Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin (Rainbow)

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Alternative Titles

Synonyms: Rainbow: Criminal Seven of Compound Two Cell Six

Japanese: RAINBOW 二舎六房の七人

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Information

Type: TV

Episodes: 26

Status: Finished Airing

Aired: Apr 7, 2010 to Sep 29, 2010

Premiered: Spring 2010

Broadcast: Wednesdays at 00:59 (JST)

Producers: VAP, Nippon Television Network

Licensors: Funimation, Discotek Media

Studios: Madhouse

Source: Manga

Genres: Drama, Suspense

Themes: Delinquents, Historical

Demographic: Seinen

Duration: 22 min. per ep.

Rating: R - 17+ (violence & profanity)

Statistics

Score: 8.47¹ (scored by 157,275 users)

¹ indicates a weighted score.

Ranked: #145²

² based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded.

Popularity: #579

Members: 395,698

Favorites: 8,435

Available At

Official Site

Resources

AniDB

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Synopsis

Japan, 1955: Mario Minakami has just arrived at Shounan Special Reform School along with five other teenagers who have been arrested on serious criminal charges. All assigned to the same cell, they meet older inmate Rokurouta Sakuragi—a former boxer—with whom they establish a close bond. Under his guidance, and with the promise that they will meet again on the outside after serving their sentences, the delinquents begin to view their hopeless situation in a better light.

The seven cellmates struggle together against the brutal suffering and humiliation inflicted upon them by Ishihara, a sadistic guard with a grudge on Rokurouta, and Gisuke Sasaki, a doctor who takes pleasure in violating boys. Facing such hellish conditions, the seven inmates must scrape together all the strength they have to survive until their sentences are up; but even if they do, just what kind of lives are waiting for them on the other side?

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

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Background

FUNimation Entertainment simulcasted Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin in North America, but didn't give it a physical release due to poor streaming numbers. It is no longer streaming via FUNimation.

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Adaptation:

Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin

More characters

Characters & Voice Actors

Sakuragi, Rokurouta

Main

Koyama, Rikiya
Japanese

Minakami, Mario

Main

Oguri, Shun
Japanese

Maeda, Noboru

Main

Park, Romi
Japanese

Yokosuka, Jou

Main

Hasome, Tatsuya
Japanese

Nomoto, Ryuuji

Main

Fujiwara, Keiji
Japanese

Tooyama, Tadayoshi

Main

Kuroda, Takaya
Japanese

Matsuura, Mansaku

Main

Waki, Tomohiro
Japanese

Ishihara

Supporting

Ishii, Kouji
Japanese

Koike, Setsuko

Supporting

Kanjiya, Shihori
Japanese

Lilly

Supporting

Yamagata, Kaori
Japanese

More staff

Staff

Tamura, Manabu

Producer

Koujina, Hiroshi

Director, Episode Director, Storyboard

Mima, Masafumi

Sound Director

Yajima, Tetsuo

Episode Director, Storyboard

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Opening Theme

"We're not alone" by coldrain

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Ending Theme

"A FAR-OFF DISTANCE" by Galneryus

Reviews

Feb 19, 2024

MichaelMorbius

Recommended

An incredibly beautiful anime that, unfortunately, I hear very little about. Rainbow takes us to a defeated and destroyed Japan after World War II where a group of young men, in order to survive, commit a series of crimes that will land them in a reformatory, where they will experience hell but in the end they will be able to get out and to make a new life despite the adversities that a group of young delinquents may encounter in everyday life. Put like this, Rainbow's story may seem trivial, but I assure you, that couldn't be further from the truth. Indeed, it is much ...

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Apr 23, 2024

hexashadow13

Mixed Feelings

tl;dr: A story about a group of juvenile cell mates suffering through life that’s full of lows and not enough highs.

This anime takes place in Japan during the aftermath of World War II, and is about a group of seven teenagers that end up as cell mates at Shounan Special Reform School. The anime has two phases, each composing approximately half of the season. The first phase focuses on what occurs at the prison school. The guard and doctor in charge are both incredibly abusive, which makes it a hellish situation in and of itself. However, things get worse when one of the inmates is ... approaching their release date, and the guard and doctor begin earnestly trying to kill him and make it look like an accident. The core of this phase is how the seven form tight knit bonds that eventually allow them to work together and push through incredibly difficult situations.

The second phase takes place after a time skip and focuses on what happens to the boys after they’ve obtained their freedom. They each go about their own lives pursuing different dreams and goals. However, their lives are far from perfect. The shadow of Shounan and everything related to it continues to haunt them and results in lives that are full of hardship. Furthermore, the circumstances of the seven before they ended up at Shounan were far from ideal, and simply returning to that brings about it’s own set of hardships. However, once again with the bonds they’ve formed they are able to help each other out such that they’re able to continue moving forward.

