Mad Pierrot, I read your post and value your feedback. I don't really disagree with anything you said and I have nothing to add. I'm glad my post before was able to give you some context and better understanding. I also like cooking.
Eden of the East 01: I picked up a prince
I was recommended this by Aeana after her and Mumei made fun of my list of can'ts and won'ts when it comes to taking anime recommendations. Since it is freely available for streaming and available dubbed and a short series, I am going to make a good faith effort to watch through it. I hope you won't mind if I share my impressions, noting that I definitely approach things from a different perspective than most here. This is the first TV anime episode I've watched in 3 or 4 years.
First and foremost I don't actually like per-episode recaps or criticism, but it's the style in here so I'll do that.
Dub vs Sub
First, I wanted to say why I'm choosing a dubbed version. I am a fluently bilingual person, English-French, and I live in a bilingual country. So I don't view myself as an ignorant "English is the only language on earth" kind of person. And I know French well enough to appreciate that every language has expressive strengths that other languages might lack. So I can appreciate that some Japanese works are probably best enjoyed in Japanese.
I am also aware that a lot of child-focused content that came to the US in the 90s was butchered (both for censorship purposes and just comprehension errors) in the dubbed versions. Finally, I understand that dubs often try to take the product out of its original cultural millieu and that for works set in the real world especially this is unfortunate.
However, I don't know enough about Japan that I'm going to catch that kind of stuff whether it's done through subtitles and editor's notes--which frankly seem to be more like a lesson and an info dump than an organic way of exposing people to something new--and I feel like, given that this is a professional dub, the quality and nuance in the acting is likely to be at least as good as what I'd pick up from hearing Japanese that I don't understand and reading subtitles.
Premise and Opening
The first episode starts with a mysterious voiceover and doesn't do much to establish the scene. The show is set in a sort of current day period. The opening credits have gibberish or decontextualized English over them ("noblesse oblige" "The King has come! With justice till the end" "To save us from the dark Who could ever doubt? We have faith", a rotating crest with "The Abuse of Greatness""). This makes me think it's about someone reluctantly taking a position of authority, assuming a heavy burden. The theme song is by Oasis.
Animation
The characters have a wide-eyed but generally well-proportioned style. Fashion seems to be normal. The backgrounds appear to be a mixed of hand drawn and computer graphics in a fairly realistic style. Visually this is appealing to me.
This however is not:
In some anime that I've seen characters have, uh, I don't know what to call it--when they have an emotional reaction, there's like unusual doodles. Like if they get angry, there's squiggly lines floating in the air. Or they blush in a very heavy way. Or their eyes get super screwed up. Floating teardrops. Etc. I'm sure you guys know it. It's incorporated here, sparingly, but I really don't like it as an animation flourish.
Although I like the designs and drawings, the animation is fairly cheap and seems to have relatively few frames. I think my expectations here are probably unfair coming from mostly having seen film anime which have a higher budget. I'd like to open up a random western pre-CG cartoon to see how the frame counts compare. Is there a name for styles that have fewer or more frames? How does this show compare to others?
Even the characters who are apparently white north Americans look Asian in terms of features. The sidewalks and buildings, by comparison, feel very American.
What Happens in the Episode
We open in Washington DC. A young girl is visiting, but is disappointed that everything is not as amazing as in the brochure. Across the street, we see a naked man. Both appear to be Asian. Cut to a man in a car saying that although "Subject 9"--an experiment? A test?--is confounding expectations, it ends now. The naked man is holding a cell phone and a gun. He snaps back out of it and is confused. So we have an amnesia situation. His phone says noblesse oblige--which is basically an expression meaning that nobility carries with it responsibility. The naked man waves at the girl but realizes he probably looks like a weirdo, nude and with a gun. The girl is very uncomfortable because she can see the guy's dong. She gives him some clothing. He runs away in a girl's coat.
The previously naked man looks through the phone he has but finds nothing. He calls his "concierge", but doesn't know who she is. She tips us off that there is memory erasing tech and that he doesn't have a new identity. He's given a location on a map.
The girl realizes her passport was in her coat pocket. Well, that's what you get for giving your clothes to naked strangers, lady. She runs down the road and finds him, after seeing another stranger give him some pants. Chase scene ensues as the man seeks the map location and the girl tries to pursue him. The map location is a very run down building. The man runs into someone in the building and says "My place is on the second floor right?" the stranger says "3B" and exits the building. Then the girl asks the stranger where his apartment is, and the stranger says "3B". Maybe that stretches credulity a bit.
The apartment is a dump but it has a map with some photos. It also has tools which look like bomb or weapon parts, and a massive cache of guns ammo and some passports. So it's pretty clear this guy is some sort of programmable memory-wiped secret agent. He thinks he's a terrorist. *pause* When I think Japan and terrorism, obviously I think the Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack. So that's the cultural context I have, that I would bring to the table at this point. I have no idea why someone with no memory would assume that guns and passports mean terrorist rather than spy. I know Japan doesn't have a formal military, I know the Japanese constitution pretty well, but why would the assumption be terrorist?
The girl arrives at the apartment and asks for her passport back. The girl's name is Saki Morimi, born 1989. The date of issue is 2010, so the show is probably set 2010-2011. The guy compares her real Japanese passport to one of his fakes. His name is Akira Takizawa on that passport. He puts the rest of his fake passports in the toaster???
Police arrive at the apartment, suspicious of the naked man and the girl who was at the White House. Akira tries to sneak past the police with Saki, pretending that they are a couple. When the officer confronts him with a picture of him nude, he jokingly drops his pants, showing that he has nothing to hide. This apparently works, and the officer lets them go. I did laugh at Saki going kind of catatonic when he dropped his pants. We see the toaster in the apartment burn the passports.
Akira asks Saki when she's going to Japan. She says today. He says "OK let's go back together". She says she needs her bag which she left near the White House--wait, she doesn't say "Err, no, you pervert, I'm not going with you???". They take a cab together to the police, although we don't know why. We cut to the airport, where we learn they filed a police report for the stolen bags and the Japanese embassy replaced their tickets. We learn this through a weird exposition dump, very cheap.
Finally Saki asks Akira why he was nude at the white house, and he jokingly says he's a terrorist but then says it's an exchange student prank. Saki says she graduated college and was touring NY and only came to DC to see the White House. She thinks it's the center of the world. I know that feeling. I like that Saki has a sort of naive but determined geopolitics that she's describing here. She expresses that Japan is paralyzed politically, unable to help itself. I hope the series proceeds in an explicitly political direction.
We learn Akira was "born" the day after Saki. It's been a strange day. Saki wonders "Could he be the prince I'm looking for?"
BREAKING NEWS: MISSILES HIT TOKYO
Closing credits
Japanese, subtitled in nonsense fate destiny what will be our future nonsense English. Cool sort of paper cutout stop-motion style showing the missile attacks. This was a really cool animation, I wish it didn't have credits over it. I like different styles of animation for sure.
My thoughts
So, I watch a lot of TV and especially a lot of pilots. By definition a pilot needs to tell us what the show is about and set up a degree of intrigue for future episodes. I think this did that. Maybe a little too much time was spent on Akira getting to his apartment and Saki chasing him, I'd have liked to see more time really constructing the world that these characters live in, but the last 3 minutes were great and I am really excited to see the show's arc.
