Ranked #980

Gantz

NOTE: This review is intended to cover Gantz in its entirety.

Gantz is about as close as you’ll ever get to a love it or hate it anime. It’s littered with so much gore, profanity, nudity, and sex that it’ll either immediately turn you off or immediately glue your eyes to the screen. Being a person from the latter group I have to say I absolutely loved Gantz right from the start. Well, okay, not exactly right from the start. Gantz starts out in the life of Kei Kurono, an angst ridden teenager who has nothing better to do but think negatively to himself and get boners in class. He’s always worrying about something, and doesn’t care about anyone else except for himself. To put it simply, he’s like an emo kid on acid. He complains about everything, but mostly dwells on the fact that he’s never gotten laid. Hmm…wonder why. Ten minutes of listening to this punk whine and cry while so eloquently squeezing in the occasional F-word and I dare anyone to not want to turn this anime off and forget all about it. Thankfully things pick up from there, albeit with all the whining and crying still intact.

After we get acquainted with our main protagonist we get to meet Katou. Katou is an old time friend of Kei’s who used to look up to him. You see, before Kei was a whinny little punk he was actually a really cool and adventurous kid. Lack of character development doesn’t exactly show why Kei went from hero to zero, but Katou tries to emulate the Kei he once knew throughout the series, starting with attempting to save a homeless guy who fell on the subway tracks, with the help of Kei of course. Here is where the feces (and blood, guts, and various other nasty things) really hits the fan. Kei and Katou successfully aid the drunk homeless guy to safety, but soon realize that a subway is coming their way. Their plan of avoiding it? Run up the tracks passed where the subway should stop. Bad plan? You bet. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather try my luck at climbing back onto the platform rather than outrunning a damn subway train. But that’s just me. It turns out that Subway isn’t going to stop at the station after all, and both Kei and Katou are royally screwed. They get hit, and heads go flying.

Welcome to the true start of Gantz. Here is where things go beyond the boundaries of typical anime. Here is where things get fun. Kei and Katou wake up in this room with a number of random people who all seem to have died. They can’t leave the room, and trying to make sense out of it all is only a waste of time. Introduced into the story next is who I like to call the third wheel. Her name is also Kei, but like everyone else in the series I’ll just call her Kishimoto. Kishimoto serves little to no purpose other than for Kei to obsess and angst over, and as fan service, but with her flakey and often times clueless personality I don’t think she’s doing anyone a service. Luckily Gantz isn’t about character depth; it’s all about violence, nudity, and all that juicy stuff. That’s where the true main character of the anime comes in: Gantz. Gantz is probably one of the coolest anime characters to come around in years, and he doesn’t even have to say a word. He’s psychotic, yet fully in control. He’s evil, yet lovable. He’s the gears in the machine.

Gantz is a game of survival that you can’t help but love. Everyone in the room is soon transported to an area of town and can’t leave until they have eliminated the targets selected by Gantz. These targets are as wacky as they are terrifying, and while many of them look harmless or relatively easy to dispatch of that is rarely the case. Part of the excitement of watching Gantz comes from not knowing what everyone will have to go up against next. It’s also worth mentioning that this isn’t your typical “bad guy of the week” series. Each time our reluctant cast is forced into battle it usually lasts for a lot more than just a single episode. This is good, because Gantz is one anime that will probably have you thinking “So many characters, so little time to kill them all.” Gantz sets its characters up like dominos. Very few of them are ever developed, and very few survive long enough to see the last episode. There is a lot of death in Gantz and plenty of gory scenes to cringe at and watch over and over again, trust me.

Gantz does suffer from one major flaw, or at least I thought it was major: the ending. For an anime that is so straight forward and brutal right from the start it sure did have a weak and vague ending. Maybe the writers just didn’t know of a good way to end it. The movie The Cube had a very similar ending and plot, so I must wonder if that is what inspired Gantz in the first place. I would have liked to get a little background info on Gantz before it ended. Like where did he come from, and what was the purpose of these “games”. Either way, there is a lot to love (and hate) in Gantz. It’s lack of character development, almost completely unlikable protagonist, and strict R rating is sure to turn many viewers off, but if you’re a fan of the brutal and nasty stuff I see no reason why you won’t like the fun little rollercoaster that is Gantz.

My Score: 9.0

Version Watched: English Dub read more

Sometimes death is not the end. There is no salvation, no peace, and no rest. Instead, what you get is a big black ball in the middle of an empty apartment room making a mockery out of your death and playing with your life.

