×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Review

by Carl Kimlinger,

Monster

Episodes 31-45 Streaming

Synopsis:
Monster Episodes 31-45 Streaming
Johan is in Frankfurt, working as business mogul Hans Schuwald's personal secretary. Tenma buys a sniper rifle and stalks Schuwald's every move, searching for an opportunity to take the life he once saved. But there are those equally determined to stop him, determined that he not become a murderer like his quarry. Dr. Gillen and Dr. Reichwein assemble the evidence of deceased PI Richard Brown and desperately shop it around, trying to find someone, anyone, who will listen and halt the unfolding tragedy. In the meantime Inspector Lunge closes in, still convinced that Tenma and Johan are one and the same. Far more terrifying, Johan seems not only aware of Tenma's deadly intentions, but appears to welcome them. And then something happens in the unfathomable darkness of Johan's mind that changes everything. It sends everyone flying to the Czech Republic, where a seasoned reporter named Grimmer is about to step into a web of murder and corruption born in the shadow of a certain evil orphanage.
Review:

Johan casts his black shadow over all of Monster, but the Frankfurt arc is definitely where his shadow is darkest and his presence most tangible. This is Johan's arc, the one where we get closest to the monster and delve furthest into its ambitions and inner workings. What we see there is terrifying.

Johan is a monster, a force of evil as elemental as wind or waves. Evil infects the children he tutors as surely as radiation poisoning effects children who cuddle up with plutonium: they warp, nihilism sprouting in the wake of his words like evil flowers after a desert rain. One can't help feeling sorry for the vulgar prostitute who tries to blackmail him in a later episode. Her confidence in the power of her petty human evil is pitiful in the face of the cold, implacable forces we know to be brewing beneath Johan's civilized exterior. Upon exiting his meeting with the prostitute, Johan plants seeds of destruction amongst the alley prostitutes as easily and casually as a pedestrian might litter. When something finally does shatter that unnatural calm of his, the link between the cause and the effect is so alien that the breach is more mystifying and frightening than humanizing. Johan himself says it best when discussing the incident with the doomed prostitute: "I thought I had reached the darkest place. But beyond that I saw an even blacker darkness." That could just as easily be us, peering further into his head.

Of course, the Frankfurt arc doesn't spend all of its time studying Johan. The cat-and-mouse game between him and Tenma heats to boiling here, eventually carrying the arc to its frantic, hellish conclusion. This is probably as blatant as the series' existential struggle between good and evil gets: two men, one the essence of decency, the other an avatar of evil, face off in a contest of wits and will from which only one can emerge intact. The show puts its own little morally ambiguous spin on it—in order to defeat evil, good must commit evil—but otherwise this is pretty unabashedly biblical. Heck, the bible even gets quoted. If moral struggles aren't your thing, the chase also offers up some terrific tension and even a couple of fine, spare action scenes. Granted it wades through quite a few short-stories about troubled children, teenaged underworld doctors, and Lunge being Lunge to get at them, but they're solid stories all and rarely dissociated enough from the plot to qualify as filler. Plus, once Tenma is in place and Johan's plan explodes unpredictably into action as the good doctor's crosshairs settle and you scream for him not to pull that trigger, gripes about pacing vanish in a puff of exhilaration. On a purely visceral level, episodes 37 and 38 are as good as the series has ever been.

Monster loves its twists, though, and Tenma and Johan's confrontation unfolds in strange and unexpected ways, eventually yanking the plot around ninety degrees and sending it loping off in an entirely new direction. That means, in the great Monster tradition, that the main players vanish into Europe's underworld and a whole new cast shuffles onstage to replace them. This is one of those habits of Monster's that will drive some people nuts. If you can't make peace with it and just accept the new story on its own merits, then you may want to take this chance to bail. This is not the last time that the series makes such a move, and it'll only drive you battier as the show wears on. Those who can, on the other hand, will be rewarded with an intricate espionage thriller that taps into a deep well of pulp cynicism about the dirty, ugly things that happen in post-Communist Eastern Europe. It boasts a fine, complicated lead in the haunted, perpetually smiling Grimmer, a vulnerable victim in upstanding rookie detective Jan Suk, plenty of betrayals, double-crosses and conspiracies, and more twists and turns than an epileptic snake at a laser show. And eventually, as everything does, it all leads back to Johan... and Tenma.

The action of the Frankfurt arc offers Masayuki Kojima a chance to show off a little, and he seizes it with a properly reserved enthusiasm. Johan's "breach" is shot as an epic dolly-in, computer-assisted camera spins add surreptitious flash to a cliffhanger showdown, and the death of one major character has the slo-mo clarity of a traumatic memory—which it soon becomes. His vision of Johan's endgame is one of the better animated approximations of hell on earth, and his handling of the subtler aspects of Urasawa's creative vision—the omnipresent atmosphere of unease, the timing and delicate execution of those moments when the larger picture jumps into focus—is persistently adept, if not inspired. The move to Prague highlights the stellar quality of the background art, which beautifully captures the forbidding magic of a place that characters regularly refer to as a "fairytale town."

