When transfer student Shion arrives at Keibu high school, only one girl, loner Satomi, knows the truth about her: the new girl is an AI robot undergoing covert field testing – and Satomi’s mother’s job hangs in the balance, depending on the success of the experiment. Unfortunately, Shion’s tendency to burst into song and hack the PA system to play a backing track soon alerts the other students to the fact that she’s slightly out of the ordinary.
Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s strikingly beautiful anime is high-concept in its themes and unashamedly sentimental in its execution, and gets rather more interesting in its darker second half. Ultimately, like Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film Ghost in the Shell and its sequel, Innocence, Sing a Bit of Harmony delves into the idea of what form an AI might take and whether it can love.
