Anime: Zankyou no Terror

This series jumps right into action. Which is the perfect start to how the series will continue. You don’t need to know who the main characters are right away. What you do need to know is that they mean business.

Obviously, shortly after the main intro action we do need to start learning a little about the characters. We don’t learn all about their past until the later episodes. But from the short flashback clips and their personalities, you get a feel for why they are seeking revenge on the government. I really like how for the most part you only learn about the main characters as the police do. It’s a great way to keep you involved and guessing. Usually the writers spend a lot of time building the backstory, which is great for a longer series. But they really keep the suspense going for the short 11 episode run.

Early on we meet a character who I found really annoying. All she does is mess everything up and cause me stress as I’m hoping their plans will go perfectly. Every series has that character in it, and every time it annoys me. But she does a good job of proving the main characters are real people and not heartless terrorists. And that was a nice touch, because I really didn’t want them to be the bad guys.

We also have the stereotypical down on his luck Detective. He’s a good guy though. I always want this generic character to win. He really makes you think that if he can solve the case first, then his life will go back to normal and everything will work out.

The last piece of the Terror in Resonance puzzle is the childhood friend. Well, maybe not friend. But someone from their past that shows up just when you think everything is going to go their way. She proves to be quite the obstacle for them to overcome. She seems like the one in the series that you are supposed to hate. And I did.

The plot moves pretty quickly, so if you aren’t paying attention you could miss something important. It’s not a jam packed action series, more towards the mystery/thriller genre. That being said, there really aren’t any dull moments. They only tell you what you need to know about everyone’s past. So there isn’t a bunch of wasted time showing you that one time in the summer they had an ice cream. And I’m glad they realized that A) it’s not relevant to the story and B) nobody ever cares.

Even right up until the very end, they keep you guessing how everything is going to work out. I liked that you can never assume anything in this series. There are a good number of plot twists and surprised that make it hard to not be on the edge of your seat.
There wasn’t much about this series that I didn’t like. I guess my only complaint (if you can call it that) is that it was only 11 episodes. I feel like they could have gone a little deeper into the main characters plans and got another episode out of it. But overall I like how they did it all. And I liked the ending. Which doesn’t happen all too often for me. This is the second time I’ve watched Terror in Resonance, and after some time passes I may watch it again. I think you should watch it at least once if you like a more serious serious.

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In a season filled with giant robots, teenage dramas and supernatural violence, Zankyou no Terror stands out from the usual crowd with its focus on the rarely explored subject matter of terrorism. Shinichirō Watanabe, renowned director of Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, and Kids on the Slope, once again teams up with Yoko Kanno and the newly formed Studio MAPPA to delivers one of the highlights of the summer season 2014.

Zankyou no Terror or Terror in Resonance, opens up with two mysterious male teenagers named Nine and Twelve, carrying out a heist at a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility and ends up stealing a device that contains plutonium. Six months later, in the sweltering heat of summer, both of them, call themselves Sphinx, commit a series of terrorist attacks on Tokyo under and caught up in their schemes, is a teenage girl named Mishima. Through a series of circumstances, she willingly becomes an accomplice in their plans to pull the trigger on the world.

Characters

Having spent their entire lives together, I felt that Nine and Twelve are two sides of the same coin with the same intentive goals in mind but exhibiting different mannerism as they go about their terrorism business. Nine is your emotionally distant teenager in glasses and approaches the work of Sphinx in a business-like manner. The Ying to Nine's Yang, Twelve more like a playful cat than anything else by the way he plays with a grenade as if it was a ball and prefers to drive a motorcycle when speeding his way through traffic. Both of them are extremely intelligent and physically capable and they soon make short work of anyone sent to apprehend them. The catch is that, while their acts of terrorism causes an enormous amount of damage, they are setup in such a manner that no fatal causalities occur. It is to the testament to Watanabe's skill that viewers can relate to characters like Nine/Twelve instead of the psychopathic monsters that the mainstream media often demonize terrorists as.

Completely opposite to the our males in every way possible is a female highschooler named Lisa Mishima. She comes across Twelve during their demolition of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building and given a choice between dying or becoming a member of Sphinx, she chooses the latter. Casted out by society due to her broken family and being the constant target of bullying by her classmates, Lisa garners a fair bit of compassion from me. While I was sympathetic to her situation in the earlier episodes, as the series went on, my patience began to wear thin at just how inept this depressed teenage girl is at everything. It would be too much for me to expect that she would turn into a goddess of terrorism but a little more usefulness out of her would have gone a long way into fostering that emotional connection with the audience. I do admit, realistically speaking, for a bumbling depressed schoolgirl to be involved with such large-scale destruction, Lisa plays that role to a T.

