To start us off on this train wreck of a show, let’s touch upon the subject which gets many people intrigued about the show in the first place: the animation. The animation which is used in Gankutsuou is called “unmoving plaid” (or, to be specific “perspective incorrect texturing”). This style is essentially when patterns act as the coloring for characters, clothing, and surroundings instead of actual colors, as seen in shows like Chowder. At first, I enjoyed this artistic choice. It was fresh and added a new dimension to the show I had never seen in anime before. About a quarter of the way through the show, I realized that the use of unmoving plaid was likely not an “artistic choice” but an act of laziness. With everything in the show being animated as a pattern, the style lost any effect it had. Seeing a vase with an outline of flowers and a picture of roses simply pasted into it, I lost all faith I had in the animators. Unmoving plaid is simply a way to get out of fully animating something, and making that the basis for your entire show highlights an obvious lack of care. Had only the clothing of the characters been unmoving plaid, an effect of wealthy, textureful cloth could have been given to the characters, accentuating their luxurious lifestyles and adding to the ambiance. Additionally, anything that was not unmoving plaid was horribly done CGI. All trees, buildings, statues, and literally any moving object was animated to be CGI. The poorly done CGI on top of an already overly saturated unmoving plaid screen created an effect that was honestly horrendous.
The other prominent issue with Gankutsuou is the character writing. Nearly all the characters show a lack of motivation, and well they do it is poorly thought out or changes at the drop of a hat. The dynamic between the Count and Albert was intriguing, but was hardly flushed out and therefore made their interactions ambiguous, and not in a way where the ambiguity was planned. Albert and his love interest Eugenie are supposed to enter an arranged marriage but neither wanted it. Until about halfway through the show, that is, when they suddenly decide that they are madly in love and need to be together. Of course, there were some aspects of the writing and characters that were conceptually well done. Over the course of the show, Albert realizes that the abstract values which he held to be vitally important were untrue, and that everyone around him was deceiving him. I found it especially intriguing how the level of betrayal slowly seeped down, from the general universe, to his planet, to his country, to his close community, to his own family. Additionally, being tricked by the Count, someone he looked up to an unhealthy amount, was essentially damaging. I really did enjoy that part of the plot. That aspect, unfortunately, was so underdeveloped it did not get nearly as much focus as it deserved, and the entire show suffered because of it.
My final issue with this show is the amount of sci-fi forced down the throats of the viewers. Throughout the show, the amount of sci-fi content continues to increase, until it feels so forced and disconnected from the main plot of the show. This should have been a concern on the creators’ minds from the very beginning, as recreating a novel from 1844 with a sci-fi spin is not something that can not easily be done. After all, plots about space prisons and alien sicknesses don’t exactly fit with themes of familiar betrayal.
Overall, this show is very frustrating to me. Not only because it actually has some good concepts that are completely wasted, but because so many people deem this to be an “underrated gem”. As Gankutsuou was utterly disappointing from the point of view of it only being an anime, if I was a fan of Alexandre Dumas’s original story, I would likely be disgusted by this retelling.
