June reviews: Another

-Final mehstination

You ever have a show that you completely forget for years on end until suddenly it rushes back into your brain after you see a gif of it on twitter? well today were gonna be talking about one of those for me (and possibly many others), the 2012 "sensation", Another

Koichi Sakakibara is a sickly teenager who, due to his father's work abroad, must spend a year living with his aunt and maternal grandparents in the small rural town of Yomiyama, however, shortly after he starts attending attending school, his classmates and their relatives begin to die in mysterious accidents, at the center of this mystery is Mei Misaki, an enigmatic girl who, according to the rest class, doesn't exist. 

Another, as a series, is fairly freaking blatant about what its trying to be, and that is anime final destination, so many aspects of the show, from its general premise to the way its death scenes are built up and framed, are taken directly from the film series (the last entry of which (as of the writing of this review) would have come out less than a year before Another started airing)

 

However, where Another falls short in this comparison is in the supernatural aspect of it's threat, a big part of what made the final destination films so successful was the simplicity of its premise: a group of characters escape their fate and so death comes for them one by one, the specifics may vary from time to time but the basis is always the same.

 

Another's "calamity" on the other hand, is convoluted beyond belief, the show seems to want to have its cake and eat it too with regards to the calamity, simultaneously portraying it as a otherworldly phenomenon the characters cannot possibly comprehend AS WELL as a system with rigid and convoluted rules it wastes a full third of an episode explaining to us

 

This issue comes to a head in the show's final stretch (the only mildly entertaining portion of it, if only for how batshit stupid it gets) when the time actually comes to reveal the big twist.     

You see, i consider it to be an unspoken rule of mystery that, if the "antagonist" of the story is a supernal force or phenomenon with a clearly defined set of rules then the conclusion must involve the discovery of some form of loophole in these rule that makes sense, and while creating such a loophole is relatively easy with rule as vague as "you avoided fate so now death is coming to you" the more specific the rules become, the more skill and creativity it takes to write a satisfying conclusion, and Another unfortunately isn't particularly overflowing with either

Despite what this review might suggest, Another isn't the worst anime I've ever watched, its not even on the top 5, it just has the misfortune of sitting dead center in the valley of mediocrity, with not enough positive qualities to be worth your time, nor enough negative ones to be worth an ironic hatewatch, and that, i think might be even worse, after all, if something's a 5/10 then why even bother watching it?

                RATING:DON'T BOTHER