Reviews

Jul 11, 2014
Mixed Feelings
Hold up your hand if you've heard this story premise before.

Naive, innocent and painfully average teenage boy is thrown into a violent game of life-or-death, having no choice in the matter. He is forced to fight, and discovers he has a mysterious, hidden power. Over the course of the show, he learns to control that power.

You can put your hand down now.

While the story to Deadman Wonderland is, of course, not going to be winning any awards, it still does make an attempt at telling it. The entirety of the plot revolves around the many characters in the infamous Deadman Wonderland prison, a place where you can trust no-one, where death roams around every corner and ironically, where the people are very boring. If I had a dollar for every character in this show with a tacked-on, forced, and extremely underdeveloped back-story, I would have enough cash to supply the pen and paper to write better ones. Even Senji Kiyomasa (The Crow), a character that got an entire OVA post-season, feels underdeveloped. I do not care for any of these people, and most importantly, don't like these people. It's amazing that a series like this with such a long list of characters manages to fail to capture my interest. I recommend that you tune in for the fights and the plot developments, and tune out during the back-story segments.

The first episode starts off like an episode of the 1990's American television show, Goosebumps. A generic high school boy named Ganta is thrown into an absurd, nightmare-esque situation where every person in his class is killed violently in a mass murder by a figure affectionately nicknamed by him as ''The Red Man''. Being the only survivor, the police officers and detectives put their brilliant minds together to come to the conclusion that Ganta killed everyone, based on the evidence of being the only person found alive. Terrific. The only apparent evidence suggesting he did it is a 30 second recording of him laughing off the murders as nothing. This hardly believable work of CGI is the only piece linking him to the murderer, and suddenly, it's off to prison, on a death sentence. Super.

Once there, he learns of the dark secret behind the prison. Morals go out the window as Ganta is forced to participate in childish games to survive. Apparently this is still an episode of Goosebumps. He forms a close friendship with a creepy, pale girl named Rei, uh, I mean Shiro. Stuff happens. People die. Shinji, no... Ganta does a complete 180° in character development, and by the finale of the season, he is back to a snivelling, pathetic mess. We are introduced to characters who get killed off episodes later, with no back-story. At all. The show is an under-cooked mess, and as for the ending, disappointing.

The art was handled by Manglobe, the animators for The World God Only Knows, and Samurai Champloo. The art style is very reminiscent of their work on Ergo Proxy. Nothing to write home about, but it gets the job done. The animation in the opening, especially some of Shiro's segments, is pretty neat. The art is uncomfortably inconsistent, often very lazy during the dialogue and slower scenes, and well done during the action scenes. At least it's not the other way around.

The sound is nothing special. Overused, cliché blood splatters and other shock-value sound effects are rife throughout the season. The opening song is a very cheesy and teenage hard rock number, which ultimately got on my nerves on the mere second viewing. The closing however, is something else. A gorgeous song that invokes some powerful and melancholy emotions about life before Ganta was forced into the prison. The background music throughout the series is fairly forgettable, excepting a bittersweet piano melody that I heard often during the slower scenes. Regardless of that, nothing outstanding.

Overall, if you desire to watch it, watch it. It's an incredibly average story, with many flat, bland characters (excluding Shiro, the only character in the entire season who I was genuinely infatuated with. She is very reminiscent of Lucy from Elfen Lied). Don't take this show seriously. It's zany, heavily-stylised, nonsensical and very gory. It relies on basic shock-value and gross-out moments to capture the audience's attention, but ultimately, comes across as childish and edgy. They are a few moments that made me smile, though. Just know, if you're not planning to watch it, you're not missing out on anything special. If you did enjoy it, hope you like waiting for season two. It's either that or the manga.
Reviewer’s Rating: 6
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