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The Positive Side: The premise is akin to a much less optimistic X-Men. In the world of Elfen Lied, there is a mutation that causes certain humans to be born with horns and deadly, super-human powers. The mutants, dubbed the Diclonius, are feared and hated by humanity, and prone to bloody killing sprees.
Elfen Lied is a series of emotional extremes. In the first episode, we move from tranquil melancholy, to bloody horror, to goofy slapstick, to tender slice-of-life, and the rest of the series maintains this course. This may sound jarring and chaotic, but these extremes actually complement each other beautifully. ... The release of the comedy is vastly more satisfying for the tension built by the horror. The horror is made more startling by the previous tranquility, and the tenderness of the slice-of-life moments makes us care about the characters all the more when they are plunged into mortal danger.
Our main character, Lucy Diclonius, is among the best anti-villains I have ever seen written, perfectly balancing the heart-wrenching cruelty she faced as a child with her horrifying sadism and blood-lust. Unlike many villains who make a grab for sympathy via tragic backstory, Lucy is actually aware of her own evil nature and laments it because she knows it keeps her separated from Kouta, the only person she has ever loved. Further complicating her character is her split personality, Nyu, a cheerful and innocent girl with child-like behavior and intelligence. Nyu almost feels like Lucy’s subconscious attempt to absolve herself of her past sins, her desire to be reborn with a fresh start taking on a mind of its own.
While Lucy is certainly the most memorable character, the show doesn’t suffer any lack of characterization in the rest of the cast. Kouta struggles against both his damaged memories, and his guilt at the cruel things he said to his sister just before her death. Mayu, after suffering repeated sexual abuse by her pedophilic stepfather, must leave to find a place she can truly call home. Yuka must reconcile her feelings for her cousin Kouta and her jealously towards Nyu with her desire to do the right thing. Just about everyone in the series is screwed-up in some way or another, and yet every one of them longs to be a better person.
The opening theme, “Lilium,” is hauntingly beautiful, and while the show reuses it more than once, it uses multiple versions to keep the song fresh. Hearing the tune played in the cold, tinny rings of a music box or sung acapella by Lucy herself provides a different experience from the fuller, more orchestral performance of the fully-subtitled opening theme.
The ending theme, “Be Your Girl”, seems horribly inappropriate at first, with its upbeat, J-pop beat and tender lyrics, but the way the show often cuts from a scene of horrific brutality to a sweet love song is hilarious, in a dark, perverse way. It’s the kind of abrupt tone shift that makes Elfen Lied so dynamic, and once we better understand the relationship between Lucy and Kouta, the lyrics become surprisingly appropriate.

The Negative Side: The only real problem I have with Elfen Lied is its heavy use of animation recycling and reused footage near the end of the series. To be fair, this is a problem a lot of older anime have, but it’s still a bit annoying.
While this isn’t a flaw, per say, this show is definitely not for the faint of heart. There is a LOT of blood and nudity, which many critics label as gratuitous, but I don’t think it’s inappropriate to the tone of the series, which has always been centered around emotional extremes. The gore isn’t there simply for the sake of gore; it’s to demonstrate the sheer power the Diclonius have over human beings, the ease with which they can rend bodies apart. The explosive nature of the violence fits perfectly with the way the show constantly plays to extremes, and I don’t think it could be the same show without it.
Elfen Lied is one of those shows people either love or hate, but if you’re able to see beneath the blood, I think you’ll find it’s a beautiful piece of work.