Hot on the heels of Sphinx is Shibazaki, a former ace detective who comes back to active duty as he successfully decrypts the various riddles. He certainly doesn't fall short in the characterization department as I perfectly understood his motivations when comes to stopping Nine/Twelve. Being an old grizzled man filled with experience, he has the demeanor of a mature adult who is very committed to the idea of justice. At the same time, he does have these nonchalant moments that make him feel like a real investigative veteran accustomed to the norms of the world.

Even though Lisa did get a little on my nerves, I did genuinely enjoyed all the characters and their journey throughout the show for the most part.

For the most part.

Five

Of course, even though the next major character is a bit of a spoiler, I cannot ignore the effect that Five had on the show when she is introduced partway through the story. Being the primary antagonist by working against Sphinx and subjugating the Japanese law enforcement agencies, she is, by far the weakest part of Zankyou no Terror. Clad in a sailor school uniform, she brings an wildly overbearing presence into the story with her antics and games. The first of two issues that I have with her is that she seemed too omnipotent when facing off with the already formidable Sphinx and damages much of the grounded realism that the show sets itself up as. Second, I could dismisses her bat-shit crazy actions if her character had an interesting motivation and background but Zankyou no Terror drops the ball in that aspect leaving only hints of what might have been a fantastic villain. It's not that I wish that Five didn't exist but I want to see her character be rewritten in a way that was more restrained and fleshes out her story. That being said, she was anything but dull and was at least entertaining, even when her actions didn't jive with the core plot.

Visuals and Sound

Accompanying our band of teenage terrorist on their quest for vengeance is the stellar soundtrack by anime legend, Yoko Kanno. Having worked on Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell: SAC and Macross Frontier fame, she produces a sound that is insidious, subversive and unsettling for the viewers. With haunting guitar riffs, subtle electronic beats and jazzy undertones coupled with the occasional outburst of sound during action scenes, Yoko Kanno skillfully tailored her composition to suit the gritty tense atmosphere of Zankyou no Terror.

Studio MAPPA has done an absolutely breathtaking job when it comes to the animation quality and comes close to what is expected of an anime movie instead of an ordinary TV production. One of the first things that viewers will notice are the muted colors and attention to detail that is intended to sets up modern-day Tokyo to be as realistic as possible. Backgrounds are expertly detailed from the reflective sheen on vehicles in traffic to the cluttered mess of a former detective's office to a Ferris wheel glowing in the rainy night sky as it carries its passengers on a ride. When it comes to 3D CGI, which is often a tricky thing to balance out in anime, it done to support the various angles and scene composition to gives Zankyou no Terror its cinematic quality. Although Studio MAPPA is still a newcomer in the industry, it has demonstrated it has the talent and potential to become a powerhouse within anime.

Themes

Aside from the very pretty explosions, Zankyou no Terror has pretty of depth to draw from with its ideas of a increasingly modernized society and its pitfalls while alluring to ancient mythology. By incorporating fancy pieces of technology like Twitter, YouTube and virtual currency as well , it makes the viewers think about the fragility of our current reality. Although, it doesn't provide any answers, Watanabe's work is certainly more than capable of generating an immense amount of discussion as to what it all means for the characters and our current world.

Conclusion

From the very beginning, I knew that Zankyou no Terror was going to be one of the very top shows from the summer season and maybe even earn a very rare 10/10 score from me. The question was whether it would be able to maintain the standard set out by the initial episode and the answer teeter somewhere between an 8 and 9. Lisa and Five certainly didn't do the show any favors as they could have as they represented the polar opposites of either being useless or completely all-powerful and insane. If Lisa would have been a little more capable and Five was toned down while given a complete back story, I would be incline to award higher marks overall. Other than those two flawed characters, every other aspect of Zankyou no Terror, from the distinct soundtrack by Yoko Kanno to the cinematic visual direction of Watanabe and his take on the touchy subject of terrorism mixed in with a little conspiracy, is certainly not lacking in quality nor relevancy.

1) Pretty Colors

What do you get when you have an anime with fine directing, great animation, and completely garbage writing? You get the best anime of all times, since anime fans don’t care about the script, as they do about pretty colors. You can give them complete shit and they will ask for more, as long as it looks nice. Ιf it doesn’t, that is the only thing they will find to bitch about it. Terror in Resonance is an example of this, since it was hailed by most as the anime of the century when it was still airing, for those exact reasons. I was never fooled of course, since I care about the script and no amount of pretty colors could hide the dozens of problems it had since the very beginning.

