The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Negative Positive Angler

Tsunehiro Sasaki is a university student with a large debt. His doctor tells him that he only has two years left to live. Living the rest of his days in depression, Tsunehiro one day gets chased by a debt collector and falls into the sea. He is rescued by Hana, a girl who loves fishing, and her fishing friends, including Takaaki.

Negative Positive Angler is an original series from director Yutaka Uemura and scriptwriter Tomohiro Suzuki at Studio NuT. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Content warning: This first episode contains a depiction of attempted suicide.

Negative Positive Angler starts off in a bit of a rough spot: an on-screen botched attempt at suicide by hanging. See, Tsunehiro Sasaki has been having a rough time, and this is only the latest in a string of challenges. He's failed at everything he's ever attempted, is deeply in debt, is about to get evicted from his filthy apartment, and has an inoperable brain tumor that's going to kill him in about two years.

It's a grim start, but you know what? A lot of excellent comedies have kicked off with suicide attempts, and if it's not a sensitive subject for you, Negative Positive Angler is worth pushing through. Unlike its protagonist, this anime-original production has a lot of life and energy. That largely comes from the script by Tomohiro Suzuki, who wrote the adaptive scripts of series including One-Punch Man and ACCA-13. He also wrote Double Decker! Doug & Kirill, which, for all its story problems, had memorable characters and snappy dialogue.

This episode comes out the gate with precisely those qualities as Tsunehiro finds himself rescued by a group of anglers after falling into the sea while fleeing a group of debt collectors. Chief among them is Takaaki, a friendly, cheerful fellow with pale pink hair. His monologue about the joys of fishing despite the drawbacks is the emotional center of the episode, and it's delivered with panache by Kaito Ishikawa. His speech doesn't just apply to fishing, though; it's about the joy you get from any hobby despite the expense, schedule demands, and everything that can go wrong, whether it be fishing, building Gunpla, or anything else.

A strong visual and audio presentation bolsters the writing. In addition to excellent voice acting, the guitar-driven musical score is unconventional enough to be interesting and builds on the mood of each scene. The character acting is just exaggerated enough to make it feel lively, which is essential to something involving a lot of standing and barely moving, like fishing. I'm not familiar with the tools of the trade, but there seems to be a lot of loving detail in the physics of the fishing lines, and the water animation, notoriously difficult to pull off, is beautiful as well. The only oddity is the photorealistic CG fish, which never quite mesh with the hand-drawn characters.

Negative Positive Angler is about finding a new sense of purpose and a lease on life. I'm looking forward to getting to know the ensemble cast better and learning how Tsunehiro's diagnosis will play into what's to come.