Anime Spotlight #76: Re-Birth/Verse
a.k.a. The Animeister.
You know I love a good pun, Ticketholders; especially puns that work on multiple levels, because it takes more than a simple homophone to create. For example, the title of today's isekai getting the Anime Spotlight treatment for the month of April takes advantage of the interchangeable phoenetics of katakana to make a bilingual pun out of its English subtitle ("birth" and "verse" are spelled with the same characters in Japanese).
Unfortunately, the anime itself ended up as a double-entendre of trying too hard and not trying hard enough. Heh; trying....
Created by Fujiko Sakuno (who also writes the manga) and series director Hideya Takahashi with animation by David Production (Fire Force and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure), it follows Narihira Takeru (a loud-mouthed brawler with a laundry list of family mottos, dubbed by the Isekai Red Ranger himself, Ethan Condon) as he is transported to a fictional, magi-punk version of feudal Japan after a run-in with truck-kun and Palworld fire Pikachu, and makes it his mission to protect Tsukimiya (the literal girl of his dreams because he's had almost two thousand recurrences before his death, and she's dubbed by Trisha Mellon—Mini Popo in Dragon Ball Daima, though I thought she sounded a bit like DanMachi's Hilary Haag) as he promised in his dreams.
Through battles with Oni (kaiju-sized beasts from another world, though their true nature has some Rising Of the Shield Hero multiverse darkness to it), Takeru comes to learn that he not only has an immunity to the petrifying Black Mist that the Oni arrive in (and one of the city's higher-ups has a suspiciously uncanny ability to predict), but that he has Re:ZER0 powers and (with training from a small group of golem-piloting exorcists with elemental magic...and his dream girl) the ability to transform into a kaiju state of his own and make the impossible possible by yelling really hard and punching really loud with the strongest, most prevalent anime trope ever conceived.
But the bigger the concepts get and the more insane the twist reveals try to be (that aren't really twists if you've seen Twin Star Exorcists, Future Diary, have any understanding of Japanese mythology, can read basic social cues and interpret obvious dialogue, and you've read enough of my reviews to know how evil the moon can be), the dumber, more cliché, and more Japraved the story gets. Like, it didn't lose my interest with a multi-hour marathon of endless sensory overload like 7th Prince Season Two did because of how shamelessly high-concept it tried to be (like Derrida and Island running on Vivy logic with Gurren Lagan stakes, and an Apothecary-meets-Samurai paint job graffiti'd over with death game genre trashiness and 2000s school harem final battle...sensibilities) and the compelling dynamics of its supporting couple-to-be. By the end, though, it just wrapped around to being the kind of show where the hero defeats the villain by cryo-traveling to the future to rescue her and re-declare his feelings to her when she is a child because that's how you undo psychological trauma (that she still has? because she "still" remembers him somehow in her future-past? so the age gap is okay?), just like my sarcasm.
Perhaps the series should have given up before it was dead and not tried to learn from fighting itself, but at least the intro ("Cry Out, Cry Over" by Who-Ya Extended) was a banger.
Stay Tuned for my thoughts on some Zenescope comics about a sexy, Greek angel, and the "Godzilla" film, Fake Ultraman vs Big Static Beetleborg, coming next week.
Until then, it looks like we could pass ten thousand views this month, so please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read because I can't manifest an ideal world by will alone, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see, receive the latest news on my content, and get me closer to that goal.
Animeister,
Out.
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