Une Vie de Chat / A Cat’s Life / A Cat in Paris

Une Vie de Chat is an Oscar-nominated French feature film. It was notable for being one of two foreign-language films nominated (alongside Chico and Rita) in the 2012 Academy Awards – which in my view was a very weak year for Best Animated Film. The main competitors were Puss in Boots and Kung Fu Panda 2, which while enjoyable were hardly typical Oscar candidates, and the winner was inexplicably Rango. Though I don’t know if they met the eligibility criteria (being released in US cinemas etc), I’d call Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha and Leafie: A Hen Into the Wild far more deserving of the gong than any of the nominated films. But hey, let us not forget who the Academy voters are.

In principle, Une Vie de Chat is the kind of film I should enjoy – though I’m confused by the French title, which doesn’t sound quite right to me (One Life of Cat? Not La Vie d’un Chat?). It uses story-book style visuals – a little ugly but distinctive and nostalgic – and tells a fun story. At night, a cat-burglar named Nico sneaks into museums and houses to steal jewels. He is accompanied on his nightly ventures by a rather ugly cat. But the cat does not belong to him. In fact, the cat’s owner is little Zoé, a sweet young girl who has been left dumb by the trauma of the murder of her father, a police officer. Zoé’s mother Jeanne is also a police officer, and hot on the trail of her husband’s killer – the dastardly gangster Victor Costa. When Zoé overhears her babysitter and Costa’s gang plotting to steal a priceless work of art, a deadly chase kicks off – and Zoé finds an unlikely ally in the thief Nico.

It’s a fun story and rolls along well. The only thing that I really felt was omitted was some recognition that while he was a thief with a heart of gold, Nico was still a criminal and no matter how much he helps a little girl and might just contribute to a happily-ever-after ending, he should have had to pay for his crimes. I also felt a little bad about how Jeanne seemed very quick to leave behind the memory of her late husband. But there’s a nice balance here between making the characters likeable and flawed. There’s actually something a bit more sinister about a gangster who’s a bit ridiculous than a cackling evil mastermind: it really does feel like there can be characters like Costa in the world, unhinged, petty and quick to violence whenever they look foolish.

But I have to say that I have problems with the ugliness of the film. There is charm to the story-book or comic strip designs. But everyone but Zoé is so hideous that over the term of a whole film it really starts to grate. I disliked the flickering colouring made to emulate on computer the style of hand-coloured animations like The Snowman – it looked affected and fake. This story is straightforward and offers very little that is unique to animation, so really needed beauty to distinguish it. While it had its own charm, I would not call that beauty. And that keeps me at an extra step of removal from this show. It looks like a 5-minute 70s animation spun out into a feature, and it does not benefit from it.

I like quite a lot about Une Vie de Chat. The tone, the concept, the setting. But I fell in love with nothing at all...and that is a real problem. Weirder, more experimental and far more beautiful animations like Le Jour des Corneilles have much more to offer. 

家庭教師ヒットマンREBORN! / Kateikyoushi Hittoman Riboon! / Home Tutor Hitman Reborn! (Seasons 1-3)

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.

By the end of the Vongola Ring arc, I am beginning to get it. The more mature edge is making it a series I feel less inclined to ignore. The only problem is that it took so very, very long to get there that I think that’s going to overshadow everything else. I may only be a third of the way through the series but if it feels like it’s only just getting off its feet after 76 episodes, I find myself doubtful it will go much further in another 130-odd. But we shall keep watching – and we shall see.  

ケモノヅメ/ Kemonozume /Beast Claws

With its highly idiosyncratic art style, insipid opening and closing episodes and rather impersonal and alienating first episodes, Kemonozume isn’t an easy anime to get into, and I have to say the only reason I got into it was my great admiration for Yuasa Masaaki and the two works that he made on either side of this production – 2004’s Mind Game and 2008’s sublime Kaiba. Honestly, without that factor, I likely wouldn’t have bothered giving a chance to this funny-looking, apparently very serious anime about flesh-eating monsters masquerading as people and the modern-day samurai/gangster types who fight them – and what happens when Romeo and Juliet-style, a couple is formed from one from each side.

