A rollercoaster of expectations, Jouran was a wild ride. Seeing the visuals of the trailers enchanted my mind, which sought unique and good animation styles. But Jouran made me realise one thing for sure, animation alone cannot carry a weak story.
Story
We start off with an introduction to Sawa Karasumori, Yuki Yukimura, an assassin working for Nue, with an ulterior motive of avenging her clan and killing their murderer. The cast consisted of lady sasuke, Hanakaze, Tsuki and Jin, all colleagues of Yukimura. There was also Asahi, whose parents were killed by Yukimura on one of her missions. Seeing the orphaned girl, she took her in, with the deal that Asahi could kill Yukimura after she had completed her revenge.
For the first 4-5 episodes of the anime, it was a huge disappointment. The story was unclear and confusing, the characters weren’t charming and the plot was monotonous. Yukimura was your average emotionless, thirsty for revenge character. Blinded by the rage of her past, she cared not for the lives of those she killed. By the 4th episode, the supposedly main villain of the story Janome was killed. We came to know that Tsuki was a traitor and had his own objectives. What they were, we never find out.
The latter half of the story is much better in my opinion, and also where things get more interesting. Till this point I felt that the direction of the anime was rather bad. Pacing issues, too many twists were some of the writing’s and direction’s most major flaw. The pacing many times underplayed the actuality of the scene, a good example of this being Asahi’s "death", which did not come off as brutal and impactful as it should’ve.
But after this point on, I felt that the character moments were much better than before. Seeing Sawa completely broken after the loss of Asahi was heart breaking. Being given the hope, and then getting stripped of it made me pity her terribly. Another such moment was seeing Jin cry after feeling the warmth of love, adding depth to the once monotonous character. And then seeing him devastated at the thought of murdering the clan he had bonded with was heart breaking. He had no choice but to kill the first beings he cared for.
Needless to say, I felt that, even though the writing was rather simple, the execution of the scenes was done very well in the latter half of the story.
Music and Art
The music was very fitting and thematic. The opening had the thrilling feel, paired with the traditional instruments. The ending had this tragic feel, as if we were in the aftermath of a sad event. In the final episode, this ending pairing up with the already depressing scene made the moment rather phenomenal. Other than the EDs and OPs, the OSTs were also good. They did their jobs and weren't very distracting
Now coming to art, the element that attracted me initially. While the art style surely is unique and cool to look at, Jouran suffers from it. The thing is, the better the art is in one frame, the harder it is to maintain. And this is visible throughout the series. The animation can get flimsy at times, sometimes ruining the moment. Due to this, Jouran has many scenes which are just alterations of one still frame. Though I must say, this was a problem only during the beginning, as I wasn’t engrossed that well.
#``Issues
- The major issues I had with the anime was its writing. As I have said, so many things were happening in an episode that it was hard to care for them. The general structure was that by the end, a new plot twist was revealed. This worked for the first 2 eps, but then it became redundant.
- There were also many plot holes. The character of Makoto Tsukishiro is still very unclear. What is he trying to achieve? Why did he betray?
The biggest of all was the death of Sawa. It felt like she was killed only to give a sad end to the story, The assassin had no reason to kill her. She herself said that she had no grudge against her, and was killing her only because of the order. Now that the government was no more, WHY DID SHE KILL SAWA ?
;-;
Conclusion
Looking back at it in retrospect, all I can think of is how it wasted its potential. The soundtracks were good, the animation was unique. Had there been better writing, the anime could’ve been much better. By the end, I was coming to like it, but was disappointed by the illogical twist.