Nihon Chinbotsu 2020

It’s fitting how this show is called “Japan Sinks”, as my expectations for Japan’s animation industry seemed to sink lower and lower with each passing minute that I viewed this train-wreck.

Japan Sinks is undeniably a poor work, but what truly prompted me to fully mull over this cesspool of incompetence and juvenility was how fascinatingly abysmal it truly was. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill Netflix-commissioned anime schlock, this is a show created under the eyes of the renowned Masaaki Yuasa. Science SARU (Masaaki’s own studio), was at the helm here, and while they’ve been fairly hit-or-miss over the past year or so, they also created Devilman: ... Crybaby back in 2018, a show that shook the earth (pun intended) with its experimental flare and masterful use of controlled chaos. Many -- including myself -- had high hopes for a similar situation in which culture would be completely shocked, hopefully creating a work as impactful and year-defining as that was. Everything has been lining up to its release, I mean, 2020 is the year of endless possibilities for controlled chaos -- just look out your window. A show as dark in tone as Devilman coupled with a more realistic edge released in a year of actual disasters was clearly a recipe for true success. It would be foolish to wonder “what could go wrong?” in a year that continually proves to be the antithesis of that philosophy, but the answer to that sadly lined up with the established pattern of our beloved 2020.

In Japan Sinks, we follow a family throughout a period of seemingly-endless suffering, all triggered by a few gargantuan earthquakes. There’s not much to say about this family, because they’re more so based off of the archetypal roles of a modern family, rather than being real people with genuine motivations and personality traits. This issue is also extended to the numerous friends they meet along the way. Because of this, none of the characters in this character-based show feel real. In a story in which Japan literally sinks, it’s unsurprising that there’s going to be loads of death and destruction, but the way the characters handle all of these incidents proves to be frustratingly alien. Nobody seems to care all that much when a man is blown to bits by a bomb or when a child is brutally crushed by a falling building: they instead tend to grieve for a few minutes, then move on with their comedic-hijinks directly after to lighten the mood. The pace isn’t so rapid and dizzying to send a suffocatingly-bleak message along the lines of: “this is your new reality, people perish like that!, and after that it’s time to move on.” No, far from it. It feels more like the creators were too apprehensive around the idea of fully committing to a despairing atmosphere, so they instead opted for the most extreme version of tonal-whiplash possible. After the first few episodes, we’re clearly shown that these non-characters will be killed off out of nowhere for the sake of creating a dramatic cliffhanger at the end of each episode, so why should the viewer care? They have no unique identities to assume outside of their most basic character descriptors, (Mom. Daughter. E-boy.) and their passings aren’t convincingly grieved over by the rest of the cast, so why should we care?

The characters are already bad enough, but even worse are the situations that they’re thrust into. Japan Sinks has to be one of the only one-cour (actually, even less!) shows I’ve seen in which multiple episodes felt like complete filler. It’s hard to understand what the show was going for in the middle portion in which the cast find themselves entangled in a cult, but these episodes completely eradicated any suspension-of-disbelief I attempted to latch onto at first. The show transforms from what seems to be an intimate family drama to a total cluster of tonally-conflicting concepts, truly making you wonder what the show wanted to say. The fact that the most famous YouTuber in all of Japan decides to ride around with this random family after a chance encounter is inadvertently hilarious in and of itself, but are we truly supposed to take that seriously? How much in this show is supposed to be taken seriously at all? The realistic edge I presumed it would have seemed to be absent following the first few episodes, as fantastical elements such as spiritual mediums who can speak to the dead as well as a travel YouTuber a la Logan Paul having a kind heart began to ruin any sense of thematic consistency it started with.

Visually, it’s a nightmare. It hurts to say that seeing as Yuasa is one of the most visually-inventive directors in the medium, but it’s the sad truth here. The character designs are fairly basic, yet they rarely seemed to stay on-model, and this was increasingly apparent within the middle segment of the show. It’s clear that a large part of it was outsourced to places it shouldn’t have been, but keyframes are constantly missing nonetheless, which leads to scenes that should be able to deliver some kind of impact falling flat and often airing on the side of hilarity. There’s moments where Yuasa clearly did have his influence with his strange use of color and anatomical fluidity, but they’re few and far between. The messy transitions from these visual peaks back down to the horrific rest of the show harshly broke immersion, and had me promptly recall, “oh, I’m watching Pyeon-Gang again,” every single time. The bitter feeling of squandered potential truly stung in those moments.

There’s an awful, awful choice made regarding the voice-acting throughout the entirety of this catastrophe that made this one of the most unintentionally hilarious shows I’ve seen in a long time. In a moment of pure genius during production, someone realized in order to truly immerse the viewer in the cultural-diversity of the cast, (seeing as it follows the aftermath of the 2020 Olympics), characters should shout out miscellaneous phrases in English...usually at the worst possible times. At least this aspect made this train-wreck somewhat entertaining. The son who’s not a fan of Japan and its culture compensates for his disdain by often randomly blurting out Engrish jumbles of words in the middle of horrific moments, like “What the! That is cwazy! No!” anytime anything that could be considered “shocking” occurred. The absolute peak of the show was when he unironically said “live, love, laugh!” like a 50 year old white woman in the midst of what should’ve been a scene of pure emotional catharsis. After that, I was simply waiting for him to screech “bazinga!” after stumbling upon a mutilated corpse. There’s also a stereotypical caricature of an American man who claims to be British despite there being no indication of such being the case, (Well, I mean, I wouldn’t be opposed to distancing myself from America in 2020 either, so I don’t necessarily don’t blame him), and he also speaks in this way, but at least it fits his identity? Ok, well that’s actually no excuse, because he cried out “hasta la vista baby!” during what the show wanted to be a dramatic climax, and I think I lost a solid number of brain cells upon hearing that. Really, what am I supposed to feel throughout all of this? All of these choices are constantly at odds with a story that should’ve fully embraced its tragic circumstances.

These are all separate pieces of a puzzle that simply don’t fit together. The vision of the creators is present, but what message does this show actually want to deliver to its audience? During its conclusion, it takes a pseudo-nationalist stance, campaigning for the idea of loving your country no matter what and endlessly supporting them in times of need. Ok. Interesting message (if not somewhat tone-deaf to reality), but where was it for the first eight episodes? Not to mention this message feels shoehorned-in in the most banal, trite way imaginable. The characters are too one-note to get attached to, the timing of both the comedic and disastrous moments are both so poor that they blend in together eventually, and the “inspirational story” backing it all up that should have mitigated a number of these glaring flaws is too flawed in and of itself to take seriously. The fascination that captivated me around this show wasn’t from a source of awe like when pondering Devilman, but instead came from seeing something that had so many things going for it disregard all of that and fail in such a calamitous way. If I, a highly-sensitive crybaby found myself laughing at what should’ve been devilishly disturbing, then you know they messed up on this one. Honestly, the real 2020 disaster was this show's existence itself.

I know all the young little nihilists populating the internet are good about recognizing and rejecting fundamentally anachronistic media, but I think we should just trade in those red pills for some black pills, and instead of merely scoffing at religion, patriotism, and chivalry, we should proceed to disregard all traditional values altogether, because from where a suicidal sociopath like me is sitting, such values do nothing but dilute the theming of creative works with trite morals and utterly squander a story’s ability to build interesting characters divorced from insipid archetypes or deliver unique messages free from the influence of unwritten orthodoxy. Nuances aside, Japan ... Sinks 2020 is not only written for amateur viewers, but is directed by an amateur creator, Pyeonggang Heo, who decided to cope with his obvious lack of experience with some truly artless cinema. While the phrase “amateur” can hold many connotations depending on who you’re asking, I personally try my best to use it as modest critique toward aspiring artists with clear potential as opposed to a condescending insult toward the incompetent. From Akira Amemiya to Rie Matsumoto, there’s so many young directors I can name who have more passion and creativity than even they know what to do with, and while anyone could watch something like Kyousou Giga or SSSS.Gridman and jadedly dismiss either one as an unorganized mess, I can’t help but see them as the creative output of geniuses who are simply unpolished in their craft. Unfortunately, I see none of this in Japan Sinks 2020. Heo’s direction feels as book-learned as that of an undergraduate film student, and just in case you had any hopeful reservations regarding Yuasa’s possible involvement, the self-seriousness of the show is absolutely suffocating in a way he would never let fly in a work he had any intimate involvement with whatsoever.