Hell, I knew before it even began airing that it would be bad. The Noitamina timeslot never produced good sci-fi, or mystery, or supernatural anime. They are good only at romances for middle aged women. Plus, the trailers showed a couple of snotty looking teenagers blowing up buildings while talking to cell phones. How hard was it to smell the failure? Did everybody forget Eden of the East already?

2) Selling on Name

I was openly stating the problems it had throughout its airing period, and I was one of the very few who dared to do so, since everybody was ready to hate and mock those who didn’t like it. The reason of their denial towards these obvious problems, was the director. There is no way Watanabe can mess up, Watanabe is God. Well, damn, he did, what a shock. Can we please stop losing our shit every time his name pops up? The guy made one super successful show (Cowboy Bebop) followed by a so-so show (Samurai Champloo) followed by a run of the mill romance (Kids on the Slope) followed by random fan service episodes (Space Dandy). And now he made this unfortunate piece of work, but very few wanted to admit it because Watanabe is God and those who disagree are trolls. The theme of terrorism in this show may be bullshit, but the pillow hugging anime community sure is terrified to admit obvious problems, and sure is quick to scare away critical thinkers.

3) Pretentious Themes

Speaking of themes, the show keeps trying to fool you it is about terrorism, because it’s right there in the title, and the two main characters’ nicknames are an allusion to 9/11; and that is supposed to be all it takes to say there is terrorism in the show. Let’s disregard how there was no political statement behind the bombings until the final episode. If they had a statement to make, they could have revealed it right away; something which of course they didn’t because that way the show would end in 2 episodes. So instead of that, they hide it until the finale, and made it seem like it was all nonsense. The very fact that these so-called terrorists made sure nobody would be killed in the explosions and only target buildings, makes them hooligans. What they are doing are acts of vandalism. Since the only demands they had up until then, was expecting from the police to solve riddles, the whole thing felt like children fooling around with peoples’ lives. Here is a game, follow the rules, have fun as the adults chase you around.

And even if we assume terrorism doesn’t need a political statement to exist and that simply scaring people is enough, not even that happens, because nobody is scared of the bombings.
- The police are not worried about them; they are more like annoyed that some punks are making them look bad. Even when the whole police department blows up and all their secret files are hacked, they are still simply angry, not scared.
- The population is not terrified; everybody is out in the streets having fun. When looking at the bombing videos and the riddles of the terrorists, they are laughing and treat them as entertainment. Even in the final episode where they know the whole city might blow up and they will all die, they look surprised, not scared.
- Not even in the epilogue, when the city recovers from a devastating disaster, and one of the most hideous experiments in recent history becomes public, which completely ruins their image to the world, they are just looking at the screen puzzled, not worried.

4) Cartoony setting

As if the character reactions weren’t enough, not even the setting manages to absorb you, despite the pretty amazing animation. Yeah, it looks like the real world, but only on a very superficial way. As soon as science gets in the way, nothing makes sense.
- Thermite doesn’t work as they explain it
- Secret agencies don’t stop explosions by blowing up civilian areas
- Americans don’t speak in terrible engrish
- People don’t stare at nuclear explosions without getting blinded
- EMP pulses are enough to kill anyone who has a pacer in his heart or is in life support in hospitals, thus contradicting the attempt to not kill anyone
- Even if nobody gets killed in the bombings, thousands of lives are ruined because they lost their jobs and stores, but of course the show doesn’t address that

Also, besides one smart cop, everybody else in this show is unable to do basic research. We live the age of information where you can google something and find any answer to any riddle in seconds. Better yet, you can have tens of millions of people world-wide looking into it. One of them can solve it for you. The riddles are also not super smart; they are based on existing myths. Everybody can solve them by a simple visit at Wikipedia. And yet nobody in the whole world, besides one cop, is able to do such a simple thing.

