Netflix Anime

by ledrule

Netflix has always struck me as a place to discover hidden gems. Somehow I can’t help but feel sad that their content is set to go rapidly downhill when Disney pulls all their shows and films with the impending launch of their streaming platform in November. Netflix will find it difficult to keep up and will undoubtedly have to raise their subscription price.

‘Death-Note’ was a surprise success on the platform, and spawned a critically-panned US set original feature Death-Note which loosely followed the same plot. Personally I blame the time restrictive format for the bad reception, with not enough establishment given to the characters for the audience to fully appreciate the following cat-and-mouse game. The original Anime was all about unpicking the complex puzzles that adversaries L and Light Yagami set for each other, like a Sherlock Holmes set in a Japanese fantasy world.

From the creators of Death-Note comes another fantasy gem, Attack on Titan. Based on the manga of the same name, Attack on Titan repeats the same patterns as Death-Note. The audience unpicks the complex decisions of the main protagonists in a what-would-I-do situation. What gives this Anime an edge, for me, is that there seems to be so much more at stake. In season one humanity is literally on the brink of extinction. The gigantic humanoid ‘Titans’ have breached the outer wall of the last stronghold. These monsters are at the same time creepy and intriguing with vacant smiles on their faces as they wreak havoc and destruction. We later learn that humans hold no nutritional value for them, they are eating us for fun. The fight scenes are truly spectacular with humans developing mobile grappling technology to spin acrobatic circles around the Titans and cut them at the neck (similar to Spiderman swinging). The tension is masterful with most battles resulting in 100% human loss, the crippling fear of the Titans being palpable. Early on I genuinely had no idea whether it was even possible to win this war.

Most Animes I have seen on Netflix have amazing villains. Starting with Godzilla Japanese filmmakers have created enduring and horrific monsters. This has partly been attributed to the devastating impact of the nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The generations after truly understood what all-encompassing mayhem, death and destruction looked like with whole cities wiped off the map. There was also a wide sense of fear this could happen again. After speaking to a Japanese friend of mine, however, I discovered there is a more modern interpretation you can draw of the humanoid Titans in Attack on Titan – that they represent a more internal fear, of authoritarianism.

They certainly hold a morbid fascination for me and were the reason I wanted to watch more and more. As is the case with much Anime, the creators seem to invent almost random rules our heroes have to deal with. Some Titans are ‘abnormal’ for example, and can run faster or show more intelligence than normal. They can only be killed by slicing the nape of the neck, and so on. As I mentioned before, there is a pleasure in trying to outthink these ostensibly insurmountable obstacles. The Death-Note rules actually seem to make much more sense, as they were well-established from the beginning. The notebook (for those of you who don’t know, the supernatural notebook holds the power to kill anyone whose name is written in it) would be unusable without examples such as ‘you must picture the persons face when writing their name’, as people with the same name would all, in theory, die if this was not the case. In some ways this is why Death-Note works slightly better than Attack on Titan.

I also enjoyed One Punch Man  for exactly the same reasons as Attack on Titan. I didn’t watch it for One Punch Man himself, (it is obvious he was going to win every time), but I watched it for the crazier and crazier monsters that seem to appear out of nowhere and get stronger and stronger every time. One of my favourites was Super Custom, he loved building custom cars so much he decked himself out and became a custom car-loving monster.

Check it out, a nice alternative to Game of Thrones.