Country of Origin: Japan
Kyosuke Date is a confused young man. He’s just been resurrected, which is strange enough, but then he quickly remembers that he was stabbed through the heart by his mean mommy on her deathbed. Unfortunately for Kyosuke, his new lease on life comes with a slight caveat, wherein he must turn into The SoulTaker, a demon or mecha (or both?) kinda thingie. In this super-powered form, he takes on enemies from an evil hospital and also the government, I think. But don’t worry, he teams up with a cool guy and a nurse girl. Is his mom still alive? Is his doctor dad also a SoulTaker? Check, please!
Over the years, I have watched a lifetime's worth of anime. It's such a vast and never-ending wellspring of wonders. Once a while, a show comes along that stands above the rest and The SoulTaker is one of those shows. What makes it so special? It's one of the worst things I've ever subjected my poor wife and myself to. I rarely regret the decision to watch the full run of an anime, much less get worked up enough to rant and rave about how stupid I feel for doing so. And yet, here we are.
Despite its low budget -and trust me, I’m no snob when it comes to a budget- and mishmash of ideas taken from other, better shows, The Soultaker was just stylish and interesting enough for me to get the halfway mark of its 13-episode run. Little did I know that I shouldn’t have ignored the alarm bells going off in my head that told me to bail. This show is utter dogshit during the second half. I should've followed my instinct and shut it off after episode 6. My poor wife tried to warn me not to keep going but I didn't listen. I got regrets, y'all.
I’ve seen plenty of classic animation where the crew is forced to break out some penny-pinching tricks to get a show done: reusing or re-purposing animation from previous episodes, dragging the camera across a still image to simulate movement, zooming in on a character’s eyes while they’re speaking to save on animating mouth movements, etc. Serial Experiments Lain is a perfect example of a show that succeeds despite its tiny budget because it’s able to more successfully hide the flaws artfully. SoulTaker tries to do things so stylishly and so bizarrely that it thinks the viewer won’t notice that there’s very little substance at hand.
However, the shortcuts in the animation of SoulTaker completely boggled my mind. Reusing animation is the least of this show’s problems. Often times, the screen would just go black, blue, or red, where I presume the animation of a scene was incomplete. At first, I thought it was a stylistic choice. Then I noticed that along with those blank screens, there were a lot of still shots of characters just standing statically frozen for long periods of time.
Now if the story had been awesome, I could've forgiven it. But before the end of the show, it all completely fell apart. Characters inexplicably changing sides or coming back from the dead and left field revelations, all just muddy the already murky waters of the plot. And that’s not even going into how overly complicated the show tries to get. I really think the creators of The SoulTaker decided to cram their half-thought out second season into this run and those tangents kind of made me wish I was dead.
I hate to straight up diss an anime like this but since I wasted a good chunk of my weekend on the punishingly bad The SoulTaker that I had to say something. The best thing I can say about this show is that it features some quite dazzling kaleidoscopic colors packed into its Art Deco style with some excellent character designs as well. If you watch the first couple of episodes of SoulTaker, you too might be wooed by the look of this show. But then the undeveloped ideas borrowed from Devilman, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and a host of other better shows will just make you take stock of your life. I really did wonder, “Where did it all go wrong for me?”
Fun note: The Soultaker had a spinoff series!?
No comments:
Post a Comment