A story about barely surviving a cataclysmic natural disaster isn’t the kind of story you’d want or expect to be particularly comedic or upbeat, don’t get me wrong, but there’s still something to be said about letting your audience have a chance to breath with anything other than aimless, themeless, tensionless meandering which populates the entirety of this show not drowned in drama or spent in an obviously destructive cult which the characters should’ve left immediately. This isn’t a high-minded masterpiece like Texhnolyze which actively seeks to smother its viewers in a dreadful tone, it’s simply an obtuse melodrama like Anohana which ascribes to the filmmaking philosophy of Michael Bay, figuring if one explosion gets the theatre roaring, then surely two and a half hours of nonstop explosions can’t possibly get boring! Our melodramatic cast of teenagers, whilst more than justified in their stress, are the same pouting anime characters you’d see in any PG rated drama, and while their struggles are certainly relatable, the manner in which they are relatable is so vast, they come across as being completely manufactured. Desperately worrying for the well being of your family, of your fellow man, of your country, of the direction of your life and aspirations following this catastrophe, or the post traumatic stress any human would undergo. Every problem which any cast member struggles with over the course of the show is so sympathetic as to be utterly impersonal. You’d have to be as much of a fundamental outlier as me to not find such basic humanistic concerns upsetting, and should you actually be as numb to humanity as I am? Then nothing which this story and its characters present to you with teary eyes and ruffled clothes will mean anything to you, and the entire experience will come across as banal normie cry porn at best, and disingenuous mass-market emotional manipulation at worst.

My abrasive wordage aside, this show obviously had nothing but good intentions, just little creative means to make me care. If generic melodrama can put you in tears so long as those on screen have the same waterworks streaming down their faces as you do, then you may find this to be surprisingly engaging, but alas, I could not. The problem with seating your narrative’s emotional ties to its audience in genre staples like family and love is when you garner the attention of a misfit who’s estranged from even these basic moral and spiritual values, they’re left with nothing to latch onto. But, hey, that’s a me problem. If I wanted to more fairly criticize Japan Sinks 2020 in a fashion which wasn’t so intensely personal, I could look any direction and be faced with a frankly atrocious animation production. Despite how much I prayed for this nightmare to never find its way into reality, this show ended up being comparable to Hands off the Motion Pictures Club, a show filled to the brim with flat gradients, shadeless coloration, misshapen modeling, progressively barren background art, and clunky animation all-around, all of which was obviously the result of the crunched scheduling they likely put upon themselves by over-producing an unequivocally beautiful first episode, only Japan Sinks 2020 doesn’t even have that gorgeous debut as an excuse and somehow gets even worse, not even touching the visual fidelity of Science SARU’s previous Netflix commission, Devilman: Crybaby, which itself was blemished with a fair amount of inconsistency and cost-cutting as well. And speaking of which, Kensuke Ushio returned to compose the score, and while his sound will always be beautiful, it is becoming very repetitive, and I’d challenge anyone to try and differentiate any ambient track herein from those of Koe no Katachi or Liz and the Blue Bird, standouts notwithstanding.

I expected inconsistency to be the name of the game, but what I didn’t expect was having to witness these enthusiasts of personalized artistic stylization resort to some truly garish CGI in absence of the time or manpower to consistently hand-draw vehicles, nor did I expect this show to be worth calling ugly as early as episode three. While I appreciate the fact this show continues Masaaki Yuasa and Eunyoung Choi’s commitment to experimental animation direction, even if I think the messy line-work is a bit much, I think the design team on this project ultimately took it one step too far with the character designs, and more specifically, the facial designs. Variation in facial animation has always been a thing in the industry, and whether someone like Hiroyuki Okiura is using the unshakable attention to detail and unmatched production values of Production IG to do it with photorealistic blinking and lip definition, or whether Yuasa himself is unapologetically taking advantage of the awesomely exaggerated Taiyo Matsumoto art style over the course of his entire career, variation in facial structures is nothing new. However, no matter how famous the creative lead, sometimes a misguided, poorly practiced, or downright bad production will leave such experimentation without unanimous praise. That’s right, if you thought Isao Takahata’s dimples in Only Yesterday were jarring, then nothing in this world will prepare you for the hideous yet hilarious neck rolls in Japan Sinks 2020. Needless to say, it is quite difficult to take the sorrows of these characters seriously when you can barely even look them in the eyes without their neck lines distracting you from the matters at hand, and even if you find this critique to be as dumb as it sounds, the atrocious animation will still do your immersion no favors. I mean, clunky key animation, missing in-betweens, and off-model artwork made even an attempted rape scene laughable.

Thrashing the production values is righteous enough when they’re this pitiful, but I fully recognize my thematic complaints are as personal as my cinematic complaints are unfair. Japan Sinks 2020 will leave you with the same uninspired emotions any other half-baked disaster movie ever has, but the fact it can leave you with any feelings at all speaks to its passable writing at the very least, and while the essence of the story will tread no new water, conclude in an astronomically corny and outlandish fashion I didn’t even afford myself time to discuss, and even alienate you should you be as desensitized to human nature as I am, it will still pander to the average viewer’s average emotions and make them feel something as opposed to nothing. While Yuasa’s position as Chief Director gets more and more set in stone in the face of his recently announced departure from Science SARU, director Heo isn’t inept, and while you’ll certainly be missing the cinematography of the master, his understudy here won’t disappoint anyone with adjusted expectations. And while the neck rolls, by far the stupidest of my critique, will remain as disgusting and discomforting to look at as the rest of the show already is, they will also remain completely in the eye of the beholder. This story of a family fighting against an unfair fate is your typical headline of tragedy not complicated by a villain or thematic challenge which is only newsworthy thanks to its ability to reassure the bleeding-heart normies they can continue to live on without feeling the guilt of the unfortunate, so if the fact the cast is, indeed, a picturesque and politically correct family of four is enough to invest you in their artless narrative despite the fact they’re cardboard cutouts who are scribbled onto the screen uglier than roadkill, then just know you have my jealousy. "Normieness is next to godliness," as a wise man once said, and I’m going straight to hell.

Thank you for reading.

(Might contain minor spoilers)

From the other reviews, it seems as if everyone either loves this and considers this a masterpiece or hates it and considers a piece of trash. Therefore I'm gonna try judging this series as fair as I can.

Earthquakes are scary. The Japanese society, culture, and many other aspects of the nation has been affected by Japan throughout the history and creation of Japan. This anime is another disaster earthquake anime in which Japan gets hit by a giant earthquake and many, many people die. At least that's what it seems like it was like until it turned into some crackheads appearing every ... episode.

Story - 3/10
Nothing worse than a badly done, over the top unrealistic story which they tried making realistic. All of Japan sinking? At least try keeping it realistic to a certain point! On the other hand, this anime does a mediocre/good job of portraying survivor's guilt and other psychological problems. I am going to pretend I never saw it become a fiery bullsh** because it seems as if I can't put negatives down.

Art - 6/10
Drawing and animating is really hard work. The art in this anime would have been really good if done correctly. You could see parts from time to time in the art and animation that was off. Animating building collapsing and humans getting crushed and twisted realistically is also very hard, making the animation more clunky and off.

Sound - 5/10
I'm not an expert in this stuff but I'm gonna try. The intro was average... just average. The sound effects were good. Everything was fine except one thing. English. I don't know about you but personally I hate it when the English is pronounced really badly over and over and over.

Character - 4/10
They honestly did a pretty good job with the characters. Or maybe since everything else was so bad, it looked better. Either way, they did a great job portraying the psychological effects on the characters.

Enjoyment - 5/10
Did I enjoy it? The answer is Yesen't.

Overall - 4/10
Honestly, the story might have been good and they could have done better.

Do I recommend this anime? I honestly recommend the first 3 or 4 episodes. Then the series just burned, got mauled, feel off a cliff, hit a landmine, blown to shreds, and then yea you get the point.

I cannot believe what I witnessed. I stumbled upon the trailer of this anime on YouTube and thought it looked fantastic. I was really looking forward to it but now I can honestly say this was my biggest disappointment after watching any piece of media in my life. Yes, it was that horrid.

The funny thing is the first two episodes were quite good with great animation and art. Then, it just went south after that to a point where I was just lost for words. The tonal shift was so abrupt and jarring. The quality of animation dipped so badly some scenes looked like it ... was animated at 5 fps. Characters never had any real development and deaths were completely pointless and for shock value.

The worst part of all of this is that many scenes were unintentionally funny. The broken engrish between characters on top of an abrupt tonal shift made this a funny watch indeed. I would’ve given this a higher score had it keep that kind unintentional satirical humor but no the show switched gears dragged itself towards the finish line. It was like a train wreck, a bad car crash that you can’t help but look despite being absolutely repulsed by it.

It was a miserable experience.

I had high hopes for this show based off that delightful opening sequence. The first two episodes were an exercise in good story-telling and great character building. It was off to a fantastic start. And then starting from EP3, I'm still not sure what happened, it was just pathetic.

