Warning: This series contains themes of suicide and depictions of abuse and violence. If you don’t want to read something about those topics, please head elsewhere. On top of that, if you or someone you know is dealing with any of this, please seek help from the proper authorities. Take care.
Suicide and abuse are topics that anime and manga is deal with constantly. Welcome to the NHK is probably my favorite example of this where the protagonist and several other characters come close to the brink but they are saved. Other anime like A Silent Voice and Wonder Egg Priority as well.
Abuse, bullying, and violence are recurring themes in anime, but Sangatsu no Lion handles bullying with grace, especially in its second season. The show shifts focus from Rei’s internal struggles in Season 1 to the Kawamoto family, particularly Hina (Hinata being her full first name). After standing up for a bullied friend who transfers schools, Hina becomes the new target, while the school does nothing to help. Rei, now in a better mental space, supports her along with the Kawamotos. This storyline portrays a mature and realistic approach to bullying, highlighting Rei’s growth as he begins helping others instead of being consumed by his own depression. It ends with the school eventually being forced to act and switch teachers, which slowly resolves the issue.
Your Lie in April is another series that comes to mind. It doesn’t really focus on bullying but it does focus on abuse, which is a central theme of Takopi as well. Our protagonist is a young lad named Kousei Arima, who is a piano prodigy. He was having a great time playing piano with his mother, but then his mother received a life altering, and even fatal illness that made it impossible to play. So she projects everything on her child. This leads to horrific abuse where Kousei gets visibly beat up and he even has trauma related to his abuse. Hence why he abandons piano by the time we see him.
All sounds good, but YLIA does a terrible job actually exploring abuse and how terrible it is for the child. Between having an actual adult excuse the abuse to a damn kid, having terrible slapstick comedy that just…isn’t funny and feels gross, and having Tsubaki, a childhood love interest, beat the crap out of him multiple times is fucked. On top of that, Kousei even forgives his mother in the middle. Now, obviously, that’s well within his rights to do so, but how its executed is so shit. He just sort of gets over his trauma related to piano playing and seems happy over his mother. It all feels wrong.
Now, why would I even bring all of this up for Takopi? After all, but 3-Gatsu and YLIA are much longer stories than Takopi. Well, very few manga and anime are quite as visceral about it as Takopi’s Original Sin is. No other piece of media I’ve seen really showed such a horrific way of suicide, especially someone that’s so young. I just…couldn’t process it for a few minutes. It was very effective and I couldn’t believe an anime could get away with it. It sort of shook me out of my terrible thoughts, so for that, I greatly appreciate this show in some ways. The abuse by the parents are never justified, never excused, and are always used as an explanation of the children’s behavior. This is good!
We are introduced to these terrible circumstances through the lens of Takopi himself. He is a little alien from a perpetually happy planet that never deals with pain and suffering. He has magical tools that allow him to make people feel happy (at least, that’s what he thinks). Things like flight, a rope that never ends (if you know, you know), and so on. His primary goal is to help people who are feeling sad feel better about themselves. It’s kinda like a more fucked version of Fairly Odd Parents.
You can see that he is not only naive, but also inept when it comes to actually helping these broken children. Marina is the primary antagonist and she beats up and taunts Shizuka because of her own family issues that involve Shizuka’s mother and Marina’s father. Of course, this isn’t Shizuka’s fault and is instead the fault of careless adults. Not that she would really listen cause she doesn’t have control of her family and the abuse and neglect that she suffers under them. She does have control over her friends and Shizuka, to the point that she can take the things she cares about the most.
Takopi is very ill prepared to help Shizuka, and episode 2 shows this to the point where he constantly fails at doing anything productive aside from the end of that episode (and even then, he fucks up). Takopi is the main source of comedy and slapstick, regardless of whether or not it really fits the tone. There are certain twists involving him that…make no real sense, but I will save that for later.
The last major character I want to talk about is Naoki Akuma. He’s probably my favorite character in this story. He’s a very intelligent child who also has a lot of interest in Shizuka and her well being. He feels powerless to help her as well as his situation with his older brother (who is kind but he compares himself to quite a lot to him) and his mother (who is just awful, but not quite as bad as the rest of the parents). He’s probably the one I relate to the most, at least, in someways. His conflict and how his brother reaches out to him really touches me personally. I know about having an older sibling be so helpful to you, even when you don’t see it.
The last thing I will go into involves the final two episodes, which are just…abysmal. They sour my entire viewpoint on the show to the point that I want to give it a much lower score than I actually will. I cannot go into them without spoilers, so this section has a spoiler warning.
Start of spoiler section
Episode 5:
After Naoki confesses to his brother, he is practically taken out of the story barring one final convo he has with Takopi in episode 6. Therefore, only Shizuka and Takopi are left.
Takopi tries in vain to connect to Shizuka, to stop her from trying to hurt more children (this time, innocent ones!) and she knocks him out. It turns out he had amnesia! Because of fucking course he does.
It turns out the first time he went to Earth lead to him meeting Marina, who is still cold, but is older and is doing better despite her family situation with her crappy, cheating, neglectful father and her emotionally and physically abusive mother.
She falls in love with Naoki, and they seem like they would be a cute couple, but then he sees Shizuka and he instantly switches.
This makes her mother super upset, leading her to nearly kill Marina before killing herself. Oh, and Marina kills herself too after Takopi leaves. Because we definitely didn’t have enough shock value yet.
You see the problem yet??? This twist wrecks the story as it makes no real sense as to why this would be the case.
