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Apr 16, 2019
The Promised Neverland is a story that fails to play to its strengths and ends up feeling like it realized less of its potential than it wasted.
Like most mystery stories, it is structured in a succession of small questions whose answers make the characters and the viewers progress in their search for the truth. Its main weakness is that it fails to make the viewers care about those questions, and thus becomes a plot-driven show without an interesting plot.
The first reason why it can be hard to get invested in all those small mysteries is that as early as the first episode, the show presents
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viewers with several much bigger and more interesting questions: what is the world like outside the orphanage ?, what made it become like this ?, who exactly is Isabella ? Compared to these mysteries, of which only one really gets looked into, it can feel like most of the events the characters get involved in are secondary and delay the progression of the main plot instead of advancing it.
The way the story is written also participates in this impression of stalling and dullness, for a number of interconnected reasons. One of the most significant issues is that it is difficult to get invested in the characters. Indeed, while they are far from being the worst shounen characters around, almost all of them, including the main trio, lack the things that usually make characters engaging: they are rather predictable and generic, they receive no development, have very simple personalities, and no backstory. They are simply very smart children. The only child who undergoes something that could be called development and about whom things are revealed becomes the least believable of them all, and is probably the most archetypal too. The one exception is Isabella, the children's caretaker, whose combination of cold scheming and warm maternal love is interesting. Her past and motivations are by far the most compelling mysteries of the series, but even she comes off as averagely written, as her level of intelligence doesn't feel consistent throughout the series. Sister Krone, on the other hand, is an appalling character, with her caricatural expressions, excessive monologues and near absence of plot relevance.
Due to the lack of complexity I described, dialogues between the children, which occupy most of The Promised Neverland's time, are often lackluster. They are devoid of creativity from both a directing and a writing standpoint, and rarely feature ingenious reasoning. The children simply try to convince one another of doing things that the viewers are already pretty sure they will do and make some oddly accurate big assumptions based on the tiny amount of information they have.
Likewise, the battles of wits that are the anime's main sources of dramatic tension are poorly written and very hard to buy into, because their structure is one that should make it impossible for Isabella to lose, given how clever she is shown to be and considering the extreme asymmetry of information between the two sides. When she gets tricked, it is only thanks to amateurish plot conveniences, and it feels contrived.
Additionally, the fragility of the suppositions the children base their actions on are so fragile makes the numerous twists of the story a lot less powerful, as viewers are bound to expect that some unforeseen events will happen, especially considering how frequently they occur.
Another major issue of The Promised Neverland's writing is how shaky its plot is: the illogically useful nature of the children's education, how many dangerous possibilities they are carelessly left with, the fact that Isabella almost never takes serious action despite having the power to do it, and many other elements of the series, are all elements that contribute to undermine the show's believeability.
Along with its flawed writing, the anime also suffers from questionable choices in its direction, which makes use of some very artificial-sounding ways of creating tension. In a lot of scenes, situations that end up being perfectly harmless are presented in such a manner as to make them seem frightening. On top of betraying the viewers' expectations and quickly making these scenes lose all power, this repeated absence of consequences undermines the credibility of the narrative as a whole. What's more, the episodes invariably end on cliffhangers that most of the time turn out to be inconsequential, and the dramatic moments of the series are frequently too overplayed not to come off as inauthentic.
As for the series' presentation, it is neither bad nor very good. The natural backgrounds are acceptable, but the interiors are often lackluster. Some of the character designs, such as Isabella's, are strong, but most of them go from average to awful.
Overall, The Promised Neverland is not a very satisfying anime to watch. Its mediocre writing and directing make most of the narrative feel inconsequential or difficult to believe, and its constant reliance on deception prevents it from having real payoffs. While its premise and setting seemed interesting, the execution didn't do them justice and turned them into little more than the context for a slow succession of heavy dialogues.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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Feb 8, 2019
SukaSuka, to my mind, is an anime that lacks a personality. Both its writing and execution lazily follow hackneyed recipes, which prevents it from being anything else than a juxtaposition of dull tropes and plot devices.
This review will delve into the main reasons why I found it very difficult to get immersed in SukaSuka's story, or even to simply take it seriously.
The most evident one, which I mentioned a bit already, pervades every level of the anime; it is the fact that the plot, worldbuilding and characters of the show all correspond to commonplaces of generic light novel adaptations. For instance, all the members
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of the main cast strictly follow archetypes like the tragic tsundere, the outgoing neko girl, or the overpowered protagonist most female characters end up in love with. The characters' personalities are justified by the plot, though not always very convincingly, but they cruelly lack something that would humanize them. Their actions, designs, and their voice acting, which is especially trite, are so clichéd that they make it nearly impossible to suspend one's disbelief and see those characters as anything else than mere plot devices. The often out of place otaku-bait that are the couple of borderline hentai scenes and Ithea's metatextual jokes undermine any suspension of disbelief even more, and are representative of another one of SukaSuka's writing issues: its lack of coherence.
