First of all, a side note on the name. The actual name of the series is 『C』, sometimes with the subtitle, The Money of Soul and Possibility. The “C” stands for “Control”; its working title before a trademark issue with an ongoing J-drama. “Possibility Control” is a misreading of some varieties of the anime’s logo. Unfortunately, this misreading made it into virtually all anime databases.

Kenji Nakamura is the king of “passable anime that comes to my mind a lot”. Bakeneko and Mononoke are widely acclaimed with its stunning aesthetics and deep criticisms of conservative Japanese culture, but the bookworm-salaryman-turned-anime-creator also directed a string of lesser-known TV anime on wonky topics such as digital democracy and mental illness. C is his urban-fantasy-action series about finance & macroeconomics.

Imagine.

In the aftermath of the Lehman Shock and the subsequent Great Recession, Nakamura got it in his head to make something on the subject, and interviewed like two dozen people — economists, financial journalists, NPOs, and CEOs — and conceived a mf’ing monster battle anime as the conduit for all this esoteric knowledge.

In it, a downtrodden college student makes a deal with the devil who whisks him away to a demonic other-world where one can magically liquidate their future happiness for cash-on-hand in the real world. Others like him enter their demonic familiars in zero-sum duels. Bankruptcy in this desperate "economy" means certain death in the real world when the devil claims his due.

The thinly-veiled metaphors don’t end there. We meet the true antagonist of the series: the leader of an all-powerful guild who fixes the majority of the games to minimize negative outcomes for all in the realm. With his dominance of the demon market, he cashes out his significant demon-wealth to prop up the faltering Japanese economy. However well-meaning the act, the plan all but ensures Japan’s gradual demise by trading its future to save its present.

In real life, Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio is an obscenely high 214%; it has literally traded the future to prop up the present to a much greater degree than other developed nations. It’s the birthplace of the term “corporate zombie”; unprofitable businesses that pointlessly persist with state subsidies, and with its demographics heavily skewed toward the elderly, Japan is in many ways a harbinger of things to come (or already arrived) for the rest of us: high debt, low growth and politics that favor the old.

Our college student protagonist challenges The Man in the ultimate showdown between generations. The prize: control of the demon-currency printing press. C suffers the same issues of all of Nakamura’s post-Mononoke works: delirious visuals and over-the-top (though true to anime) schlock that wildly over-compensates for what’s assumed to be uninteresting subject matter. Nothing he’s made recaptures the confident swagger of his debut. That said, the mere attempts to convey a wonky, non-otaku topic in a marketable TV anime each carry their own “Hataraku Saibou”-like charm, however wobbly the results are.

In an interview, the director says that he sees Japan as leaderless, and the result of indecision is an ongoing status quo of “poverty and stability”. In the anime, our protagonist forces the issue with monster battling and macroeconomic magic, but in real life, political change is far from easy. It follows that Kenji Nakamura would later make a two-season meditation on democracy itself called Gatchaman Crowds.

Postscript: This review was originally written in 2020 as part of my Passable Anime that Comes to My Mind A Lot series.

Comment on this review