Season aired: Spring 2019
Number of episodes: 24
Genres: Music, Drama
Thoughts: When Shinichiro Watanabe, director of the critically acclaimed Cowboy Bebop, announced that he was heading the original project Carole & Tuesday, fans immediately responded to his announcement with enthusiasm. Fast forward through the spring season, Carole & Tuesday continued to be supported by the fans and eventually won the entire Spring Awards at Anime Trending, despite only airing the first cour. For me, Carole & Tuesday hits many magical points that leave the viewers emotional and excited but once the dust settled, I began to see the flaws in the storyline.
As the title suggests, Carole & Tuesday follows the journey of two aspiring artists. One grew up street smart with no parents to guide her, and another grew up sheltered underneath the domineering and rich presence of her politician mother. When the two meet on the streets of Mars’s capital, they find musical synergy with each other and decide to work together to reach the tops of the music industry.
There are, without a doubt, many things to love about the series. For one, the accurate portrayal of Los Angeles is translated to a city of hopes and dreams that exists on Mars instead. Because I have close friends in Los Angeles who are trying to make a name in the entertainment industry, I know how wide of a gap the road to stardom is. On one hand, we have the rich, famous, and successful who lead lifestyles that everyone admires and wants to become. On the other hand, we have those who struggle on a day-to-day basis, pick up every odd job they can find just so they have somewhere to live, and dream big but never seem to reach the stardom they chase after. Carole & Tuesday shows exactly that with how downtrodden Carole’s home is and how dire her financial situation can be. While she dreams of singing beside the glorious artists with glamour shots and bright concerts, Carole trudges with sketchy jobs like being a crier at a funeral.
However, Watanabe-san is not ignorant of the problems behind the entertainment industry. Many people who do become successful actually end up quite miserable and feel incredibly lonely. We are familiar with these homages to famous celebrities such as Flora for Whitney Houston, who after her rise to fame, fell to severe drug addiction and died at only forty-eight years old. It shows how hypocritical the idea of fame is: everyone wants to be you, but no one truly wants to be with you.
Because Watanabe-san created characters to reflect real life famous artists (with Crystal clearly being a call to Beyonce), he also enlisted artists from all over the world to sing for these characters. The end result is an absolutely phenomenal soundtrack. Every single character has their own style of composing and singing, and I have lost track of the amount of times I’ve listened to these songs on Spotify. I love every single piece that graced the series, and part of the magic of Carole & Tuesday is undoubtedly the music he brought in.
However, success in the music industry isn’t the only conflict to arise in the series. A consistently more relevant problem as the series continued is the introduction of politics. Very thinly veiled at American politics today, Tuesday’s mom, Valerie, is a woman aiming to become the president of Mars. In order to win, she hires Jerry, a sketchy campaign manager, who convinces her to spout anti-immigration and conservative policies in order to appeal to the public for the sake of winning. Unfortunately, her campaign trail would affect the entire culture and atmosphere of Mars as native Mars born citizens begin turning against refugees from Earth, which has since become a wasteland, and more specifically, black artists who use their music to take a stance on this form of racism.
I have nothing against Watanabe-san adding American politics into his storyline. In fact, I have nothing against any anime writer and director making such a decision; I think it makes for a compelling point of view. When someone from outside your country sees how cult like and brainwashed your country is becoming and makes a 24 episode series to critique it, should you not be worried?
The problem with this added conflict and theme it draws attention away from, arguably, the show’s most prominent theme from the first half of the series. For the first twelve episodes, Carole & Tuesday hints at humanity’s growing dependence on AI, to the point that we even hand over creativity to the computers. On Mars, musicians don’t even write their own songs, and certainly other people don’t write it for them. Instead, AI’s write lyrics based on what it analyzes is the best songs to be released as a public hit, and the musicians sing them. As aspiring artists, Carole and Tuesday stood out because every single piece of music they produced came from a place of real passion and creativity; they didn’t rely on any AI assistance whatsoever.
This question of using AI in the music industry never gets answered in lieu of the growing restless political climate in the second cour. Sure, we still see Carole and Tuesday go through their own private creative process to write their own album and later their final New Year’s Eve song, but the original conflict of their style versus the world’s trending style never got addressed again. Yet, this theme took an entire first half of the series, so I think it’s important to keep in mind that it never got its full closure.
I also wish the series followed up on more of the characters they introduced. Mentioned above, the protagonists meet Flora as a fallen artist who disappeared after spiraling into drug addiction. The episode that focuses on her is incredibly poignant and one of the most emotional episodes written as it shows how much the industry has destroyed her personally. Although we do get a glimpse of her recovery at the end, we never see what happens to her after that small peek, and because she is such an influencing factor in the story to not only Carole but also to Crystal, the Beyonce of Mars, I think she should have had the “camera” following her for a bit longer.
However, these flaws absolutely do not detract from the “7 minutes of miracle” that the first episode speaks about and the last episode finally delivers on. For even with all my complaints on the forgotten theme and the lack of following up on certain characters, when the finale song started playing, I found myself pointedly moved and teary eyed by the lyrics and the artists. Songs reach people’s hearts and can very much define culture, and Carole & Tuesday’s final episode proves that fact with a single song.
All in all, Carole & Tuesday as a series had its lows, but when it reaches its highs, it soars. For someone who might want more closure within the plot and characters, I’m sure its flaws would annoy you to no end. However, for someone who looks more upon the big picture, I think the series is a solid story that reflects the entertainment industry, American culture today, and proves that a single song is sometimes enough to change your thoughts and feelings.
Rating
Plot: 7
Characters: 8
Voice acting: 7
Art/Animation: 7
Soundtrack: 9.5
Total: 38.5
Multiplier: 2
FINAL SCORE: 77
