Do We Already Have The Best And Worst New Anime Of 2021?
There is little doubt that we have seen the worst anime of 2021 already, in the form of the excruciatingly bad Ex-Arm. But already there is a strong contender for best anime of 2021 in the surprisingly well-written and directed Jobless Reincarnation. I’ll run down why each anime is, just two episodes in, punching for their respective belts in greater detail below. To do so I will have to use mild spoilers beyond what the descriptions on MyAnimeList.com use, but I won’t ruin any specific story or plot details. If that satisfies, read on.
1994 wants its CG animation back
Let’s start by getting the trash out of the room. Ex-Arm had some real hype behind it going into the Winter 2021 season. The story, based on a manga by HiRock, sounds pretty interesting. In an alternate timeline a young man with a dislike for electronics but an innate talent for fixing them, Natsume Akira, dies in an accident in 2014. In 2030, he wakes up as a brain inside a case, being carried by a woman cop and her female-appearing android partner, as they are attempting to steal the case back from thieves that took it. Akira is told he is something called an Ex-Arm, a type of technology somehow even too advanced for 2030. Each Ex-Arm device has its own special power, and his seems to be that he is able to take possession of any computer system or even complex AI.
Armed (pun intended) with this description, I was ready for an interesting anime based on a obscure manga. What I got was a CG animated mess that made the 2016 version of Berzerk look good by comparison. No joke, at least Berzerk‘s 3D animation was consistent, if consistently bad. Ex-Arm regularly uses 2D characters in the same scene as 3D — and not background drawings, actual important characters interacting with the 3D character. The first time this happens is in a flashback Akira remembers, so I thought maybe it was a stylistic choice. But no, in the next episode they do it multiple times with characters other than Akira, in the current timeline of the action.
The animation is stiff and unrealistic, particularly in the fight scenes in the first episode. CG animation is supposed to be used to make things seem more fluid, not less, and the overuse of unrealistic camera moves and super-fluid character action is one of the problems of (normally) bad 3D animation. Ex-Arm sure doesn’t have that problem. In a world where CG anime like Land of the Lustrous and Beastars (both from the studio Orange) exist, how something like Ex-Arm could get released as a finished product is beyond me.
There is no way to tell for sure who gets the blame for Ex-Arm. The studio, Visual Flight, has no other credits. The director, Yoshikatsu Kimura, also has zero credits of any kind on MAL. Weirdly enough, the anime has eight production companies listed as producers, whereas a typical anime has one or a few, or even none aside from the animation studio. Since the producers put in the money, and Ex-Arm has many times as many producers as usual (including Crunchyroll), it doesn’t seem like lack of funding is to blame. For comparison, one of my favorite recent 3D anime series, 2017’s Inuyashiki: Last Hero, had five producers and the studio was MAPPA, not at all known for 3D work. Inuyashiki‘s 3D animation was almost flawless. By contrast, Ex-Arm has character talking animation that looks like the animated cartoon ReBoot — from 26 years ago.
It’s really too bad that the animation sucks as hard as it does, because the story and the setting seem pretty interesting. But there is no way I am subjecting my eyeballs to Ex-Arm‘s awful animation again. Two episodes was two too many.
(Ed. note: The YouTube channel The Canipa Effect has dug much deeper than I could into why Ex-Arm is so terrible, and I strongly recommend you watch the 15 minute video to see how NOT to make an anime.)
All things to all people
Based on a light novel, Jobless Reincarnation attempts to be almost every anime category there is. Isekai? Check. Ecchi? Check. Uncomfortably serious drama? Well, check. Man, put in a mech or giant robot and you would have almost everything in anime covered. But instead of getting bogged down in trying to serve too many tonal masters, Jobless Reincarnation does each of them well — really well. And they all integrate seamlessly to serve the overall story.
An unnamed 34-year-old hikikomori (jobless shut-in) dies in an accident trying to save some people, and finds he is reincarnated in a new world — like seriously reincarnated, as a just-born infant, although he still has his memories and personality from his previous life. Named Rudeus Greyrat now, he finds that learning comes easily because of his actual mental age, and also that he seems to have an inordinate amount of innate magical ability. If that was all that Jobless Reincarnation was, it would be a bog-standard isekai with an over-powered protagonist. But like the amazing Ascendance of a Bookworm, this anime explores some of the more realistic aspects of being dropped into a roughly medieval society — mostly through an ecchi lens. Rudy, more aware than most toddlers, finds the … inappropriate … sounds coming from his parent’s room in their small house quite amusing. But rather than leaning on the ecchi elements, it uses them for both obvious comedy, but also to more realistically anchor the reactions of a 30-something otaku shut-in to a pretty realistic depiction of the crude life of a medieval-style world.
Where the show really takes a major turn from a standard isekai is in its depiction of Rudeus’ previous life, in flashbacks. The description of Jobless Reincarnation on MAL calls him a NEET but he is a full-blown hikikomori — an agoraphobic shut-in that hasn’t left his room in years but for bathroom breaks. We see the awful things that drove him to become a hikikomori, but we also see the disturbing things he does as a shut-in with zero motivation. It’s rare in any anime, and more so in what could be a typical power-fantasy isekai, to both give us a reason to sympathize with the protagonist and also a reason to be disgusted by him. Jobless Reincarnation gives us both, and with no judgement placed on either aspect of the protagonist’s previous, messed up life.
While I adore Re: Zero, it is bracingly refreshing to see an anime that doesn’t gloss over the more disturbing aspects of a hikikomori’s life, as happens with Natsuki Subaru. Or worse, fetishize it, as almost always happens when the hikikomori is a girl or woman. Seriously, just about every female shut-in in anime is not only adorable, but for some reason specifically a computer genius and hacker.
This writing quality of Jobless Reincarnation can probably be credited to the light novel author, Rifujin na Magonote. The excellent direction (seriously, Rudy’s realization that he is an infant is one of the best bits of direction and timing I’ve seen) comes from Manabu Okamoto, who did episodes of Akame ga Kill and Re: Zero, as well as helming the solid 2017 anime Gamers!. The voice cast is good, with the incredibly prolific Sugita Tomokazu (Joseph Joestar in the 2012 anime JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) as the voice of the previous version of Rudy, mostly heard in Rudy’s internal monologues and memories.
I would recommend that you start watching Jobless Reincarnation with the same force I would recommend you avoid Ex-Arm like the plague. And check back at the end of 2021 to see if anything surpasses the former (likely) or sinks lower than the latter (not bloody likely).
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