Review: Deadman Wonderland Season 1

Quick Info:

Title: Deadman Wonderland (デッドマンワンダーランド Deddoman Wandārando)

Written by: Jinsei Kataoka
Illustrations: Kazuma Kondou

Published by: Shõnen Ace
Anime adaptation: Manglobe

Reviewed: Anime version

Liscensing rights: Tokyopop/Funimation

Aired on: Crunchyroll.com

So let's talk Anime, shall we? Deadman Wonderland is one of those ultra-violent, ultra-dark series that comes along once in a while. It starts off with a very bleak tone, and while it may delve into typical Shõnen territory then and again, it manages to keep somewhat fresh. It's based on a actual dead-wood manga, but I've only had the anime available to me (No actual effort was put into tracking down the manga though, the anime version is legally free on Crunchyroll.)

INTRO:

So I sit down in front of my computer, ready to have the usual J-pop insanity thrown at me,

or at the very least some sort of death metal nightmare. Instead I'm treated to a pretty descent little New Metal song, In English no less. The song is best described as akin to Pre-Reanimation Linkin Park, though it lacks rap it's very similar to their normal metal. Listening to it, I can't help but think of songs like Runaway or Papercut. The actual intro video, while very bloody and dark isn't all that visually interesting to look at. It features the most important characters in different kinds of poses, obscured by darkness and bloodsplatter.

PREMISE:

While it may be decently cool, The premise seems mostly like something an angsty teenager would come up with. A high school kid named Ganta Igarashi is somehow spared when all of his classmates are murdered brutally by an entity known as The Red Man. He is blamed for it however, and quickly sentenced to death. He's sent to the privately owned prison/fun fair called Deadman Wonderland. Built in the crater that once was Tokyo, Deadman wonderland is known for putting their inmates out in display as entertainment in a giant theme-park. Ganta quickly gains two friends, a secretive thief named Yõ Takami, and a albino fanservi-I mean happy girl named Shiro. It's also pretty fast established that Ganta has been given a special power to shoot bullets out of his palm. How it works, and why he has it it's too much of a spoiler to reveal here. The characters are cool enough, but the author seems to forget the story is supposed to take place in a high security prison and not a High School sometimes. Because of this, I sometimes feel there's a blur between this and any other High School battle shõnen available.

MAIN CHARACTER:

Ganta Igarashi suffers from the I'm-So-Weak-Phenonemon that's become very popular among authors these days. His personality and even given voice is very similar to Tsuna from Katekyo Hitman Reborn or Sena from Eyeshield 21. Both decent anime in their own right. The voice actress Romi Park, previously the voice of such characters as Edward Elric from Full Metal Alchemist does a stunning job though. It does make Ganta kind of intolerable in the long run, as these kind of characters lack of confidence tends to take up most of the first couple of story-arcs. All in all a very typical Shõnen hero that struggles to find their place in the world. The other characters, though interesting in their own right, really suffers from being comparable to other manga stereotypes as well. Off the top of my head, The character Crow is similar to Roronoa Zolo from One Piece.

ALL IN ALL:

While nothing groundbreaking or genre-changing it's a pretty good Battle Shõnen. The action is typically epic and like with any other series in the genre it let's you root for the characters and have your blood boil in excitement when the hero saves the day in the end. If series like One Piece (or something similarily popular) were to end tomorrow, Deadman Wonderland would probably be one of the series that the torch would be passed on to.

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Top 10 Insane Characters

Insanity is a lovely character trait, and while it's mostly used for villains it just makes alot of fictional characters a lot more entertaining. It's almost always more interesting to follow a character where you're not always sure what the person is going to do in any given situation.

PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THIS WILL CONTAIN SPOILERS.

10 - Stinky Pete The Prospector From Toy Story 2.

Toys are meant to be played with, and this becomes no more apparent than with the villain of Toy Story 2. Secluded ever since fabrication, Stinky Pete has watched all the other copies of his type of toy being taken home by kids and parents and being loved and cared for. This has made him Mean spirited and dark. He actually ends up deciding that children are mean to toys, and even destroy them and that th

ey will be better off being admired in a museum for years to come. His character arc is one of the coolest in the otherwise pretty happy-go-lucky movie, perhaps foreshadowing the pretty dark themes that the Toy Story movies would end up tackling in the final movie.

09 - The Black Knight From Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

Monty Python characters are already insane enough, hell the writers are probably a little insane as well. Then you have The Black Knight, he protects a certain path somewhere in medieval England for whatever reason. Then King Arthur shows up and they do glorious battle for all of.. 2 seconds. The Black Knight takes persistency to a whole new level. He loses an arm, calling it merely a fleshwound. This he does 4 times until he's nothing but a torso and a head. And even then he tries to keep fighting, this guy just doesn't know when to stop. Most Monty Python characters may be relatively insane, but when you're being called a looney by one of them, you might want to do some self-reflection.

