Category: Rainbow

This episode featured the most extreme themes, but at the same time the cheese also was the most reserved. Thank god, really. The drama felt a lot more genuine in this episode, and it showed that this series knows how to put a bit of subtlety into its atmosphere.

What strikes me the most however is how fast this series is moving. At first, I thought that this series would be about how An-chan and the six others live together at the prison, and how they spend their daily lives. However, An-chan is about to be released. At first I believed that the creators would end up pulling some kind of twist that would lead to An-chan having his sentence increased, but this episode blew that theory out of the water: Psycho-guard is determined to kill the guy. Any longer there, and he would not have survived. The next few episodes are going to get this guy out of prison, I’m sure of it.

This is really going to lead to interesting character-development as soon as he’s gone, however: psycho guard won’t have his hate anymore. He’s either going to direct this at the six leads, or change completely. The six leads in the meantime will have to survive in prison on their own. The thing however is that even without An-chan, they’re a close-knit group now. Especially Heitai, this guy could become very much like the next An-chan: he’s mature, level headed.

But yeah, this show was already heavy, but heck. They actually killed someone here, with someone else about to die. Psycho guard is really getting more and more extreme with every episode, only fueled on by Pedo Doctor.
Rating: * (Good)

Looking at this series, I can really tell how good the manga must be. A bit more subtlety, and this really is an excellent look into the depths of corruption inside prisons. If it were so easy for one person (in this case the friendly guard), there would not have been a problem at all, however this episode showed that it’s really impossible for him to stand up to his superiors.

It’s way overdone, but heck, I’m really warming up to the themes of friendship here, and the bond between the lead characters. This isn’t just one-sided, in which An-chan protects the six ones around him because of the suicide of his former friend in prison. You can also see that everyone tries to return his favour, and help him out to defy psycho guard.

This episode also kept hinting at the practices of that really creepy doctor. I tried to look at some statistics about prison rape, and got quite scared of what I found. In 2007, there were already 70000 prisoners raped. Just think of how worse it would have been in a world recovering from the biggest war it had ever run into. I find it really hard to determine whether that creepy doctor is portrayed accurately or not.

Psycho guard is a bit too much though. Even though I have no idea how the minds of these corrupt officials work, he still feels like a caricature: for 24/7, it feels like he’s busy trying to make An-chan’s life miserable. Now there are grudges, and there’s hate so ridiculous that it just stops being believable.
Rating: * (Good)

Holy crap. I’m not often disturbed by gore in anime, but there are a certain number of exceptions (from madhouse series, of course). This episode was such an exception: what an amount of detail they put into that broken hand.

Normally I really don’t like it when a show pulls a Murphy. Not enough drama? Let’s throw in some punks! Let’s nearly kill someone! Let Easter and Christmas take place on the same day! But seriously, this show does it with such force. It’s so incredibly determined to show a worst-case scenario. As much as I hate the extreme cheesyness of this series, I’m still glued to the screen from start to finish.

Here is a tip for this series however: during the lighter parts, stop playing that ridiculously cheesy music. I really feel that the first half of this episode would have been a ton better if just no soundtrack was played at all. It’s a very simple choice the director could have made. I like series that have a lot of emphasis on music, but these shows should know when to use it with subtlety. It doesn’t really work to play sad music every time. If the music is good enough, then okay. It can be awesome to play really outrageous music during just a simple and random conversation. But not this kind of cheesy stuff.

Psycho guard’s absence in the first half did show that he’s just a special case. Most guards actually can be normal people. It’s just that this is one ridiculous nutcase that gets to run free. The question is of course his portrayal: insanity is often a very tricky thing to portray in anime. It’s just so easy to go over the top with it. The same as the punks that were introduced in the second half. I admit that I know very little of how punks like them used to behave in Japan in 1955. They were just kids during the war, their role models probably ended up to be criminals. Can it really go so far, though?

Then there are the idiots. Mario really took the cake in this episode, which really surprised me. In a way though, I can really see a teenager do that. It’s stupid and annoying, but at the same time I can see how he wants to be kind-hearted, but really fails to think of the consequences of his actions. The thing with these things is obviously balance again. Stupid teenagers is one thing, but they’re not that much of a moron. Compared to just about everything that this show does over the top, Mario’s actions actually feel pretty believable.

Overall though, out of all the brilliant directors that are stationed at Madhouse, it’s a shame that Hiroshi Koujima got allocated to this series. I haven’t seen the other series he directed, but the stories I heard about them all reeked of mediocrity. Rainbow is set to be his best work, but that’s only because the rest of the staff is so excellent. The manga won a bunch of awards (and I can really understand why), and Hideo Takayashiki has more than enough experience to plan out the series correctly. Sure, he may have screwed up at Kaiji, but most of his works were really excellent: Ride Back, Maison Ikkoku, Souten Kouro, One Outs, Akagi, and then there’s the script of the Hi no Tori Movies, Oniisama E, Master Keaton. And it really shows: for all that it’s worth, there really has been nothing wrong with the pacing so far. This episode was yet again well paced, combining both the light and the dark moments with each other. It’s just a shame that the director has no idea what the word “subtle” means.
Rating: * (Good)

Watching this series is seriously making me think again about what makes a good anime. I mean, especially now that I dropped Hakuouki, this series features the worst acting out of all the shows that I’m blogging at the moment. It’s way over the top, way too early, and full of cheese. And yet, I just can’t deny that out of every show that premiered this season, it’s actually the most intense to watch by far.

