The Fruit of Grisaia: Complete Collection Blu-ray Review
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, May 13, 2016
It wasn't exactly a storybook wedding, though the celebration
did end up as one of the more memorable tales in the annals of Greek
mythology. At the already pretty contentious joining together of Peleus and Thetis, a goddess named Eris, already somewhat infamous due
to her inclination toward getting into trouble and now more than a little upset that she wasn't included on the invite list, tossed a legendary
golden apple into the proceedings which had been emblazoned with the epigram "for the most beautiful one", which in turn set off a huge
fracas amongst the veritable bridesmaids, each of whom thought it was obvious that the fruit was meant for them.
That then led to
the Judgement of Paris which, in true domino fashion, led more or less directly to a little thing called the Trojan War. There's another "cosmic
apple" of sorts on display at the very beginning (and recurrently thereafter) in
The Fruit of Grisaia, but this one isn't golden, and in
fact rots into dust rather quickly, a perhaps salient image about transformations and (possibly at least) death and decay.
The Fruit of
Grisaia is one of those anime that plays its cards fairly close to its vest in the early going, which may lead some viewers to decide that it's
going to be just another
shōnen or harem entry. While both of those genres certainly play into
The Fruit of Grisaia's plot
dynamics, it becomes clear by the end of the first episode that "something else" is going on, in a series of quick and initially puzzling reveals
that play out during a "closing" credits sequence that in fact happens a few minutes before the end of the episode (a gambit that the series
continues to exploit as it goes along). On its surface,
The Fruit of Grisaia seems—emphasis on seems—to be about a young man
named Yūji Kazami who has transferred to an odd and vastly underpopulated private school, one where his only classmates are a gaggle of
young women (hence both the
shōnen and harem angles). However, the fact that the series begins in a police station with a
martinet officer interrogating Yūji and asking if he's a terrorist, as well as a very quick elision which seems to indicate Yūji has some
connections to "higher ups" who can extract him from precarious environments (like a police interrogation) give early clues that there's a
subtext at play which will ultimately be revealed.
The Fruit of Grisaia follows in the path of many other anime by being based on a visual novel series, and evidently (I admittedly have
no experience with the source material) that outing was fairly sexually explicit, something that tends to fold into the anime adaptation as
well.
In fact, I was a bit surprised that unlike many anime which delight in depicting naked girls frolicking in steamy bath waters,
The Fruit of
Grisaia actually had a brief shot of a (nearly) nude (and pretty buff looking) Yūji in a tub in an early moment, and in fact the series doesn't
shy away from showing
him in his birthday suit (albeit from the back). Later, when one of his female classmates shows up in his
room,
she's topless and there's absolutely no question about what's on her mind, even if the dialogue is routinely commonplace.
Already, though, there's obviously more going on than "mere" sexual hijinks, though the series' somewhat disjunctive opening episodes want
to
delay denouements in favor of character introductions and establishment of various interrelationships. It's obvious, and in fact overtly
mentioned, that Yūji just wants a "normal school life", but that whatever his "secret identity" is has prevented him from achieving that dream.
Similarly, it quickly becomes evident that the females inhabiting the Mihama Academy have their own backstories which have in their own way
kept
them as isolated as Yūji himself. As a result,
The Fruit of Grisaia takes perhaps more than the usual amount of patience
to
begin unraveling a tale that becomes increasingly dark as it goes along, something that chafes at least occasionally with the series' penchant
toward (admittedly pretty tame) fan service and
shtick laden comedy.
And it's that increasing darkness which will probably either intrigue or frankly maybe repel each individual viewer going forward. It probably
doesn't come as any huge surprise that each of the handful of characters has a wound of one sort or another in their background, some (as
in the case of Yūji) which are played for at least supposed poignancy, while others (as in the case of Michiru Matsushima, who lapses in and
out of
tsundere tropes) played for laughs. If
The Fruit of Grisaia had gone the
No Exit route with regard to what
Mihama Academy "really" means, it might have given the series more of a feeling of
gravitas. As it stands, these end up being fairly
formulaic characters stuck in a prison of sorts that's too literal to withstand the show's increasing tendency to exploit coincidence (the way
one character's backstory tragedy is woven into a sad sidebar memory for Yūji seems especially "convenient").
The kind of weird thing about
The Fruit of Grisaia is it has kernels of an interesting plot that are sometimes defeated by an oddly
disparate tone. Anime culled from visual novels often have a hard time making the transition, and in some ways it seems like
The Fruit of
Grisaia makes the jump reasonably well in terms of delivering easily accessible (if often almost willfully stereotypical) characters and a
decent plot. But the series is an odd combination of ideas and one that might have benefitted from a less literal presentation. It has enough
of traditional
ecchi, harem, and
shōnen conventions to at least offer glimmers of interest to viewers, but since it ping pongs
between these conventions at will, individual tastes will react differently depending on how much they want a particular idiom to stick around
for a while longer.
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