ファンタジックチルドレン / Fantastic Children

Fantastic Children is something a bit different. Ignore the bad title, a misleading bit of Engrish – I’m sure it sounds cool to the Japanese, and I assure you that there are no super-babies in this show. This anime is actually a lyrical, mysterious and quite beautiful piece of work, with one of the most complicated and fragmented plots I’ve ever witnessed. The show is sometimes melodramatic, sometimes falls flat, sometimes becomes truly epic, but is always ambitious and bold.

With distinctive, old-fashioned character designs, which I see as part of the charm, this anime does not look how you might expect from the sophisticated and challenging plot. Several complex strands run simultaneously: a group of strange (yes, fantastic, if we ignore the campy connotations of the word) adolescents known as Befort’s Children appear at various points throughout history. They have an ethereal appearance – white hair and blue eyes – and unknown to the world, Conrad Röntgen (Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen is the historical figure) was one of their number. Röntgen allowed himself to grow up, forgot his past and pioneered his research into x-rays, which he seemed to know about intuitively. At the same time, a girl called Helga grows up in an orphanage with her friend Chitto. She is always drawing the same picture, a strange shape like a crescent moon behind a great tower, a picture that other solitary women have drawn at various points in history. When she runs away from the orphanage, she meets Thoma, a boy trained as a fighter, who immediately swears to protect her. There are still more plot strands: Dumas, known as Damien, a boy who looks like the Befort’s children yet is not one of them, is part of an agency searching for Helga. Dr Gherta is a leading scientist in this organisation, but why does she feel so drawn to the mysterious object that opens a path into another dimension, where it seems that dead souls go? Then there are the men and women who were used in experiments involving this zone, who have grown old before their time. Finally, there is the detective trying, like the audience, to draw together all these disparate strands and see how it is all linked together. It finally becomes clear that the answers lie in another galaxy altogether, where a princess’s spirit can only be saved by transferring it to Earth – but can it be retrieved? The strands eventually do intertwine, and a charming, elegant story results, ambitious and grandiose.

As you can no doubt tell, this was extremely convoluted for 26 episodes, and in all honesty, it needed to either move more quickly or have an extra three of four episodes towards the end, because everything was resolved far too quickly and expediently. Considering the story is supposed to work over several generations, it seems bizarre that all the coincidences happened at once, and in all honesty, the ‘Losing their memories once they pass 12’ plot device was rather an irritating contrivance. Plus the Gricia arc was too slow and tried so hard to be stately and impressive that it ended up looking very false. The first half of the series was almost entirely exposition, and it provided such intrigue that the answers, when they came, were rather a let-down.

But Fantastic Children really stands out in terms of style. It looks like old-school anime, being produced by Nippon Animation, harkening back to their World Masterpiece Theater series. As ever, their designs bear a resemblance to Osamu Tezuka’s simple style, as well as 3,000 Ri In Search Of Mother, which this pays homage to with a little simian cameo. Characters sometimes have very exaggerated noses or hair, but at the same time the animation is for the most part top-notch, albeit with one or two rather unnatural character motions, an annoying tendency to direct combat as one character hitting the camera, and then cutting to another bouncing away, and one obvious example of (gasp!) recycled animation (taboo!). However, for the most part it was excellent, and the impressive CG blended in well.

Despite the shortcomings of the story, there were a lot of wonderful ideas and well-drawn characters. Not a perfect series but nonetheless an extremely enjoyable and charming one that I will enjoy watching again someday.

(collated from impressions, 19.3.05 and 17.11.05)

ハンター×ハンター / HunterXHunter

It’s been years, now. The last Greed Island OVA was back in early 2004, and since then the mangaka Togashi has (supposedly) suffered a mental breakdown - producing only half a story arc in the last seven years. Most of the younger crowd of anime fans now probably don’t even realise that once, HunterXHunter was considered the third of Shounen Jump’s ‘big three’, and probably more major than Naruto was. Bleach didn’t even get a look in.

The anime reached 62 episodes and would have run longer, but they were running out of manga material. What they would do now would be to start endless horrible filler and ruin the series’ reputation. Instead, Nippon Animation came up with a cleverer idea. They stopped the series and instead, produced a lot of OVAs. The impression we all had at the time was that they would finish the Greed Island arc, and then when the Soldier Ants arc finished, more OVAs would come.

But then the manga became a disaster. Artwork became mere scribbles, and Togashi’s little ‘breaks’ became months long – and then years. It wasn’t worth animating half an arc, so the series ended – and quite possibly the end of its relevance is why shows now don’t go down the route of stopping for a while and then resuming, resulting in Naruto and Bleach becoming jokes (though Bleach actually has some pretty good filler), and One Piece ending up with absurdly long intro sequences. And when Naruto recycles concepts from HunterXHunter, most of its fandom doesn’t even know.

It’s sad, because HunterXHunter is great shounen. It follows a young boy called Gon as he joins the Hunter Organisation to find his father. He was always strong, but even in the entrance test he finds people far, far in advance of him. Nonetheless he makes some close friends, and together they get ever stronger, and he inches closer and closer to his father – as well as helping his close friends.

As with Naruto, the best characters come from the mysterious criminal organisation who exist on the periphery of the story. Unlike in Naruto, they don’t end up all getting defeated absurdly easily and ultimately seem like very little threat after all. They’re also a good deal more eccentric, although possibly Bonorenof was a step too far in the end. Still, the only real shame about the Soldier Ant arc not getting animated is that some superb chapters with them never got shown in motion.

I still hold out some tiny hope that HunterXHunter will have a renaissance, one final arc…but realistically, the manga is going to finally end in a real shambles, the anime will never enjoy the advances of the last few years in animation techniques, and ultimately what was one of the very biggest shows around will fade into obscurity. Which is a shame, because at its best it was as good as anything else in Jump, and probably carries the torch of Dragonball better than any other. That said, it was the last arc that resembled Dragonball most closely, and that may just be the arc that signalled the series’ death knell. Too bad.

(A few months later I was proven wrong as HunterXHunter got a reboot)