Disaster has struck! A plane crash during a school trip leaves 4 girls stranded on an abandoned island. With little hope of being rescued, the girls will have to find a sustainable way to survive in these dire circumstances. Fortunately for them, Homare Oshiname is a survivalist expert. With her on the island, they may just stand a chance.
Are You Lost? or Sounan Desu Ka? is a 2019 series of anime shorts, each around 13 minutes long. It chronicles the various struggles that the girls endure on the island, which are typically solved by Homare teaching them how to deal with it. This makes it an educational comedy anime, even if the lessons it teaches may never be of actual use to you. At least, I sure hope you won’t ever need some of these instructions.
To its credit, Are You Lost? does cover a wide range of survivalist advice. Common sense stuff like “don’t drink saltwater, you dipshit” to elaborate instructions on setting up different traps. I learned some interesting things from this show, some of which could be realistically useful even if I never find myself stuck on an island.
That said, I wasn’t entirely stoked about the show. Like How Heavy Are The Dumbbells You Lift? it tries to get its lessons across through comedy and fanservice. While it’s generally funny enough, if a little predictable, the character designs felt too uninspired. They’re generic anime girlies, all of them with a massive honkers. Perhaps that added buoyancy is the reason they were the sole survivors of the plane crash, come to think of it. Even so, I already mostly forgot what they looked like the next day and didn’t get much from the fanservice.
The girls are also a tad annoying, though I’d argue that fits the show well. These are everyday teenagers cast into a terrible situation; of course they’re going to complain, get sentimental, or stress out. Watching them slowly adapt and become less of a burden on Homare is actually quite nice.
What I did dislike is how often Are You Lost? relied on flashback sequences. Oftentimes when Homare wants to explain something, it flashes back to the time when she learned it as a kid. It happens so often that these bits end up feeling like interruptions. Especially when the anime has repeatedly proven that it can weave its lessons into the plot more elegantly.
Are You Lost? is quite fun and achieves what it set out to do. The anime itself isn’t terribly memorable, but its lessons sure stuck with me. If you’re up for learning a few survival strategies, then give it a watch. Bonus points if you’re into oppai.
Yeah, this one was all right. As long as it’s taken for what it is, with its open and obvious fanservice, it’s fine. I did like Homare too, and my favorite parts were where she was shocking her classmates with her survivalist accounts and her advice to them like “squeeze the blood out of a fish and drink it” etc.