Every single character just decided to become a psychopath with the empathy of a rock. I've never seen a quality drop like this in any show ever. It's just truly upsetting watching this show play out. No superlative I use here will be enough.

But you know what? Watch this show. Just watch from EP1 to EP5 to ... get a sense of how bad something can be.

A show that marketed around Yuasa's name that has nothing to do with Yuasa's works and his brilliant direction, let alone writing.

The amount of disdain I ended up having when I finished the last episode kind of forced me to make a review just to share with the world how disappointed I am with studio SARU and Yuasa in general. They could have easily skipped all episodes except the first one and the last two and nothing would have changed. Actually, I probably would have enjoyed this show more.

From the mastermind behind PPTA, The Tatami Galaxy, Devilman CRYBABY, and so on and so forth ... we are getting this absolute pile of dregs? Absolutely senseless.

I won't delve into the specifics because the show doesn't even warrant a thorough analysis and/or discussion. They wasted all the budget on the first episode which is actually a quite decent one. After that everything goes south, unfortunately.

The music is somehow bad, tracks don't match the scenes and feel anonymous and without charisma.

Characters are cardboard placeholders, they die like flies, sacrificed on the altar of Shock Effect. They don't even care about each other, not even when they are blood-related or long time friends, they just move on because whoever wrote them is terrible at his job and should probably be fired.
And then there's Daniel. I have no idea who thought that having a buffoon running around with not even lame jokes but annoying lines was a good idea.
For some reason, we have a gamer kid who spends half of his screen time talking in English. And this is where most of my enjoyment of this trainwreck (or shipwreck, given the series) comes from: people doing or saying dumb shit.
I cannot for the life of me care about the protagonists when the scene is completely ruined, each fucking time, with some weird English line thrown around to make it cooler.

The main theme was a sci-fi cataclysmic disaster that is basically left to rot until the last episode to have a senseless ending thrown together to give some kind of... closure? They also waste entire episodes with filler stuff that doesn't have a place in this kind of work. And when you feel you are wasting time with filler episodes in a 10-ep series, you know something is seriously messed up.

The story as a whole is terrible. Its main premise is thrown away after the first 2 episodes, random stuff happens, and then we get LE PROFOUND SOCIAL CRITIQUE that has the same depth of a puddle. Yes, nationalism bad, but also proud Japanese people have gone through worse and will muddle through this shit too. Great social commentary guys, I feel enlightened.

Whenever they try to adapt a novel that was written in the past (1973 to be precise) while trying to modernize it by making it take place in the 2020 (the same thing that happened with Parasyte and because of that they fucked that adaptation too), weirdly enough they fail hard.

Pretty sure Yuasa had nothing to do with the series as a whole, perhaps some brief supervision, and maybe he was the reason behind the incredibly cringe, vomit-inducing rap dubstep scene during the second-to-last episode, since we know he loves these kinds of things.

"You're kidding!" -A main character mere seconds before succumbing to one of the stupidest anime deaths this year, Japan Sinks 2020

Hope, while often necessary, can be a ruinous thing to have in the midst of a disaster. Despite the catastrophically negative reception among friends and the similarly dismal scores the show has, I still had hope that it could be at least entertaining in some regard. Even an Inuyashiki tier “so bad it’s good” title would’ve been enough to be satisfying, if still ultimately bizarre given how this is treated as a Yuasa work...more on that later. Unfortunately, this ONA is just an abject failure ... in almost all regards, and outside of some moments in the second half, is a dull and frustrating slog. 

If we’re going to start anywhere, might as well do so at the visuals to get some things out of the way. The name “Masaaki Yuasa” most certainly got thousands to check this show out, as he’s one of the most acclaimed directors of the 2010s for his work on hits such as Tatami Galaxy and Ping Pong The Animation. Unfortunately, it’s a name that isn’t as baked into the show as with most other titles he is involved with, as Korean first-time director Pyeonggang Heo was the series director. Needless to say, it really shows when the only other credit Yuasa had for this show was storyboarding for 4 episodes. Those episodes have a few genuinely nice shots, even if they aren’t anything special by his standards. However, even in those episodes, the artwork in this show can be rough, to put it generously. While there are moments that look nice, such as when two characters are playing fighting games or when one of the characters is in a dream sequence that looks like an MMORPG, the show’s main art style is generally unappealing, The artwork rarely stays on model, and it all just comes off like a discount Devilman Crybaby. The animation often feels incredibly choppy, and that’s when it doesn’t become a slideshow or otherwise feel standard at best. For the first half of the show, there is almost no awful CGI outside of some of the water in the show, but that’s not exactly praise, now is it? Then we get to the second half where the already subpar production plummets below the earth’s surface. There are a few decent shots with our characters at sea in episode 8, but the artwork consistently dips through the floor and is where most of the meme screenshots come from. The abysmal CGI grows more rampant by the episode and the choppy visuals get even more stilted. The slideshow moments and other cost-cutting techniques increase as well, indicating that in an already likely outsourced production, the latter half received considerably less attention and time than the first half. Science SARU is still listed as the production studio for this show, but this is a far cry from even their less visually stable works prior to this. 

The production values are far from the only baffling thing about the show. There’s a disturbing number of scenes where I don’t know that the aim of them being there was apart from filling time. The lack of handling regarding the show’s tone further accentuates the issue, as I generally don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel during most scenes. I get the idea of the show being how one must persevere and have hope in the face of adversity as that’s the only way to get through. However, it just feels like characters have no time to grieve and instead just become happy go lucky mere moments later, forgetting about any trauma entirely. Immediately after one of the main characters dies in the second episode, the third is just everyone walking while being slightly mopey. Whenever someone dies in episode 8, the survivors get sad for less than a minute before riding off in a motorboat while someone screams “LET’S GO CRAZYYYYYYYYY” in glorious Engrish, and upbeat electronic music plays. This is followed up by a rap battle, by the way. It doesn’t feel like the characters are lifting their spirits organically, and more like death is never a lasting consequence on anyone’s psyches or mood outside of one character moping on occasion. As a result, it’s difficult for these deaths to stick as impactful for the audience either. It doesn’t help when episodes just start introducing off the wall concepts and plotlines out of nowhere like when our characters are enveloped into a cult or when a bunch of people are having a mexican standoff over a vault of gold where a medium between life and death pulls out a katana on everyone. Are we supposed to take this show seriously and address the supposedly realistic elements like characters scavenging for food and water, or go with these fantastical concepts and ignore things like the MC receiving a laceration on her leg until it’s convenient for the plot to make her stumble? By the time an old man started 360 no-scoping people on a wheelchair with a bow and arrow, I stopped being sure about anything anymore.

Yes, this show’s writing and structuring are abysmal, and that’s not even the half of it. Even outside of the aforementioned example, the show is so absurdly contrived that in the first episode, we get an out of nowhere plane failure that coincidentally happened alongside the earthquake, and the convenient path of colored trees the main lead and her mom found afterwards that let them know the dad was alive without us being given any reason at the time to assume there was any correlation. This is just so they can have complications and then meet up. In episode 3, poison gas coming out of the ground is sprouted for that scene only, and it’s so they can unceremoniously kill off and immediately replace a character that was close to our main leads with a Youtuber. Japan Sinks also pulls a Devilman Crybaby and introduces cliffhangers for shock value and then immediately disarming them or forgetting about them at the start of the next, rendering them entirely pointless. After instilling a somber yet hopeful tone for the last few minutes, episode 1 decides to end on a random helicopter crashing as bloodied corpses fall from the sky and onto a bunch of civilians, including our main characters. Episode 3 has it even worse, with one of our main characters getting shot in the heart area where his gaming handheld is. In the first 2 minutes of the very next episode, they pull it out of the gadget and all that happened to him was that he hurt his head a little and needs his green PS Vita repaired. Perhaps even more insulting than all of that is something I’ve never seen any piece of media do until now. Whenever a character is dying or a building related to them is crumbling, we’re given flashback dialogue in order to manipulate the audience into feeling for a character’s death or the destruction of something related to them when often times, this is the first we’ve even learned anything about why these people and places are special. The only exceptions are the deaths of two characters in 8 and 9 where we learn things about them in advance, only to still get these verbal flashbacks. Oh, but don’t you worry. You’ll get your precious visual flashbacks in the 20 minute epilogue 10 minutes into the finale. Hope you don’t mind all the slideshows and how most of the time, we probably could have been shown things about the characters’ pasts and attempts to grieve rather than told about them several episodes later! Enjoy the endless suffering as you barely know what’s going on, why certain characters are here, why things are even happening, or why you should even care about any of these characters beyond half of them being family members and some of them just being sometimes kind people! It’s not like character establishment is important and that several scenes in the first half could have actually expanded on the characters and dynamics beyond the shallowest of traits! 