08 - Wile E. Coyote from The classic Looney Tunes cartoons.

One of the most Stubborn characters in fiction, Wile E. Coyote is a Super genius living in the desert. Starting off as mere hunger, Wile E.'s hunt for the Roadrunner has become an insane addiction. He constantly comes up with increasingly convoluted and complicated schemes that always fails in the end. He clearly has access to post-order services and in one case even The Internet so one has to wonder.. Why doesn't he just order a pizza? Well because he's endured tons of amounts of pain just to catch the damn bird and he'd be damned if he ever stops trying.

07 - Scrooge Mcduck From Disney's Comic Book universe.

To those of you only familiar with the cartoon version of Scrooge, You're in for a treat! Scrooge's Gol fever in the comics are exagerrated to an extreme degree. If he looses money in a deal, he's able to cry so loud that it can be heard in the far reaches of space.

In one case, it even causes him to Flood The City of Duckburg With His Tears. That's alot of crying. Being an avid treasure hunter, Scrooge's Goldfever allows him to smell Gold already when he lands in the airport. It can cause him to run on water, lift giant rocks, and gain nightsight. When he's not out in the world making more money, he even bathes in them. He rarely eats more than three beans and a piece of bread with a glass of water, just to save money. If something becomes wrong with his money bin (such as having cracks due to over-filling) He's known to become seriously ill. He may be somewhat stable, not having been on a killing spree yet (at least not that we know of) but this is a serious case of obesession.

06 - Edward Wong Hau Pepulu Tivruskii The 4th from Cowboy Bebop.

Edward is a girl, though she may look like a boy. Edward is also a hacking prodigy from Earth in the year 2071. Edward also likes to talk about herself in the 3rd person. Edward is a very strange person, straying from place to place like a cat and always being pretty careless. She almost never walks normally, always running or climbing or prefferably

walking on her hands. She also named herself, as her father is always moving from place to place she decided her real name was boring. Her real name is Francoise Appledelhi, a boy's name because her father is too clueless to understand that he has a daughter, and not a son. Ed get's best along with other kids, but in particular a super intelligent corki puppy named Ein. For same strange reason they're able to have at least some kind of communication. Edward also never refers normally to people, with lines like "Father person, this is Spike Person and Jet Person". Though she may not be dangerous like some of the others on this list, she's definetly insane.

05 - Johnny from Ed Edd N' Eddy.

Johnny has a vivid imagination to put it softly. He talks to a board named plank, with a drawn face on it and it's able to throw him into fits of all-destroying rage. Being alienated by the rest of the kids in the cul-de-sac really doesn't help, making him create Melonhead the superhero persona. His faith in Planks reality is so believable to others that it's actually able to do physical harm to people without Johnny's presence. This kid needs a therapist, and soon.

04 - The Joker from the Batman comics.

The Joker is one of those classic insane villain that everyone knows. He's been subjected to something horrible at some point in his life, having permanent bleached white skin and freaky smile. He's come to enjoy he's super-villain persona too much and is now beyond the help of any psychologist. So he does what he loves, fighting his arch-enemy the Batman and making Gotham city into his private playground. His insanity has come to the point, that he can't remember his own past. Therefore he always tells us a new story, which makes him all the more creepy. Afterall, there's nothing more scary than the unknown.

03 - Tyler Durden from Fight Club.

Insomnia is dangerous, just ask this guy. After having problems sleeping he goes on a plane and meets Tyler Durden. Durden is a soap salesman, and has a very different lifestyle. Our main characters goes to live with Tyler Durden after a fistfight between the two gave him a rush. They start a Fight Club, and little by little it evolves into a cult. Tyler Durden decides he want to blow up all credit card firms in America, causing the destruction of debt. This of course turns to true insanity when it turns out Tyler Durden never was a real person, and our main character has been fighting against himself all this time. This is skitzofrenia on a whole other level, and the only way to defeat oneself is to shoot youself in the head. Which oddly Works.

02 - Johnny "'Nny" C. from Johnny The Homicidial Maniac.

Johnny lives in a random American suburb, in a house that already had all sorts of torture devices when he moved it. He goes around killing anyone that annoys him (which in reality, constitues EVERYONE) and pours their blood on a certain backwall in his house. He's convinced that if he ever stops feeding the wall with blood, something even worse will come out. So he keeps on killing, and he isn't picky. He's kept company by three "creatures". One is Nailbunny, a floating dead rabbit with a nail through it's head, representing his inner child. Then there's two Doughboy statuettes named Mr. Eff and D-Boy. One of them claims to be working for the entity behind the wall, the otherclaims to be working against it. He's also known to go off on existential rants about modern society, actually making kind of a understandable point sometimes (I'm NOT crazy). But really, he's a serial killer with voices in his head. What more do you want?

