Anime: Nihon Chinbotsu 2020 5v3hn

"You're kidding!" -A main character mere seconds before succumbing to one of the stupidest anime deaths this year, Japan Sinks 2020

Hope, while often necessary, can be a ruinous thing to have in the midst of a disaster. Despite the catastrophically negative reception among friends and the similarly dismal scores the show has, I still had hope that it could be at least entertaining in some regard. Even an Inuyashiki tier “so bad it’s good” title would’ve been enough to be satisfying, if still ultimately bizarre given how this is treated as a Yuasa work...more on that later. Unfortunately, this ONA is just an abject failure in almost all regards, and outside of some moments in the second half, is a dull and frustrating slog.

If we’re going to start anywhere, might as well do so at the visuals to get some things out of the way. The name “Masaaki Yuasa” most certainly got thousands to check this show out, as he’s one of the most acclaimed directors of the 2010s for his work on hits such as Tatami Galaxy and Ping Pong The Animation. Unfortunately, it’s a name that isn’t as baked into the show as with most other titles he is involved with, as Korean first-time director Pyeonggang Heo was the series director. Needless to say, it really shows when the only other credit Yuasa had for this show was storyboarding for 4 episodes. Those episodes have a few genuinely nice shots, even if they aren’t anything special by his standards. However, even in those episodes, the artwork in this show can be rough, to put it generously. While there are moments that look nice, such as when two characters are playing fighting games or when one of the characters is in a dream sequence that looks like an MMORPG, the show’s main art style is generally unappealing, The artwork rarely stays on model, and it all just comes off like a discount Devilman Crybaby. The animation often feels incredibly choppy, and that’s when it doesn’t become a slideshow or otherwise feel standard at best. For the first half of the show, there is almost no awful CGI outside of some of the water in the show, but that’s not exactly praise, now is it? Then we get to the second half where the already subpar production plummets below the earth’s surface. There are a few decent shots with our characters at sea in episode 8, but the artwork consistently dips through the floor and is where most of the meme screenshots come from. The abysmal CGI grows more rampant by the episode and the choppy visuals get even more stilted. The slideshow moments and other cost-cutting techniques increase as well, indicating that in an already likely outsourced production, the latter half received considerably less attention and time than the first half. Science SARU is still listed as the production studio for this show, but this is a far cry from even their less visually stable works prior to this.

The production values are far from the only baffling thing about the show. There’s a disturbing number of scenes where I don’t know that the aim of them being there was apart from filling time. The lack of handling regarding the show’s tone further accentuates the issue, as I generally don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel during most scenes. I get the idea of the show being how one must persevere and have hope in the face of adversity as that’s the only way to get through. However, it just feels like characters have no time to grieve and instead just become happy go lucky mere moments later, forgetting about any trauma entirely. Immediately after one of the main characters dies in the second episode, the third is just everyone walking while being slightly mopey. Whenever someone dies in episode 8, the survivors get sad for less than a minute before riding off in a motorboat while someone screams “LET’S GO CRAZYYYYYYYYY” in glorious Engrish, and upbeat electronic music plays. This is followed up by a rap battle, by the way. It doesn’t feel like the characters are lifting their spirits organically, and more like death is never a lasting consequence on anyone’s psyches or mood outside of one character moping on occasion. As a result, it’s difficult for these deaths to stick as impactful for the audience either. It doesn’t help when episodes just start introducing off the wall concepts and plotlines out of nowhere like when our characters are enveloped into a cult or when a bunch of people are having a mexican standoff over a vault of gold where a medium between life and death pulls out a katana on everyone. Are we supposed to take this show seriously and address the supposedly realistic elements like characters scavenging for food and water, or go with these fantastical concepts and ignore things like the MC receiving a laceration on her leg until it’s convenient for the plot to make her stumble? By the time an old man started 360 no-scoping people on a wheelchair with a bow and arrow, I stopped being sure about anything anymore.