Oh yeah, that’s right. We should probably talk about the characters now. Ayumu is our main lead. She’s a daughter, one who whines sometimes and gives people water only to be taken advantage of. There’s not much to her beyond that outside of being the stupidest motherfucker to ever get a cut that never hurts until she needs to be crippled for a moment. She never examines or tries to treat it even after working at a hospital in the middle of the show, and no one else seems to notice the pretty deep wound she has until moments before the epilogue. You’d be surprised how much that can get under a viewer’s skin for 10 episodes, which, I remind you, is the show’s entire run time. She gets into arguments with her mom in conversations that resemble a toddler saying “I hate you” to her mom and the mom parroting it to shove the kid’s childishness back at them. The dialogue barely even feels human or genuine, doubly so when random Engrish is plastered onto tense scenes all the time. Speaking of the mom, we have Mari. She’s dependable and has her own secrets, making her the most complex character in the show, for what little that’s worth. She sometimes feels like she has genuine human interactions. I don’t know why there’s a track star turned NEET named Haruo here outside of the fact that they need a character to develop in the middle of the show, as forced, out of nowhere, unearned, and immediate as it is. There’s also the son, Go, who hates Japan and blurts English phrases. That’s about it for him. I guess there are other characters such as the pragmatic YouTuber (KITE) who ends up being probably the best character, but outside of him and the survivalist dad, just about no one else matters or is worth talking about. There are less than 5 scenes where characters have genuine and charming interactions to make them seem remotely fleshed out and alive. There’s virtually nothing to them, and almost no redeeming qualities about some of them, including the worst/main character, Ayumu. As the eight deadly words of TV Tropes go: “I do not care what happens to these people.”

I guess the least awful aspect of the show is the music. I needed some faint semblance of positivity before losing my mind, so I’ll say that the opening sequence was a nice and tender song. Kensuke Ushio’s OST has some decent ambient tracks to convey a sense of emergency or tragedy, even if they aren’t particularly memorable. The episode 10 ED isn’t absurdly terrible...oh wait, that’s it.

Japan Sinks 2020 might be the worst work with Yuasa’s name on it, and a crushing directorial debut for Pyeonggang Heo. What went wrong here?! Was there not enough time for Yuasa to do any more hands-on work or for episodes to get refined visually? What happened here? Did the writers not have a decent understanding of how to adapt the 1973 novel of the same name while modernizing it? Either way, what we got was a disastrous waste that will probably be but a miserable footnote for Yuasa and the industry in the coming years. Oh God, I didn’t even talk about the gaudy rape attempts or the shark scene. I didn’t even talk about the “That’s a video gamer for you” line which ranks up there with FLCL Progressive’s “tsundere routine” line as one of the worst pieces of dialogue I’ve ever heard, either! Jesus, this show sucks!

Okay, so like what the frick?

Imma just dive in real quick, spoilers are ahead, you’re warned. This show gets a 3/10.

Story: Please stoooop
It’s just one of these stories that jumps from one accidental occurrence to another. Like every step just feels random. Oh, a hidden mine field? Guess someone has to die. Let’s put toxic gas here, haha another one bites the dust. Uh, a city that is for no reason not damaged by sinking Japan? Not anymore, let’s kill all the citizens. But before that let’s party and pretend like Japans just fine.

Yeah, another thing, you might realize. Every episode there has to die ... at least one character cause I guess that’s fun. It’s like in one of the last episodes, no one had died yet and they had restored important knowledge in a sd card or sth. The brother held the chip in his hands and let it slip. Maaan, nobody had died in a long time, let’s make one of the characters retrieve the card while dying in the process. Sure. It just takes the shock and drama out of people dying. It’s just used to remind you that Japan in fact is sinking and it’s not the adventurous journey of a random group of people through Japan.. Sure people die when there’s a disaster but they don’t die in patterns. The deaths didn’t feel written in a natural way but forced.

Also about this Japan sinks thing. Like nobody saw it coming but this random scientist. And he knows like every detail of when which part and where Japan is supposed to sink and also when it’s supposed to pop up again. Sure, there is only this one person in this whole universe that saw it coming and also can predict Japans future. Maybe it’s his doing..

Last thing: mood swings. Like is this show trying to be a happy adventure like ‚yeah Japan sinks, let’s paaarty‘ or does it want to be a bloody, dramatic piece of weirdness. In one moment everyone’s crying and dying and in the next they have a rap battle about equality. Like literally, I’m not even lying.

P.S. the plot is freaking predictable. The mc cuts her leg like in the first episode and doesn’t get it treated - why are you so stupid just talk to people. I was just rolling my eyes like boy it will get infected, she will lose her leg. Congrats, she did!


Characters:
These characters are so unlikeable and unrelatable. They feel so unreal and behave like they’re on their period the entire show. How am I supposed to get emotional? That’s it, there’s nothing left to say.

The conversations feel so unorganic like two apathetic potatoes would talk to each other. And the urge to take photos of everything? Like boy, Japan is sinking and you have nothing better to do than to take a photo? Wait, maybe that’s the only behavior that’s making sense.

Also there is a scene, where the cast joins a dude with a car. The dude is being a horrible jerk and forces himself on one of the ladies, the others kick him, steal his car and leave him behind. I guess one character even said something like ,That felt good‘. Wtf, human decency, anybody? Tie this jerk up and take him or put him somewhere where he gets a chance to survive? No, let’s kick him, steal his car, feel good about it and leave him to die while the country goes down.

Art:
It’s decent most of the time but sometimes the characters have like these creepingly big swollen hands and warped faces.

Sound:
Sometimes nice, most of it was forgettable.

Overall:
This anime dragged itself and made me wonder why I watched it. I loved Devilman Crybaby directed by Yuasa, Masaaki and I had hopes that he would manage to direct something nice again but boy was I wrong. The idea of having a disaster and putting a cast into it can totally work but rather than the show telling about a disaster it was one itself. Sad thing tho, it wasn’t the kind of bad where you go ,it’s so bad, I can actually enjoy it‘. It was just bad.

This is a spoiler-free Review!
Nihon Chinbotsu 2020 is not an anime about a disaster, it's a disaster anime!

Let's start with the FAQ

Is this show similar to -Tokyo Magnitude 8.0?- - Yes, they both have earthquakes here and there, and obviously some tragedies occur here and there, but that's basically all the similarities there. In terms of quality, Nihon Chinbotsu 2020 is simply - Awful - and if you haven't seen both of them, I'd recommend watching -Tokyo Magnitude 8.0?- over this abomination - 100 times out of 100.

1)Art - 1/10
From the get-go you realize that the art isn't the strongest point of ... this anime. There are lots of scenes where the scenery and people just hold still. You're basically watching a very poorly made drawing for up to 5 seconds, while listening to some background noises, or characters talking. Many of these "people" are basically sketches an elementary-school student would draw better.

In some scenes there's literally copy/paste Photoshoped elements of the environment, such as damaged cars, barrels and so on. It's painful to the eyes and makes you wonder whether the creators of this show had a very low budget to work with, or whether they were simply too lazy to give a better effort! I'd say that both are true here.

2)Animation - 2/10
Perhaps just as bad as the art, but there are several moments when you feel that the animators made an effort not to make the scenes downright pathetic. Still, the animation is so abysmal that sometimes you'd want to cry. I can't still forget one moment for example, when a landslide began while the characters drive away in the car. The animators basically used CUT option from paint and sliced off a part of the drawing of the mountain and simply dragged that perfectly sliced piece down - to leave an impression that the landslide happened and the hill is going down!
In the scenes when the vehicles are moving, you are left with desire to throw up - it's just that bad.

Oh god...Throughout the series you'll be asking yourself if this show was made by amateurs, a lot. Perhaps my overall score would have risen if i knew that this show was a school project and some inexperienced children made it with very limited resources available to them. Sadly, that's not the case.

When it comes to art and animation, I, and a lot of other people are eager to forgive the show if the plot and characters are decent at least. Are they?

3)Characters - 3/10
No...The characters in this show are incredibly cliche, boring, undeveloped and quite often - downright annoying.
3 out of 10 might be too generous, but still, i'll give credit where it's due. There are moments when certain characters actually resemble human beings and act like them. 3 female characters, in particular the MC, certain girl -Nanami, and the mother, as well as the father, are the only characters i sometimes felt sympathy towards and could relate to and feel sorry for them.
The rest of the cast, that consists of 5+ characters do nothing but ruin the mood of the show, are forgettable and too fictional to make you feel anything for them.