01 - Shinji Ikari from Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Shinji is troubled kid, so troubled that his puberty makes him think he's fighting aliens in giant robots. His relationship with women is convoluted, to the point of him giving his masturbation dream a persona named Rei (Yes, That really is what she's supposed to symbolise) while most of the episodes is just a Giant Robot anime, later on there comes whole episodes where we get a nice trip through the poor guys psyche.. And it isn't pretty. The two ending episodes were so confusing to most people that they made an alternate one i movie form, depicting what happened in the Giant robot world while all the stuff was going on inside Shinji's head. His mother and daddy issues is pretty.. entangled. Let's leave it at that.

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So that was my Top 10 for the most insane characters. Of course there are probably even more insane characters out there, but I tried not to make the list too samey (otherwise, Rorshach, Green Goblin and most of the Rogues Gallery of Batman would have made the list as well).

I hope you enjoyed my list, and will comment on what you think, perhaps mention some characters I haven't thought of?

SUPAH FAIGHTING ROBOTTO!!

I love anime.

I'm currently watching The Cowboy Bebop and Astro Boy cartoons.. and i gotta say.. it's funny how sci-fi anime is amongst the most classical series out there.. series like Akira, Neon Genesis Evangelion and .Hack//Something or another is highly regarded as being either art or absolute classics.. it makes one wonder if the japaneese have some of their technological skill from being so interested in Sci-fi.

I've also watched Death Note 1 & 2 now.. Theese movies could teach alot of american companies just HOW to make comic books into movies.. especially considering what they're planning to do with the new Dragonball Movie. They follow the series enough to not actually just copying them and being utter redicolous because lets face it, following the source material is great, but from a financial and artistic point of view it would be just plain retarded to not try and improve without destroying the orginal stuff.

The changes between the Death Note series and movies is really not all that big and they're barely noticed (to me atleast) of course there are some characters removed, forexample the crime syndicate isnt in it at all, instead it's a journalist that gets the Death Note while Light's plan about forgetting the Note is going on.

Theres also no M or N, only L. But that actually great because M and N just felt unesscesary in the original series (in my opinion)

oh well.. that's my 2 cents..

Silver and Weed

No, this post is not about how you can earn quick cash on illegal substances.

Recently, or well not that long ago I finished watching all of Silver Fang (Ginga Nagareboshi Gin) and its follow-up Weed (Ginga Densetsu Weed) and I gotta say both was pretty entertaining:

Ginga Nagareboshi Gin, or Silver Fang:

The Original Series evolves around a Akita Pup named Gin or Silver depending on what part of the world you're from. (I'll just stick to Silver from now on). The mountains of Ohu is under siege by the monstrous bear Akakabuto which has grown to an extreme size due to it not sleeping through the winter because it was shot in a nerve near it's brain.

Silver is the son and grandson of to great bearhunting dogs who both risked their life and died while facing Akakabuto on a one on one. Silver joins forces with the boy Daisuke but later leaves him to join an army of dogs who's seeking strong males to fight off Akakabuto and take back Ohu and the Twin mountain pass. This brings Silver in the company of strong dogs like the Great Dane mix Ben and the fighting dog Benisakura.

It's an old anime and it shows, the pictures isnt as clean as you see in most anime these days and sometimes in the dubbed version you can still hear remnants of the Japanese voice actors which actually gives the series a nostalgic charm. The Anime was never on TV outside of Japan so chances are you haven't heard of it if you didn't have it on VHS.. luckily it's rereleased on DVD so get going and buy it!


Ginga Densetsu Weed, or Weed the Son of Silver!:

Weed is the son of Silver! in this anime everything has been updated, even the artwork!

The story takes place 14 years after the fall of Akakabuto, The Twin Pass of Ohu is under attack by a monster dog and Smith is send off to take the pregnant bitch Sakura to safety who bears the child of Silver who is now the boss of it all!

6 months later Sakura is dying and her son Weed is desperately trying to save her by getting her tasty stuff to eat, he meets up with the english setter G.B. who names him and Smith, after saying their farewells to Sakura who sadly dies, Smith and G.B. takes Weed to meet up with his father at the dogs paradise in Ohu, but they run into many trouble on the way.

This Anime takes a sudden turn from the classic Silver Fang setup to something a little more chaotic, also it's pretty obvious to the audience that this isn't made by the same crew that made the original series. Nonetheless it's entertaining as a stand alone anime and shouldnt be seen with the old series in mind or else you'll get a little disappointed through most of the series as Silver nearly isnt in it.

All in all, it's two very interesting series that, if you haven't already you should definitely check out.