Shelf Life

A Glass Half Fullmetal

When the unassuming Makoto Naegi is chosen via lottery to attend the prestigious Hope's Peak Academy, it seems too good to be true. Hope's Peak is filled with high schoolers of only the highest caliber, with each student being the ultimate specimen of his or her chosen field. His first day shows that everything at Hope's Peak Academy Academy is not what it seems, however, as he and fourteen other students wake up in class to find the windows barred shut, with security cameras and machine gun turrets watching their every move.

Things get even worse, and even stranger, when Makoto and company discover that the headmaster of Hope's Peak is a psychotic talking teddy bear named Monokuma. The sadistic stuffed animal gives them an ultimatum: spend the rest of your lives trapped in the academy, or kill your fellow classmates and evade their prosecution to “graduate” into freedom. With the body count rising every day, can Makoto find a way to save his newfound friends from each other and escape their life of despair?

Full disclosure on this one: The visual novel/murder mystery Danganronpa and its sequel are two of my favorite Playstation Vita games. Having poured countless hours into the unabridged adventures of the students of Hope's Peak Academy, I went into watching Danganronpa The Animation from the perspective of a fan of the source material. This led to a decidedly strange and ultimately underwhelming viewing experience.

Everything gets off to a promising enough start. The weirdness of its world and the bizarre charm of its characters and story are what made the game click, after all, and you'll find those things here in the anime. The game's infectious soundtrack and enjoyably off-center art style also make the transition to animation more or less completely intact. While most of the English dub is taken up by different actors than from the game, Bryce Papenbrook returns to voice Makoto, and the rest of the actors do a fine job translating the characters' simultaneously silly and serious natures. With all these aspects of the game surviving the transition from game to screen, why would I find the anime so lacking? You see, it turns out that Danganronpa The Animation's faithfulness to Danganronpa the game is both its biggest strength and the source of its undoing.

In a word, the problem comes down to pacing. Danganronpa has thirteen half-hour episodes to tell its story, which is much less time than the game had to work with. So while Danganronpa The Animation manages to make it through the most important bits of the plot, in doing so it sacrifices of much of the characterization and narrative development that made the story so special in the first place. Not only that, but the rushed pacing deflates almost all of the tension and mystery from the murders and subsequent trials that comprise so much of its runtime.

When one of the students is murdered in the game, Makoto takes a lot of time investigating clues, interrogating witnesses, and piecing together the facts of the crime. When class trials begin and everyone is lobbing accusations and theories at one another, it is up to Makoto (and the player) to figure out the truth hiding behind the misdirection and deceit. This takes a lot of time to set up, and time is one thing Danganronpa The Animation is lacking. The investigation and trials of this show happen so quickly that the solutions to the mystery are revealed before the viewer has time to properly digest the facts of the case. The most fun part of watching a whodunit type of story, at least for me, is taking part in the solving of the case, making theories and seeing how they stack up to what unfolds. Danganronpa is so concerned with getting through the wealth of material it has to cover that it completely disregards any such viewer participation. It is like reading the Cliff Notes for a Sherlock Holmes story: Sure, you get the gist of what went down, but where's the fun in it?

It may seem unfair for me to compare the show to the game as much as I am, but my knowledge of the game is probably what got me through it in the first place. For every rushed plot development or barely explained twist, I was able to use my background knowledge to fill in the blanks. Characters that seem full and rich to me only seem so because I spent hours of time getting to know backstory details about them that are either glossed over or completely skipped in show. The murder mysteries themselves only made sense to me because I spent so much time working through them in the source material; if I hadn't practically memorized facts and clues about the proceedings, many of the trials might have seemed straight up nonsensical. For Danganronpa fans it's easy enough to keep up. For newcomers, it may seem closer to pure gibberish.

Funimation's Blu-ray/DVD combo release of Danganronpa The Animation is in keeping with the quality of their recent releases: A pretty good dub coupled with a quality audio/visual setup. The extras are the usual opening and ending clips, with a commentary available from the English dub crew on Episode 1. The Blu-ray set also features an extended Director's Cut of the final 13th episode, with about ten extra minutes of footage.

Perhaps if every episode had that little bit of extra time to flesh out its bare bones, the series would be easier to recommend. As it stands, I know that much of what I liked of Danganronpa The Animation came from what I knew the story could be, and not what was actually presented on screen. If you haven't played the game, Danganronpa The Animation might be a fun enough experience as long as you don't particularly care about the taking part in the “mystery” aspect of mystery shows. At the end of the day, though, the show acts as a purely functional crash course in Danganronpa lore, one that is missing a lot of the intrigue and character that made Danganronpa so popular in the first place. Make of that what you will.
-James[TOP]