Amidst all of that functional beauty and tasteful showboating, it can be easy to lose sight of the humbler aspects of the series' execution. Though not flashy, the character designs are thoughtfully illustrated and animated. Johan's overpowering presence has as much to do with his perfect, imperturbable posture and the facile emptiness of the amiable mask he wears as with his actions, and Tenma's predicament is plain to read in the sad kindness of his eyes and the determined set of his jaw. In the meantime the dissonance of Kuniaki Haishima's score works tirelessly in the background to keep us nervous and off-kilter—most effectively I might add.

Abrupt shifts and short-story inserts mark this run of episodes, as does the show's usual icy deliberation. Viewers displeased with any of those will be no more pleased with them now that the series has hit its second high-point than they were when it hit its first or any time in between. To them I say phooey. It cannot be overstated how brilliantly apart from the anime mainstream this unsettling, fiercely intelligent, and ultimately uncategorizable journey into darkness is. This is arguably the most successful stab anime has taken at mythmaking since Berserk, and for that alone it is essential viewing for anyone who is really serious about exploring the medium's capabilities.

Grade:
Overall (sub) : A-
Story : A
Animation : A
Art : A
Music : A-

+ Frankfurt arc reaches its thrilling conclusion; Prague arc gets off to a paranoid start worthy of the best Cold War fiction; finest Johan material to date.
Too many side-stories; Tenma goes AWOL again; where's the sense of humor?

discuss this in the forum (7 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url
Add this anime to
Production Info:
Director: Masayuki Kojima
Series Composition: Tatsuhiko Urahata
Script:
Namiko Abe
Kazuyuki Fudeyasu
Masatoshi Hakada
Masahiro Hayashi
Ryosuke Nakamura
Ryū Nakamura
Masashi Nishikawa
Tomonori Saitō
Kurasumi Sunayama
Tatsuhiko Urahata
Kazuo Watanabe
Tomomi Yoshino
Storyboard:
Minami Akitsu
Hiroshi Aoyama
Hiroyuki Aoyama
Morio Asaka
Sumio Hiratsuka
Akane Inoue
Atsuko Ishizuka
Tomohiko Ito
Yoshinori Kanemori
Sunao Katabuchi
Tomoki Kobayashi
Masayuki Kojima
Yukihiro Miyamoto
Hiromitsu Morita
Hiroyuki Morita
Kenji Nagasaki
Kentaro Nakamura
Ryosuke Nakamura
Toshiya Niidome
Satoshi Nishimura
Tomonori Saitō
Junichi Sakata
Shinji Satō
Yūzō Satō
Nanako Shimazaki
Kazuhiro Soeta
Atsushi Takahashi
Tōru Takahashi
Kōjirō Tsuruoka
Tetsuya Watanabe
Soichiro Zen
Episode Director:
Minami Akitsu
Hiroshi Aoyama
Morio Asaka
Shigetaka Ikeda
Akane Inoue
Tomohiko Ito
Tomoki Kobayashi
Masayuki Kojima
Yukihiro Miyamoto
Kenji Nagasaki
Kentaro Nakamura
Ryosuke Nakamura
Kazuhisa Ōno
Yūzō Satō
Nanako Shimazaki
Atsushi Takahashi
Tōru Takahashi
Yukiyo Teramoto
Kōjirō Tsuruoka
Kanji Wakabayashi
Atsuko Watanabe
Tetsuya Watanabe
Music: Kuniaki Haishima
Original creator: Naoki Urasawa
Original Character Design: Kitarō Kōsaka
Character Design: Shigeru Fujita
Art Director: Yūji Ikeda
Art:
Mio Isshiki
Hitoshi Nagasaki
Takafumi Nishima
Katsushi Shimizu
Tomoyuki Shimizu
Sawako Takagi
Hideyuki Ueno
Chief Animation Director:
Takuji Abe
Shigeru Fujita
Kunihiko Hamada
Sumio Hiratsuka
Yoshinori Kanemori
Katsunori Kimizuka
Yoshiaki Tsubata
Animation Director:
Hisashi Abe
Takuji Abe
Shigeo Akahori
Hiroyuki Aoyama
Noriyuki Fukuda
Hitoshi Haga
Kunihiko Hamada
Ei Inoue
Dong-Jun Kim
Katsunori Kimizuka
Kanako Maru
Shinichiro Minami
Chizuru Miyawaki
Mutsuaki Murata
Kazutaka Ozaki
Masaaki Sakurai
Tōru Shigeta
Ikuo Shimazu
Hiroshi Shimizu
Mamoru Takahashi
Junichi Takaoka
Yoshiaki Tsubata
Aki Yamagata
Yoshiya Yamamoto
Minoru Yamazawa
Character Conceptual Design: Kitarō Kōsaka
Sound Director: Yasunori Honda
Director of Photography: Ryu Takizawa
Producer:
Masao Maruyama
Toshio Nakatani
Manabu Tamura
Hiroshi Yamashita
Takuya Yui
Licensed by: Viz Media

Full encyclopedia details about
Monster (TV)

Review homepage / archives