4)Story - 2/10
Oh boy...Here we go.

So the story, as the title explains, is about Japan going to the bottom of the ocean. It's your typical disaster/apocalypse story where we follow certain characters, see their struggle and how they overcome certain obstacles and change personalities when making decisions. With the poorly-made main characters out of the way, we have the world to deal with, and sadly it's filled with every possible cliche imaginable related to this genre.
We have rapists, anarchists, awfully bad people who forgot about morals and decency the moment the quakes began and act like animals, racists, supremacists, cultists - you name it!
Typical for a poorly scripted story, it's filled with conveniences and characters being incredibly lucky, especially towards the end.

The reason I still give this abomination a 3/10 is that the start of the show was somewhat intriguing and the ending of the ending has a message about "what it is to be a citizen of a certain nation", "what it is to be a human", "why acceptance is important", "why it's important not to cling to the past and keep moving forward". The final message kind of redeems the episode to a certain degree, but sadly that's not even remotely enough to redeem the whole show.
Honestly, in the end i was left with an impression that the author knew how to start and end the show, but didn't know what to do with the 90% of the story in-between the start and finish, thus they/he/she filled it with random shenanigans that makes no sense and is basically a -waste of time!- I'm talking about a certain arc in the middle of the show that made me want to drop the series, several times.
When it comes to the whole "will Japan sink one day?" theory; I personally have doubts that it can submerge underwater in just a couple of days! I've read a certain manga that involves a similar scenario, but the outcome, even though it was just as apocalyptic and world-shattering, was much different and realistic. -Dragon Head-
What makes Nihon Chinbotsu 2020 a terrible story? - The poor execution! Quite often you will be asking yourself "what the heck am i watching?!" Randomness of certain events completely ruin the atmosphere of the show and makes you distance yourself from the characters and the plot. Considering that the art, animation and characters are awful, there is very little that keeps you attached to the show and i barely watched it to the end, considering dropping it at least 8 times - and the series consists only of 10 episodes!

5)Sound/voice acting and soundtracks - 4/10
4 - meaning decent, but not mediocre. At least something was done right. The sounds and voice acting was done the best in the show, even though there's not much to be proud of. There is a lot of "Engrish" spoken in the show that annoyed me a lot, but overall it still sounds the way an average Japanese person would sound when speaking in English, so that's that.
When it comes to music, I always soften up a little. I can't just ignore the fact that there are at least 3 soundtracks in the show that are good, and I liked them. Usually, having a decent soundtrack is enough reason for me to give +1 or more points to the overall score of the show, no matter how terrible it might be. So congratulations to the sound team.

6)Enjoyment - 2/10
As you most likely guessed, I didn't enjoy the show. There really is not much to enjoy in it, and i mean I've read and seen a lot of disaster/post-apocalypse books/movies/anime/manga and by far this was the worst experience for me. Certainly would recommend avoiding it like a plague, unless you're, like myself, obsessed with this genre and has already seen everything else. For this very reason that i love this genre, i forced myself to watch this atrocity to the end, and overall, I've decided to give this show a
-3 out of 10- in the end.
1 for the genre, 1 for the soundtracks, 1 for the drama and how certain characters made me feel something other than disgust.

Thank you for baring with me to the end!

I've been following this series since the release of its Netflix reveal trailer hoping to find fulfillment that Tokyo Magnitude left. However, in all aspects this series still managed to fall terribly short of what I would consider a shred of hope compared to any of the series I'v e seen. In short, Tokyo Sinks 2020 is an poorly structured, lack of common sense based story with unnecessary character bloodshed.

The members of the Mutou family deaths are used to add shock factor when the story runs dry of action or intense internal conflict. All the characters lack general cognitive problem solving capabilities and judge ... their situation leading to a pile of dead characters that slowly accumulate as new characters are introduced.

TL;DR Not worth the watch, too illogical and lazy plot progression & character development.

Story: 4/10
There are a large amount of plot holes that weren't cleared up as the story progressed, most likely due to the continuous chronological events. The story was too ambitious and tried to cram a lot of content in 10 episodes which was such an unsatisfying experience. When the story was on track about the sinking of Tokyo, it became interesting but content addressing that was like finding a needle in a haystack. Almost all the events that occurred throughout the story were irrelevant to get the ending anyway which made the filler content redundant.

Art & Sound: 5/10
Most likely one of the worst Netflix anime art & animation I've seen to date and I think I am generous to make it inclusive to anime licensed out by Netflix. If you froze an action sequence, you'd understand the depth of detail maintained in the character design in Tokyo Sinks 2020 - It looks like a completely ripped/rotoscoped style of design. The faces, body structure and even color palette of these characters were in the form of a webcomic/webtoon which I wasn't expecting, maybe the budget dropped mid production and inbetween animators were on a crunch to pump out the series in time for the deadline. Generally, the art style is garbage but the animation fluidity wasn't 'bad'.

Sound was an average, nothing spectacular.

Character: 2/10
It terrible I can think of over 10 supporting characters that were blatantly killed off to add shock value to the series. The deaths ranged from digging in a minefield, drowning (x2) to being shot because of a stray bullet on a boat because a passenger panicked and falling to their deaths. Character development was this series worst notable aspect out of all the aspects because they were excessive and as the story progressed the deaths became insensitive. Adjusting to the characters dying became easy since the cliffhanger of most of the episodes involved characters dying or on deaths door which made it an unbearable watch.

Also, Dr. Onodera is underrated; his persistence made the show bearable because his predictions were accurate.

Enjoyment: 1/10
Waste of time, This series was simply overhyped from the beginning if the characters were fated to die how they did.

Overall: 4/10

Japan Sinks 2020 has a lot of hype behind it. It’s an adaptation of a seminal disaster novel from 1973, updated to modern day by Masaaki Yuasa and his studio Science Saru. This is the same team that struck lightning by similarly updating the classic Devilman manga into the now-just-as-classic Devilman Crybaby, and Japan Sinks 2020 very much feels like it wants to recapture that magic. Here, again, is a ten-episode Netflix Original anime series with moments of intense violence and sex. Here, again, is a modernization of an old classic that diversifies the cast with all different skin types and nationalities, making extensive use ... of modern digital technology. Here, again, is composer Kensuke Ushio, turning in a very similar dark synth electronica soundtrack to the one he graced Crybaby with. Here, again, are characters who run track and field, with running and passing the baton both very prevalent motifs. There’s even a scene late in the series where the characters engage in a rap battle. This series wants to repeat the success of Devilman Crybaby so badly it’s palpable.

But there’s one critical difference that sets Japan Sinks apart: Yuasa isn’t the series director. That role falls to Pyeonggang Heo, making his directorial debut after a handful of episode directing credits across the past decade or so. The scriptwriter as well is different, trading veteran Ichiro Okouchi for the incredibly inexperienced Toshio Yoshitaka. I didn’t discover this information until after I finished this series, but in retrospect, it makes sense.

Because that’s the only explanation I have for why Japan Sinks 2020 is just as big a disaster as the one it’s named after.

The story starts out well enough: Japan, nation of earthquakes, is hit with its biggest one ever. Over the course of the first episode, we follow four individual family members as they find their way to each other across the city of Tokyo. It’s actually a pretty clever structure, as we’re not told why these four people are important until they start reuniting and we realize they’re all part of the same family, so we’re allowed to be introduced to them organically. But once they’re all together, the news drops: this earthquake is only the first. Japan is going to be rocked by seismic activity until the entire island nation sinks under the Pacific Ocean. And with most of the airport runways already rendered unusable, the entire population of Japan is left scrambling to find a way to safety. Thus, the Mutou family- dad, mom, older sister, younger brother, and a couple of neighbors- sets off to find a way off Japan before the whole thing goes under. Along the way, they run into all sorts of colorful characters and odd scenarios, lots of people die, and everything very quickly starts to fall apart. And unfortunately, the “everything” in that last statement refers to far more than Japan itself.

The issues start cropping up early once the death toll starts to rack up. I won’t bother spoiling who lives or dies (or tells your story), but it becomes clear very quickly that this series has no idea how to handle death. One of the family members is gruesomely killed right in front of the others, and it takes about six minutes for them to go back to acting like nothing’s happened. This will become a depressingly common occurrence as the show goes on. Someone dies, or something awful happens, there’s a moment of horror as our central cast reacts to it, and then they’re back to wacky hijinks in the next scene. No one in this show acts like they’re in a crisis situation; it feels like they’re just on a very long, very nonsensical road trip. Maybe the attempt was to try and lean into those road-trip sensibilities and just be a sightseeing tour of interesting people and places with the disaster as a backdrop, but it’s still so wedded to the reality of that disaster in its realistic presentation that the tonal whiplash becomes exhausting. You end up staring slack-jawed as these characters bumble through unnatural situation after unnatural situation, wondering why nobody’s reacting in anything close to resembling human pathos.

