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Well that didn't work.

I open as such because it sort of sums up the whole experience of Tokyo 24th Ward: it just didn't work. And it's not for lack of trying, not for lack of ambition, not for lack of ideas, no it's for the completely opposite reason. The show tries really really hard, is overflowing with ambition, has tons and tons of ideas, and from that comes a hot mess. Hoo boy is this show a mess…

So, the show's basic pitch is that it is a coming-of-age story about three young men: Aoi Shuta, the supremely athletic son of a baker who aspires to ... become a hero, Akagi Ran, a brilliant street artist and computer genius who runs a hackivist group, and Suido Koki, the son of the mayor who aspires to use his power and privilege to make the world a better place. The three live on a man-made island in Tokyo Bay, a special administration zone known as the titular 24th Ward. In high school the three of them made up "RGB", a trio of heroic problem solvers who became local icons thanks to what they could do when they worked together, but after a tragedy where Koki's sister Asumi died in a fire the group drifted apart. Koki joined the ward's special law enforcement branch commanded by his father, Ran went underground and continued phreaking and hacking as a political statement, and Shuta got stuck in a rut. However, one day when the three of them met up again they received a phone call inexplicably from Asumi who gave them a vision of the future and a choice, a mutual friend was about to be killed by a train car. Would they derail the train to save her, or let her die?

From there the show spirals outward, because it turns out that there is a LOT more to the setting and the world than even that fairly expansive more-than-an-elevator pitch gets across. Not only did the phone call give them a vision of future, it also gave the three superpowers for the length of the crisis! And the setting isn't just a fairly standard Japanese urban Prefecture, there's also the fact that the police equivalents in the ward have access to the "hazard cast" which is a minority report style crime precognition software which is made publicly available as a smart phone app. Also, there are rising tensions between the ward in general and its lower class shantytown area. There are also political tensions relating to whether or not the ward will become a part of greater Tokyo or remain largely self governed, and also the ward itself is being used as a political petri dish for ideas like the aforementioned minority report technology. Also organized crime has inserted itself into the story for a variety of reasons. Also there is an epidemic of futuristic sci-fi drugs. And the ongoing question of whether or not Asumi is actually dead given the phone calls she keeps making for leads telling them to answer various versions of the trolley problem. And we can't forget the dude in the elaborate costume and Jester mask who keeps claiming responsibility for the various crises facing the city.

If that sounds like it is quite a lot for any show to handle, much less a 12 episode anime, well there you go. When the weirdo in the elaborate Joker costume amounts to little more than a side note to the main story you know your anime is bloated to hell and back.

The simple fact of the matter is that there was just too much stuff in Tokyo 24th Ward. If the show had focused on one or two of its big ideas it might've gotten somewhere, but was put on screen is an overfull, jumbled mess. Is this a show about the loss of privacy in the information age? The philosophical challenges of the modern era? Class disparity? The need for solidarity? The end of childhood innocence? The role of art in politics? About grief, loss, mourning and the need to move on? The limitations of technology? The challenges and weaknesses of democracy? Speculative fiction about transforming society? The conflict between the past and the future? Nurturing a mature ideal of heroism? Standing your ground and holding fast to what you know is good? The agony of making a hard decision? How not to use a corpse? Why you shouldn't commit electrical sabotage in the middle of a hurricane? You could credibly argue the show is about any, if not all, of those things but the problem is that a 1 cour show that asks that many questions is going to have a hard time giving satisfying answers to any of those big deal questions, and wouldn't you know it Tokyo 24th Ward is not exception to that concern.

By the end of Tokyo 24th Ward many questions have been answered, but they are questions we either didn't need an answer to, didn't want an answer to, could have figured out on our own, or have answers that are very stupid indeed. The full reveal of what happened with Shuta and Asumi and the others on that fateful day left me going "seriously? That is seriously it? You have got to be kidding me," and alas they weren't. The show also throws up its hands about half of the ideas it brings up and quietly ignores them going into the back half of the story line, and even the storylines that it tries to carry through just don't hold together. The character arcs have this jagged and inelegant quality to them, like each episode and each interaction doesn't quite flow naturally from the previous into the next. And related to that complaint, one of the most curious things to me in hindsight with regards to Tokyo 24th Ward is the vague sense that the show somehow forgot that people in the audience do not know about things that happen offscreen. The show seems to take it as read that the big emotional moments will have the same impact to the viewers at home, but the show is also all hands when it comes to actually doing emotional storytelling. Not good.

Some time must also be spent to mention that the show seems like it had a troubled production. Studio Cloverworks has not had a good time of it recently given some of the horror stories coming out relating to the productions of last year's disappointments like Wonder Egg Priority and The Promised Neverland Season 2, and there is a vague sense that something similar happened here given that regular viewing was interrupted after episode nine for a clip show, which is always a very bad sign. Even worse, this clip show episode aired immediately after the show threw away all its momentum after serious turning point to suddenly jump into a flashback episode that told us approximately nothing we didn't already know. Whether the flashback (which was mostly talking and therefore probably cheaper and easier to make) was always intended on being here or was hastily put in as a triage is unclear, but it nonetheless speaks to the show's overall slapdash structuring.

And no, Tokyo 24th Ward doesn't actually take a strong stand on the final big idea trolley problem. If you're looking for a particularly interesting or thought-provoking anime this isn't where you should be looking. And I honestly can't even necessarily recommend it for the humor value of being an overwrought trainwreck, it's a little bit too dour and a little bit too serious to be all that fun. Thumbs down.