On top of all of this, it’s so bizarre that Marina’s parents just sort of flip and we are never given a real reason as to why this happened. Why did Marina’s dad start cheating on his wife? Why did Marina’s mom start emotionally and physically abusing her only daughter to the point of scaring her? Why is the father the only one working? Even in a small rural town like this, it’s getting more and more expensive. Do they not have any other relatives to go to? If so, why?
The abuse is supposed to tell us why Marina in turn inflicts so much suffering on Shizuka, since her mom is an escort and is the person that Marina’s dad is cheating with. It’s also how Marina is a foil to Shizuka and how they really aren’t that different after all! We’ll get into why that’s…problematic later, but for now, it just feels so off and the fact that none of these questions are ever answered by the story just sucks.
Episode 6:
After all of these revelations, Takopi initially wants to kill Shizuka but Naoki talks him out of it. Naoki reveals that his brother lost his job, will probably not get into college, and their parents are both in a terrible position with their Akuma clinic (which…why would you name it Akuma? That means devil lmao)
Takopi tries to reason with Shizuka, but she stomps on him and beats him up. She feels super angry and finally vents about everything. She vents about her parents, like the escort mom who never thinks about her while her dad straight up abandoned her and had kids with some other lady. The school never helps her, and she loses the one thing that anchors her to the world (her dog). Eventually, she calms down after talking things out with Takopi. She cries for a good long while (and that sequence was pretty nice).
Now here comes one of the two massive issues I have with this episode. Takopi goes back in time on final time and resets the whole thing, making the whole thing feel pointless. Marina and Shizuka make up and kiss (ok, the kiss bit is a lie)
The final, and arguably most insulting thing that happens is how Shizuka and Marina are supposed to be viewed in a similar light, despite the fact that Marina bullying Shizuka to the point of suicide is still her fault entirely. Sure, Marina is still a kid and didn’t deserve to die, but to have Marina beat the crap out of Shizuka to then suddenly being friends also feels…so incredibly nasty in ways that not even the likes of Erased or YLIA managed to do for me. It all not only feels artificial, but even manipulative. Nothing about this ending is sincere. You can’t just kiss and make up with someone like Marina so easily. She didn’t even say sorry! It sends a terrible message to the audience that you can forgive your abuser if they share a similar background to you. Everyone feels like they have become trivialized.
End of spoiler section
Now, it wouldn’t be fair of me to say that there are no good things with this show. The production values are all incredible. The animation, shot composition, and cinematography in general all look stunning, especially for a new studio with a smaller staff.
The director and series compositor is Shinya Lino, who has been working on anime in some form or another since 2012. You probably recognize his work in the first two seasons of Dr. Stone. He was the director for that as well as being the assistant director of Made in Abyss and being an episode director in stuff like Frieren, Revue Starlight, and Barakamon, among others. He really has a talent for these different shots and perspectives that really pop. I wish he could’ve directed the rest of Dr. Stone, but oh well.
The character designer is Keita Nagahara, who you can find on Twitter and Instagram. One thing I find striking about his work would be the way he draws eyes, as they often look uneven and weird. He was the animation director, did the key animation for the OP, and has worked on things like Frieren, Dungeon Meshi, the Shirobako movie, and Dynazenon as a key animator. He has done a phenomenal job conveying the characters emotions through their facial expressions.
There are some other notable staff members, like Yuu Wakabayashi, the “Director of Photography”, which I didn’t realize was a thing till I saw it via Anilist, but given the backgrounds, that makes sense. Kumiko Sakamoto is an editor who worked on MHA, Dr. Stone, Lazarus, Carole & Tuesday, and others.
The music also sounds lovely. The OP really contrasts with how dark the show really is and the ED also feels like it fits like a glove. The sound design also feels quite nice, like when someone gets hit. It’s snappy and powerful.
Ano sung for the OP, and her last major appearance for anime as an actual character was when she played Ouran Nakagawa in Dead Dead Demon’s Dededededestruction. She is also a singer, model, and actor. Otherwise, she mostly does songs like DDDD, the new Ranma ½, and one of Chainsaw Man’s Eds (ED7). She did a great job here too.
The ED was sung by Tele, though his presence in anime is much less pronounced than Ano. He is “the solo music project of Japanese singer-songwriter and producer Kitaro Taniguchi (谷口喜多朗).” – (Anilist) and he does basically all of the making of music on his own, which is impressive. ED has a very melancholic feel to it and I love listening to it.
Ultimately, in many ways, this is probably one of the worst instances of handling suicide, bullying, and abuse I’ve seen from an anime (which says a lot). Erased beats it out in terms of how awfully you can handle these things, but just barely. I also felt like Erased, as bad as it is, doesn’t piss me off as much as this one does. The commentary on neglectful, abusive parents feel palpable but how it flows into the story is also trash. It feels like it tries to make a false equivalence between Shizuka and Marina and how they resolve things feels so…insulting. I can’t believe this is what they went with in terms of writing, it’s poorly formed at best and incredibly stupid at worst.
If you want a story that handles bullying better, just watch Sangatsu no Lion (not a fair comparison at all, but still). If you want a story that deals with abuse better…that’s a bit tricky, since this is, what, the third time I’ve been pissed off about this for anime (Erased and Your Lie in April). Breaking Bad would probably be a better time for that I guess. Utena is probably the only anime I’ve seen that deals with familial abuse with any tact.
Again, if you are dealing with intrusive thoughts, please seek help from professionals and loved ones. Please do not burden yourself with your struggles alone.
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