Yes, this show’s writing and structuring are abysmal, and that’s not even the half of it. Even outside of the aforementioned example, the show is so absurdly contrived that in the first episode, we get an out of nowhere plane failure that coincidentally happened alongside the earthquake, and the convenient path of colored trees the main lead and her mom found afterwards that let them know the dad was alive without us being given any reason at the time to assume there was any correlation. This is just so they can have complications and then meet up. In episode 3, poison gas coming out of the ground is sprouted for that scene only, and it’s so they can unceremoniously kill off and immediately replace a character that was close to our main leads with a Youtuber. Japan Sinks also pulls a Devilman Crybaby and introduces cliffhangers for shock value and then immediately disarming them or forgetting about them at the start of the next, rendering them entirely pointless. After instilling a somber yet hopeful tone for the last few minutes, episode 1 decides to end on a random helicopter crashing as bloodied corpses fall from the sky and onto a bunch of civilians, including our main characters. Episode 3 has it even worse, with one of our main characters getting shot in the heart area where his gaming handheld is. In the first 2 minutes of the very next episode, they pull it out of the gadget and all that happened to him was that he hurt his head a little and needs his green PS Vita repaired. Perhaps even more insulting than all of that is something I’ve never seen any piece of media do until now. Whenever a character is dying or a building related to them is crumbling, we’re given flashback dialogue in order to manipulate the audience into feeling for a character’s death or the destruction of something related to them when often times, this is the first we’ve even learned anything about why these people and places are special. The only exceptions are the deaths of two characters in 8 and 9 where we learn things about them in advance, only to still get these verbal flashbacks. Oh, but don’t you worry. You’ll get your precious visual flashbacks in the 20 minute epilogue 10 minutes into the finale. Hope you don’t mind all the slideshows and how most of the time, we probably could have been shown things about the characters’ pasts and attempts to grieve rather than told about them several episodes later! Enjoy the endless suffering as you barely know what’s going on, why certain characters are here, why things are even happening, or why you should even care about any of these characters beyond half of them being family and some of them just being sometimes kind people! It’s not like character establishment is important and that several scenes in the first half could have actually expanded on the characters and dynamics beyond the shallowest of traits!

Oh yeah, that’s right. We should probably talk about the characters now. Ayumu is our main lead. She’s a daughter, one who whines sometimes and gives people water only to be taken advantage of. There’s not much to her beyond that outside of being the stupidest motherfucker to ever get a cut that never hurts until she needs to be crippled for a moment. She never examines or tries to treat it even after working at a hospital in the middle of the show, and no one else seems to notice the pretty deep wound she has until moments before the epilogue. You’d be surprised how much that can get under a viewer’s skin for 10 episodes, which, I remind you, is the show’s entire run time. She gets into arguments with her mom in conversations that resemble a toddler saying “I hate you” to her mom and the mom parroting it to shove the kid’s childishness back at them. The dialogue barely even feels human or genuine, doubly so when random Engrish is plastered onto tense scenes all the time. Speaking of the mom, we have Mari. She’s dependable and has her own secrets, making her the most complex character in the show, for what little that’s worth. She sometimes feels like she has genuine human interactions. I don’t know why there’s a track star turned NEET named Haruo here outside of the fact that they need a character to develop in the middle of the show, as forced, out of nowhere, unearned, and immediate as it is. There’s also the son, Go, who hates Japan and blurts English phrases. That’s about it for him. I guess there are other characters such as the pragmatic YouTuber (KITE) who ends up being probably the best character, but outside of him and the survivalist dad, just about no one else matters or is worth talking about. There are less than 5 scenes where characters have genuine and charming interactions to make them seem remotely fleshed out and alive. There’s virtually nothing to them, and almost no redeeming qualities about some of them, including the worst/main character, Ayumu. As the eight deadly words of TV Tropes go: “I do not care what happens to these people.”

I guess the least awful aspect of the show is the music. I needed some faint semblance of positivity before losing my mind, so I’ll say that the opening sequence was a nice and tender song. Kensuke Ushio’s OST has some decent ambient tracks to convey a sense of emergency or tragedy, even if they aren’t particularly memorable. The episode 10 ED isn’t absurdly terrible...oh wait, that’s it.

Japan Sinks 2020 might be the worst work with Yuasa’s name on it, and a crushing directorial debut for Pyeonggang Heo. What went wrong here?! Was there not enough time for Yuasa to do any more hands-on work or for episodes to get refined visually? What happened here? Did the writers not have a decent understanding of how to adapt the 1973 novel of the same name while modernizing it? Either way, what we got was a disastrous waste that will probably be but a miserable footnote for Yuasa and the industry in the coming years. Oh God, I didn’t even talk about the gaudy rape attempts or the shark scene. I didn’t even talk about the “That’s a video gamer for you” line which ranks up there with FLCL Progressive’s “tsundere routine” line as one of the worst pieces of dialogue I’ve ever heard, either! Jesus, this show sucks!