The Positive Side: The show’s premise is gripping not only because of its horror, but also because of its originality. Ganta Igurashi, a schoolboy of 14, witnesses the gruesome murder of his entire class by a strange, supernatural being in bleeding, red armor. As if his life wasn’t horrible enough yet, Ganta is framed for this murder and back-stabbed by his own attorney. Still traumatized by the death of his friends, Ganta is thrown into the hellish prison known as Deadman Wonderland, where inmates must participate in deadly competitions in order to stay alive. The owner of Deadman Wonderland (who ... is also the man who posed as Ganta’s attorney) rakes in profits by marketing the gruesome deaths of the inmates as entertainment to the public while convincing viewers that the deaths are actually staged via CGI. It’s a premise that immediately places Ganta into a sympathetic position, and also offers insightful commentary on the evils of prisons for profits and on the use of violence as entertainment.
Ganta gets a lot of accusations of being whiny and useless, and I’ve always found those accusations pretty baffling. A fourteen year-old watches his friends murdered, and is immediately thrust into a prison where he is seemingly doomed to die horrifically, and the audience hates him for being upset? What people seem to miss about Ganta (despite the fact that Shiro flat-out says this) is that he never gives up, even when giving up seems so tempting. His determination to stay alive and avenge his friends is made all the more remarkable because of his fear, his weakness and the fact that he is perpetually outmatched by the people around him.
The supporting cast is pretty strong (on the heroes’ side, anyways). Ganta’s friend Shiro provides some much needed comic relief, but because she is obviously mentally damaged, her character doesn’t clash with the overall grimness the setting. Nagi provides a foil to Ganta, his strength, stoicism and soft-spoken nature contracting Ganta’s perpetual state of panic.
There’s some neat concepts in the setting, such as the power to form weapons out of one’s own blood (thus granting super-powers for the cost of constantly risking auto-exsanguination in combat), and the prisoners being forced to wear toxic collars that could only be staved off by consuming regular doses of an antidote. The way that outsiders to Ganta’s plight are perpetually deluded and oblivious about what’s actually going on is unnerving from both sides. It hard to say what’s scarier, the thought that we could be put through hell without anyone on the outside noticing or caring, or the thought that something horrific could be happening just under our noses without us knowing.
The Negative Side: The first problem with this show is that it over-stuffs its cast with psychos. I get that this is set in a futuristic and corrupt prison, but there are simply so many sociopaths, all shoving and piling over each other in their separate efforts to wow the audience with competing abominations, that each individual villain becomes less memorable. This would probably be forgivable if Deadman Wonderland didn’t betray its own maturity in the last two episodes for the sake of indulging in the narcissistic power-fantasy that seems mandatory to the Shonen genre. I’m going to be talking about an ending now, so there’s gonna be some spoilers, if you didn’t get that. Seriously though. Spoilers are coming. In like, the next paragraph.
The series’ downhill slide begins with the removal of every character besides the Protagonist who could hope to make a difference, starting with Karako. Karako has been set up as Nagi’s second in command. She successfully rallies the rebellion in Nagi’s absence, and when their escape attempt is interrupted by an acid-spewing robot-tank, Karako ensures that the rest of the group escapes before taking on the robot one-on-one and beating it to death with her fists. In short, Karako is badass with a capital B. Well, until the writers say otherwise. In the series’ ending, Karako gets easily captured, and seemingly forgets about the sword-wielding psychopath standing right behind her, which results in her being impaled and disabled for the rest of series. This sudden stupidity and helplessness is not at all consistent with her character.
After swooping in and saving Ganta’s ass, the Hummingbird bows out of the escape effort by claiming she deserves to be in prison, a sudden turn of idealism that just feels wrong for her cynical, foul-mouthed personality.
Worst of all, Crow, the man who demanded Ganta never, ever get in a fight when he isn’t there to watch, learns that Ganta is about to fight the strongest, scariest villain in the Wonderland with a brand new technique that Crow just finished teaching him, and Crow decides that somehow, this isn’t worth tagging along to see. None of these actions are even remotely true to everything we know about these characters, but apparently, respecting interesting secondary characters you’ve spent the entire series developing isn’t nearly as important as making the Protagonist feel speshul.
The absurd lengths the writers go to keeping the sidekicks out of Ganta’s way reach a climax when Ganta and Shiro are facing down the Gay Surfer-Monk of Darkness. Shiro is in her absurdly powerful Wretched Egg form, and Ganta pushes her aside and flat-out tells her, “It’s time for me to be the hero!” I get that they’re trying to show Ganta has become more badass then he was when the series started, but really? They couldn’t find any more believable way to do it?
Ganta is not an Escapist Character. He has never been an Escapist Character, and abruptly deciding to toss him a Deus Ex Machina Super-Power and letting him take down the Season 1 Big Bad on his own is, like almost everything that happens in the last two episodes, completely inconsistent with the character development that made us care about these characters in the first place. Ganta garners sympathy specifically because he ISN’T a typical Shonen hero. He’s scared, perpetually traumatized and physically weak, and even when he learns to harness his supernatural abilities, he is surrounded by people with powers equal to and greater than his own. Despite having every conceivable disadvantage, Ganta is determined to survive and attain justice, and that makes him an extremely compelling character. By shoe-horning him into the spot-light and suddenly giving him a new weapon that is far more powerful than anything any other Deadman has shown, they’ve robbed Ganta of everything that made him interesting. He’s just another Shonen hero, stealing glory from his supporting cast and pulling inexplicably superior fire-power out of his ass at any point the plot demands. To add insult to injury, the only reason the Deus Ex Machina Gun is required is because Ganta’s hyper-sonic attack fails, even though the hyper-sonic attack was developed specifically to take down the kind of bad guy Ganta is facing. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Ultimately, Deadman Wonderland chose to compromise its artistic potential for the sake of appealing to a power-hungry, adolescent audience. What could have been a memorable Seinen horror is instead, a violent, melodramatic and manipulative chunk of garbage.

