As I live more of my teenage life, the more I am attracted to media featuring realistic teenagers, especially in the Slice-Of-Life genre. When I first started developing a large interest in manga and anime, the first scanlation manga I started to read was Bakuman, by the creators of Death Note, one of the only anime I had watched online before. Bakuman starts with Moritaka Mashiro contemplating his life and the emptiness of his existence. Quickly, however, he is swept into creating a manga with classmate Akito Takagi and the story moves on from there as the two try and get published in Shonen Jump.



In some ways, BECK: Mongolian Chop Squad is similar. The main character is Yukio Tanaka, nicknamed Koyuki by childhood friend Izumi. Like Moritaka in Bakuman and myself, Koyuki is 14 and also feels emptiness in his life. This is until he has a run in with an odd looking dog called Beck and his owner, Ryûsuke who is a guitarist trying to start a new band. Slowly over the first part of this 26 episode series, Koyuki develops an interest in music and starts to learn to play the guitar before finally joining Ryûsuke's band along with Chiba, Taira and Saku.

Much like life itself, BECK:MCS does drag on slightly over time, but in general the anime is very engaging due to its great cast of characters and their relationships with each other. At the beginning of the series, Ryûsuke acts as an older brother figure or mentor for Koyuki but before you know it, their friendship is broken which is unconventional for a series just starting.

My favourite aspect of the story was the slowly blossoming romance between Koyuki and Ryûsuke's sister, Maho. Complicating this romance, however, is Yoyuki's childhood friend, Izumi, who secretly harbours feelings for him. I believe the relationship is beautifully done and many of the situations between Maho and Koyuki are very easy to relate to. Some of the thoughts and doubts Koyuki has about Maho seem to be stolen almost word-for-word from my own personal thoughts.



While you might not have realized it already from what I have said about this anime, BECK:MCS is an anime based around music. A lot of time in the episodes, especially once the band is formed, are of the band practising and preforming music. This would obviously fall flat if the music was not very good, so I am thankful that the soundtrack of BECK:MCS is amazing. The songs even sound BETTER than the original songs do when dubbed, which just goes to show how fantastic the dub of this anime is.

And the dub IS fantastic. The dialogue between characters feels very natural, and this is shown no better by the slide-show sequence in the last episode where Koyuki and Maho are talking to each other about the photos. This scene was mind-blowing - not only was it a simple way of showing what had happened during the tour, but it was done incredibly effectively and the dialogue was incredibly well-written and sharp and the performances were just as good, if not better.

While these are just brief impressions of the anime of BECK:MCS, there is a lot to this anime that I wish I could put into words, but alas it is late at night and I do not know how. I recommend BECK:MCS to anyone, even if you have little to no interest in music - I sure don't, but this has become one of my favourite anime I have ever seen. I give it my highest possible recommendation.

Dim.