^{Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.}

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There’s gonna be a recurring narrative throughout some of these impression posts this season, possibly this year on the whole, and it’s not a particularly positive one. CloverWorks are doing a lot of anime in 2022. More than one studio can reasonably handle. I put the blame on CloverWorks’ corporate masters at Aniplex more than the studio themselves, but this fact is going to loom over every single anime they produce this year, including a number of highly anticipated adaptions. If any of those adaptions bottom out, the general public will not be kind.

Tokyo 24th Ward, however, is not one of those adaptions. It’s an original production, and comparisons to a thoroughly divisive anime CloverWorks made almost exactly a year ago–and my own favorite anime of 2021–are inevitable. These comparisons will do Tokyo 24th few favors. Tokyo 24th is not Wonder Egg Priority. It has weaknesses, even this early on, that WEP never did, and its strengths are completely different. They are whole worlds away from each other.

Consider this. The first half of the first episode features parkour and graffiti that digitally inserts itself into a city, signifiers of flash and style. But also, it opens with an arson attack and a solid five-minute run of the episode takes place at a funeral mass. It’s a bit inscrutable.

Here’s a question though: a single episode in, is that really a problem?

Set the question of whether this will be a good anime aside for a moment. It will absolutely be an interesting anime. Even the episode’s first (and worse) half is weird. It’s fairly slow, there’s a winding narrative voiceover about the alternate history the show takes place in (boring), and a lot of fucking annoying waffling on what it means “to be a hero.” Main character (and presumable cousin to Yomogi from SSSS.DYNAZENON) Shuuta Aoi failed to save someone–his friend / maybe love interest / other friend’s sister Asumi Suidou–in that arson attack, you see, during a time where he and his buddies (the other two main characters; reckless Ran Akagi and uptight political heir Kouki Suido) had a habit of playing hero and trying to solve others’ problems. They got in over their head.

Naturally, the incident at the arson fire puts a stop to all that, and by the time of the show’s present the three have drifted apart. Shuuta has become a NEET living above his mother’s bakery, Ran is a Twitch streamer / graffiti artist whose creations “hack” themselves into the city, and Kouki enjoys the privileged but miserable existence as the son of the titular 24th Ward’s mayor during a transitional period from self-rule toward integration into Tokyo proper.

They live very different lives, and the funeral mass is the first time in ages they’ve all been in the same place. A subsequent and by chance meetup at a local restaurant serves to highlight how little they have in common anymore, and there is frankly way too much puffed-up talk about each characters’ worldview, especially Ran and Kouki’s, given their very different stances on authority. This indicates a solid underlying political sensibility, but the series does not handle it in a compelling fashion in this first episode. It feels surprisingly dry.

Then, just when things seem like they’re going to get boring, all three friends get a phone call apparently from the dead Asumi. The ensuing scene is a surreal headtrip wherein the camera literally dives into our characters’ brains, and Asumi’s ghost beats the three of them over the head with a lightly modified version of the Trolley Problem while a bunch of gaudy VFX fire off and make the whole thing look like a fever dream. It’s insane. It’s instantly memorable. It is by far the best moment in the whole episode.

But that’s not to say that what follows it is any slouch either. Suddenly dialed in to some supernatural force (Ran later speculates that it’s some kind of “brain hacking” which, hey, sure), the three realize that this is no mere thought experiment here. There is actually an out-of-control train that is going to run over an innocent person–their friend Mari, plus her dog–and if they stop it in the wrong way, the train will derail, killing everyone aboard. This extremely misses the point of the Trolley Problem, which is intended to be a theoretical ethical dilemma. I would also argue that since it gives the episode a sense of urgency and direction, that that does not matter in the slightest.

The three engage in some real superhero bullshit, and Tokyo 24th improbably backs up all that “what is a hero? 🤔” silliness from the first half of the premiere. Shuuta, in particular, is incredible here. He’s faster than a speeding bullet and more powerful than a locomotive, although the sick-ass roof-running he pulls off here isn’t something Superman would ever do.

I won’t bore you by describing their methodology in detail, but with their powers combined, our heroes save the day. It’s cheesy in the way a lot of the best anime are. It rules.

The episode ends on a down note, though. With Shuuta assuming that the phantom phonecall means Asumi is still alive. Ran is skeptical, Kouki–Asumi’s brother–is downright insulted by the idea, and the two almost come to blows. Personally, I’m on Shuuta’s side here, since he seems to be the only one who actually understands what sort of show he’s in.

So that’s what actually happens in Tokyo 24th‘s first episode. How it happens is another matter. Production-wise, and despite the director’s own concerns, it looks pretty good so far. But it doesn’t really look conventional. There’s a real love of flashy scene transitions here, and there’s also a trick that recurs a number of times where cells are directly layered over each other to give the appearance of events “popping in” on top of each other. It takes some getting used to, and it makes shots look over-crowded in still form, but I’d grown more fond of it than not by episode’s end. It works best when deployed with more lighthearted or more action-oriented scenes. When used against a more serious, dramatic, backdrop, it just looks silly.

My hope is that Tokyo 24th Ward manages to hold things together against all odds. This is a weird anime, and that’s a good thing to be in a season that so far looks to mostly be rather conventional genre fare. (Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, either. But it helps Tokyo 24th stand out.) Who knows what we’ll be saying about this anime in six weeks, but I’d say it’s worth keeping an eye on.

^{Also: who the hell was this?}

Grade: B
The Takeaway: Skepticism because of the whole CloverWorks situation is entirely warranted here. But, if you’re looking for something that’s just weird and fun to look at and aren’t too concerned about whether or not it ends up being a masterpiece, this is probably worth checking out.

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