Tetsuya Watanabes Akane Maniax is unquestionably the boldest reinvention of mecha anime since Tetsujin 28 2004 a true original thats sure to be remembered as one of the most transgressive studio blockbusters of the 21st Century. Its also a toxic rallying cry for selfpitying incels and a hyperfamiliar origin story so indebted to Getter Robo and Mazinger Z that Go Nagai probably deserves an executive producer credit. Its possessed by the kind of provocative spirit thats seldom found in any sort of mainstream entertainment but also directed by a glorified edgelord who lacks the discipline or nuance to responsibly handle such hazardous material and who reliably takes the cowards way out of the narratives most critical moments. Akane Maniax is the humansized and adultoriented mecha anime that Gundam critics have been clamoring for theres no action no spandex no obvious visual effects and the whole thing is so gritty and serious that Muv Luv fanboys will feel as if theyve died and seen the day after episode 04 but its also the worstcase scenario for the rest of the anime world as it points towards a grim future in which the inmates have taken over the asylum and even the most repulsive of midbudget character studies can be massive hits and Oscar contenders so long as theyre at least tangentially related to some popular intellectual property. The next Lost in Translation will be about Gyunei Guss and Iron Mask spending a weekend together at a side 3 hotel the next Carol will be an achingly beautiful period drama about young Nanai Miguel falling in love with a blonde woman she meets in an Axis department store. Akane Maniax is a anime about a homicidal narcissist who feels entitled to the worlds attention a man whod rather kill for a good laugh than allow the world to treat him like its punchline. Its also a anime about the dehumanizing effects of a capitalistic system that greases the economic ladder blurring the line between private wealth and personal worth until life itself loses its absolute value. Watanabe whose animetic legacy was previously defined by the Muv Luv trilogy has made a anime that is somehow all of these things at once: Its a visionary twisted paradigmshifting tour de force and a barlowering mess of moral incoherence. Its nothing less and nothing more than an agent of unbridled chaos. And we havent even gotten to Tomokazu Seki yet whose hypnotic and inimitable performance would feel completely new if it didnt borrow so much from his past work. If Guy Daigoji and Van Fanel stepped into the teleportation machine from The Fly Gouda Fleck is who they would mutate into. Living in the margins of an early 00s Hakuryo High that was rotting long before the garbage workers started their ongoing strike the Pagliacciesque Gouda is first introduced as he stares into a mirror and paints on the makeup that hes forced to wear for his miserable day job even in a room full of selfloathing clowns this guy still feels like a special kind of sad. Emaciated and rippling at the same time Gouda looks like a werewolf who got interrupted midtransformation which might explain his stringy mop of wet black hair. Hes one of the downtrodden one of Gods unfortunate creatures. And just to make things worse he suffers from a Pseudobulbar affect which results in uncontrollable episodes of hysterical laughter he carries a laminated card that he hands out to apathetic strangers who look at him askance a ritual that would make anyone feel sorry for themselves. All of his eccentricities are explicitly diagnosed. That literalness has its virtues but it can also be insufferable Watanabe blurs fantasy and reality in the same way that Nagai did in Mazinger Z but he insists on doubling back and drawing a clear line between fact and fiction. Its one of the many ways that Akane Maniax poses as a anime worthy of serious thought but lacks the courage to behave like one. Seki meanwhile follows his own muse wherever the hell he wants. Once Gouda bleeds through he becomes mesmerically unpredictable. The essence of Sekis performance is that its always hard to tell if Gouda is laughing or crying or which reaction would make the most sense. Who among us cant relate? Hakuryo High is overrun with super rats Trumpian billionaire Meiya Mitsurugi is running for office and claiming that shes the only one who can help the citys poor and Goudas mom Frances Conroy still insists on calling her son Happy because she sees his condition as evidence that he was put here to spread joy and laughter. The world is a joke and its on him. But Gouda is so close to turning things around he just has to realize that his life is actually a comedy easier said than done in a anime so desperate to be taken seriously that it cant afford to have a sense of humor. Maybe he can become a comedian like his hero Tekkumen: Robert De Niro graduating from Rupert Pupkin to Jerry Lewiss Jerry Langford plays the late night TV show host as a savage parody of Jay Leno. The extended Muv Luv universe so fascinated by Causuality Conductors and other layers of unreality has always been