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This post is by guest writer Liam O’Loghlen.
Feels Bad
Over the years Jun Maeda has firmly established himself atop the dubious throne of the visual novel melodrama, and subsequently expanded to the throne of the anime melodrama. He’s developed a cult following that’s made his works synonymous with terms like “feels” and “cry porn” and other far less glowing terms, eliciting every possible emotional response out of anime fandom. And yet here am I living under a rock, having never seriously viewed a single Maeda work prior to this review. Out of pure morbid curiosity I now venture into Maeda’s latest original creation, Charlotte.
Charlotte is a story about adolescents with special powers, albeit powers with some serious imperfections. It follows a group of students who attend Hoshinoumi Academy, a school designed to protect said adolescents from being discovered by scientists and being used as test subjects. What follows is a very curious little show that tries its best, and even has a couple of shining moments, but on its way to being a tearjerker it falls apart from severe structural issues that range from infuriating to downright hilarious.
Episodes 1-3 Review
We begin with the aesthetic hook of protagonist Yu Otosaka standing in the middle of a colorless street surrounded by colorless people, engaged in the important ritual of the anime teenage boy inner monologue about identity issues. He asks himself “Why am I only myself, and not someone else?”, peppering it with self-indulgent references to Descartes and all sorts of other gobbledygook. This turns out to be the basis of his secret power, to very briefly take control of other people’s bodies. Being an anime teenage boy, Yu tries and fails to use it to peek on girls, and eventually settles on using it to mess around with school bullies and cheat his way to the top of the school system, all of which are given copious amounts of monologue in spite of what’s happening on the screen telling us everything we need to know. It’s far from overtly excessive, but it very quickly establishes some graceless storytelling quirks.
Once that’s out of the way we have some time to actually get to know our protagonist, who we quickly realize is kind of a vain narcissistic jerk. Visual cues like his constant sinister smirking are a nice touch in establishing this, letting us in on the fun that Yu has in worshipping himself. In general, Charlotte is good in the early-going at using subtle gestures to establish little character nuances. Our second lead, Nao Tomori, in particular is shown to be charmingly playful by her poise, such as in one scene where she casually hops around on her tip-toes while crouching. That kind of ever-so-slight oddness has an organic fun feel to it. Nao is played by Ayane Sakura, who has a knack for upbeat characters with a kind of rough edge and can make quick natural shifts between her usual bubbly high voice and a much less innocent sounding lower pitch. Right off the coattails of her phenomenal role doing just that as Iroha in Oregairu Zoku, this part feels like somewhat uninspired type-casting, but it works well enough.
I should also give credit to some of the smart narrative composition that leads into building the premise. Nao is shown most of the first episode filming Yu, and then sets him up to redo an exam to prove he didn’t cheat so she could catch him trying to use his powers again. It’s nothing spectacular, but it contains some fun little subtleties. As it goes on it doesn’t really maintain that solid construction. Besides the imperfections, the magic abilities are mostly elaborated on in fairly broad strokes, and don’t really have a particular hook. They just happen to occupy some space in the narrative.
I’m not much of a fan of Maeda’s sense of humor.
Moreover, I don’t find myself to be very much of a fan of Maeda’s sense of humor, which seems to consist mostly of dramatic reactions and cheap slapstick. Another one of our leads, Jojirou Takajo, has the ability to teleport, but really his ability is to thrust himself at an uncontrollable rapid speed in a single direction. I found some mild humor in this gag in episode one, but when it came to be repeated as a gag in episode two and again in episode three it got exactly zero laughs from me. Yu also has a token little sister, and she likes stars and can’t cook and…that’s about it. There’s very little worse than a dead weight lame joke character.
