Normally, I don’t pay much attention to the particular studio behind a given show – I honestly couldn’t tell you what companies produced a lot of my favorites. But one credit that will make me sit up and take notice is the involvement of Studio Trigger. The reason for that is that a lot of Trigger productions, perhaps all of them, share a few traits, meaning that there’s more of the Studio’s style mixed in with the particulars of genre, writers, director, talent, and so on. Not that other studios don’t bring specialties to the table, but Trigger’s inclinations are obvious and loud. Perhaps it’s because Trigger favors original productions, meaning they have a lot more in-house creative control over most of their project than do adapters of Manga and Light Novels that already have a well-defined look and feel from their source material.
Trigger Anime shows are, without
exception in my particular experience, arguably defined by excess.
They’re bright, colorful, and loud. They cram in a ton of story,
some uniquely bizarre visuals, usually a good lot of action,
over-the-top characters, weird high concepts, and probably a hearty
or heavier serving of fanservice as well. Even their most mellow and
down-to-earth efforts are high flying and bizarre by the standards of
others. I’ve joked at times that Trigger shows almost seem to be
written by the corrupted cores from Portal 2 – there’s a deep
thirst for adventure, a willful disconnect from the universe and
“fact” as others know them, and they will often find a way to go
to space for their climax. When they’re good, they’re amazing. When
they’re bad, they’re still amazing, just in a very different way.
That should tell you that, despite the
fact that I can usually enjoy the ride, not every Trigger show is a
winner. In some ways that makes it even stranger that it’s taken me
this long to get around to reviewing one of their productions, but in
any case now is the time to rectify that oversight. And thus, we’ll
be taking a look at Trigger’s attempt to play against type while
still playing exactly to type, Kiznaiver.
In terms of playing to type, Kiznaiver
is an original show where a host of literally and figuratively
colorful characters engage with a bizarre supernatural scenario. At
least at first, it seems to have kinetic energy of a typical Trigger
offering as well as the cast. In terms of playing against type,
though, Kiznaiver is about pain. Physical pain, emotional pain, and
how the pain people experience can connect them to their world and
one another. This is fare that, in terms of its themes, is much
heavier and more “real” than Trigger usually wants to go, which
demands a careful touch that’s been attempted by more typically
philosophical creators before (and incompetent ones too; insert Star
Trek V joke here). While Trigger shows will sometimes say something
meaningful and applicable, at least in their subtext, their type is
more all in for the “Snow Goons are bad news” species of message,
being more about their own crazy universe than they are about the
human condition, even if there are some good things you could take
away if you assume the “snow goons” are metaphors.
In some ways, this makes me consider
Kiznaiver one of Trigger’s more ambitious and daring shows. It
doesn’t have the heavy fantasy aspects of Little Witch Academia, the
multi-layer mindscrew reality of SSSS Gridman, or the… whatever you
call Kill la Kill’s brand of insanity. The presentation is full of
Trigger oddness, but the content is overall a fairly grounded sort of
near-future science fiction or -punk, meaning it can’t fall back on
doing something bizarre but cool if the core ideas don’t work. There
are a lot of risks taken in Kiznaiver, but do they pay off?
Let’s start with the start of the
story: Agata is our theoretical lead character, a white-haired boy
who can’t feel pain and, because of that, is generally numb to the
world, unable to express himself, empathize with others or really
emote like a human being. We’re also introduced to Chidori, his
childhood friend with a huge crush on him, and a host of other
bizarre characters before getting the real game-changer with the
arrival of Sonozaki.
Sonozaki, in some ways, comes off as similar to Agata, but a lot more harsh. She’s also unemotional, but unlike Agata’s very dull, muted existence she comes off as incredibly sharp, cold, and clinical. After a weird talk about the seven deadly sins of high school students, she pushes Agata down some stairs before addressing the group she’s gathered, having apparently already conscripted them all into the Kizna system, a means by which the gathered individuals (not including Sonozaki or her bizarre mascot costume wearing goons, of course) share their pain and injuries with each other. The system seems to divide the experiences, hence Agata’s tumble down the stairs not killing him.
