COPPELION

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MANGA ActionCoppelion

REVIEWS

• 

  Ciaora39

  26/100
  Nuclear holocaust anime that is about as bad as one.

  

  The post-apocalyptic genre has been quite popular due to new mediums pulling their spin. So very few manage to do the genre justice with how vast the genre generally has to go for it, and most writers don’t have the most competence to write out a competent narrative. Whether or not they are about a nuclear holocaust, zombie invasion, ecological disaster, divine judgment, or pandemic reasons, there are so many possibilities for story writers to come up with brilliant ideas for the genre with some great results and ones that are not so great. Our little anime Coppelion falls into this category that fails to provide a meaningful narrative and a dull melodramatic story that severely cripples it from being an intricate show during Japan’s nuclear fallout disaster into one that completely mocks it.

  Most people are in unanimous agreement that the artwork is pretty spectacular. To which it is, backgrounds really do look fantastic and fit pretty well to the tone of the post-apocalyptic setting with the dense watercolor backdrop on the dead grass that inhabits the concrete buildings and roads. However, with that said, there’s still a problem with the consistency of the character art designs to the world’s art design. When you look at the characters, they look like they belong in your typical high-school anime with their sleek, clean looks and schoolgirl outfits. If they were to be taken seriously as consistent designs, I’d imagine them not being the glamorous, pretty girls they are if they lived in this environment for so long. Not only does it not fit very well in a post-apocalyptic setting because of its distracting nature, but it also doesn’t fit well with the show's tone. It would be like watching a movie set in the Middle Ages during the Black Plague era, and everyone else looked like they were. Animation does fair more than the consistent artwork, but these awful CGI techniques are used constantly throughout the vehicles and fight scenes.

  

  Of course, this straightforward construction of the enormous points of the show’s problems is the writing. Following a 1st personal narrative from the eyes of the three girls, the show follows several plot arcs where we meet certain groups of people trying to survive out in the nuclear wasteland of Tokyo. However, if you’re expecting something that is a similar type of story to say Mushishi, you will be sorely disappointed with this. The characters we meet hardly get any deep characterization. The ones that do come across as lazy cliches that become predictable and unfortunately delve into bland melodrama that comes across as laughable than anything else.

  What does kill the show overall comes from the erratic pacing that goes on. From left and right, characters crop up in many places, with each episode having agendas and personal vendettas toward others. With a show that is only 13 episodes, something like this could’ve worked in a much longer season. Because of this, the pacing regularly suffers immensely in hopes of moving things forward without putting a lot of the plot points into clarification to the audience. They might have trouble with what the main plot is supposed to be besides just three girls walking through point A to point B in a post-apocalyptic setting. In one episode, they are desperate to find this granny that they’ve been building upon a lot, and then in the next episode, the granny character is not spoken of ever again, and they move on into a new mission. Almost as if these events don’t feel connected whatsoever very well that cripples the world-building as a whole. When it finally does get to that specific point where you do see where the plot is trying to go, it doesn’t go anywhere. You almost can’t feel any emotional impact from the constant cliffhangers because there’s little development to the story and characters.

  

  Very few characters make a considerable impression apart from the main characters, but they suffer bland stereotypical fates. Only Ibara Naruse seems to have a brain in her head, while the rest seem only to have screaming and whining as their only two reactions and become more like cheerleaders for Naruse most of the time. They even sometimes screw up certain things that almost jeopardize their whole operation, which begs how they even got the job of being these operatives in the first place. If anything, they come across as mere mindless pawns that don’t offer anything other than pure annoying schoolgirl service that isn’t charming or funny because of their out-of-place nature.

  There are logical inconsistencies that can’t be taken with a grain of salt in some action scenes, such as breaking the laws of physics. In some action shows, viewers can ignore these problems because of their outlandish nature of defying physics just for convenience. Still, Coppelion is portraying itself as a realistic setting. You can’t just toss out these laws to see pretty action sequences because it will go against odds with the show’s naturalistic atmosphere,e and we won’t be able to take it seriously as we did in the beginning. Examples include: 1) People can survive a rocket launcher’s backblast from inside a building. 2) Someone can survive an anesthetic bullet from close range even though a bullet can still kill someone. 3) How can someone survive from a shell exploding next to them even at medium long-range? None of which are given any context whatsoever due to the hack directing.

