Watched an interesting anime last night. GANTZ. The premise would appear to be that dead people are brought to an apartment with a great big black sphere in it. The sphere dispenses instructions and weapons and the dead people are given a chance to improve their karma by ridding the Earth of Aliens. Presumably, if they work out, they will go to a good place when the death process is completed; failure means the death process continues right then and there? Hard to extrapolate where they are going with this, since there are only two 30-minute episodes on the disk and they all just finished dying and are in the process of facing their first alien. Maybe Yu Yu Hakusho with better production values? and more of an SF than magic motif?

The main problem with it (other than only 2 episodes per disk) is that the main protagonist is a whiny teenager who doesn’t understand why the world is always against him, and, he has learned you can’t trust anyone. The POV listens in on the thoughts of most of the characters, so that whining really drags on. But, they don’t listen in on the thoughts of the two secondary protagonists (Thank God) so you get a rather lobsided POV of what is happening.

It is a bit gory. The main and secondary protagonists died after the secondary P went down on the subway tracks to get a drunk who fell onto the tracks back to safety. The Primary P felt shamed by his former friend and went down to help. They got the drunk to safety but an express train came through before they could get out of the track well, so, they were smashed and their heads went flying, torn from their bodies, and then they were suddenly in the apartment. A flashback to the station indicates that their bodies disappeared. (And, of course, the primary is mentally whining that it all the secondary’s fault that this happened. He could have just left the drunk lying on the tracks and everyone would be happy; really wearing after a while.)

The third protagonist shows up naked shortly afterward. Evidently, she had just committed suicide in the tub. The nakedness causes some problems with the others in the apartment. Basically, most of the deaders are not nice people. I think there are about nine deaders in the apartment before the orb starts issuing incoherent instructions.

I will start this one off with a 7/10 rating for interesting storyline ( I am interested to see what happens next) and good production values. The artwork is crisp and edgy. But it is borderline on 6 because of the whining. I don’t know that I will care for these characters. I know some people might think it is a little too gory, with exploding bodies and the like, but it isn’t t over the top.