And I’m glad I watched. I’m not going to say ‘Where else can you see the bad guy’s head sprouting legs and running along while a comedy monkey deeply kisses a part of the baddie’s flesh that is in the form of a lady monkey?’ because, well, in the big scheme of quirky anime, I’m sure I’ll see things at least as strange again. But though I started watching a pretty long time ago, this hardly took up very much of my time and it was a lot of fun to watch once it got going. There’s one episode about paralysis and a mysterious 20-foot-tall mobster (who becomes a regular character) that is one of the funniest I’ve seen. As with Mind Game, the surrealism, mature themes and seriousness predominate, but once the spotlight is on something funny, Yuasa really comes into his own.

There’s a reason he’s one of the big names of anime direction, and the studios let him do this crazy stuff. There’s a reason that Ankama went to him to give their Nox episode such a distinctive aesthetic. And there’s a real skill to how he juggles his different themes. This is my least favourite of his works – Mind Game was more heartfelt and also crazier, while Kaiba was much more conventional but also wonderfully strange in its peculiar cuteness – but it was still definitely enjoyable.

Next is The Tatami Galaxy. I’m looking forward to it – it certainly seems to be Yuasa’s work that has made the most impact, even if I seriously doubt I’m going to like it nearly as much as I liked Kaiba. 

Fire Candy (manga)

I think few people knew what they were in for when they started Fire Candy, the mangaka included – something that’s more or less admitted in the apologetic afterword. The concept is quite interesting – half-human half-animal teenagers in a future that seems quite heavily influenced by Akira cope with their status as pariahs by forming rollerblading gangs, inevitably ending up surrounded by the passions and tragedies of gang warfare.

This is a seinen manga, meant for older teenaged boys and young men, so everything is stepped up a notch, made adult in the same way that Western comics tend to be made adult. An emphasis falls on sexuality, with emotionally fraught sex scenes and rape. And then of course the violence becomes extreme, more extreme than I’ve seen in any manga as far as I remember. When reading the chapters about Ryoaki, our main character, being angsty and trying to replace one girl with her sister and having occasional scraps with other rollerblading delinquents, or some middle-aged man who looks like a little girl being sexually provocative, I most definitely did not think that we’d eventually end up seeing kids getting sexual kicks from decapitating their enemies and sticking their thumbs through the eyeballs of the severed head. It walks a fine line between shocking and just plain melodramatic, but somehow, making vicious murder sexual keeps it the right side of cheesy crap. Some stunningly good art doesn’t hurt, either. The plot is loose, meandering about with no encompassing story, but each mini storyline is fairly direct and carries the characters to interesting places.

But the real shocker is that this ultraviolent, testosterone-fuelled and gang-centred bloodbath is that its mangaka is female. There are telltale signs (using, of course, huge generalisations): the sexualised representation of the teenaged boys, the delight in flustering them with a headstrong older man who looks like a sexy young girl, the close relationship between Ryo and his close comrade Leo (a rare positive, attractive representation of a young black guy in a manga), but really, given the kind of things you see in Bleach and Naruto, those aren’t obvious indications of the creator's gender. In the end, it makes very little difference what gender the people writing manga are, but sometimes expectations are confounded.

A strange, subversive little manga I only read because it was scanslated by one of my favourite groups, it’s far from world-shaking, but I certainly enjoyed it.

(originally written 6.11.07)

パーフェクトブルー / Perfect Blue

This 1997 animated film was for some reason quite heavily promoted over here five or six years ago. It’s dated in several ways, not least of which being the notion that any young idol could be clueless about the Internet, but it’s still a very powerful work, and something of a mind-fuck.

When a pop star wants to make a transition to being an actress, those responsible for tarnishing her pure image, making her act in rape scenes or do nude photoshoots, start to be picked off in grisly ways. But she herself is losing grip on reality, and unsettling cuts and disjointed scenes which may or may not be real disorient the watcher: for all the lack of subtlety in talking reflections and repeated waking-up scenes, the idea that possibly pop star Mima really is the character she was acting and the fiction is what was presented as real life is appealing.

