At last, we've reached the finale of the 2013 Anime Retrospective......at the end of March. ^^; That took me WAY too long to finish, and I apologize. Thankfully the timing is perfect, as many new shows have just wrapped up along with the Winter '14 season, so I've got plenty of content to cover down the road. For now, I'm concluding the Retrospective with a look at one of my least favorite shows from last year, Beyond the Boundary. Read on and enjoy my displeasure! :D
*Note: This particular review contains some spoilers, as I have alluded to occasionally including in the past. Consider this your warning. (The tell is that I'm much more likely to include spoilers in a review if it's of a show I dislike)
In a world where demons known as "youmu" co-exist with humans, glasses-loving, mild-mannered high school student Akihito Kanbara is a half-youmu cursed with a body that can't be killed. One day, he meets Mirai Kuriyama, a careless young girl who is also a Spirit World Warrior, whose job it is to seek and eliminate aggressive youmu. From this encounter, a tale unfolds.
Hello Kyoto Animation, my old friend. Last summer you charmed me and floods of fujoshi everywhere with the campy and exceptionally well-written Free!; an excursion that could've easily failed to achieve more than being another dosage of complacent fanservice, it instead found the sweet spot between out-of-context fun and modestly built storytelling. It was a reminder to us all that KyoAni's special injection doesn't always sully the strength of good source material. I was happy - I was ready to love you again. But this......this is what you give me the season IMMEDIATELY following Free? THIS? I feel betrayed, KyoAni. You have wounded me.
On
paper, Beyond the Boundary adapted by
Kyoto Animation sounds like a formula for success. It's a dark action drama,
something KyoAni has only dabbled in lightly but never tackled the full premise
of, so it's a good opportunity for them to expand their skill set. Fight
sequences + KyoAni's expert animation prowess can only spell victory, and
truly, Beyond the Boundary is
exquisitely beautiful. Every frame is loving crafted and flows effortlessly
into the next, making the series' requisite battles fluid and appealing to the
eye, bursting with a full palette of color and flavor. Truly it is a beautiful,
beautiful show......if you don't look any deeper than the surface. Beyond the Boundary is very pretty, but
as I have stated time and time again, KyoAni gets no points for this because
their animation is ALWAYS very pretty. Once you get over the gorgeous visuals
and begin examining what Beyond the
Boundary is all about......hoo boy.
Now I
don't know what to blame on KyoAni and what to blame on the original light
novels. We live in an age where 90% of light novel content panders to the
lowest common denominator, and even the most prestigious of adaptation
companies will be unable to save it. One of the better cases would be J.C.
Staff's line-up of adaptations, although they've been lucky to receive stronger
material such as ToraDora and Golden Time. At the same time, KyoAni is
well known for injecting their workload with as much otaku fluff and pandering
as possible whether the source contained it or not. Having not read the light
novels, I admittedly have no clue which side to blame for the faults I find
with Beyond the Boundary.
Regardless, I will proceed to list them.
First
off, the characters. It's a bit ironic that our protagonist Akihito is a member
of a book club and a lover of literary design. In the first scene of the show,
he waxes on about his meeting with Mirai being a narrative device of two
stories intertwining and how the true path of the story begins from here or
something like that. Basically he's saying, "We met" in an extremely
pretentious way. But the interesting part is that the character claims to be on
top of storytelling, whereas the story he is in cannot keep its own characters
in check.
If I
could've improved one thing and one thing alone in Beyond the Boundary, it would be the continuity; namely, in its
current form, there isn't any. This is a show full of characters who can be
defined concretely by next to nothing because all of their actions are in
service to a fanservice device separate to the story at hand. You may be
wondering if Akihito's love of literature ever takes him down any path o--it
doesn't; in fact, they hardly ever bring it up except to weakly frame the
narrative by saying, "This is a story that happened." It's one of the
most profoundly lazy attempts to create a method of framing I've ever seen.
