Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night

Name: Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night
Genre: Drama
Released: 2024-04-07

夜のクラゲは泳げない (Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai)

8.0(1)

OtakuDen

7.7(51,709)

MAL Score

Ranked #1355

Popularity #1948

Drama
Music

Episodes: 12
Duration: 23 min per ep
Aired: Apr 7, 2024 to Jun 23, 2024
Status: Finished Airing

Synopsis

Mahiru Kouzuki is a talented young artist who once abandoned her passion after classmates mocked the vivid jellyfish mural she painted in elementary school. Years later, an unexpected supporter appears: Kano Yamanouchi, a former idol carrying her own complicated history. Their meeting pushes Mahiru to pick up her childhood dream again.

When Kano launches a new music project called JELEE, Mahiru is asked to create its mascot and pulls in her childhood friend Kiui Watase, now a professional streamer, to help produce JELEE’s first music video. Joined by Kim Anouk Mei Takanashi, a pianist and devoted fan of Kano’s idol days, the group sets out to make JELEE known far beyond their circle—while confronting the lingering weight of what they’ve each been through.

Otaku Consensus

Jellyfish Can't Swim in the Night earns its 7.7-range reputation by letting Ryouhei Takeshita’s Doga Kobo direction and Yuki Yaku’s original-cour writing turn cute-girls-creating-together material into a sharper coming-of-age drama, with the creator-confidence, idol-afterimage, and online-identity material landing best. The common criticism is not that it fails, but that it plays too safely: many viewers praised the character development and ending, while dissenting reactions felt the final stretch colored inside the lines instead of becoming the knockout its early promise suggested.

Why You Should Watch

Watch this if you want a music anime about making art in public: the sting of comments, the pressure to brand yourself, and the strange intimacy of collaborating through screens. It scratches a neighboring itch to Bocchi the Rock! and A Place Further Than the Universe, but trades gag rhythm and expedition grandeur for neon urban adolescence, idol afterimages, streaming culture, and illustration-as-identity. The appeal is not band performance alone; it is the way a drawing, a handle, a fan attachment, and a viral video can all become versions of self-defense. Viewers who prefer CGDCT with real conflict, but not grim melodrama, get the cleanest payoff. Viewers demanding a radical deconstruction of idol or VTuber culture may find it too contained.

Key Characters

M
Mahiru Kouzuki
Mahiru is where the show’s Drawing and Coming of Age tags converge, treating talent less as a simple gift than as something that can be damaged by public judgment and rebuilt through authorship.
K
Kano Yamanouchi
Kano gives the music side its idol-industry aftertaste, making the project feel like a second attempt at self-definition after life as a performed image.
K
Kiui Watase
Kiui is the series’ streamer and VTuber pressure point, the character who most clearly ties online performance to both protection and isolation.
K
Kim Anouk Mei Takanashi
Mei turns fandom into character drama, bringing a pianist’s discipline and a fan’s devotion into the same room without making admiration feel uncomplicated.

What Makes It Stand Out

1
It is an anime-original one-cour production credited to JELEE as Original Creator, so its 12-episode structure is not compressed from a manga or light novel source. That matters because the show’s reputation rests on whether its own ending satisfies, not on adaptation fidelity.
2
Doga Kobo produced the series under director Ryouhei Takeshita, with Yuki Yaku handling series composition. The result fits the studio’s character-focused strengths while pushing beyond pure slice-of-life comfort into more visible conflict than the CGDCT label usually implies.
3
The visual identity has a traceable design chain: popman3580 provided the original character designs, Junichirou Taniguchi adapted them for animation, and Chiaki Nakajima, Shuri, Miyu Hattori, Shouko Nagasawa, and Shino Kuzuhara are credited across sub-character, prop, and costume design. That staff spread matches a show where clothing, avatars, objects, and creator branding carry narrative weight.
4
Its tag profile is unusually hybrid for a MAL-listed Drama/Music title: AniList marks Drawing at 90%, Band at 86%, Idol at 82%, VTuber at 61%, LGBTQ+ Themes at 66%, and Yuri at 62%. The series is better understood as a youth-creator ensemble than as a straightforward band or idol anime.
5
Its reception profile is solid but not runaway: MAL lists a 7.74 score from 51,238 votes, while AniList sits at 76/100 with 1,502 favorites. Those numbers line up with the critical pattern: warmly liked, frequently recommended inside its niche, and often described as just short of exceptional.

Fun Facts & Trivia

Fun fact 1: The Original Creator credit is JELEE, the same name used for the girls’ creative project in the series, giving the production a built-in meta layer around authorship and collective identity.
Fun fact 2: Although online discussion often files it under CGDCT, AniList gives Coming of Age a higher tag weight at 94% than Cute Girls Doing Cute Things at 70%. That gap explains why many recommendations frame it as CGDCT with stronger story conflict rather than a comfort-only ensemble show.
Fun fact 3: The MAL page’s taxonomy is minimal, listing Drama as the genre and Music as the theme, while AniList’s user-tag ecosystem captures the messier mix of illustration, idol culture, band activity, streaming, and queer subtext. The same anime can look much narrower or much broader depending on the database.
Fun fact 4: Its MAL popularity rank of #1947 trails its score rank of #1340, suggesting a title with better approval among viewers who finished it than broad mainstream reach. That matches its reputation as a Spring 2024 conversation piece for creator-drama and CGDCT fans rather than a universal breakout.
Fun fact 5: AniList includes low-confidence tags such as Motorcycles at 20% and Alchemy at 10%, a reminder that tag percentages reflect community signal rather than official genre labeling. The meaningful high-confidence identity of the show remains female-led, teen-focused, urban, creative, and music-centered.