Tokyo Ghoul
a review by R2R
a review by R2R
Our bookworm/shy MC 'Ken Kaneki', one day got an opportunity to date a hot woman named 'Riza' who seemingly shared the same book interest as him but by the end of the date, she tried to eat him (No, not in the sexual sense but in the literal sense). Turns out she's a ghoul, a blood-thirsty man-eating monster who, by nature has a tendency to devour humans. But due to some (un)fortunate events, Kaneki ends up swapping some of Riza's internal organs with his and she ends up dying. Now Kaneki has to keep his senses straight, by not letting that human-hungry nature surface but the world of ghouls is more than just eating humans.
While I understand why Tokyo Ghoul is considered "rushed", it does a few things right.
(Mild spoilers)
Let's take one of my favorite scenes in Tokyo Ghoul. "Touka vs Mado" & "Kaneki vs Amon".
Just before the real fight, there's a 5 minute dialogue where Amon confronts Kaneki about whether ghouls even feel grief for their man-eating nature and Touka confronts Mado about their ghoul-hunting nature when the only thing ghouls want is to live. This scene plays out really well because of not what the dialogue is, but rather who's saying it.
Touka, a ghoul who tries her hardest to conceal her man-eating nature from her dear friend who's making her eat shit (in ghoul terms), she's a ghoul who just wants to live along with humans but her ghoul nature is opposing that mindset of hers. Amon, a human who just saw his colleagues who he just got to know a bit, got slaughtered in front of his eyes for absolutely no reason.
(Mild spoilers end)
There's an interesting duality that's being portrayed between ghouls & humans. They're hunting the other kind, on their own rules & values which you can understand but from an outsider perspective, you really can't tell who's right, or more importantly who's wrong. This dilemma is so well portrayed, especially in the after mentioned scene by interchanging their individual dialogue, cutting at the right moment and making you question "what I would've done if...".
Tokyo Ghoul characters, much like humans, have an exterior side & an interior self.
On the exterior you have the edginess, which was greatly portrayed with character designs & bit of a "I'm badass" personality everyone has within them. Aside from Kaneki, literally no character in this Anime feels uncool, even someone like Yoshimura, who looks like your regular old man you see at a coffee shop has a cool personality and the Anime does a great job at nailing this side. On the interior you have the human side that wants you to care for these characters by either showing regrets & difficulties of their past (Jason) or by showing how hard these characters try to fit into society just to not lose that dear person (Kaneki, Touka, Nishiki and many). And this interior is what TG failed to create. It never lets you feel for these characters even when absolutely terrible things happen to them (flashbacks to Hinami) and that's due to its fast pacing, rushing the story to get into 'good' bits without any proper buildup. So if you take out the emotional part, what's left? The Edge. And that's basically what Tokyo Ghoul characters are & what TG became. An edge fest with very little drama, somewhat of a self-insertable protagonist and a lot of characters with cheap tricks to make them 'human'.
The anime did somewhat of a job to nail the emotional side, by letting inner thoughts of Kaneki to surface but for the most part of this season, Kaneki is just a crybaby who's feeling pathetic for being a half-ass in everything and his words feel as empty & generic as you can think of your regular shounen protagonist. We'll see the world through Kaneki so it gives us an edge for being more empathetic towards him than others but apart from him, everyone else is so lifeless. For a story that's trying to talk about human nature via inhuman characters, you really need to make them emotionally investing because being human is something more connected to the soul than the mind. And if not, we can't feel the actual weight of the drama and that's basically Tokyo Ghoul. But despite all the things it left and wasted, there's one thing that it succeeded to do right and that is the last episode, the famous badass transition.
Kaneki's torture episode is the highest point the Anime ever reached (The infamous white-hair finger-snap transition). Because now, not only do we see Kaneki reflecting on everything he did & didn't, we also get to see his backstory showing how he became the whiny boy he is and letting Riza take advantage of it. So when he snaps into a ghoul, it just feels badass. But for this one moment, the Anime sacrificed so much of its potentially emotionally investing characters by making things too fast.
I see no problem in art style or animation, unless you've watched the censored version.
I can see people being pissed off just by looking at this image.So,
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