Scorch
Explorer
Hello,
Just got finished watching the first season (11 episodes) of a cool little anime called Gantz and I thought I would throw together this review of it:
Killer DM: we all are familiar with the phrase. A game master who kills his players off either intentionally, through some sort of malicious streak, or unintentionally, due to unfamiliarity with the rules or just plain sloppiness. What if your life was taken over and run by the whims of a Killer DM? Such is the question posed by the manga/anime Gantz by Hiroya Oku.
Kei Kurono used to be quite the hell raiser of his little grade school clique. He was the leader that they all looked up to, especially Masaru Kato. But as with most relationships at that age, they went to different schools and grew apart eventually falling out of contact with one another. Kei has grown up into an apathetic teen who is a little angry at the world and just wants to be left alone. His inner monologue is full of the typical angry quips that one would never say out loud in such a polite culture as Japan’s.
A chance meeting with his old childhood friend, Masaru, while waiting for a subway train changes their lives forever. A homeless person falls onto the tracks and no one seems to want to actually help him off (a bit of social commentary on Oku’s part concerning Japan’s “don’t get involved” attitude). Masaru jumps onto the tracks to help and Kei guiltily follows. They manage to rescue the man but are killed by an express train.
They awake in an unfurnished apartment overlooking Tokyo tower but they are not alone. With them are also people who have also died and have found themselves suddenly locked in this apartment with each other. There is a senator who had died that night of cancer, a school teacher, two yakuza (Japanese mafia), a twenty something slacker, a beautiful young girl (who had obviously slit her wrists in a suicide attempt before being whisked away to the apartment), a smirking eighth grader, and a dog. The only other feature in the apartment is a large, metallic black ball that the eighth grader, Nishi, refers to as Gantz.
As the newly dead try to puzzle out what is going on, music blares forth from Gantz and text scrolls across its surface:
“Your lives have ended. How you use your new lives is entirely up to me. That's the theory, anyways.”
With that they are given orders to hunt down a strange alien that looks like it stepped out of a video game. Cases of weapons and armor spring out of Gantz and they are only given a few minutes to prepare before they are thrown out onto the streets of Tokyo in a bizarre game of death that none of them understand the rules to except for Nishi who has obviously been through this before.
Thus begins the fever dream that is Gantz. The players fumble through a game they barely understand with deadly consequences. The senator dies, this time for good, when he stumbles “out of bounds”. Gantz forgets to mention the alien they are supposed to hunt down is only the small harmless version and that the giant hulking version shows up after they kill the first one. The body count mounts up as the survivors try to quickly learn the rules and also how their strange armor and weapons work.
Kurono manages to activate the powered muscle suit he had put on before the game began and he and Masaru are able to fight off the alien long enough for Nishi, who had been invisible since the game began, sneaks up (the game term “Camper” comes to mind) and uses a capturing device to send the alien off thus winning the game and returning them to the apartment.
Only Kei Kurono, Masaru, Nishi, the girl (Kei Kishimoto, same first name as Kei Kurono), and the dog have survived. Gantz awards them points and they are free to go but Nishi makes it clear that they will be summoned back again and again until they either die for good during the game or score 100 points and “win”. What winning entails is not clearly defined but Nishi seems to think that it means going free for good. He also makes it clear that the rest of the group is most likely going to die in the next game and that he sees them all as nothing but obstacles to his winning the game. Before leaving he drops one more bomb on them: all of them are just copies created by Gantz at the point of death of their original bodies. Their real selves are already dead and they are but “faxes”.
While it is fun to watch Kei, Masaru, and the others fumble through trying to figure out the rules and playing pieces of the game it is even more interesting watching them interact after the game in anticipation of the next round. Kei and Masaru find out that their bodies disappeared from the subway and witnesses think it was some sort of hoax. Kei Kishimoto finds out that Gantz is sloppy as well as capricious when she discovers that her original self survived the suicide attempt and is living back at home. Having no where to go she begs Kei Kurono to take her in at the apartment he lives in alone. Kei Kurono is very attracted to her but she is very much infatuated with the reluctant hero, Masaru, much to Kurono’s frustration. We get a glimpse of Masaru’s unhappy home life with his younger brother and abusive relatives as well as complications at school. Nishi and Kurono have kept their power suits outside of the game and use them for different purposes (Nishi to sadistically kill stray animals, Kurono to fend off school bullies). All during this we are also introduced to the daily lives of characters we know are going to die and fill the ranks for Gantz’s next round of games.