With these kinds of shows that have very obvious major flaws, it’s always a matter of trade-offs: how much you’ll enjoy these kinds of series depends on how much of the flaws you can stand, and the way in which the series in question actually makes up for it. It’s very similar to series as Shangri-La. It’s obvious that this series is no Sarai-ya Goyou or Yojou-han, but still. Out of all the series that feature bad or sub-par acting this season, this show makes up for it the most. The key to this series’ success in the long term is that it needs to continue to keep the balls in the air. As soon as the show starts dragging, my suspense of disbelief will break and it’ll turn into just another dull series.

This episode however, continued episode 2’s pacing and delivered yet again one heck of an atmosphere. Baremoto’s entrance in the sea of fire was cheesy, but despite that it had something really cool about him. This episode was all about teamwork, and the manly bonds between the group of lead characters.

Because seriously, despite the fact that this just isn’t Madhouse’s best staff at work, you can really see the strength of the manga author shine through. One by one, the characters are shedding their stereotypes. Mario at first was portrayed as your typical punk. Yet, the previous episode showed that he’s just a softie. Baremoto, at first introduced as your typical bookworm instead also has shed his stereotypical skin in this episode. I also wonder how Psycho Guard was in the manga: how much of that ridiculously overblown scumbag was present in the manga, and how much of it did the anime creators just make up to increase the tension?
Rating: ** (Excellent)

Like Senkou no Night Raid, Rainbow is a bit of a strange series. If the creators played it realistically, it definitely would have been the best show of the season. The execution that the creators went with however, does hit hard. As opposed to most series, which often take their time introducing the characters, Rainbow plays it heavy, right from the first moment. This episode goes to huge lengths in stirring up some drama, trapping some of the cast members inside a burning prison while Nomoto gets stirred up by psycho guard in order to turn against them.

Still though, I believe that setting the psycho guard aside, all these things could have happened: the arson was set up because Nomoto quickly stashed away a burning cigarette. And even the psycho guard becomes a bit less stereotypical in this episode when it turns out that he just hates Sakuragi. This guy is obviously way over the top, but he does illustrate the problem of corrupt prison guards. What I also liked was that this episode did show that there were other normal guards around, but even they seem to either ignore or don’t know about psycho guard’s issues.

This show obviously is extreme, but I’m interested to what kind of character-development it’s going to lead. I mean, the OP keeps hinting that it’s going to keep animating the manga until we reach the part in which the kids grow up (and who knows how much more).
Rating: * (Good)

Wow. Okay, like I said in my Senkou no Night Raid entry: I might just drop it when Rainbow’s second episode turns out to be really good. It did.

Seriously, the first episode was full of overacting, but this episode actually made me tear up a bit. I’m not sure whether I’m going to drop Night Raid or Angel Beats in favour of it, though. It’s not like these two are the worst, but I’m getting rather worried about their short length of only 13 episodes.

But seriously: the reason why I didn’t like the first episode was because it really tried way too hard. It was all sentimental without us knowing anything about them, and without any build-up whatsoever. The acting wasn’t that good anyway. The lack of build-up was probably its biggest flaw. And here the second episode comes and wastes no time in building up, exploring who these kids really are. Seriously, talk about improvement!

My guess is that the creators wanted to rush through the introductions, so that they could start with the good parts of the manga as fast as possible instead of having four episodes of these introductions. It’s not my favoured approach, but damn, this episode sure made up for it. Joe gets to be the first one to be put under the loop, surprisingly. He first struck me as a bit of a weird kid, but damn. Having been continuously raped in his childhood, about to lose his sister to another pedophile. This is heavy stuff, and I guess that the setting of this series really allows for the creators to write about the darkest parts of society.

The old hag may have overreacted a bit, but still. That part in which Joe escaped the prison, only to be recaptured when he tries to look for her was rather hard to watch. I’m not exactly sure why she decided to react so coldly, but it probably was because she knew he’d be punished severely if he were to try and escape again.

I actually have no idea for how long this series will continue (I of course hope as long as possible), but it’s mostly going to have find its balance between subtlety and overacting, while still capturing the horrors that these kids went through. But if all of their stories are going to be as good as with Joe, then there’s a ton of potential here. And really: what I’m hoping for the most is that the creators are smart enough to actually let this continue up to the end of the manga, in which we can see the characters grow up. I know the manga is really really long, but animating it until the end would really be awesome.

The animation however is nowhere near Madhouse’s best. There are a ton of still frames and speed-lines, and you can really see that Madhouse’s best staff are currently too busy with either Yojou-han and the Marvel-series. But still, that old hag looked really creepy.
Rating: ** (Excellent)