Cike Wu Liuqi

Scissor Seven is the first Chinese animation to be picked up by Netflix. Is it "worthy", or should another one have been picked?

Let's start with the best part - the animation. It's great. Looks like Scissor Seven had noticeably higher animation budget than usual Chinese animated series and it shows. This combined with the unusual (at least for anime) character and setting designs makes for an enjoyable parade of animation with plenty of sakuga moments. I would honestly say that the animation alone is enough reason to watch this.

That said, this somewhat fails at the rest of the departments. Well, maybe "fail" is ... too harsh of an expression, but they are certainly not that interesting. This show is episodical and unfortunately except for the first episode and the finale it follow exactly the same formula - the protagonist accepts the contract, the protagonist tries to fight the target, some sob story plays out and the protagonist ends up not killing the target for reasons. While some of those self-contained stories were fine, mostly it was just somehow predictable meh. A little twist here and there to the usual format would have been nice. Maybe we'll get that in the 2nd season. Something that I'm not also very fond of is that almost nothing is explained, be it the scissor telepathy or the transformation that are both used frequently or even the world setting where a teenage boy just nonchalantly accepts the idea of becoming a killer of hire without any moral stutter. Maybe those are all secrets that are planned to be revealed later, but I doubt that as they were all presented as a matter of fact that shouldn't be questioned and because from what I experienced of Chinese fiction so far, it frequently doesn't really dwell on explaining the stuff.

"But dude, it's a comedy, who cares about the story?" is what you might be asking. In that case I regret to inform you, the reader, that the department at which this series fails at the most is the comedy one. At least for me, because of course comedy is something considerably subjective and hard to rate/review, so I'll just note that this series didn't make me laugh even once. To be fair it did make me raise the corner of my mouth twice or thrice, but I don't consider that satisfactory for a comedy series.

Overall, it still belongs among the better Chinese anime I've seen and it might even work as an introduction to that. Just don't expect wonders.

Scissor Seven is a comedy series about a psychic barber assassin. Yes, that's what it's about.

The biggest appeal of this series is the animation. It could be more intense, but other than that, it's really smooth and nice to look at. The animation contributes to the entertaining battles as well. The one-episode appearance characters are pretty simple, and the main character is a 'loveable loser' kind of archetype at first. His chicken mentor guy is pretty cool too. The story starts episodic, but eventually becomes more focused and climactic. It's predictable, but entertaining enough.

The comedy is the main part I guess, but it's honestly hit ... and miss for me. It's very crude and low-brow, and I can only take so much of that. My favorite jokes were the really zany ones and the more visual comedy. If you like crude humour though, this is for you.

The humour is what it comes down to. I just wish the comedy was better. Also, avoid the dub. I'm usually alright with dubs, but this one was bad.

This show has got to be out of my age range but I'll still give my pretty exact POV of it.

First and foremost I'm just going to say it, I thought the show was boring as hell all the way until maybe the last two episodes where I guess something actually... happens? The wait for the climax was excruciatingly long and I could only have made it this far because the episodes were short. Why did I think it was boring though? Well it pretty much got overhyped for me when I was seeing bits of it (mostly action) on my socials and I was ... surprised to find out the show was from China after wondering where the Japanese sub was (which I will touch upon later). Anyways yeah basically I got disappointed at the lack of action and the amount of what was basically a version of Peppa pig to get near the end.

Secondly, I'll just straight up say it, I'm Chinese and through some experience cannot bear any Chinese voice acting in some snippets of Chinese cartoons I've seen, so instead I had to bear the English dub. I had to bear it, because damn the MC's English dub was just straight ASS (a nicer way of saying it would be "unfitting"), I HATED it, I could bear every other character's voice except this dude's. If I'm going to describe it, I'm going to first take a big guess and say the VA's got to be Asian and probably most specifically Chinese but also sounds specifically like an Asian 14-year-old kid who probably listens to JuiceWRLD, Eminem and "Sunflower" by Post Malone if they said they listened to rap (the sunflower part was intentional) and since it's 2024, maybe even "Not like us" (Please don't get offended if this describes you). Now I know I just sound like a straight hater but that's because it's true, there could have been any other individual that could have sounded good for this role but I guess maybe they were trying to go for a more comedic route to have picked this dude? Idk, but it just sounds goofy but in an unfunny way and a Johnny Bravo/Heroic sounding guy would have probably been more bearable for me, which brings me to my third thought.

