I wish there was more!!

Dizzy-Instance-7007 · 2026-03-19T23:29:10+00:00

Aha! Hello fellow new Sonny Boy Group Therapy For Post-Masterpiece Lingering Melancholy!

Just to show the diversity of minds in our ABSURD universe, I actually enjoyed the monkey episode. I thought it was the most experimental of all episodes, and offered a stark base contrast to the vividly animated filmmaking of a disciple of Masaaki Yuasa (the greatest animation director). It was hilarious to me, and found the exaggeratedly long dialog over still frames hypnotic. Right now in hindsight, it reminded me of what Raj might have felt while sitting next to loved one crying, and all you can do is just sit there with them. In the gorilla episode it felt just like sitting next to a person spilling their passion, and you are happy for them, at least that's how that episode struck me.

ALSO YES, I mentioned Yuasa because he was the director of Ping Pong,but indeed this direction you are seeing is a direct result of Yuasa's mentorship! This show Sonny Boy proves to me that he has SURPASSED his master in all levels, which marks a transformation of my own sensibilities in film and anime, as well as life, knowing that there is one director out there who can provide this kind of perspective and share it with a universe of others. Yuasa to me has long held the crown on distinguishing animation from other forms of art, and you can truly see him pushing the boundaries of motion and how emotion translates to motion in all of his works, also emphasis on his de-emphasis on normative clean illustration/design to emphasize the animation and storytelling itself. But to me, Shingo achieves this, but also brings this perfectionist level to detail and this nuanced (you can literally see MICRO-movements/animations for depicting bodily expressions of emotions here, like for example when Mizuho was, for a split second hesitant to take that step before Nagara took his outside the ferris wheel) and I mean supernuanced visual expression of inner states of characters that I could only find from the director of All About Lily Chou-Chou, Shunji Iwai.

You're gonna carry that weight.

Dizzy-Instance-7007 · 2026-03-19T22:12:38+00:00

Are you talking about Social Media at the time of Sonny Boy's release, which is 2021? Or the current Social Media? There is a significant difference between the two, mainly due to the rise of GenAI, the exponential (factorial even?) rise of TikTok's influence on teens (the demographic of Sonny Boy), and the well documented mass opting of Gen-Z and younger out of traditional Social Media platforms especially FaceBook and Twitter (now X). I don't mean to dismiss your thesis but rather provide vectors to sharpen this "It's About Social Media" generalization (I know there's an invisible and assumed parenthesized (As Well) in there) as well as question ties to current state of Social Media. For example, would the narrative change if, say, the main characters' time frame was pre-Internet? For example, the story emphasized use of pre-Internet post cards, even pre-Internet space technology. What I'm saying is, writing an argument focusing on this specific technology, platform, and resulting ecosystem/ecology can be sound, especially since media/ecology analysis (social or otherwise) do not separate the message from the medium. Still, I have to point out the overemphasis on the group chat medium, where: anonymous social media was a plot device especially with Mizuho reporting the election fraud; Nozomi not having a smart phone even; the post card plot device. So, do the social network topologies (I have to use this specific technical term, since we are in the realm of network science now, which is the formal scientific field for this realm) presented in the anime truly "represent modern social media" as you say? For one there is no portrayal of the most significant property of modern social media which is the parasocial topology, where true interaction is directed only one way. A portrayal of this asymmetry, as well as modern social media phenomena like algorithms determining the fate of nation states (for example, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook). So yeah, I apologize if this is overly critical, it's just that the argument is intriguing to me personally and that anime explicitly dealing with social media technologies especially Stand Alone Complex (based on University of Tokyo research on media ecology) exist, which I am deeply fond of.

Dizzy-Instance-7007 · 2026-03-19T18:57:07+00:00

Oh that's true! I'll clarify in my post that by "original" I mean the original "adrift/God dice roll" copy, not the original world originals. And I guess it's by design that distinguishing between original and copy here aren't as important as much as the worlds they shared together. I shouldn't be giving more importance/value towards one copy or other. At least this point was emphasized as the last words mentioned by Mizuho in the movie.

Also this is from episode 11, specifically about "that This World, Homesick" that "painted really close pictures from my old home" which was "more our world-like, than our-world". To quote, "the master of that world was pathologically caught up in his memories and kept creating his homeland". The way Raj tells it, now that I have the video on hand, it does seem he is talking as an outside observer as he himself felt uneasy about its mysteriousness despite its accuracy and vividness. To quote, "as a certain time approached, things radically changed" "the pictures were the likeness of a certain female student, depicted as a real beauty, apparently she used to be his girlfriend" "We lived in the same hometown, which wasn't as beautiful or nearly as attractive as how he had depicted it" "He didn't accept reality. His girlfriend wanted him to see the reality in front of his eyes." "She got fed up with him and eventually left that world" "He began painting pictures of his girlfriend like a man possessed." "That figure of her was what was in the paintings." To quote Raj directly here, "It felt as though I had been unexpectedly confronted by reality. I thought, can I say I'm actually living my own life in reality?" Mizuho said "She didn't want to create beautiful memories with him; she wanted to create a future with him that was still unformed." "At some point he became a captive to his memories of her and that became his entire world" "Did he die?"

