![]() ![]() The Taisho Era was the golden age of the Japanese Empire - coming out of World War I on the winning side with massive territorial gains and ushering the decade of prosperity, progress, modernization, and social change. It’s Taishou Era (the early 1920s) Japan - no doubt the consequence of Kimetsu no Yaiba’s success, that nonetheless has more significance than just being a marketing gimmick. Here, I ought to elaborate on the show’s setting and how it contributes to the tone and the narrative. The second half ditches the episodic structure and the theater homages in favor of a single main plotline, but what it loses in aesthetics gets compensated twofold in weight of its dramatic writing - Episode 6 is a particularly profound highlight. So the wide shots don’t just exist for the sake of pretty pictures - they are contributing to the show’s extravagant theater-like atmosphere and to its exclusively visual storytelling, the much-vaunted “show, don’t tell” principle, which many like to use as a buzzword but few appreciate when it’s seriously put to practice, as lack of spoonfeeding makes the story cryptic and genuinely hard to follow (I had to watch the first episode twice to fully understand what transpired there - and I saw many not only completely miss the ENTIRE story of that episode but also miss even the fact that they’re missing something - but more on that later).Īlso, it’s about vampires, which I hope is something I don’t have to explain because any self-respecting vampire fiction fan should understand that vampires means pathos and pathos means vampires.ĭo note that the show has two distinct “phases”, and so far I’ve been talking about its first half. And then the storylines of the early episodes mimic the very same classics in a deliberate, ostentatious manner. The cast members can’t walk three steps without quoting some classical drama (the fact that several of them are actual thespians helps). The show is adapted from a stage play, and it wears that origin on its sleeve. It wouldn’t be weird to think you’re watching Quentin Tarantino’s work, so skillful the presentation on the pure craftsmanship level is.Īnd it’s not like I’m implying this is a case of style over substance - in Mars Red style IS substance. Every other scene of Mars Red is an absolute masterpiece of shot composition, properly utilizing the wide aspect ratio for grand panoramic views and pensive camera Not like a TV anime is shot on 70 mm film and meant to be projected on cinema screens.” Boy, am I happy to be wrong on this one. If someone told me before I have seen Mars Red that it’s a TV anime entirely drawn in cinemascope size (2.35:1), my first thought would’ve been, “Well, that’s pointlessly pretentious. This review contains an optional spoiler section at the end.
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