitive person who I always seem to quote, that would be the case. And to give the show even more credit, one or two of the characters are a little compelling. Too bad it’s balanced by just as many flat, offensive, and just plain hyperbolic characters.

For every girl in a modeling agency who wants to break free from her restraining, greedy, corrupt boss, you get two girls whose only collective goal in life are to be members of Lemon Angel. Also a gay guy who makes Liberace look like a ladies man.

For every two of those, you get a villain whose only reason for existing is to make the main characters miserable just for the sake of being evil. C’mon, this is a show about five girls and their rise to fame as part of a citrus fruit/seraphim themed phenomenon. For hell’s sake, Heartcatch Precure does better characterization with their villains. I mean Kumojacky at least becomes a little less smug over time.

Lemon Angel Project has little characterization, especially with the antagonists. They stay bad throughout the episodes that they feature in, and have no chance to redeem themselves. If their actions weren’t so cartoonishly villainous, they’d be marginally less boring than the color beige.

Speaking of color, the focus on the foreign girl Erika Campbell and just how foreign she is doesn’t make for a very compelling plot. Then again, I’m just irritated that I never found out what her nationality really is. They say she came from South America, but being ethnically ambiguous, that would still lead to confusion over the last name Campbell, a distinctly un-Spanish/Portuguese last name. She also looks and acts similarly to Kaolla from Love Hina, so that only complicates matters more.

However, where the characterization, overall plot, and animation fail, individual elements of the plot come to the rescue. It isn’t too much of a stretch to say that despite the lack of a compelling overarching narrative, the plot itself isn’t bad. I retract what I said earlier. The small elements, like Erika learning the truth behind her brother’s past and the entire train station episode, are done pretty well and with enough conviction to make me forget the lame… everything else.

Since I seem to be running out of steam, there are just a few more points I’d like to make, and gripes I’d like to complain about.

There are a few minor problems that I had watching it, in addition to the larger ones. These weren’t enough to really make my experience unpleasant, but they sure didn’t help LAP’s case at all.

First, the main character’s voice is annoying through most of LAP, even when singing. I don’t know any kinder way to put that. Some people just don’t like it, but I found it mildly grating after a little while. Imagine Ahiru’s voice from Princess Tutu, except cracking while yelling into a wind tunnel. Now you can imagine how unbearable Tomo’s voice really is at times.

Finally, the entirety of LAP was punctuated with thunderstorms to frame a dramatic moment. I can’t tell you just how unfortunate it was that every single evening and nighttime moment was accompanied by an intense rain and thunderstorm. The last episode had a particularly hilarious example where thunder would sound whenever any two characters argued. I counted four different storms, all brought on by internal strife.

To summarize my first point again, Lemon Angel Project isn’t bad. It isn’t particularly imaginative or good, but you could do far worse in the coming summer months.

Man, was this a bait and switch! I expected a shoujo anime about idol hackers; I got a fanservicey CGDCT anime.

All the mysteries involving Yui and the disappearing idols are resolved in an infodump in the middle of the series. Occasionally you'll see some cool flip phone designs, and the idols have a futuristic-looking tour van that appears once or twice, but that's it as far as the cyberhacking or this show being in the future go. The rest of the series is pure moe filler with some occasional idol concerts and fanservice scenes. None of the characters are well written; they're cardboard cutouts ... with different backstories and traits to differentiate themselves. They don't even have personalities! It's like watching a painfully unfunny, deliberately boring version of Hannah Montana! Because this series was made before Kyoani's rise to fame, the series attempts to incorporate J-Drama elements involving the idol industry on top of the moe, albeit unsubstantially and for a fake sense of story progression and tension.

What's interesting is that this series ended up predicting two huge anime trends before they went mainstream: this is a slice of life idol series before Aikatsu/Love Live/etc made that genre big, and the main character is a blue-haired girl with long ponytails! A time traveler must have come back to 2006 to make Lemon Angel Project in hopes that Radix would claim the successes of Hatsune Miku and Love Live for themselves!

Even though this is a Radix anime, it sure doesn't look like it! There are no weird uses of CGI except for a single CGI light rig, and the coloring is far less saturated and the characters don't have weird reflective skin. This series just looks like a regular, poorly preserved 2000s anime, so not even the visuals are interesting.

Even though this is the type of story and series that would appeal to little girls, this is made for grown men! It was aired in a programming block, Anime Spirits, that mainly specialized in fanservice anime, including Godannar and Radix's Divergence Eve and Heretical Love Hour, and eroge adaptations, including Radix's HaniHani, Wind: A Breath of Heart, and Comic Party Revolution. The anime is a homage to the real life 1980s idol group Lemon Angel, best known for creating TV tie-in shorts with Cream Lemon. Indeed, this seems to be the flagship of an attempt Radix was making to reboot Cream Lemon, since in this anime, the main character's VA also plays the (separate) main character of Radix's Cream Lemon OVAs. And, fun fact, this VA, Ryou Shihono, took on these roles when she was 15! And as part of a promotion for the Lemon Angel Project anime, the producers launched a podcast where Shihono would read letters from viewers, including lewd ones! Yuck!

Lemon Angel Project is trash of the highest order, which I only remember because the songs are so darn catchy. WATASHI DAKE, MITSUMETE YO- stop it, earworm! So, enjoy the songs on Youtube, but avoid this creepy snoozefest of a show. It's a shame, because this could have been peak 2000s Fruitiger Aero futurism and a decent shoujo series at the same time. Even if you're a Radix completionist, you won't get anything out of this.