NOTE: There are going to be some spoilers in this. Yes, I know I’m not supposed to do that on this site, but I can’t critique Fist of the North Star to any satisfying degree without talking about certain specific details. If you don’t want the show spoiled, stop reading now. If you don’t care, go right ahead.
The Positive Side: This is a show about a man who looks, and talks, and fights like Bruce Lee, traveling a nuclear wasteland and making comically evil people explode with his fists. For what it’s worth, Fist of the North Star embraces what it ... is with every fiber of its being, and never once attempts to be anything else. There’s a kind of courage in treating an absurd premise as seriously as Fist of the North Star does, a kind of charming naivete. It’s a bit like the anime equivalent of a B-movie.
Fist of the North Star hails from the bad old days of anime, the 80’s and 90’s, so the art isn’t very polished and the relative sizes get pretty wonky, but there are some beautifully painted settings, and the action feels consistently dynamic, hot-blooded and over-the-top.
Some of the music is pretty great, and the opening theme of Part 1, “Ai no Torimodose!!” (yes, that second exclamation mark is absolutely mandatory) is sure to put you in the right mood for this show, with its echoing shouts of “You hua SHOCK!” and its dramatic, fatalistic lyrics.
The story is very melodramatic and morally uncompromising, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. While the characters are exaggerated, there are still moments where we are moved by their suffering.
The simplicity of the show’s morality has a certain charm as well: when evil people do evil things, the hero shows up and punches them to death, and all is well again. Don’t you wish the real world was this simple?
If I could separate Part 1 from the rest of the series, I would give it a 7 out of 10. There’s a surprising sophistication to the irony of the plotting, and the anti-villain, Shin, is memorable and intriguing, but his sympathetic aspects never detract from his menace.
The Negative Side: This show neatly captures both everything good and bad about Shonen. The series comes to a neat close in Part 1, and then insists on dragging on for a hundred more episodes, well after the show’s artistic merit has been wrung dry.
This show is very repetitive, which is fine if you consistently enjoy watching our hero, Ken exploding bad guys, but gets boring pretty quick if you’ve grown used to more mature anime. Adding to this repetition is an abundance of animation recycling. I hope you liked that shot of Ken using the 100 Crack Fist of the North Star on Zeed in the first episode, because you’re going to see that about fifty more times before the series is done.
The character development is also lacking. While a few of the major villains are well-developed, the majority of the villains are two-dimensional, which isn’t too bad at first, but becomes truly grating as the series wears on and we are forced to trudge through one heartless, irredeemable megalomaniac after another. Kenshiro is supposed to be loved for his compassion and kindness, but that’s a bit hard to buy when you look at the sheer number of creative and sadistic deaths he inflicts on his foes. Ken’s sympathy is also hindered by how over-powered he is compared to the majority of his foes. For every villain who manages to significantly injure Ken, there are a dozen whom he effortlessly slays with a single blow.
There are a few side characters who are more interesting than Ken himself, but nearly every single hero not named “Kenshiro” dies a tragically stupid and pointless death trying to stop some over-powered villain. It’s not only predictable, but irritating to watch characters we care about strive so hard to live honorably and justly (like Kenshiro gets away with constantly), only to be effortlessly slaughtered by a villain to get the point across that the villain is a threat.
It’s a bit unsurprising that a Shonen from the 80’s would have trouble with gender, but the way Fist of the North Star’s handles women is consistently cringe-worthy. A disproportionate amount of time is built setting up Rei, a supposed hero who, to the modern audience, is more likely to come across as a sex criminal than a crusader. It is very hard to weep for Rei’s death when his first interaction with a major character (Mamiya) consists of him leering at her and ripping away her bath-towel. I was honestly amazed the scene didn’t end with Rei raping Mamiya. This isn’t the only time he forcefully strips her of her clothing, and to make matters worse, Rei and Mamiya are set up as love interests to each other later on. Insisting that a woman become romantically invested in a man who sexually harassed her the first time they met isn’t just unrealistic, it’s insulting.
Mamiya does her best to serve the role of the powerful, independent and capable woman, but gets hit very hard by what I like to call “Sakura Syndrome”, named after Naruto’s Sakura Haruno. Sakura Syndrome is when a female character in a Shonen is supposed to be a competent warrior, but never (or nearly never) wins a significant fight. Sakura Syndrome is generally the result of a Shonen that wants to make a female character a badass, either to placate feminists or for purposes of fetishism, but also wants to make sure that the male heroes stay firmly in the spotlight at all times. Mamiya mows down plenty of random mooks with her razor yo-yos, but the moment she is placed in a fight against anyone important enough to be given a name, she is doomed. Mamiya also espouses the philosophy that one cannot be a woman and a warrior at the same time. Because, you know, it’s not like there’s thousands of women enlisted in the Armed Forces at this exact moment. Eventually, Mamiya gives up on her career as a warrior and gets shoved back into the kitchen, which begs the question of why Fist of the North Star played with creating a female warrior in the first place.
Part 1 is worth watching if you like action series and don’t mind melodrama and cheesy dialogue, but if you go any further than that, you’re wasting your time.