But things only get worse from there, as this show quickly reveals itself to have one of the most haphazard, unfocused plots I think I’ve ever seen. The story careens back and forth between completely unrelated concepts, tossing in ideas out of nowhere just to wipe them away in the very next moment. One moment we’re in a survival road trip scenario, the next we’re spending three episodes living in an Earth Mother cult while an old geezer in a wheelchair infiltrates a high-security complex with 360 no-scope bow-and-arrow shooting. No, you didn’t misread that, there is an old geezer in a wheelchair who shoots arrows at armed guards while spinning. What, and I cannot stress this enough, the fuck. Forget breaking suspension of disbelief, this is so utterly moronic it just about shatters the concept of disbelief itself. And the show just keeps tossing weird shit in with no buildup and expecting you to accept it. There’s a weird foreigner who somehow makes his eyes and ears bulge out like he’s doing magic tricks. How? Never explained. Why is there a random sex scene with the cult leader and her husband? Never explained. Why is there a random bank robbery involving two characters we’ve never met before and both die pretty much right after? Never explained. How the fuck is this cult leader somehow capable of actually speaking to the dead? Never explained. Why do so many characters just choose to stay behind and die despite having perfectly usable means of escape within reach? This isn’t even a case of not enough room in the boats or whatever, they could have easily survived with no ill effects. They just decide, nope, I’m cool with being crushed to death in the most ecological disaster of human history.

It is shocking how poorly thought out this entire show is. Nobody acts like a real person, nobody reacts like a real person, and every decision just makes less and less sense, to the point where I started slapping my forehead in stunned disbelief. One character gets a nasty cut on her leg and doesn’t bandage it for the entire show, despite having plenty of opportunities to do so. It ends up getting infected and turns into a big plot point, and none of it would’ve happened if she had just fucking grabbed some random piece of cloth and covered herself like someone with more than one brain cell. A famous Youtuber shows up out of nowhere and decides to pal around with this family for some unknown reason, which immediately gets their minds of watching yet another close friend die before their eyes. There’s an attempted rape scene that has no effect on anyone and could’ve been completely cut without changing anything. Characters find out information just because with no forethought or foreshadowing. There’s this whole running subplot about a mad scientist and his paraplegic partner who somehow predicted this disaster, but it’s so poorly explained that it feels like it belongs in an entirely different show. And seriously, take a step back and look at this rap sheet. Natural disasters, cults with actual magic, mad scientists with secret mountain labs, and fucking parachuting Youtubers? There is no consistency to this show’s world, and it doesn’t have the slightest idea what kind of tone it wants to set. The final episodes try to tie a neat little bow on things with this big montage about the Japanese people and the character of the nation, but if this show was supposed to be about the concept of Japan, then it owes Japan an apology for depicting it so fucking nonsensically.

Even more frustratingly, not even the technical merits are enough to distract from how godawful the script it. There are moments of great animation in Yuasa’s traditional loose and flowing style, but most of the time this show just looks ugly outside of the gorgeous backgrounds. Characters are constantly off model, facial expression warp and distort to inhuman shapes, so many key frames are dropped to the point where it looks like the characters are teleporting every other step at times, and there is no consistency to the blocking or editing of scenes. This is why I’m inclined to place the blame more on Heo than Yuasa, because the directing is just flat-out abysmal. There’s no shape to scenes or moments; they just come and go at random intervals, cutting off shots at the most awkward moments and randomly panning the camera across the screen with no consideration to what would best highlight the emotions of the scene. It’s a cluttered, unfocused, often confusing mess, and most of the scenes trying to be dramatic are instead rendered comical by unnatural dialogue, grotesque parodies of human movement and expression, and a complete inability to grasp the concept of dramatic timing. The one consistently excellent part of this show is Ushio’s score, and even that’s treated with so little consideration and precision that it all starts melding together into audio soup that makes the already unfocused scenes even more chaotic and tonally confused.

Japan Sinks 2020 is an unmitigated fucking trainwreck. For all the talent and pedigree behind it, it just keeps making the most wrongheaded, counterproductive choices over and over again until it suffocates itself. It’s the kind of show you don’t so much watch as gape at, wondering how any functioning human being could’ve possibly thought this would work. It almost feels like storytelling by Mad Libs, but at least Mad Libs is funny and random on purpose. This show wants to be a profound artistic statement to be Taken Seriously(tm), and that only makes its baffling incompetence all the more infuriating. If you’re eager for a “family survives an earthquake” anime, just go watch Tokyo Magnitude 8.0. That show is ten thousand times the show Japan Sinks 2020 will ever be.

I really don't know how to describe this without including the words "What the hell was that?"

(Spoilers in this review) Japan Sinks: 2020 had a standard premise, which if built upon right could make a solid story. Disaster hits, individuals deal with losing loved ones. And this is what happened, for maybe the first two or 3 episodes.

To begin, the story of this show was all over the place. It jumped from the city, to the countryside, to some sort of cult camp, to the coast, in the ocean for a while, and then they are saved. I can understand the choices of ... losing loved ones throughout their journey, but these deaths felt empty, and inconsequential. Some of the characters, (I'm looking at you, mother) had absolutely NO reaction to the death of her own husband for several episodes, for the reason that "you must repress your emotions." Yeah, uh no, that is not how emotions work. This, along with so many other reactions to similar deaths, made the characters feel hollow, but I'll touch upon that later. The story somehow manages to have an entire third of the show be filler, with our group living in some cult. (what else could it be?) They stay they for a stint of time, acting as if their lives are not in grave danger because the ground they literally stand on is at risk of collapsing at any time. After this the story takes a 180, with now the number one priority being to save the crippled doctor's research, which is apparently important? And somehow everything turns out okay, ignoring that 3 quarters of the cast died.

Discussing art, the quality of the character design and animation is barely watchable at best, and completely illegible at worst. This ONA has none of the charm of the artstyle of so many anime, replacing it with crude drawings with no real character. Sound in this is something that is very skipped upon, looking back. Sound, and in turn music, helps to set the scene for plot points, such as deaths or moments of joy. Japan Sinks fails to meet the mark for many of the deaths, with no buildup at all to them.

The characters in this are absolutely godawful. I don't have the next week of my life to go into depth on all of them but I will try to touch upon the most important points in my view. So many of the character deaths in this show are pointless. The mother, who they ALL know has a heart condition, volunteered to dive underwater to get their boat free? Dead. The guy with the hat and glasses, who was literally IMPALED with a piece of metal, who after it was wrapped up and specifically told NOT to mess with it, up and running and grabbing things fine, no problem. The daughter, who cut her leg on what I can guess is some metal, NEVER had the thought to, you know, CLEAN the wound maybe? Bandage it? The daughter here must be mentally disabled or something, specifically when her and her brother were in the lifeboat just floating in the ocean, they saw the man they were with literally eaten and taken away by a shark, and you know what she did literally days, if not hours later? Just stuck her head underwater to look under the lifeboat, not a care in the world. The only slightly redeeming character is the son, who is kind of a gigachad.

Overall, this show is something like a trainwreck in motion. It's terrible and you should look away, but you keep watching to see how bad it could possibly be. I would not recommend this to anyone to be honest, there are several other disaster anime that one could watch and get much more enjoyment out of.

Japan S(t)inks is probably one of the confusing animes I've watched in the recent years.
Contains spoilers.

Story (1):
The story first shows promise on the first episode, then quickly goes down the drain. Many parts of the story are quickly thrown in just to thrown out (people falling from the sky).
The anime tries to add many themes (culture, family, earthquakes); however, with only 10 episodes there was no way to expand on these themes so it all becomes a convoluted story.
Murphy's law was also in play in this anime. Characters quickly introduced would be just as quickly killed off.

Art (5):
Sometimes the animation becomes ... terrible and laughable. The art style is similar to other shows from Science SARU such as Ping Pong the Animation.

Sound (7):
Some OSTs were really good, however I feel some were out of place. Cheerful music would be used after a character dies and serious scenes throwing off the mood of the scene.

Character (5):
Some of the characters were really annoying and their motives were confusing.

Go, one of the main protagonists would keep throwing in random English words in his speech, sounding like cringe weeaboos using Japanese words like desu, senpai.

Ayumu another protagonist was also annoying always complaining about something.

Kite, the number 1 YouTuber suddenly decides to join the protagonists without ever knowing knowing the reason why.

Haruo was one edgy kid who barely talks in the anime, having a sudden change of personality half-way through the anime.

