Type: Television Show
Episodes: 24
Rating: TV-14
Runtime Per Episode: 24 min
Director: Maeda Mahiro
Produced By Gonzo
Year Produced: 2004
Ignoring the totally yaoi covers and pictures that I found online, I have my own opinion of this show.
Since I have a hard time being mean, I'll have to say this...
It was... interesting. In a good way, though.
The whole story is vaguely reminiscent of the actual classic... The Count of Monte Cristo, written by... I don't know and I don't particularly car, I'm nowhere near a literal guy. If the book isn't loaded with pictures and speech bubbles, I don't usually bother with it.
I kind of remember watching that one movie: Man in the Iron Mask, or something like that, but I don't remember well enough to cross-reference.
The story behind this one version is that in the distant, distant future, you've got a bunch of noble brats... and then a heroic soldier from I dunno what campaign. As you can tell, I already have a slight bias, but not debilitating (and I didn't like the soldier much better than the others, it was just that I agreed with him a lot more than say... I dunno... Albert (pronounced "Ahl-bhere", since he's French... wait, that explains it!)).
Albert is the son of a famous General (famous from some other campaign), and some rich princess-kind of person.
Bored with his mundane life of... whatever the hell it is that young nobles do, Albert and his friend Franz go on some kind of vacation to another world. They arrive just in time for some big festival, and during the course of it, Albert meets a mysterious, pointy-eared, freaking green tall noble, who drops his pocket watch.
Like any good conniving upstart, Albert uses the return of said pocket watch to have a meeting with the mysterious man, who is introduced/actually introduces himself as the "Count of Monte Cristo".
Now the big question running through my head right now is: "If this is space, and most of the humans alive in that age probably haven't even heard of Earth, then where in the hell is "Monte Cristo", or is that not even a place?".
Anyway, the two get together and CoMC (... you know, I'm not even going to explain it to you. If you get it, good, if you don't, then you've got a problem) invites Albert and Franz to brunch at a... public execution. What the fuck? Have people in the future reverted back to some kind of medieval entertainment system? Then again, this is based on a classic set in those times, so maybe this is supposed to be happening.
And so their wild and utterly annoying time together starts. If you know the story of the Count of Monte Cristo, then you know where this story leads, and if you don't... then I guess you'll just have to watch it, won't you?
I actually watched a bit of this before I even decided to do this blog, so I had a good idea what I was getting myself into, and I choose to anyway because this anime had a couple of things that I wanted to talk about.
First of all, the director Maeda Mahiro was staff on a couple of other animes that I liked, such as a couple of Miyazaki movies like Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa, Castle in the Sky, and even Porco Rosso (all of which are coming up in quick succession), and he also worked on Samurai Champloo (which I just recently watched... it wasn't bad), and Last Exile (which I didn't love at first, but after watching it a second time a while back, am starting to like).
Maybe because of all of his work on stuff that I already liked (though he didn't direct any of those), or maybe because he's just good, I found the style and such of this anime to be really cool... it was just the characters that pissed me off.
The other thing that I'll bring up is the clothes. I don't know if this is unique, or something Maeda Mahiro's take from one of his other animes, or what, but the way the clothes were animated was really interesting. Since I'm an aspiring mangaka myself, I'll let you in on a secret.
Mangakas, being people who don't want to work themselves to death on every little detail have come up with something called a Screen Tone. What that is is like a sheet of a "tone" with a given pattern on it. What they do is cut it down, then basically glue it over the parts of their work that they want... toned.
... Like all that black in night scenes... do you really think that the mangaka spent about three days coloring all that shit in? Well, maybe, yes. But probably not.
For those of you who are reading this without any frame of reference in this anime or manga, then I'll tell you... that you're out of luck. You might as well just close this down and go watch the anime I'm talking about.
For those of you who are following me, then I'll just finish up with; "What made this anime worth reviewing is the fact that they use a stable tone on the clothes. So there's no crinkles or anything, it's just a shifting tone on a body. It's really kind of cool and new."
Since this is from a book, I couldn't tell you if it was "true to the original work", but it seemed to flow nicely and keep a good pace. Actually, I don't really recall a down moment, there was always something weird or aggravating going on.
Character development was good, actually. The Count's history came to light in bits and pieces, though if you had half of a brain, you could usually see the plot "twists" coming from an episode away, but that's okay.
Albert's history and personality... I don't really give two shits about. He was a little prick, the end. In this show, I found myself liking the supporting cast way more than... Albert. The Count was okay though.
The animation style, I've already said everything that I want to about that, but still, even if it's just for the first episode, I highly recommend checking it out just for that. It was a really mind bender the first time I saw it. No matter how much I plug it though, I actually didn't find it all that appealing. It was new and all, but it kind of distracted me for a while, not that the story line was keeping me enthralled.
Japanese or English, it doesn't matter, Albert was still weird. Actually, both versions were good enough. And in the English one, Albert's wimpy side was made all the more clear by the actor, so good job, man!
The music was... harsh on the ears in the beginning. I dunno what that guy was on when he wrote that, but the dumbass tried to cram too many syllables into a line, then he scratched on another, and all kinds of weird stuff happened.
All in all, I wouldn't have kept that take... or the song, for that matter (I thought the song in general was crap too). Eugenie's version wasn't bad though... mainly because nobody was singing it.
The ending themes were pretty good, more to my style of music, and when you're following up "We Were Lovers", it's hard not to be better.
Okay, I've bashed this enough for the visible section... oh, and I watched this from a borrowed DVD, so that's why this post isn't overflowing with pictures and stuff.
Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo Minitheatre
Coming up next!
Miyazaki Week... and then some!
Day 1: Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa!
