NOiSE

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What to say about "Noise"...without sounding like the cult trying to recruit a new member... Fascinating.

Noise properly introduced me to Tsutomu Nihei, even though I had heard of Blame! before reading it. I've re-read it on several occasions, which even surprises me. I'm not a horror guy, but it goes well with sci-fi. Like bourbon and a cigar perfect fit.

Nihei's style is the imagined result of Clive Barker and H.R. Giger being drinking buddies, without the fetishy sexual undertones. There's an alien, shadowy, unnatural feel to the world he creates, something so far beyond dystopian that I'm not ... sure there's a word to describe it. It's something so foreboding and different that it just feels WRONG, but at the same time it tickles your sense of adventure and you really want to grab your ruck and explore it.

Definite must read.

"NOiSE" is really unnecessary.

Being a prequel of "BLAME!", we just get a little smell of what was before it all crumbled down for eternity in that world. Way more clear with the storytelling, but I don't know if I can even interpret it as such. The complexity of Nihei's works tend to throw me for a loop when he gives us a more straight-to-the-point story. I feel like I got it, but then, what's there to appreciate? Just the art, I think.

The story could've been expanded way more. We got a very sympathetic character, a person who clearly wants the good of everybody, but it's ... put against nightmare fuel concepts, such as brainwashing, conscience transferring, purposeless existence, body modifications in such a short span. If we got at least double the time with her, to flesh out those other characters, and the concepts, we would've gotten one of Nihei's most comprehensible stories, but alas, we're stuck in the machinations of his minimalistic explorations.

As of characters, missed potential, and sure, you can tell me all about how that's not the point of this guy's work. However, the seems of a good, character-driven story are there, it's more like the problems of his writing got on the way of exploring more. There's a battle between what to focus on, and the world won over characters, it seems. In a way, the lesson of the story feels all the less depressing because I couldn't connect that much. "The failure of the few, let to the end of the world for the many".

In terms of art, holy mother of god, I always love Nihei's art. The impact, the dirty, gritty nature of the story. It's all there in full throttle as always. You have unfathomable structures, the multiple kilometer-sized mayhem, overpowered weapons that are basically the only thing allowing people to exist, everything shown with enough distance as to give impact, but not enough to really get a good picture. Purposeful, incredible, massive, unique, I never get disappointed on that front. Great stuff.

I wish everything had the same level of quality. The story is clear, sure, but it doesn't try to delve deep on people's psyche, even if it seems like it tries to. The characters have such a great foundation, but not enough time to shine. All that with godly art.

5.2/10, if you want more clarity on "BLAME!", give it a shot, but don't expect it to work on its own.

Question: how do you classify a work as being “the bottom of the barrel”? For most people it’s quite simple, their most hated work is also the one they hold as the worst they’ve seen. I, in the other hand, try to separate what I feel about a work from any critical judgment of it. That is not for buying any illusion of objectivity, it’s simply because I feel like it would be dishonest from my part to do it. That is why I’m at the same time put off and fascinated by a work like NOiSE, one of the few that I got to ... classify as an absolute failure. For those who are usually annoyed by the length of my reviews, you can rest assured that this one is not going to be as long as the previous ones. I don’t think I’ll have anything positive to say about the work anyway.

Story and Characters

When elaborating a story you’d think that “Where to start?” would be among the first questions that go through the authors mind, both in regards to the setting as well as the timeframe in which the story decides to kick-off. Whether it’s an anime or manga, the job of the first episode or chapter is to properly establish characters and setting and offer a decent hook to grab the audience’s interest. The issue that is immediately apparent in NOiSE is that the series starts directly with a hook that has no setting or characters to stand on. We’re introduced to two characters, the protagonist, Susono Musubi, and Clawsa, investigating a place where missing children were found dead. The chapter jumps straight into the plot, with the most basic and confusing characterization possible: there’s no establishment of what kind of people these characters are, outside the fact that they’re police officers, no comprehensive explanation about the setting and no proper notion of how these two elements relate to each other.

You might see here and there someone criticize a work by saying that the characters, for example, have no personality, but believe me, I’m not exaggerating by claiming that the characters here have little to no dimension whatsoever. Musubi has her job as a police officer as her only trait and behaves in the predictable manner for that role, Clawsa is nothing more than cannon fodder and the antagonists, two organizations called The Order and the Safeguards, have objectives and actions that are vague to the point of being nonsensical. From the bad works I’ve read or seen over the years that gave me enough of an impression to award it with a score, one characteristic the majority seemed to have, at the very least, is that they were followable, something that only occasionally NOiSE barely manages to be. That is one of the traits the can lead me to call a work an absolute failure, when even following the narrative is a struggle, not for an specific writing style, but due to sheer incompetence. The details laid out by the plot don’t properly connect with each other, the information given by the characters has no ground to stand on within the line of events or the setting and I still have no idea of what the title means, for Christ sake!

Now, I’m someone who appreciates subtlety and the ability some works exhibit to convey meaningful information or emotion in a concise manner, reason why my favorites include series like Toradora!, Shiki and Ergo Proxy. However, there is a difference between being subtle and having no distinguishable worthwhile substance and this is a work that crosses the line going from subtlety to emptiness. I do understand that NOiSE is a prequel to BLAME!, another work of Nihei Tsutomo, but there’s no excuse to why it couldn’t work as a standalone story. A prequel is supposed to flesh out the world and events prior to another story and for that it’s necessary to be well crafted and capable of being appreciated on its own rights. The Star Wars prequels, for once, receive particular hatred for being a bad chapter of a beloved franchise, but they didn’t work not for being part of a larger series, it was for being bad movies in the first place.

Presentation

Good Lord, it seems that nothing here is salvageable! The first thing to notice about NOiSE’s presentation is that it has particularly bad use of framing. Complementing the fact that the narrative is a clusterfuck, the transition between panels is confusing, to the point I had to read some pages three times to understand how characters went from one place to another. This is, off course, not helped by the art. For once, it has very schizophrenic use of gradiance, with it being entirely absent from some chapters, while others are all in varying shades of gray. Most of the panels have stark distinction of black and white, which could be a way of conveying a gritty, hopeless cyberpunk setting, but loses its effect due to the many problems of the work and the poor quality of the drawings. If there are recurrent set pieces, they are barely recognizable, and weirdly, the art style seems remarkably afraid of straight lines, for some reason. Could be simply result of the overall poor quality or a form of conveying the crapsack nature of the world, but it generally contributes to the damage that is already being done to the presentation.

Personal Ramblings

I have not seen much of Nihei Tsutomu’s works. Aside from NOiSE, I’ve read the first two chapters of Biomega, which were bad enough to make me drop it right there, and watched an ONA based on BLAME!. All of them displayed the same issues and gave me, overall, very little faith in anything else coming from that same author. I can’t say I’m not curious, though!, As I sad at the beginning, a work like NOiSE fascinates me to a degree. Sometimes a movie, or manga, or anime can be bad, but also very intriguing on its own rights, compelling us into trying to grasp what was the thought process that leads to such embarrassing result. Recently, another work from Nihei Tsutomu to garner some attention was Knights of Sidonia, a 15 volume manga that was adapted into a two-season anime series, and I’m very skeptical of its quality, but still very curious about how it fares. Whether this author has evolved and learned to do characterization and setting right or if he still has no idea on how to differentiate between subtlety and vacuity, I’ll have to find out for myself.