Tag: MAPPA

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: On a Highway to HELL’S PARADISE

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.

If you’re the sort that craves a truly classic premise, try this one on for size; disgraced ninja threatened with execution is offered amnesty if he can find the Elixir of Life, hidden somewhere on a mysterious island that may or may not be one of the Buddhist Pure Lands. The specifics here are, of course, very culturally Japanese, but the core of that idea is universal. Death is the ultimate equalizer after all, and despite many attempts over the centuries, no one has truly figured out how to escape the Reaper’s long reach. Certainly, the topic preoccupied the minds of those in the late Edo period in which the show takes place as much as it does today. It’s a fairly universal point of fixation.

Some, of course, claim to not fear death at all. Such is the case with Gabimaru (Chiaki Kobayashi), protagonist of Hell’s Paradise and star of this season’s opening anime.* All told, it’s an extremely promising one. It’s also remarkably slow for such a thing, but that’s not a complaint. Despite being a MAPPA-produced shonen adaptation, Hell’s Paradise knows better than to overplay its hand at this early juncture, and there’s a deliberateness to this opening act. This is the sort of story that wants us to know the why before the what. Episode one is, thus, mostly an examination of Gabimaru’s motives and how he comes to reckon himself with them.

How does Hell’s Paradise get there? Well, we open on an executioner repeatedly trying and failing to behead our protagonist. His sword simply breaks against the young man’s neck. This is Gabimaru, disgraced shinobi, captured and hauled before a magistrate and condemned to death. As the magistrate’s executioners repeatedly try and fail to kill him—first by beheading, then by burning at the stake, then by tearing apart with bulls, and then finally by dousing him in burning oil—is someone who claims, again and again throughout this first episode, to not be attached to this thing we call life. Honestly, combined with the nearly documentarian narrator, it becomes pretty clear from the word ‘go’ that, in addition to anything else, there’s a surprising amount of grim humor in Hell’s Paradise.

That claim to have accepted his impending death is what’s most important here, though. Gabimaru is lying.

Serving as a counterweight to Gabimaru is Yamada Asaemon Sagiri (Yumiri Hanamori), an executioner and “sword-tester” who seems to directly serve the shogunate itself. Sagiri spends most of this first episode in a detached and observational mode. She grills Gabimaru about various things, scribbling notes down in a small book she keeps on hand. Two points stand out here. One; the village of Iwagakure, a shinobi enclave that Gabimaru was raised in from a very young age, and two, the daughter of said village’s chieftain, who is also Gabimaru’s wife. It is for the sake of his wife—who, despite their arranged marriage, he loves very much, as shown in some genuinely super endearing flashbacks—that Gabimaru clings to his own life. It is also for her sake that, when Sagiri offers a way out of being executed, Gabimaru accepts.

Gabimaru cuts an interesting figure across this first episode in general; he seems very fatalistic, but that’s clearly also at least in part a cover for how badly he misses his wife and, perhaps, some deeper traumas. When recounting how he was apprehended by the Iwagakure shinobi, Gabimaru leaves out the part where he resisted so stubbornly that he took out twenty men before eventually being captured. There is definitely some level of self-serving memory going on here; no one accidentally kills twenty people, but whether it’s to keep Sagiri in the dark, as part of an internal attempt to reconcile himself with his wife’s wishes for a peaceful and ordinary life, or some other option, isn’t yet entirely clear.

Nonetheless, Sagiri offers him a pardon from the shogunate itself, offered on just one condition; he must go to a recently-discovered mysterious island, which may itself be a Pure Land, far past Ryukyu, and recover the Elixir of Life. In doing so, he’s competing with a number of other condemned criminals, each of whom also seek the Elixir on behalf of the shogunate. Essentially, Hell’s Paradise seems to be setting up a death game scenario here, though I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more to it than that. (Sagiri also assures Gabimaru that his wife is allegedly still alive and patiently waiting for him back at Iwagakure village. This screams “bait” to me. I would not be shocked if there was a plot twist of some kind that hinges on that particular detail.)

There’s a little bit of Capital-A Action sprinkled in here too; a pretty great bit where Sagiri proves that she could kill Gabimaru, even if he resisted with his various ninja techniques, and makes the ludicrously badass claim that her sword’s reflection shows the true inner nature of the people she executes. She and Gabimaru have a nicely-choreographed fight before she eventually offers him the pardon, and when they both have to escape the angry troops of the magistrate, Gabimaru deploys a proper jutsu for the first time in the series, lighting himself on fire in the process. (Ninja Bullshit will always be cool to me. I had a brief Naruto phase in middle school and that was more than enough to rearrange my brain in that regard.)

And in the episode’s closing minutes we get some truly gnarly shots of what happened to the first expedition to this “Pure Land”; they came back to Japan’s shores in wooden boats, dead, bodies overgrown with flowers, and their faces contorted into a ghoulish smile. That’s one hell of a hook to get you to tune in next week

I can imagine, in theory, someone being perhaps disappointed that the first episode of Hell’s Paradise doesn’t lay all its bells and whistles on the table right away. But personally, I’m finding this slower approach pretty captivating. The show is not, at least not yet, a full-fire storm of blood and adrenaline. It’s a creeping, almost nocturnal dread, not unlike the fear of death itself.

*Heavenly Delusion, which I will also be covering for a first impressions article, technically premiered about an hour earlier.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Let's Watch

Let’s Watch CHAINSAW MAN Episode 3 – Nyako’s Whereabouts

Let’s Watch is a weekly recap column where I follow an anime for the course of its entire runtime. Expect spoilers!

