Anime: Tokyo Magnitude 8.0

Even since I read King of Thorn, I had been excited about the prospect of a "survival" anime, something along the lines of Hollywood movies like Daylight, Dante's Peak, Volcano and to some extent, Titanic. Along comes a new series with an interesting title... Tokyo Magnitude 8.0.

The basic premise is that at some point in the future, Tokyo could be hit be a magnitude 8.0 earthquake, hence the title. This anime looks at what that would be like if that actually come to pass. But this isn't some over-dramatic, explosion-packed action series, oh no! Science and human drama is the order of the day here, as a little message after the opening theme says:

"This work of fiction is based on the hypothetical situation of a giant earthquake occurring in Tokyo, and has been produced after extensive research and inspection of facts"

A message that also gives me a raging science boner. And it's done really well too, with scenes in the show (post-magnitude 8.0 earthquake), depicting things like flooding from burst water mains and rooms taking on entirely different shapes with the ever-present threat of falling debris. Visually,it reminds me a little of Bioshock actually, which is nice too. Speaking of visuals, the show looks really nice. The characters are kinda simple-looking, but the backgrounds really shine, someone on the staff clearly spent a lot of time looking at photos of ruined buildings.

Anyway, basic story is two siblings, younger brother and older sister are at a robot exhibition when the aforementioned magnitude 8.0 earthquake strikes. The series then continues to show what it would be like to survive the sort of earthquake that brings Tokyo to it's knees.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is shaping to be an very interesting series, fans of the survival/disaster genre, as well as those who want to see a really fresh and unique anime would do well to check it out!

There's always something suspicious about anime series that strive for realism. After all, live action is a much better medium for it. But once the titular earthquake hits, we see this series has a good excuse.

The ruined, post-earthquake Tokyo has been envisioned in incredible detail, and it never lets up; every screen we see collapsed houses, broken streets, and people trying to survive the aftermath of the disaster. It's a very impressive start, and for a while it looks like this series is really going somewhere.

Unfortunately, it isn't. The story is too simple for even twelve episodes; we follow a brother and sister (and the woman who takes them under her wing) trying to get home, and that's it as far as plot goes. Character interactions should take up the slack, but though a lot of time is given over to their (particularly the sister, Mirai's) worries, regrets and hopes for their family and each other, we in fact learn very little about them. The emotional scenes, while full of impact the first time, retread the same ground a lot, and the characterization of even the leads is actually very shallow - Mirai spends her time on her phone and doesn't get on with her family, but loves them deep down; her brother Yuuki is a good kid and likes robots, but that's all we get. It's hard to relate to either child, and the woman, Mari, never feels remotely vulnerable, so we never really emotionally connect to the danger. (And the eventual conclusion, while brave in some respects, is too much of a woolly compromise).

The animation maintains its high standard throughout, and while there's not much music, it's all equally polished. Voice acting is very clear, but that's easy for a show with only three significant characters. But this only makes the series more disappointing; with better characters, and a little more plot (or reduced length) to keep things interesting, it could have been god. Wheras ultimately, for all its production values and beautiful scenery, it isn't really.

Tokyo 8.0, a great anime from the 09 year. The opening text states that this is a simulation of what might happen if an earthquake of 7+ were to hit Tokyo.

Animation - Fantastic
Now, I wasn't too fond of Tokyo 8, I thought there were quite a few cliches and moments that were too predictable. But the fact that I didn't really like Tokyo 8 doesn't detract that it is a great show.

The animation is fantastic. The character models look great, there are things that they do that give them realism. Honestly, I wouldn't be suprised if it was filmed in live action on a green screen and transposed to animation. There are things the characters do that you wouldn't even think about for an animation. The way sweat pours down their face when Mari isn't feeling good, or how Mirai limps a little when her feet are injured, the little things that you take for granted. They are there! Fantastic job!

Now, for the animation of the earthquake and the resulting destruction. That was wonderfully animated, you could almost feel your seat shaking as you watched the earthquake happen. The fear spread across characters faces, the "me first" attitude that seems to become all the more apparent during times of distress and emergency. They are all there, which it makes you slightly disgusted that people aren't so willing to help someone in need, but you ask yourself, what would you do? Would you help a little girl look for her lost brother after a massive earthquake with the potential for the building to collapse while you are searching and being crushed to death, or trapped and starve? Or would you push her out of the way, pretending you didn't hear her as you make your way towards the exit that is only a few metres away?

While I'd like to be noble and chivalrous and say that I'd go help the girl, honestly. I don't know that I would. I haven't been in that situation. Anyway, I am getting distracted. The animation is fantastic, the backgrounds look phenominal and the color is pleasing to the eye, even in such a tragic story.

