Assault Lily Bouquet

Title:Assault Lily Bouquet
アサルトリリィBOUQUET
Overall:Watch
Keywords: , , , , , , , ,
Notables: AKAO Hikaru
Animation - Shaft
Natsuyoshi Yuuko
Pink-haired Hitotsuyana Ruri has been accepted into the prestigious Yurigaoka Girls Academy to train as a 'Lily'. These are female fighters who resist humanity's greatest enemy, the 'Huge'. The Huge are 'super scary monsters' that first appeared 50 years ago and sometimes emerge from their nests to attack humans. Ruri resolved to become a Lily after her own life was saved by one several years ago. At the academy she finds a culture of proud and jealous girls striving for recognition--and quickly finds herself undergoing on-the-job training.

12 episodes
OverallArtAnimationCharacter Design MusicSeries StoryEpisode StoryReviewer
Watch Stretch [series:4211#628]
(Watch+ or Rent-)

(All episodes watched):

This show quickly left me with an impression of it being pretty ordinary. One ordinary thing was the repeated shots that focused on the bare skin regions of the girls' bodies below their short skirts. When a character enters a room in episode two, the view moves to her chest first, then to her face. Lots of re-hashed details about this latest threat to humanity which (of course) only hot girls can counter, but little or nothing that was truly novel. Lots of German names and terms ('Schutzengel'); again, hardly unusual. I wished a confrontation between two girls would hurry up and be over with so that we could get on with the story. The Huge(s) that we encounter look sort of like Tie Fighters from Star Wars with big blades attached. I thought for a moment that Ruri might be deeply humiliated by an amateurish mistake she makes when thrust unexpectedly into combat, and might become depressed and thereby this show might take a sophisticated psychological tack. But no, she quickly redeems herself and then some--as is often the case, she must have plenty of innate skill. There are no boys in the cast (except the harmless Academy president), and the show starts to drop hints of homosexuality within the cast. I sort of take a liking to Ruri, what with her being something of an underdog among haughty, well-off rivals, but everything seems so predictable. What are the Huge? Why can only girls fight them? How do CHARMs (the weapons of Lilies) work? Considering how little truly original stuff there is here, you would think there would be time to answer questions like these, but that doesn't happen. After watching episode one I felt that we still knew relatively little about what direction this show was going to go, and I was not certain that it was really going to go anywhere.

Fortunately episode two is mainly about getting to know the characters better. Riri goes looking for Yuyu, the Lily who once saved her life, and asks her to enter into a Schutzengel pledge with her. Despite all the fanservice I was a little frustrated that the overall quality of this show seemed to be pretty average and therefore I could neither definitely commit to it nor write it off. I must admit getting a laugh out of the scene in the bath. It looks like some effort is being made to develop credible drama and romance, and the fanservice could have gotten a lot more explicit than it did. If only the Huge were more interesting opponents. So, I decided that I'd be watching episode three as well!

Early in episode three I was having a hard time telling whether this show was putting a higher priority on drama or on fanservice. Towards the end of it the story got more dramatic, though I'm not sure it was doing all that good a job of it. We learn of Yuyu's past, and the traumatic incident that once occurred with her previous Schutzengel partner, plus the berserk fighting tactic she sometimes devolves into. Some effort is being made to tell a story of sorts. Episode four is more comic, as Ruri misunderstands an instruction from Yuyu. It's hard to keep track of all the different girls, but they are likable and while definitely not brilliant this show now seemed fairly entertaining. There's a hint that we might just get an explanation of sorts of just what the Huge are.

The thought occurred to me during episode five that maybe this show is more comedy than anything else. Fanservice is modest and fighting is actually fairly rare. For example, Yuyu spends most of episode five looking for a good birthday present for Riri. It certainly wouldn't hurt if the jokes were a little better, but this is good news, and helps explain why I was still watching. In episode six the Huge are back and this one is unusually tough. Yuyu discovers an unexpected link to the tragic loss of her previous partner. It was almost moving; if her moods hadn't shifted so rapidly, from despair to a revival of determination (typical in anime), I could have taken her completely seriously. Still, it could have been much worse. In episode seven a different Huge attack leads to a girl, Yuri, who has amnesia (but lots of Magie) turning up and being essentially adopted by Riri and the girls of the Legion. There's some talk of how odd it is that both Lilies and the Huge are powered by Magie, but it never really made much sense to me. In episode eight there's some talk about how Huge DNA works--that was kind of hard to buy, since they had seemed more like machines than living beings to me. Shady human organizations are looking for Yuri, but Riri and the girls of the Legion vow to protect her. What happens is partly moving and partly rushed and stereotypical. It seems that far from being considered unqualified heroines by the general public, Lilies are viewed with a good deal of suspicion, which came as a mild surprise to me. You would think that such a conundrum would get a good deal of attention in this story, but again it has hardly been mentioned until now. Apparently Lilies are so good and pure that they gladly risk their lives fighting for a people who are sometimes ungrateful. Or maybe the author just needed a convenient threat to put Yuri in danger. It seems to me that this show works best when it doesn't get particularly serious and instead focuses on the everyday lives of the Lilies. The attempt to delve into tragedy felt sort of forced and unconvincing.

Something bad happens to Yuri, which was news to me--either I missed it (did it happen after the ED sequence last week?) or just completely forgot about it. I couldn't get excited about the looming crisis in episode eleven, because (again) this whole business of the Huge being powered by Magie, just like the Lilies, never made much sense to me. It seemed more like a joke than a serious plot element. Or maybe the problem was that I just couldn't take seriously a bizarre problem in a series which had always seemed better at humor than at drama. Did Yuyu's former mentor actually betray the Lilies? But what would she have had to gain by doing that? I didn't get it. I just could not believe that these cute girls and the weird Huge had anything in common. The girls have a showdown with a big Huge in the final episode, and use some sort of tactic which requires some sort of magical projectile to be bounced back and forth between them before launching it at the target. Needless to say, I had no idea why this was necessary, but it was modestly thrilling to see these girls make the trick work. The whole premise of Lilies and Magie and the Huge never made much sense to me, but the characters were likeable, the humor was OK, and I could follow the general outline of the plot and get some entertainment out of it.

Last updated Friday, January 08 2021. Created Saturday, October 10 2020.

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