Indeed, the anime's plot is both full of holes and extremely unequally distributed between the episodes. It generally is developed through some unclear and heavy exposition scenes, and most of it is only explained in the penultimate episode. Consequently, during most of the anime, it is impossible for viewers to really grasp what is happening to the characters, as they don't yet know the rules that govern their world. Therefore, each new plot point feels like it comes out of left field and lacks a logical explanation, which damages the sense of continuity and the solidity of the narrative. The main female character, Chtolly, also acts and thinks very inconsistently; her personality changes from scene to scene in a way that is jarring and hard to believe.
A lot of these inconsistencies can be attributed to a wish from the writer to create dramatic tension at all costs. As a matter of fact, none of the anime's ideas and themes are really explored, as it limits itself to scenes that aim at causing an emotional reaction in the viewers. Even when one looks at it in hindsight, SukaSuka's story doesn't make much sense: its historical context and its magic system seem like they exist only to justify the fact that children are used as weapons, that the main characters are special and that they find themselves in tear-jerking situations despite being overpowered. The romance between the two protagonists is as banal and mawkish as it is unrealistic, and only adds to the impression that the show's writing is deplorably superficial.
On top of having a weak plot, SukaSuka suffers from inept execution. In particular, the arrangement of its different scenes doesn't allow for the building of a harmonious atmosphere. In addition to the fact that the scenes that contain essential information for the story are often given less attention than insignificant ones, they follow one another extremely abruptly without there being a sense of cohesion between them. The exposition, whose role is crucial in any story to establish a sort of author-reader contract, is by far the worse part of the series: it haphazardly mixes tones and juxtaposes different commonplaces and techniques, which for the majority of them never reappear again. This tendency to clumsily blend different kinds of atmosphere is a recurring feature of the anime, which is at its worst at the end of episode two, when a scene which is supposed to be sad and emotional is immediately followed by an especially distasteful fan service moment. The presence of fillers even though the series is only twelve episodes long goes to show how badly its screen time was allocated.
From a presentation standpoint, SukaSuka is not the worst of series, but it doesn't really shine either. Its cinematography varies from generic mediocrity to incompetence, its average OST is used in a cheesy manner that participates in its poor handling of ambiance, and most of its designs are uninspired. Those of the animal-people, evil beasts and flying boats are awful, but those of the main characters as well as the setting are about passable.
As for the dialogues, they are dreadfully bad: not only are they stereotypical and devoid of any aesthetic concern, but they also waste an incredible amount of time making references to things both the characters and the viewers already know, without elaborating on them. Sometimes, they also do the opposite by hinting at things or mentioning subjects so vaguely that one only ends up equally if not more confused after the dialogue than before.
To put it in a nutshell, SukaSuka is not an interesting anime. It doesn't seem to truly understand the codes and tropes it is made of and handles them in an amateurish manner, to such an extent that it sometimes feel insulting. It has no soul, no depth, no originality, there is no reason to watch it.
Reviewer’s Rating: 1
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Jul 27, 2018
It is not rare for shounen sports manga to end up focusing more on the characters and on their evolution than on a careful representation of the sport they practice. Slam Dunk opts for the opposite approach, as it relies much more on the tension generated by realistically and extensively-depicted basketball than on character-development to offer an engaging experience. My opinion is that it only partly succeeds in this undertaking because it is brought down by some significant flaws.
This review will mainly be a critique of what I consider to be Slam Dunk's main weaknesses: its characters, its dialogues and the way its basketball
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games are structured. I will however start by mentioning the manga's visual representation of the sport, which I found to be its main quality.
Inoue's art, which is already above average at the start of the manga, consistently gets better and successfully brings the basketball games to life in a both realistic and striking manner. Along with the masterful way in which the panels are laid out, it effectively displays the difficulty of the moves it depicts and equally contributes to bringing suspense and strong payoffs to the games. The few text-less scenes are especially impressive, I found them breathtaking.
Apart from those strictly technical aspects, several other elements pertain to the ambition of the manga to rely on pure and realistic basketball: the rules and main moves are progressively explained to the reader at the same time as the protagonist is learning them, and many of those moves are as well-described as they are impressively showcased. Furthermore, legitimate tactics play a major role in the games. Even though the characters can be extremely talented at using some techniques, they don't have any of the nearly magical secret powers one can often find in shounen manga.