The next thing Sonozaki wants is for
the characters to introduce themselves. This takes an entire episode
because a normal introduction isn’t good enough for her: they have to
each blurt out the one thing they least want any other person to
know, and are menaced with various forms of agony and mortal danger
to force them to cough up their secrets. After they go back to
school, they find that there’s a seventh member of the band, due to
that person sending pain signals through shockingly frequently.
They’re given a mission to find this person and discover that their
last member is, in fact, a huge masochist. You’d think that would
portend lots of events down the road, but it mostly just gives him a
unique perspective on everything that’s already going on, which he
sometimes shares with the others.
In general, the pattern of Sonozaki
putting the other kids through some sort of BS wringer continues for
some time. The first arc of that sends the kids to summer camp,
where Sonozaki tags along to strike up a weird, unemotive,
enigmatic-flashback-based thing with Agata. The trip features the
group dealing with a pair of bullies recruited as Kizna-connected
fighters and their bond deepening so that, with Chidori’s angst
leading the way, they can feel acute emotional pain from others as
well as physical harm.
In the second such arc, the gang finds
out the sordid past of one of their members, the haughty girl Honoka
Maki. Maki’s confession was that she had killed someone, but she
brushed it off after the introductions were over. In this arc, we
learn that Maki used to be one half of a Mangaka duo, along with a
terminally ill girl called Ruru. Using a pen name, they created a
wildly popular manga, but they had a falling out when Ruru developed
feelings for Maki that Maki didn’t want to pursue (in a very
complicated tangle), and Ruru created the last chapter alone before,
you know, dying. An upcoming film adaptation opens Maki’s old wounds
and, because they can feel and share her pain, the others try to get
close to her not just for their own goods but because they’ve
developed a genuine empathy – this despite Maki’s usually
hard-to-get-along-with personality. They finally succeed when she’s
convinced to actually read the last chapter, something she’d never
done, and finds Ruru’s parting words were about forgiveness and grace
not curses and condemnation.
The Maki arc is, in my mind, one of the
two real strong points of the show. But, despite that, it feels
weirdly disconnected from the rest of Kiznaiver. There are no goons
in insane mascot suits chasing everyone around, most of the emotions
are played extremely earnest without the typical larger-than-life
Trigger melodrama, and it tells something of a complete story on its
own, with pieces that the rest of the show doesn’t really heavily
use. It’s a break from Chidori, Agata, and largely from Sonozaki as
well. On one hand, it’s quite welcome, as it makes the ensemble cast
more of a true ensemble rather than “and the rest”. On the other
hand, it does kind of tease us with an execution of the premise that
has the tact, grace, and power that the material needed more of in
its treatment. I think if Kiznaiver had been a 24 episode anime and
most of it had been doing arcs at this quality level and tone for
most if not all of the characters, it would have been a much stronger
product.
Ah, well, back to mayhem.
The mascot mooks once again kidnap the
group, this time bringing them to school while a typhoon approaches,
forcing them to watch a presentation on the first Kizna experiment,
twelve years earlier, which didn’t go so well for the little children
involved. After that, the minions chase the group into smaller units
in an attempt, according to the program runners, to spark romantic
relations between pairs in the party by having them go through a
harrowing experience. To say that this backfires would be a grave
understatement. The scenario really aims to disaster when Chidori
attempts to confess her feelings, only for Agata to be drawn to (and
run off in search of) Sonozaki, who’s busy wandering around and
putting herself in typhoon danger. The two have what I guess you
could call a moment, though it’s not much of one given that they’re a
block of wood and a block of ice, and we see that Sonozaki has a
Kizna scar of her own.
When Chidori finds the two of them…
she doesn’t take it very well, and her distress and agony over her
crush once again levels up the group’s connection, this time to
full-on telepathy that leaves them all on the ground in agony as
their painful thoughts and feelings aren’t shared and divided, but
spread with the others who often figure in them. There’s actually a
great bit of this scene where Agata, who’s comparatively unaffected
given his dull nature, clearly wants to comfort Chidori. She screams
for him to stay away… but her mental voice begs to be held. Agata
mostly just stands there, but it does a good job at showing without
telling what their bond can mean and where some problems lie.
