Written By: Yasuyuki Muto
Studio: Manglobe
Original TV Run: April 17, 2011 – July 3, 2011
Episodes: 12 (plus one OVA)
In this alternate reality that is modern day Japan, Tokyo isn’t the grand spectacle of a city people know and celebrate. Ten years prior to regular high school kids preparing for entrance exams, Tokyo was devastated by a grand earthquake that caused mass evacuations and left people calling the city that mostly descended into the Pacific “The Red Hole”. But human nature allows society to return to a state of normalcy and the prototypical average life. Ganta Igarashi – one of the Tokyo evacuates – is a perfect example of how tragic events can become something of a non-factor in the progression of one’s life. Ganta becomes nothing more than a typical student who plays video games, jokes with his friends, and looks forward to the annual class field trip – this year they have to the chance to go to a prison that just so happens to be an amusement park called (you guessed it) “Deadman Wonderland”. But chaos always has a way of disrupting normalcy – be it an earthquake or a man draped in red.
The sight before Ganta when he awakens from this unbelievable attack is nothing short of a slaughter that leaves him terrified over the fact this unidentified individual just killed his entire class. Before Igarashi can even find out why, his assaulter decides to stab him with a projectile – more than likely something similar to what allowed him to decapitate kids like his friend Mimi. Somehow, Ganta survives. Once again, the questions Ganta has when trying to find out what and why this happened, he suffers a terrible fate.
Thanks to some convincing video evidence (that seems a little too contrived or even falsified if Ganta’s naturally innocent demeanor has been seen by those who knew him before the series started) Igarashi sentenced to death while incarcerated in Deadman Wonderland. Unfortunately for Ganta, the belief that Deadman Wonderland – a place created following the aforementioned earthquake to not only revitalize the economy, but also do something about the growing criminal population that the natural catastrophe enabled – is nothing more than one giant show isn’t actually true.
It doesn’t take long before Igarashi sees just how serious things are in “Deadman Wonderland” when the chief prison guard slices an inmate’s chest open with her sword, has to work construction in an effort to keep his new home place up to par, and avoid being killed by a mysterious albino wearing a near-full body jumpsuit to match the colors of her skin & eyes (who just happens to be a pretty good fighter codenamed “The Wretched Egg”). But Ganta, through sheer happenstance, is gifted a great ability from the man who ruined his life. By stabbing Ganta, “The Red Man” embedded a red crystal that activated Igarashi’s ability to create crimson-colored projectiles just like him. With his newfound power, Ganta makes his mind up and decides he’ll not only figure out a way to clear his name and earn his freedom, but also get revenge on “The Red Man”. But you know plans of mice & men never turn out as well as one would initially hope.
Gore, Gore, Gore: The initial premise of “Deadman Wonderland” – both the series and the amusement park that bares the same name – is rather simple: inmates are forced to wear collars that slowly administers poison that can only be hampered by the ingesting of a terrible-tasting piece of candy. So how does one attain these sugary antidote balls? By competing for paying tourists in games to the death, of course! While the general public believes this is just one giant show, the fact is people are actually fighting, racing, and simply trying to survive long enough to live to do it all over again the next day.
The violence eventually grows beyond the confines of spectacles for viewing audiences, becoming, in a lot of ways, the sole reason why the story progresses. Violence begets even greater violence; as well as roaming death squads, revenge hopes, and, of course, attempted inmate revolts that could result in the exposing of what Deadman Wonderland is really all about. The effective use of violence – be it the simple challenging of Ganta by an inmate looking to reinforce his physical and potential mental superiority, or a young woman embracing the hatred spawned by parental abandonment issues – to reinforce Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of how carnival-esque environments allows a certain level of freedom and rejection of societal norms and ethics adds more to the plot that almost anything else in “Deadman Wonderland”.
It Looks & Sounds Good: In the same vein as previous anime they’ve had a hand in like “Samurai Champloo” and “Ergo Proxy”, Manglobe came in with the big guns when producing “Deadman Wonderland”. There is a definitive mixture of enthusiastic brightness highlighted by well-made CGI that is eventually offset by the gritty darkness usually reserved for major action scenes. The level of violence utilized is only heightened and made better by the incredible animation. There is a little bit of censoring in the American version (darkening of the screen, changing the shapes of projectiles for piercing effects), but it doesn’t take from the overall look and feel of the series. The sounds are also enjoyable from the music selection and overall dubbing. Songs come at the viewer in a consistent fashion that is topped by the opening theme. Greg Ayers and Monica Rial as Ganta and the albino Shiro do a marvelous job giving limited characters some true solidity to their existences.
Resolution, Who Needs It: “Deadman Wonderland” suffers from the terrible fate of being an anime based off of an on-going manga. Now you’re probably thinking that other anime have been able to overcome such “problems”, but “Deadman” isn’t one of those franchises. That means while there is a conclusion there is also a lot of major plot points left wide open. This lack of a definitive ending to the anime adaptation is made even worse due to the fact the series didn’t attain enough popularity in its home country to warrant a second (and most likely conclusive) season (not to mention the studio going bankrupt). Even though “The Complete Series” describes the series’ DVD/Blu-Ray packaging, the plot itself is incomplete. So if you want find out what happens after the final credits roll you’ll have to invest time and money in the manga that ended two years after the anime finished airing.
Man up: Beyond the lack of a resolution there’s another glaring flaw when it comes to “Deadman Wonderland”: the characters; specifically Ganta. With only twelve episodes to work with, “Wonderland” refuses to give a majority of the characters unreasonably thrust onto screen any real time to develop an emotional connection with the viewer. Though some do have back stories (one major character introduced late in the series avoids this problem, but it’s over the course of three episodes to ensure his story actually has merit), most are just typecast characters the watcher is either meant to cheer or boo. And then there’s Ganta.
Understandably so, Ganta starts off the series as an angry young man in over his head to the point fear and anxiety tends to overtake him. Unfortunately, the whiny kid Ganta is introduced as stays that way for the entire series. Even when it looks like he’s about to have a breakthrough late in the series Ganta reverts back to the crybaby who can’t handle his emotions and man up. Shiro proves to be a nice bit of comic relief, but her inability to be smarter than a six-year-old definitely doesn’t help her cause of being nothing more than a prototypical character voiced by Hanazawa Kana. It’s hard to tell whether or not the characters would’ve benefited from more episodes, but in their current form they just don’t help the series attain that lacking emotional attachment.
“Deadman Wonderland” is the type of anime (or any form of visual media) that looks and sounds good, has an intriguing premise, and initially hooks you effectively, but soon falls apart when it tries to expand upon what should’ve been its comfort zone. The ballooning cast under the limitations of twelve episodes (one character gets an OVA dedicated to his life during “The Red Hole”, but it proves to be too little too late to rectify the problems of character development) is just too much to make people care about what these people are going through. The violence eventually becomes the main character and “Deadman Wonderland” ends up being an unintended promotional tool for the manga. That’s not to state that the series is terrible overall. Gratuitous violence isn’t used just for the sake of grossing people out, but actually plays a big role in the plot’s development. Everything looks and sounds great for the series’ majority. And Shiro will get a few laughs out of you. When it comes to “Deadman Wonderland” save your money and legally stream the series through something like Crunchyroll instead of purchasing a physical copy.