Akihito's only other trait is that he gets the jollies from girls who wear
glasses. We never know why in particular this is the case, anything about his
family life, his hopes, his desires, his dreams, NOTHING. We know that he is a
half-youmu who is seemingly immortal and that he almost killed a close friend
once, but that only serves as a fragile limb to the convoluted plot which I'll
get to later.
Then there's Mirai, the 'bespectacled beauty'. Oh but clearly
she's a good character because she can fight and she's strong, you might say.
Firstly, the ability to be fragile and weak is an acceptable and real human
trait just as much as emotional empowerment. Secondly, Mirai doesn't fit that
prerequisite because her traits are a grab-bag of moe cliches that clash with
consistency. She wears glasses which are way too big for her face and thus they
constantly slide off; she's cute but never cares about her appearance, always
wearing baggy clothes and looking disheveled like she just got out of bed;
she's a Spirit World Warrior with the greatest power in her bloodline, but
she's also totally clumsy! Mirai's a walking pile of oxymorons is what she is,
a Moe Sue. The one point I can give KyoAni is that they didn't animate her
running to school with a piece of toast in her mouth. That must've taken great
willpower.
The remaining characters fair no better. The Nase family in
particular is defined by a whole lot of nothing. Mitsuki, Akihito's closest
lady friend and part-time guardian, is defined by her ability to be snarky and
making Akihito feel publically humiliated for no good reason, and that's it.
Hiromi, Mitsuki's older brother, is defined by his creepy little sister complex
and that he likes to touch Akihito under his armpits, and that's it. Both of
these characters are Spirit World Warriors of the prestigious Nase family, but
their world and story simply require them to be quirky badasses - there's no
weight behind their status. Sakura, Mirai's childhood friend, is perhaps the
most confused character of them all. She enters into the series characterized
as a "cold huntress out for revenge", but after her 'sins' are and
arc are absolved, everything about her character is forgotten. Or rather,
nothing about her character was ever put down in writing. She still acts mopey
and cold through the rest of the show even though there's no stimulus for her
to be that way anymore......sometimes she's friendly, sometimes she's
standoffish, sometimes she's tough, sometimes she's vulnerable......occasionally
she'll be aggressive and kick Akihito in the face even though she never shows
any sign of being a tsundere elsewhere. My theory is the writers had no idea
what to do with her and instead of writing her out of the show, kept her around
to help represent whatever mood was required for a particular scene, whether it
fit with her bleakly defined character or not.
Another big problem with Beyond
the Boundary is its plot. Again, for a show with a main character who's all
about stories, the story he's in is needlessly complex. Early episodes follow a
fairly standard formula: Mirai has very strong powers and isn't good at
controlling them, having killed someone in the past, and is thus unsure of
herself; but then she meets Akihito, a half-youmu who also has dangerous powers
but has moved on from the pain, and he understands her pain, creating a
connection. The odd thing about this relationship is that Mirai is introduced
as the base affected by a catalyst (Akihito)......even though Akihito is the
main character. This is a common fault of LN-storytelling: the main character
will be male but the story will hinge to the behest of the female lead's
actions, primarily using the male as a dull catalyst to the tirelessly more
fleshed out female. Beyond the Boundary
fairs somewhat better in that Akihito contains more defining features than your
standard male LN protagonist.
Once the connection between Mirai and Akihito is made, the
story tapers off into a series of seemingly separate vignettes which connect in
a not so cohesive way. We eventually discover a secret about Mirai which
completely turns around the interpretations of her actions, yet amusingly,
doesn't change the stakes which were set up in the first episode, though the
show desperately wants them to. Because of this, I don't mind spoiling this to
you at all. In Episode 1, Mirai is constantly trying to slay Akihito, because
she can sense that he has youmu blood in his veins, and that's her job: to slay
demons. Later on, we uncover the horrifying truth about her actions,
namely........that someone HIRED her to slay him! O-okay? So the big twist is
that she's been trying to kill him for the entire show......even though we
already knew that?
