Seriously, that's what I thought the moment I saw the character design. Igarashi Ganta reminded me entirely of Renton Thurston from Eureka Seven. You have a 14-year old boy whose main "Character trait" is alternating between despair and determination like a manic-depressive on crank, all the while being completely unaware of what's really going on around him, and screaming "Why?" about everything not working the way it should.

Right off the bat this series commits Steven Den Beste's cardinal sin. It introduces a cute girl just to kill her brutally in the first scene. It does this so that another character can be said to resemble her, but seriously, I don't see it.

In the first episode, Rent, er, Ganta's classmates are discussing their upcoming class trip to "Deadman Wonderland" a Prison/Amusement park where the prisoners are the attraction. And everyone is okay with this. The discussion also introduces what will surely become an important plot point, that Ganta forgets the past really easily. It helps with his constant state of bewilderment.

Suddenly this monstrous red man floats outside the window and blows the place to bloody smithereens, killing all of Ganta's classmates, and when he comes to, the first thing he sees is his friend Mimi's decapitated head hanging by her hair from the monster's hand. No, wait, apparently he has zoom lenses for eyes and only sees her head at first and asks her if she's okay, THEN he notices that she's bodiless and hanging by her hair and he freaks out. Framing tricks work for cameras, not eyeballs, Mr. Director. Anyway, the big bad man forms his blood into some kind of crystal and jams it into Ganta's chest.

Next, he's in the hospital, and the police come in and charge him with Mass Murder. Evidence? We don't need no stinking evidence. A public defender introduces himself, and one quick trip to Kangaroo Court later, Renton, er, Ganta is sentenced to death. Then the director, in a fit of brilliance, AFTER the sentence is passed has someone pop up some doctored video of him confessing in front of the Public Defender. That must be the overwhelming evidence the Court was talking about, because it sure didn't come up at the trial. This is also the first display of his gear shifting, because he goes from numbly going through the motions stunned at what's happening to him to screaming about it, for all of ten seconds before he collapses on the floor.

Now mind you, this all goes screaming by so fast because they really don't care about HOW he got here, they just need to push him into the "Wrongly accused guy in prison" role as fast as possible. They've got a lot of set-up to get through, and they've got to get through it fast or else you'll start questioning the stupidity.

So Ganta gets shipped off to Deadman Wonderland, which being privately owned, apparently the prisoners are property with no civil rights at all, and everyone's okay with that. Oh, and in passing it's mentioned that Tokyo was wiped out by some kind of black hole thing ten years ago, but moving on, that's not what the story is about. Just know that the proceeds from the prison/tourist attraction are gonna be used for reconstruction, so it's all good.

While he's on the bus, we first see Shiro, which is a VERY imaginative name for an albino girl, don'tcha think? She mentions that Ganta is coming, by name, somehow knowing this from her perch atop the prison. She is very athletic, wears nothing but a white bodysuit with some red designs painted on it, some sort of oversize collar, and what look like boxing gloves that are strapped on. Now supposedly even though she's albino, and dressed like some kind of circus gymnast, and has uncut hair, Ganta thinks she looks like his late classmate Mimi, who had straight black hair cut in bangs (Plus she's got a different voice actress, and their eyes aren't even the same shape). Sure. How could I have missed it?

Maybe it's the smile. But you could chalk that up to the style.

Now I have to say, the Albino nutgirl is the only reason I decided to stick with the series. She's the single most nonsensical thing is this pile of nonsense, which ends up making her the most appealing thing there. In a later scene, when Ganta is moping around saying he wishes they'd just execute him and get it over with, she says "If you wanna die, I'll be happy to kill you," in a cheerful voice, and tries to brain him with a pipe. She uses the fact that he dodges (several times) to prove to him that he's lying about wanting to die, and therefore he should cheer up. Absolutely a nutjob, but she makes more sense than anything else.

"If you wanna die, I'll be happy to kill you,"

"Why'd you move?"

Slightly before this scene, we get our obligatory prison commandant intro. Captain Makina is the perfect fetish prison mistress, with high heeled boots and an enormous chest stuffed into her tightly tailored uniform. She carries a sword and freely slashes the chest of one inmate just to prove she's crazy-bad tough. And one of the new arrivals has to prove what a lowlife he is by talking about her boobs. Unfortunately this is a HorribleSubs job, and they prove how correctly they are named in this scene, because even with my sketchy Japanese, I can tell they've taken some liberties.

Makina: Koko made de nani ka shitsumon wa? (This far, are there any questions?) "Any Questions this far?"

Inmate: Ano, nani cuppu desu ka?(Those, what cup(size) are they?) "How big are those titties?"

Makina: G da. (They're G) "G-cups."

Well, glad we cleared that up. But that prisoner's line is pretty off. Makes you wonder how unreliable the rest of the translation is.

"Thank you Mistress!"

The scene also introduces the control collars, ripped off from god knows how many crappy sci-fi prison movies. They've got tracking, and tasers, and some other stuff in them. But the writer forgot to mention the most important thing, so he had to crowbar in a scene later to explain that for those inmates on death row, the collar doses them with a slow-acting poison and they must earn the antidote candy by working the park in the most deadly attractions every three days.

And yet, the "Slow acting poison" is SO predictable, that the collar has a digital countdown that can be relied on to the SECOND for when the poison will suddenly cause instant death. They show this by having some other death-row inmate take a hostage, and Makina tells the guards and her assistant to just make small talk while he expires. Hmmm, what about the built-in taser?

We also see Makina go up to the office of the prison's director, and what do you know, it's the Public Defender! I DID say it was a Kangaroo Court. Apparently he knows all about the Monster that killed the class, and he wanted Ganta in his prison because of it. Makina though, has been kept in the dark about this.

Then there's a final scene where we discover that Ganta too has this blood-borne power. Hey Prison Director, nothing like blowing up a tower in the middle of your amusement park full of the public to try to drop it on him to force his power to come out. Wish I had your confidence.

The end credits feature photographs of all the characters in their pre-prison pasts. And apparently there are pictures of Ganta and Shiro together as little kids. Good thing Ganta is so forgetful, I can't imagine an albino playmate is the kind of thing anyone with a normally functioning brain wouldn't remember.

Okay, so I'll stop this here for now. I know it's probably pointless to keep reviewing last spring's series, but I've got a LOT of stuff to catch up on, and I finally found a copy of the OVA to cap this off. So I hope my single reader isn't disappointed that I'm not going over Moretsu Space Pirates like everyone else.

One advantage of reviewing old stuff is it really doesn't matter if I reveal spoilers.

Posted by: Mauser at 02:40 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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