By complete coincidence I just finished WUG earlier.
Wake Up, Girls! End
Well the depraved aspects of the industry kind of disappeared after a while so the show's bite was rather lost and it just became another predictable show of a group winning against an initial struggle.
Well there was still the repeats of the same scenes with Megaphone Bloke from
AKB48 L-1. Dance dance dance, here's todays losers goodbye and lets shout that idols are not people. Fun the first time, after about the third time we got the message and after the five or six times they cut to this it was getting a bit old. Well it was still kind of funny seeing the CG background models looking worse and worse each time until they were basically an army of shop window dummies. Problem was in the end he was just a grumpy guts. He just talks in a monotone the same boring things and yet we're meant to believe he has a passion for idols that is beyond belief. They could argue that his vision of perfection has resulted in his solum soul and loopy logic but honestly he just sounds bored with the whole thing. Just some sort of emotion is all he needed because honestly it makes one wonder how he managed to get started in the first place. I think a one second flashback near the end was meant to signify something towards him having some fort of emotion but he's so glum it was lost on me.
It is nice to see an idol show where their songs don't just appear out of thin air. For as great as iDOLM@STER is, the fact they have oodles or dance and song routines is rather glossed over. But that's really all I can say for it. The characters are kind of boring so the show can certainly not be considered character driven. I mean the group of fans and the president seemed to be more fleshed out than the WUG. Actually, thank goodness for the president because the producer is literally just there. iDOLM@STER took the invisible "you" character from the games and turned it into into a likeable character, Puchimas takes this even further. Producer here is just a male wave in a female sea. You can basically forget he exists after episode one. Back to the WUG, problem is they all literally had one attribute and that was it, the ex idol, the non quite made it idol, the one that likes to eat, the maid cafe idol, the one who thinks they are great at everything, the one who thinks they are bad at everything and the older one. Sure I'm not expecting multi dimensional characters from an anime, but we can do a bit better than that. As a resulted I never really found myself rooting for them mostly because firstly I could see how the story was going to go and secondly I didn't really find myself liking any of them. I was just indifferent to them.
I made a brief mention of CG models earlier. I believe the L-1 training lessons were the only time they used them in the show (may have been another time with L-1 but I can't remember despite only watching it a few hours ago which goes to show how memorable I found this show) but this isn't necessarily praise. While one can give the show credit for traditionally animating most of the dance scenes, this doesn't mean much when they looked stilted and quite frankly bad. They really lacked any energy. I mean just compare
First Rate Smile from WUG with
REST@RT from iM@S (yes, I keep mentioning this show, but it really is the best of the bunch and hey WUG was all about comparing themselves with the best). Static angles, static poses and dodgy faces and of course nothing that can compare with the Yukiho wink, but then again I don't expect anything to ever beat that. I mean did you see that bit at around 10 seconds in the WUG videos, the heck was that?
Well at least it provided a spot of Union Jack watch. Which is always a good thing!
So yeah, I'd say watch it if you are on idol watch but otherwise just watch some of the better ones (iM@S, Love Live, Sekai de Ichiban Tsuyoku Naritai! etc). It may have the distinction of being the most grounded in reality but the problem is reality can be rather boring sometimes.
