Spring 2021 Anime Pt. 2
MORE ANIME LET’S GO
This is the big “prestige” show all the serious business anime heads are looking forward to this season, which is a shame because I found it incredibly underwhelming.
The Republic of San Magnolia is locked in a vicious war with a neighbouring empire, but things are a lot cheerier than they sound because the country’s eighty-five districts are protected by an army of autonomous drones that handle all the fighting, allowing San Magnolia to keep the frontline far from home without expending the life of a single soldier.
At least, that’s what the populous is told. In reality, the “drones” aren’t autonomous at all; they’re piloted by the residents of district eighty-six, whose inhabitants are born and raised for combat and who are viewed as subhuman by the military. The series focuses on an army handler who bucks against this mindset by treating the 86ers under her command as though they were ordinary subordinates and not expendable weapons, but her resolve is shaken when she’s put in charge of an infamous squad said to drive its handler to madness through unknown means.
Sounds like a neat premise! I’m all for it, in theory. But the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
The biggest issue for me is the ridiculous villainy of the San Magnolian military, whose attitude towards the 86 soldiers isn’t just one of indifference, but of active malice to an utterly cartoonish degree. Like, the very first scene has a handler literally cackling with glee as he sends his soldiers on a suicide mission. I think this is partly supposed to be the spooky effect of Gravedigger making him go insane, but it’s right in line with the way the other handlers act, where they’re like GOD DAMN I SURE LOVE IT WHEN THOSE 86 PIGS DIE, IT’S FUN TO LISTEN TO THEM SCREAM MWAHAHAHAHA.
This is a pitfall that a lot of stories about racism fall into. Outside of periods of inflammation like a pogrom, most people in racist societies don’t spend every waking moment of their day seething with volcanic rage at the targets of their racism; it’s more common for the racism to manifest as a kind of extreme apathy, where the majority thinks so little of the underclass that they don’t even deign to notice them if they can help it. I would especially expect that to be the case here, where the residents of 86 are so separated from the rest of the country that I’m not even sure if the general population knows they exist.
I use the word “racism” deliberately, because it appears that that’s actually what’s going on. It’s never explicitly drawn attention to, but the residents of the other eighty-five districts all have identical pale skin and eyes and white hair, whereas the eighty-sixes are ethnically diverse and seem (based on their names) to be either immigrants or descendants of immigrants from other parts of the world. Thus, using them for battle is apparently not just a matter of convenience but an active genocide.
These are heavy themes. The show immediately makes me question its ability to handle those themes by making most of the characters shallow anime stereotypes, including our heroine--a high-ranking military officer trying to eke out empathy in a cruel, genocidal system--being a moe-moe child-like girl who pulls stock reaction faces while eating delicious slices of cake.
The tone doesn’t really gel, is what I’m getting at.
On top of all that, the whole thing just looks cheap and junky. Hard pass on this one.
I’m unfortunately getting off on the wrong foot here, because unlike with all the other shows airing this season, I’ve read some of the source material, and thus I’m judging this more as an adaptation than a stand-alone show. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly good one.
Like the manga, Shadows House is set in a sprawling Victorian estate inhabited by a silhouette-like nobility of shadow people, who are served by “living dolls”: human-looking children whose exact origin and nature isn’t clear to either them or the audience. The story focuses on Emilico, a newly-hired (created?) doll assigned to serve Kate, a young shadow girl who finds it difficult to interact with others.
Right off the bat, it’s both interesting and frustrating to see how Shadows House the anime differs from the manga in terms of priority. The manga is a very slow-paced affair, with its opening chapters consisting of short slice-of-life episodes wherein Emilico and Kate gradually get to know each other and Emilico starts vaguely probing at the story’s central mysteries. You can tell it’s going somewhere larger in scale, but it’s in no hurry to get there.
This first episode of the anime, by contrast, is clearly in a big hurry to blast through all the initial character-building stuff and arrive at the main plot as quickly as possible, cramming together several stand-alone episodic manga chapters. I noticed this right away due to being familiar with the manga, but I think even a newcomer to the story would be able to pick up on this due to how choppy the episode is and the way it keeps bouncing from topic to topic without any rhyme or reason.
But you can really tell within the opening minute that the primary focus is on the big mystery rather than the quiet character drama. In the manga there’s one panel of the dolls emerging from their coffin-like boxes and then we cut straight to Emilico working as Kate’s servant, with almost no explanation given for what’s going on or what the real nature of the situation is. The anime has several scenes of vague mysterious nonsense--a crow made out of soot flies into a window and then a girl blows on the crow and it vanishes!--which I assume is meant to pique the viewer’s interest, but is actually just sort of confusing.
Worse, we get a scene of the dolls, prior to being assigned to their masters or mistresses, swearing an oath to the heads of the household and drinking a mysterious liquid, which feels like the show jumping the gun really early on what I’m assuming is meant to be a big twist.
Everything else about this episode shows a similar lack of subtlety and restraint. The characters have been heightened to a fair degree, which is unfortunate in the case of Emilico since she’s already a little bit annoying in the manga and is even more annoying here, but it’s really unfortunate when it comes to Kate. As written and drawn in the source material, she’s meant to be this extremely reserved figure who basically displays no emotions whatsoever save for the cloud of soot that emerges from her head when she experiences negative feelings; here, she’s been made way too emotive and expressive.
The most disappointing aspect of the adaptation is also the one that I can’t really fault the show for, which is its visuals. A mid-budget anime series was never going to be able to replicate the gorgeous vintage fairytale illustration style of the manga, but seeing how flat and undetailed everything looks by comparison is still disappointing.
I’m still highly interested in Shadows Houses mysteries, and if the amazingly over the top opening and ending sequences are anything to go by the story gets into some really campy, gothy territory that seems extremely fun. But I’ll probably do so by reading the manga, once it gets an official English translation (the one fan translation I found is incomplete and doesn’t seem particularly good).
So, uh, wow. This was by far the best thing I watched this season. By which I mean, this one episode was better than a lot of entire shows I’ve seen.
The plot of To Your Eternity is a little hard to sum up, but basically: an entity that I guess might be God sends an orb down to either Earth at some point in the distant past or an Earth-like fantasy world--it’s not clear--where it “reflects”, transforming into various things it finds there. It spends an indeterminate amount of time as a rock, then turns into a big floofy wolf after one of those dies near it. Once ambulatory, it finds and befriends a lone boy living in the ruins of a northern village. The rest of the villagers fled south five years ago in order to escape the increasingly cold weather, and the orb-wolf and the boy soon set off after them, searching for the “paradise” that they were supposedly heading towards.
In a way this turns out exactly like you’re probably picturing a story about a boy and his dog trekking through dangerous terrain to go, but also it kind of way the hell doesn’t, because as you’ve probably gathered, this is a bit of an odd story.
I won’t spoil what happens, but suffice to say the series going forward turns out to not be at all what I was expecting based on the promotional artwork. But if the quality of this episode--the artistry, the excellent music, the heart-tugging emotion that mostly avoids crossing the line into melodrama--persist then we might have something really special on our hands here. The preview for the next episode makes it seem like the show going forward is going to be kind of a cross between Kino’s Journey and Mushishi, which I am all the way down for since those are two of my favourite anime.
My only real complaint is that I could have done without God (or whatever it’s meant to be) narrating parts of the episode; having the orb’s initial transformations play out with no explanation would have given the whole thing a kind of 2001-esque surreality. Hopefully God will keep his mouth shut going forward.