Arakawa Under the Bridge Season 2 Blu-ray Review
Crazy, but endearing.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 13, 2012
The life of a reviewer can be filled with both frustration and wonderment. The frustration comes from seeing too many
films or television series that simply retread familiar material, often with little or no ingenuity or panache. The
wonderment can occur when something unexpected or new manages to peek its head above the rubble. Anime wasn't
even really on my radar several years ago, though I had been exposed to some of the bigger, more iconic titles in the
genre, things like
Akira, which I had really loved. But I suddenly started getting a lot of anime titles assigned to
me, and I was awash in all sorts of weird and wacky material, and I was soon investigating all sorts of
other
releases that I didn't even have to write about. Now truth be told, anime can also be an extremely frustrating genre,
as there are a number of subgenres that are endlessly paraded with standard characters, plot devices and even
animation styles. The last few years have seen an uptick in some incredibly inventive outings, both from story and
character perspectives, as well as animation aesthetics.
Arakawa Under the Bridge is sort of borderline with
regard to animation style—it isn't quite at the innovative level of, say,
Samurai Champloo—but it makes up
for that (if indeed it even
has to make up for anything) with a patently odd storyline that is certainly one of the
more bizarre in recent memory. The show's basic premise is minimal, to say the least: Ko (sometimes transliterated
Kou) Ichinomiya is the heir to an industrial fortune who has been raised to be almost phobic about ever getting in debt
to anyone. The first season of
Arakawa Under the Bridge of course finds Ko almost immediately becoming
incredibly
indebted to a young girl named Nino, who in the first episode of the series manages to save the would be tycoon after
he falls off of a bridge while trying to reclaim his pants, which have flown up onto a girder (if you think
that's
odd, just keep reading). Nino has a very simple request of Ko in order for him to repay his debt: she wants him to fall
in love with her. That leads Ko into a secret society of sorts, where he soon discovers that Nino is part of an (almost
literally) underground group of people who have formed a culture that lives under the bridge. Ko is an outsider trying
to make his way into a disparate (to say the least) group of oddballs, and his "adventures" (if that's the right word)
with these weirdos make up the bulk of
Arakawa Under the Bridge.
As with the first season of
Arakawa Under the Bridge, there's really less to
what happens in this series
than in
how
it's
told. The first season often was a langorous, almost somnambulant exercise where little things like how Kou would
have his hair cut could
take
up vast expanses of any given episode. That same tendency continues with the second season, where something as
odd and supposedly
minor as Kou trying to find a missing baseball takes him on a journey upstream on the Arakawa, where he comes in
contact with yet more
bizarre denizens of the riverbank, in this case an Amazon Queen who insists she isn't male, who is surrounded by a
bunch of aides (are they
men or women?) in tengu masks. There is something akin to an arc in this second season dealing with Nino's supposed
Venusian
background,
and this element provides some giggles as the entire population of Arakawa decides they want to journey to the far
away planet with Nino.
(And truth be told, wouldn't they be less "alien" there than they are here on Earth?)
The planned trip to Venus actually takes up the bulk of the central portion of this season's thirteen episodes, but even
with that through
line, there are the expected number of weird little subplots that crop up, some tangentially related to the Venus arc,
others completely
unrelated. For example, the denizens of Arakawa figure out that their combined weight is too much for their rocket to
achieve liftoff, which
leads to a mad dash of dieting and exercising. In another example, a sort of tournament to decide who's the strongest
inhabitant of the
river will grant the winner one wish, which ends up playing out as the series' wrap up to this season, with some very
sweet, good natured
results.
Arakawa Under the Bridge may be absolutely minimalist in story ideas, but it manages to be one of the more
charming anime efforts
in recent memory, simply by dint of the fact that it has such an odd concatenation of memorable characters. These
characters may in fact
never
do very much, but they're so unusual and so appealing that it really doesn't matter. The fact that all of
these characters are in
their own way outcasts probably helps the series' appeal immeasurably, especially for those who have ever felt they
don't quite "fit in".
While some of the miscommunication between characters (notably Nino and Kou) can be overdone at times, the show
manages to craft a
weird sense of community among those with a variety of "hangups," for want of a better word. While some of these
may push the bounds
of political correctness—the cross dressing nun springs instantly to mind—it helps give
Arakawa Under the
Bridge its unique and very
peculiar sensibility. The series is also notable for its completely outré filmed closing credits sequence, which sees live
actors in completely
over the top costumes appearing as various characters within the anime. These utterly bizarre little segments may well
be worth the price
of admission alone for those with particularly skewed sensibilities.
Arakawa Under the Bridge Season 2 Blu-ray, Video Quality
My comments with regard to the first season of
Arakawa Under the Bridge hold true for this second season, released courtesy of NIS America
with an AVC encoded
1080p transfer in 1.78:1. The unusual looking characters and the neatly variegated graphical style of the series all pop
really well on this high
definition transfer, and this second season has a number of really cool dimensional effects added in as well. Note how in
the first episode when
Kou is traversing the riverside and gets lost in a huge overgrown field of weeds, it has a virtually three dimensional look,
with clearly delineated
planes of the various plant life. Colors are bold and even provocative at times, and line detail is extremely sharp and clear
looking. In fact about
the only complaint some will have about this presentation, and one which also hampered
Arakawa Under the
Bridge's first season, is the
fact that the subtitles are encoded into the image and can't be removed. This becomes especially distracting in some
sequences where there is
also Japanese text on the image. Other than that anomaly, though, this is a spectacular looking release.
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