Spoiler Space: Turkey’s opening-credits shock had me speculating all season. Now that it’s over, I have an answer
(One of the things I really like about Turkey! is the way it doesn’t shy away from the “nasty, brutish and short” of ancient life, even though it’s at heart a “cute girls have fun” anime.)
(Please note one more time if you did not catch it from the title: this piece contains full series spoilers for the recently concluded anime Turkey! Do not read and instead watch this anime, with my enthusiastic recommendation, if you care about that.)
Turkey! was this anime season’s “keep ‘em guessing” series. Like Bang Bravern a year ago, it marketed itself for months as something perfectly ordinary utterly in keeping with the trends… only to reveal in the final moments of the first episode that it’s actually extremely weird, dropping a modern day girl’s bowling team into a backwater village in feudal Japan.
As the girls got acclimated to ancient Japan, found their color-coded counterparts, "invented" bowling, and faced their personal demons, mysteries floated in the background. What are the people of this village hiding? How does this time travel work? And wait, what is this opening hinting at?
The opening of Turkey! isn’t exactly meant to represent events that happen in the show directly: after all, it features the girls as a fully functioning rock band. The whole sequence is a symbolic fever dream that splits joyful images of the girls and their counterparts between nightmarish and tragic images of the same characters, rapidly cut together, often faster than we can discern what’s happening. Every week the opening drops more hints as we learn more about the story and characters.
But one scene early on caught my eye right away. Right after Mai Otonashi (pink) throws the big flaming bowling ball, there is a scene of Rina Godai (blue) looking on in horror as a silhouette is bloodily sliced in half by a katana. The silhouette is unmistakably wearing modern Western clothing, so it must be one of the heroines. The skirt gives this away by itself, but turning up the brightness reveals a green stripe that denotes the character is the bowling club’s “green ranger”, the soft-spoken group peace-keeper Sayuri Ichinose.
What the hell?! Someone’s gonna get cut in half on the girls’ bowling show?!
