Coppelion

Coppelion is an anime about these radiation immune Charlie's Angels who cry all the time and whatnot. It's a melodramatic sci-fi story about these girls who won't die on radiation unlike all the other people in the world. These people are of course saints, and we get to see missions where our three radiation immune saints save people from radiation while crying. By three radiation immune saints saving people, I mean our main girl, Ibarawhatever, saving people while the other two watch. Alternatively watch and cry. The character are pretty useless and stupid and for some reason there is three of them instead of one.There was a seemingly interesting settings; normal people getting saved by radiation immune people. The catch being that normal people don't think these immune people as people at all. People see them as dolls, basically. However, their actions on saving normal people would change normal people's views about radiation immune people == change for character development. Unfortunately situations like these get turned back to zero by our main girl who simply replies " I don't understand such complicated things." Then we move to an another scene about crying. Followed by the next mission. Leaving me wonder why the fuck. It's not deep, there is no message. She just literally says that I'm too fucking stupid to follow what you are saying about me being like human and I also have to cry since I haven't for a while. This really could have been an interesting series if there was other things going on, the characters had some sort of brain function and there was a reason for all of this. A plot, some motives, a tiny bit of depth of some sort, but instead of this the creators decided to take a way which should be referred as "I have a emotion thingy." This is seriously more like some project which is still on the beta stage, only way to make it sell is to add 5 radiation immune and 5 normal bishies to the series and call it a reverse harem.

The post-apocalyptic genre has been quite popular due to new mediums pulling their spin. So very few manage to do the genre justice with how vast the genre generally has to go for it, and most writers don’t have the most competence to write out a competent narrative. Whether or not they are about a nuclear holocaust, zombie invasion, ecological disaster, divine judgment, or pandemic reasons, there are so many possibilities for story writers to come up with brilliant ideas for the genre with some great results and ones that are not so great. Our little anime Coppelion falls into this category that failsto provide a meaningful narrative and a dull melodramatic story that severely cripples it from being an intricate show during Japan’s nuclear fallout disaster into one that completely mocks it. Most people are in unanimous agreement that the artwork is pretty spectacular. To which it is, backgrounds really do look fantastic and fit pretty well to the tone of the post-apocalyptic setting with the dense watercolor backdrop on the dead grass that inhabits the concrete buildings and roads. However, with that said, there’s still a problem with the consistency of the character art designs to the world’s art design. When you look at the characters, they look like they belong in your typical high-school anime with their sleek, clean looks and schoolgirl outfits. If they were to be taken seriously as consistent designs, I’d imagine them not being the glamorous, pretty girls they are if they lived in this environment for so long. Not only does it not fit very well in a post-apocalyptic setting because of its distracting nature, but it also doesn’t fit well with the show's tone. It would be like watching a movie set in the Middle Ages during the Black Plague era, and everyone else looked like they were. Animation does fair more than the consistent artwork, but these awful CGI techniques are used constantly throughout the vehicles and fight scenes. Of course, this straightforward construction of the enormous points of the show’s problems is the writing. Following a 1st personal narrative from the eyes of the three girls, the show follows several plot arcs where we meet certain groups of people trying to survive out in the nuclear wasteland of Tokyo. However, if you’re expecting something that is a similar type of story to say Mushishi, you will be sorely disappointed with this. The characters we meet hardly get any deep characterization. The ones that do come across as lazy cliches that become predictable and unfortunately delve into bland melodrama that comes across as laughable than anything else. What does kill the show overall comes from the erratic pacing that goes on. From left and right, characters crop up in many places, with each episode having agendas and personal vendettas toward others. With a show that is only 13 episodes, something like this could’ve worked in a much longer season. Because of this, the pacing regularly suffers immensely in hopes of moving things forward without putting a lot of the plot points into clarification to the audience. They might have trouble with what the main plot is supposed to be besides just three girls walking through point A to point B in a post-apocalyptic setting. In one episode, they are desperate to find this granny that they’ve been building upon a lot, and then in the next episode, the granny character is not spoken of ever again, and they move on into a new mission. Almost as if these events don’t feel connected whatsoever very well that cripples the world-building as a whole. When it finally does get to that specific point where you do see where the plot is trying to go, it doesn’t go anywhere. You almost can’t feel any emotional impact from the constant cliffhangers because there’s little development to the story and characters. Very few characters make a considerable impression apart from the main characters, but they suffer bland stereotypical fates. Only Ibara Naruse seems to have a brain in her head, while the rest seem only to have screaming and whining as their only two reactions and become more like cheerleaders for Naruse most of the time. They even sometimes screw up certain things that almost jeopardize their whole operation, which begs how they even got the job of being these operatives in the first place. If anything, they come across as mere mindless pawns that don’t offer anything other than pure annoying schoolgirl service that isn’t charming or funny because of their out-of-place nature. There are logical inconsistencies that can’t be taken with a grain of salt in some action scenes, such as breaking the laws of physics. In some action shows, viewers can ignore these problems because of their outlandish nature of defying physics just for convenience. Still, Coppelion is portraying itself as a realistic setting. You can’t just toss out these laws to see pretty action sequences because it will go against odds with the show’s naturalistic atmosphere,e and we won’t be able to take it seriously as we did in the beginning. Examples include: 1) People can survive a rocket launcher’s backblast from inside a building. 2) Someone can survive an anesthetic bullet from close range even though a bullet can still kill someone. 3) How can someone survive from a shell exploding next to them even at medium long-range? None of which are given any context whatsoever due to the hack directing. The antagonists they face don’t come across as anything memorable with all of that aside. Not even the Ozu sisters, with their very eccentric personalities. The main antagonists’ reasons for trying to take over Coppelion aren’t given enough context, so we don’t even get enough out of them whether we are supposed to be sympathetic or hate them for their reasoning for doing the things they do. In reality, they don’t have much reason to respond other than that they are just evil people because they’re just cruel and whatever reasons the show had written for them felt muddled and contrived. Their archetypes are the typical big lousy government organization that wants to rule over the landscape to gain control over Tokyo, just like every other story like it. I never thought I would say this, but Aoi would be the first character in an anime that Kana Hanazawa that I constantly couldn’t stand at all just from her voice alone. Usually, Hanazawa can pull off a good performance, even when her characters aren’t exactly likable. But with her character Aoi, there’s absolutely no positive outcome from the fact that the only tone of her voice that she seems to put into Aoi is high-pitched whining. The other cast members don’t stand out either, but they are listenable, unlike poor little Hanazawa. For the music aspect, for what few stand-out songs there are for the show itself, the opening and ending themes are okay songs that fit somewhat to Coppelion’s setting with lovely dark guitar tones in the OP by the band Angela. Calling Coppelion an abject failure would be taking it lightly. It could’ve been a solid show to be experienced if there wasn’t the atrocious pacing, poorly developed characters, and horrible melodrama underneath it all, but we could’ve only hoped that it would be entertaining from a funny standpoint once it stops being funny and steps into a mind-numbing boring anime, the entertainment stops and the dull mediocrity sets in. I’d rather watch a show be entertainingly bad than be boring, and this managed to do both. To this, I must now let Coppelion sit on the throne as one of the most disappointing failures of the year, if there was ever a throne in the first place. Grade: D

