The Reflection Review – 32/100

The superhero genre has been undergoing a surge in popularity in recent years. From the Marvel movies in the West to anime series like My Hero Academia in the East, super heroes are everywhere.  As such, for good or ill, it was inevitable that we would get a merging of the two. The Reflection is one such result of this union. The Reflection tries to do a lot, succeeding on some and failing terribly at others. The end result is a an inconsistent mess of seemingly stitched together episodes and story moments.

Lets jump in.

Before hitting any individual points, here is a quick summary of The Reflection. Originally created by Stan Lee and produced by Studio DEEN, The Reflection is a classic Superhero Western. Everything was normal until an event known as the Reflection, where green light and black smoke rained from the sky all across the world. Those hit by either of these, the smoke or the light, either died or were given super powers. The story takes place 3 years after this event, the survivors now known as Reflected. Tensions are high across the world as normal people learn to deal with their super powered neighbors. Meanwhile, a mysterious figure known as Wraith has a plan to change the world. Taking place in North America, join X-On, Eleanor and I-Guy as they attempt to uncover and foil Wraiths plan.

Animation/Art

The first, and most striking, thing we need to talk about is the art style of The Reflection. Reminiscent of Western comic’s, The Reflection focuses bright, contrasting colors, with simple details. Its actually very striking compared to most modern anime and looks good in stills. Numerous effects, such as fire or lightning, actually dont have black outlines, giving them an interesting look and feel. However problems start to appear once everything starts moving.

The Reflection has very little consistency in regards to its animation. In the first few episodes, everything is slow, so much so that you can count the frames in real time at places. However later on there are instances of great animation, such as the fire effects in the final episode or I-Guys hand to hand combat near the end. Its clear they saved time for what they thought was most important. This is a shame, as when the animation is good, the art style is presented in full force. The bright colors and simple designs means very little loss of detail in messy combat scenes. When the animation fails though, the simplistic art makes the lack of frames very noticeable and just comes across as lazy. This inconsistency, combined with poor direction, does little to make a viewer want more.

Direction

Speaking of Direction, The Reflection’s is very poor. Awkward stills, shots that linger longer than they should, weird camera angles. Its all over the place. There are a few ambitious shots, such as episode one where the camera pans around the city as I-Guy starts his show. Or the cut to black/grey silhouettes during an emotional punch. However these were to few and far between, and some of them the team simply didn’t have the skill to pull off.

All in all this is one of the more disappointing aspects of The Reflection

Setting

The setting itself is simple in concept, yet wide in its scope. The world hinges on one single event, the Reflection, and lets everything else branch out from there. Naturally once people gain powers, there will be negative feelings towards them. Naturally some will fight back. The government then has to respond. It all cascades, one after the other.

It would be very interesting, if we had not already seen in almost every other of Stan Lee’s work. The delivery system of these powers was different, true, but that didn’t effect the resulting world. This could very easily have been a knock-off X-Men world. Plus, we don’t actually get to learn much about the Reflection event. We get a glimpse of things to come, as this was clearly planned for a second season, but I fear we will never get to see it.

Characters

Next are the characters. A mixed bag this bunch.  Our leads include X-On the mysterious hero, Eleanor the walking plot hook, Lisa the peppy girl in a wheel chair, and I-Guy the only character of any real value. On the villains side we have Wraith the mysterious final villain, Evil Stan Lee, Steel Ruler the emotionally damanged murderer and Flaming Fury, the russian fire ninja. Quite the lineup no? The problem with most of these characters is that we learn very little about them and typically what we do learn only raises more questions that will never get answered. There are only 2 exceptions to this, Steel Ruler and I-Guy.

Both of these characters get full stories. Steel Rulers is short, but enough for us to get in her head. I-Guys slowly unfolds before us, transforming him from arrogant attention seeker to scarred hero seeking revenge. We see his rise, fall and rise again story and it was really the only part of The Reflection I looked forward to. Each time he was on screen, it furthered his character or opened him up abit more. Usually. Nothing is perfect, but I-Guy was simultaneously the best character in this show and was too good for it.

None of this is even mentioning the Idols, whose voice actresses sing the ED. Interspersed throughout the entire series we see little flashes of these Japanese girls lives as they slowly make their way to America on a school trip. They are irrelevant to the plot, we hear their names perhaps once, their powers are introduced in the last episode and none of the characters even meet them until the final conflict. They truly feel added in for no reason beyond needing an Idol group. There are some cute conversation scenes with I-Guy in the last episode, but nothing worth actually keeping them for.

Story

Finally we have the story. Oh boy the story. If there was any one section that, if fixed, would greatly improve The Reflection it would be this one. There will be spoilers in this section, so skip the following paragraph if you want to avoid them. Suffice to say, its not very good.

The whole story of The Reflection hinges on Eleanor’s dead brother, who was brought back to life by the Reflection event, because both light and smoke hit Eleanor at the same time. How this works is never explained, Wraiths origins as either risen dead or split personality type thing is never explained, Wraiths powers are never explained. All we get to see is that Wraith needs Elen to disappear, so he can gain his full powers. With that, he will mind control/absorb the life force of all Reflected affected by the dark smoke. Using this power he plans to open a portal… and summon a dragon… called Darkness? Is this where the Reflection came from? We have no idea because its never explained. We are left to infer all of this, with incomplete information.

Even at the very end they introduce new aspects to the series, in the last 5 minutes, rather than simply let it play out. The Reflection suffers from attempting to pack to many ideas into to small a space. If you enjoy super hero’s, some interesting art and don’t mind character inconsistencies than you may enjoy The Reflection. However if its just interesting Super powers you are looking for, I would recommend My Hero Academia. If its Western Comics style of story you want, check out the late 2000’s Justice League. May look like a children show, but its still one of the best written Super Hero cartoons out there.