The kindest way to describe this science-fiction action manga is as competently average. It’s a likable, lightweight read, with lively action scenes, but the first book is also laughably tropey and flimsy. The book has a note from creator Yoshinori Matsuoka, who mentions he’s written manga on other subjects (shogi, rugby), but this is his first, “long dreamed-of” entry into sci-fi. That’s borne out by the book, whose visual storytelling is confident, but whose sci-fi is overwhelmingly derivative.
At first glance, the setting seems to be present-day Tokyo. In the first scene, an unfortunate girl is mown down by a speeding car (must be Truck-kun’s day off). No-one seems much bothered, though, and the girl is damaged rather than injured. This is a world where almost everyone uses a Re:Anima, an artificial body. The real humans are sheltered underground, because Earth’s temperatures have risen to unbearable levels. But people can link their brainwaves with a surface-level Re:Anima, and carry on their lives pretty much as normal. The bonus – which the story signposts is really a grave liability – is that people can’t feel pain in Re:Anima bodies, though they can be traumatised if those bodies come to harm.
Consequently, there are still cops, or “enforcers” as the story calls them… and any sense of novelty falls away. The book focuses on two low-level enforcers. One is a perky, ditzy young woman called Shinano, whose cuteness distracts from her world-class judo skills. Her companion is Kara, who resembles a little boy, but who gets very cross when people think he is one, as he’s almost thirty. He wields a special sword to take down bad guys, and has a super-mysterious backstory, bound up with how he doesn’t use a Re:Anima, but somehow survives the surface in his real body.
Yes, it’s that tropey. So far, what the pair’s dealing with is familiar too – embodied techno-crime as people illegally “mod” (modify) their Re:Anima to perform super-feats for money or kicks. Superpowers are effectively crimes, which may be why there’s a seeming homage to the anti-superhero saga The Boys – a girl is pulverized, ostensibly by a criminal running “through” her at Flash speed. Some culprits are just doing crime for the lulz – after all, they’re not killing anyone – while other have nobler motives, but it’s all familiar future-action stuff.
At least it’s very readable, with clear storytelling and zesty action, where the goodies and baddies zip confidently through the frames. Their limbs sometimes become blurs of bristling linework, while Kara has a jacket that serves as his superhero cape. The characters are often drawn in throwaway fashion for you to flip past, but Matsuoka sometimes has frames of attractive or striking faces which function like exclamation marks– for instance, when a frail-seeming girl suddenly barks out her defiance like a yakuza. There’s a running joke about Kara being a trainspotter, which is handy for a Tokyo detective. Matsuoka’s plainly joking about his own proclivities, as he renders trains with special enthusiasm.
Storywise, there are reasonable twists to the individual cases – three in the first book – but not much underlying ethos yet. Kara comments on how the lack of pain receptors in Re:Anima bodies makes people lose their sense of self-preservation, and of consequences to their actions. It’s established that all the Re:Anima bodies are being built by one corporation, an uh-oh for any techno-thriller. There’s also a moment when Kara tells one young hoodlum raging against the world to grow up and stop playing the victim. Maybe Kara’s a pint-sized Dirty Harry, but he could equally be parroting Major Kusanagi – “If you’re unhappy with this world, then change yourself.”
The manga’s world-building deserves a bit more discussion, as at first it seems ludicrous. The remote-controlled bodies may remind you of James Cameron‘s Avatar, though the idea goes back at least to “Call Me Joe,” a 1957 American story by Poul Anderson. However, Re:Anima reminded me more of Surrogates, a goofily enjoyable 2009 action film with Bruce Willis, from an American comic. However, Surrogates allowed people to have beautified bodies, whereas in Re:Anima, the artificial bodies all seem boringly copied from the originals. How about trans people, for example? And aren’t there evangelists for post-human ways of being? At least Re:Anima offers the disabled options – Shinano uses a wheelchair in her real body, but doesn’t for action on the surface.
Initially, we seem asked to buy that Re:Anima‘s showing a very near-future. Tokyo looks exactly as it does now, though the first scene shows Halloween celebrations in Shibuya, increasingly curtailed these days. Later, the manga’s dateline turns out to be 2032, which looks ridiculous even for pulp sci-fi! It’s only midway through the book that it’s explained this is an alternate history. In Re:Anima‘s timeline, Earth was hit by a solar flare in the 1980s, which wrecked the climate before we did and took out most of humanity. (Eighty percent, letting fans of a certain franchise write their own jokes.) Re:Anima technology came about in the next few decades.
Explained like that, the backstory’s no sillier than a space battleship anime, though it would have been better to put the altered history at the start. Possibly it’s meant to explain why there’s not much sign of the internet or cyberspace in Re:Anima, at least as mass media. Even in artificial bodies, the ordinary citizens don’t have access to giant info-sources or wired communities; they’re not the cyborgs of Ghost in the Shell. But it’s doubtful if this will make Re:Anima distinctive. Even in the first book, there’s still a stock scene where the hero consults with a woman in a wired-up headset, who calls herself a “database” and searches oceans of video.
In such ways, Re:Anima tamps down any hope that it’ll do much that’s new with its familiar-feeling ideas. So far, it seems happy to be one more genre potboiler, to take or to leave.
