Speed Grapher - I finished watching the show a few days ago, waiting to talk about it until I've mulled it over for a few days. Honestly, I'm still not sure if I liked this show or not, because while there was entertainment to be had I can't even begin to count the number of things in this show that should make me hate it. It's a Gonzo show from around the point where the beloved animation studio began their Fall from Grace, but if you didn't see the Gonzo logo you wouldn't know they made it. The character designs are very simple; the coloring is very flat; and the animation is as bad as you can get without resorting to still frame camera pans. Gonzo was once what Madhouse is now: a studio known for awesome animation even if their scripts could be sometimes iffy. Seeing a product like this from them now just saddens me, though not nearly as much as watching some of their most recent work.
There is something both very appealing and yet repulsive about the tone and characterization in the series, as it's very Noir. It's a show about human decadence: almost every character in the show (including to some extent the main character, former war photographer Saiga) is a despicable human being. And man does this show like to show you that. Sexual deviance, serial fetish-related murder, rape, child molestation, financial ruination, political corruption, flagrant abuse of police power...this show has its perverse base covered pretty thoroughly. Because this ends up being a show about how money and obsessions inevitably destroy people (in often comically exaggerated ways, such as a man who loves music turning into a walking boombox that kills people with sonic vibrations), that didn't bother me as much as it probably would otherwise but it comes just short at times of becoming a snuff film.
For all its pretensions, however, Speed Grapher is a very simple show: guy discovers decadent secret society, finds girl with strange power, gets a strange power, fights dudes, escapes with girl, and the society sends people with strange powers to kill guy and recapture girl. There are some wrinkles here and there (some work, some don't) and the show takes a pretty drastic hook at a "message" towards the end, but for the most part it's just a dude with the ability to kill people with his camera fighting all sorts of obsession-empowered superhumans. I would like to really commend the writers for the series' main villain, though. He is very well-written, perhaps one of the best I've seen in anime. His motivations are simple and his plan actually makes sense, and in a great twist he actually achieves pretty much everything he wanted.
There is one thing I've been putting off, though, that really bears mentioning because it's a very icky subject this show dabbles in: however much the series tries to dance around this, the main character is a 30 year-old man who falls into a mutual relationship with a 15-year old girl. Like the rest of the show, the writers managed to deflect a lot of the "icky"-ness by re-framing the relationship in other forms like "Father-Surrogate Daughter" and others (to avoid spoiling too much) and there never is anything physical shown or even hinted at on-screen. At the end of the day, though, it's still a romantic relationship between a 15-year old girl and a guy probably literally twice her age. That's probably a big issue for most people, and I wish the writers didn't bring it to that. At least they handled it with much more class than you would expect from anime.
Speed Grapher is a hard anime to recommend. I really feel like I shouldn't like this series, and maybe it was just the case of the right kind of show at the right time. There are certainly worse shows out there, and it's entertaining enough and thought-provoking at times. I didn't feel B.S.-ed by the ending, and that's certainly rare with anime. That said, Gonzo has produced far better and far, far, FAR better-looking shows than this.
Topic: Rate the last TV show you've seen (Read 1347979 times)
