What does it mean to hurt? What does it mean to love? What does it mean to be a friend? Kiznaiver, a Drama/SciFi manga adaptation from Studio Trigger (Spring 2016), takes a stab at a heavily character driven story and completely succeeds. The show uses it’s beautiful animation + soundtrack, objectively unique and strong characterization, and deep philosophical questioning of human connection to deliver a new twist on the plot of Rebirth and a meaningful re-imagination of anime’s friendship cliché.
Love or hate the show, there’s no denying Studio Trigger ‘showed up’ for the art of Kiznaiver. Each character has an identity, their looks reflecting
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their personalities brilliantly, not to mention their body language. Simply watching the intro, we are given a grand spectacle which imprints an understanding of the characters early on, before we have even met most of cast (but I’ll be going more in depth on Kiznaiver’s OP on my blog at a later time). Each character is visually appealing and expressive, giving the audience little reason to turn away from the screen for a majority of the series. Even those with little emotion in the show are extremely interesting to look at, allowing the director (Hiroshi Kobayashi) to set up some genuinely funny and serious moments as a result. On top of that, the animation itself is phenomenal, making use of fluid dynamic camera angles and the works.
As far as audio goes for the show, it is great. The music rises and falls in a perfect flow for the narrative, and knows when to go completely silence to let powerful lines of dialogue hit hard. Yuuki Hayashi (previous works including: Haikyuu!, Death Parade, and Boku no Hero Academia) was in charge of music for this series, and did a terrific job. The music for the opening and endings are fantastic (the op being the thing that drew me in to watch the series in the first place), and the ed following up was a great touch to every episode (the ed being another thing I’d like to go in depth on at a later date). Going past the music, the sound effects were spot on. The fictional sound effects that was generated for group’s connected pain was intuitive and, for how often its heard, never gets distracting or feel out of place. Well done over all.
(Plot Summary will be kept to a minimum for MAL review guidelines)
Getting into the story, the plot revolves around seven main characters, the most prominent being: Katsuhira Agata (or Kacchon). Katsuhira is completely unable to feel pain, and is emotionally distant from the world. A glimpse into his past in the first minute of the pilot shows him at a young age chasing after a girl standing on a roof. While trying to talk her down, she grins and jumps. He cries out, reaches down to his chest in pain and his hair turns white (see: Marie Antoinette syndrome). This scene sets up a potent understanding of, and connection to, our protagonist as we view his behavior and hear his first few words. In this scene he is holding conversation with Chidori Takashiro, a close friend growing up. He asks why a cicada bothered coming to the surface: its safer underground and it won’t live very long anyways. Chidori replies, “Maybe it wanted friends, or something?” It is the brilliance of these lines, that expose us to the main ideas of the plot while giving an introduction to these character’s personalities and already starts to build a connection with these characters.
As the story progresses, Katsuharia meets a strange girl who we later find out to be Noriko Sonozaki. She tells him that people bully him because he doesn’t get scared, and doesn’t feel pain, meaning others “cannot find themselves within him”. As he processes these words, she suddenly throws him down a flight of stairs, knocking him out. Upon waking up he is in a hospital with 5 other individuals. They are informed they are a part of the “Kiznaivers experiment” and they are now connected by their wounds. If one individual experiences pain it will be divided equally between everyone connected, in an attempt to create true human connections. The others who are chosen for the experiment were selected under the criteria that they would have never met normally or got along with each other, as well as loosely fitting the definition of the seven deadly sins (or an updated version for modern japan). These differences in characters truly play into the strength of the show’s characterization as each one is unique. From their designs, to body language, to behavior; but it doesn’t stop there. Each character has very human flaws, insecurities, and desires; so when the characters get time on screen you to truly begin to understand them and connect. No character can simply fill an archetype, as they are all diverse and feel deeply human, and in their doing so: Trigger has made a colorful cast of individuals who you want to know more about. This creates an environment where every line and decision made feel purposeful and impactful to the group as they learn how to get along.
Lastly, the show taps into a deeper philisophical question, of how do humans connect? Human inherently are not perfect, and as a result of this connection with others is not always simple. Especially in our age of internet its easy to keep to ourselves. In context of Katsuhira’s cicada, why bother going outside where you have to open up and can get hurt? We die too soon anyways. We can see an argument formed through the show’s use of the Kiznaiver experiment, This creates a literal empathy between the characters, and over the course of the show we see these individuals grow, connect and change. They will never be the same people they were at the start. They’ve opened up slowly and they will get hurt along the way. The guy doesn’t always get the girl, others don’t always return their feelings, tragic events can completely destroy friendships, but as humans we keep on moving. The show doesn’t sugar coat the hardships, but it shows us the joy in making the connections, to being a friend to some body. Characters may not end up with who you want them to, and while this has been known to piss some viewers off, we should really see it as beautiful thing. That’s not how real life works, why should it in the show? Getting to know these people so well, you want these relationships to blossom as much as the characters themselves, so it can hurt when we get the truth, but in the end they come to terms with things and learn to live on. This is the re-imagination of the ‘friendship’ trope; we aren’t forcefed a “friendship concquers all” scenario, but instead are eased into a more human and compelling arguement of: “connection with others gives meaning to life”. The main theme the show is presenting is: people need to open up. It’s not easy, you will get hurt, and need to share that pain with those closest to you. But goddamn is it ever worth it.
TL;DR
+ Beautifully Animated
+ Deeper Themes to make you think
+ Strong connection with the cast makes dialogue feel purposeful, and decisions feel impactful
– Plot lags in the interest of character development
– It had to End
If I have to put a number to it:
9/10
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Oct 17, 2016
What does it mean to hurt? What does it mean to love? What does it mean to be a friend? Kiznaiver, a Drama/SciFi manga adaptation from Studio Trigger (Spring 2016), takes a stab at a heavily character driven story and completely succeeds. The show uses it’s beautiful animation + soundtrack, objectively unique and strong characterization, and deep philosophical questioning of human connection to deliver a new twist on the plot of Rebirth and a meaningful re-imagination of anime’s friendship cliché.
Love or hate the show, there’s no denying Studio Trigger ‘showed up’ for the art of Kiznaiver. Each character has an identity, their looks reflecting ... |
