デッドマンワンダーランド/ Deadman Wonderland

Deadman Wonderland is one of my favourite manga of the past few years, although admittedly I haven’t picked up all that many lately. There was an interesting link here with the anime Eureka Seven, which was adapted during production by the mangaka duo Kataoka Jinsei (story) and Kondou Kazuma (art) for Shounen Ace. When that series came to an end, Kataoka and Kondou were given a chance to make their own story, and the result was Deadman Wonderland. I like that - two artists given a chance to develop from adapting another’s work to flourishing on their own, and Deadman Wonderland is an excellent story in its own right. And while the character designs and something of the main relationship between a young, naïve boy and a girl with hidden powers hark back to Eureka Seven, the series itself feels very different from something the latter’s chief writer Satou Dai would write. There’s something of a juvenile immaturity about the first few chapters, but the title settles into something clever, dark and full of interesting characters.

So I was pleased when I heard that an anime adaptation was being made. It seemed to me a great time to release something like this, violent and grim but with more relatable characters and genuinely smart plot elements than the likes of Higurashi or High School of the Dead. And so Deadman Wonderland was released with slick animation from Manglobe – albeit not so impressive as on their previous series like Ergo Proxy or Samurai Champloo (both, incidentally, Satou Dai-linked projects) – and a great opening song only slightly marred by the singer getting a bit over-excited at the end. It seemed well-received, OVA releases were announced before the series even began to air, and word-of-mouth was very positive. Personally, I objected only to the casting of Paku Romi as Ganta – her well-known voice (for roles such as Edward Elric, Hitsugaya, Ueki etc) is a little rougher than I ever imagined Ganta’s - but I soon grew to accept her acting without finding it inappropriate, and she delivered a good performance particularly at Ganta’s most vulnerable moments.

But the problem was that Deadman Wonderland needed a nice, extended adaptation. It needed a good long run – 52 episodes would be about right. What we got was 12 too-short episodes, covering about the amount of manga I felt the creators had needed to find their voice and start making the story really strong. The story covers the exposition and the first major conflict: young Igurashi Ganta’s entire class is butchered by a mysterious ‘red man’, leaving only him alive. Trusting in a lawyer Enzai-style, he is framed for the killings and incarcerated in the bizarre Deadman Wonderland – a prison modelled on a theme park, where convicts are forced to partake in deadly games for the entertainment of the public, an endeavour so successful the institution can fund itself. There, he not only discovers his own mysterious power, but is befriended by a very strange girl who he half-remembers from his early childhood, and may or may not be a regular inmate. His abilities soon lead him to discover a hidden underworld in this prison, where those with odd powers are forced to fight one another – sometimes to the death. Will he be forced to submit, or will he be accepted by the resistance movement?

Quite a lot for twelve episodes, I grant you – but it’s really only after the attempted uprising that the manga gets really gripping. I remember reading the chapters surrounding Owl and thinking they were a bit rushed, but that things improved drastically just afterwards. On one hand, the chapters focusing on him becoming the final climax of the anime gave those events the gravitas they needed to work even better than in the manga. On the other, though, this is a series that ends just as it is really beginning.

I know there is more, but I am worried we will see only the OVAs and no more. The problem with OVAs is that oftentimes they signal the end of an anime’s televised presence – although that’s certainly not always the case (witness Maria-sama ga Miteru, for example). If Deadman Wonderland is allowed to continue and flourish, it could be one of the best dark shounen stories to have aired in years. If it remains as it is, however, I fear it will end up like Claymore or Narutaru’s anime adaptations: interesting companion pieces to a much wider and more compelling story that considered alone, are a mere shadow of what their potential could have made them.

サムライチャンプルー / Samurai Chanpuruu / Samurai Champloo

The first episode seemed to me to promise something great. After the success of Cowboy Bebop, the director, Watanabe Shinichiro, was given a new project with an extremely high budget. The animation was stunning, the fight direction inspired, the characters well-designed and expertly voiced, the story – three misfits thrown together by tenuous circumstances – fairly interesting and the anachronistic humour of inserting elements of hip-hop culture into 17th-century Japan gave ample opportunity for laughs. But SamCham suffers from the same flaw as Bebop – no story. There’s a loose framework: the characters are searching for ‘a samurai who smells like sunflowers’, and get into all sorts of scrapes on the way, but ultimately, the series was totally episodic. This made for an extremely varied quality – sometimes good, solid stories were told in one or two episodes, sometimes it degenerated into terrible slapstick, as when the drifters were forced to play baseball against some visiting Americans. Yup. We also had to endure ogres, fake Christian missionaries, graffiti artists and beatboxers. The hip-hop elements were funny as incidental details. Over a whole episode, less so, especially when you just want to know when the real plot is going to kick in.

