Winter 2022 First Impressions – Tokyo 24th Ward

Streaming: Funimation and Crunchyroll

Episodes: 12

Source: Original

Episode Summary: Note: episode 1 is double-length.

Tokyo’s Far Eastern Special Administrative Region, also known as ward 24 was built on reclaimed land in Tokyo Bay, and has been seen in the past as a lawless region. Now on the cusp of being officially acknowledged, political tensions are high. One year previous, three childhood friends born in the 24th Ward are witness to a fire at a school, and afterwards go their separate ways until they’re reunited at a memorial service. All three are navigating life differently; Ran dabbles in guerilla protest art and hacking, while Kouki remains a rule-follower who everyone expects to go into politics like his father. But Shuuta has struggled in the year since the incident, wondering if the heroic goals he once had were just childish fantasies.

The three keep meeting by chance around town, and as they’re settling down to lunch all of them receive a mysterious phone call from someone who sounds like their late friend Asumi, who was lost in the tragic fire. The voice warns them of an impending accident in which their friend Mari will get stuck on the train tracks. Their choices are to reroute the train, causing it to derail and likely killing the 150 people onboard, or to let it continue on its current path, thus killing Mari. Asked to make the choice yet unsatisfied with both outcomes, the three young men use their know-how and physical prowess to achieve a solution that saves everyone. But who was the voice on the phone? And can it truly see into the future?

Impressions: A couple of evenings ago, my husband and I sat down to watch the highly-praised opinion piece on cryptocurrencies and NFTs written and presented by Dan Olson of the YouTube channel “Folding Ideas.” In the video essay, Olson describes the origins of cryptocurrency and the issues surrounding its generation and the people who hold and use it. It’s a fascinating piece with a lot of very interesting information – and it’s also two hours and eighteen minutes long. I saw someone joking on Twitter a while back that they have trouble sitting down to watch a half-hour episode of a TV series, but for whatever reason have zero issues settling into a multi-hour video essay on YouTube. The meat of the joke, I think, is the question of what’s different between these two things that makes one difficult and the other simple, and I can think of a few different things. One piece of media is a smaller part of a narrative whole, requiring context and continuity awareness, while the other is essentially self-contained. One requires paying more active attention than the other. They definitely feel “different” from one-another.

I’m sure each person has their own reasons for feeling whatever way that they do about what they watch. For me personally, it’s often a matter of both initial interest in what’s being portrayed, as well as my perception of the necessity of taking up that amount of my time (when I have a lot of things I could be doing – which isn’t to say that I’d actually be doing them). I don’t mind committing time to something that I think is worthwhile, but convincing me that something is worthwhile is often an uphill battle, especially when my ADHD brain craves novelty on a constant basis.

Tokyo 24th Ward is one of many recent series (there seems to be at least one per season) that starts off with a double-length episode. I won’t say that this tactic is never successful, but I think the only time in recent memory that I’ve found the practice to be worthwhile was with Astra: Lost in Space, because there’s just… a lot of things to set up during those first moments of the story. In most other cases, the practice often feels mostly self-indulgent; at its worst, it feels like a waste of time.

The first half of this episode meanders in such a way that I feel much of it could have been cut or relocated to a later episode. Many (many!) things occur but not all of them are immediately pertinent, and this makes the entire episode feel very confusing until its later minutes. We’re tossed a lot of information in a very casual way – the fire disaster, the discordant relationship between the three leads, the political situation of this incarnation of Japan, the “Minority Report” policing situation, the potential return of a dead friend – that it becomes difficult to identify what bits and pieces are worth focusing on immediately and which should be filed-away for later. It takes the action scene in the final 7 minutes or so to snap things back into focus, and by that point I wondered if it may have been too late. I made several attempts to watch this episode, and ultimately I feel like the payout for an hour of my time (or more, by the time I went back and re-watched what I needed to) wasn’t proportional.

This seems like a well-made production in other ways (though, once again, I must really question Cloverworks’ ability to deal with this volume of anime series this season) and I had a lot of fun once people started leaping up buildings and jumping off of trains, but I have a lot of nagging questions – and not the type that I’d say are likely to fuel an urge to watch more of the series.

Pros: Visually, this is a really beautiful episode. The character designs are fun and distinct; even though I still had to look up the characters’ names after watching the episode, visually it was easy to tell them apart.

The animation in the climactic moments of the episode is great, too. It’s difficult not to feel at least a little rush when a character takes a flying leap off the front of a moving train, especially when it’s animated dynamically.

Cons: This episode, and by extension the series, bites off a lot when it comes to potentially depicting social issues, and I’m not confident that it has the chops to follow through with a proper examination of them. Like I mentioned above, one of the background elements that’s talked about fairly quickly and without a ton of detail is the fact that, apparently, there are ways for the authorities to predict crimes before they happen. There’s a bit of grumbling over the fact that, in spite of knowing about them, the police aren’t allowed to make any arrests until a crime or accident occurs (though they’re often in a nearby position to respond because of it). I’m… not necessarily against an anime series trying to tackle society’s “big” questions, and in fact I think speculative fiction in general can be a good way to think through all sorts of social and political issues that may become eventualities. However, the tone of this episode doesn’t seem to mesh well with the serious nature of the questions being posed.

There are also a few pretty basic logical inconsistencies that I’m wondering about. For example, Ran’s extracurricular art and hacking activities seem very against-the-law, especially in the low-key authoritarian situation the characters are working within. Yet he makes no secret of it – in fact, what he’s doing seems so extremely out in the open that the other characters are all aware of it. What’s the potential punishment for this kind of thing, I wonder? Whatever it is, he operates as though completely undeterred, and the two other protagonists seem mostly unmoved, so it’s difficult to put much weight on it.

Finally, I rolled my eyes at the fact that the big climax of the episode is literally based on the trolley problem, one of the more basic (and endlessly-memed) philosophical questions of our time. It just reads as very try-hard.

Content Warnings: A character dies from their wounds after being crushed beneath rubble in a burning building. PTSD. Political authoritarianism. Humans and a dog threatened with bodily harm. A near-accident as the result of workers being forced into a “crunch” situation.

Would I Watch More? – Despite the criticisms I might have right now about the thematic execution, I’m also kind of curious about this series. I might put this at a “maybe” for right now.