Courtesy of Sentai Filmworks, Carole & Tuesday finally comes to blu-ray after being sequestered on Netflix for a while, and it’s a humdinger of a show! Directed by legend Shinichirō Watanabe of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo, Carole & Tuesday takes place in a future where the music industry is driven by AI-written tunes and that is set to be turned on its head by a homeless orphan with a keyboard living on the streets named Tuesday and a sheltered, rich and sensitive girl named Carole with a guitar and a dream. When they come together, it sets in motion a heartfelt movement that will show how real human feeling and emotion can best any AI out there.

Carole & Tuesday is absolutely crammed with music, bursting at the seams with an earnestness not often seen in an anime. The title characters are both very likable and the series very convincingly shows us why they would gravitate to one another and create such compelling songs. The songs themselves, a combination of singer/songwriter ballads and more electronic pop depending on the artist performing them, are nice written actually and could easily be seen to be hits in the future. Not just Carole & Tuesday, but all the acts in the show are given unique characterizations and a signature sound that makes them stand apart from one another quite well. The sheer ambition of the musical performances in the show is impressive as well, with at least one new song in nearly every episode. So if you enjoy the music, the series has plenty of it to chill to. Another strong point of the series is how great it is with world-building. For the most part, unlike a lot of sci-fi, it avoids massive exposition dumps to explain how things work and the state of the world, but instead SHOWS us this future that mankind now lives in. Watanabe has already shown us how capable he is of building fully realizing sci-fi worlds in series like Cowboy Bebop and Space Dandy, and Carole & Tuesday is no different. It’s full of little background details that serve no narrative purpose but seek to primarily make the universe of Carole & Tuesday a living breathing place. Realistically this story could’ve easily been told in present day for the most part, other than the AI songwriting angle, with much of the narrative taken up with Carole & Tuesday’s rising star in the music business, complete with jealous rivals, an gruff, washed up manager and colorful quirky side characters. Honestly if this series has any negative it’s in the predictability of the plot. Even if the show didn’t telegraph Carole & Tuesday’s success from the beginning, we know this story. But really, the story isn’t terribly important here. Carole & Tuesday is a series of heart and soul.

On the technical front, like most Sentai blu-rays of recent series, the image is crisp and clean. More importantly the audio is also well done with a DTS-HD 2.0 Stereo track in both English and Japanese (with subtitles). While I’m sure that Sentai is working with what was provided with them, I can’t help but miss a true 5.1 surround sound mix for this series, a show so dependent on it’s musical exaltation. I think it could have been transcendent. Still, what we are given is a solid mix that showcases the music well enough.

I’m actually quite pleased with the extras here. Beyond the usual clean OP and ED animation and other Sentai trailers, this disc actually several other nice inclusions that I do truly appreciate. First we have the eight little mini gag episodes featuring silly conversations between chibi versions of characters from the series that while definitely not essential, are pretty fun and amusing little larks. We also get two music videos from the actress/performers that Carole & Tuesday were based on, and it’s cool to see them in action live. Fans of the songs will definitely appreciate this one. Next up is what Sentai calls a “Making Of”. It’s a series of short clips showing the finished animation side-by-side with storyboards and the live action performances that the animation was based on and is pretty cool to see how the show used rotoscoping to create such fluid character movements during the music sequences. We also have some original Japanese promos which are standard but still nice to see. Finally, the disc includes a rather atypical extra, what it calls “Song Lineup”. This is basically a 30-minute highlight reel of every song in the series preceded by a title card of the song and episode title. For each song, we hear about a minute of it while watching clips from that episode until it fades out to introduce the next song. It’s a little odd of an inclusion but kind of a neat thing to put on in the background if you like the music. One thing I would’ve like to have seen for this show in particular that I’ve seen for other music-heavy releases is a playlist type feature where you can skip to specific songs as a shortcut.

Overall, this is a very nice release of a great series that I thoroughly enjoyed. I definitely want to give Sentai Filmworks kudos for going above and beyond on the extras as well!