The Fall 2014 Anime Preview Guide

TERRAFORMARS

Bamboo Dong

Rating: 3

Review: As one of the first shows out of the gate this season, Terra Formars is serviceable, but perhaps only to those who otherwise have felt deprived of entertainment in the gap between seasons. Its premise is shlocky, and its attitude towards scientific or rational exposition seems to be to brush it under the rug so fast that maybe, hopefully, no one will notice that none of it really makes sense. Its saving grace is that it's intriguingly ugly, which may appeal to viewers (myself included) who sometimes tire of standard anime eye candy.

The first episode opens with an underground cage fight. Like many sci-fi billionaires, the wealthy 1% in Terra Formars prefer to spend their money watching hapless folks kill each other in brutal hand-to-hand combat. Our hero Hizamaru has a noble story, though—he's in the cage because he wants to help his childhood friend/crush secure the money and means to get an organ transplant for her incurable (and very mysterious) disease. But wait, there is a twist—his last opponent is a big, burly, tough, American, flesh-ripping… bear. Hizamaru gives it the ol' college try, but in the end, he is defeated. As he lies on the mat, having his gut systematically and slowly eaten by a bear, who is mercifully taking his sweet, sweet time, Hizamaru morphs into beast-mode, grows some talons, and murders the bear.

Sadly, while this act of valor doesn't quite earn his gal pal the life-saving surgery he so desperately wanted, it does earn him a mysterious, body-altering surgery, and a spot on a mission to Mars to fight giant, humanoid cockroaches. After so many years of adapting to life on Mars, they have evolved into vicious, human-killing machines, and they are the one thing that stands in the way of a scientific mission to gather virus samples from Mars. This virus happens to be the same strain that struck Hizamaru's childhood friend, adding yet another layer to this goofy sci-fi romp that trades in mumbo-jumbo, vaguesplanation, and basically just wants an excuse to see humans fight giant bipedal cockroaches.

Perhaps time will tell, but at least as far as the first episode is concerned, Terra Formars is a bit of a snooze. It may involve bear wrestling, gut-eating, and space voyaging, but it so haphazardly dashes through each plot point that it feels a bit like staring at a child's crayon drawing of a landscape. You can see the picture, but only because you know what the shapes are supposed to represent. Terra Formars has the shell—excuse me, the exoskeleton—of a campy and interesting sci-fi flick, but at the moment, it hasn't found it footing yet. The characters are shoddily introduced, the motivations are hazy and unclear, and even basic questions like "Didn't that guy have probably most of his stomach eaten in the amount of time he was lying there and having flashbacks?"or "How did you guys make it so that there is accessible water on Mars?" are too distracting to ignore.

It certainly isn't the worst show in the world, but it doesn't leave a strong impression. Perhaps the next episode will be better.

Terra Formars is available streaming at Crunchyroll.

Nick Creamer

Rating: 3.5

There are definitely worse ways to grab the audience's attention than starting your first episode with a man cage-wrestling a giant bear. After a brief montage of rich people grinning menacingly at the camera, that's exactly where Terra Formars drops us, wasting no time in making it clear this will be a grisly (no pun intended) macho-man kinda ride. The episode briefly flashes back to bear-wrestler Akari's childhood, where we learn his current predicament is all for the sake of a sickly childhood friend, before Akari bulks up through some mysterious power and demolishes his opponent, all while suffering bearly (okay I'll stop) a scratch.

There aren't really many places an episode can go after a caged bear fight, and so the rest of the episode is largely spent establishing characters and premise. In the 2600s future of Terra Formars, an incurable virus from Mars has begun wiping out Earth's population. In order to combat this virus, Akari and ninety-nine other newly conscripted operatives will have to journey to Mars and collect virus samples, making use of a strange medical procedure to survive the harsh Martian environment. This task is somewhat complicated by one awkward variable - the cockroaches of Mars, hulking man-sized monsters with a penchant for people-killing.