Some impressive fast-paced animation and unflinching presentations of sex and violence rather than being gratuitous actually demand to be taken seriously, which was surprising. It was a bit unconvincing that three separate pivotal characters are quite mad, and the identity of the ultimate antagonist was, for me at least (and the friends I watched it with, since I piped up with it as soon as it occurred to me) far too obvious, but it was a striking, mature and memorable film, different from what I was expecting but surprisingly good, and quite a leap from the average anime film.

(originally written 4.1.08, before I had anything but a vague notion of who Kon Satoshi was - though I had already written about him in my impressions of Millennium Actress.)

賭博黙示録カイジ / Tobaku Mokushiroku Kaiji / Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji

Of the many remarkable things about Kaiji, the most immediately noticeable is, without doubt, the character design, which looks more like some wacky French comic or even a Westerner’s parody of anime than like the vast majority of other productions around it, especially from Madhouse. Faces are elongated, eyes are simple and bold, noses are as striking as any from Fantastic Children and, most crucially of all, the lines of the art are comparatively very thick indeed, which more than anything else gives Kaiji its stylised look. Other elements are certainly remarkable too, from the excessive reactions and hysterics of the characters in moments of great despair, the near-fetishistic brutality of its scenarios and the trademark ‘zawa’ sound effect, so prominent in the manga that it was not merely imitated when making an anime, but spoken and even written in the onscreen space.

Kaiji is a gambling anime about the unfortunate titular character, who through no fault of his own ends up in huge debt. Gangsters offer him the chance to win the money he needs, but at great risk, with the stakes ever-increasing. Kaiji has to figure out tricks to help him win, as well as discovering whether or not his opponents are playing fair. As stakes rise and so do histrionics, Kaiji gleefully flings itself into extremely over-the-top situations, accentuated by a very melodramatic presentation, but that is part of its charm.

The first arc, centred on the game ‘restricted janken’, was really quite ingenious, with clever strategies and tricks, and Kaiji believably growing from naivety to canniness. After that, though, the situations became increasingly absurd and while memorable, really weren’t very well-suited to a gambling anime. Sadly, towards the end of the series, when card games returned, the strategies and tricks were extremely simplistic and Kaiji is tricked by simple things (and comes up with failing strategies) that really he should see are much too obvious. The mini-arc grows into satisfying bluffs, double-bluffs, triple-bluffs…but that’s really where it ought to have started, getting cleverer from there. While the show pleasingly ends without huge fanfares of triumph, there’s the feeling that this is really only because there’ll be another season (at least; there’s plenty more manga), giving little closure.

Memorable, iconic, entertainingly overblown and very enjoyable, I nonetheless feel Kaiji should’ve been more.

(originally written 14.6.09)

ルパン三世 カリオストロの城/Lupan Sansei:Kariosutoro no Shiro/Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro

While I may consider Miyazaki one of the very best writer/directors who ever made films, animated or otherwise, that is not to say that I will automatically adore everything he does. Indeed, there are a few of his movies I consider to be good, but not great. This is one of them.

This was Miyazaki’s first movie as a director, and the only one not considered part of the Ghibli canon. True, Nausicaä was made before Ghibli’s foundation, but most of Ghibli's staff was formed from the team that made that film, it’s generally considered part of the studio’s work. Cagliostro takes the Lupin III franchise’s well-known characters (in Japan at least…and perhaps one day internationally if Miyazaki’s fame continues to rise or Spielberg ever does the long-rumoured live-action adaptation) and puts them in a typical perilous situation: tracking down the source of counterfeit bills, Lupin and his nakama find themselves uncovering corruption in the heart of a small country, and of course a beautiful and innocent young damsel to rescue.

