Anime Impact: Fragtime offers a time-stopping bisexual adventure
It was Pride Month a couple of days ago, and I was in the mood for some cute gay times for anime! So what better way to find that but with the help of Google and some all important key words? That’s how I found Fragtime.
Fragtime is a short manga series by SATO, author of titles like Living Dead!, Iwasetemitee Monda, and more. Released in 2013, an anime movie adaptation followed and came out November 2019, featuring Yume Miyamoto (voiced in Mushishi, Yesterday wo Utatte, Aikatsu Stars!) and Miku Itou (voiced in Nekopara, iDOLM@STER, and BanG Dream!).
The story surrounds high school students, Moritani, a quiet and shy girl who can freeze time, and Murakami, the popular girl who is loved by everyone in school. The movie opens up to Moritani’s classmate, Kobayashi, trying to recruit Moritani for their table tennis after-school club. Moritani isn’t the biggest fan of making friends, so when confronted with conversation that goes over just small talk, she freezes time to get out of any situation. While the time freeze only goes on for 3 minutes at a time, this is enough for Moritani to escape any deep conversion she’s in.
While Moritani enjoys her 3 minutes of time frozen solitude, she catches sight of a girl she admires, Murakami, reading alone on a bench. Feeling secure in her power that everyone can’t move and notice what she’s doing, Moritani goes and looks up Murakami’s skirt. While I wasn’t fond of the choices made there, it leads to Mortitani finding out that Murakami isn’t phased by the time freeze. Murakami ends up calling Moritani a pervert – a pleasant surprise. Baffled by being caught peeking at panties and meeting someone who is unphased by the time freeze, Moritani doesn’t know what to do. However, to Moritani’s benefit, Murakami is more interested in why she’s the only one not frozen by Moritani’s power, rather than linger on why Moritani looked up her skirt.
Time passes and Fragtime shows what seems like a developing romantic relationship between Moritani and Murakami. The two get closer, showing a peek into Murakami’s insecurities, and her finding Moritani more comfortable to let loose, they start breaking school rules while in a time freeze like throwing stuff during exams and taking their clothes off in class. The anime brings viewers a throwback to what crushes used to feel like when you were in high school. Seeing Moritani nervous on a date with Murakami brought me to my first mall date, and the amount of panicked laughter, the uttering of um’s and uhh’s, and the inability to look at my crush’s face. Yet while Fragtime brought me moments of nostalgia to my high school days, I couldn’t ignore that this might’ve been the only thing I was looking forward to in the plot. Beautiful animation, wonderful lines executing how the two main characters felt about each other and the world around them, it still did not save me from feeling let down that I didn’t know enough about the two protagonists, beside their life at school, to start feeling invested in them.
I’d like to think I might’ve not been in the right mood for Fragtime, but even with the plot-changing twist nearing the end of the anime, I still found myself saying it was OK. There wasn’t very much character development with Moritani and Murakami besides “I’m more comfortable now.” Having read the author’s past works, I wanted to take the risk of watching Fragtime without reading it first; I wasn’t disappointed in what the Fragtime was able to have me experience as a viewer, but was let down with the lack of context and knowing the characters outside the school setting, where this power came from, and other lingering questions. Usually anime without the context, like the Daily Lives of High School Boys, tries to make up for wild antics and characters, but even with a supernatural element like freezing time, Fragtime’s story is too slow to pull that off.
Though, if you’re looking for a bisexual story between two girls wondering how to possibly navigate weird and scary internal feelings, its a watch for you! Fragtime does really well in how to convey the “oh is this actually happening” feelings like first kisses and doing something against the school’s wishes. And if you want a break from the fantasy action and explosions a lot of anime this season seems to have, this slow watch could offer an escape.
You can watch Fragtime now on HiDive and VRV!
Anime Impact is a column from Monti Velez that looks at anime from a queer and critical perspective.
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