As far as manly action premises go, this episode felt somewhat middle-of-the-road, with clear strengths and weaknesses. The character designs and subdued color work fit with the overall gritty aesthetic, though the extreme light saturation seemed more abrasive than purposeful. I did like how the show contrasted specific splashes of bright color - the roses, the open window, the blood - with the overall subdued color palette. And the show's use of ambient background noise also helped in promoting the show's clawstrophobic (okay I promise I'm done), semi-dystopian atmosphere. Both the visuals and sound design were clearly focused on evoking a caged, metallic, unglamorous world, and in this they succeeded. On the negative side, easily my biggest problem here was the writing. Though the show's direction didn't overplay its emotional moments, hammy speeches like Komachi's appeal to “people who have the same rage boiling inside them” threatened to tumble over into self-parody. And the show's broad-strokes contrasting of its unfortunate protagonists and the Evil Rich People wasn't any better. Overall, this episode felt like an unremarkable but clearly articulated statement of purpose - if you're looking for macho action with a serious body count, Terra Formars looks ready to please.

Terra Formars is available streaming at Crunchyroll.

Hope Chapman

Rating: 2

Review: Terra Formars opens on a cage match between two unlikely competitors. It's a fight between a troubled muscle-bound young man and a--hey! Down in front! I can't see a thing! Oh wait, that's not the peanut gallery, those are censor bars. Gosh, that's an awful lot of censor bars. What the heck is even going on? This is problem 1/1000 with the first episode of what should have been one of the most anticipated anime of the fall season.

First of all, if you happened to hear the premise of Terra Formars, and then saw the beginning of this anime adaptation without knowing what it was, I highly doubt you would connect the two at all until the last five minutes, and that's not a compliment. Ten minutes of this episode is taken up with the overwrought tale of Beefstack A's tortured turn to rigged cage fighting for the entertainment of The Evil Rich Person Underground (yawn) in order to afford an operation to save his hospitalized sweetheart from an unknown yet fatal disease (yaaaaaawn.) The five minutes after that are spent in boring conversations with uninteresting characters explaining their motivations and key plot details from stiff chairs in flat slow-panning shots. We only get to the point of it all, (there are murderous humanoid cockroaches on Mars and misfits injected with bug-powers are Earth's only hope for exterminating them,) in the last couple minutes via an expositional monologue from blonde-lady-scientist-who-nobody-can-keep-on-model.

Things might be different if the cage match against a monstrous black bear, (although at that size it would have to be a Kodiak Bear, not literally the Black Bear species,) was entertaining, but somehow it isn't. The show has a really hideous low-contrast color palette filled with sickly glaring-white light sources in a failed attempt to give it some life. It's less Texhnolyze and more Speed Grapher, unfortunately, resulting in a cheap and unappealing aesthetic only potentially salvageable through excellent animation...but we don't get any of that either. The show is dominated by canted angle closeups that are not only unpleasant to watch, but not a very convincing method for hiding the shoddy animation. Bodies jerk and twist awkwardly from pose to pose when they bother to animate anything rather than just intercutting poses with crowd reaction shots, and the chiseled mannish faces of our bland cast members change so often that it's hard to keep track of who is who. It's pretty bad.

It's a shame, because the premise of Terra Formars sounds like a ridiculous good time, and the manga is a continually rising hit overseas. I don't know what went wrong in adapting this material, but it went wrong in spades, from the blah visuals to the blah presentation of the content. Literally all this show has going for it right now is the original concept's success and some skin-crawling (if way too on-the-nose) sound work near the end. So disappointing.