Sound - Outstanding, again
The music, oh the power that music can have on a mood. Not only was the character voices amazingly done, the background music reflected the mood and feel of the goings on wondefully. Now, to me the OP felt out of place, it was a sad dramatic tragedy, yet the OP had a positive upbeat feel to it. The Ed was a lot better, although I can't quite give you reasons as to why. I just liked it.

Story - What would happen if?
A question that has given life to many great, and not so great, stories. Tokyo 8 would be among the great.

It revolves around Mirai, her younger brother Yuuki and a stranger that helps them, Mari.

Mirai is your average teenager, slightly disgruntled to the fact that adults aren't as awesome as they appear to by when you are a child. She is unhappy with her life and wants change, however not quite the change that the earthquake brings. Her younger brother is quite the contrast to her personality. While she is quite the pessimist, he is an eternal optimist. Can't wait to get home to see mom and dad, always looking on the bright side, even among the tears, death and destruction that is all around them.

He sees a picture of his family with a bridge behind them, he decides that he wants to go see that bridge again. However mom and dad have to work so he gets Mirai to take him, under the excuse that there is a robot convention he wants to go to. Anyway, they go and look at the robots. Mirai is having a good time, but being the disgruntled teen that she is, she can't show it. On their way out, Yuuki says he has to go to the bathroom, which Mirai tells him to hurry up and she'll be waiting outside for him. Then she starts texting on her phone, she enters, "I wish the world would just break." Uh oh, queue earthquake.

The rest of the series revolves around them trying to get home to see their families. However, I suppose this is also where I started to dislike the show, it felt predictable. I don't know exactly, but there are three major emotional moments in the show. They are!



Of those three, only one affected me.



Anyway... I am rambling.

Characters - Yeah, the development
The story revolves mainly around Mirai, Yuuki and Mari.

Mirai being the average disgruntled unhappy with her parents and the world teen. Yuui the eternal optimist and Mari, the stranger that helps Yuuki and Mirai along the way. Each receive their own development, you learn about their history, how they handle situations, etc. Although, I didn't really care for Yuuki or Mirai. I did grow attached to Mari though.

Value + Enjoyment - This is where I rate it low
Now, I will admit that Tokyo 8 is a great show. It will probably win quite a few awards this year over at ARC. However, I didn't like it. I gave it a 7 overall, I didn't like 2/3rds of the characters, the story and the way it unfolded felt predictable and the emotional revelations didn't have much of an impact on me. However, I feel I am the odd one out. I think most people will enjoy this and it will become a timeless classic like Hotaru no Haka.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 -- A disaster show it may be, but the show itself is anything but.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is a 2009 11-episode anime original animated by Studio BONES. By its own admission, it is an "intensely researched simulation of a magnitude 8 earthquake situation in Tokyo", or, to be more precise, another one of those damn coming-of-age stories the Japanese are so inordinately fond of. While the anime *does* feature an earthquake as an antagonist (in that the plot probably wouldn't go anywhere if there hadn't been one), the main focus is on moody teenager Mirai Onozawa, her little brother Yuuki, and Mari Kusakabe, a helpful adult, who are trying to find their way home after getting stuck on the other side of Tokyo after said earthquake is done tearing the city's infrastructure to shreds.

The show is kind of what most Hollywood disaster films involve, really, but with less semi-pornographic focus on CGI-intensive destruction of famous landmarks and various redshirts by the natural disaster, and more focus on the actual human side- and after-effects, including both on the main characters and on the other survivors they meet on their hike home.

Oh, and it's a lot better too in basically every way, did I mention that? This show was actually surprisingly damn good, as I'll be getting on to in a minute.

Animation and Graphics: 8/10 -- Somewhat simplistic character models, beautiful backgrounds and excellent animation.

Studio BONES has a relatively long history in making relatively graphically impressive animes (like Fullmetal Alchemist, Soul Eater and Xamd: Lost Memories), and I am very pleased with seeing that they're well capable of keeping a high graphical standard even when making less action-oriented shows such as this one. Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is very very pretty, with an extraordinary detail put into the background and uses a lot of CGI to create moving crowds in the background. Overall, the CG is kind of conflicting, really -- on one hand, it's objectively much better than the empty locales or primitively painted and unmoving crowds found in the 'traditional' way to do it (which obviously wouldn't be very realistic at all), but on the other, the CG crowd becomes rather noticeable and it looks a bit... Wonky, for lack of a better term. As a final note on the backgrounds, while I'm neither a seismologist nor an expert on Tokyo geography, I'm going to go out on a limb here and presume that the makers have striven towards recreating the metropolis as faithfully as possible in their scenes. They also seem to have put a lot of thought into how an 8.0 earthquake would damage the city's infrastructure, buildings, roads, etc, which is nice.

The character designs, meanwhile, are a lot more simplistically made. While there are some variants, most of the children's faces seem a bit derived from the same template, and many of the adults look quite a bit alike as well. It's nothing major and the characters are able to be told apart and emote well enough, but the attention to detail is certainly nothing close to that of the lovingly crafted backgrounds. Ultimately, I'm a bit torn over the graphical impressions, but mostly over just how good it is -- it's more a question of whether it's a 8 or a 9 more than anything else. It's really good either way.

Audio: 8/10 -- Standard sad piano score, but well-voiced and with nice overlap.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0's music is more or less what you'd expect from this kind of series: When the BGM isn't staying quiet to let a scene carry on its own weight, it'll be adding a bit to them with your standard piano music. Well, I say 'expect', but the fact of the matter is that the show does this a fair bit more successfully than most -- the music is quiet and downcast enough to avoid getting pompous and swallowing any of the scenes, but well-crafted enough that it's somewhat memorable and manages to successfully support the scenes it's interlaced in without being forgotten the moment the scene has passed (an all-too common problem I have with this kind of music). Add this to the director knowing when silence is the better complement to the human drama, and we're looking at a fairly positive musical image, especially when we take into account the catchy OP and ED, both of whom are well-chosen and fit the series pretty well (the ED may jar a bit with cliffhangers, but in a good way).

The voice-work is pretty well-done; both the three principal characters and the side characters deliver voices that fit both their characters and the style of the series. The series doesn't have any big-name voice actors I feel like name-dropping into this review; let me just say that the whole thing was pretty rock-solid, lack of famous names be damned, and that if I should point out one voice job I particularly liked, it's probably Yumiko Kobayashi as Mirai's eternally cheerful brother Yuuki, who manages to sound both upbeat and pretty much like I'd expect a child of his age should without having a voice that grates on my nerves like such characters all too often do.

Story: 9/10 -- Well-written, well-paced, and with the most EPIC troll in animedom (which I shan't spoil).

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is, as I mentioned above, mostly a tale of humans rather than a tale of an earthquake. After a first episode that introduces Yuuki and Mirai to us, Tokyo is hit by said natural disaster, leaving us with 10 episodes of how the two, with the help of Mari, make their way home and personally witness various human by-products of the catastrophe. Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 could easily have gone down the path of either making this a journey into the depths of human depravity with looting and rape and whatnot (I'm looking at *you*, Mohiro Kitoh...), or turned into a clichèd Hollywood take of faux-heroism in the face of the evils of natural disasters. Pleasantly enough, it does neither: The show mostly consists of the characters slowly making their way home by walking, while coming to grips with their situation and meeting people who are doing the same, having lost some of their loved ones, trying to help others as best they can, or simply indulging in what they usually do, only within the context of a post-earthquake Tokyo.

In fact, if this anime has some sort of central theme, I'd probably say it was 'bad stuff has happened, but life goes on'. It's somewhat refreshing in the midst of all this over-dramatic treatment of natural disasters I've seen in x numbers of previous media, actually, helped nicely along by the high degree of proficiency shown by the storyboarding team. While there are a bit of cliches played up and the ending tends to drag on a bit much and is, in my opinion, perhaps a bit too focused around one particular story event (though, I suppose I shouldn't blame them given how important it would be to most people), the overall image is excellent. The pacing is good, there is a fair bit of variation on what the week's episode is about, and arc-based material overlaps nicely with events that only stay relevant for one episode. The episodes tend to either end on good positive notes, or manage to leave us with exciting cliff-hangers, and the story writers actually dare to throw a few curve-balls and twists at us which I, honestly, didn't see coming. So good showing to them.

Characters: 9/10 -- Real people, and nicely written ones to boot.

The character section of Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is, naturally, centred on the three protagonists Mirai, Yuuki and Mari. Basically, without going too deeply into character analysis, I found all three to be very well-written and conforming both to being believable characters and also very sympathetic without pandering too much to the stereotypical traits of anime character archetypes. Mirai is a recent teenager, of the kind that discovered not so long ago that adults aren't the all-knowing, all-competent and constantly caring people they're cracked up to be when you're a child, and acts much like a moody teenager is wont to do in that time of life (as I know from personal experience), which contrast with her kid brother Yuuki, who is still an eternally cheery barrel of sunshine and ironically more sometimes more mature than his sister in that he doesn't give up hope even when things look their worst.