Other artists have made Lupin and co look much cooler, but Miyazaki’s design suits the slapstick tone of this far-fetched story well. There’s no magic, but most of the fights and the tricks Lupin manages to pull off are cheerfully unlikely and silly. The story is loose as can be, climaxing in the most slapdash ending of all Miyazaki’s slapdash endings, but there’s a lot of fun to be had with the playful interaction between characters and the inventive setpieces.

It’s not hard to see the huge influence Lupin III had since his manga debut in 1967 (writer Monkey Punch based him on the original Arsene Lupin, of course). The clown that can be very serious when needed is now second only to the innocent young boy on a voyage of discovery as a typical shounen protagonist (and often the two are merged). The cast of Cowboy Bebop are heavily based on these prototypes – replace Ed with Zoro from One Piece and everything would fall together. And this movie is generally regarded as the best Lupin III has to offer.

But it’s really quite slow and predictable, and only sporadically funny. It hasn’t dated too well, shaky framing and washed-out colours reminding me of cartoons like Inspector Gadget – not necessarily a bad thing (oh that the Inspector Gadget movie had been this good) and the animation does hint at glories to come, but watching someone make a good film with what materials they had and watching someone make a genuinely good film is different. Fun as it is to see what will become Miyazaki hallmarks (design, simple and obvious romances, mid-air drama…and this is the first of three Miyazaki movies with ‘Castle’ in the title), that doesn’t make the film itself any better or any worse.

Not a bad movie, by any means. But I would rank it as similar to, say, a middle-tier One Piece movie. A nice addition to a franchise and certainly an entertaining diversion, but no great classic – nothing that I would watch again and again.

(Originally written 26.8.06)

鉄コン筋クリート/Tekkonkinkreet

Tekkonkinkreet is an interesting animated movie, something of a milestone in anime history, despite being far left of the mainstream. For one thing, it’s the first major anime film ever to be directed by a gaikokujin – American special effects artist and cell-shaded cgi pioneer Michael Arias. On the other hand, the film is very much in the house style of Studio 4°C, and was based on an existing manga, but the daring compositions of shots and the high-octane action sequences recall the (separate) sequences from The Animatrix that the director and the studio were responsible for. I think the American’s influence is most obvious in brutality of the fight scenes, the willing embrace of weird hallucinogenic sequences that recall Scarfe’s flowers in The Wall, and perhaps the need to cram in a bit too much, making the middle of the story sag really quite badly. But it’s 4°C who really leave their fingerprint on this film. One of my favourite anime of the last few years has been their Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu, and having seen that overlooked classic, I instantly recognised the distinctive style of their animation: Mahou Shoujoutai may have had prettier character designs, but it took similar risks, with impressive CG, fluid animation and quirky art that didn’t necessarily follow the conventions of anime anatomy or stay wholly consistent.

Tekkonkinkreet is the story of two street kids, Kuro and Shiro (Black and White) who rule their city. When yazuka and property developers invade their turf, it becomes clearer and clearer that despite their superhuman skills, the two of them need one another more than even they know. Kuro is the tough one, the fighter and the breadwinner, while Shiro is something of a village idiot, possibly autistic and certainly mentally undeveloped, but pure and good-hearted. It’s the situations the story forces these two into that really matters – which makes a lot of the peripheral stories seem somewhat extraneous, but the payoff is worth it.

The rather ugly characters contrasting with the beautiful cultural mishmash of the background art makes this unique and will keep it away from the mainstream, which expects its aesthetic a lot prettier, and while it could have done with a good 25 minutes trimmed off, and has some very predictable twists, it’s a moving and effective anime movie and well worth seeing, even if it won’t be for everyone.

(originally written 11.1.2008)

マインド・ゲーム/ Mind Game

Before the masterful, childlike Kaiba and the somewhat disturbing Kemonozume, experimental and fast-rising director Yuasa Masaaki made this critically acclaimed but undeniably avant-garde feature.

