I still like Eden of the East, for all its faults
It’s a bummer when some minor flaw draws attention to itself and throws obstacles in the way of enjoying an otherwise quality experience. I recall how viewers couldn’t stop talking about the characters’ noses in Escaflowne: considering how it juggles a variety of themes, aesthetics and plot devices and appeals to an audience of both genders and a broad age range, its achievement should never be clouded by an insignificant stylistic quirk.
This balancing act of bringing totally separate ideas into the same narrative stewing pot and getting them to work together without any one detracting from the others trips up even the best writers and directors, making the first half of Escaflowne that I’ve seen so far even more impressive in my eyes. Which brings me to Higashi no Eden, a show that also tries to sit some ambitious and disparate ideas side-by-side; the consequences of which can be more serious than a ski-jump hooter.
I’ve read about the comparisons between …Eden and Honey and Clover so frequently I feel like the guy in Mallrats who spends the entire film trying unsuccessfully to find that sailboat in the Magic Eye picture: he fails to see what everyone, much to his chagrin, can see. I’ll have to resign to the fact that I never really got on with H&C in the first place so the parallels that are so obvious to the rest of you are bound to be lost on me.
Even so, until an interview or similar suggests otherwise I can’t help but believe the evidence for these similarities is circumstantial. More importantly though …Eden is stumbling over a demanding act of narrative multi-tasking, in that the colourful and ambitious premise made a rod for the creative team’s own back: at times it’s trying to do too much in the time it’s been given.
I was overjoyed at the prospect of Kenji Kamiyama and the Production I.G. staff working on a story that has wide-eyed romance but also has its finger on the pulse of today’s world. I found the socio-political aspect of the SAC to be very well handled so had similar hopes for this; admittedly eleven episodes is less than I would’ve liked but I daresay Kamiyama and Co. felt the same way.
It feels like a true post-9/11 anime show in that topical ideas are lifted from the headlines of Real Life and applied to a fictional story. Genuinely mature anime is as rare as Yorkshiremen with inferiority complexes at the best of times; the idea of a political thriller with the thread of personal drama running through it to offer something of the everyday for the viewer to hold onto was something I couldn’t pass up.
While I don’t doubt their skills at the political thriller and social commentary (a point I’ll get to in a minute), it clashes with the lighter shoujo romcom and forces the viewer into sharp gear changes that wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t needed so frequently. The comic-style facial expressions during the more anarchic moments effectively conveyed the mood of the scenes but things often shifted very suddenly – and jarringly – into something darker and more demanding.
Take the Johnny Hunter arc: imagine the pastel-shaded realism of Tokyo Marble Chocolate and put it next to, say, Speed Grapher if it were less camp and better animated. In fairness …Eden is far more subtle than Speed Grapher and doesn’t focus on matters of the heart as much as TMC but I often found these two opposing forces pulling me in different directions.
Higashi no Eden I think suffered from the mid-season blues: that time when the central portion of the series that made a strong start meanders a bit before hitting the final furlong. For a show of this length and with this level of expectations on its shoulders it was disappointing when this happened but the eighth episode firmly declared where its real intentions lay and things began to finally look up.
Right from the outset, through the occasionally misplaced humour and the under-used romantic subplot, the show has always kept me guessing. It’s not often I genuinely have no idea as to what would happen next but apart from the unfortunate incident that ends the ninth episode (which is familiar to anyone as addicted to Bourne-style government conspiracy films as I am), it’s given me new twists and questions every time. This for me is what’s kept me coming back: between the excellent opening and ending credits with their appropriately excellent music and the slick presentation it’s all wrapped in, I can’t say with certainty where it’s going.
This is an example of how an identity crisis in premise and intentions can hamper a TV show, but as much as I’m risking upsetting people in saying so I think it’s also another case of these intentions not matching the expectations of the viewers. It does eventually get its shit together, decide what it wants to be and how best to accomplish its aims; which is enough to save it…just.
The thing is, once I got over the idea that the romance between the two leads wasn’t the main event I was able to accept it as a component part of the larger theme. The fact that Saki started to act her age again and allowed me to look upon her character as fondly as I did at first is something of a coincidence really: she and Takizawa are part of the social commentary and mysteries that the series is keener to address.
This is something that I hope to revisit later (via The Sky Crawlers too of all things, if I’ve read into the reviews correctly) but the idea of …Eden’s status as a topical anime isn’t as preachy as it sounds. It feels contemporary and relevant thanks to the spectres of terrorism and government conspiracies but is also possibly critical of the younger generation, with a personal spin to emphasise the point thanks to the Saki/Akira dynamic.
