This Week in Anime

What Does Vanishing Line Have to Offer GARO Fans and Newbies?

Jacob
SPIT IT OUT MAN

Oh no, Alanis Morissette is EVERYWHERE D:

but at least there's also GARO

Leather dusters? Would anyone like a PILE OF LEATHER DUSTERS?

So how many Garos are you familiar with, Nick? I've seen all the anime entries, but that's it.

Yeah the less said about Crimson Moon the better. But the nice thing about GARO is that every new series is standalone! All you need to know is that there are Makai Knights, who wear ostentatious life-draining metal lion armor. And they fight Horrors, which are demons manifested in human bodies (and sometimes objects or ghosts) through despair or desire for power or other unsavory emotions. And the Knights also get a hand from Makai Alchemists, usually sexy ladies with a buncha magic tricks up their sleeves. Real straightforward!

Yeah GARO has always been filled with a level of violence and sex that recalls an aesthetic closer to the 80s and early 90s in anime than anything modern. But never has that been more true of the franchise than in Vanishing Line, which takes place in pseudo-America and stars a hero literally named Sword who prays to boobs.

Now now, he eats reasonable American-sized portions after a long day of demon-slaying.

You definitely know what you're getting into from the start. (That shot appears within the first two minutes of the first episode.)

WYSIWYG the Animation

The production is heavily driven by the sensibilities of Seong Ho Park, who's done a ton of key animation for other shows in the past (including Garo the Animation), but he hadn't really done any directing until he handled the OP for a little show called Yuri!!! on Ice.

>:[ ...Am I gonna have to rub your nose in that?

Well naturally, everyone attached to that show is riding a rising star right now, so it makes sense that he'd get his own series to direct not long afterward. And Wow what a debut effort. Straight-up, there is very little dialogue in this show and a lot of animation. While previous GARO series used their simple premises to explore more complex questions about the characters or setting, Vanishing Line takes place in a modern world with no explanation needed, stars big broad obvious Hollywood archetypes, and uses this simplicity to just deliver one killer action setpiece after another instead. You can write the whole story of these three episodes down on a napkin in two minutes, but the direction, pacing, and storyboarding of this paper-thin material has been just phenomenal.

And outside of the animation highlights it just has all-around stellar art direction. The color work especially is phenomenal and able to set the mood better than any amount of dialogue or exposition.

Usually even within the early episodes (and oh boy will we see about that fourth one, cuz episode 4 is the most common dipping point ime), a show with a jaw-dropping premiere will need to start holding back, but not Vanishing Line! It's enthralling to watch, but I am concerned that we'll run into problems when the production needs to slow down and we have to rely on the story and characters to carry it cuz uh

Look, Sword is a man of simple tastes.

Yeah to be fair, the cast balances Sword out well. There's a naive orphan girl searching for the same thing as Sword (the mysterious Codename Eldorado), albeit probably for different reasons. So he'll have to deal with a smarmy kid at some point.

And Sword's foil, who is tragically not named Gun, demonstrates how much worse Sword could be if he did his job remorselessly, without trying to protect and console people the way Sword "selfishly" does.

Also apparently their boss ships them, and who am I to argue with the boss?

Gina doesn't dislike Sword, but she does seem to take understandable umbrage with his habit of praying to bosoms.

I mean come on, dude, you're a grown man, what gives?

It's a well-worn archetype, but Gina is enjoyable as a femme fatale who can knock Sword off his flow by doing things her own way and pressuring him to take the fall. Ye Olde Fujiko Gambit.

I mean doing backflips over security lasers in a catsuit and stealing a guy's DNA by tonguing him...I Have Seen These Things Before. But Vanishing Line really is about the experience so far, so I'm willing to tolerate all those basic cliches as long as they continue to be executed in a tremendously entertaining fashion. I guess the real question is how do you think this compares to Garo the Animation? Obviously Crimson Moon is out of the running wwwww

That's fair! Right now I'm leaning more toward Garo the Animation because its aesthetic was so cohesive and immersive up front. When you have a story about demons tempting humanity, taking it straight to the muck and misery of the middle ages evokes a very specific feeling that works really well before you even get to know the cast better. Right now, Vanishing Line's production is extremely impressive, but its aesthetic and atmosphere are pretty rote. So even if the story remains basic, I guess I'd like to see Vanishing Line acquire a more specific flavor that makes the whole demon-hunting-in-a-modern-world thing stand out as more memorable.

And no, I don't just mean putting demons inside computers.

The Chest Rug is mightier than the Sword.