Shelf Life

Junjo Come Here

Last week there was some discussion as to why I labeled certain shows as “depressing.” In the case of Lain and Boogiepop Phantom, they both involve suicidal characters, which I find depressing. Casshern Sins is depressing as all get-out, but it doesn't leave you despairing for humanity like Grave of the Fireflies. Since Grave of the Fireflies is an anti-war film, it at least leaves you with constructive pathos.

Titular character Casshern is an amnesiac living in a stark, gray, post-apocalyptic wasteland. The only media I've ever consumed with amnesiac characters done well are The Guin Saga (novels and anime) and Memento (the film). So amnesia: strike one against Casshern.

There are very few humans left in the world, but a lot a robots are hanging around, waiting to die of “The Ruin,” which has the effect of rapidly rusting them to petrification. I cannot think of a single thing I'd rather do on a Saturday night than WATCH ROBOTS WAIT FOR DEATH. Strike two. I could listen to the weird sounds my antiquated 10" PowerBook G4's fan is making and have a nicer time.

All the robots Casshern encounters want to kill him and eat him. There are two reasons for this: 1. They believe that if they eat Casshern's body, even a small part of it, they'll live forever (which sounds oddly like Catholicism) and 2. They've heard Casshern killed Luna and started The Ruin, so all of this is his fault. Casshern can't remember anything, so he doesn't remember who Luna is and whether or not he killed her.

Unfortunately for Casshern, he's a great fighter. It's not clear if he's a human or a robot or what in Part One, but he has lightening reflexes and a Wolverine-esque healing factor. I said “unfortunately” because eventually, Casshern just starts telling the other robots to kill him. Oh, joy! A suicidal protagonist! Strike three!

Casshern's budget-saving all-gray backgrounds make Planet Namek look like a tropical paradise. The characters hide lip flap a lot, presumably to save money for the fight scenes. I can't really blame them, the old lip flap-hiding trick is used even in the best of anime. But coupled with the bleak gray backdrop, the show looks extra low budget.

The dub script gets a lot of leeway because of the lack of on-screen lip flap. Monica Rial puts in an alarmingly convincing performance as a busted-in-the-head 4-year-old recurring robot child Ringo. But even Funimation's talented dub cast could not save this show from sucking. There is a live action extra feature of the Japanese seiyuu cast in which Kenji Utsumi, the voice of Braiking Boss, is slightly amusing. Utsumi says he's been type-cast as a bad guy, and I find that impossibly cool and kinda sexy.

Speaking of Ringo, here are some other post-apocalyptic films with annoying child characters that you can find at your local library: Six String Samurai (better music than the movie deserves), Waterworld (an expensive failure), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (geek canon, but ridiculous). Why is that a trope?!

This is the sort of show that airs at 2 AM in Japan, and you watch it while falling asleep. In fact, you can sleep through 2/3rds of any given episode of Casshern and get the gist of it.[TOP]

Dawning Blue never gets good. It was never good in the first place. And it has one of the most irritating deus ex machina endings I've ever seen. Even if that ending was intended as a parody or a joke, I still found it offensively terrible. It's difficult to describe the ending without spoiling it entirely, but to put it in very vague terms, just as things seem to be wrapping up happily, a tragedy occurs and the credits start to roll over tearful faces. Suddenly, a third party arrives in an outlandish scene that was set up in an earlier episode which nevertheless seems like an gigantic cop out. The tragedy is averted, the credits stop, and we're given a new super-happy ending instead. To stop the credits and figuratively yell "Psych!" seems like a bad practical joke.

To be fair, there was a drastic change in the show at episode seven. A new suitor appears to claim Feena's hand in marriage. When Feena returns to the moon, Tatsuya is forced to come to terms with his feelings for her. Tatsuya realizes he likes Feena, and they go on a date, and then they decide to get married (without really saying the word "marriage"). I found the jump from "Oh my god, I do like her" to "and now we're aiming for marriage" rather abrupt. If you asked the happy couple, "So how long have you been together?" their answer would be "One. One date."

There is a very badly handled showdown with Wreath, the requisite little kid character in the non-harem harem cast. It turns out her body is being occupied by something like the ghost of a dead planet (no wait, that was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within). This scene in particular suffers from poor screenwriting. Wreath explains her actions and motivations in a long awkwardly handled monologue. In the subsequent unentertaining one sided fight, Tatsuya is totally defenseless against her energy blasts.

That fight scene was bad on the surface, but it took me a day or so to realize what's really wrong with this show. The real problem is that none of the main characters have flaws. Feena and Tatsuya are both very nice, relatively competent characters. There is nothing particularly unique or memorable about either one. Aren't characters supposed to have flaws according to Aristotle's Poetics (he calls it hamartia)? They're the sort of couple who are certainly nice, but you'd never want to go out to dinner with them because it would be intensely boring. Every supporting character has at least one unique trait, even if those traits were chosen from a shopping list of anime character traits, but for the love of god at least you'd have something to talk with them about.

There is no dub, and the only extra is a music video so slow and inane you could sleep through it soundly.[TOP]