This Week in Anime

Great Pretender is a Devious Joyride

Steve
Nicky, for this introduction, I really wanted to create the textual equivalent of Freddie Mercury in a shiny white suit jumping through a giant curtain that reads “THE GREAT PRETENDER.” However, despite today's subject, this is definitely one case where no reproduction can top the real thing. So here we go!

Oh I have a pretty good hunch he'd be fine with it.

It's one hell of an auspicious production! And actually, before we start digging into the show proper, I just wanna say—as someone who has learned to approach the phrase “Netflix Original Anime” with equal parts fear and trepidation—this is a home run. Whether you value my taste in anime (which is questionable) or my expertise in crappy Netflix shows (which, thanks to TWIA, is unimpeachable), please heed these words and check Great Pretender out. There are some delicious twists and turns in here that I would not want to ruin for you without prefacing the column like this. And if you're still on the fence, please let me reiterate: its ED contains a Freddie Mercury song and singing cartoon cats.

It also helps that the subject of the show is near and dear to my twisted heart. For whatever reason, I've always loved stories about con artists, whether real or fictional. I just think they're neat. And despite the clown car full of them that is our country's current governing body, I was pleased to discover I can still love these smug bastards in the right context.

The other immediately viewer-friendly thing about Great Pretender is its structure. This first season is divided into three story arcs of about equal, movie-equivalent length, and this naturally lends itself to Netflix's binge model. I watched the whole thing over the weekend in just three sittings—one for each arc. It was a breeze!

It also does one of the coolest things I've seen a dub do, which is start out as a sub! The first ~10 minutes are still in Japanese even in the English track, after which it transitions into all-English (or all Japanese in the original). It's treated like a fun gag, which it kinda is, but it's also a cool way to reflect the multiculturalism and country-hopping nature of the story.

And the first arc in general is a super fun time that introduces our main cast via a constantly escalating series of cons. What starts out as a simple wallet swap spirals into a showdown at a secret Hollywood drug superlab, with our protagonist Makoto suffering all the way. It's delightful.

"A bit" is putting it lightly considering he goes from posing as a water inspector to posing as Japan's most infamous opioid expert. That's what makes him a good "hero" to follow tho! He straddles the line between devoting his life to the grift and wishing for something more along the straight and narrow, but ethical boundaries can be tough to weave when you've got a hot French dude hitting on you and telling you to do Crimes.

Yes, Great Pretender can get pretty darn gay when it wants to.

Yeah Great Pretender really thrives on the strength of its characters. Especially Abbie.

The show has a very high quotient of birds being flipped, and Abbie serves about 80% of those.

And that's the angle each arc takes: Laurent's crew may be made up of a bunch of notorious swindlers, but their targets are always cartoonishly evil robber-barons almost begging to get their bloated fortunes swiped right under their noses.

You'd almost be tempted to call these scammers noble, like a modern-day Robin Hood and his Merry Men, if not for the fact that they definitely keep the money to themselves lol.

I'm just saying: Cynthia owns her own island. You don't get island money by giving it all away. But they certainly DO commit to their scams, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars of investment. They plan on earning it all back with interest, of course, but the ridiculous lengths they go to land their mark make the show that much more exciting to watch. I'm also very much NOT going to complain about a grift that involves the creation of an entire underground female boxing ring.

Thank you for the beef, Great Pretender.

Oh yeah, if you ever wanted to hear the phrase "Double-Double" uttered in an anime, Great Pretender has got you covered.

The writer, Ryota Kosawa, hasn't worked on very much anime, but whoever they are, they absolutely understand America.

Editor's Note: Kosawa is a super-famous Japanese live-action movie scriptwriter

You got that right. They make up a whole charcuterie board of Shitty Dudes who act like they have the world dangling on their little finger.


In a sense, they're very easy, safe targets for a story that steers clear of ethical gnarliness. But on the other hand, it's very satisfying to watch them squirm.

Great Pretender's writing is also savvy enough to know that schadenfreude alone cannot sustain a show, so each story arc also focuses on one of the main 4 characters. By means of the current grift, we explore their backstories and motivations for becoming a con artist, filling in the rougher edges of the ensemble cast.

Honestly one of my favorite aspects of the show is the compassion it holds for people who end up on the wrong side of the law because of the circumstances they're born into, like Salazar here.

It also goes into this with Makoto's background, where both his father's awful crime and his own unwitting participation in a scam company make him pretty much unemployable. It highlights how the justice system and society at large still care very little for the idea of restorative justice.

Really the only criminals Great Pretender holds absolute contempt for are the millionaires and billionaires who hoard their wealth and treat people like disposable garbage. And that's one hell of a resonant message to have in 2020, lol.

Yeahhhh, the series is obviously inspired by Hollywood productions, for good and bad. And one very bad part is that it does like to tie a neat bow on everything, even when it's not deserved. Like, I know what they're going for with Abbie's backstory and putting her on the road to forgiveness, but AT BEST that's the kind of thing you have to earn by putting in the time necessary to make the emotional beats work. You can't just make this the B-plot.

And Cynthia's backstory in the third arc thankfully works much better. It's more gracefully integrated into the plot, it doesn't have to do with war crimes, and it gave me plenty of excuses to fawn over how beautiful her hair looks.

Turns out Cynthia's big secret is that, like so many of my friends, she's weak for twitchy English guys with messy hair and sharp features.

But yes, the arc overall lambasts the high-rolling world of fine art auctioneers and its thin veneer of respectability—basically by making this guy the biggest twat in existence.

Yet because he's the one who appraises the art, he's the one who dictates its monetary—and thus overall—value. Which we quickly learn is all fake.

Despite being the shortest one, I think it's my favorite arc, because its themes hew so closely to the fundamental ones about con artists. What is authenticity? What does it mean to create something? What does it mean to imitate something? Is art, by necessity, deceit? Is deceit therefore art? I think these questions are, in part, why I still find myself fascinated with stories about cons. It also echoes one of my favorite moments in the Monogatari series.

Shout out to my main man and con artist extraordinaire Kaiki Deishu.

My dude's a sentient trollface.jpg, so I'm a little apprehensive about the rest of the show devoting itself to unraveling his mystery. Nonetheless, Great Pretender has certainly earned more than enough goodwill out of me, so I'm eager to see what feelings it can con out of me with its final emotional grift.

Moreover, I'm just eager to see more of the show because it's consistently, ridiculously gorgeous. Its backgrounds and scene composition have some of the most liberating application of color that I've seen in a show since JoJo's Part 4, or some episodes of Flip Flappers. A buffet for the eyes.

The production through and through is polished as hell. Director Hiro Kaburagi must have taken what he learned from 91 Days and turned it into a brighter, more exciting, and all around better emulation of Hollywood thrillers by way of anime. It's easy to see why Netflix picked this one up, and it's an easier recommendation, even for normies who don't watch anime. Catch this one if you can!

Good night, and may we all channel the raw power of drunk Cynthia as we wait for the finale.