Anime Review: Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress

Today, the 2016 anime from Wit Studio, Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress.Let’s Jam.

ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, STEAMPUNK SETTING, SAMURAI IN JAPAN, CRAZY TRAIN.The weird combination of set pieces is masterful here, let me tell you.So in this alternate history of Japan, the complete country has been overrun by infected mindless beasts known as Kabane or “corpses".Most of the survivors are luckily able to keep them at bay by living in heavily walled cities, connected by a massive railroad system.How they built that railroad system with the undead hoard bearing down on them is never explained, but it’s there, so might as well use it.And use it they do!Carrying supplies from stronghold to stronghold, armoured trains travel constantly throughout the country, and as such are under constant threat of attack from the Kabane, and the humans deal with them like you would expect.Hold them off as best you can, and if anyone gets bit they must sacrifice themselves for the good of everyone else.So the onset is good.The paranoia that anyone can become a Kabane is brought into play really early, and while the series never dips into horror per say, it never needed to.And let’s be honest, it’s was hard enough to get the paranoia right.Adding proper scary horror elements would be asking too much when they have the handicap of doing it all animated, which makes horror much harder to be considered actually scary.

So, we get introduced to our main character, Ikoma, who looks like he was found in a lost pile of Matsumoto sketches.He is an intrepid young engineer who comes up with a piercing gun to quickly dispatch the Kabane, Ikoma gets bit by a Kabane, but instead of becoming one of the undead,he gets superpowers instead by becoming what is referred to as a Kabaneri. OH HEY, I GOT BITTEN BY A ZOMBIE TIME TO AUTO-EROTICALLY ASPHYXIATE MYSELF It was at this point that I released I still wasn’t getting the kind of paranoia series I wanted, because if one character could gain superpowers from this, doubtless others can as well.Even if they don’t, the possibility is always there, and the threat of the hoard suddenly becomes a lot less threatening. So through a series of stupid decisions by some unimportant red shirts, the initial city the show starts in gets overrun and survivors make their way out of the city on the titular Iron Fortress to hopefully survive further onslaught.The train consists of a variety of different characters, from weak willed  to musclebound goddesses of strength, and over the course of several episodes the train makes it way towards the capital, with all of its passengers, including two Kabaneri. Oh yeah there’s more than just Ikoma. 

Mumei is our secondary lead and honestly the only real character in the show to get any positive development.This might sound strange on the outset because her introduction places her in the camp she is the living manifestation of the idea that everything is possible if you make the acrobatics check.I’d almost say she is the series’ true lead character as Ikoma’s standard bearer personality of a typical seinen hero make him feel more like he’s just filling a role rather than leading the charge. Mumei’s backstory is pretty screwed in the head though, with biological experiments,a sometimes crooked sense of right and wrong, and a brother complex to top it all off. But what I liked most about her character arc was how it quickly passed over the part of it that I was least looking forward to.

In the beginning with every battle Mumei would continue to get more and more reckless, which I predicted would eventually come to a head.She tackles more than she can handle and suddenly becomes a damsel in destress, and while that is technically what happened, the show doesn’t dwell on it too much and her recovery to stoic badass happens much quicker then with other characters.Looking at you Asuna. But as most people will tell you, the biggest problem with this series is the second arc.The first 6 episodes of the show barring Ikoma’s disposition and development are really good,borderline amazing at times.But then there is a noticeable drop in…entertainment.The whole plot shifts from one of survival to this: what felt like a hastily put together yet self-contained story of revenge from a character who’s not even introduced until episode 7.The shift is so drastic I would say that it almost felt like I was watching a different show. Let me put it this way, episodes 7 through 12 are an enigma and an anomaly.

The status quo that existed at the end of episode 6, is still in place at the end of the series.Hell, this is a show where the threat of characters dying from the zombie apocalypse should bea very real thing and yet I don’t think a single character from the first half of the show lost their life to a Kabane in the second half. Because it wasn’t really their story anymore, so why dwell on them right? So that is where I got disappointed.The second half did have some entertainment value to it, sure, but it wasn’t to the same caliber that the series started off with. If we ever do get another season I would hope that the writers try to pretend that the second arc never happened as much as they can.Just do a Bugs Bunny cut through continuity and it’ll be fine.

Now, as far as the animation goes, Kabaneri was done by Wit Studio and directed by Tetsuro Araki. A subject I quickly touched on was the comparison between Kabaneri and Attack on Titan, considering their almost identical staff.Allow me to reiterate my opinion on that comparison: Calling Kabaneri “Attack on Titan but in Steampunk Feudal Japan” is a really good and quick way to likely sell the show to people.It’s probably the main reason why I started watching the show in the first place.But I think that this inevitable comparison is not entirely accurate.On the one hand, Koutetsujou no Kabaneri is made by the same studio as Titan. It was directed by the same person, it has a similar artsy style, the same musical composer,and as far as the development of our main character, fairly parallel plot points.However, that’s as far as the comparison goes. In Titan, it’s semi-steampunk Germans fighting against giant colossal beasts. Kabaneri is a much more steampunk-heavy series with samurai and rail guns who fight against a zombie apocalypse.Just because something is fighting something else in both cases does not mean that one is copying the other.There are enough major differences that makes the series distinct enough to stand on its own.

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Plus, personal opinion but I just think that visually Kabaneri looks much better. Like Titan was great, but that was three years ago, and I’m impressed with how far With as come as a studio.I would also say, despite its literal train wreck of a finale, that it also shows a slightly positive upswing in Araki’s directing of original work. But Kabaneri was a lot less convoluted than Guilty Crown.The finale still had major problems and one or two narrative leaps that I didn’t think made sense, but it wasn’t the same kind of cluster that Crown was. Kabaneri however did thankfully take the best part of Guilty Crown, by having Egoist perform the opening theme. EGOIST, a musical unit derived from Super cell, is just as amazing here as it was there.Because of this Kabaneri’s opening is thus far my contender for best opening of the year,even though as I stand here we still have several months to go. Sawano also came back to work with Araki and did the music for the series as he has for several of Araki’s other works but I’ll be honest, as good as this soundtrack is,and it is very good, it is still just a Sawano soundtrack, which means it kind of blends with his other works.It’s slightly depressing, but would only bother me more if I didn’t happen to really like his music in general.

Overall, Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress is a show that I very much enjoyed, but I don’t think that it ended up becoming something that’s truly memorable.The Intro was solid, and for the first 6 weeks I was recommending it left and right as the season began, but that stopped quite quickly in the second half.It’s still not a horrible show by any means, but I felt as if it had lost sight of what made it entertaining.To bring back my recent D&D comparisons, Kabaneri is what I would expect out of a campaign whena new member joined and doesn’t know how to play nice with the spotlight.So they hog it all.Sure having that character voiced by Mamoru Miyano was awesome, but that doesn’t excuse the lack of development for characters that we just started to get to know in the opening half of the season. As such with all its faults I can only unfortunately present Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress with a recommendation to Stream it rather than buy. I’d recommend the initial episodes to most everyone, as they are rather superb, but beyond that watch at your own risk and pray for a season two.

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