Charlotte’s major shortcoming here is found in the one place it really counts: the dramatic composition. By episode two we’re already thrust into Nao’s tragic back story, which is more than a little overbearing. I feel the concept of people with special abilities being used as test subjects is one that definitely works, and it’s given some nice subtle reference in the first episode, but it goes for the big guns before we really even have a reason to care. We know that Nao is scarred by her brother’s abilities being used for inhumane experiments, and we know that Nao has become desensitized to the sight of him in a mental hospital tearing away at his futon, but we don’t know Nao. We know she has a playful but calculating personality, but what else have we really been shown besides her tragedy? There are a few brief moments to show us that she has a close sibling bond, but that’s far from an emotional connection.
When a narrative pulls this kind of heavy-handed drama so soon it feels like it’s trying to cheat me. Yet I’m almost embarrassed to admit that it has cheated me slightly. Maeda swings for the fences so unabashedly with his writing that I can’t help but feel somewhat invested in the melodrama. It also helps that P.A Works’ production chops bring a solid visual front to set the mood, with Nao’s backstory depicted in a dreary monochrome with some sharp contrasts like the red paint reading “I’m Out!!” that Nao splattered on her wall before she escaped the testing facility. If anything, Charlotte knows what it’s going for, and boy does it go for it.
In these first few episodes Charlotte is very eager to show us what Jun Maeda is about. It’s a generally okay but deeply fractured slice of life comedy, interspersed with abrasive melodrama that somehow manages to hit a certain soft spot with me. I suspect that soft spot is what makes people fall in love with Maeda. I can’t say at this point that I’m one of those people, but I do appreciate Charlotte for trying.
Episodes 4-7 Review
Charlotte settles into a groove in these following episodes, and not a particularly good one. Super popular teenage idol Yusa Kurobane, possessed by her pyrokinetic elder sister Misa, is added to the mix. This seems to mark the point where the slice of life moments devolve into little more than a tedious series of vacant gags without any of the previously articulated charm. A typical sequence involves Yusa being cute, Jojiro dramatically fanboying, and Misa taking over to give him a slapstick beating while Nao proclaims Jojiro’s behavior is “such a turn off”. There are variations of settings and the order these gags take place in and slight semantic details, but they remain largely untouched in execution as they’re run through over and over again like some sort of automatic mechanical process.
All I can do is go through the motions with these walking tacky novelties.
We also get some flirty rom-com business between Yu and Nao, another addition to the pile of groan-worthy anime clichés. I find nothing endearing about this characterization, and it only helps to further emphasize my belief that Jun Maeda wants to cheat his audience into an emotional connection rather than earning it. All I can do is go through the motions with these walking tacky novelties.
These issues are further aggravated when Charlotte decides to go for a big dramatic touchstone revolving around Yu’s little sister, Ayumi, who as previously mentioned is defined by her bad cooking and not much else. They find out Ayumi has an ability called “Collapse”, which Yu and the others seek to keep under control by having her stay at home. She disobeys and goes to school, and in an utterly screwball twist of events is attacked with a knife by a classmate who’s jealous that her crush asked Ayumi out — complete with corny ultra melodramatic framing. When backed into a corner, Ayumi activates her ability and destroys half her school and takes her own life in the process. I should probably mention that one of her last lines in this episode was “This is the revenge of pizza sauce”. Go figure that one out for yourself.
We spend the next episode with a traumatized Yu in full melancholy anime boy mode getting into street fights with his powers, soaking up the non-existent empathy we’ve been moved to in response to his loss, until Nao finds him and brings him back to his senses by making his sister’s pizza sauce. Either Jun Maeda has failed miserably at character building or he intends for Charlotte to have a very specific appeal to people who are emotionally connected to bad pizza sauce. Unfortunately I’m not one of those people. I don’t think any amount of quality P.A Works visual presentation could have saved moments like these for me.
Charlotte takes a disappointing turn for the worse as it reaches the midpoint. I struggle to view these characters as anything more than half-baked amalgamations of things I’ve already seen so many times before, and I struggle to laugh or cry or feel any sort of interest in watching what they go through. I can only hope things get better, but sadly I think Charlotte is pretty comfortable with the direction it’s heading in.
