"The closer you look, the less you see."
You ever start an anime and get very amped up with what's going on, calm down a bit midway, then finish and find yourself scratching your head as to where it all went wrong?
Darling in the Frannx may have been a show I initially gave more credit than it deserved.
Studio Trigger and A-1 Pictures teamed up for this heartthrob mecha, with Trigger bringing the action and A-1 bringing the... lack of Trigger animation. That's not to say Frannx is poorly animated -- most action sequences look good. But very few are great. Characters have unique faces but none have particularly standout designs. It really feels like someone took your average modern anime and made it about 5% more "Trigger-ish". Frannx may still be technically more impressive than a lot of shows out there, but there's a certain soullessness to its animation that can't be escaped.
The better half of Frannx (as you may have already been told) is its first half. For those of you simply wondering "what's all this Zero Two hype about" I suggest you simply stop at episode 13, as you'll already have the answer by then.
I suppose the truth is that early-on Frannx felt flawed-but-fun. Our MC, Hiro's blandness felt like baggage that came with romance action anime, and I personally was willing to endure it. After all, the battles were suspenseful, and Zero Two in addition to being a pretty well-executed killer waifu, was morally grey enough to keep us on our toes. It had its bumps and bruises but hey, the OP slapped. Essentially, it felt like guilty pleasure anime.
But the pleasure fades pretty fast. The second half suffers from poor pacing, unclear story development, bland characterization, cliche abundance, undefined/confusing villains, and a general feeling of disconnect from its first half.
But in retrospect, perhaps it was inevitable. Frannx's early story is mostly fueled by the flames of early romance -- once that fades we're left to see what's lurking underneath which is... not much? too much? Somehow it feels like both.
A point of clarity -- I actually think the allegory for declining birth rates in Japan was bold in calling out overwork as a direct cause. It's just a shame the actual story of Frannx can't keep up.
So much of Frannx's apparent "story" is inexplicably hidden until the last possible moment. Much of the show feels like it doesn't have a villain, and when things are finally explained, it feels more like a memorization exercise than anything dramatic or meaningful-- the show's overstuffed chest of backstory is littered with cut-and-paste pieces we've all seen a million times. I also still haven't decided which I hate more -- how they escalated to the final battle or the final battle itself. Remember when I said they did action well? Yeah, I'm not so sure they do action well.
Storytelling issues might be bearable if we had action to fall back to, but the fights never really develop beyond what we see early on -- not in any way worth caring about, anyways.
With story out and action out what does that leave? Characters? Perhaps the greatest failing of them all -- Frannx's cast serve their allegorical purpose well, but don't have much going for them beyond that. I personally think it speaks volumes that Zero Two has about five lines (ok I didn't count but that can't be far off) between episodes 14-19 yet still feels like the most interesting character during that sequence. Surely she's more interesting than Ikuno, Mitsuru, Ichigo, Goro, or Kokoro, all of whom seem to be in a competition of who can spin their wheels the fastest.
And she's DEFINITELY more interesting than Blandy McBlandface, who I originally thought was just going to be your soft-spoken average protagonist with some assertiveness, but really who turned out to lack any sort of identifying character trait whatsoever, beyond a vague wish for everyone's lives to be better. I wanted to like Hiro so bad, but he is impossible to have an emotion about.
If I enjoyed a character other than Zero Two, it was probably the comic relief coupling of Zorome and Miku -- they at least manage to be a mildly amusing bickering duo. I almost wish they'd gotten more screen time... until it occurs to me that they likely would've been ruined if they'd gotten it.
I can't bring myself to score this lower than a 6 -- despite all of my gripes, the fun I had when I started this show was undeniably an experience I value. But I also cannot score it higher than a 6, as I cannot look away from its problems.