But in the end, it was an excuse to have two hyper-powered, pretty much invulnerable heroes (who survive stabbings, massive explosions and various other grievous injuries unscathed) going around kicking arse. Okay for a while, but it gets old quickly. Especially since the characters weren’t that good to begin with. Mugen was essentially Zoro from One Piece (with the same voice and everything), except less likeable. Jin was the strong, silent type, which was fine, but didn’t allow for much development. Fuu was the everyman character, but the injected plot device of this sunflower-smelling samurai that she keeps whinging on about despite never seeming very personally involved made her rather irritating.

The show was at its best when showing traditional fight scenes, such as when Jin battles a blind woman who is nevertheless an expert with her weapon on one of those Japanese bridges that has a gap between every step. Hard to swallow, perhaps, but extremely impressive nonetheless. But good fights can’t make up for a deficiency in plot, and that’s what really matters. A shame, because I was hoping to genuinely love this show.

It will find an audience with people overawed by pretty clashes and bangs, who like superpowered heroes who never really seem to be in much danger. But for people who want a little more substance, I would advise looking elsewhere.

(originally written 3.11.05)

エルゴプラクシー / Erugo Purakushī / Ergo Proxy

I’ve been watching a lot of anime that I consider very different from the usual crop of late, with considerably higher budgets than the average shounen action series, and much more ambitious, seinen plots. Ergo Proxy is one of these, reminding me of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex for its impressive animation and futuristic setting, and Monster for its dark tone, emphasis on its characters’ psychological states and understanding that sophistication also needs a good plot, unlike, say, the dark but meandering Serial Experiments Lain.

Ergo Proxy is the story of a futuristic society, with the wasteful luxury of Brave New World and the reliance on robots of an Isaac Asimov setting – and a similar need to question the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. Vincent, a bashful, ineffective young man trying to fit into this society, and Lil, the rebellious granddaughter of the ‘Administrator’, become entangled in the mystery surrounding the Proxies, mysterious and powerful beings, and the Cogito virus, which can grant robotic life-forms a consciousness – embodied by the young infected ‘Companion-type AutoReiv’ Pino, a robot designed to be the perfect little girl, who tags along for the journey. If this sounds like one of a thousand sci-fi novels/movies, that’s because it is. But it’s the presentation that makes this series stand out, and how the concept is developed.

Ergo Proxy is ambitious. It’s full of nods to philosophy (some without much meaning, like the names of the computer-council which owes a lot to Evangelion’s Magi system, some integral, like the nod to Descartes in calling the virus ‘Cogito’), art (Michaelangelo statues; a direct nod to Millais’ vision of Ophelia) and Western theology (Much talk of sin, creators, angels, free will and ‘The Rapture’), it aspires to the highbrow. It makes you concentrate, too, with disorienting storytelling that starts in the middle and then fills in the blanks, multiple levels of reality (the Proxies can invade minds) and a second half that diverges wildly from any kind of typical climax-resolution structure, for just as mysteries need to be unravelled, we have whole episodes devoted to how characters interact when they’re bored and stranded, or cleverly unsettling pastiches of cheesy game shows and a direct parody of Disney. Never predictable and very willing to take risks, it makes for intriguing viewing.

The art, too, is distinct, realistic and darkly-lit. Lil looks oddly like a Western comic book hero with her eye make-up and penchant for dark clothes. Ergo Proxy looks like something out of Noein in a more realistic style, and little Pino may act like Yotsuba, but you won’t see any expressions more exaggerated than the classic ^_^ smiley eyes. Fluid animation and some very imaginative sets make for impressive visuals. The androgynous young Dr. Daedalus (Greek mythology references present and accounted for too!) looks very nice on the screen too.

Directed, written and presented in a very novel way, with a story that isn’t too original but is unfolded with such control and branches off in such surprising directions, Ergo Proxy is well worth watching.