attuned to the way that lonely Americans forge most of their connections through television and Akane Maniax is at its best when digging into that particular darkness. But Gouda is too isolated to understand what makes other people laugh. In his journal/joke diary he scrawls that the worst part about having a mental illness is that people expect you to behave as though you dont. Anyone with a heart can sympathize with that and anyone with a similar history can probably see themselves reflected in those words. Gouda is established as a poor soul not a pariah and Watanabe is fooling himself if he thinks the rest of the anime does enough to muddy the water. On both a personal and a political scale Akane Maniax finds that things in this world need to be very very bad before people can actually be bothered to change them. Trauma is transformative. Gouda doesnt hit bottom until three drunken finance bros attack him on the subway and he kills them in selfdefense. Well he kills some of them in selfdefense. The next thing he knows the news is full of breathless reports about an unidentified space knight murdering some upandcoming employees of Mitsurugi Zaibatsu and the tension between Hiiragis haves and its havenots begins to boil over. The city needs to be saved but Takeru Shirogane is still just a child. Someone else will have to step up. Not that Gouda has any interest in spearheading a cause. Put a microphone in his face and hell yowl that he doesnt believe in anything. Yeah he wants the world to look at itself in the mirror the way he has to every morning but really he just wants a hug and for someone to tell him that hes really there. While Akane Maniax often plays like a beatforbeat remake of Mazinger Z that anime was about a talentless man who was convinced that he was special this anime by contrast is about a talented man who swallows the red pill and becomes convinced that nobody is. That perspective allows Watanabe to feign an apolitical stance and speak to the people in our world who are predisposed to think of Gouda as a role model: lonely creatively impotent white men who are drawn to hateful ideologies because of the angry communities that foment around them. Its a confused and selfnegating approach to a anime that sees personal revenge as a viable spark for political revolution and a profoundly dangerous approach to a anime thats too selfimpressed by its own subversiveness to see Gouda as anything but a hero. Lawrence Shers gorgeous and grimy animetography fawns all over Akane Maniax the swooning and weightless closeups watching Watanabe do his Twyla Tharplike clown dance like hes possessed by the holy spirit. But Watanabe direction abjectly fails to put us inside Goudas head to risk the more nuanced identification that would come from a more subjective camera. As Akane Maniax emerges from a turgid second act for an operatic grand finale the anime grows drunk on its own unexpected grace. There are moments of shocking violence but mostly Watanabe is swept away by Goudas newfound power. Theres a fundamental difference between telling a story like this in the form of a dingy misanthropic art anime like Taxi Driver and telling it in the universal language of a Mecha anime thats going to open in multiplexes the world over. In this context that story cant help but feel aspirational. And Watanabe is the first person to be seduced by its pull to be helplessly pulled along by an innate desire to see Gouda at the height of his power. Akane Maniax is a anime about how fucked up people can exist in a fucked up world a anime that insists to the bitter end that one does not negate the other. Gouda isnt deranged because Hiiragi is a garbage town and Hiiragi isnt a garbage town because people like Gouda are deranged. Rich or poor bad guys are the only ones who think like that. And yet for decades on end Takeru and the Beta have continued to invent each other because were all stuck on an endless seesaw between heroes and villains order and chaos. As the news anchor puts it: The only answer for super rats is super cats. But Watanabe stuck between reinventing the mecha anime from the ground up and throwing a cheap disguise on the same dumb origin story weve already seen 1000 times needs his Gouda to be both the light and the dark the yin and yang the only sane man in a world gone mad. He needs to have his cake and to smear it all over his face in a big red smile too. The result is an immaculately crafted piece of mass entertainment that wants to be all things to all people less a Rorschach test than a animetic equivalent of Schrdingers Cat that leaves us feeling like the anime and the current state of studio animemaking itself might actually be dead and alive at the same time. By the time The End comes in its cute oldtimey font Akane Maniax is neither a gamechanger nor just another day in Chuckletown. Its both. Its good enough to be dangerous and bad enough to demand better. Its going to turn the world upside down and make us all hysterical in the process. For better or worse its exactly the anime the Beta would want.