And holy crap, how can anyone take a show seriously, if it makes the police to act like complete idiots? And I don’t simply mean being unable to solve the riddles with a simple visit at Wikipedia. They can’t even make the most basic profiling with the evidence they have so far.
- If you have videos of the criminals, with their voices and a clear room in the background it is more than enough to make a hell of a detailed profile of them. You don’t sit on your ass waiting for the next video riddle to appear.
- They are not even increasing patrols or security measures, something which is the first thing any sane department would do, even if the threat were a bunch of pick pocket urchins.
- They are looking for hard copies of a case the terrorists hacked into digitally. They could have simply found it on their computer instead of looking for hours in the archives.
- In the very few cases where they do try to do something right by having briefing meetings to find the terrorist base, even that is used to make them look stupid since the (not really) terrorists make them fall for traps they deliberately placed for them to fall in.
I understand that this is done purely for making the main characters seem super smart when in reality they are just average people amongst retards, but damn, this is insulting your intelligence when they keep saying the show is realistic and mature.

5) Stupid Eureka Moments

Even the single cop who has brains is unable to do the obvious. Despite knowing early on that all he needs to do is look into a myth to find the answer to a riddle, he doesn’t do so until out of nowhere he looks at a guy playing a videogame and saying completely irrelevant things. He then magically finds the solution. This is not how actual detectives do their work; they do not look at something irrelevant and all of a sudden light bulbs appear on their heads. They use facts and information they have in front of them in order to logically solve a mystery with simple deduction procedures.

6) Lazy Exposition

The way things are revealed in this show are not limited to lame eureka moments but also to lazy exposition methods. They constantly do that annoying thing, where they have to state the obvious or point at things and ask “What is that?” for more infodump to take place by talking instead of just showing stuff. They do the same thing with the background stories of all major characters. We never get a clear flashback to what happened in their lives, only glimpses of past events, and even those appear at random intervals. We only get someone monologuing about them for 10 minutes and that’s it. Although this method serves its purpose, it is very slapped on. It lacks talent and effort and passes as very amateurish for a story that is supposed to be a mystery that is slowly revealing itself. It feels like it’s not about connecting the dots and examining clues, but more like revealing stuff the characters know all along and don’t tell us about it because we have a dozen episodes that need to be filled somehow. Instead of stating the obvious, let’s waste entire episodes in briefings, where we talk about scientifically incorrect mambo jumbo that mean nothing in the longrun.

7) No Character Appeal

All that lead to characters that not remotely interesting. None of them had something special for you to care about them. It was the mystery of the riddles surrounding the characters that felt intriguing, not them. Since most of the show was wasted on silly riddle solving, and stuff blowing up, there was never much time invested in the cast. Most of what we know about them comes from boring monologues, and most of the motives are revealed too late in the story to mean anything by then.

Nine and Twelve feel like they were fooling around and rendering most of what happens in this show pointless. They could simply hack into the police archives and give them all the information they need to investigate the place they wanted them to go to. They could threaten to blow up the city with the nuclear device they stole in the beginning of the series in case they were not taken seriously. Hell, they could have simply detonated the device and hacked into the archives afterwards, thus making their point and still not killing anyone. But instead of doing something so simple, they spend the whole show blowing up buildings and throwing around riddles. They try to excuse it as if they wanted to gather the attention of the world before actually revealing the truth but that is bullshit. A nuclear bomb is more than enough to attract everybody’s attention. I mean what would the media around the world do if they had a huge explosion over Japan? Ignore it because some punks weren’t blowing buildings before that?

Lisa did absolutely nothing in the plot besides causing trouble. She was there only to be kidnapped or assaulted every 10 minutes, so the (not really) terrorists had to constantly endanger their plans to save her, just so she can take up space in their apartment and poison them with her awful cooking. She was a hindrance, existing to simply waste episodes by being in them. Many tasteless casuals kept yelling about how she represents the average teenager who is bullied and wants to see the world burn, and how she is the eyes of the viewer, and how the drama with her mother was very touching, and how she was supposed to be the human factor to keep 9 and 12 sane, and to have a cute romance going on with them, and lots of other bullshit that mean nothing in the longrun since she was just a lobotomized askman, as well as a damsel in distress. Awful tropes can only result to awful characters.

Five was presented right away as a one dimensional psychotic bitch we are supposed to hate. She was somehow allowed by the American secret agencies to go around doing hideous things, which somehow would help them capture the other two. Well guess what, not only they failed to do so, but the stupid bitch was causing more trouble than helping them in their work. She completely shattered whatever plausibility the show had by basically making the police place bombs, blow up civilian areas, and making the (not really) terrorists to run around for hours while playing chess with completely broken rules instead of just… capturing them. She knows who they are and where they are but doesn’t just send the police to capture them, she bombs the place, thus erasing all tracks of them while still failing to stop them. And of course she never gets arrested for causing more damage than the actual threat because we need to stretch the story even more. And when finally shit hits the fan, she just says it was all a game, shoots her colleague, and kills herself. Well, that was pointless. By the time she was out of the picture, there was more damage than good accomplished. Also, half the show was wasted because of her, since she was doing nothing but constantly derailing the plot from its main objective, thus constantly taking away time from character fleshing out and world building. The tasteless casuals will keep yelling how she is representing the evil version of the two good terrorists, and what they would have become if they hadn’t escaped. Meaning, she was there only to make the cartoony evil organization to seem even more cartoonishly evil.

