ISLAND

ISLAND

ANIME

STATUS
COMPLETE
EPISODES
12
RELEASE
September 16, 2018
LENGTH
24 min

DESCRIPTION

Urashima, an island far from the mainland. The people who live there lead carefree lives. But five years ago, the island's three great families suffered a series of misfortunes, and succumbed to suspicion. The people of the island cut off all contact with the mainland, and began a slow decline. The key to saving the island lies in three girls who belong to the three families. But they are bound by old traditions, and are conflicted. On that island, a lone man washes ashore. The man claims to be from the future, and he begins a solitary struggle to change the island's fate.

(Source: Anime News Network)

CAST

Rinne Ohara
Yukari Tamura
Sara Garandou
Hibiku Yamamura
Karen Kurutsu
Kana Asumi
Setsuna Sanzenkai
Tatsuhisa Suzuki
Kuon Ohara
Rina Satou
Rinné O'hara
Yukari Tamura
Emiri Sunda
Takako Tanaka
Nirvan Ohara
Naomi Kusumi

EPISODES

Dubbed

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RELATED TO ISLAND

MANGA DramaISLAND

REVIEWS

Stoffe
70/100
A potentially great mystery series dragged down by pacing issues
Disclaimer: While I am aware of the visual novel that the anime is based on, I have not played it, and will review the anime as its own, free-standing product.

Island is a story of mystery and romance, with slice-of-life and drama sprinkled throughout. Awakening on a beach with little memory of his origins, a young man calling himself Setsuna tries to puzzle together how and why he ended up there. He soon gains the friendship of Rinne, Karen and Sara, daughters from the island's three most powerful families. As he helps them with the struggles brought on by the island's traditions, more and more of its mysteries begin to emerge.

The series' presentation is above average, but not to the point where it manages to stand out. The animation, while never really reaching any outstanding moments, stays consistently inoffensive aside from a few wonky angles, and the detail of the individual drawings has a generally higher level of detail than most seasonal anime. The visual style itself is in tune with the actual content, a trait shared by the series' soundtrack. The opening and ending tracks are memorable, and the score serves to uphold a strong sense of mystery.

A mystery stands front and center in Island, and it's definitely an engaging one. Many different threads arise throughout the story, and even though some of them feel like they might be overlooked by the end of the story, it all manages to come together into a very satisfying conclusion. It goes places that I never would have expected it to coming in, yet it stays consistent, and no part of it feels like a sudden contrivance without building upon what's previously been hinted at. After it was all said and done it left me thinking about the finer details and implications of it, and not in a bad way.

But what would the story be without any characters? The series puts most of its focus on the four aforementioned characters, Setsuna, Rinne, Karen and Sara, but also features other recurring inhabitants of the island. The main cast all have distinct personalities, and we get to know them better throughout the episodes with all of them managing to become endearing, albeit some mildly raunchy parts might be off-putting to some viewers. However, while they all have their moments, I was left feeling like more time would have needed to be spent with them. Some characters in particular, while likeable, did not get nearly as much time as they needed for their emotional arcs to become effective. I simply didn't have enough time to form any sufficient attachments to them. This leads us to the unfortunate yet undeniable pacing problem of the series.

Despite being twelve episodes long, Island feels like it has the content to fill twenty-four. The early episodes keep throwing enough threads about prophecies and legends at you that you become unsure as to what the show is even about, and which are left hanging while the show goes off to warm you up to the main characters for a few episodes. While getting to know the characters is of course important, some of their arcs feel rushed, in particular Sara's, which in a way really only gets focus for a single episode. The strongest effect of the pacing is felt from a section towards the end of the series, which was conceptually fantastic yet fell short from how rushed it ended up becoming.

Island does an astounding job of making me wish it was better. It leaves me disappointed with how much the pacing worsened the series, yet it's undeniable that it still managed to keep me excited each week to see how it would progress, and that while the characters could have used more time to grow on me, I was still quite fond of them by the end. As a net experience, I quite like the series. The good parts of it manage to pool together to overcome the one big bad part of it. And, if nothing else, it's given me a very solid VN recommendation.
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PixEFit
30/100
Awful pacing and boring story.
A naked guy on a beach with amnesia wakes up with a girl laying face down on his dick. This is the first scene of Island, a show airing this summer anime 2018 season. Labeled as a drama sci fi show, Island takes place on an island that is isolated by the rest of the world. Bound by its old traditions, the island has its own social structure, which consists of their three families basically acting as major political figures on the island. Recently, the island has been under some distress and the families are under suspicion. These odd circumstances can only be solved by the daughters of the three families, named Rinne Karen, and Sara, and by a mysterious man that washes up on the beach devoid of all memories. Except the fact that he is named Setsuna.

This show is quite obviously a visual novel. It has three girls, and a protagonist that looks generic as have the watcher imprint themselves on them, and a story that clearly shows all of the girl’s story options. Now me myself haven’t played or seen any gameplay of the game, but with basic visual novel tropes I can guess some things about the anime based on that. So the anime tried to adapt all of the endings and make it flow into a cohesive story. I feel as though this backfired though, because it feels suddenly split from one girl’s storyline to the next one, which made things more confusing for me. And it doesn’t help either that Sara and Karen’s story ended before the 6 or 7 episode mark. I guess in this visual novel there is a very specific girl you were meant to follow, and they tried to make the majority of the show about that. That in and of itself isn’t bad, but it feels like the other two stories were rushed. Especially with Sara’s story, where the revelation and the twist happened literally in the span of 10 minutes. It was resolved as soon as they knew what the problem was. And after both their stories were finished, they were forced to the sidelines almost immediately, now acting as side or even filler characters to react to what they protagonist and Rinne does.

