I wanted SpeedGrapher to be one of those well executed anime that had something to say about the broken side of modern life. It showed promise as an anti-cute, grim look at greed, but instead presents a far too idealized dystopia complete with a monolithic corrupt upper class, that I had a hard time taking the message of the show seriously, because it really failed in its understanding of power and how people acquire it. But, my goal isn’t to bang the SpeedGrapher sucks drum as loud as I can. It wasn’t all bad.
A Brief Rundown of the Premise
Speed Grapher is the story of Tatsumi Saiga, a former war photographer who finds himself going through the motions of modern life as a tabloid photographer. While sniffing out trash to snap and sell to a rag, Saiga stumbles upon something big, an underground pleasure club whose membership consists of all the power brokers in Japan. Still, this was just trash Saiga needed to capture to make a buck, that is, until he was kissed by The Goddess, the sixteen year old Kagura Tennouzou.
With that kiss, something awoke inside of Saiga, a power, yes, but something else that was more important. He found himself needing to save Kagura from the clutches of Suitengu who exploits her and from Shinsen Tennouzou, her filthy-rich mother who abuses her. His personal quest to save Kagura turns into something much larger as he learns more of Suitengu’s motives.
The Good
I really like the setup of SpeedGrapher, since it points a finger at what is broken in modern life. SpeedGrapher tells us what we know, that working harder doesn’t often lead to success (as it does in most anime), but is just something most of us bottom feeders have to do. People are messed up. The world is messed up; and, most people ignore it just to get by.
But really, what I dug most about SpeedGrapher was the character designs, which is why the limited edition releases from Funimation rocked. The LE’s are plastered with illustrations. The dvd case was designed to have many surfaces to put artwork on and each volume had booklets with character sheets and art cards. Okay, maybe it’s not the best sign when I’m talking about the character illustrations and the packaging as the best parts of the series. Still, it’s a nice package.
I love this illustration of Kagura:
The Bad
While watching this anime, it just felt like they squandered so many opportunities. The pacing and storytelling were awful and the mature aspects, the corruption, the violence, and the pleasure club felt immature. Storywise, the creators seemed to not know what the A-story was, stumbled along to the halfway mark, and realized the show had to go somewhere while never building a foundation for the A-story, which was the relationship between Kagura and Saiga.
Neither Saiga nor Kagura is really developed much throughout the series, which leaves their feelings for each other seem a little off. It dulls some of the emotional impact that could and should have been there. Like I know I’m supposed to root for them, but I don’t feel it.
I actually found myself identifying more with the recurring bad guys. The most fully realized character to me is actually Shinsen Tennouzou, Kagura’s abusive mother. She has different sides to her very messed up character and we get to see how she got to where she was. We also get to see what motivates Suitengu to carry out his revenge against society. While I don’t agree with the childish path either of them took, I can understand their pain.
On the technical side, the cheap animation really destroys the great design work for the series.
The English Dub
The main strength of Christopher Bevins, the director for the English dub, is how he builds his cast. He’s able to find the right voice for a character and have each of the voices be unique for each character, which works to build the character as an individual.
There are a lot of standouts in the cast, particularly among the recurring bad guys. Chris Ayers as Suitengu; Greg Ayers as Tsujido; and, Pam Dougherty as Shinsen Tennouzou all played heartless villains that were completely different from the other.
Dougherty really nailed Shinsen Tennouzou and really kept her from seeming inhuman in spite of all of her cruelty toward her own daughter.
Overall Impression
SpeedGrapher has major problems and I felt like it wasted so much potential, but I was able to sit through it mainly because of its promises. There aren’t many anime on region 1 dvd flavored like SpeedGrapher and that helped to keep me interested.
I’m kinda surprised that you neglect to mention Suitengu as a believable character. You can actually relate to his rationale more than other characters have been able to.
I was a fun show to watch though, especially when you see GONZO try so hard to show that the world was seedy that it became funny. :3
Good point, thanks (edited post).
I did find myself identifying more with Suitengu, Shinsen, Tsujido as the story progressed than I did with Saiga and Kagura. I’m not sympathetic to what Suitengu became though.
It’s a good thing we don’t have the same power as Saiga, else we’d be crying manly tears that our figures exploded, lol.
That would be tragic!
Obviously they didn’t pay much attention on animation and character development. Too bad, watching the 1st episode i thought this anime could be really good. i still watched it till the end though. In the last part where suitengu finally caused a financial crisis, i found that quite interesting from an economic poin of view.
If something like that ever happened then the whole world economy would go crazy. Though really, if that much money went out of circulation even before being destroyed, it would have already affected the marketplace and not gone beyond the notice of investors all around the world. Though I’m not holding that detail against the story.
It’s nice to see a review for Speed Grapher.
I do agree that they really let the animation go to crap in this series. It seemed to me that the first couple of episodes were animated a lot better than following ones, and the production value just seemed to get worse as the series went on. And I agree that Kagura and Saiga’s relationship – and characters in general – should have been explored more. In the end I didn’t really care if Kagura lived or died, and I found Saiga to be more wishy-washy and whiny than he came off at first, which troubled me a lot.
I did really like Tsujido and Suitengu though. I agree that what Suitengu became and aimed for was wrong, but he had a lot of character depth. Chris and Greg Ayres did amazing jobs on those roles. I didn’t even realize it was Greg playing Tsujido at first.
Chris Ayers was a great Suitengu. Villains are usually interesting characters, but I think his portrayal carried the show toward the end. As the story just went to hell, I pretty much latched onto that as a highlight of the show.