Reviews

*Edit* There are spoilers in this review. I was under the impressions that spoilers required a plot that was coherent enough to spoil, but after some complaints I decided to put in this warning*

Before Fractale aired, the dir­ector Yamakan declared that moe was the can­cer that was killing the anime industry and that he would cre­ate a show that stepped out­side that and appeal to a wider audi­ence (not quite in those words, but that was the gen­eral gist of his ram­blings). He even man­aged to get him­self a slot in the fam­ous Noit­am­ina timeslot, a place ded­ic­ated to host­ing anime that don’t suck, for his upcom­ing per­sonal ori­ginal anime pro­duc­tion Fractale. This is all pretty ironic to look back on, because Fractale proved to be:

1. Moe
2. Bear­ing a whole lot of other stand­ard anime tropes
3. Shit

Fractale sets itself out as a sci-fi show set in a post-scarcity world where nobody inter­acts with each other because they can cre­ate dop­pels to do that for them. There­fore every­one lives in com­plete lux­ury in whatever set­ting with whatever types of people they choose to live with. It’s an inter­est­ing set­ting and one that Fractale occa­sion­ally explores but never attacks, almost as if they brought up that plot point by acci­dent and it has noth­ing to do with the overly­ing theme of the anime. Occa­sion­ally the show will come across a char­ac­ter who uses the Fractale sys­tem in cer­tain ways that seem like a fas­cin­at­ing explor­a­tion of that character’s psyche, but then aban­dons said char­ac­ter pretty quickly.

One of the points brought up early on by the Fractale sys­tem is that people liv­ing in it don’t exper­i­ence proper human con­tact. The whole point of the first epis­ode is show­ing the main char­ac­ter, Clain, and his baffle­ment and embar­rass­ment with meet­ing a real live in the flesh human girl, who pro­ceeds to strip in front of him. You would think this would there­fore be a run­ning theme through­out the show, but that was ignored pretty quickly. The closest it got was hav­ing another female char­ac­ter call Clain a per­vert in about 5 times per epis­ode. I’m guess­ing the show thought it was being funny by say­ing this? I dunno, it’s not like Clain was doing any­thing per­ver­ted any­way, was that the joke?

It did try to cover basic human inter­ac­tions as part of the plot, but this was even more laugh­ably tackled. Over the course of the show, Clain sees these people he has joined up with, the Lost Mil­len­nium group, who are against the Fractale sys­tem, mow down old gran­nies. It offered the viewer two sides of the story, the Fractale Sys­tem and the Lost Mil­len­nium group that opposed it. But that one good scene was instantly deval­ued by ignor­ing it from there on in and intro­du­cing another eviler group of the Lost Mil­len­nium, mak­ing the mas­sacre of gran­nies from the group Clain were with seem like a totally cool thing in com­par­ison. This comes to a head towards the end where Clain joins in the granny gen­o­cide cam­paign, telling the Good Lost Mil­len­nium group that it’s OK that you kill people because you’re my friends!

That’s just the themes seem to appear more often, but other parts of the plot make far less sense. The plot fin­ishes up on a rev­el­a­tion that God is not 16 years old, but actu­ally 10 and there­fore pure. What this had to do with any­thing I have no idea, but Fractale seemed to like telling us this in a very dra­matic fash­ion. The Fractale Sys­tem bad guys were equally baff­ling, also obsessed with pur­ity for whatever reason and gen­er­ally being a deranged bunch of lun­at­ics who filled their armies with sui­cidal gran­nies. For a show that seemed to be present­ing both sides of the argu­ments, surely you shouldn’t have the Fractale guys be such a bunch of lun­at­ics who like lick­ing the face of our brave heroine?

Now this could all be fine in another series. You can be silly but still have a lot of fun. First off, Fractale isn’t fun, unless 10 ref­er­ences to Clain being a per­vert per epis­ode is your idea of a good time. But mainly, Fractale pre­tends it’s deep. It’s all about Themes and Issues and is Like Totally Ser­i­ous. But it brings up these points with no idea what it’s doing with them. It’s like it has taken ideas and scenes from other anime it’s seen, real­ised that these scenes make this anime great and stuck them into Fractale without real­ising why these scenes make that other anime great. You can have psychotic vil­lains who lick their pure heroines, but not in a show where your also try­ing to present a bal­anced view of those sides of the conflict.

The reason I hate Fractale is because it offends the story-telling lover part of me. This is not some­thing that is appar­ent in the early epis­odes. This is some­thing that only rears its true ugly head in the later epis­odes where it tries to bring its plot to some sort of non­sensical con­clu­sion. It has taken a lot of dif­fer­ent plot points but has never con­sidered how they tie in together. It’s thrown out scene with Deep Mean­ing without real­ising that the mean­ing that scene pro­trays has noth­ing to do with whatever pre­vi­ous scenes the show has had, or even con­tra­dicts pre­vi­ous plot points. I’m guess­ing the Fractale Pro­duc­tion Com­mit­tee meet­ing went some­thing like this.

— OK guys, this anime Fractale is going to be so awe­some! It will have a girl who you can only touch if you like her. That means Love is import­ant and stuff

–And his par­ents will be a water cooler and a pink lampshade

–And then the rest of the team will betray him, but he was actu­ally work­ing for the priest­ess all along

–The big-breasted girl will actu­ally be an old man

–But then it will turn out it was his dad all along

–She was talk­ing to the Cart Driver, who turns out was actu­ally the main character!

Yamakan: –Great Ideas! We’ll put them all in!