Its mentioned in the synopsis that the island is cut off from the rest of the world, which suggests a more tropical, deserted island feeling. But, this isn’t the case at all, and is pretty industrialized for what it claims to be. It seems to be receiving manufactured goods, so the only way its cut off is that the families won’t let anybody enter or leave. Another issue is with the genre tags used for this show. The first half of the show doesn’t have anything to do with sci fi at all. Even some of the middle episode after that only hint at some ancient technology before we get hit all at once during the last 4 or so episodes. Before that its a slice of life drama with a piece of mystery through and through.

The characters in this show represent your basic girl tropes in anime. Karen is the blond hair tsundere who is the daughter of the family that currently runs things. Sara is a shrine girl loli that works really hard to compensate for her family that has gone off the map in terms of politics. And Rinne is the main girl which has the most backstory and development behind her. The protagonist I already touched on as being your typical anime protagonist. I can’t say the any of them are good characters. There are always leaps in logic and stuff that should have been obvious, but wasn’t. It doesn’t go far beyond in accordance to their personalities. They’re mostly carried by their stories.

Island’s story is confusing, rushed, and boring. The first 6 episodes were very very slow, almost completely ignoring the sci fi tag. And even when they did go into the mystery more, I just ended up not caring for anything they were showing me. Or in this case, telling me. Maybe if this show was more then one cour or season, they would have had the time to flesh out the stories of each character more. I feel like they stories they presented were genuinely interesting, but it was just presented in such a way to the point where it became a snooze fest full of characters I don’t care about.

The art in this show is below average. In terms of both character art as well as background art. On a tropical island, you were expect to get long shots of beautiful beaches or some pretty pictures of some of the scenery you would see. Island has that, but they don’t look good in the slightest. If the show takes place in a setting where it's supposed to be bright sunny and beautiful, I would assume you would spend more of the budget on its art. This show’s animation is also sub par. Its very stiff and it doesn’t do much extra when it comes to its “action” scenes. It's not on the lowest tier of animation I’ve seen, but it's enough to notice that something is wrong here.

Island, for me, felt like it had more to say. But its short run time made it feel like they didn’t get enough stuff into it as they would’ve liked. Anyway, the end result is a bad show all around. I recommend this to someone who wouldn’t mind waiting for a while to watch a only decent sci fi mystery. Maybe someone else can appreciate Island more than I could. I give this show a 3 out of 10. This has been PixEFit’s spoiler free, but not really anime review on Island.
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SMSWTA
50/100
Should My Sister Watch This Anime? Ye...No.
Island represents for me one of the two death flags for anime, and if you start to notice them, you may be able to save yourself the time and energy I find myself wasting in pursuit of criticism. The first, not represented here, but I am sure I will get there eventually, is that the anime you are watching is based on a light novel. Generally, this is a sign that the plot is not going to be satisfying because it is designed to entice you into reading the LN. There are exceptions of course, but in the main, I find this is true.

The second is that the show you are watching is from the science-fiction genre (but not a mecha show). Enter Island.

Disclosure: according to AniList, I watched Island over the course of four months, but I watched the last half or so probably within the last week and a half or so. A binge session may result in a different experience… I doubt it though.

In as spoiler-free a summary as possible: a man (Setsuna) wakes up on beach with no memory of who he is other than his name and the name of the girl who finds him later (Rinne) and the fact that he needs to 1) save someone and 2) kill someone, and he believes he has come from the future. Pretty “simple” as far as typical anime contrived plots go, but then we must layer on the B-Z plots. Everyone has personal problems needed resolved, the titular island is wary of strangers (we hear this a lot, but only one person every raises any issues regarding this), Rinne has a mysterious past of her own, and there is a mysterious sickness that affects some of the town’s population. The series revolves around Setsuna dealing with the mysteries both within and without his control.

For the first ¾ of the show, I’m on board. It is exploring the (inter)personal relationships of our four main characters and has a surprisingly laid-bare romance that is refreshing in a normally cloistered medium. I had even forgotten it was a sci-fi show until… the sci-fi jumped out and slapped me in the face.

Here’s the thing about science fiction in anime, and perhaps in all media, I don’t know: it is frequently too light on the science. I remember the same feeling in Kiznaiver and Dimension W (to name a few off the top of my head) where the story develops to a point and is interesting, but there comes a point where the writer or someone doesn’t know how to make the science make sense…. So they don’t. Whatever needs to happen happens, usually in the waning few episodes and the story ends.

I got on board with the romance, the setting, all of that, in Island, but once the science entered the picture, with less than half the run to go, it proceeded to crap both the bed and itself. The change in tone and pace is abrupt. The series had been fairly slow, but it takes a violent left turn and never looks back. The result is a science-fiction anime that hand-waves past the science and a romance anime that jarringly shifts and refocuses in the closing minutes in such a way that leaves the viewer (or at least me) confused and rethinking all the decisions that preceded that moment.

A thematically-unrelated shift could be seen a short while ago in the How I Met Your Mother finale, if you watched that. I won’t spoil HIMYM here, but if you are familiar, the jarring last act switcheroo is reminiscent here in ways that go well beyond the normal “best girl loses” troupe of previous romances in anime.

In short, I suppose, Island is an okay show. It doesn’t look bad or sound bad, and 95% of the story is okay, but that last 5% is enough to spoil the whole affair. Maybe, just maybe, if the science had had more room to breathe, and there was less time spent on plots going no where (Karen getting married? Who cares. Soot Blight Syndrome? Not important. Why don’t they like outsiders? Who knows?), Island could have been good. Instead, it feels incredibly mismanaged and inconsistent.

Should my sister watch this anime? No. Whatever goodness that is in it is spoiled in the end like finding a worm in the last bite of your apple.
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