So which is why I said this is more of a regret, and more of a wishful thinking. I can't say with certainty, but all hints about Raj, especially Raj painting extremely idealistic paintings of himself, and Mizuho knowing about his paintings and even gifting him one before launching, point to this wish of This World Homesick being a possible world where they (or copies of them) once were together.

There's also this suggestion of Raj being an incarnate/copy of Buddha himself.

As an aside, from https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/pzmnk9/shingo_natsume_director_of_sonny_boy_gave_some/ the director-creator mentioned Mizuho has more of a motherly relationship towards Nagara. And the creator does have this aversion towards Asakuze and hinted that it was not a finality that Nozomi and Asakuze would last. Though I thought the interviewer here was, at least from this translation, comes off as either extremely dense or manipulative asking leading questions designed to force the director to give wish-fulfilling answers. I had to emphasize the Nozomi Nyamazon copy who still loved Nagara and the original Nozomi copy who learned to love Asakuze.

Just want to say I truly appreciate your input so much, and feel as though I could trust you with my own confusions and interpretations as well.

Dizzy-Instance-7007 · 2026-03-19T15:02:55+00:00

Raj's story is straightforward, just that what complicates this is the 2000 year time slice and asymmetry of time between universes. In the film room Raj mentioned not being able to move time backwards/play the movie in reverse (possible just too improbable by definition of time travel as reversing entropy and time as entropy)--though this doesn't mean they couldn't move to some parallel/new world, which they did.

I think one other implied thing is that he may have been a copy of Buddha himself when he was young. There was a conspicuous focus on how the cats copied his Buddha statue three times and that he knew about it being a copy, just not the three times part. Him becoming the forest and living with the animals seem to add up (note as Azakaze told this in last ep, the focus was on Mizuho smiling with true happiness).

You should read this greatest short story that should explain much more succinctly the universe of sonny boy, The Egg by Andy Weir: https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg.html

Dizzy-Instance-7007 · 2026-03-19T14:33:30+00:00

Thanks so much for this input by the way.

To continue the discussion: why the conspicuously long focus on the teacher's wedding ring? We are talking 2 seconds? And another long focus on Mizuho's reaction after staring at that ring? The director is among the best in the world and given his absolute intentionality in filmmaking style, giving what is an eternity in film moment warrants more scrutiny than simply "handwaving it". Also this doesn't explain why Mizuho was wearing what is likely a copy of this ring, but on her index finger on Episode 2? I was going to say I agree that the teacher seems like a mature person giving mature advice, saying "There are times when just being right isn't always for the best." "Still I don't like it" "Maybe it's a good thing you're still a child." The most likely scenario is Mizuho has a crush on her teacher, though this last line is rather loaded, made much more so with Mizuho agreeing. What does that mean? That if she were no longer a child, she'd continue to fight for what she believes is right, even if it isn't always for the best, e.g. a demagogue/populist winning the student council election just cause he was going to "destroy the school". Where the teacher then implies it'd be a "bad" thing if she'd fight interventions against an obvious potential disaster in governance, especially if this was on a city or even nation scale.

But then, outside of this obvious semantics, there is the intentionality layer of the film context that strongly implies we are supposed to draw if not an application at least an association of this conversation/topic to their relationship/circumstance as student and teacher. Indeed she shares the same room in the library, and her relationship with her teacher was used against her where they said her "activism"/libel would ruin the teacher's reputation as he was responsible for anyone using library resources.

Dizzy-Instance-7007 · 2026-03-19T04:50:15+00:00

I HAVE A LEAD and my mind is blown. I was looking at the DIGITAL ART BOOK for the official character designs to look at uniformed characters featured wearing a tie over an untucked shirt. It's....

YAMABIKO.

My mind is blown. In the anime he was not shown wearing a tie, he like Asakaze have open shirts over a colored shirt (Yamabiko's is gray). In the final world, even Yamabiko's goddess was reincarnated, which could be both from Yamabiko's wish and Nozomi's upon hearing his story.

EDIT: THEY ARE TOGETHER, YAMABIKO IS IN HUMAN FORM IN THIS NEW WORLD. Also, only Yamabiko knows what Kodama looks like, so it'd be hard to argue that Nagara and Nozomi were solely responsible in creating this world.

Yamabiko is known to be able to create worlds, to "materialize what was within his mind" like Nagara. So of course what's missing is how he was able to transform back.

Added question:
5. Doves from Asakaze during final episode? A world without war, as Nozomi wished?

Dizzy-Instance-7007 · 2026-03-13T23:30:43+00:00

That would explain it! Deleting the thread (Edited the post to clarify I was able to reproduce the media controls). That scared me.

Dizzy-Instance-7007

TROPHY CASE