It's probably unfair to say this considering the show's probably targeting kids out of my range but the comedic part of the show was just not hitting AT ALL, I could only laugh at any corny moment I saw but that was about it, literally the parts that weren't meant to be funny at all, and this is coming from someone who laughs at ANYTHING. To be honest, I wasn't looking for a lot of comedy, mostly action, but not much of that was there either so I would just be hit with blanks of comedic attempts that just weren't for me.

And going back to the subject of dub, on the website that I watched this on, the dub and sub were pretty different, idk if it was a cultural difference or because it was like the ghost stories situation where the actors had absolutely no idea what the characters were originally saying, or final theory is that the dub tried to convert the best out of what was being said for the Chinese audiences, to something that every other audience could get a handle of. I'm just saying that the dub was probably more fun than the sub if you're reading this.

To conclude, I'll just say the only reason I don't like this show is probably because it's just not my thing and has humour in a medium that doesn't move me at all. The things I liked were the minuscule amounts of action scenes that basically only showed up at the end and Thirteen. And though I expressed my hatred, I am still willing to at least try another season in the hopes that there is more action.

The spouse and kid had previously seen this Netflix hidden gem, and once season 3 dropped we committed to a re-watch so our memories would be fresh.

Art 3/10

Let's get the bad news out of the way first - I HATE the art. It's terrible for 2018. The style, everything. I'm guessing they did this series as a "proof of concept" as the episodes are short but it's obvious the art is low quality. The interesting thing is if you watch it you can almost see the manga panels from which it is animated. This scene, one panel. Transition. That scene, the next panel. I've ... never experienced that when watching an anime before.

Story - 6/10

Wu Liuqi, a Beef Offal seller with great Scissors skills is persuaded by Bo Dai (his Blue Chicken friend) to become an assassin so they can earn more money to pay off their debts, we later find out these are medical debts and they're USA medical system level HUGE medical debts. In the meantime our hero moonlights as a barber, applying his scissor skills to hair, naming his Salon Dai Bo Jo which is a funny play on the Mandarin Dai Jo Bo "It will be all right" a reassuring phrase. His mis-adventures as a bargain priced assassin with a heart of gold are hilarious, even if parts are predictable.

Sound - 7/10

This is interesting. If you watched the subbed version it's a bit jarring as Bo Dai and Liuqi, our main character, speak Mandarin until they get upset, and then both tend to lapse back into native Cantonese. It is a subtle point that when Liuqi remembers parts of his past self (amnesia) he regresses back to always speaking in Cantonese. This is a small, but subtle language play most people would not pick up,

Character - 7/10

The length of the episodes (they're short) means the characters are not as well developed as they could be with more time. We get the basic view of each character archetype:-
* Wu Liuqi - assassin with heart of gold, and some power
* Bo Dai - gruff mentor / protector
* Fei, Xiao - translated to little flyer, the mysterious get out of jail free sidekick
* Thirteen - another assassin and obligatory love interest
The smaller supporting characters are also interesting and provide a lot of the humor.

Enjoyment 7/10

Generally, comedy / parody anime is hard to do well, but this Donghua has no problems pulling it off, in fact, I'm astounded because Scissor 7 has no business being as funny as it is. It has a very "Mob Psycho 100" feel to it and is definitely entertaining.

Overall 5/10

I laughed a lot, but can't rate this higher due to my hatred of the art. This needs a bigger art budget, and then we'll really see this take off.