This being said, it doesn't mean that Slam Dunk is free of the usual shounen sports manga framework, as its main storyline is as typical as it gets: there is a steady escalation of stakes and powers, simplistic -though sometimes touching- flashbacks are regularly used to give scenes more emotional impact, and the humor, which is very typical of its time, sometimes works well but sometimes feels very heavy. More importantly, almost all characters often act, think and speak in a simplistic or even silly manner, which I find to be the one of the major weaknesses of the series.
The main character Sakuragi is extremely dense, hot-tempered and a bit of a delinquent, as a lot of shounen protagonists were in the nineties, but he is so naturally talented and has such an incredible learning speed that he quickly becomes a key player in his high school's basketball team. Rukawa, who is the ace of the team and another one of the most important characters, is rather boring and flat, other than the fact that he has a rivalry with Sakuragi which most likely inspired that of Naruto and Sasuke: the red-haired, hot-tempered guy with amazing potential wants to catch up to the apathetic, dark-haired genius. And that's about the extent of this manga's character writing. The characters mostly stay as they are for the entirety of the long story.
That is to say, Slam Dunk's character writing is quite weak. Even though Sakuragi and his teammates steadily grow as basketball players, they only ever change as persons on occasions that are so rare and sudden that they lack impact and feel artificial. The measly amount of character development the manga has to offer is therefore neither significant nor realistic. Where other shounen manga often rely on their characters to carry them in the long run, Slam Dunk's main cast lacks complexity and is not believable enough to stay interesting for 31 volumes. Some of the other characters like Akagi and to a lesser extent Kogure, Ryouta and Mitsui are much more likeable than Sakuragi and Rukawa, though they are also quite simplistic. The one thing that best managed to draw my empathy was actually the abstract but omnipresent entity of Shohoku (the name of the character's high school and team), which concentrates the passion and dreams of many, and thus has enough emotional weight to occasionally move a reader. As for the antagonists, when they are not ridiculously caricatural, they are about average. Not a single one of them is really interesting.
Slam Dunk's subpar characters, strong art and rather realistic depiction of basketball logically lead the reader to focus on the action, which thus constitutes the main interest of the manga. Regrettably, the weakness of the characters often bleeds onto the action itself. For instance, the way they speak during basketball games is quite unpleasant: they frequently shout across to their opponents and provoke them brashly, and their monologues are full of annoying ramblings about the importance of victory and their desire to be stronger. This kind of speech is fairly common in shounen manga, as the opponents are supposed to represent the inner obstacles that the characters have to overcome in order to grow, and as it further contextualizes the action, thereby raising its stakes. In Slam Dunk however, the caricatural personalities of the characters, the paucity and redundancy of the words they use and the recurrence of those passages make them feel tedious.
Another problem with the manga's action is the unnatural rhythm of its basketball games. They are almost systematically divided in sections in which one team tries to overcome a problem posed by the other team's way of playing. In order to do so, they need to implement a specific strategy that will either quickly succeed -in which case the section is generally entertaining-, or require a given player to surpass himself by mastering a new move or by managing to overwhelm his seemingly superior opponent. These moments, which can be found in most shounen battle series, are very frequent in Slam Dunk and extremely annoying, because they often include the aforementioned weak dialogues or flashbacks that interrupt the game and break its flow.
This unnatural rhythm strongly undermines the realism of the manga for the sake of cheap clichés and power-ups. Even worse, in order to create tension, several of those drastic changes in players' abilities often occur in the course of a single game and they are always accompanied by significant score gaps that are alternately bridged and widened by both teams.
Slam Dunk's length is its last weakness: the characters are not good enough for the emotional connection the reader builds with them over time to counterbalance the manga's repetitiveness; it makes elements that were funny, believable or dramatic in the beginning lose their effectiveness and ultimately feel unimpressive.
The ending of the manga is average, and so are the majority of the secondary characters such as Haruko, Ayako, Aota and the coaches: they are decent but basic, semi-effective in their role as comic reliefs, and are ultimately bound to stay underdeveloped spectators.
To put it in a nutshell, Slam Dunk is neither awful nor outstanding. It relies mostly on being purely about sports at the detriment of the characters, but despite its strong art, it doesn't really manage to excel in this domain due to a lack of realism that sometimes makes it hard to take seriously. Watching a real basketball game with real stakes, more consistent tension and actually interesting players is in my opinion a more interesting activity than reading this manga.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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