I don't normally get emotional when watching Anime, but the story and the characters in ERASED are so realistic, and develop in such organic ways, that its almost hard to not care for them with all of your soul.
So, when something awful seems to be headed their way, its only natural for your heart to race out of your chest.
You beg, and you plead: Please, let them escape from this alive! Let them live another day!
ERASED is essentially that sentiment in Anime form.
Its an unconventional murder mystery, where our main protagonist is somehow granted the ability to go back in time to stop a series of tragic events from occurring.
But, its so much more than that.
Love is the ultimate lesson in this Anime.
Its about self-sacrifice: To make something of oneself; To care about someone else more than you've ever cared about yourself, and with no alternate motives.
Anyone writing for Anime can, and should, learn a lot about the way to properly execute a manga to anime adaptation, as it was handled flawlessly. Here, we have a very short series, one that is able to compact YEARS of syndicated manga pages into an overwhelming and powerful short anime.
I'm not sure how anyone could rate this as any less than a masterpiece in the medium of anime. It does what so many other anime have tried to do and fail: Tell a brilliant mystery, keep us in suspense, and all the while stay mature and relevant.
The artwork is also a masterclass in classic animation. I rarely uses blatant CGI or enhancements, and instead, relies on a near-Miyazaki level of attention to detail and illustrious illustration.
From the character work, to the backgrounds, to the simple details, the animation here is near flawless and should be the standard to which modern day anime epics are executed.
I only wish the anime world had works that even neared the quality and intensity of Erased. We live in a time when Anime is so commercialized, so lowbrow and churned out for profit, that we rarely see productions that feel genuine and truly loved by their creators.
To witness an anime of this caliber is to truly bask in the glory of the medium.