Both the manga and the anime are fascinating in both their character studies of the reluctant game players as well as some of Oku’s social commentary on Japanese modern culture. Some of it may seem alien to us while others are painfully familiar. Masaru always reluctantly looks to Kurono for leadership that is not coming even though he is better suited to be the leader, a role he shies away from until later when he makes the decision to get everyone through the games alive. Kei Kurono was once the brash leader type and his devolved into the apathetic teen who cares only for himself. With the Gantz games he is starting to turn into something else and is walking a thin line of being a great hero or turning into a cold-blooded killer like Nishi.
Then there is the question of the bigger picture. What is Gantz? Is he the man imprisoned inside it or is Gantz feeding off of him? What is the purpose of the game? Is the world itself real? Is the world and everyone populated within it just programs running in some sort of massive ancestor simulation program (like the movie “The 13th Floor”)? Have hackers broken into it and are using the program as their own personal First Person Shooter playground? Things just get stranger as the series progresses but I know I will be reading the comic and watching the show every time a new chapter or episode is translated.
I should note at this point that the comic is very graphic both in sex and violence. There is also cursing, a lot of it. Not something for kids. The TV show has had a lot of this edited down, sometimes too much. Watching the trailers for the show and some teaser shorts it is obvious that there will be a TV edit, which is showing now in Japan, and a DVD edit. Much like what they did with Cowboy Bebop. Sometimes the TV edit leaves out too much and makes the narrative incoherent. An excellent example of this is in the episode when the players chase down the first alien which resembled a small boy with an onion-like head. The opening credits of the show have quick shots of the chase scene with it but in the episode itself they just cut to a weird edit of the players shooting at something the viewer cannot make out. Readers of the comic will know that this is a very graphic scene of four of the players gunning down the boy-like alien while it begs for mercy as a horrified Masaru watches on. The censors probably thought that this was too graphic and told the animators to go back and re-edit the episode. Also, the teleportation method Gantz uses to move the players around is sort of a slow scanning process that in the comic and some of the teaser trailers is anatomically graphic, much like watching an MRI scan across a cross section of the human body. In the actual TV show this is replaced by a white light. A little annoying but when it comes out on DVD we will probably be able to see an edit much truer to the manga.
If you want something a little different from your typical formulaic anime or manga, I would highly recommend this title. They are not commercially available here in America yet but there are fan subtitling channels out there (which I will not get into for obvious reasons).
Check it out.
Just got finished watching the first season (11 episodes) of a cool little anime called Gantz and I thought I would throw together this review of it:
Killer DM: we all are familiar with the phrase. A game master who kills his players off either intentionally, through some sort of malicious streak, or unintentionally, due to unfamiliarity with the rules or just plain sloppiness. What if your life was taken over and run by the whims of a Killer DM? Such is the question posed by the manga/anime Gantz by Hiroya Oku.
Kei Kurono used to be quite the hell raiser of his little grade school clique. He was the leader that they all looked up to, especially Masaru Kato. But as with most relationships at that age, they went to different schools and grew apart eventually falling out of contact with one another. Kei has grown up into an apathetic teen who is a little angry at the world and just wants to be left alone. His inner monologue is full of the typical angry quips that one would never say out loud in such a polite culture as Japan’s.
A chance meeting with his old childhood friend, Masaru, while waiting for a subway train changes their lives forever. A homeless person falls onto the tracks and no one seems to want to actually help him off (a bit of social commentary on Oku’s part concerning Japan’s “don’t get involved” attitude). Masaru jumps onto the tracks to help and Kei guiltily follows. They manage to rescue the man but are killed by an express train.
They awake in an unfurnished apartment overlooking Tokyo tower but they are not alone. With them are also people who have also died and have found themselves suddenly locked in this apartment with each other. There is a senator who had died that night of cancer, a school teacher, two yakuza (Japanese mafia), a twenty something slacker, a beautiful young girl (who had obviously slit her wrists in a suicide attempt before being whisked away to the apartment), a smirking eighth grader, and a dog. The only other feature in the apartment is a large, metallic black ball that the eighth grader, Nishi, refers to as Gantz.
As the newly dead try to puzzle out what is going on, music blares forth from Gantz and text scrolls across its surface:
“Your lives have ended. How you use your new lives is entirely up to me. That's the theory, anyways.”
With that they are given orders to hunt down a strange alien that looks like it stepped out of a video game. Cases of weapons and armor spring out of Gantz and they are only given a few minutes to prepare before they are thrown out onto the streets of Tokyo in a bizarre game of death that none of them understand the rules to except for Nishi who has obviously been through this before.
