Netflix and TV TOKYO's live-action adaptation of Mob Psycho 100 is unwatchable garbage.
Literally unwatchable.
Like, you actually could not pay me enough money to sit through the whole series and
give it a thorough review.
I mean, OBVIOUSLY it was going to be a train wreck from the second they announced it – live
action adaptations ALWAYS suck, and this is a story so abstract and surreal that it just
doesn't make sense in live action – but I wasn't expecting it to be THIS awful.
I haven't seen special effects this bad, editing this terrible, or facial expressions
this forced and over the top since back when Jim Carrey had a career.
You know, before he shifted gears to convincing parents to let their kids die from preventable
diseases.
What an asshole.
Sorry, where was I?
Right.
Mob Psycho 100 is a manga from One, the creator of One Punch Man, that explores the life of
Mob, a socially awkward middle schooler with incredible psychic powers… who really wishes
that he could just be normal and popular.
Between his part time job as an exorcist and the actions of some shady evil organizations,
he does get into some psychic brawls, but his ultimate goal is to just grow as a person
and get on with his everyday life.
It's a refreshingly original premise.
It also happens to be one of my favourite anime and favourite manga of all time.
One's writing for the series is nothing short of transcendent, and his art is… charming,
if nothing else.
And Bones' adaptation is an innovative, phenomenally directed work of mixed media
magic.
So I thought I'd have a lot to say about netflix's take on the series regardless
of its quality… but I just can't do it.
It's so incompetently made on every level, and there are so many better things I could
be doing with my time right now.
Like refreshing myself on steins;gate so I can properly enjoy and talk about zero, or
watching the old galactic heroes ova, or slamming my head against a wall repeatedly and praying
for death!
But I did force myself to sit through one episode of the series, and even that was enough
to give me something substantial to rip into.
Because Netflix took one of the best jokes in any anime or manga ever… and took a big,
steaming shit all over it.
So what's the joke?
In episode 2 of the anime – chapters three and four of the manga – we and mob are introduced
to the "Telepathy Research Club."
A group of slackers who hang out in a club room after school eating snacks and… well,
that's about it.
One of their members quits because he's getting weird looks about the club from classmates,
and they're left scrambling to find someone new to join because without 5 members, the
student council will force them to disband.
And they have NO time to do it, because the student council vice president shows up one
femtosecond after their member quits, telling them a new club wants their room, almost as
though he's just been waiting for an opportunity to shut them down.
Luckily for the telepathy club, Mob's JUST been talking about how he feels he's not
doing enough with his youth… and he's got psychic powers to boot.
As soon as they set this up you have an idea of how it's going to go – the telepathy
club is going to approach mob out of desperation, and after thinking about it for a bit, he's
finally going to join at the last minute, saving their butts.
Afterward, they'll find out about his powers, and join him as he gets embroiled in increasingly
dangerous and kooky psychic shenanigans.
He'll find a place where he belongs, and their long-dead passion for the supernatural
will be reignited.
But that's not how things go down – even though they make you believe it will right
up to the last second.
After the club approaches mob, as you'd expect, he begins considering his options
and thinking about joining them.
He takes a bit more time to think it over the anime than in the manga, but at the end
the day he ends up the club room, where the telepathy club is confronted by the student
council, and the intimidating tough guys of the body improvement club that wants to take
over the room.
Remembering advice from his con-man mentor, Reigen, Mob digs deep inside himself to figure
out what he really wants out of life.
After recalling how his psychic powers once helped him impress his childhood crush tsubomi,
and thinking about how she's drifted away from him, becoming more interested in the
school's athletes, he reaches a conclusion.
He wants to join the club.
The body improvement club.
Because mob wants to impress tsubomi by getting swole.
God, I love this joke – and not just because you've gotta respect any show that dedicates
a whole episode to setting up a single punch line.
It really works on every level.
And that's impressive, because in order to work, the joke both has to come as a genuine
surprise to us in the audience, while still making perfect sense based on the progression
of the story and what we know about the characters.
So what makes it come together?
This joke is an ingenious subversion of a bog-standard anime trope we've seen play
out a thousand times before – the evil student council wants to tear apart a close-knit club
of friends for no other reason than the rules demand it!
Only, if you look at it objectively, there's a lot of good reasons the club SHOULD be disbanded.
The members are really just exploiting a loophole to take away space that other clubs could
make better use of, all so that they can hang out after school and spend their 20 dollar
a month club budget on junk food.
No wonder the council's so eager to give them the boot.
They're the VILLAINS in this story, trying to take advantage of the school AND mob for
personal gain.
But we don't see that immediately, because we're so familiar with this trope that we
just expect them to be in the right – plus tokugawa comes off as an asshole.
We're also introduced to them from their perspective, and of course from that point
of view they're gonna be framed as correct.
They also have juuuuust enough personality that we can picture them as a decent supporting
cast of friends for mob.
Spending an entire episode – or two chapters – focusing on this storyline makes the club
seem like they have some sort of greater plot significance, instead of just being, effectively,
gag fodder.
