Yet again, Netflix’s algorithms have shat out an awful anime. This time, it’s a blend of shoujo and horror with visuals ripped straight of the early 2000s. 7 Seeds is a fitting title because it took me 7 seconds to realize it's bad enough to rival Mars of Destruction, at least for the first two episodes. It’s so bad because it tries to be gruesome and scary, but the art is terrible and the dialogue is hilariously stupid. Rather than being shockingly awful, after episode two it just becomes boring. The plot setup is interesting; to avoid extinction during the apocalypse, different countries put groups of people in cryosleep. The premise is good, and nothing else is. Dozens of random people awaken to find themselves on the island, we see the various groups beginning survival strategies, and big bugs eat some of them. In the first episode, everyone is either screaming in fear or at each other, and not even the animators know what the hell is happening. It’s wild, stupid, and it had the potential to be a so-bad-its-good comedy. Detracting from the humor is the infuriatingly annoying main character.
Natsu, the first protagonist, is the epitome of a useless shoujo protagonist. For some reason, she tells us how weak, cowardly, and awkward she is. It’s all said in one big long run-on sentence because the show is paced incredibly poorly. We immediately know how useless Natsu is because of how she acts, her pathetic ‘woe-is-me’ internal monologues are completely unnecessary. Who needs well-written characterization when you can just info-dump the main character’s entire personality in 10 seconds?! When a huge manga is condensed into twelve episodes, it really shows. Scenes jump from one character perspective to the next with no transition whatsoever. The tone shifts wildly at the drop of a hat from cheesy shoujo drama to people dying violently. Then suddenly we’re thrown into some random guy’s backstory lasting half the episode. 7 Seeds may have worked as a manga, but this adaptation borders on incoherent.
Fortunately for us, the writers forget about Natsu after the third episode. From time to time we’re told how she’s doing as if we care. All Natsu does is silently lust over a generic handsome bishounen. The bishounen is committed to someone else, and Natsu never pursues him out of fear of hurting his feelings. She did nothing for the whole show because she was such a whiny child. For some reason, Natsu and the Bishounen stay with a long-haired dude who smacks her ass in the first episode, he’s a one-dimensional bastard but he sticks around to bully her for some reason. Thankfully, his voice acting in the English dub is fucking hilarious. When he or any character calls out Natsu for being useless, and it sounds genuinely real. You can hear their hatred for Natsu in their voices. For all the verbal beat down she takes, I couldn't care less about her. There is no way to sympathize with someone denser than a two-ton boulder, just stop whining and solve your own problems. The second protagonist, Hana, is thankfully less infuriatingly stupid. I call her the second because she gets introduced in the second half of episode one. Eventually, she gets the full protagonist role. Hana is far more adaptable to her environment and automatically better because she’s not an infuriating coward. Even without any worthwhile characterization and a blank slate personality, was a far better perspective to see the story from than Natsu.
Aside from Hana, there are dozens of other named characters. By the time you learn someone’s name, three more will be introduced. Any ‘development’ no matter how poorly written won’t matter at all if you can’t remember who the character is, and so few of them do anything worth remembering in the story. 7 Seeds attempts to make its cast memorable by over-exaggerating all of their emotions and reactions, which just makes them more obnoxious. Some of them scream every other sentence, and the rest treat every slightly bad thing like it’s the end of the world. Stubbed your toe? Must be the be fatal, scream about it. Swatting someone away? Oops, looks like I fell into a river with 30mph rapids, better scream bloody murder. Either the dialogue is quiet, monotonous, and boring, or it is over-acted to the point it’s funny. There are some hilarious one-liners in the dub because even the actors know how bad this show is. To make the character acting worse, the audio is so lazily edited; no matter how far apart the characters are, they will sound just as loud as if they were right next to each other.