Episodes 8-13 Review
The second half of Charlotte decides that it’s bored with plain old teen melodrama and goes heavy on the science fiction, which in one way is fantastic but in another creates a complete and utter embarrassing mess of a narrative. Thankfully it’s at least not an unpleasant watch. I found myself laughing out loud at many scenes that wanted themselves to be taken seriously, but it’s better than grumbling about bad character writing. It manages to surprise me by starting off with a fairly decent episode here.
Yu finds himself meeting the lead vocalist of ZHIEND, a band who Nao’s brother adored. This is the first peculiar twist we get, and it only gets more questionable from there with Nao’s brother being brought back to normal by hearing vocalist Sala Shane’s voice, but Sala herself is a decent character. Although she’s equally as insipid in comedic moments as the rest of the cast, in serious moments she offers Yu an adult perspective on his troubles. That’s a dramatic device I personally enjoy seeing even if I’m not invested in Yu trying to cope with the loss of his sister. The introduction of a new character like this does manage to give a bit of momentum to Yu’s character journey despite that.
In the next episode that momentum goes down the drain, as Yu and Nao go to ZHIEND’s concert and everything gets weird. One of ZHIEND’s songs causes Yu to recall confused and unsettling memories and pass out in a panic attack. While unconscious Yu finds himself inside those memories, listening to the same ZHIEND song at a scientific facility where he and his sister are detained for their powers. As it turns out these memories are an alternate timeline, and Yu and Ayumi have an elder brother named Shunsuke who’s being held captive because of his ability to time leap. Through an elaborate plan that we see unfold through a sudden so-so action sequence Yu saves his brother and changes reality, and Yu wakes up to find himself back in the reality where he passed out. Got it? Me neither.
I have a hunch that Jun Maeda really liked Madoka Magica.
Charlotte gets points for trying, but this plot twist completely flops for me because the foundation of the narrative up to this point has been so shaky. The only conclusion I can come to about the existence of this twist is that Jun Maeda really liked Madoka Magica. That hunch appears to be true, because after Yu connects the dots and learns that Shunsuke is alive in this reality we learn he’s used his time leap over and over again to save children with special powers like himself. It’s awfully familiar, albeit nowhere near as graceful in its execution or contribution to the sum of its parts. Had this been a more focused part of the narrative from the beginning I feel it would have been a much more captivating development, but it stands as plain silly.
Things only get more bizarrely science fiction from here on. Yu finds out that his secret ability is to steal the powers of those he possesses, and he uses it to take Shunsuke’s time-leap ability and save Ayumi. This only further muddies things, rendering the previous major plot twist of her death null and void and even more silly than it was simply existing. Also, a foreign terrorist group comes after Yu and he loses an eye and collapses a warehouse. The less said about that episode the better.
For the benefit of Jun Maeda’s fans (of which there are understandably many) I’ll lay off any major spoilers for the conclusion of this series, but suffice to say it builds on its nonsense with more nonsense, and sucked my remaining inklings of legitimate interest away with only the fun I made for myself left. The last magic user we come across is a little girl in Beijing. Her ability is courage. Just courage. Yu The Wonderful Wizard of Oz tells her that she had courage all along. Yes, that’s correct people. We finish with one last scene between Yu and Nao which would, in a vacuum, be nice and heart-warming, but unfortunately for Charlotte my investment is spent.
Charlotte might have one of the most unintentionally absurd second halves of any anime in recent memory. It tries hard, but it fails spectacularly, leaving simply fascinating destruction on its path. Despite having some fun moments, it leaves an incompetent narrative looking even more incompetent than ever in its final stretch.
If you’re a fan of Jun Maeda you may find something more to like in Charlotte than I did. Sadly Charlotte was a failure for me on all accounts. A failed slice of life, a failed science fiction work, and maybe worst of all a failed tearjerker. I found it incoherent and simply bad at most of what it did. I don’t plan to go much deeper down the rabbit hole of Jun Maeda’s works, because I’m quite frankly afraid of what I’m going to see.
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