Beastars

[Season 1] For too long I've been determined to throw Beastars on my viewing menu. Not only was I gritting my teeth a little at what I’d heard and rolling my eyes at the thought of what roughly happens in it, but I'm also generally not a fan of CGI in anime. Some of these assumptions didn't fundamentally change after viewing it, but at least more insights were added; not necessarily bad, but not good either. The most interesting part of it all is what turning humans into anthropomorphic animals will do with all the obvious themes. If this were a story with ordinary human characters, it would have difficulty achieving the ethical, moral, and physical conflicts that this anime manages to outline. It would hardly be about half the population living in fear that the day may come at any moment when some abstinent predator decides to have you for lunch. Also, the issue of relationships is suddenly all over the place when a chicken and a crocodile can fall in love, and Beastars isn't afraid to go all the way to bed with both problems. I was therefore stiffly uncomfortable in places, which is a kind of audition on the part of the filmmakers to see if it will hold up, because at least in this series everything had a certain boundary it was pushing. The characters are frighteningly far from perfect and quite often artificially play at being sophisticated, generating a slight stuffiness and tension and injecting a serving of unpredictability into the plot. Questions over the workings of society are constantly in the air, forcing me to either ponder or vehemently continue watching. And while the romance in the Japanese version can be incredibly drawn out, awkward, and corny here and there, Beastars handles it sensitively without ever threatening to fall into soap opera waters. Production-wise, you have to bow down to the guys from Studio Orange: the computer animation is excellent, rarely getting in the way of anything unfinished or spastic, and I got used to it very quickly. If other CGI anime had looked like this, it might have diverted my prejudice and mild hatred of them. Beastars managed to adjust my anime self's acceptability of several variables that a nastier inner self would never have given a chance. I recognize that for a lot of these, it's an overly thorny path and it will soon turn around. What doesn't devour me, though, in this case entertains me. 4 stars (08/01/2021)

Sure, it's very nicely animated, opening beautiful, ending fine. The characters have some history, some traumas, some dreams, some they like and some they don't. Maybe they get along okay, but I didn't really get along with them. From about the fifth episode onward I didn't really care what happened next, apart from the wolf and his dog friend, I couldn't find a single character that I was more interested in, that I wanted to root for. I actually found the wolf interesting just because he was so calm, and his friend because he acted like a nice and genuine friend – that made him very likable to me. It's just that all of that together doesn't make for a good show. Since I didn't care what happened, since the whole world didn't fit, and since I found a lot of the characters unappealing, it wasn't a fun show for me at all. The casting of the rabbit reminded me a bit of Scum's Wish, an anime similarly hollowed out, even though it pretends that all the characters have depth. They don't. The society in the anime was so terribly oddly set up, with some suppressing their nature and others living in constant fear. The animal metaphor wasn't necessary, if they were normal people I probably would have rated it better – you don’t have to drag it out of me that these types of characters aren’t really my thing, which is probably why it couldn't evoke the right emotions in me at the right time. Who knows. One way or another, though you could think a lot more about what the poet was trying to say, I think it was just too much in some respects. Anyway. It didn't suit me, didn't entertain me, didn't charm me. In the end, it's just a high school anime with some of that social criticism and where sex isn't taboo – in fact, it's very sexually charged. Whoever finds the panda's eye wins! (18/03/2020)

I have attempted to watch this anime series twice, and I just could not get into it. The first time I tried to watch it, I took a cursory look at one episode when the show had just come out (I do this with every new anime series, and if something does not feel right, I pretend I have not seen it) and was put off by the animation and the fact that it is about anthropomorphic animals. I am not a big fan of CGI, which is probably obvious from my other reviews, and I did not particularly like how they use it in this show, even though it is supposedly top quality when used in this style of animation. When I saw the hype around it, I watched a few more episodes and got the impression that this is a Romeo and Juliet style story, where the former does not know if he wants to eat or fuck the latter which seemed pretty weird to me. "Well, okay, I shall come back to it later..." I thought. Then the next year arrived and suddenly animal anime series were all over the place. There was Nekopara (I gave up on that within minutes), Seton Academy: Join the Pack! (I could not even get through the first episode) and even something about Oda Nobunaga reborn as a dog (the previews were enough to put me off). So then I got kind of fed up to the back teeth with animal themed anime series, and perhaps I missed out on a great anime series I do not know. Fortunately, the next year BNA came along which I really enjoyed, and because of that I decided to give Beastars a second chance. I managed to watch three episodes, and then totally gave up on it (I actually watched the third one this morning, after a two-week break + I took a cursory look at some other episodes). I am afraid that this show is just not for me for some reason. Sure, it is certainly full of allegory, and maybe it is an interesting romantic drama, although I am not sure I want to think about the sexual exploits of anthropomorphic animals. Maybe some people are into it, although personally I just find the idea of a wolf shagging a rabbit plain weird, and I found other such strange pairings are equally bizarre. I am not being narrow-minded, this subject matter does not offend me, it is just that there is too much of it in this show, and so I am out of my comfort zone. I just could not relate to the characters and build a positive relationship with them. The whole thing was just too weird for me, and it was as enjoyable as stroking a cat’s fur the wrong way (in keeping with the animal theme...), and although I get what the phrase "a gentle wolf" used on the Netflix website means in this context, it is still an oxymoron to me personally. So no! I am not going to finish Beastars (dropped after episode three), I am not going to give it a third chance, and if I had to sum it up in points, I would simply award it 3/10 at most. (23/05/2020)