Mars in the future. Blond teenage girl Tuesday flees from the home of her mother, Valerie, a political candidate who wants to win elections running on a xenophobic platform with a promise of deporting refugees back to Earth. Tuesday meets musician teenage girl Carole, an orphan, they become friends and decide to form a music band. They perform and their video goes viral on the Internet, and thus manager Gus decides to lead them. Carole & Tuesday attend a music pop idol talent show, where they win together with Angela. They sign a contract and release their own single. In order to protest against the treatment of musicians who are arrested for singing controversial politicial songs, Carole & Tuesday rally all the best Martian musicians together and let them perform in the Immigration Memorial Hall on Christmas, which becomes a sensation on Mars. Valerie quits her political race.
"Carole & Tuesday" is an anime series whose first third is so outstanding that you are taken aback at how underwhelming it is for the next two thirds of its story. You wish its last 17 episodes were as great as its first seven episodes. Overall, it is a sweet, charming and often funny depiction of young musicians trying to make it, to achieve their dream, practically having to beg producers and famous musicians to just give them a chance to listen to them sing, whereas the animation is highly detailed and crafted with finesse, yet the director Shinichiro Watanabe once again shows that he never managed to repeat his greatest achievement, "Cowboy Bebop", which here shares only "Carole & Tuesday's" setting—a terraformed Mars—but does not share its quality. The opening seven episodes are wonderful, showing Watanabe in a highly inspired edition, adding the two title heroines an emotional dimension which is easy to understand—the first episode shows Carole playing music on a synthesizer on the bridge, while the pedestrians ignore her, as she narrates: "I know my music won't reach anyone here. I know no one is interested in me. But I still want to sing, let these feelings out."
However, the anime also has a lot of comical moments: a stand-out is manager Gus, who transforms from an alcoholic bum in a bar to a fully sober, focused man in an instant as soon as he hears Carole & Tuesday's music video on a mobile phone, as if he found his meaning again. For instance, episode #2 shows Carole taking a job of a person who mourns at the funeral of a deceased rich stranger, but as she spots a butterfly on the head of a bald priest, instead of crying, she bursts into laughter, thus losing her contract, whereas Carole & Tuesday's amateur music video in episode #4 is hilariously bad. The audition of the contestants for the Martian pop idol talent show is so absurd it almost reaches the level of a parody—one candidate is a ventriloquist whose dummy sings, while the other is a grandmother who starts with an openning that the following song is dedicated to her deceased mother, who sang this to her when she was a child, only to then start a demented hip-hop chanting while she slides across the studio using her cane, shocking the judges. However, one gets the impression the story should have ended with the conclusion of this talent show at around episode #12, since the plot is lost after it. The story simply doesn't know what to do with these characters in the second half, exhausting itself with one-episode subplots which don't go anywhere (transgender musician Desmond invites them to sing one last time before he dies; retired producer Tobe; Flora, Gus' former client...) and feel pointless. There is one good joke in episode #23 (Pyotr and GCK, who lost the talent show contest, form a new band, "Losers"), but the overindulgance with long singing throughout several episodes reduces the anime's grip on the narrative, making it too routine, vague and mechanical in the second half.
Grade:++
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