Are You Lost? Review Episodes 1 – 5

So This Is The Tale Of Our Castaways

Sounan Desu Ka? Episodes 1 – 5

There’s not a lot to this anime which is why I decided not to review it in individual episodes and yet at this point I’m still kind of enjoying 13 minutes of island survival with the group of girls each week in Are You Lost? The problem really is that for every sweet and charming moment or bit of situational humour that hits the mark we have something that flies way out of my appeal zone and so the overall viewing experience is pretty mixed.

Honestly, it is a simple set up with the four girls washing up on the island. The first episode spent more time with them drifting before swimming for the island, fighting off a shark with a mobile phone battery. Which is the other problem here. One of the characters, Homare, has been trained by her father to be some kind of survival expert and while at times this feel authentic at others they seem to be really stretching it to give her some new bit of trivia or wisdom to unload. More importantly, not all of her advice is amazing like the idea of peeing into someone else’s mouth when the person doing the peeing was also highly dehydrated.

Still, the other three girls learning from Homare, or at least trying very hard not to starve to death by eating the various things she unearths for them, are a nice mix of personalities and episode 5 finally brought the tear-fest as one of the girls thought she saw a boat and it made the others realise that they really were stranded and not going home any time soon.

This anime could have fallen hard if these girls weren’t pleasant to spend time with and while none of them are particularly unique in their characteristics, they’ve balanced the group fairly well. It would be nice to see Homare struggle a little more occasionally though given she more or less seems like a self-contained survival machine.

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Now, there is plenty of fan-service and gross out moments thrown into the mix and with varying degrees of success. Episode one hits hard with the peeing and squeezing blood out of a fish and almost every episode has the girls at some point stripping down to their underwear. Whether this makes or breaks the show for you depends entirely on your tastes. For me it neither adds to the appeal nor is it intrusive enough to diminish the rest of the viewing experience.

Basically, if you want survival slice of life with cute girls doing survival things then this anime is likely to hit the spot for you. Otherwise there isn’t much of a pressing need to jump onbaord.

And yeah, I just can’t help the Gilligan’s Island connection:

No phone, no lights, no motor car,
Not a single luxury,
Like Robinson Crusoe,
It’s primitive as can be.

source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/gilligansislandlyrics.html

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Thank-you for reading 100 Word Anime.
Join the discussion in the comments.
Karandi James

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• Sounan Desu Ka Episodes 1 – 5
• Images from: Are You Lost? Dir. N Nagayama. Ezola. 2019.