It is the story of a loser who suffers an extremely humiliating death, only to get a second chance. His rebirth leads to an adventurous escape from the Yakuza with the two girls he just might love, and then in a surrealistic turn and Pinocchio reference, a period of self-contemplation for all three of them with a strange hermit in the belly of a whale. Despite the strangeness of both style and plot, the vast majority of the film flows linearly and makes a kind of internal sense, although the ending is purposely ambiguous, focusing on the idea that tiny changes can bring innumerable possibilities for a person’s life.

There are recognisable stylistic links to Kemonozume, the rather ugly, sketchy drawing style, angular animation and inventive angles in the mise-en-scene. Kaiba is evoked by the pastiche-y clips of a retro anime with the time-turning belt that reinforces the theme of the film, in some of the forms of God and in the strange organic nature of some of the worlds the characters must inhabit, even just for a moment or two, as well as in the often disconcerting editing style. These links are more remarkable given that while Yuasa's later work came from Madhouse, this film was primarily by Studio 4°C – also behind such visually quirky works as Tekkon Kinkreet and Mahou Shoujotai: Arusu – with contributions from Gainax and Production I.G. That the style is similar across studios shows Yuasa’s great influence and command of his productions.

But if anything, Mind Game is weirder than either. Often using photocollage effects, real faces inserted into animated worlds, it constantly draws attention to itself as artistic expression. We see the film changing the media of its art, bursting into a wild and sexualised parody of an animated musical number, slipping between exaggerated parody and heartfelt introspection, and fully utilising the animated medium to express strange things, comedic things, surreal things, always seeming to be aware of Walt Disney’s dictum that animators cannot show the fantastic ‘unless we first know the real.’

But while Disney may have firmly established what is real before using a dream sequence or drunken hallucination to introduce the truly bizarre and formless, Yuasa delights in setting up expectations, and then subverting them, even if those expectations are that there will soon be another shift in style or pace.

What is remarkable, however, is that even though the audience is constantly reminded that the characters are only works of fiction, even though they are presented as shallow, changeable, detached and often duplicitous, even though the situations are weird in the extreme, they are still believable, sympathetic and more human than many in more formulaic and straightforward films. Mind Game’s chief achievement is that while it is incredibly strange, it has heart.

しおんの王 / Shion no Ou / Shion’s King

Perhaps unusually, I’m predisposed to like manga and anime about board games. Shounen Jump’s Hikaru no Go remains my favourite manga, and amongst my favourite anime. So even when people were mocking the exaggerated animations for shougi players making their moves, I wasn’t at all phased by the concept. This was one of the series the anime club watched in my masters’ year on the day of the week I didn’t attend, but the club president’s taste was usually pretty spot-on (possibly excepting Allison and Lillia) so I picked this up.

It’s taken me until now, more than a year later, to actually finish watching it, and however similar the titles sound, Shion no Ou is certainly no Hikaru no Go. While both revolve around teenagers playing board games with, despite any exaggerated animations for placing pieces, a generally realistic tone, the genres each borrow from to create their drama are very different, and I find Shion no Ou markedly less sophisticated.

While, despite its supernatural conceit, Hikaru no Go mainly revolved around the relationship between two rivals and interpersonal relationships, Shion no Ou has at its centre a murder mystery. Murder stories can be sophisticated and extremely clever, but this one is rather predictable, obvious and cheesy.

Shion was born into the world of shougi, or Japanese chess. Her father is a Kishi, a professional player, and by the age of four she was recognized as prodigiously talented. However, an unknown murderer kills both her parents, the trauma leaving her struck dumb. However, she is taken in by fellow shougi players, and the story starts when she is in her teens and ready to enter the world of professional players. Is the killer somewhere amongst them?

It’s slightly odd, considering the thought processes behind these characters. Shion is adorable, childlike and while very strong in her chosen field, rather hapless and very naïve outside it. It’s an increasingly familiar type of character, seen in other works aimed at an older-teenaged male audience, like Bamboo Blade, Gunslinger Girl, even the likes of Lucky Star. Essentially, she is a little child that the insecure male would feel comfortable dominating and find extremely sweet. Normally that’s just fine for me, but the way this anime seems to seek to make a character moé by making her experience a grisly murder and giving her a disability that can most likely be magically overcome later on doesn’t sit quite right with me, even if Shion is extremely likeable. The rest of the cast are largely uninteresting: a cross-dressing boy who will very soon see his duplicity is wrong, a girl whose primary characteristic is hero-worship of a father figure, a prime suspect who seems to snarl and posture far too much and thus more or less counts himself out as the actual villain, leaving only one other person it could have been, making for a very obvious ending.