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS

The Positive Side: Like Cowboy Bebop, Big O benefits greatly from a cyber-noir atmosphere and voice-acting talents of Steve Blum. The romantic relationship between Rodger Smith and the robot Alice is by turns, deeply moving and bleakly hysterical. The exploration of the humanity in androids feels like a throw-back to Isaac Asimov in his prime. While this is primarily an episodic series, each episode is well-plotted, setting up mysteries and following the unique schemes of various cackling baddies.

The Negative Side: Can a good show be retroactively ruined by a bad ending? It’s hard to say, but no show ... comes closer to fitting that description than Big O. The finales of Seasons 1 and 2 are by far the worst episodes in the series. After twenty episodes of grounded, though imaginative, cyber-noir, the show takes a sideway leap into mind-shattering nonsense. Rodger is inexplicably hurled into an alternate universe where he is a beggar instead of a wealthy and respected Negotiator. Characters suddenly become actors on a stage, playing themselves to entertain an imaginary audience. A character named Angel suddenly sprouts wings, time reverses, and the cockpit of a gigantic mecha inexplicably fills up with tomatoes. Watching characters we have followed and come to care about vanish into the gaping jaws of insanity, we are left desperately asking what has just happened, and eliciting no coherent response.
This is not to say that Big 0 would be perfect if not for the finales, as there are plenty of other faults. The opening theme music is some of the most obnoxious I have ever heard, repeatedly blaring the name the titular mecha in lieu of actual lyrics. This is especially baffling when compared to the ending theme, a beautiful piece of work that can still draw my tears.

Though the anime moves along fine on story and character alone, the artwork fails to impress. Villains are all comically ugly, and all the characters have these flat, pupil-less eyes that just make them look dead and lifeless. The action isn’t bad on its own, but the hamminess of giant mecha battles tends to clash with the rest of the tone.
Big O may not be a bad series, but it is certainly a lot worse than it could have been. Watching it is more likely to prove frustrating than satisfying.

The Positive Side: Cowboy Bebop was the first anime I could really get into as an adult, and its maturity remains one of the things that sets it apart from most popular anime of its time. After watching hokey kids’ stuff like Pokémon and the cheesy, attack-name-screaming, adolescent violence of Dragon Ball Z, I was a little surprised to find an anime I could actually take seriously. Despite it being science fiction, Cowboy Bebop’s setting feels both believable and extremely original. The smokey, ill-lit bars and gray, rain-washed city-streets could have been pulled straight out of a crime noir film, and ... there’s a joy in watching hi-tech innovations like space-ships and computer hackers interact with mafia hierarchies and drug deal plots.
Despite hailing from the era of pre-digital animation, Cowboy Bebop’s art is superb. The character designs are striking and memorable, and there’s just enough color to offset the generally somber backgrounds. The fight scenes are particularly wonderful, and Spike’s martial arts motto, “Be like water,” translates into action that is both fluid and visceral.
As for the music… well, just about the entire soundtrack is composed by Yoko freakin’ Kanno, perhaps the greatest musical talent in the anime industry. The Seatbelts deliver a blend of jazz, blues and rock that moves from melancholy to energetic and back in perfect sync with the story. The lyrics are pretty terrific on tracks that have them, so it’s worth putting an ear to the OST.
The character development is all-around great. Our protagonist, Spike Spiegel, has more than enough casually badass attitude and ass-whupping ability to serve as an escapist character, but also has just enough brooding moments that you can feel how his past has scarred him. Jet is an ideal foil, constantly fretting and worrying over Spike’s well-being like a surrogate father while insisting that he doesn’t care what happens to Spike if he leaves. Faye serves as wild-card, shifting femme fatale to ally at the drop of a hat, constantly keeping the audience guessing as to where her loyalties lie, or if they even exist. Ed is a consistently bubbly comic relief, but also contributes to the team through her incredible hacking abilities. Even minor characters who are only present for an episode or two gleam with life and intrigue.
The show gives us a good look at how people struggle against their own pasts. There are plenty of other themes—vengeance, war, and ambition—but at its heart, this is a story about the struggles between past and future, a theme captured by the anachronistic setting as well as by the struggles of our intrepid bounty hunters.

The Negative Side: Where does Cowboy Bebop come up short? Well… uh… it isn’t the cure for cancer, nor will it help you lose 20 pounds in 30 days.
Joking aside, this anime is about as close to perfect as they come. Some fans are put off by the plot structure, which is far more episodic than most anime, but every episode is capable of standing on its own, so it really doesn’t suffer from a lack of over-arching plot. Criticizing Cowboy Bebop simply because its structure is different is more a failure on the part of the critic than it is a failure on the part of the work. Take the show for what it is, and you won’t be disappointed.