Enjoyment (3):
I spent a good amount of time laughing at this anime, despite it supposedly being serious. I couldn't take it seriously as I did not feel any emotional attachment to the one dimensional characters.

Overall (3):
If you turn your brain off and do not take it too seriously you'll enjoy it. I should've dropped it after episode 3, but it was so bad I had to keep watching it to see where the ending would go.

Minor spoilers ahead, but let's be honest, you won't care to read this review if you are actually planning on watching this show. TL;DR further down.

Short rant:

So! Japan sinks 2020 wasn't short of a dreadful mess of a story that was awfully put together, where even in the first episode I was already quite sure how the rest of the anime would play out.
(But I somehow still managed to finish the show, which I will give them a bonus point for(JK not really)
From a weird cut in the first 10 minutes of the episode to not explaining anything about that what could have ... possibly happened until 7 or 8~ episodes later which was, let's be honest, really half-assed.
(The mother is apparently a really good swimmer that can avoid a tsunami but struggles to keep her breathe for more than 20 seconds in a later episode, and have the plot armor stronger than any of your typical Isekai MC's)

Story: 3

Here is why I somehow enjoyed it, I love this kind of genre, but this was extremely poorly executed. It just all felt so random, I couldn't feel a flow of what was going on with it, each episode was quite decently set up structure wise, but the story was just weird, random and somewhat confusing.

Art: 3

From CTRL C CTRL V trees in the 2nd episode to 3 framed blurry scenes and shaking effects to very off-putting CGI (I can usually tolerate a bit of CGI) it wasn't looking very good for the art part.

Though, I do quite enjoy the way it is drawn, from having certain scenes being quite stunning to a 7-8 score but then having other scenes being barely a 2 and more close to a 1, especially when it was the majority of the show. It did end up bringing the score down for me.

Sound: 5

I actually enjoyed the OP song quite a lot, melancholy feeling I guess, and the 2nd episodes ED was very well used. Though it was the only two memorable things with the sound for me.
Rest of voice acting it was quite fine, I can't really judge it too well though as I am not fluent in Japanese. And I think that most is to blame on the director for it either way.
Other than that I can't say that I am too impressed with the sound but not disappointed either.

Characters: 1

Here is the biggest flaw for me, AWFUL character development and design.

The characters are not short from being as unrealistic as possible, I couldn't relate to any of them.
The constant thrown in English was so painful to hear. I GET IT, KID! YOU ARE A GAMER! (The young brother is a HC Gamer)

The biggest issue I had with the show was the characters reaction to loss, I couldn't understand any of their reasoning or reactions at all. They are faced with absolutely terrifying things you'd expect to see in a extremely dark and tragic show (which catastrophic shows should have) this was actually quite extreme in my opinion, but not in a bad way honestly... IF IT WASN'T FOR HOW THE CHARACTERS JUST DIDN'T CARE.
Second episode in an we get to witness a main character to the family go game end, yet it is as if nothing happened. CMON! There is blood and gore even, yet it doesn't feel like we get to see any of their emotions from it.
Yes we all experience tragedy differently but this just for some reason seems like the most unrealistic take they could have used.

Enjoyment: 4

Yes, the show isn't good, and far from perfect.
BUT it did have it's moments, otherwise I wouldn't have finished it. As I said previously it is one of my favorite genres.

Overall: 3

It wasn't good, it was hard to enjoy it without sometimes even outright sigh at what I was watching.
I wouldn't even recommend this to someone if they did have time to watch something, but either way it just boils down to my opinion, I can already see that a lot of people enjoy this show quite a lot. So don't take my word for it and watch it if you really want to!

TL;DR:

It's bad, other shows have done this way better in my opinion, like Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, where I actually got really emotional compared to this where I feel like I should have been more affected because of the horrifying scenes they have in it, but in the end I wasn't.
Make up your own mind and watch it though if you really, (Like really really really) want to. Otherwise I'd pass this one!

At first, when you start watching, you full your mind with all possible scenarios that can derive from a apocaliptic plot, but theres no plot.
The script is full of inconsistences, the animation is awful at best and theres a constantly need of make you feel something forcing you through some empathy that I never got.

You can watch the episodes in non specific order, it doesnt matter, you just need to watch the first, and the last, and you save a ton of money watching something else.

I've never wished before to erase the time i've spend watching this.
If you want a good apocalyptic anime, ... please watch Tokio Magnitude 8.0, which is better scripted and animated.

The first episode is quite good, but after that, the series turns into quite a mess, like a totally different show. The characters often act so illogically that it's almost an insult to the viewer's intelligence. It's as if the characters lack normal human emotions. Just a few minutes after a highly traumatic moment, such as a brutal death of an important character, the characters might appear to have completely forgotten that anything even happened. The promising first episode gave me false hope that the series would improve as it progressed, but unfortunately, it didn't. It's rare for me to feel that a show I've ... watched from start to finish is a complete waste of time, but this one truly is! The animation quality is okay, but it doesn't redeem this show.

Oh boy, what did I just watch? [ spoilers ahead ]

I finally came around to watch Nihon Chinbotsu and I gotta say, it's one burning dumpsterfire. So much so that I just had to write my first review on MAL ever.

Normally, I enjoy Anime with more realistic art and tone, but goddamn, that was far from it.

Let's start with the art - I really dig the artstyle but the animation just isn't consistent at all. Some scenes are gorgeous and feel very fluent but most of them just look like inbetweens or like that one weird background character you spot that just looks deformed. ... That being said, the animation was probably the second best thing about this Anime. Gotta say though, I really liked the character design. A bit more down to earth than most shows.

Next thing - the music. I was expecting a lot in this department, seeing that Kensuke Ushio worked on it. Well, the music itself wasn't bad - except for a few tracks that just felt like loops - but the placement of certain songs was just unfitting. Grim situations fell flat due to the upbeat music. And let's be real - that rap part was ultimate cringe.

The characters. In my opinion, most of them didn't have enough characteristics to even be called a character. It's what almost made me quit the Anime. Ayumu was annoying until the very end, making unreasonable choices whenever she does anything, blaming everyone around her. And I know that a lot of people will say "Oh, but she's 14, of course she needs to vent!" right about now and, yes, I fully agree, but the poorly written - and badly timed - dialogue just didn't deliver those feelings. The only scene where I somehow found her to be an appealing character was when she was in that safety boat with Go. Other than that, the best character - Koichiro - died way too early, making all the other deaths in the show fall flat in comparison. Kite was quite okay as well, but let's be honest - he was OP, especially when you pair him with completely imcompetent morons. It would've been far more enjoyable if everyone in the group had something to contribute. I mean, Go somewhat did, even though he was only 12. Go's constant English lines were getting on my nerves though, especially since the timing of the line contribution was even worse whenever a character spoke English. One of the worst character I've ever witnessed in an Anime though was Daniel. What were they even thinking? Why put a slapstick comic relief that just felt unrealistic in a show like that? I wanted to bash in my screen every time he appeared.

The story - oh boy, how could they mess it up so badly with such a great concept? I'm not going to go into detail and pick apart every last bit - because I'd have to rewatch the show to be able to do that, and trust me, I won't - but I'm going to highlight the parts that annoyed me the most.
The Anime was supossed to feel a bit more realistic and dramatic, but it all fell flat and was comedic at times where it shoudn't have been. Most of the times, I found myself laughing due to the obvious build up of a main characters death, ridiculous death scenes ( I'm looking at you, weird-weed-cult-kid! ) and overall bad timing.
The beginning was mostly fine, really, but as soon as they started killing off the characters, it became stale. I gotta give it to Koichiro though, his last words were great.
Some of the scenes - like that almost-rape scene - made sense to be in there, but were poorly executed, which ultimately made them funny - which they really shouldn't be.
The worst part by far though was that cult arc. It's where I first stopped watching for a few days due to how annoying Daniel was. How did anyone think this was a good idea? It felt like it belonged in another Anime, was scrapped there, and therefore was put in Nihon Chinbotsu, as they've already animated it and didn't want to scrap it. It really didn't fit the intended tone of the Anime.
Also, what's up with these ships? 1000 people chosen by lottery and kids with a promising future? Seriously? When there could be another earthquake any second? Y'all really wanna check passports and ID's in a situation like that and not just try to save as many people as quickly as possible?
The last few minutes just felt like a filler, obviously put there to make you cry - but that's only possible if you were able to feel any connection to the characters at all. I'm somewhat annoyed by the fact that they have put Kite in the audience and haven't made it somewhat clearer that he's still alive, as a reunion between the main characters would've felt nice and more rewarding - especially if he's so close by. It just felt like they were teasing.