The writing is good at fleshing out the main cast and establishing the bonds that form between them. It also does a decent job at getting the viewer invested in some of the cast, mainly Sakuragi, Mario, and Noboru. Though it also drops the ball pretty hard on a few of the cast making them really hard to get invested in. I also can’t say I’m much of a fan of the monotone narrator just explaining a lot of things. It makes things feel much more dull than they should be. The pacing is also felt pretty uneven, and how episode transitions are handled also felt bizarre at times. For example, the way the time skip flowed was pretty awful.

But the biggest issue I have with the story is that it’s overtly unfortunate. For the vast majority of the anime, it just doesn’t let the cast get any straight up victories. There is always a major element of loss associated with any wins they get. I certainly don’t expect their lives to be great and free of drama, but I feel that there should be a balance of ups and downs. Some arcs should just get happy ending and let the viewer be happy alongside the characters. For the vast majority of the anime this doesn’t happen. There’s always something or other that drags things down and makes things somewhat depressing or at the minimum bittersweet. It doesn’t help that logically it feels that there is no reason for most of this. The writing has to bend over backward to make things worse for the cast.

A core part of this is the way things are framed. Even if there are issues, depending on things play out and what’s focused on, the overall final note that an arc has can be happy. But here it felt like it was trying to do the opposite and try to make things as dreary as possible. It got really grating as things went on. There are certainly people that like stories like this, and from that point of view this is probably great as can be seen from the high rating. However, I really am not a fan at all. Things do start turning around in the final stretch of the anime and there’s a pretty positive atmosphere to the ending, so overall I would say I was satisfied with the ending to the anime and may read the manga if it continues with the same vibe. I still can’t say I enjoyed the anime overall however.

The art and animation are solid enough. It doesn’t look good, but the style and designs work pretty well for the story it’s trying to tell and the atmosphere it’s going for. The soundtrack also worked really well in the setting. The OP is great in terms of the song and visuals, but there’s only a single OP for the entire anime, so it did feel like it was overused. Especially as it also plays the song sometimes during key moments, such as the final episode which also plays the OP normally earlier in the episode. The ED is decent in terms of song and visuals, but also suffers from there only being a single one for all twenty six episodes.

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Feb 3, 2024

AnimeEnjoyer420

Not Recommended

This is a series that I desperately wanted to like, and it does have the occasional good moment, but generally speaking, this is a story with interesting ideas that is constantly failed by poor writing.

The core ideas here - a story about a group of boys that bond while being abused at a reformatory school in 1950s Japan, and which follows them after their release and into adulthood - are loaded with potential, and that brotherly bond between the characters is easily the strongest part of the series. The storytelling ambition to progress through its story and the lives of its characters rather than muddling ... through a status quo of its own making is commendable as well. Unfortunately, all the other elements are far weaker. From unnuanced villains that do the worst possible things simply because they are Evil to gross writing that has a lurid fascination with sexual exploitation, there is very little to recommend here in the way of storylines or drama. All the emotion in the story is drained away by the ridiculous overacting of the villains and the extreme, edgy nature of how things tend to play out.

Edginess is, unfortunately, the name of the game here. There's a tendency to frame this sort of thing as "adult" or "mature", and indeed it's even listed as such on Crunchyroll, where I watched it. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. The defining characteristic of the writing in Rainbow is really a sort of childishness, with a fixation on sex, suffering and unfair persecution that screams adolescence. Virtually every named female character in the series is either a prostitute or a family member of a character that is introduced into the story so they can be raped by a villain. Virtually every adult is an unhinged, tyrannical fascist or a huckster. While the series begs for understanding of its protagonists, misunderstood boys branded criminals by society for justified acts of self defense or revenge, it does not extend that understanding to any of its other characters, which are largely 1 dimensional and defined by their villainy. It even leads to more significant writing problems, where the logic of the story begins to break down unless you look at it through the lens of "this is a story written by an author that was just trying to write about people doing the worst things he could think of at the time", most unforgivably in the climax of the Anchan vs Ishihara story arc at the end of the 1st cours that I will keep vague for spoiler reasons. Suffice to say that the intended emotion of the scene lands more on the "so idiotic that it made me laugh" side of things than was intended.

These issues start to improve in the 2nd cours, but never fully go away. It does have some nice moments though, Turtle and Lily's story arc late in the 2nd cours is a rare high point in the series. Sadly, this only heightens the pervasive sense throughout the series that it could have been excellent if only it was written by someone without a sledgehammer sense of subtlety and a creepy fixation on prostitution and rape. I simply can't recommend it as it exists in reality though.

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Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin

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Characters & Voice Actors

Sakuragi, Rokurouta

Minakami, Mario

Maeda, Noboru

Yokosuka, Jou

Nomoto, Ryuuji

Tooyama, Tadayoshi

Matsuura, Mansaku

Ishihara

Koike, Setsuko

Lilly

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Rainbow: Nisha Rokubou no Shichinin

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Synopsis

Background

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Characters & Voice Actors

Staff

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Ending Theme

Reviews

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