Thus begins the fever dream that is Gantz. The players fumble through a game they barely understand with deadly consequences. The senator dies, this time for good, when he stumbles “out of bounds”. Gantz forgets to mention the alien they are supposed to hunt down is only the small harmless version and that the giant hulking version shows up after they kill the first one. The body count mounts up as the survivors try to quickly learn the rules and also how their strange armor and weapons work.
Kurono manages to activate the powered muscle suit he had put on before the game began and he and Masaru are able to fight off the alien long enough for Nishi, who had been invisible since the game began, sneaks up (the game term “Camper” comes to mind) and uses a capturing device to send the alien off thus winning the game and returning them to the apartment.
Only Kei Kurono, Masaru, Nishi, the girl (Kei Kishimoto, same first name as Kei Kurono), and the dog have survived. Gantz awards them points and they are free to go but Nishi makes it clear that they will be summoned back again and again until they either die for good during the game or score 100 points and “win”. What winning entails is not clearly defined but Nishi seems to think that it means going free for good. He also makes it clear that the rest of the group is most likely going to die in the next game and that he sees them all as nothing but obstacles to his winning the game. Before leaving he drops one more bomb on them: all of them are just copies created by Gantz at the point of death of their original bodies. Their real selves are already dead and they are but “faxes”.
While it is fun to watch Kei, Masaru, and the others fumble through trying to figure out the rules and playing pieces of the game it is even more interesting watching them interact after the game in anticipation of the next round. Kei and Masaru find out that their bodies disappeared from the subway and witnesses think it was some sort of hoax. Kei Kishimoto finds out that Gantz is sloppy as well as capricious when she discovers that her original self survived the suicide attempt and is living back at home. Having no where to go she begs Kei Kurono to take her in at the apartment he lives in alone. Kei Kurono is very attracted to her but she is very much infatuated with the reluctant hero, Masaru, much to Kurono’s frustration. We get a glimpse of Masaru’s unhappy home life with his younger brother and abusive relatives as well as complications at school. Nishi and Kurono have kept their power suits outside of the game and use them for different purposes (Nishi to sadistically kill stray animals, Kurono to fend off school bullies). All during this we are also introduced to the daily lives of characters we know are going to die and fill the ranks for Gantz’s next round of games.
Both the manga and the anime are fascinating in both their character studies of the reluctant game players as well as some of Oku’s social commentary on Japanese modern culture. Some of it may seem alien to us while others are painfully familiar. Masaru always reluctantly looks to Kurono for leadership that is not coming even though he is better suited to be the leader, a role he shies away from until later when he makes the decision to get everyone through the games alive. Kei Kurono was once the brash leader type and his devolved into the apathetic teen who cares only for himself. With the Gantz games he is starting to turn into something else and is walking a thin line of being a great hero or turning into a cold-blooded killer like Nishi.
Then there is the question of the bigger picture. What is Gantz? Is he the man imprisoned inside it or is Gantz feeding off of him? What is the purpose of the game? Is the world itself real? Is the world and everyone populated within it just programs running in some sort of massive ancestor simulation program (like the movie “The 13th Floor”)? Have hackers broken into it and are using the program as their own personal First Person Shooter playground? Things just get stranger as the series progresses but I know I will be reading the comic and watching the show every time a new chapter or episode is translated.
I should note at this point that the comic is very graphic both in sex and violence. There is also cursing, a lot of it. Not something for kids. The TV show has had a lot of this edited down, sometimes too much. Watching the trailers for the show and some teaser shorts it is obvious that there will be a TV edit, which is showing now in Japan, and a DVD edit. Much like what they did with Cowboy Bebop. Sometimes the TV edit leaves out too much and makes the narrative incoherent. An excellent example of this is in the episode when the players chase down the first alien which resembled a small boy with an onion-like head. The opening credits of the show have quick shots of the chase scene with it but in the episode itself they just cut to a weird edit of the players shooting at something the viewer cannot make out. Readers of the comic will know that this is a very graphic scene of four of the players gunning down the boy-like alien while it begs for mercy as a horrified Masaru watches on. The censors probably thought that this was too graphic and told the animators to go back and re-edit the episode. Also, the teleportation method Gantz uses to move the players around is sort of a slow scanning process that in the comic and some of the teaser trailers is anatomically graphic, much like watching an MRI scan across a cross section of the human body. In the actual TV show this is replaced by a white light. A little annoying but when it comes out on DVD we will probably be able to see an edit much truer to the manga.
If you want something a little different from your typical formulaic anime or manga, I would highly recommend this title. They are not commercially available here in America yet but there are fan subtitling channels out there (which I will not get into for obvious reasons).
Check it out.