Shibazaki is a cool fellow and the most promising of the bunch, but he too eventually becomes nothing but a plot device to keep the story going. Because somebody needs to solve the riddles, and somebody needs to be the smart counterpart that will be opposing the terrorists. The tasteless casuals keep saying that he was vital in exposing the plans of the evil organization by solving the riddles, but come on, that’s bullshit. The riddles were pointless, and as soon as the secret agency with the stupid bitch Five popped into the story, he became just a passive observer. Once the nuclear explosion happened and everybody was looking into what happened, his investigation was meaningless, since there was no way the truth could be hidden anymore.

There are also lots of side characters, each one serving an interesting side story to further flesh out the cast, but are left as nothing but decorations. This includes people like Lisa’s crazy mother, or Shibazaki’s daughter, or the politician who orchestrated the experiments on children. We could have more focus on them, but didn’t because the show went for dumb riddles and big explosions.

8 ) Rule of Cool

So it all comes back to what I said in the beginning. The show is ruined because it is trying to be taken seriously when it is made to be flashy and entertaining. It is not good at being about terrorism, or grey morality, or some metaphor for what is going on in Japanese politics right now. It’s a rule of cool show about two brats making adults look bad while the population doesn’t care if they are blowing up buildings. It’s about them laughing while escaping the authorities on their cool bikes. It’s about them outsmarting the police because they are good at playing chess; even if the animators don’t even know the rules of the game. It’s about their nemesis being a shallow psychotic narcissistic schoolgirl that the audience is meant to hate right away. It’s about the Japanese politicians thinking that the best way for Japan to get over its losing mentality from WW2 is to return back into thinking they are the masters of Asia, and threatening the world with their hidden nuclear arsenal. All that are not deeper or smarter than watching an average fighting shonen where a bunch of stupid boys solve their problems by punching things.

9) Plotless Plot

Do you know how much actual plot this show has if you take out all the flashy extras? If you remove Five, it doesn’t need more than a movie’s worth of duration to tell the whole thing. If you remove the pointless riddles, it doesn’t take more than a couple of episodes. The characters were literally overcomplicating everything with pointless riddles and bombings and running in airports, and saving useless schoolgirls. Instead of offering character fleshing out and world building, we got 90% filler, a plot that makes no sense, and doesn’t delve into its themes. All you will be remembering from Terror in Resonance are explosions, some weird riddles, and cool camera angles. If that is all that matters for you, in order to call a show good, then you have a really shit taste. It is a better show to your average harem, but calling it a good detective story about terrorism? Not even close to that! Before it even a semi guilty pleasure like V for Vendetta is a masterpiece of storytelling.

Let's end this with a joke I wrote about episode 8:

Nine: Dammit Lisa, stop cooking, you made the apartment explode!
Lisa: No it was a bomb that was mailed to me!
Twelve: And what did you do to save our base?
Lisa: I ran out while holding the ladle.

FBI guy: Five, stop blowing up places. Not even my connections can protect you from bombing civilian areas. Blowing up huge airplanes in public airports is ok, but not small apartments.
Five: Dammit, I was sure the bomb would take them out.
FBI guy: You mean the bomb you sent to the place you saw that girl go in, which you spotted by chance while looking at cameras?
Five: Yes, that one. For some reason I never spotted by chance the other two.
FBI agent: So why didn't you just tell us to surround the place and arrest them?
Five: I was busy polishing my nails. But it's ok, we can still use that girl Lisa as a bait.
FBI agent: How original. It's not like we didn't do the exact same thing last episode. And how do you know where she is?
Five: By spotting her of course. Something I can't do with the other two. Now go bring her to me, I want to polish her nails too.

Nine: Oh no, Lisa is in trouble for the 10th time in this short series. We got to endanger our plans once again to save this completely worthless girl.
Twelve: Indeed. She is vital to take up space and poison us with her cooking.

Watanabe: I created another masterpiece.
Tasteless casuals: Anime of the century! Better than even Momokyun Sword!