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Friday, May 18, 2012

Posted by IceCreamNinja in Anime / Manga August 13, 2009 at 03:21:48 PM

Have you ever met someone who at first you thought was entirely normal and quite possibly maybe even a bit endearing, and yet gradually over time revealed themselves to be a complete raving psychopath? Sure you have. We all have. It’s part of the human experience. A friend’s mother, a cousin you haven’t seen in fifteen years, a new step uncle; one hasn’t truly lived until they’ve unwittingly struck up a conversation with and invested a significant amount of time into a person whose recurring acquaintanceship will haunt them deeply for the rest of their lives.

Eden of the East is like that.

It starts off interestingly enough. The show is well animated with beautiful backgrounds, particularly in the first episode. It grabs the audience’s attention early ("why is that guy naked?") and holds it for a decent amount of time afterward. Most impressively, it attempts to move away from the annoyingly high school-aged cast that seems to pervade most series of recent memory, offering instead a group of characters who have just graduated from college and are struggling to enter an increasingly pessimistic job market. Too bad they can’t seem to leave behind the particularly high school-like behavior when it comes to relationships, but that’s okay. At least they’re moving in the right direction.

The premise however is where things start to go wrong. It’s schizophrenic. There are references to serious events and issues such as 9/11 and the ever-growing population of Japanese NEETs (persons Not in Employment, Education or Training) interspersed with ridiculous scenes of 20,000 naked men and an American police woman demanding to see the main character’s crotch. Yet its madness is also subtle, cumulative; one doesn’t truly realize it until only much later, at which point they’ve already essentially committed to finishing the series anyway. Questions are introduced early on which are never answered: “Why did he have so many guns?” “Why was he in Washington, D.C.?” “Why was he and pretty much everyone else, at one point in the show, naked?” You can forget about these and many others; the series has heard your cries and it has made it clear that it doesn’t care.

The plot shifts in a mercurial and illogical fashion. The first episode gives the sense that the series has taken a page from The Bourne Identity, where an amnesiac main character/possible assassin teams up with a random Girl In The Wrong Place in order to figure out who he might be. The Bourne angle is quickly forgotten however in the following few episodes in favor of an Agatha Christie 12 Little Indians motif, where our hero learns that he’s actually just a charming young guy caught up in a deadly game put on by an eccentric billionaire. All well and good, one might say. He and eleven others representing a cross-section of Japan’s social strata each hold a murderous mystery phone and the equivalent of about one hundred million dollars at their discretion, which should make for a fairly interesting modern take on Christie’s classic novel. And who really liked all the Bourne movies anyway? Except that after a few more episodes the plot the audience has invested in decides to suddenly shift again. So the money on the murderous mystery phones wasn’t meant to be used to destroy one’s fellow contestants in the most creative way possible—dropping nuclear-armed American Civil War-era Iron Sides filled with brownies from an orbital death station onto the heads of unsuspecting players amidst densely populated urban centers? Rather, that paltry sum is supposed to somehow be used by each of the players to save Japan? From what, one may ask. And why? And how, with the monetary equivalent of about ninety cents for every citizen in the country?

I told you to stop asking questions.

The main problem with Eden of the East is that it does not adhere to the rules it set out for itself in the beginning of its run. It’s a problem that has appeared before in anime and other works (Lost and Last Exile are other series guilty of this in my opinion), wherein a show will seemingly establish a reality for itself in which the viewer will comfortably create a set of limitations which in their mind they know should not be broken, and then, for inexplicable reasons, the show will go break them. In Eden of the East, this happens largely through the varying use of the characters’ cell phones. If the viewer has been led to believe for instance that the reality these people exist in is one that adheres to the rules of our own, i.e.: that these characters could basically be real people if not for the fact that they have relatively more advanced technology owing to the series being set two or three years in the future, one should not then have this belief challenged unless it turns out to be a central focus of the plot. Watching The Matrix for twenty minutes before realizing what the Matrix is was great. Watching Eden of the East for seven of the eleven episodes before suddenly seeing something magically happen that has no explanation, no foundation in the rational reality the show has heretofore constructed and no bearing on the overall plot of the series thereafter can only be described with a curious blend of resignation, annoyance and blind, seething rage.

Ultimately, Eden of the East falls into that regrettable category of “time waster.” The show at first seems to promise an examination of some interesting issues in an engaging and creative way while in the same moment offering enough entertaining asides to keep itself from appearing too heavy-handed. This is a trick; a sort of entertainment alchemy much akin to what that psychotic acquaintance of yours pulled to get you to talk to them way back in the nostalgia shrouded halcyon days of your innocent, untarnished past. By the end of the series, nothing has truly been learned, nothing gained, and a distinct sense pervades that the prior episodes essentially served as nothing more than a prologue to some other as-yet untold story. Undoubtedly, more information will be revealed in the upcoming movies, yet given the point where the series leaves off, one has to seriously ask themselves if they’d really care to invest any more time in the universe than they already have. I, for one, suggest simply treating the show like the insane gibberish-spouting subway drifter that it is, and just ignore its random flailing and gesturing until one can safely exit the train and forget about it altogether.

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