We don’t really use the term “antihero” too often anymore. I think perhaps, collectively, we were a bit burned out on it somewhere around the mid-2000s. But it describes Denji to a tee, so I hope you won’t mind if I pull it out here.

To wit; our boy’s primary motivation throughout this episode is, once again, to touch a boob. This time, Power’s, in exchange for helping her rescue her pet cat (a less easy task than it may sound, given that said cat is imprisoned by a powerful devil, but we’ll get back to that). It’s such an idiotically basic motive that the word “motive” itself almost seems too grandiose. But hey, after god knows how many years of anime protagonists who “want to be a hero” or other similarly abstract things, I at least appreciate a protagonist whose motives are understandable if not exactly noble.

The cat-hunting is more in the latter 2/3rds or so of the epsiode. Before that, the series goes some way toward establishing Denji and Power’s push-and-pull dynamic. Notably, right off the top, Power gets in trouble for killing the Sea Cucumber Devil at the tail end of last week’s episode, and her first instinct is to immediately—and badly—lie and try to pin the blame on Denji.

In general, Power is pretty interesting, and it’s worth pausing here to talk about why. One of the best ways to make a character distinct (South Park influence notwithstanding, go look that up if you’re curious), is to pile on enough small character tics that aren’t notable in isolation but add up to a peculiar whole. Power is rather slovenly, as conveyed by the hoodie that’s often half-hanging off of her shoulders. She’s incredibly violent and prone to lying. But she also intermittently speaks in a screwy, stilted dialect of Japanese that the sub track translates as spurts of weirdly archaic English. (Even in that screencap up there, note that she phrases it as “It was he who commanded me to kill” and not something like “He told me to do it” or what have you.) She also noticeably clams up around Makima, who she is comparatively deferential toward, and seems perhaps even afraid of. All of this sums up as a character who is really pretty unique in the current anime landscape, and, accordingly, she’s a lot of fun to just watch bounce around the screen.

She has one further quirk; a fondness toward cats. As mentioned, this episode’s main plot consists of Denji being convinced to help her rescue her pet cat Meowy. (Or Nyako. They mean basically the same thing.) Power, as a Fiend, is pretty broadly disdainful of humans and, really, most life in general. Cats though, she seems to have a fondness for. Later in the episode we get a flashback about her initially meeting Meowy and it’s genuinely very sweet despite the fact that Power spends the entirety of said sequence naked and covered in grime. (CSM is bizarrely good at putting emotional resonance into scenes that read as ridiculous on paper.)

Denji, ever the gentleman, is openly disdainful of this affection….until Power makes the aforementioned offer to let him touch her chest if he helps her recover Meowy. At which point, he’s suddenly fuming mad about “that fucking Devil” stealing poor little Meow-Meow. The soundtrack even revs up alongside him. It’s pretty funny.

Elsewhere, Makima gets a few spotlight scenes as well, which serve to add some further depth to her character. Also, they serve to sate my endless thirst for this show’s insanely good use of characters’ lines-of-sight as non-verbal tells about how they’re feeling. Aki, in his only real scene in this episode, questions Makima on the wisdom of having Denji in his squad. If you were only listening to the dialogue, you would take Makima’s response as fairly cool and natural. If you look, however, she visibly glares at him (from behind, so he can’t even see it) for a moment before replying. Somebody doesn’t like their authority questioned, is all I’m saying.

I think if someone who looked like this looked at me this way I’d die on the spot. But hey, I’d die happy.

Also of note; a meeting between Makima and her superiors is the first glimpse we get at the wider state of Chainsaw Man‘s world. This particular council of anonymous, vaguely military-types makes mention of “war hawks” over in America and The Soviet Union (!), and rumors of devils deployed for military purposes. How true any of this is, we don’t yet know. But it is worth making note of the fact that even this council refer to Makima’s underlings as “dogs,” in case you were wondering if the people she works for are any nicer than she is.

As for the whole cat rescue situation? Well, Power was lying. She had no actual intent to help Denji fight the Bat Devil or anything of the sort, instead offering him to the Bat Devil as a sacrifice, so that the larger devil might heal his wounds by drinking Denji’s blood. This ‘brilliant’ plan has several flaws.

Flaw 1: The Bat Devil is a dick.

As soon as Power shows up with a half-conscious Denji (who she’s whacked over the head with one of her bloodmallets), the Bat Devil collects his sacrifice and starts squeezing our boy dry in a decidedly unpleasant way. (Seriously, he vomits blood, and the Bat Devil drinks it. Chainsaw Man is not afraid to get nasty; remember this.)

Power demands Meowy back, but, surprise, the Bat Devil thinks Denji’s blood tastes terrible, and he takes out his frustration on Power by eating her cat in front of her. Then, while she’s having the flashback scene described above, he eats Power herself, too.

Flaw 2: There is no flaw 2. Flaw 1 got her eaten alive, what else do you want?

Anyway, this all makes Denji rather unhappy.

As far as battle cries go, it’s not exactly “you shall not pass,” but hey, whatever works.

The final act of the episode is a truly stunning fight scene; easily the best in the series so far. Denji and the Bat Devil tear a cityscape to pieces, ripping up chunks of concrete and twisted metal as they slug it out. And in what is arguably his first act of something vaguely like superheroics, Denji actually rescues a couple people. (He also throws a car at the Bat Devil with the driver still inside it, but, hey, nobody’s perfect.)

All told, this stands as probably the strongest single episode of CSM so far. It manages to keep a pretty noteworthy number of plates spinning, and it looks great while doing it. Here’s hoping to much more of that to come.

And now, making its grand debut, the Bonus Power Screencap, because I know what the fans like. This one is from this week’s ED. A simple Power, but strong, and bold.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.