This is the essence of Gantz. It is a giant game of Simon Says where Simon is cruel and heartless, and he does not "say" what he wants you do to--he demands that you do it.

Immediately, Gantz is the type of anime that will turn a viewer off or completely absorb and fascinate them. It follows Kurono Kei, a young teenage slacker who seems to go through the motions of going to school, perving out and getting cut no slack when being made fun of in front of his peers. All that changes when, in the series first shocking moment of grotesque violence, he is chosen by the entity known as "Gantz" to play a game. An unfair and brutal game, where he has to fight for his life.

Gantz throws away concepts of heaven and hell and delves right into the absurd, abnormal and alien. It is filled with gore, violence, sex and brutality, and is not the type of anime for the weak-stomached or impatient. It is undoubtedly one of the most frustrating series to watch because of the pacing of some of the scenes. There is one particular moment where another character is bleeding to death, and instead of going and doing something, everyone tries to pass the responsibility of saving that person to someone else.

Gantz is unpleasant to watch because it shows humanity as something inhumane; what does it say about human beings when all they can think about is themselves and their own selfish endeavours even when someone else desperately needs their help? It simply says the truth.

The art tends to border on a more realistic side, with clearly defined facial structures for the characters and detailed city backgrounds where most of the story takes place. The one unreal aspect of the anime are the proportions of the girls. This anime is ecchi, and to fit with that, the girls are lusciously designed; extremely well-endowed and curvy, with adult feminine qualities to them. They are made the butt of several perverted fantasies, and some of the more memorable moments of good animation in this series are not the fight scenes, but the sex scenes. That being said, the fight scenes are not bad at all, and the camera zooms around the skies and the streets like a vulture watching these people. The close-ups are all well-timed and the general direction of the scenes are done extremely well. The enemies designs are a mixed bag; some look downright silly, intentional, of course, many are hideous and others are even a bit beautiful.

Gantz's focus on the sound aspect is mostly on dialogue. Several minutes can pass within an episode with no background music used at all. The point of this is to focus on what is actually being said. In a bright room stuck with only random people you do not know and a giant ball-like thing in the centre, what else is there but the sound of awkward silences and your own chatter? The anime has a weird OP theme song, but it is highly fun and strangely suitable, and the sombre ED theme song fits with the overall mood.

This anime has a cast of characters that you will love or hate, but mostly they are not likeable because they are so real. Kei is the voice inside of all of us. He is that bit of us that thinks, "I don't wanna help that bum--he stinks.", "Her knockers are huge, can I squeeze them?" and "Screw you all, who is looking out for ME!?" Every guilty, immoral, and selfish thought that we know is buried deep in us is articulated by Kei. He changes throughout the course of the series, though we learn that this is not so much a change as he is becoming who he is truly. Katou is the voice of reason and the symbol of that which is good in human beings. While he comes off as the goody two-shoes, he absolutely is not. He is capable of destroying people, but he chooses not to. And it is this that makes him the moral being in contrast to what Kei personifies.

In fact, the minute we start getting annoyed with Katou and start wishing that he would be more like Kei is the minute that Gantz catches us--we have, just by rooting for the crueller character, affirmed our own flaws as human beings. Katou is the good guy in all of us. And Gantz uses him to show us just how much we intrinsically hate that guy, because he is useless, self-righteous and never gets anything done. We are all Kei. He is the Mr. Hyde, that potential in all of us, even if on the exterior we live only like a good, sincere Dr. Jekyll.

The third main character is Kishimoto, and she seems nothing more than a fanservice prop, and that is pretty much what she is, really. The difference is that Kishimoto, outside of her figure, is not exactly the type of girl that would appeal to any "normal" fetishes. She is depressed, she is suicidal, she has deep emotional and mental issues. Not exactly the typical heroine. The rest of the cast is pretty mish-mash as the background characters constantly change. Despite some of their brief appearances, the supporting cast is an eclectic bunch, featuring any and everybody, from yakuza to pretty boys, salarymen, psychopaths, grannies and even dogs.

Enjoying this anime, as aforementioned, is a challenge. Most of the time you will be wishing that some characters drop dead and they won't, and when they do, you want them to come back. Eventually, you even start cheering for the "villains" of society, simply because they are the heroes of this game that Gantz is making them play. It is a odd and unusual anime, quite unlike anything ever made before, clearly highlighting the flaws of the human condition.

Gantz, while it is crude, crass and grotesque, highlights clearly the basest of human desires, thoughts and actions. This anime says what we want to say, it thinks what we all secretly think, and it does the things we all want to do. It is a fine piece of absurdist literature simply animated. read more