SPOILER-FREE!
It’s important to remember that anime is not made by studios, but people. They may be released and financed under the company name, but it is men and women, sometimes from around the world, who are the ones that actually put pen to paper (or stylus and mouse to screen, rather) to produce the content we care about. The studios’ management is involved as well, but the current landscape of the anime industry is often not friendly to its staff, sometimes dumping projects on them with no time to get them finished or rushing them out the door despite their lacking quality. More and more stories like these are becoming documented, and it’s important to acknowledge them.

Tokyo 24th Ward was a Winter 2022 anime that regrettably got this problem. One month before the show started airing, key animation director Kiminori Itou vocally stated on Twitter that he was not optimistic about the project, and that the amount of time given to the production paled in comparison to CloverWorks’ other two shows that aired this season, Akebi’s Sailor Uniform and My Dress-Up Darling. This puts Tokyo 24th Ward in a weird light – if it succeeded despite itself, it would be all the more impressive. If it failed, it would likely be the result of the series not having enough time to pull itself together. Whether that is the result of CloverWorks themselves, or Aniplex, the company that licensed it, we can only guess. Either way, it is the end product that determines an outcome like that.
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The series takes place in a futuristic, economically-divided ward that might be integrated into the larger city of Tokyo. After their friend Asumi dies in a fire at their old elementary school, childhood friends Shuta, Ran, and Koki all receive a mysterious phone call at the same time from someone claiming to be Asumi. Upon answering the call, they receive a vision of one of their friends and her dog stuck on a railroad track and must decide whether to allow the train to hit them or slow down the train and risk hurting the passengers. The phone call also imbues them with enhanced abilities, as they spring into action to try and resolve this rather-literal Trolley Problem. As time passes, more Trolley Problem complications will be presented that the three friends must contend with, and it will test the boundaries of their friendships, the ward, and whatever is causing these things to happen.

One of the Trolley Problem’s caveats in practical application, among many, is that it presents two moral extremes for which there is no possible alternative, which dangerously runs the risk of being too disconnected or disassociated from real life to have any significant meaning (even if one can cherry-pick actual stories of Trolley Problem-esque occurrences). An additional downside is that it can reduce a person’s perception of a situation down to its numerical value rather than an empathic value, which doesn’t necessarily bode well for psychological interpretation. To put it another way as Spock did, one could look at the Problem and argue that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” without understanding the resulting implications for who lives and who dies and the world beyond the problem’s framework. Thus, a story using the Trolley Problem starts on a fundamentally shaky ground because it needs to frame the scenarios as being justifiable both in terms of setting them up and the extremes it presents.

The fact that Tokyo 24th Ward takes place in a futuristic setting allows its incorporation of the Trolley Problem to work more seamlessly than it would otherwise. Because the series utilizes advanced machines, surveillance, and revolves primarily around the lives of its three main characters, the Problems read as being the expected result of things not occurring within expected parameters. The machines not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, or actually doing precisely what they’re supposed to be doing but in an unforeseen manner, is why the Trolley Problems themselves manifest. Shuta, Ran, and Koki all have various outlooks on the Problems, which helps fuel the conflict surrounding the moralistic decisions they face, as well as their tolerance of each other’s reasoning.

But as far as the three friends are concerned, their chemistry together, regardless of being fractured from Asumi’s death, isn’t pleasant to watch. Shuta fashions himself as the hero of the 24th Ward and upset that he failed to save Asumi, but fails moreso to have a character beyond being a “nice guy” with a superhero ideology, and sadly not much in the way of intelligence. Wanting to help people is certainly noble, but the more-fascinating relationship among the mains, the one between Ran and Koki, is such because they are at complete odds with one another – Ran is a graffiti artist that uses his talents to convey messages, while Koki is a by-the-book, calculating individual with a penchant for siding with law and order. They naturally gravitate towards different circles and schools of thought.

Interestingly enough, for people who supposedly care so much about Asumi, including the fact that Koki is her brother, it is mind-boggling that Shuta, Ran, and Koki never at any point have an earnest conversation about whether it really is Asumi talking to them, or someone pretending to be her. Especially given the crazy happenings that led to the events in episode one’s climax, one would reasonably expect that there would be some kind of brainstorming session to determine what precisely happened. Even if no conclusion had been reached, even if tempers get particularly flared, or even absent any agreement, this is a conversation that needed to happen. Months in-universe transpire without that dialogue.

