Our hero is named Saiga, a famed war photographer. Working for a newspaper in Tokyo, he gets caught up in a club where Japan’s richest and most powerful go to have sex, eat, drink; indulging in depravity. Saiga winds up being captured by these people and is going to be executed when a young girl falls from the sky named The Goddess. She kisses him and gives him apparent superpowers. He can use his camera to make things blow up by snapping a picture of whatever it is. Anyway, he saves the girl, gets caught up in a plot to destroy Japan, and spends the whole series battling a bevy of strange enemies with superpowers like his, while also protecting the girl. There’s biological weapons, gray area bad guys, and lots and lots of really creepy sexual tension.
And this is where I find that the series really excelled: the bad guys. Each bad guy had a superpower related to his or her fetish or addiction. There was a dentist who got off to kissing a tooth he pulled. He turns into a spider person with dental equipment at the ends of his legs. There was a guy in a gimp suit who had elastic abilities. There’s a guy who’s made out of speakers who tweaks his nipples to turn up the volume. It’s really freaking funny and I don’t particularly know if it was supposed to be. I spent more time laughing at this series than I have at any anime I’ve ever watched. So if you’re looking for a comedy, you have one here.
The entirety of the bad guys is supposed to apparently represent the greed and corruption of the Japanese government, a notion that will be jammed down your throat more often than you’ll like. Especially toward the end, the message is so loud and spelled out in such simple terms that you’ll want to bang your head against a wall. “GOVERNMENT IS CORRUPT! OKAY! GOT IT!”
Another bang your head theme is how often the Goddess, whose real name is Kagura and has the ability to give people the superpowers, is kidnapped. If you’re looking for a strong female lead, this series is not for you. Kagura is weak, whiny, and entirely depends too much on someone to save her. A portion of the series is dedicated to her and Saiga escaping from the bad guys, but a majority is spent with Saiga saving her ass.
The interaction between these two is interesting though and the few reviews I’ve seen for this show either call the character development between these two one of pedophilia or one of brother and sister. I didn’t feel romance in any way brewing between the two characters, but it’s easily misconstrued as Saiga’s girlfriend gets completely jealous of the two anytime she sees them together. This makes the relationship out to be something creepy between a thirty-some year old and a fifteen year old. But nowhere in there is there sexual tension. He loves her, she loves him. If any romance was to be had it’s one-sided from Kagura’s end considering she spent all of her life bottled up in her house with very little outside interaction. So it’s pretty easy to understand if she loves the guy who saved her.
That said, I should bring up Ginza, the cop whose in love with Saiga and the character who gets my Seal of Best Character award. She’s a sort of yandere, threatening to kill Saiga if he doesn’t fuck her and such. But she’s got a more compassionate side that the series gives a little time to shine. She’s also hilarious, calling out any act of violence as “self defense”. The biggest problem with her is her outfit. Do Tokyo police not have regulation outfits? She’s basically showing off her thong. That is not regulation anywhere lady.
And finally we have the bad guy, Suitengu. At first he’s a bad guy, later he’s in the gray area. He has a terrible past and back story and he has white hair, glasses, and a coat, so you know he’s a conniving, evil person. In the grand scheme of things he’s not a memorable bad guy, especially compared to the weirdos Saiga battles to get to him. But he served his purpose and became a little more three-dimensional toward the end.
Issues with the series are plentiful, the main one with the story, for me, being the pacing. It starts off pretty fast-paced but the middle slumps a little and the end is protracted and drawn out to get to a slightly satisfactory conclusion. The formula also gets dull. A bad guy is played up then goes to face off against Saiga. Then when that bad guy’s dead, the next one shows up. So it can get a little stale which might be why I felt the middle wasn’t as exciting as the beginning.
Another problem is the music. And it’s not the actual music because the OST is fantastic, blending haunting piano with the jazzy action-movie music of the eighties. It’s the overuse of the same five or six songs. It’s obvious this show wasn’t made with a huge budget and the music really tells you that. The same songs over and over and over to a point of total annoyance. Plus, that damn piano gets stuck in your head.
The dub is…edgy? There’s a lot of curse words thrown in pointlessly and lots of yelling. It’s a pretty good dub that could do with just a few less “fucks” thrown in to make it “mature”.
The animation is dated and doesn’t hold up in any way. It’s low-budget and can look like total crap at points. It’s not God-awful, but it does make some still-shots laughable as hell.
So where do I stand on Speed Grapher? When it started, I loved it. It was wacky, it was weird, it was original. But as it kept going it got mired in politics and giving off a message. It grew stale because of the formula but stayed fresh by introducing ridiculous bad guys. The characters were, for the most part, decent, but could use more fleshing out. And the ending wasn’t as spectacular as I was hoping it to be.
Say one thing about Speed Grapher though: it’s entertaining as hell for all the wrong reasons. The inclusion of all these sexual deviants getting off to some of the weirdest stuff makes the show hilarious, despite the fact it’s trying to give us a message of greed and corruption. It’s an extended metaphor that is given in such a way as to make whatever message it’s sending a joke. Yes, political greed is bad. Yes the country is fucked up. But when you play up the Prime Minister to be absolutely evil then fight him as his head expands into a giant balloon and his tongue becomes spider legs, your whole message is destroyed.
Metal Gear Solid could throw us messages because, despite the bevy of insane, weird, and otherwise unrealistic characters, there were still human characters and situations we could relate to. And I see a lot of Metal Gear Solid trying to come through here. It just doesn’t work.
This is an entertaining, dark, and edgy anime. But it’s also not at all as smart as it tries to be, nor as serious. It’s hilarious, it’s weird, and it, ultimately, is one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.
Especially Saiga baring his chest to show the ten cameras he has strapped to himself. If ever there were a laughable way to defeat a bad guy, it’s goddam chest cameras.
Suggested.
