This Week in Anime

Is ID: Invaded High Concept or Just High?

Nick
Ah come on Steve, even when times are tough it's important to think positive. Pull yourself together!

If nothing else I commend director Ei Aoki for always trying something new with his projects. Last time we saw him he was having light novel characters murder their own authors, and now he's brought that daring creative flair to the table and given us Inception: The Animation.

Hey let's not be uncharitable. This isn't about predicting crime. It's about using a PlayStation Move controller to find brain particles that smell like murder to create elaborate Freudian dreamscapes that allow an amnesiac detective to look for vague metaphors that will lead to identifying serial killers. So it's way dumber than Psycho-Pass or Minority Report.

Dunking aside though, ID: Invaded gets points from me for putting a different spin on a very, very tired TV narrative. I cannot count how many forensic crime dramas have littered the airwaves for my entire life, so I welcome a show where at least the characters are looking for something besides DNA swabs and gunshot residue.

Much like fellow serial-killer-hunter show Criminal Minds, it's a premise that allows for a repeatable formula while also letting the show turn its episodic criminals into more fleshed out characters in their own right. Even when they occupy little screen time, the elaborate mind palaces we spend each episode in means we at least know something about even the least important ones.

The Id Wells in general are just a really good idea for spicing up a massively formulaic genre. Like can you imagine how boring this show would be if it was just the real world all the time, and every episode was watching cops stare at computer screens for 20 minutes?

Having half-watched enough episodes of Criminal Minds and CSI to kill a lesser man, I am firmly in support of just making all detective serials be about the cops solving murders by getting exploded Source Code style for at least the next decade.

All things considered it's a pretty roundabout way of being detectives, but that's kind of what makes it work. Instead of searching for basic clues or witnesses, it's about testing different interpretations of whatever stream of consciousness logic each Id Well follows. All told it's a clever way of dolling out mysteries that the audience can speculate with alongside the characters. Though it does lead to some awkward moments when Sakaido manages to figure things out before everyone else.

Ah yes, that wonderful bit of twisting the knife. Like hey Sakaido, thought you would get to be the hero saving a victim from a terrible, meaningless death? Too bad! Turns out sometimes YouTubers just lie.

Oh right, I guess we should mention that ID isn't interested in just any run of the mill serial killers. It's chiefly interested in the flamboyant asshole kind who livestream their victims suffocating to death or make glitterbomb explosions to destroy skyscrapers.

On the one hand, it's literally monetizing murder. On the other, it's a least COPPA compliant so who's to judge? Anyway, while the premise of overall execution of ID is pretty solid, where I think it's far shakier is with its characters. In that there are precisely 3 of them with anything resembling a personality and the rest are blank-faced cops in suits who stand around watching other people do interesting things.

Listen man, if you kept getting plugged into The Matrix For Assholes as your day job you wouldn't look too great either.

ID: Invaded is really ID: Innovating by having its gruff, gravel-voiced detective be motivated by the brutal murder of his wife and daughter. Never seen that before. Never. Nope.

Are we sure Narihisago didn't have 3 or 4 daughters he's forgetting because there's no way that much people juice fit inside one anime girl.

Cliche backstory notwithstanding, that's a pretty interesting place to take our protagonist. Narihisago is a messed up, broken person and the longer we spend with him in the real world, the more obvious it becomes that Sakaido is a projection of what he wishes he could be - the brilliant sleuth who always solves things in the end and makes things right. Also I'd be remiss not to mention how much of the character is carried by Kenjiro Tsuda's voice. Dude sounds like he's been gargling nitric acid for this role and it's sublime.

It's an effectively layered character that basically carries the show for me. The moment that actually hooked me was episode 2's coda, where we see him in his isolation cell, surrounded by pictures of the past, imagining actions he wished he'd taken in the Id Well and hoping that maybe Sakaido will figure out his wishes next time.

Ah yes, the Take Your Daughter To Work buddy cop duo. Seriously, I'm actually a fan of most of ID's stylized character designs but who in the world decided that our naive young detective needed to look like a middle schooler who put her mom's dry-clean-only suit through the wash?

What gets my goat is that they try to bullshit me with this:

Listen. I've seen plenty of shorter people who looked younger than they actually are. I have a friend who was mistaken for a middle schooler in college. But they didn't wear a pink plastic flower hair clip and a school backpack to work. ID: Invaded is blatantly trying to skirt child labor laws and I will not let it get away with it.

Hell, when Narihisago is off getting punished for driving his 5th serial killer to suicide, they even bring this dude in as a temp, only to find out he sucks ass at it.

Now Steve that's an outright lie. The funniest line in the whole show comes in episode five when they investigate the OTHER serial killer with a skull hole.

I fucking lost it at that line man. ID was always straining credulity with all its Freudian influence but having somebody become a serial killer because his scrambled egg brain gets L's and S's confused is so stupid I'm surprised Tow Ubakata didn't come up with it.

Props to Hondomachi being the only detective in the entire Mind Police squad with a lick of intuition. Probably doesn't say much good about these guys that the 10-year-old with literal brain damage is their sharpest eye.

Same energy

But yeah, as a potential deuteragonist she's not exactly pulling her weight. There are hints at her experience with the Perforator (and subsequent perforation) having more lasting consequences than she realizes, but so far she's decidedly less engaging that Narihisago.

Part of me is begging for the final revelation of ID to be that the only way to prevent serial killers is with prohibition. Like I dunno who decided to design and NAME their Laughing Man equivalent after century old booze mascot but props for making it memorable.

Sakaido really is the glue holding this whole thing together. Without him to anchor it I don't think I'd have any patience for the vague sci-fi nonsense or all the cop show cliches. But as-is there's just enough tethering me to keep up with it. Though I was definitely tested in ep 4 when everything started to uh...melt.

Oh I've seen that Id Well. It's called My Sister, My Writer.