Anime review: Ajin

Ajin was a show almost nobody bothered to watch because of the crappy CGI. And yes, it was crappy no matter how much some claimed otherwise. It was so bad, Ajin became overlooked to the point it wasn’t even a candidate in the Crunchyroll awards of 2016, despite having one of the best villains of the year. There were some who defended it by claiming the CGI is what made it stand out, which doesn’t mean anything if nobody liked the unusual artwork.

It was even out of place compared to Knights of Sidonia, the previous work from the same animation studio. It had the same style, but the setting of genetic engineering in the far future was excusing the eerie way everything looked. Ajin takes place in a mundane Japan of today, so it’s bizarre for the sake of being bizarre.

The only thing that benefited from the CGI was the appearance of the black smoke monsters, which look really cool as Stand knock-offs from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. But even those were a small part of the whole. 90% of everything you saw was robotic characters and low frame animation.

Aside from how ugly and robotic it looked for the average viewer, it was also torture porn for edgelords instead of a decent story to enjoy even if you could overlook the eye cancer. It tried to pass as deep by showing the effects of becoming desensitized because of immortality, and how humanity becomes terrified of such creatures living amongst them. It didn’t explore the theme ala Parasyte and ended up being excuses for gore and murder.

The prime problem with the show was the retarded protagonist. Most deaths and torture scenes wouldn’t happen if he had a 3 digit IQ. Nothing he did made any sense, such as not hiding his face in public areas and avoiding the constant attacks of people who recognized him. He was passive, needlessly overcomplicated every situation, did nothing useful most of the time, and constantly made the plot go in circles thus becoming detrimental to the narrative.

Satou, the main villain, was the best thing about the show, since he was the exact opposite of that idiotic MC. Proactive, had an agenda, and was experienced in battle. In effect, he was the story of Ajin. If he was the main character, or at least had found Kei much sooner, the show would be so aimless half the time.

But instead of that, all we got was a useless teenager protagonist constantly reacting to everything, then running after the bad guy, and slowly changing the show from a psychological thriller to a generic fighting shonen. You end up watching it just to see fucked up ways to kill or torture someone, tensionless battles between Ajin who cannot die, before eventually the MC defeats a clearly superior fighter because the plot said so. A complete travesty.