All in all, if they would've made this into a movie and would've gotten rid of half the plot and could've distributed the money better for the animation, it might've been decent.

[Spoilers Ahead]

Japan Sinks 2020, to put it lightly, is a dumpster fire that is so bad, that it's good.

To be honest, Japan Sinks for me had some high expectations. Going in I felt like this anime did have some promise, coming from the same studio that produced the likes of "Ping Pong The Animation" and "Devilman Crybaby", granted, both of those animations had different producers who really captured the essence of what they were trying to create. The same cannot be said for Japan Sinks.

Barring the animation, which is an easy thing to nag on when it comes to this anime, I felt as if ... a large majority of the characters weren't all that interesting, nor fleshed out to the point where they could be considered "likeable", besides Kite to a certain degree. Ayumu didn't hit the right chord with me, and came off as egregiously annoying majority of the time, Go was sort of similar, but showed more emotion with the more "impactful" deaths, and Koga had promise, but didn't get to fulfill it due to not speaking for nearly half the anime (outside of the terrible freestyle portion in Episode 9).

Some of the deaths came off as unnecessary, or completely unavoidable. The Mothers death was quite possibly the most confusing thing to me, as she could've survived had she gone up for air after finding the wench to the motor boat. The Dads felt a little brain dead, Daniel died after Shin City fell, and a majority of the supporting characters died in thaf Earthquake. Nanamis was so sudden and pointless, especially after her semi-epic moment at the gas station when axe kicking the truck driver.

The most enjoyable thing about this anime is just how overly serious it was, the fact that an old man did a 360 quick scope on a guard who was literally six feet away, missing shots with a nine millimeter pistol, Daichi getting randomly killed by falling debris, and Mr. Onodera free styling with both Morse Code, and his eyelids. Moments like this killed any seriousness this anime WAS trying to go for, and it made the experience that much more enjoyable. I would recommend watching this with a friend, as I know that there will be enjoyment from this dumpster fire of an anime. Overall this anime did have promise, and the animation style has been proven to work with the aforementioned anime's above, but it felt rushed, and a little bit heartless. Overall I'd say it's worth it to watch if you're wanting to find something so bad it's good, just be sure to watch this with a friend or group for even more enjoyment.

At first glance Nihon Chinbotsu appears to be simply a somewhat confused and disjointed disaster show. Like most disaster films and shows it's riddled with convenient coincidences and punctual evasions--but that's to be expected, so no grief given. Well, maybe just a bit of grief; this show seems to take it to a whole new level when it comes to quantity of ridiculous escapes, convenient timings and exceptionally moronic decisions made by our main heroes. Though, there is an actual motivation behind it all, which, theoretically, can excuse this. But more to that later.
Furthermore, some classic tired tropes are present, of people becoming evil ... rapists, thieves(as much as you can be considered one in the apocalypse), murderers and drunkards.
The outlook here always seems to be that the threat of punishment, rigid rules and structures of a society is the only thing that keeps the evil tuns and do-no-gooduns among us from purging/stealing everything in their proximity. It's very shallow, but this, perhaps, is best reserved for a more philosophical discussion.

Let's start with the intro: It's a nauseating thing and did not fill me with much hope; Ooh, just look at the beautiful mundane before we were punished by God almighty and the nature. Appreciate your boring life, you chump! Tea? Forever gone. Time? Ran out. This cat? Presumed drowned. Ain't that fucking sad.
But, of course, I know better than to judge a book by its cover, or in this case, an anime by its opening intro. And maybe that is my mistake.

Something did not sit quite right with me from the very beginning of this show. Like some kind of point was being made that I was missing. The chaotic randomness of deaths and various events seemed a bit too structured to be deliberately random. I entertained the thought of it being one of those creations where the grand goal is to be "different" or "experimental". But the odd sense of structure did not leave me.
The realization struck maybe about six or five episodes in; the authors intent became clear to me at last. He was attempting to preach his interpretation of biblical morality of the west and its religions. And, on retrospection, I've discovered that most of the events that had transpired were rooted in biblical allegory to some degree at least. The notion of not recognizing what this man deemed moral and amoral for so long still fills me with a sense of slight discomfort.

The great flood(of course); thou shalt not be greedy; thou shalt not use the drug; thou shalt not have impurity of thought; thou shan't be a caricature of a racist; arrogant; have sex; thou shalt only feel happy when at work, upon performing thy noble sacrifice, or an act of martyrdom. A person's real redemption can only be achieved with their death. The exception here being the disabled Jesus, who is miraculously resurrected: as it is tradition. Kite--an angel modernized to take the form of a YouTube Vlogger, descends from the skies with help and blessings, then, humbly ascends back when the deed is done and necessary lessons learned. The list goes on. I wonder if there is a biblical event about riding a hog too. Maybe I should look into that one at some point.

So, in summary: The maker appeared to be so preoccupied, obsessed even, with conveying his bizarrely crude morals to the viewer, that no cost seemed too large. The characters were thrown away at random. The same was done to any moderately intriguing plot-points also. The overarching story is a shambles, despite the concept itself being fairly straight forward as per title: Japan Sinks. Ironic, really, that the entire thing appears to me to be devoid of soul. Especially the main cast lacks any personality and is dull, but as aforementioned--they are just there to be used as virtue devices. A peculiar sacrifice to make, I say. Additionally, the journey is riddled with attempts to evoke this funny sense of paranoia that paints the world outside the pre-prescribed bounds of our civilization as some kind of hellscape that you mustn't mingle in, or Else. But if you happen to venture out anyway, you're most like to be blown up by some mine, or poisoned by the earth itself at random. So stay in your pen and fear the deadly world around you! Unless, of course, it sinks into the ocean.

Then there is the resolution. Some kind of cheesy, strangely global, but also contradictory nationalistic Japan Olympics promo mess, paired with a very transparent, cheap sob-fest of excessive positivity and "hope". Lucky for me, I hardly cared about what was happening at that point.

Though, with rigid preaching put aside, there are still some alright aspects of this anime that are worth a mention:
The rap scene was delightfully cringey, but also different, it really took me aback--I like that. The art style served its purpose, I suppose. It was satisfying to figure out the religious theme beneath it all. The initial intrigue of the cult sub-plot was good, not sure how much credit it deserves though, given the 'resolution'. One unusual choice that I'd like to point out was the prolonged droning melody of the same piano chords throughout many of the episodes, the weird, stubborn tedium of which seemed unusual. It made me wonder if it's meant as a deliberate attempt at mood manipulation of the audience; or something that was done out of stylistic reasons which I could not determine. If it was the mood, it has misfired, but still, kudos for the strange perseverance.

Overall I believe for this anime to be made by a sick mind, who is not very well acquainted with humanity. Not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing. It's interesting. Not enough to like it though.

Nihon Chinbotsu or Japan Sinks 2020 is probably the most appalling non-ecchi show I have watched this season. The show's tone fluctuates massively and often even every episode. The beginning is built up to be a struggle-filled journey for survival. This is further compounded with very events that show the characters suffering emotionally. However, this grim tone is heavily undermined by all the poorly executed humor and lucky coincidences that get the characters out of bad situations. After weeks into the disaster, the group is suffering and some new characters are added and they work together to survive. Unforgettably the entire setting is hilariously neglected ... when the group of characters finds LITERALLY PARADISE. It is at this point where the entire setting of "Japan Sinking" is put on the back foot while creepy non-sensical fantasy elements are introduced and the characters are dancing around. Overall, the story is filled with loose ends, bizarre transitions, absurd coincidences, and more appalling details.

The art is practically the same as Devilman Crybaby. If you could tolerate that art-style, you can watch this. For those who have not watched Devilman Crybaby, know that the animation is very rough but still captures emotions well.

Sound is similarly reminiscent of Devilman Crybaby. For those who have not watched Devilman Crybaby, the soundtrack really sounds like experimentation.

The main character, Ayumu, is emotionally damaged by the tragic events around her and suffers from an injury. However, while her emotional state is well resolved her injury has almost no mention throughout the series. That being said, Ayumu is the most interesting character in this show due to her receiving the most screen time and showing distinct change in character as the story progresses (also she makes stupid decisions and learns from them). Most of the other characters aren't shown enough to be interesting characters (Koga/KITE) or just don't seem to really be fazed by the disaster (Go).

I expected a gritty fighting to the tooth and nail survival story from the synopsis but only around half of the show could be feasibly be considered a survival story. My biggest gripe was that the characters' situation fluctuated from dreadful to optimistic far too much.
Did I come into the show with pre-concieved notions? Absolutely, and I think this greatly affected how much I enjoyed the show.

If you come in watching this show with the mindset of a slightly cheesy adventure story, then you can enjoy it much more than I did.