For its shortcomings, though, I enjoyed Shion no Ou quite a lot. These characters may be unoriginal but they were all likeable, and Shion’s sweet nature and painful past makes you care what happens to her, even for rather cheap reasons in writing terms. There is real warmth in the interactions between the friendly characters and even if Kawasumi Ayako is just doing her default thoughtful-Nodame voice and Paku Romi has done this exact performance a zillion times already, the voice acting is strong. The animation is largely stilted and functional, but the penultimate episode has some nice experimental segments, unusual for Studio Deen.

Ultimately, though, Shion no Ou just lacks a real hook. The characters are likeable, but you’re never on the edge of your seat wanting to see what’s going to happen. The murder angle is clichéd and slow. So rather loathe as I am to say it, I can’t call this anime anything other than mediocre. Cute and worth seeing, but certainly no classic.

Monster

Of all the anime series I’ve watched, Monster has always stood out. By far the most sophisticated and most mature series I’ve been watching, part of its charm has always been that it could easily have been a live-action series, and indeed, a Hollywood movie is supposedly in preproduction. Monster doesn’t have any magical powers or robots or psychics. If someone thinks that animation is just for kids, it’s not ultra-gory or cod-profound series you should make them watch; turn them instead to Monster, a challenging and highly original crime thriller set in the real world and the present day.

Tenma Kenzo is a highly brilliant and very successful Japanese surgeon working in Germany. One day, a little boy is brought into the hospital with a gunshot wound to the head. Tenma is about to operate when he is called away, instructed to let the boy die in order to save an important investor. Believing all life is equal, no matter the pecuniary benefits, Tenma refuses, instead saving the child. The next day, the directors who he disobeyed, who have made it clear that his promising career will now stall under their influence, are found dead, and the boy has vanished.

Because of lack of evidence, Tenma is cleared, and continues working in the hospital. Many years pass, and when a series of murders make him once again the main suspect in a serial killer investigation, Tenma realises he may well have saved a monster.

That’s how the series begins, but this interesting premise is developed in several fascinating ways, touching on organised crime, the fall of the Berlin Wall, human experimentation and the possibilities of psychological manipulation. Tenma is only one of several main characters, along with the twin sister of the boy Tenma saved, a man from the same orphanage who cannot remember how to feel emotions and a machine-like detective called Runge, who is pursuing Tenma as a fugitive and habitually makes typing movements with his hand to input data into the ‘hard drive’ of his mind, one of the most striking but effective character quirks I’ve ever seen. Numerous other minor characters have their stories told, and while most do not further the plot significantly, all were at least interesting diversions.

The atmosphere of the show is unparalleled. The respect the major characters earn through their actions and simply through what they endure is remarkable. The main antagonist, Johan, barely appears, instead being a shadowy presence lurking in the background, controlling his puppets, which only makes him more fascinating (although unfortunately, by the climax, we still don’t know nearly enough to satisfy curiosity). The moral questions of who can be called a ‘monster’, how such a person can be created, and what it really means to erase your existence are all deeply compelling.

While I think the final act was a little far-fetched for all its great moments, and find it a bit daft that certain characters seem able to totally manipulate just about anyone just by finding out about their insecurities and confronting them with them until they crack, the plot was well-paced and huge in scope, and a story well worth watching, from start to end.

It was also brilliant how the characters all aged, changed in appearance depending on their circumstances, how different art styles got mixed in (especially those creepy children’s illustrations during the credits.

I’ve been watching this for so long – it’s strange, not having more to see. I’ll have to read 20th Century Boys instead!

(Originally written 16.2.06)