FEATURE: Bocchi the Rock! is a Great Exploration of Anxiety and Finding Freedom through Art
Hitori “Bocchi” Gotoh is a high school girl who struggles with anxiety. She has no friends at school and her family struggles to understand her. But Hitori has a secret — she’s an incredible guitarist who goes by the handle “guitarhero” online. BOCCHI THE ROCK! is the story of Hitori’s quest to join a rock band and become somebody she can be proud of. But it is also the story of her classmates and peers who realize, to their amazement, that Bocchi rocks.
It’s an underdog story, and so was the making of the show itself. The young staff of Bocchi includes talented folks like the character designer Kerorira and the live performance director Yusuke Kawakami. Cameos by resident Trigger genius Kai Ikarashi as well as Toshimasa Ishii, who directed last year’s transformative anime adaptation of 86 EIGHTY-SIX, keep things exciting. Steering the ship is the show’s director, Keiichiro Saito. Saito directed and storyboarded the eighth episode of Sonny Boy, one of the most idiosyncratic episodes of TV anime to be aired in recent memory. His take on BOCCHI is less abstract than that formidable masterpiece, but just as willing to take big risks.
BOCCHI THE ROCK! looks like a mundane high school club anime on the surface. But it’s closer in spirit to the classic cringe comedy WATAMOTE ~No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys Fault I’m Not Popular!~ Just like Tomoko, the heroine of WATAMOTE, Bocchi is tormented by fears of failure, loneliness and social exclusion. She expresses these fears to the audience in non-stop monologue even as she hesitates to share them with her friends and family. Her anxiety is relatable but always just a bit off-putting. By putting herself out there, Bocchi embarrasses herself over and over.
Bocchi’s character is key to the show’s appeal, but also tough to balance. Soften her too much and the show loses its edge. Punish her too flagrantly and the audience begins laughing at her rather than empathizing with her. Saito didn’t want to make Bocchi an object of ridicule. In a Purizm interview translated by bitmap at Sakugablog, Saito says that his team “strove to make you laugh when she does something weird, but also make her especially captivating when she shows off her cool side from time to time.” Bocchi has a fearful side to her like Tomoko, but also a streak of bravery that appears when you least expect it. She’s an idiosyncratic person who lives in her own world but struggles every day to build bridges to the worlds of others.
Each episode of BOCCHI THE ROCK! pays close attention to how the characters navigate physical and personal space. Bocchi is repeatedly isolated or fenced in by corridors and buildings. She looks out at her friends without ever being able to touch, and only gradually becomes able to inhabit the same space as them. Some of the best visual jokes in the series come when those rules are unexpectedly broken, such as in the first episode when Bocchi crawls from the back of a room to the front like BOB from Twin Peaks. Careful storyboarding is a boon to TV anime but is also time-consuming and difficult. Even so, every episode of Bocchi released so far reflects this attention to detail in one aspect or another.
Bocchi’s anxiety is signaled not just through her words but by the way she carries herself. She’s reticent to look others in the eye, her face melts when she’s stressed and her body super-deforms during bad anxiety attacks. When she’s in the zone playing her guitar, she stares directly at her instrument and meticulously plucks the strings. The other characters have their moments too. Drummer Nijika doesn’t have much to distinguish her on paper, as the second “cheerful girl” in the cast, but she has some of the best interpersonal scenes with Bocchi, including a trip to a vending machine in Episode 5 animated in its entirety by Tomoki Yoshikawa (per the character designer Kerorira).
What truly sets BOCCHI THE ROCK! apart, though, is its willingness to go big and weird during Bocchi’s anxiety attacks. At times, this means simple flights of fantasy, like when Bocchi imagines herself transforming into a Godzilla-sized monster under the influence of social media. At other times, reality itself breaks. Recent episodes of BOCCHI have featured cut-out puppets on popsicle sticks, a horrifying sports festival zoetrope and even a big Game of Life game board with a little model Bocchi. The staff took the time to build these from scratch in the midst of what must have been a tight schedule, just for the sake of nailing a joke.
That said, I think the key to BOCCHI THE ROCK! lies in its performance sequences rather than in its flights of fancy. Bocchi isn’t simply happy when she is at her best on stage, she’s focused. No longer consumed by fear or anxiety, her eyes are solely on her guitar. Stage Bocchi is more than just a performance. As depicted by the animators, Stage Bocchi and Anxious Bocchi are two sides of the same coin. Her obsessive personality flips from a debilitating weakness to a source of strength when given the right outlet. As Nijika says in the eighth episode, Bocchi is their rock, the heart and soul of Kessoku Band.
Bass player Ryo says of Bocchi’s lyrics, “It might not connect with many people, but those it does, it’ll hit deeply.” She might as well say the same of BOCCHI THE ROCK! itself, which has grown over the course of its airing into a cult favorite. But how underground is the series, really? It’s a show about cute girls, perhaps the most reliable predictor of anime success. Its music may skew toward tricot rather than the pep of K-ON!!’s Hokago Tea Time, but is sold as ready-made singles on Spotify and iTunes just the same. Bocchi looks like a disaster from the outside, but is really a guitar savant with skills well above high school level. She’s how I would have imagined myself as a high schooler dealing with anxiety and mental illness, rather than the person I actually was–who was likely much closer to WATAMOTE’s Tomoko.
I’m reminded of the sixth episode of Freaks and Geeks, one of the best TV shows of the 1990s. Teenage stoner Nick loves playing on his drum set and believes himself to be a serious musician compared to his peers. But when he takes a risk and tries out for the rock band Dimension, he’s rejected immediately. Another series might simply have Nick bomb the audition, but Freaks and Geeks suggests instead that Nick was never very good to begin with. His dreams of rock and roll stardom were always resting on sand. Nothing in BOCCHI THE ROCK! is as cruel as that ruthless, clarifying moment.
Everyone imagines at one point as a teenager that they are different and misunderstood. BOCCHI THE ROCK! spins that fantasy into gold. Bocchi moves closer and closer to self-actualization in each episode. In reality, living with depression and anxiety means having good and bad days. It means accepting that while you can build connections to some, others may want nothing to do with you. BOCCHI THE ROCK! gestures at cynicism. But at its root, the show is no more realistic than Bocchi’s wild fantasies.
But then, what’s wrong with fantasy? Some folks need a bit of hope to make it through the day. If that hope comes in the form of an anxious pink-haired high schooler impressing her friends by rocking out on the guitar, so much the better. Besides, you can hide all kinds of things inside candy coating. The staff of BOCCHI THE ROCK! took a slightly barbed comic about cute girls in a rock band and smuggled in as many outrageous tricks they could think of. Fans of BOCCHI THE ROCK! love the series even more for those tricks rather than in spite of them. I hope that future anime productions take the lessons of Bocchi to heart: that anime can be weird, and weird anime is fun. Speaking personally, BOCCHI THE ROCK! is the most fun I’ve had watching anime all year.
Are you watching BOCCHI THE ROCK! When have you most empathized with Bocchi? What are your most embarrassing high school memories? Let me know in the comments! (If you feel comfortable.)
Adam W is a Features Writer at Crunchyroll. When he isn’t listening to tricot, he sporadically contributes with a loose coalition of friends to a blog called Isn’t it Electrifying? You can find him on Twitter (so long as it exists) at: @wendeego