And then, for the last three episodes,
we basically cut to a different show. The group is allowed to stay
apart for the rest of summer (at which point their Kizna scars fade
and the bond vanishes) and they largely do. Agata looks into this
whole Sonozaki thing and discovers not only was she part of the old
experiment, but he was too. Something, however, went wrong and
Sonozaki ended up bearing everyone’s pain, which she’s kept drugged
up to suppress, resulting in Agata’s status. He got off well, too: a
group of his old friends are essentially catatonic from the
experience. There’s another dynamite single scene here when Agata
faces them and recovers his childhood memories, and he breaks down,
screaming and crying. Even in the most intense situations before,
Agata had remained unaffected, but faced with the weight of his past
not even he can remain unemotional and without pain. It’s a pity
it’s never really used or followed up on, probably because the show
didn’t have the time left.
The final arc has to do with the gang
having to get back together to deal with Sonozaki taking extreme
action, trying to bond with everyone in the city and take their pain
on. This results in a mad dash for where she stands atop an opening
drawbridge and an attempt, both physical and emotional, to save her
that… works somehow. I guess. The show lets us in on a new web of
crushes among the group and pretty much just stops once Sonozaki’s
not going to be trying any insane mad science things anymore.
And when all’s said and done, it’s a
strange kind of failure. In some ways, Kiznaiver is too bloated.
The camp arcs, the introductions… they take too long, as do the
numerous scenes of mascot minions chasing our group around. They
aren’t given a lot of time to bond as people rather than with guns to
their heads. On the other hand, it feels oddly squashed. The final
arc is certainly rushed out as a postscript to the main group’s Kizna
times, and only a few of the characters really get arcs with the kind
of meat you want out of them.
But, the biggest and oddest failing of
Kiznaiver is that it proves its own point, but not in the way it
wants to. The thesis of Kiznaiver is that pain is essential to a
“human” experience, and that the sharing of pain is what creates
empathy and allows people to understand and become close to each
other. The way the shared pain spreads through the group is a bit of
a mixed bag. Sometimes, as with Maki’s arc, it does foster closeness
and understanding to have someone else’s experience inside you.
Other times, such as in the school/typhoon arc, it doesn’t feel like
enough. What always resonates right, though, is the negative side of
the hypothesis: without the ability to share and understand someone’s
pain, we can’t really empathize with or understand the person either.
Case and point, Agata and Sonozaki.
Those two are, as previously stated,
flat affect characters. And they have to be, that’s the entire point
of their existence. But by Haruhi it makes them hard to watch as the
lead characters of the show, particularly when they have to have some
sort of scene or romantic chemistry. Because they never emote, and
perhaps specifically because they never display the strong desire
that would lead to emotional pain when that desire is thwarted, we
can’t understand them or feel for their wants. For all the scenes
between Agata and Sonozaki, including the weight of their initially
mysterious past hanging over them and making their relationship
something of a foregone conclusion, I felt more for Chidori
throughout. True, I have no clue what she saw in Agata, especially
since the reveal of his history makes the timeline for his becoming
numb and her “childhood friend” status somewhat awkward, but I do
understand, intensely because of how it makes her suffer, that she
does care and that it is important to her.
Trigger, I pretty much said in my
opening, is in their comfort zone and at their best when they’re
working with loud, colorful characters and bringing humanity to them.
Most of the cast has this down, with well-defined personas but also
some hidden depth that can be delved into in order to make them more
than just caricatures or archetypes. Agata and Sonozoki don’t have
the loud and colorful persona to start working with. There’s nothing
to draw you in, and they resist the desire to know them better. If a
good character, whether written with subtlety or in flagrant
opposition to the same, can be likened to a baited fishhook to entice
the viewer, capture their interest, and then draw them along, then
Agata and Sonozaki can, at least given their roles in the story, be
likened to ends of fishing line with neither bait nor hook attached.
They did too good a job at proving what the writers wanted to say
about empathy.
So, while Kiznaiver is a creative
endeavor, that takes risks and really does try most of the time, with
a few great scenes backing up an interesting high concept to
explore… it’s still really a C- final product. It trips over
itself far too often and in ways that are far too critical to award
it any better. It’s watchable, in large part because it does still
have the same clear creative passion and at least some of the energy
that you expect from Trigger, but it’s also a deeply flawed product
with few real high points. I’d recommend watching it once for the
experience, but not highly, and not if you have to pay money to do
so.