Sci­ence-fic­tion and song­writ­ing find per­fect har­mo­ny in Car­ole & Tuesday

Beloved pur­vey­or of eclec­tic and acces­si­ble ani­mé Shinichirō Watan­abe has final­ly returned with a new show, and it’s unlike any­thing he has cre­at­ed before – though not for the rea­sons that one might expect. A cre­ator of eclec­tic crossover hits like the styl­ish Cow­boy Bebop and Samu­rai Cham­ploo, which mixed jazz music and hip-hop with space-far­ing boun­ty hunt­ing and an Edo peri­od samu­rai road trip, Watan­abe has shift­ed into a more earnest mode for Car­ole and Tues­day, chan­nelling his easy­go­ing cool into a show full of heart.

Tak­ing place entire­ly on a colonised Mars where life has become almost entire­ly auto­mat­ed and music is writ­ten by AI, the show begins with Tues­day, the daugh­ter of a wealthy politi­cian, run­ning away from home to pur­sue her dream of cre­at­ing music in Alba City, a sci-fi ana­logue for New York City (she ends up liv­ing in ​‘New Brooklyn’).

She soon encoun­ters Car­ole, the yin to her yang, a refugee from Earth. The two con­nect over a pas­sion for music and a shared feel­ing of lone­li­ness, and Watan­abe grad­u­al­ly takes us on their jour­ney from anonymi­ty to singer/​songwriting star­dom. This all unfolds through var­i­ous slice-of-life instal­ments, fill­ing out the world and the pasts of its colour­ful sta­ble of characters.

Lus­cious­ly ani­mat­ed by the stu­dio Bones, who worked with Watan­abe on his 2014 show Space Dandy, Car­ole and Tues­day just emanates joy, from the begin­ning of its catchy, uplift­ing (and stun­ning­ly gor­geous) open­ing titles to the last note of every episode. It wears both its heart and its influ­ences on its sleeve – notably, each episode is named after a famous west­ern pop song.

The score is more del­i­cate and spaced out than his past works, mak­ing room for the var­i­ous (love­ly) mid-2000 throw­back pop songs con­jured up by Car­ole and Tues­day, their rivals and their inspi­ra­tions. In an inter­est­ing twist, the songs are all per­formed in Eng­lish – mak­ing this the first ani­mé to do so – pre­sum­ably to allow for the West­ern star-stud­ded line­up in the sound­track, a ver­i­ta­ble juke­box of pop songs with con­tri­bu­tions from artists such as Fly­ing Lotus and Thundercat.

While this is new for Watan­abe, there’s still famil­iar touch­es. For starters, his knack for mix­ing world build­ing both absurd and fas­ci­nat­ing is still intact, colour­ing in the cor­ners with pet owls that dou­ble as alarm clocks and sil­ly jokes about ​“Bruno’s Mars per­for­mance”, in a world where bina­ry gen­der is lit­er­al­ly dis­ap­pear­ing due to space radi­a­tion. Fur­ther still, Car­ole and Tues­day join the ranks of his many per­pet­u­al­ly broke pro­tag­o­nists, like­able under­dogs attempt­ing to make a liv­ing in a sys­tem rigged against them (many ear­ly episodes have them run­ning from the authorities).

But what sets it apart is how much atten­tion the show pays to the ambi­tions of its char­ac­ters. Spike Spiegel was con­tent to just exist, but Car­ole and Tues­day want to live. It’s this sin­cere respect and por­tray­ing their pur­suit of their dreams and their blos­som­ing rela­tion­ship that makes Car­ole and Tues­day a per­fect anti­dote to a year where it’s all too easy to slip into cyn­i­cism and despair.