The reason for this is because, without Asumi’s insistence that when the three are working together that anything is possible, the narrative doesn’t really have a friendship to cultivate for them. The show plays up the chasm between the three in light of Asumi’s death, which makes sense. But whether through flashback or present-time events, we see little evidence of an earnestness between the mains that existed beforehand. Hence, a dialogue taking place evaluating the truth of whether Asumi called them after the first episode cannot happen because the connection via friendship is, more or less, nonexistent.

Instead, the second episode follows the Ward putting on a cooking festival for the residents, resulting in a controversy over someone buying up all the cabbage. This handling of storytelling priority is a part of what makes Tokyo 24th Ward so bewildering; the series will propose plots or threads that are theoretically interesting, but shies away from exploring many of them. And when it does try to explore some of those threads, its sense of dramaturgy makes for some questionable decisions. During that same cooking festival arc, the three main characters are outside a warehouse and are deciding whether to bust in and get the cabbage they need for their friend’s okonomiyaki recipe, only to be told by someone that they don’t need to do that because they found some more cabbage lying around that they could use. There’s a build-up that insinuates some kind of action-style sequence will occur, only to pull the rug out from under itself by saying that such a thing wasn’t necessary in the first place.

The roster of secondary characters is wide, and it’s rather sad that they tend to be vastly more interesting and theoretically-compelling than most stories involving the trio. Given the outcomes of some of the Trolley Problems that take place, the secondaries occasionally have to face the ramifications of the trio’s decisions. Kozue is one particular character who stands out in this respect, as an entire episode is centered around her in the aftershock of what happened. But she, like many others, is stymied by Tokyo 24th Ward having her take actions or decisions that either lead to unspectacular payoffs via poor buildup or head-scratching choices.

And unfortunately, not even the overall animation or aesthetic can carry the show along, either. It seems that Kiminori Itou’s frustrations make themselves most evident in this regard. Despite the decent look of the cityscape and the ward itself, the character designs are rather uninteresting or are, at worst, horribly off-model. Watching this show from week-to-week made it feel like the show got quite shortchanged in regards to the animation side of production, and given that episodes were delayed twice with a mid-series recap thrown in, this really becomes a nuisance. That doesn’t mean that there are no moments that don’t work, because some do. But given the level of animation CloverWorks is capable of, they are few and far between.

Perhaps the biggest frustration within Tokyo 24th Ward is that the various ideas that are on display here are indeed more than capable of filling out a twelve-episode narrative. But as presented, it is oversaturated and cannot accommodate everything in a satisfactory manner. The result is a slew of concepts that are half-baked, unable to reach anything moderately close to full realization, whatever that could be. If the show wants to propose a series of ethical or moralistic decisions that our characters are thrust into, or paint its world with overarching themes that carry particular significance for its characters, then it needs to make a commitment to actually investigate them seriously. It doesn’t need offer a complete, perfect solution to each question (and it would be presumptuous to assume one exists), but the exercise of engaging with the discussions the show wants to have must still be fun in and of itself. For me, this wasn’t.

One could argue that the series is not trying to actually probe that deeply about its concepts, that a series where conflicts are presented to generally last a couple of episodes doesn’t bear the responsibility to fully flesh them out. But when the series puts forward the ideas of economic class disparity via Shantytown, ethical decisions about who should live and die via the Trolley Problems, technology’s growing presence in our lives and its misuse, and stopping crimes before they happen (among other things), it’s not really a compliment to make a claim that the show doesn’t have to put in the legwork. It doesn’t need to be on the level of elegant prose, but it cannot read as disingenuous, which was what it left me with. By the time the final episode had rolled around and presented its last predicament, my interest had, much like Asumi, long since died.
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Tokyo 24th Ward is an inconsistent lumping of concepts and aesthetic, trying to have its various pieces come together in a way that makes sense, but cannot commit to doing so. Its drama often does not work both at the individual episodic level and the grander narrative overall, with characters making unusual decisions or having revelations that lack dramatic weight and sensibility. The designs are often off-model, and the plot is a hodgepodge of events that don’t deliver despite trying to make use of its Trolley Problem framework. Ultimately, it was a misfire. It’s ironic that a series about having to make decisions with little time to spare was made by animators and writers with little time to spare themselves. Delaying an episode an extra week or having a placeholder recap is only a temporary band-aid for a larger wound. This is one case however where life imitating art resulted in the worser of two results.