Article by Sean Wilkinson,
a.k.a. the Animeister
I was going to cover
To Your Eternity this week, but I decided to continue the time travel theme after I remembered today's two anime:
Plunderer and
Dr. Stone. If you haven't seen either one, they are both available for streaming on
Crunchyroll.
You can also click the following links to check out some times in the past that I have reviewed films and anime involving time travel. To avoid pulling focus (and because I didn't feel like copying another six links), Loki is not included among them.
Wandering Witch - The Journey Of Elaina and
And now, on to the anime!
Plunderer is an...interesting
shonen series that combines the Justin Timberlake movie,
In Time, the "Duelist Kingdom" arc of
Yu-Gi-Oh!, the plot of
Seven Deadly Sins, a shadowy tentacle monster named after the German parliament because anime, and eventually, time travel. It's your basic retro-futuristic, post-apocalyptic series where everyone has a number tattooed somewhere on their body that is related to something they do a lot. Depending on what that something is, their number either goes up or down (for example, a charitable person's number goes up if they do things for people and goes down if they commit a theft. Hoarders may increase their number by buying or making things, or decrease their number by throwing away, destroying, or selling things). But then there are people like the female lead, Hina Farrow, whose number is tied to the number of steps she takes, that would completely break the number system if not for the world also having a battle royale mechanic. This allows desperate criminals and the military police (the latter of which is led by Jail Murdoch, the most 90s badass name to ever be conceived by modern day Japan) to challenge people to star wagers (this is the
Yu-Gi-Oh! influence at play): physical battles that result in the loser forfeiting their count to the winner. If a person's count hits zero, Allthing (the aforementioned, grabby shadow monster) appears to erase their tattoo and drag them away to their presumed deaths. But as this is a perverted
shonen anime (an
ecchi shonen, to be Japanese about it), and we're ripping off
Seven Deadly Sins as well as
Yu-Gi-Oh and obscure Justin Timberlake films, the shadowy, handsy tentacle monster isn't the only handsy character in
Plunderer. The male protagonist (stop me if you've heard this one before) is a bar-frequenting pervert who is secretly the supposed last surviving (and possibly immortal) member of a disgraced elite military squad from the distant past. Yeah, he's basically Meliodas from
7DS, but designed to look like "the red guy" from an ArcSystem Works fighting game with a little Vash the Stampede from
TriGun thrown in for good measure. And because we need to reference the best dirty cutaway gag ever written for
Family Guy, his name is Licht Bach.
 |
| He Licht Bach, but he never Licht Debussey. |
Also, one of the female military officers calls him "Pudding." Do with that what you wish.
The series really picks up after a production hiatus when it's revealed that (shock!) other members of Licht's squad survived and (shocker!) they are evil now and (shocker-er!) the world of Plunderer is the way it is because of nuclear war, a rogue artificial intelligence, technomagical eugenics experiments, and steampunk anime bullshit. But Nana Bassler, the owner of the bar that our hero hangs out at, is secretly also a technomagical eugenics super-soldier, and she can make time travel happen. So the good guys and the bad guys-turned-good guys (not including Licht or his former squad because who knows what will happen if people meet themselves?)
get sent back in time to the military school that ended the world so they can stop Allthing and the super-soldier squad from being created. Things get bloody, compelling, and a bit statutorily Japraved from there because of the time travel element (think Marty McFly having the hots for his mother, only more disturbing), until...I don't remember. Maybe COVID halted production? Or they just picked the most abrupt, "read the manga!" cliffhanger moment to end on? Whatever the case, and despite its derivative and depraved nature, I found myself wanting to learn what was going to happen next, especially once the time travel arc started. Give it a watch if it's for you.
Much like
Plunderer,
Dr. Stone takes place in a post-apocalyptic future. Unlike
Plunderer, it is much less Japraved, and you get to learn stuff, kind of. It all begins when an as-yet-unsourced wave of green energy washes over the Earth, turning all human and animal life to stone. Nearly four thousand years later, Senkuu Ishigami is broken out of his petrification by convenient geography and protagonist plot armor. Never mind that everyone else petrified is depicted as being solid stone, but Senkuu was somehow able to remain conscious while petrified, such that he counted
thirty-seven hundred years worth of seconds! That's roughly 166.8 BILLION seconds, if I'm doing my powers of ten correctly. So, nice way to set up the "
shonen protagonist, but using brains instead of strength" concept, but as nerd-cool as that sounds, it also doesn't make any consistent sense within the bounds of its own world. Anyway, putting that bit of plot-inconsistent nerd badassery aside, Senkuu goes about using his vast, scientific,
MacGyver-inspired knowledge to survive in the "Stone World," as he and the other characters call it. Once he realizes the secret to his de-petrification, Senkuu locates three petrified people: Senkuu's strong idiot best friend, Taiju Oki; Taiju's crush, Yuzuriha Ogawa; and the series' initial antagonist, Tsukasa Shishio. While Senkuu can make pretty much any machine or chemical compound from what he finds in nature, Tsukasa is the "Strongest Highschooler King Lion," an anti-authoritarian martial artist and master strategist who can kill a full-grown lion by punching it in the face, and shatter stone with his bare hands (this includes petrified adults, as Tsukasa believes the world will be better off if youth and strength rule the day, and he has no qualms about killing for his cause). Thus begins a war of wits between Tsukasa's society of strength and Senkuu's "Kingdom of Science." In some ways,
Dr. Stone is a typical
shonen, with super-strong fighters and flamboyantly dressed weirdo henchmen making up the villain side of the cast, and there even being variations on the qualifying tournament and enemy stronghold infiltration arcs (the latter comprises the bulk of the second,
Stone Wars season, before it goes full
Lion King by ripping off the
Lion King, which itself ripped off
Kimba the White Lion and
Star Wars). But the focus is mainly on strategy, social politics, and Senkuu and his growing group of oddball friends struggling to make technological advances in the face of obscure resources and strong opposition. This latter focus is also the source of the series' edutainment value, complete with limited (for legal reasons) "blueprints" for each of Senkuu's creations. The manga's author, Riichiro Inagaki, even went so far as to research the veracity and efficacy of each process to make his series as scientifically accurate as possible, to the degree that each episode has a "do not try this at home" disclaimer. I mean, even in Japan, making your own sulfuric acid and nitrate compounds when you're not an accredited scientist will get you anywhere from a government watch list to melting off your own hand or blowing yourself up. Oh, and I need to talk about the art style and character designs. They're pretty great. The clothing is thickly stitched-together animal textile with the occasional feathering flourish on the feminine pieces. The characters have bold outlines and minimal highlighting outside of the hyper-detailed action or comedy scenes, and each character has a unique scar from being petrified, which is a nice identifying touch that fits the world's lore. Definite artistic inspirations from
Yu-Gi-Oh! (and maybe
HunterXHunter) here, but it still looks like its own thing. So, yeah. Do watch
Dr. Stone. Don't try to be
Dr. Stone.
To Your Eternity and Nope reviews next week, and stay tuned for that Ticket Stubs on 11:14, coming this Thursday to a blog near you.
Animeister,
Out.
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