When listing the significant long-running anime
based on Jump comics, even fans would be forgiven for forgetting Reborn!
– while it had quite a notable impact, a successful anime run of over 200
episodes and plenty of merchandising, fanart, cosplay and the other hallmarks
of a success story, ultimately it’s just…quite forgettable.
Recognisably a shounen work by a female
mangaka, it has that seemingly characteristically female-mangaka protagonist,
reminding me of D.N.Angel and the pilot for D.Gray-Man – a
hapless, innocent, very childlike young adolescent boy who is adorable by grace
of being the runt of the litter, very feminine and rather whiny, but with a
hidden strength that comes out when needed. If most shounen protagonists
are clowns who have a hidden powerful side, there’s a definite subtype that is
very often seen from female writers that is very reminiscent of the ‘uke’ in
yaoi writings, perhaps at least in part explaining why this series and many
like it are hits with the fujoshi crowd.
Sawada Tsunayoshi, known to his friends as
Tsuna, is hopeless in school – no good at studying, no good at sports, and no good
at acting on his crush on pretty classmate Kyoko. One day, a strange baby in a
sharp suit who introduces himself as ‘Reborn’ enters his life, informing him
that as the great great great great grandson of a prominent Italian mafia boss,
he is now in line to inherit the title – and this the baby, one of Italy’s
elites, is there to tutor him and to teach him what he needs to know to become
a mafia boss. Since he is not very good at this, Reborn often uses a special
bullet shot from the gun form of his magical chameleon to induce a state of
near-death in Tsuna – who as he expires regrets the things he didn’t manage to
do just before dying, then resurrects with a flame on his forehead and all
clothes but his underwear being torn away through the sheer force of his ‘dying
will’, and sets about rectifying the things he regrets with superhuman strength
and speed.
It’s a very silly set-up and only gets sillier
as more outlandish characters are introduced – the baseball nut who turns his
bat into a real sword; the boy who creates supernaturally accurate rankings
while objects float around him; the little Chinese girl who when flustered
turns into a human bomb; the mafia assassin who kills with her ‘poison cooking’
but seems unaware of it being deadly and tries to give it to her friends; and
especially the little boy with a big afro, horns and a cow-print romper suit
who calls himself ‘Lambo’ and sometimes disappears into a bazooka to switch
places with himself ten years into the future.
Eventually, as is pretty inevitable with these
things, the silliness gives way to action and tournament-like set-ups are
emphasised, with a conflict over ‘vongola rings’ marking the point that not
only a series of easy-to-write one-on-ones can take place (familiar to anyone
who’s seen Naruto’s chuunin exams, the latter stage of the exam in HunterxHunter,
most of Fairy Tail and One Piece or the entirety of MÄR),
but where things take a more serious tone and Tsuna uses his powers – no longer
involving shedding clothes – to save his friends’ lives rather than lend a hand
in sports or take on the role of a support teacher.
While I enjoy the light fluffiness, have fun
with the daft characters and enjoy seeing the tone get more serious, the
trouble is that Reborn! never really goes anywhere. It never captures
the attention very much or makes you feel concern for the characters. Artland’s
very simple animation looks cheap and ordinary, but the real issue with engagement
comes from the writing: a lot of characters are very much defined by one quirk,
usually not very interesting, and I spent much of the first 50-odd episodes
wondering just what any of the fans saw in these uninteresting characters.
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