  

  The antagonists they face don’t come across as anything memorable with all of that aside. Not even the Ozu sisters, with their very eccentric personalities. The main antagonists’ reasons for trying to take over Coppelion aren’t given enough context, so we don’t even get enough out of them whether we are supposed to be sympathetic or hate them for their reasoning for doing the things they do. In reality, they don’t have much reason to respond other than that they are just evil people because they’re just cruel and whatever reasons the show had written for them felt muddled and contrived. Their archetypes are the typical big lousy government organization that wants to rule over the landscape to gain control over Tokyo, just like every other story like it.

  I never thought I would say this, but Aoi would be the first character in an anime that Kana Hanazawa that I constantly couldn’t stand at all just from her voice alone. Usually, Hanazawa can pull off a good performance, even when her characters aren’t exactly likable. But with her character Aoi, there’s absolutely no positive outcome from the fact that the only tone of her voice that she seems to put into Aoi is high-pitched whining. The other cast members don’t stand out either, but they are listenable, unlike poor little Hanazawa. For the music aspect, for what few stand-out songs there are for the show itself, the opening and ending themes are okay songs that fit somewhat to Coppelion’s setting with lovely dark guitar tones in the OP by the band Angela.

  

  Calling Coppelion an abject failure would be taking it lightly. It could’ve been a solid show to be experienced if there wasn’t the atrocious pacing, poorly developed characters, and horrible melodrama underneath it all, but we could’ve only hoped that it would be entertaining from a funny standpoint once it stops being funny and steps into a mind-numbing boring anime, the entertainment stops and the dull mediocrity sets in. I’d rather watch a show be entertainingly bad than be boring, and this managed to do both. To this, I must now let Coppelion sit on the throne as one of the most disappointing failures of the year, if there was ever a throne in the first place.

  Grade: D

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• 

  seanny

  60/100
  A rollercoaster of blunt allegories and anime catharsis in a Chernobyl-flavored postnuclear adventure

  A nuclear disaster of epic proportions. The outcasts that live in the irradiated exclusion zone. Thick kansai-ben. An adventure in the ruins of an iconic city. A meditation on the Japanese condition so loud and dumb even a foreigner can understand it. A villain with loose socks.

  Sometimes, a passable anime continually returns to my mind because it happens to push the right buttons. Originally from an '08 manga, the story took on an accidental prescience after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Reactor meltdown. Coppelion, however, is obviously fashioned after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster which I hope needs little introduction. Its subsequent exclusion zone is an accidental nature preserve; a couple hundred elderly still live there illegally. The abandoned city of Pripyat is a symbol of the downfall of a utopian ideal. It holds a very special place in the popular imagination.

  Coppelion paints Tokyo in these postnuclear colors. Short-lived, genetically engineered teens in school uniforms are dropped into the zone for a mission of no return: to find and evacuate the last holdouts who roam the city like ghosts. With their superhuman resistance, they pierce the swirling, radioactive fog and discover the secrets of the zone and the “Coppelion” units that preceded them.

  The series is nothing if not a thermonuclear warhead of explosive pathos. The joshikousei angels continually descend on the haggard old men of the wasteland, offering hope in a world of despair. The old men prostrate themselves at the feet of the young Coppelions, begging forgiveness for the ruination they’ve inherited. I sense something of an allegory.

  The pot of hope & despair churns constantly. A woman prepares to give birth in the zone; a symbol of rejuvenation in a dead world. Meanwhile, her husband joins an ex-military death cult that seeks to further the spread of the nuclear fallout, aided by renegade Coppelions who’ve lost their way. Meanwhile, figures involved in the original catastrophe seek redemption by joining the good guys. Meanwhile…

  People may find this roller coaster ride of anime catharsis blunt and shallow despite the Chernobyl trappings, but the trappings are oh so interesting. A “twenty years later” version of the big city with its rust, overgrowth, shattered windows and teetering skyscrapers provides visual interest. The love-it-or-hate-it, prismatic “GoHands colors” accidentally works in an adventure through an irradiated wasteland. And the Osakan studio does deliver the occasional over-the-top action setpiece. What it lacks isn’t flavor. Flavoring may be the only thing it has.

  Postscript: I originally wrote this review in 2020 as part of my Passable Anime that Comes to My Mind A Lot series. If you're looking for a good post-apocalypse mystery-adventure series, I highly recommend 2023's Heavenly Delusion (Tengoku Daimakyou) over this one.

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