×
  • remind me tomorrow
  • remind me next week
  • never remind me
Subscribe to the ANN Newsletter • Wake up every Sunday to a curated list of ANN's most interesting posts of the week. read more

Yatterman Night
Episode 3

by Rose Bridges,

One thing I can never get over, every time I sit down to watch Yatterman Night, is its basic premise. It may be part of anime's recent fixation on making "updated," often-revisionist versions of popular 1970s shows, but even then—"the world of Yatterman is now a dystopia where the villains' descendants are oppressed"—sounds much more like someone's grimdark Yatterman fanfiction rather than official material. But in execution, Yatterman Night feels neither like fanfiction nor particularly dark. While it does take a critical look at the world of its source material, it's still infused with a young heroine's youthful optimism and hope. It has fun, memorable, sympathetic characters, and it only keeps adding to them and fleshing them out.

This week, we got to know two more characters, and now we finally know who those two kids running around in the ED are supposed to be. They're Alouette and Galina, the residents of the house Doronbow found for rest and warming up in last week's episode. Alouette is innocent, oblivious, and appears to be blind. Galina has dedicated his life to taking care of his childhood friend. He's less trusting of the Doronbow gang when they first arrive, especially since he finds Voltkatze and Elephantus naked as they're waiting for their clothes to dry. He thinks they're perverts and urges them out, but Alouette insists that they're her "angels." After Galina sees that they make his friend smile, he warms up to them. When the robotic Yatterman soldiers come knocking, he decides not to reveal the Doronbow gang's location—even if he decides it with a coin flip.

After digging into Galina and Alouette's tragic backstory, those earlier hints that the Yatter Kingdom is a dystopia become crystal-clear text. These kids are citizens of the Kingdom, and yet their parents were taken away and killed by the Yatter government. They were shipped off to a factory in the capital city Yatter Metropolis, forced to work until they died. Alouette is blind from trauma, and acts clueless due to her refusal to acknowledge what happened. She believes her "angels" will either bring her parents back or lead her to them. In the end, Alouette ends up being surprisinglyright. After the Yatterman knights figure out the truth and blow up Alouette and Galina's house, the duo join our existing trio on their way to Yatter Metropolis to set things right.

Yatterman Night is excellent at tonal shifts, and episode 3 showcased that perfectly. One of the best moments came right as the Yatter knights were about to obliterate Alouette and Galina's house with both them and Doronbow inside. Right as one of the robots reaches the end of its countdown, it stumbles and looks down, to find Oda (Doronbow's pet pig) peeing on its foot. The show jumps from horrifying dread to potty jokes without a second thought, and it works. Another tonal whiplash came at the very end of the episode, as the Doronbow gang and their new pals soar above in their flying machine, and Leopard practices her wicked laugh. It's a moment of (literally) soaring triumph—until their plane slowly demolishes and they come crashing to the ground. The show can make us cheer, gasp, and laugh at our heroes all at the same time. Yatterman Night's seamless transitions between moods make it work so much better than its grimdark fanfiction premise would suggest. It's not only that it mixes light with the darkness, but that choice also makes its darkness more meaningful. It digs deep into its characters' tragedy and pathos while shifting just enough toward comedy and happiness not to take itself too seriously.

This episode also continues to reward those familiar with the original Yatterman series in little ways and big ones. Galina and Alouette bear more than a passing resemblance to the main Yatterman heroes in the original '70s cartoon, and their first names also sound similar. Combined with the fact that Alouette reminds Leopard of her mother (down to sharing a seiyuu, Shizuka Itou), I bet that Doronbow's two new fellow travelers will grow in importance throughout the story, and possibly be key to the Yatter Kingdom's redemption and a return to its (presumed) former glory.

Yatterman Night continues in excellence, giving viewers everything they could want in an action-adventure series. It has battles and colorful environments aplenty, but also strong character writing, and not just for its leads. I'm eager to see what it will do with Doronbow's enemies and with the origins and structure of the Yatter Kingdom when we get there. Honestly, I readily await whatever this show has up its sleeves, if it keeps being this good.

Rating: A

Yatterman Night is currently streaming on Funimation.

Rose is a musicologist who studies film music. She writes about anime and many other topics on Autostraddle.com, her blog and her Twitter.
.


discuss this in the forum (60 posts) |
bookmark/share with: short url

back to Yatterman Night
Episode Review homepage / archives