So, in my last post I said that I literally hated Japan Sinks 2020, but that I was scared to voice my problems with it, from a writing standpoint, due to so many people genuinely liking the show. It seems I'm not alone at all. A lot of people encouraged me to make this post, so, here we go...
(This is going to be a long one)
Everything Wrong With: Japan Sinks 2020 (and it's a lot):
this post contains spoilers, obviously.
The music doesn't fit the mood of the show, like, at all. Don't get me wrong, the music is actually good, a lot of it is in my study playlist now, but it absolutely doesn't fit the scenes that accompany it. e.g. the dad gets literally blown up by a ww2 bomb leaving only his severed hand behind *happy music intensifies* this just cheapens the entire scene and removes any tiny fragment of emotional response to what you're being shown. And this happens all the time.
The animation... The backgrounds and general scenery look absolutely stunning, but the characters look genuinely awful. At times, I would be legitimately crying whilst watching a scene, not out of sadness, but out of laughter at just how bad the characters look. Extremely lazy drawing, and if the character isn't the one talking, they just freeze their animation for minutes at a time, not even making them blink or move slightly, just... frozen there.
Go and his constant use of cringy Engrish. I get it, he's half filipino and he looks up to an English-speaking YouTuber. But he goes into this broken English way too frequently, and again, it doesn't match the tone of what's happening.
How did Mari survive the first tsunami? Also, why didn't we get to see the first tsunami? Or the plane crash-landing in the bay and hitting the bridge? Why do we never actually get to see these large-scale events that are supposedly impacting our characters? Also, if Mari supposedly was in a plane crash, then ended up in the river where a tsunami hit, and she somehow managed to swim out of the river during a tsunami, how does she then have the energy and strength to walk all the way through the city to the shrine, and doesn't even seem out of breath? Also, if Ayumu was in that changing room which resulted in people being literally severed in half, how is her phone not even smashed? Cracked a lil? No?
THE POLAROIDS. I actually turned the show off the second time Mari pulled her camera out for a group photo, and I had to force myself to go back and finish it. Why on earth do the characters keep insisting on taking these chipper polaroids like the literal apocalypse isn't happening around them? Is Mari emotionally stunted? I don't understand. Is it supposed to be making some kind of point? I don't understand...
The characters seem to have zero reaction to awful events happening around them, or they comment on it and move on immediately.
Random magical cult city growing serious amounts of weed... Literally everything that happens there is just awful writing. So far, everything that has happened has been a natural disaster, and they explain them as being due to the tectonic plate movements. So we're supposed to be believing all of this as possible. Explainable natural events. You can't build a world around this and then suddenly introduce magic out of the blue. Not to mention, what even happened in the end? Did 'Mother' reincarnate herself? How? Why?
The weird nightclub scene and the pensioner sex scene are both two scenes I could do without.
The weird trickster guy who keeps pulling fake eyes/ears/noses out of nowhere. Again, he ruins the tone of the show. Not only that, continuity just doesn't exist with him. He says he's from England, but speaks English with an American accent. And then he says he grew up in Yugoslavia. Like, which one is it sweetie?
Why is this old man just randomly addicted to morphine?
You can't expect the audience to have a legitimate emotional response to character deaths if you introduce and kill off new characters so frequently, whilst simultaneously not really telling us anything about them that would cause us to care that they're gone.
Huh, what do you know, episode 8 was actually kind of good-ish, and the only reason it was good was because we were left with only two characters, the characters we've known right from the start, meaning we have at least some reason to care about them. And there's none of the random happy music. And Go keeps his Engrish to a minimum. And neither of them dies in a freak accident that gives the animators reason to show more body horror out of nowhere for shock value.
THE RAP BATTLE. At this point, I genuinely thought that this show had to be satirical. Like, there is just no way this is supposed to be a serious show. Again, the tone is non-existant now. For some reason this show likes to be really self-deprecating towards Japan at every available opportunity and they just went full speed with this rap battle. Like, I get that maybe the writers thought, oh, we've been showing a lot of bleak scenes, let's give some comedic relief. But that only works if you haven't had happy music blaring this entire time, combined with hilariously out-of-place English phrases and the weird Yugo-Brit-American guy with fake eyes, etc. That only works if this was a serious show to begin with.
I'm making a separate point just for the godawful animation during Kite's weather balloon scene. Jesus Christ.
The fact that they built a new mini-Japan/Tokyo for the surviving Japanese people, knowing full-well that Japan is going to re-emerge at some point, thus destroying this new island and killing its inhabitants in the process.
We're supposed to believe that nobody, not one nation, tried to claim the area that Japan was once in for themselves, supposedly as a good will to the Japanese people, even though it would be a prime location for fishing, etc. And there's definitely not enough Japanese people left to try and contest it.
I forgot to mention the fact that the intro doesn't match the show either.
There is a consistent issue with the show not understanding the tone it's supposed to be having. Combining the happy intro, happy music throughout, characters' lack of response to what's happening around them, laughable animation and random "comedy relief" aspects like the foreigner and the rap battle, you're left with a show that is unable to make you feel the way it wants you to feel. It seems like a joke, you want to see it as satirical, but the show continues to act like these events should be taken seriously. Now, I've seen anime that does this kind of thing before, having the tone of one genre whilst actually being another, but in a good way. An example would be Gakkou Gurashi (School Live). But Japan Sinks 2020 seems to do this unintentionally. It's just... Funny. I don't think I cared that a single character died. And that, in itself, is sadder than the entire show.
If you've made it through this post, congratulations. As someone who is both a writer and a fan of apocalyptic/natural disaster fiction, this show hit a nerve and I needed to speak out about it. Especially since I'm seeing it be praised so much online!