Terraformars is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rating: 3.5 (of 5)

Review: The year is 2619, and twenty-something karate expert Akira Hizamaru finds himself in a cage death match for the entertainment of an uber-wealthy audience as a way to collect the prize money necessary to save a childhood friend who desperately needs a transplant due to a fatal disease. His final match turns out to be against a grizzly bear, but Akira also turns out to be no ordinary human, either. When he discovers in the wake of the match that his friend was never going to be saved after all, a pair of U-NASA recruiters step in and give him a fresh opportunity: though they weren't able to save Akira's friend, they offer him a chance to work towards defeating the alien virus which ultimately killed her. That means a special surgery to prepare him to go to Mars, one whose survival rate is a mere 36%. But he has a biological advantage, as do, apparently, a few other individuals that we are much more briefly introduced to. Before they head off to Mars to retrieve samples of the disease that can be studied in hopes of finding a cure, they learn what they are really up against: humanoid cockroaches called Terraformars, which apparently resulted at least partly from a crude terraforming experiment centuries earlier, who must be defeated if U-NASA wants to retrieve anything.

The most immediately distinctive feature of the series is that the cast is composed entirely of adults, and the look and tone of the content suggests that the series as a whole is skewing more towards older audiences. (When Akira happens to look down the cleavage of one female character, for instance, he gets chastised for it in a very adult fashion.) That alone would make the first episode stand out even if it wasn't for the generally darker coloring, the high-quality artistic effort by Liden Films, the initial shots of the almost-caricatured faces of the rich and the disconcerting way their mouths and eyes are animated, or the really bizarre notion of the Terraformars revealed at the end of the episode, who look kind of like masked uber-bodybuilders. The violence is apparently going to be pretty graphic, too, as the later stages of the bear fight get censored to a massive degree. In fact, you can probably place bets now on which characters from the team that blasts off at the end of the episode will eventually die messily and in which order, as this one has all of the vibe of a bloody, heavily atmospheric alien slugfest, albeit with at least some attempts at character development to back it up.

On the whole, the atmosphere and production merits are used well enough to merit an initial recommendation. There are some warning signs that it could go over-the-top if not kept tightly under control, and that may ultimately determine whether or not this ends up being a good series. But at least it's a promising start.

Terraformars is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Rebecca Silverman

Rating: 3.5 (out of 5)

Have you read the Terraformars manga? Well, prepare to experience volumes one and two in fast forward. The anime's first episode skips over most of volume one – we have a couple of very brief flashbacks – and starts right in with volume two before glossing over most of the middle of the book. To be honest, this isn't a bad thing: anime is a faster-paced medium than manga and leaving us to wonder about bloody scenes vaguely hinted at is very effective. Essentially we get all of the important information in a dark, swift episode that teases us with terror to come.

The focus of the episode is a Japanese teen named Akari, whose best friend/crush is dying of one of anime's many Mysterious Wasting Illnesses. Desperate to get money to pay for her treatment, Akari enters a very shady underground cage match that turns out to be far more dangerous than anyone expected. But then again, so is Akari – he somewhat handily dispatches his opponent by means of a strange power, which results in him being recruited by U-NASA (the U is for “United Nations”) to go on a Mars mission. The catch is that he'll have to undergo a dangerous operation with only a 40% survival rate, but at this point, Akari is willing to risk it. At the U-NASA facility he meets other similar recruits – Marcos, Alex, and Sheila, who are clearly a set, and Eva, a German recruit brought in by officer Adolf. We eventually do learn the purpose of the mission and get a glimpse of the titular terraformars at the end.

The overall color scheme of the show is sepia, which really works with the air of nefarious purpose this episode builds. While the art and animation isn't spectacular – men tend towards the overmuscled look of American superhero comics and there's a fair amount of just talking with no movement – it really does get the job done, at times enhancing the creepy air. While there's been a lot of talk about offensive elements of the manga, at this point the only really major objection is that the two German characters are called Adolph and Eva, which, if it is foreshadowing, is really lazy, and if it isn't is just in poor taste. That aside, Terraformars is off to a very promising start with an alarming atmosphere and overall sense of doom and a combination of shocking images and vague explanation. Hopefully it will build on that potential.

Terraformars is available streaming on Crunchyroll.