Übel Blatt

Episode 3

Three episodes into the hotly anticipated anime adaptation of this dark fantasy manga, and the deficiencies in Satelight and Staple Entertainment's approach to the material are unfortunately becoming only more apparent. In brief, this episode is a mess. It doesn't help that, according to what I've read from fans online, several chapters from the beginning of the story, enough to fill a couple of episodes with world-building, backstory, and important character motivations, were unceremoniously removed. This means characters talk about people and events the viewer has no context for, and it's hard to know what to care about.

Take Lady Aht, who randomly appears to attack Köinzell in revenge for killing her elder brother Kratt three weeks previously. Köinzell killed a bunch of rebels, plus Kratt. Why did he do this? Who were the rebels rebelling against? None of this essential material is explained. Oh – and Wied also supposedly pledged loyalty to this Kratt person, though it's the first we hear about it. Wied calls Köinzell the “Man of the Black Sword,” as if that's meant to mean something, plus also tells Aht he recognizes that she's wearing the “Black Avenging Garb,” which appears to be yet more wildly impractical fetish-wear. Can someone please find the poor ladies in this show something to cover their underwear? They all look very cold – after all, everything's drenched in a perpetual blue filter and it constantly rains in this episode, titled LANGER REGEN (The Long Rain).

This sheer narrative randomness extends to every other aspect of this heavily-disjointed episode. We get a brief prologue of a sad-looking woman (a priestess of some sort? We never learn), staring at the twin moons in the sky and mournfully declaring “the cosmic laws will be rewritten.” Okay, I get that portentous declarations are part and parcel of the dark fantasy genre; maybe we'll get an explanation for this later, but it's only the beginning of this episode's confusing madness.

When Köinzell crash-lands his stolen dragon after being shot down by some random characters, whom I'm not sure are meant to be important or not (who the hell is Rozen?), he suddenly winds up in the Seven Heroes encampment. That was fast… Of course he attempts to stab Lord Glenn, one of the men who tortured and killed his former alter-ego, but somehow can't move… for reasons that are never explained. He's then restrained with chains, but Glenn just sort of… lets him go, and swans off. It's unclear if Glenn doesn't know who Köinzell is, or if he doesn't care, or if he's turned over a new leaf, or used the opportunity to grant clemency to a random murderous child to score political points with the baying crowd. If it's the latter, it seems to have worked.

Then later, in the refugee encampment where Peepi meets more people of her Miruel- Mirael race and finally gets some appropriate clothing, Köinzell is just kind of moping around. It's really hard to get a feeling for his motivations at this point. Instead of driving the plot, he's being pulled around by it. At one moment he's murderously consumed by revenge, at other times he's wandering around dead-eyed and passive.

New character Centurion Geranpen's introduction is tonally bizarre. He's a bald, tattoo- headed muscle man (a little like Fullmetal Alchemist's Armstrong), and it's clear we're initially meant to think he's a bad guy, in league with the miscreants rounding up Peepi's people and selling them into slavery. (Yes, this episode leaps from unrelated plot point to plot point in totally discombobulating fashion.) However, whenever he opens his mouth he says things like “why does no one ever see me for who I am?” while the background turns shocking pink. He even complains when he sees another man's sword that “it's longer than mine.” He sheds tears in what I suspect is meant to be a comical way, but the clumsy queer-coding of his character seems incredibly out-of-place and very outdated.

Episode three's brief fight scenes are also very poorly-directed and confusing to follow, while the characters themselves look too clean and cartoonish. This is not the aesthetic the show requires. I wish I could say I enjoyed Übel Blatt more, as I was really looking forward to it, but if this adaptation continues along this sub-par trend, then it really will be a tragic missed opportunity. I hope later episodes improve.

Rating: