Gatchaman Crowds

– Review by Dustin Kramer

Isn’t the Internet great? Think of all the things we can do with it — sharing, communicating, manifesting our digital selves in the physical world to deal with crime and natural disaster recovery. Wait, we can’t do that last one? Well, if we can’t by 2015, we’ve been scammed (also hover boards and Mr. Fusion, please and thank you). But imagine if we could actually eliminate the need for central authority and organizations by using cyberspace to self-govern. Could it really work? Gatchaman Crowds attempts to answer this question and a few others. Let’s dive in.

In the aforementioned near-future landscape of 2015, the Gatchaman are a group of not-so-super superheroes in the fictional Japanese city of Tachikawa. With only one of their five members, the paragon Sugane Tachibana, actively fighting alien invaders known as MESS, there seems to be some trouble in paradise. Paisan, the supergroup’s cowardly leader, is an alien that looks like a panda — but don’t you dare call him one. His bark is much worse than his bite, and he avoids violent conflict at all costs. Utustsu is a recluse, crippled by social anxiety and the fear that she might hurt someone with her power. Jou, the misanthrope, has been jaded by too many years on the G-Crew (just think of him as the grizzled cop that’s “too old for this shit”). OD rounds out the group as the swishy, self-described “Gatchaman who can’t transform.” Right, so, who needs broken superheroes anyway?

Rui Ninomiya, or LOAD-GALAX as he’s known online, has developed a social network that allows users to connect and help one another with various issues. Need legal advice? The GALAX platform will connect you with an attorney and reward the counselor with a kind of proprietary currency. Rui’s goal is ambitious; he wants to break down old systems of power and leadership and “update the world” in accordance with his ideology. He dreams of a world where individuals use the internet to advise and protect one another, upholding the universal understanding of discovered law. But his logic is flawed. He has recruited an elite group of 100 GALAX users to participate in a special program called Crowds — a platform that allows its participants to drop physical avatars into the real world to deal with more immediate threats to humanity like earthquakes and riots. So, in relying on his own wisdom to determine which 100 among us deserve this privilege, he has effectively recreated the hierarchy that he wishes to dismantle. Crowds is only made possible through technology (or magic or whatever) called NOTE, a small device the Gatchaman also use to transform into their super suits. He is given this by Berg Katze, an androgynous alien who will become important later.

At this point it should be apparent that Gatchaman Crowds begins as a sort of anti-superhero tale. It succinctly establishes a world in which the heroes are ineffective in comparison to a benevolent populace. It’s very Japanese, really. Rui’s pro-collectivism is conveyed loud and clear and exists in contrast to the far more individualist, god-like hero tales from Western comic book fiction. The theme even gets its own scene where Rui speaks to one of his Crowds users, but the dialogue here only serves to expose the living hell out of something that, unfortunately, was already quite obvious had you been, you know, watching the show — but its point is an interesting one to be sure. A part of me hoped that the story would focus on illustrating how veritable gods find their place in a world that no longer needs them. The direction it ends up going in is a bit more conventional but thematically satisfying all the same — but I’m getting ahead of myself.

In the first episode, the G-Crew’s status quo of virtual inactivity is promptly disrupted by a hand grenade of eccentricity known as Hajime Ichinose. Unconventionality made flesh, the secondary school scrapbooking sweetheart is tapped out by the Gatchaman’s overseer, the mysterious JJ. Questioning the G-Crew’s every method of operation and quickly disregarding any and all instruction she is given, Hajime all but neutralizes humanity’s primary threat, MESS, by the end of the second episode. Maaya Uchida’s shrill performance here is fittingly irritating given the nature of the character. Love her or hate her, Hajime is a force to be reckoned with — but so is Berg Katze (I told you he’d be back).

