Reviews

Opus.COLORs starts out less than promising with murky direction and unimpressive animation. The setting is poorly explained, centered around an original form of "perception art" involving some element of VR, but how the mechanics work is vague to the point of obtrusiveness. We know that the art process is inherently collaborative, needing both the efforts of an artist and what the show refers to as a grader, who appears to take on some form of editorial role. It's unclear how the grader actually contribute to a project beyond things like basic marketing or choosing what frame to put a painting in, which all seem like tasks an artist could easily do alone. Moreover, the perception art obsession the world has is relatively new. Not a decade ago, the public were up in arms protesting over its growing popularity. How could something as inconsequential as an art medium inspire such fervor?

Beyond that, the show seems to function like an average insecure gacha adaptation, featuring a bloated cast size and surface level character exploration in an attempt to please every fan. The first half of the show are focus episodes rotating between new characters learning how to better understand each other in mundane, predictable ways. The show is dogged by a sense of soullessness, that a committee looked at what character dynamics were popular out in the joseimuke space and copied them down while ignoring all context. While a few of the musical numbers at the end of most episodes are more visually creative than others, they all feel shoehorned in yet still artificially short. It's as if they were the cutting room floor scraps of when the staff were still working on Starmyu and hey, they might as well go into this project too.

Eventually though, the show does find its footing, and that footing is, no joke, morphing the narrative into the mold of a murder mystery. The show starts with speedrunning our protagonist's tragic backstory, orphaned as a child after losing his parents in a traffic accident, evoking feelings of sympathy and pity with all the subtlety of a hackneyed light novel. But about halfway through the show, we go back to that accident in a flashback episode, and we get to see the parents seemingly fine and dandy walking out of the crashed car. So what happened? How did they die? The element of intrigue builds somewhat slowly, initially relying on its audience to doubt what is shown to them for any sense of momentum, until it intensifies enough to become the centerpiece of the narrative. The VR art gimmick of the show that seemed largely pointless suddenly takes on a more interesting, even conspiratorial angle on if people really saw what they thought they saw. The resolution doesn't quite live up to its potential and the art worldbuilding never escapes feeling lacking, but the emotional core in the final product works fine enough. The last few episodes give the show some much needed focus, exploring themes of loss, survivor's guilt, and learning to cherish what you still have. Or to be blunt, it's basically a BL melodrama that's too cowardly to commit to being BL, but it's carried by the voice actors doing as decent job as they could working with the material they're given.

Opus.COLORs is inarguably a technical mess, but it does something unique and weird enough to stand out among the mass production of anime that gets pumped out these days. It may not be what you could call good by any conventional means, but I can't say I wasn't ultimately entertained.