Aug 5, 2022
This is my very first review, so please bear with me if it gets choppy.
I'm going to keep it short because nothing annoys me more than opening the "Read More" section, seeing a PhD thesis about the philosophy of the world and the ethical connotations of child murder on something like ERASED, and having to read the synopsis again. No one is here for that.
--- ACTUAL REVIEW/CONTAINS SPOILERS ---
I found this anime to have incredible potential with the subject matter it portrays in all of its episodes, but that potential is wasted when every scenario is only an episode long with only 7 minutes of
...
actual screen time:
- The idea of transcending spoken language and being able to add emotion to what you're trying to convey, but it ends up bringing the worst out of people and driving them all to loneliness and solitude.
- The idea of helping people out on the verge of starvation only to find out they're slavers and ate their slaves for sustenance.
- The idea that tradition can drive a civilization to an inevitable self collapse due to their inability for self reflection, or their overwhelming urge to develop a tradition of their own without realizing that their drive for traditions is a tradition in of itself.
- The idea of living in a society where 12 years old is the pivot from when you're a child to an adult. You then go to a hospital to forcefully brainwash you into being a mindless happy member of society.
- The idea that your labour in every aspect can now be automated, but your society is built on using the stress of a job as a social and economic currency, and the ethical connotations of being a slave to your work without realizing the value of anything else.
- The idea of a society where your fighting capabilities determine your hierarchy in society, and that the civilians live under the whim of the winners of those who fight in a colosseum.
- The idea that a society is so devoted to the repetition of tradition to where it is so hostile to innovation that it actively persecutes those who innovate.
- The idea that a library's contents and its allowances are entirely dictated by an unelected group of censors that prevent anything to be read that could pose as a threat.
- The idea that the creation of mechanical beings to take control of manual labour so that the majority of society could focus in on its own domestic issues: racial tension, class hierarchies, and general unrest. To which it backfires and causes the society to implode and kill itself, leaving only the mechanical beings that they had created to succeed them.
- The idea that two warring nations that have been fighting each other for over 100 years, having lost hundreds of thousands of lives, agree to cease all hostilities and to compete instead on who can massacre the most amount of civilians of a third party tribe. This tribe that is massacred is not even hypothetically close to even being able to fight back and just allows themselves to be massacred due to this helplessness.
- The idea that a society that is too prideful to leave an area that their forefathers founded despite knowing that they would be utterly destroyed due to a cataclysmic event they knew was coming, leaving the only trace of their existence and their memory to the one traveler known as Kino.
All of these are phenomenally beautiful scenarios that could be fleshed out wonderfully, but are doomed to express themselves in that limited 7 minutes. I could not help but feel as if this entire anime was more of a slideshow, showing idea after idea for the viewer to see rather than to be told.
I understand that this limiting factor is due to Kino's obsession of giving herself only three days to experience these places as she's afraid to settle down --due to her upbringing and exposure to another traveler to which she took her name from. It makes sense that these ideas couldn't be fleshed out more than they were, and that is exactly why this anime was an enormous disappointment for me.
TLDR: This anime had the potential of a year but only had an hour to show it. The equivalent of killing a deer and only taking the antlers. This is an anime doomed to fail in its storytelling due to its arbitrary --yet understandable due to Kino's past-- limit of three days in any location despite the wonderful story it could have told.
It truly does pain me to have rated it what I did, but I do feel as if it deserved it due to its actual product rather than what it promised.
Thank you for reading my first review.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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