Once MESS has been taken care of, Berg Katze uses his strange power of transforming into someone by kissing them to steal Rui’s identity, hijack GALAX, recruit his own “Neo Hundred,” and begin wreaking havoc with Crowds, awarding points to users for blowing up government buildings and the like. However, it only takes a couple of conversations with Hajime for her to figure out that Berg Katze is her equal opposite. Where Hajime promotes transparency by removing her Gatchaman costume in public and introducing herself by name, Berg Katze hides behind the faces of those he kisses. And it’s in observing this dichotomy that the conflict resolution becomes clear. Rui decides to take Crowds public, allowing anyone and everyone to become a user, but he no longer trusts in the inherent good of the general public. He makes the cynical yet effective decision to turn the whole thing into a game — much like Berg Katze did — but instead of winning points for acts of terrorism, users can make food for refugees, participate in rescue parties, et cetera. The plan works; before long, Berg Katze is hopping around, powerlessly begging for someone to pay attention to him. Quite a fitting end for the world’s worst internet troll.

Gatchaman Crowds turns out to be a fairly dense show thematically. Its politics land a bit on the cynical side, but that doesn’t mean they don’t ring true. The show uses GALAX and Crowds to effectively illustrate the usefulness of the internet as a communication and organization tool but decries the value of anonymity in cyberspace. I can’t imagine this show is popular with those darker corners of the internet that seem to thrive on facelessness. The world of Gatchaman reconciles itself somewhere between the communist ideology sought by Rui at the beginning of the series and the currently standing hierarchy of power but doesn’t take any time to explore the longterm implications of this compromise. What happens when Crowds users discover more profitable ways to exploit the platform outside of the built-in reward system? What can be done when these activities cross into the realm of illegality? Instead of addressing these issues, the series uses valuable runtime (half an episode to be exact) to flashback and re-explain how Hajime has helped her comrades throughout the course of the show. Oh, well.

And that brings me to the problem with Hajime. She is the necessary antithesis to Berg Katze, a force of absolute good to combat a force of absolute evil. She is the manic pixie dream girl that shows up to cast an unrelenting ray of sunshine on all of the dark spots within the G-Crew. She is the angel on your shoulder whose words you strive to embrace, even when Berg Katze shows up on the other shoulder to offer you a more enjoyable but malevolent alternative. Because of this, she’s not what you’d call a dynamic character. The writers go to great pains to show you how perfect she is and how her perfection comes at a price — she’s weird. Rui’s whole concept that the normal people will do “the right thing” is totally debunked the moment Hajime shows up. Sure, she’ll always do the right thing, but she is in no way normal. This is absolutely the point. Hajime and Berg Katze are both ideas, and when the villain is absorbed into our heroine’s body in the last moments of the final episode, you get the feeling that this combination of light and dark finally bestows Hajime with all the good and bad that it takes to be “normal,” whatever that means.

The series has a very distinct sense of style — one that I’m admittedly not very fond of. The bright, piercing eyes and broad streaks across characters’ hair is a bit too Candy Land for me, but I really can’t blame someone else for finding the look appealing. Lots of the animation is pretty janky, save for a couple of sequences near the beginning and end of the series. Some elements (like the Tiger & Bunny-esque Gatchaman suits and the cubic MESS aliens) are rendered in CG and don’t look nearly as shoddy as a lot of the other animation. While the hero costumes are a bit busier design-wise, the way they blend in with other elements frankly puts T&B to shame.

Taku Iwasaki’s soundtrack is also notable, utilizing a variety of styles to fill out the atmosphere of the series. The main action theme brings to mind funky exploitation film scores from the 1970s and is a personal favorite of mine. Other musical styles explored are as eclectic as orchestral, electronica, and choral.

I’d like to applaud how progressive Gatchaman Crowds is for featuring three, count ’em, three LGBT character who aren’t defined by their sexual proclivities within the story. However, the realization that the cute panda character is likely meant to sell toys and the prepubescent “introvert” inexplicably wears a bikini everywhere is a forceful reminder that you are indeed watching anime. I guess some harmful tropes are just easier to overcome than others.

Gatchaman Crowds deserves praise for it’s ambitious take on individual and group morality in the internet age. It still feels pretty incomplete in places, but I doubt it could have been much more fleshed out — even if its allotted 12 episodes had been used a tad more economically. Having no experience with the Gatchaman franchise until now, I can’t make an educated recommendation of this series to fans of the older stuff. I can, however, recommend it to anyone who likes a pretty good superhero story with some somewhat heavy cerebral stuff mixed in.

3.5 androgynous aliens out of 5.

[starrater]