This Week in Anime

Anime Director Tsutomu Mizushima's Wild Ride

Steve
It's okay, Nick. I know just how to salvage this. See, I've been watching a lot of really cool, normal guys on YouTube, and they've been teaching me so much about this thing called 7G and what it's doing to male virility. I can't wait to tell you all about it.

I like how that guy's name, "Poison," has somehow become one of the least weird details about Train to the End of the World.

I know they go choo-choo, and if that's good enough for Zenjiro, then that's good enough for me.

Also, in my defense, accurate train lore seems pretty low on this show's priority list. Like, its announcement coincided with the 150th anniversary of Japan's first railway, so I'm sure concern is there, but it's somewhere beneath horny zombies and butt mushrooms.

I will cop with being a little jealous of people who can probably look at this and go rainbolt mode, giving me the exact make and model of the train in question.

The best I can do is instantly identify when a shot uses the 1973 Wicker Man film as a visual reference.

Sometimes, it feels like it's trying to cram everything into a single episode!

I certainly didn't anticipate the extent of the madness these tracks would lead to, but I had an inkling. Astute readers might remember that this was my pick for the most anticipated of the season. That choice was based almost entirely on my faith in director Tsutomu Mizushima and writer Michiko Yokote. They hadn't let me down before, and they're doing pretty darn good here, in my opinion.

Yeah, I kind of love his CV because you've got niche crowdpleasers like Squid Girl and Girls und Panzer alongside infamous B-movie schlock like Blood-C and Another, solid manga adaptations like Witch Craft Works and Prison School, and absolutely deranged stuff like The Lost Village and now Train to the End of the World. It's such an eclectic spread.

And oh yeah, there's Shirobako.

Shirobako really came along at the exact right time for me. This was about a year or so after I started seriously getting into anime again, and the show helped me perceive and think about the behind-the-scenes work that goes into every anime. It's not a perfect vertical slice of the industry, but it does have cartoon Hideaki Anno with Evangelion-coded couches, so I think it's pretty cool.

I'll accept no The Lost Village slander. Its premiere is flawless and arguably Mari Okada's most sophisticated script.

Just kidding. Slander it all you want. It only makes us Mayoiga-heads that much stronger.

There's a lot of friction in that episode; I'll give you that. Mizushima, in general, is a strange case because while I like him as a director, he doesn't have a super distinctive style like an Anno, an Ikuhara, or a Hatakeyama. And yet, there's an identifiable feel to a lot of his work. Something almost jester-like.

That always counts.

The dogfights in Kotobuki were so good and made such smart use of the advantages of CG animation. That was a sorely underrated and under-watched series. It's worth checking out if you like planes. And for everyone else, there's always this:

Suit yourself. That's the small-mindedness we're trying to eliminate in our post-7G world. Anyway, another recurring theme across his works is an appreciation of over-the-top B-movie strangeness. A lot of stuff in Another, Blood-C, The Lost Village, and even Train comes together when you realize that the man must love schlock. At least, I don't know how else you explain the giant rabbit monster massacre in Blood-C.

Hey, the show's not over yet! They could show up at any time. These tastes made him a natural fit for Prison School's evocation of exploitation films and other abject trash.

Mizushima is many things, but a coward is not one of them. When the man commits, he commits. Moreover, I suspect he eggs on his writers to do the same when working on an original project together. At any rate, that's my running theory for why Mari Okada was even more unhinged than usual in The Lost Village and why Yokote's work on Train has resulted in the least predictable anime of the year.

That kind of indulgence is a double-edged sword. It will wear on you extremely quickly if you don't vibe with it. Depending on your perspective, I'm lucky in that regard (or unlucky). Something about Train syncs with my neural wavelength and makes me enjoy the sensation of my brain matter leaking out of my ears.

It's a great episode! It is also a relic of a time when the show appeared, and it might follow the conventional rules of a serial television program.

It's somewhere on the continuum between Heybot! and Sonny Boy right now, which I suspect is borderline insufferable for most people but good sickos.jpg shit for freaks like me. This week's episode is the most egregious example yet—just completely nonsensical, by design, in its bizarre reconstruction of Alice in Wonderland from first principles.

I think I get where the episode is coming from—it's partly a commentary on the perceived dichotomy between chaos and structure—but I also get where you're coming from. Furthermore, this is the first episode of the season in which Mizushima is credited with the script, so one could argue that this is the closest to his "vision" for the series overall, for better or worse. I suppose a lot of it comes down to whether or not you find it hilarious that he threw in upwards of a dozen slides detailing the biographies of characters from a fake anime that's only tangentially germane to the warped setting of the train stop.

Meanwhile, I'm sufficiently amused by foley-based jokes like tire squealing that fades flawlessly into pig squealing and living shogi pieces that chant the acronym for polymerase chain reactions for no discernable reason. I guess I'm just built differently. Also, the show throws so much out there that I can't help but have affection for its gumption.

Weirdly, I feel like there's a much older quality to the breakneck pace of its dialogue, like it's one of those old Hollywood comedies from the '40s or '50s where the actors are throwing out at least five zingers per minute. But for the brain-poisoned shitpost generation (me).

This week's cold open would indicate they might tackle the girls' heavier traumas with a presumably steadier hand so the show could recalibrate. Or it might just keep getting stranger and stranger. I've given up on trying to predict its next move.

I should note that I also threw my hands up in a similar fashion partway through Metallic Rouge last season, but Train's wild pacing and narrative swerves feel so much more confident and intentional.

Hey, with these smart, savvy, and completely normal heroines at the controls, what's there to worry about?