We expect this story to have big ramifications on the plot moving forward.
And it does… but only because mob signs up with the bodybuilders, and they end up
being his friends and helping him better himself instead.
Speaking of the body improvement club, they're explicitly framed as dangerous, intimidating
thugs, surrounded by an aura of menace and jojo villain sound effects (in the manga)
from the moment they walk in the room.
We also meet them pretty late in the story – so it's unlikely that we'll make the
connection with mob's previously-expressed desire to be more popular and second-guess
the punchline.
But when the punch line does come, all of that information clicks in an instant, and
we laugh all the harder because, yeah, it makes PERFECT sense for Mob to join the body
improvement club.
He's already got psychic powers, so why would a telepathy research club be of any
use to him?
Especially one that doesn't actually do anything and deserves to be shut down.
The only reason to have him join is, frankly, lazy writing.
This moment turns our expectations on their head, presenting a fresh perspective on a
story arc that's been done TO DEATH, broadening our understanding of mob as a character, and
leaving us wondering where the story could go from there.
And it also makes us laugh our asses off, which is arguably equally important.
It's a carefully-constructed bit of narrative machinery that impresses me every time I look
at it.
And the Netflix drama tears out basically every moving part that makes it function.
For starters, in the drama, we only ever see the club as a side character.
Yes, character.
singular.
The president, Kurata Tome, is the ONLY member of the club in this version, and we don't
even see the vice president threaten to shut her down – that threat only comes up toward
the end of the scene.
As far as we know, she's just some weirdo who tackles mob because she's weird.
Also… this is the take you guys are gonna use?
Yeah I totally believe she's overpowering him.
Right off the bat, we have zero context for why it might matter that the club will be
shut down.
There's no friendship to tear up– and on top of that, no big group of supporting
characters to potentially join the cast.
If mob joined the club it would just be the two of them which would be a weird dynamic.
This also happens 15 minutes into the episode, and the gag's done a few minutes after that,
meaning tome doesn't really seem significant the way that she does when she gets a whole
episode of her own.
In other words, we have zero narrative reason to root for the telepathy club, and zero reason
to believe it will be a significant part of the plot.
They haven't even bothered to set up the tired old trope that this joke is meant to
subvert But that's not the only problem by a long
shot!
When Tome first meets Mob, she's immediately drawn to him, saying that he received her
"psychic signals," and when she gets him to the club room, we see it filled with all
sorts of fancy sci-fi bullshit.
Like she's… actually studying the paranormal.
Which undercuts the whole point of her character – in the manga she's got a passing interest
in the supernatural, but it's really just an excuse to waste time.
We're not supposed to take her seriously.
We're also supposed to be intimidated by the body improvement club when we first meet
them and… yeah, that doesn't happen.
Like, the music is heavy, and they make really mean faces, but the camera presents them in
a mostly neutral perspective – not as the intimidating giants they are in the anime
and manga – and they're with Mob's brother Ritsu… for some reason… who we already
know is a good guy who cares about his brother.
So by association, they're probably decent people as well.
And, oh yeah, RIGHT BEFORE the telepathy club scene, the show introduces the body improvement
club by EXPLICITLY framing them as the answer to mob's question of how to change himself.
They're presented with triumphant, upbeat music that's meant to leave mob – and
us – in awe of their energy and fitness… two minutes before we're supposed to see
them as potential villains.
Yeah, that's some grade-f Fucking AWFUL filmmaking – and even worse joke delivery.
Not only does the show's sloppy editing mean it takes FOREVER to go from the setup
of "I'm joining the club" to the punchline of "the body improvement club" – where
the manga and anime make it quick and snappy – THEY TELL US THE GODDAMN PUNCHLINE THREE
MINUTES BEFORE IT HAPPENS.
It's kind of impressive how hard they missed the point here.
This is a degree of script-level incompetence that we don't often see, even in live action
anime adaptations, and from everything I've seen of the show… shit, from the TRAILER,
it seems like just the tip of the iceberg.
In a vaccum, some of these decisions… kinda make sense.
Like cutting the other club members who don't have an impact on the plot, and reducing the
time the club's introduction takes in order to make the story move faster… but only
if you totally ignore what mob psycho 100 is about as a whole, and what purpose these
elements serve by being written the way they are.
It seems like the writers of this drama haven't got the faintest understanding of any of that.
The whole point of the fucking story is that psychic powers aren't a big deal – that
it's more important to be a well-rounded person no matter what you can do – yet from
it's goddamn opening monologue this show is playing up espers like they're the defining
feature of its world.
The most important thing in existence.
It certainly seems like they couldn't have missed the point harder if they tried.
This could very well be a worse anime adaptation than anything else I've covered on this
channel.
But I can't say for sure, because I'm never, ever going to watch the rest of it.
I'm never going to know how bad it gets.
I just know that they butchered one of my favourite gags ever, and as far as I'm concerned,
that's enough for me to permanently write this one off.
I'm Geoff Thew, Professional Shitbag, Signing Out from my Mother's Basement.
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