Mirai and Yuuki actually kind of resemble kid side characters in traditional disaster movies. Y'know, the teenager that when rescued by the Manly Man protagonist learns the power of friendship and trust instantly, and the cute annoying little kid that constantly needs to get saved -- the ones who do little but tag along and have if anything even stronger character shields than the main character because if Hollywood actually were to harm or kill either of them it would be like pushing a crippled cancer patient in a wheelchair full of kittens down a stairwell full of green soap and broken glass (good times, good times), and not to mention it would force them to actually be *original*. If you've seen any disaster movies, you know who I'm talking about. Anyway, in this case, they actually are the main characters, and since it is from their point of view we do get to see them suffer a bit, and their character development (especially Mirai's) is considerably more believable and satisfying to watch as a result.

And it would, of course, be even worse if the third member of the main cast, Mari, wasn't there. Put shortly, I really liked Mari as a character. She's cool-headed, nice, and very helpful while at the same time showing that she is only human, but doing the best she can nonetheless. If I was ever put in a similar position, I actually hope that I would be able to act like her, or be helped like someone like her if was in need of it.

Finally, we have the supporting cast, most of who are on a per-episode basis and showcase how other people make due after the earthquake, sometimes in spite of great material and human losses. Since the story is from Mirai's point of view we only see the characters from a superficial point of view, but like the main characters most of them expertly balance sympathy with believability. Pretty much all of them bring something unique to the table in showcasing the human cost of the disaster, and do their parts in the story admirably.

Value: 8/10 -- Hollywood could probably learn a thing or two from this.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 has very few barriers on it which would ban it from any particular sex or age group, and comes close to what I would call 'universally recommendable'. While I have seen several disaster films, I have never a disaster film story tackled by an anime before, nor tackled from such a POW or with such amounts of skill, taste, and realism, giving it an excellent rating in being memorable and uniqueness as well. OK, it's still a 'coming-of-age' tale, but it's not really comparable to most of its kind. I don’t think it’ll start trends so historical importance takes a hit and re-watch value may not be the highest one, but I wouldn't mind watching it again someday, and hope it gets licensed.

As for similar anime, I should probably put up Grave of the Fireflies (although this show is more of an up-and-downer than just pure down like that one) -- though, ultimately, like Eden of the East, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 defies most common genres of current anime. Perhaps I'll name-drop Dennou Coil while I'm at it; it's kind of similar in that it's a child-based story with a great coverage of different moods, but story- and character-wise they're pretty dissimilar.

With it being a similarly down-to-earth tale of having to go somewhere, I would also recommend The Straight Story to anyone who liked this, unless you guys all get the gibblies of the thought of watching a western live-action film. If you happen to love Hollywood disaster films for their special effects, this *may* not be for you.

Enjoyment: 9/10 -- It has its ups and it has its downs; both well-crafted. Incredibly humanising.

I enjoyed Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 a lot. I mean, really a lot. I highly anticipated each new episode, and even at its 'worst' the show managed to maintain my interest. At its best, it had me glued to the screen. I kind of balk at calling anything 'emotional' these days, but I will say this: Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 is more alive, more humanizing, more touching, more *real* and finally more well-crafted in its drama than ten of your standard moeblob anime love stories with their crazy-hair coloured archetypes and the traumatised protagonist. Sure, there were parts that some people may say were slow, but to me there wasn't a single superfluous moment in the anime. I couldn't count many plot holes or left-behind story lines, and the ending was well-crafted and left me with kind of a fuzzy feeling while at the same time making me kind of misty-eyed.

Total: 8.5/10 (rounded up to 9/10) -- The only 'unfortunate' part of this show is that its score won't match its name, a superb piece of work otherwise.

I kind of wanted to give this show an 8.0, you know? It would be, as you say, appropriate. But I can't. Because it wouldn't be me being honest with myself, and I damn well feel it wouldn't be what I think the show deserves. So, yeah, Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 gets a 9 (by rounding up) instead. It may not be big and epic and filled with heroics, but those 11 episodes tell a really good story about regular, ordinary, realistically written but yet very lovable and sympathetic humans put in a bad situation and simply doing their best to survive, which neither panders to the great heights of Hollywood heroism nor sinks entirely down into the depths of complete despair like Grave of the Fireflies does at the end (which is one of the reasons why I actually prefer it to the latter), but shows a little of both and how well the two can inter-mesh when written properly. Highly pro-humanity, highly realistic in its treatment of both characters and situation, and highly recommended.