Coppelion can be summed up as disappointing. This is because it has an alluring premise: a derelict city scarred by nuclear disaster, overrun by wilderness with a few human survivors scattered about. There's plenty interesting about a setting like this, and Go Hands does such a great job on the scenery porn that I am currently using a rotating cycle of background shots from the show as my wallpaper. Unfortunately the characters who populate that setting are not interesting, nor is anything they do. The writing for this show is crap, plain and simple. Setting aside the issue of the Coppelion being teenage girls (standard animeconceit), the whole Coppelion project seems half-assed and directionless with no clear goals despite the apparently huge amount of time and money spent on developing these super humans. Ibara's unit stumbles blindly from one rescue to the next with no plan besides wandering the ruins of Tokyo with a magic Geiger counter that mysteriously led them to humans or sometimes to animals, as the plot required. Virtually every "mission" they acquire is something cobbled together at the moment, a response to some random survivor's plight. But I've watched shows with worse plots (or no real plot at all) and enjoyed them. What keeps that from happening here is a dearth of likable characters. Let me start out by saying I liked the Coppelion girls at first. I liked Ibara's tough compassion and Aoi was adorable. Taeko didn't stand out much, but that ended up helping my opinion of her in the long run, since I came to greatly dislike both Ibara and Aoi by the end of the series. I found Ibara's compassion to be a very sympathetic trait in the beginning, when it was directed toward the truly pitiable and desperate, but it became grating as the series wore on and she indiscriminately bestowed compassion on even the most psychotic people she encountered. It just didn't sit right with me, it made her seem naive and a supremely bad judge of character. She is not a pacifist, she can't pull off the Jesus thing, so her compassion seems arbitrary and forced when it comes to sparing the lives of homicidal lunatics. Aoi is less a hypocrite and more useless baggage. Her shining moment of the series is running away from people who bullied her in school. I wish I was exaggerating here, but I'm not. To be sure the show tries to dress it up as something heroic, but Aoi is a hysterical coward to the very end. Taeko at the least shows some grit playing the mid wife, though most of it is skipped over in favor of Aoi and Ibara using non-lethal violence against homicidal lunatics. And a word about these lunatics: even these characters are not satisfying because they are none of them committed to their goals. Virtually every antagonist except for the shadowy foreign waste disposal companies is redeemed by episode 13, and that whole subplot about the waste dumping was forgotten halfway through the season. So nobody in this series is really interesting. They lack conviction. Not the antagonists or the protagonists. The people rescued either gratefully go along or die. I lost track of how many times a side character took off their mask dramatically and then had a tearful goodbye, I imagine their deaths were to make a point about being the only characters in the show with an ounce of conviction in their beliefs. And lord were there tears. Ibara's toughness is apparently only skin deep, because she cries almost every episode. She cries when a person she just met dies, she cries when a person she just met leaves the city, she cries because something vaguely sad was just told to her. Aoi is even more emotional, but on her it works and doesn't seem to conflict with any of her other traits. She's a hysterical coward, so crying over every little thing is practically her job description, it's honest of her. The wishy-washy, directionless writing aside, the show is technically mediocre. The one redeeming factor is the art assets, which are fantastic. The animation is mediocre and the sound is poor. The music was forgettable, the main problem I had with the sound were the effects used for various weaponry, which were jarringly bad, and I'm nothing close to an expert on military weapons. I wouldn't recommend this to anybody who's got better things to be doing. Backlog it for a particularly boring stretch of time off if you think I'm exaggerating.

Coppelion is an anime about a girl crying, more crying, getting kidnapped, even more crying and then later break down and do nothing. Seriously! All is there to the anime is hearing some lame ass character whine and bitch about everything. Besides having a girl who cry throughout the whole anime, the action scenes are all replaced by a single art showing either the characters getting punched in the face or jumping. To sum it up, It's Shit.