His amnesiac hero (which is a cliché) and her ditzier side (which places her closer to the airhead anime girl archetype and further away from a different personality I hoped she would be) do serve a purpose: it’s one of the many facets of the NEET phenomenon presented here. There’s also the shipment of young bums to Dubai at the hands of a pre-amnesia Takizawa; not to mention the intentions of Hirasawa, apparent head of the high-tech school club of the show’s title, who wants to fight the system like the Japanese student protesters of the 1960s…minus the ideals. He’s a rebel without a cause really.
It’s hard to decide at this stage whether NEETs are a burden on society or victims; much like Takizawa himself, are the NEETs heroes who will usher in a better world, or are they a destructive force that’s as misspent as the youth that defines them? Far from the kids rising up against the corrupt adults, the waters are muddied to a delightfully anarchic degree by the traditional faceless Manipulative Bad Guy of Mr Outside tempered by the idea that Takizawa may or may not be the selfless saviour. My guess is that the wiping of his memory was a self-inflicted discarding of his younger, less heroic self. What sort of villain, or hero for that matter, does this world create?
You know, it’s nice to be able to read a more balanced view of this show and I have to salute you for it – I’ve found it difficult to distance myself from my gut feeling that “this is something special”, to step back and ask myself “but is it really?”… I guess the fact that it is trying something a bit more brave, broad and ‘grown up’ than a lot of current anime is masking some of its deficiencies that you’ve pointed out here.
Personally, I’ve really enjoyed the dynamic of Saki and Akira for its largely understated nature – It’s never really been lost to my mind even in episodes where it isn’t explicitly touched on… It’s always there in the look in Saki’s eyes or a moment of hesitation or doubt before she speaks, and the internal dual between her burgeoning love of Akira and her doubts about him have been expertly realised.
The whole NEET debate generated by the show is also fascinating, although I’m inclined to think that the series as a whole is swinging towards lauding the positive aspects of this kind of society – That physical isolation is no longer a barrier in this hugely connected world, and that it can in fact bring about even greater progress (witness the Eden search engine for example) thanks to the erosion of “groupthink” as a result. Perhaps not having “a cause” is creating a generation freed of only thinking narrowly about a small sub-set of goals and problems, for the good of everybody? Regardless, this show serves up food for thought faster than I can clear it from my proverbial plate, and I love it warts and all for that ability.
I don’t have much to say here, but for me the H&C connection has more to do with the character designs. I can easily imagine Saki in that show.
What concerns me most of all is that, wherever the plot is going, they’re not going to tie up all the strange things they drop into almost every episode. The Johnnies? The dog with useless wings? I love strangeness, but even as I watch things like the man giving Akira his pants or winged women crashing through windows, I can only hope we get a fuller explanation in the few eps we have left.
Oh, yeah, with the winged women, there was that helicopter …
I think that lack of cohesiveness is really what makes Eden difficult to get stuck into. The genuinely good bits get bogged down by the stilted attempts of genre-striding. The audience aren’t given enough of anything to really sink their teeth into and it results in a fairly tepid final opinion.
After the ninth episode (which I thought was excellent) I’m honestly convinced that Eden needs to be a 26 episode show. All its disparate elements could fit in with each other if they were given time to breathe, but as it stands eleven episodes probably won’t be enough. It’s very frustrating.
I have similar sentiment,there’s a lot of things in it that I’m hoping the series will explore in depth, however with only a few episodes left it’s hard to imagine how this series going to tie up everything together. Unless it goes onto a second season.
@Hanners: the fact that it’s trying to be grown-up at all makes me more forgiving, but it throws enough questions out to allow you to forget that too. I’m still not sure about the NEET issue, mainly because events move so quickly that the final episode (hopefully being subbed and released in the next day or two) will throw my theories out of date so quickly.
@Peter S: it’s frustrating, but I’m having to accept the possibility that there will be a lot of incidental details left open, but that only had a minor effect on my enjoyment of Xam’d, for instance. Now we have not one but two feature films to speculate about now…
@Hige: again, the “what about the movies?!” gets me scratching my head. This is one of those series that’s crying out to be twice the length it is…makes me wonder if the scenario was planned for a longer episode run, until the schedulers dropped the eleven-week bombshell at a relatively late stage in the production. That wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest actually.
@Kin: you’ll be waiting impatiently to see what the films do then, right? It’s not much comfort I know, but you’re not alone. Dammit, it’s nearly a year!