The only character I cared about was the bearded nomad guy with all of the cute wolves, but he became so forgettable I cannot recall his name. Once he shaved his beard, lost his wolves, he became a generic bishounen to fall in love with Hana. Only three of the characters get developed beyond one trait, and the rest don’t even get that much. Some of the side characters exist solely to comment on their surroundings and look helpless when monsters attack. Right as a random girl thinks she will be eaten by big bugs, she suddenly says “I wanted to be a doctor and an astronaut.” Wow so relatable. I am definitely going to cry when she dies violently. Strangely enough, she doesn’t die. After the second episode, very few people die at all; it becomes a boring slice-of-life drama rather than a campy horror. The giant bugs and badass dinosaurs were never seen again. We never learn how the bizarre monster filled future came to be, the writer simply grew tired of them. Instead, the story becomes a generic shoujo about the interpersonal relationships between people we have no reason to care about. There are at least four loosely connected stories being told at every moment in 7 Seeds; each story follows a different group of people in different locations. Trying to keep track of all the locations, characters, and plots is like studying for a test right before class; I couldn’t remember anything because the pacing is so unimaginably awful. That's why episode 10 is the least bad out of all twelve. It is still poorly animated, melodramatic, and disjointed, but it entirely takes place in a flashback. There are almost no sudden jumps between character perspectives and distant locations. Rather than having to follow the giant cast, we follow one main character and four side characters. Episode 10 is the only reprieve we get from the horribly written story and whiplash-inducing editing. Each episode ends mid-scene with no closure, abruptly cutting to the ED. From the beginning to the end, the editing is appalling, this even happens at the end of the last episode. Supposedly this is "Part 1" of the 7 Seeds adaptation; the ending was incomplete for sure, but it did nothing to set up a sequel.
Another effect of the breakneck pacing is a lack of any transition between shots. At one point someone suddenly said, “We’re going to fly together on my glider!” Random, but it sounded cool! Smash cut to them on a glider being slid across the screen on a motion tween, then another smash cut to an unrelated scene. This all happens over the course of FOUR SECONDS. It’s like watching a Michael Bay movie. At any given moment in 7 Seeds is telling multiple stories across multiple locations with little to no connection. It jumps from one story to another flippantly; the editors do not care if you're able to follow the sequence of events. All of the characters look similar too, making the many storylines even harder to follow. The character designs generic and everything else in this show is an eyesore.
Who would have thought the end of the world would look so ugly? The action scenes, character animation, background art, effects, everything. Monsters slide across the screen on motion tweens, the monsters are just repeated assets sized differently from one another. Close-ups of the characters' faces look fine. But when they move, or if they’re a bit too far from the camera, they look hideous. The background art is mostly repeated assets and blotchy green colors. Whenever it's raining (it happens a lot) the effect is haphazardly slapped onto the screen over a normal shot. It is not integrated into the art in any way. Gonzo has adapted plenty of great stories surpassing their mediocre art. This is not one of them. I can only praise Gonzo for attempting to use 2D art for everything, but the little CGI they used looks bizarre. The CGI ocean is such an eye-sore; if someone is swimming, waves just clip through them. Boats don’t affect the water at all. It’s like someone stuck poorly drawn anime stickers onto an over-edited photo of the ocean. Awful visuals like this are enjoyable ironically, but the inane directing of the action scenes is where the true hilarity comes from. A tiger is about to attack three, newly introduced people. One of them randomly pulls out a baseball, then another grabs a stick and says to through it at him, and somehow it hits the tiger square in the face. The whole scene looked like shit, but it was fucking hilarious. My suspension of disbelief did a 360, rolled down a ditch into a dumpster, then it exploded.
7 Seeds straddles the line between being ironically funny and taking itself far too seriously. Horror, romance, drama, shoujo, action, mystery; it wants to be the jack of all trades, but in the end, it is the master of none. The result is a tonally maligned shitfest that isn’t funny, scary, relatable, sympathetic, or entertaining. As for the romance? There is nothing aside from crushes only mentioned in internal monologues and sexual assault. Great. I would recommend this anime to people who want a free lobotomy, those who like bleaching their eyeballs, and basically anyone else who finds pleasure in torturing themselves. Shoujo and horror are two genres that should not be combined, and this dumpster fire demonstrates why.
Dear Netflix, please stop making shovelware garbage like 7 Seeds.