From here, the story just congeals into a bloated mess,
which I will rush through now. A giant cloud of youmu energy called The Calm is
passing over the city which agitates youmu and makes them more aggressive, thus
there is a fear that Akihito's youmu side will take over him, and instead of letting
Akihito stay alert and be wary of his own actions, Izumi (the elder sister and
heir to the the Nase family) drugs him even though this will make him more
vulnerable and indeed it does and his youmu side completely takes over, but she
did this because Izumi Nase was the person who hired Mirai to slay Akihito
before the series began proper because apparently his youmu half is a youmu
called "Beyond the Boundary" and it's the most powerful youmu of all
time which I guess explains why Akihito is partially immortal and apparently
only Mirai's blood can slay "Beyond the Boundary" though they never
say why and apparently we absolutely have to slay Akihito even though there was
no proof his youmu side would ever take him over, in fact that only reason it
ever did is because Izumi drugged him and left him susceptible to The Calm so
if you hadn't have done that he'd probably be fine making this whole scheme
entirely circumlocutions and A WASTE OF OUR TIME. *fizzle*
Then everything gets all romance-y and introspective and
continues abandoning sense for dramatic effect and pretty visuals, complete
with a giant fuck you ending that really hinges on how much you like Mirai as a
character and ultimately blows away any chance of this narrative making sense.
And all the while existing within a frame device ABOUT storytelling and how the
paths of characters intertwine. Beyond
the Boundary would have you believe that two paths destined will always
intertwine, even if it makes absolutely no fucking sense. It's that kind of
show that makes you think it's taking a bold upper road and keeping the ramifications
of an event in reality, but then it turns around and everybody lives happily
ever after, no emotional baggage, no growth, no lessons learned, the end! Fuck
off, Beyond the Boundary. You did not
EARN that happy ending.
Beyond the Boundary
believes that is it imparting a profound message; it believes that it is deep
emotional drama; it believes it is a lot of things. And it could have pulled
them off. The pieces are all in place for a truly meaningful work to emerge,
but in the end it feels like nothing more than a pandering cash-grab to add to
KyoAni's ever growing list of the same. Though a massively clichéd statement to
attribute, this show really is a prime example of "having your cake and
eating it too". Instead of trying to be one competent thing, it tries to
be ALL the things: action, comedy, drama, romance, horror, mystery. The result
is a show that staggers from one tone to the next with the grace of a
tilt-o-whirl.
This show, to me, is unfinished. If you want a 12-episode
long demo reel of Kyoto Animation's stellar animation quality, than this works
perfectly as such, but as absolutely nothing else. As an anime series, it's a
seashell encrusted with fabulous jewels, but inside it's completely empty.
Beyond the Boundary is so unconvincingly stuffed with plot and nonsensical
non-humor and inconsistent characters that try so damn hard to endear
themselves to you, utilizing the same old tricks KyoAni exercised to negative
effect in their more serious romantic affairs like Chuunibyo, this attempt feels like a whole lot of hot air. The
original story is garbage with the weakest kinds of twists and turns, and
KyoAni does nothing to salvage it. Rather, they only make the flaws more
apparent with the most uninspired application of their inherent strengths yet.
And
yet, I don't think this show did badly at all. I think most people LIKED it.
But such is the terrifying power of Kyoto Animation. They know exactly what
otaku want to see and they deliver. In that case, if you want to see a one-off
anime episode about a demon that is attracted to young girls and specifically
is attracted to young girls who dance while dressed as idols, and when
disturbed explosively cums stinky goo all over the girls.........then Beyond the Boundary unfortunately
provides. Enjoy your mindless spunk filler!
You can currently find all subbed episodes of Beyond the Boundary streaming online courtesy of Crunchyroll. The series has been licensed by Sentai Filmworks and is slated for an unspecified home video release sometime this year.
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