Sorry for the wait, seems we've had a crazy couple of days. But on to the article. For some reason communing with the dead has always had a certain amount of appeal to humanity, especially in cultures where spirits are believed to live in practically everything. Even better, if there are ways to exploit them. However, there aren't nearly as many shows where the main way to exploit such spirits is to allow them to possess you. That is the appraoch taken by this show. Even so, it is very much a shonen series and therefore we are beset by the obligatory fights and epic hair. After all, what else can you do with spirits except use them to decide your petty battles? You'll meet Yoh Asakura, a young and lazy shaman, as he and his group of friends strive to achieve the most powerful possession... ahem, I mean position, in all of Shamanhood. So strap on that feather-bedecked pager and prep you're primary spirit partner, today,we're taking a look at the first part of Shaman King.
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| The cast just saw a Bruce Lee... err... Li Pailong movie. ^^ |
The story starts with Manta, a 13-year-old middle school student (who might be a dwarf), from whose viewpoint much of the story takes place, encounters the protagonist, Yoh Asakura in a graveyard. He soon learns that Yoh is a new kid at school, and not only is he a shaman, a special person who control spirits, but that he wants to become the shaman king, a sort of super shaman with the ability to merge with "the great spirit" whether this is god or something else, it's kind of hard to say since we're definitely approaching this whole situation from a distinctly non-judeo-christian viewpoint. After Yoh forms a bond with one of the spirits in the graveyard, a samurai named Amidamaru, and fights it out with other rivals, shaman and
muggle alike, they meet up with his fiance (a title that's a little creepy since their only 13) Anna, who plans to train him for the Shaman Fight in Tokyo. (Yes, that's what they call it?) Why does he want to be Shaman King? Because he wants an easy life... wha...? When did this become
Irresponsible Captain Tylor? Anna is a bit stricter though, and she won't let up on him in terms of training because she wants Yoh to become the Shaman king so that she can be the Shaman Queen.
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I think she's a little creepy when she smiles.
Even so, did she really have to be promised to Yoh to be
the Shaman Queen? There are girls in the fight,
why couldn't she go after the King title herself? |
Seeing as the setting for the majority of the series is contemporary Tokyo with a couple of twists, there really isn't much to say about the world itself, except that in this universe, shamanism works, and everybody looks like they ran afoul of a maniacal hair dresser (which in a shonen series is perfectly normal). As such, I'm going to jump right to the main characters.The anime starts rather unceremoniously with Manta strolling into the graveyard and finding Yoh, and I don't know if that was the best way to handle it it (probably because that episode runs us through the age-old cliche of having the main character start by standing up to the neighborhood toughs, one of which eventually has a huge change of heart and becomes a supporting character). Yoh's motivations for why he does stuff doesn't necessarily make sense in my opinion. I could see why his family would want to push him to try to be the shaman king, and in a show where they are seriously pushing the "be yourself" motif, that could be played with in more interesting ways, but if not for Anna, he'd be sitting around doing nothing, and loving it. I don't see how becoming the Shaman King is conducive to having a lazy life, but apparently he does want it, because somehow, he's still trying to do it. Manta, on the other hand, being a brainy kid who likes to learn about stuff, is an okay character. Neither of these are outright horribly done, and they did grow on me a little bit once we got out of the early phase and into a little more plot related stuff but even so I still have yet to be totally impressed with them.
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Hmm... who would have thought being possessed
could be an asset? On the other hand, I can only wonder how many
of the crazy fundamentalists cried foul when this crossed the pond. |
The supporting characters are minimal in terms of importance, there's Anna, who I mentioned previously, and eventually Ryu of the wooden sword (from the gang mentioned earlier, who has a hairdo to rival Inuyama from
Air Gear). I pretty much covered Anna above, aside from the fact that she's also a spirit medium who is notorious for her deadpan personality and death glares that might be laser guided. She seems to be Yoh's main driving force since he seems to prefer to goof off. Ryu on the other hand, seems to have a problem with multiple personalities. He starts the show off as a cruel tough who beats up younger kids because they wander onto his territory, as well as the first real enemy that Yoh must face, along with Amidamaru, who I'll talk about next. But later he comes back completely reformed and wanting to become a shaman himself, just because. It's kind of abrupt. After the change, he does act a little more stable though, which I guess was kind of helpful due to the crazier antagonists that come along, but the whole illumination by defeat thing is a bit over used in the series, as we'll see with the antagonists. Yoh also gets, Amidamaru, a ghost that he forms a special bond with to make him into the spirit he regularly takes into himself to fight people, who is a samurai with a notorious reputation but is actually something of a sweetie, but he's little more than a friendly ghost with epic hair and armor. (It is kinda cool how he looks out for Yoh though, and their dynamic is kind of cute).
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| That's a cow lick that could hurt someone. |
In terms of antagonists, the show takes the villain of the week approach, like B'tX, for the most part. There is guaranteed to be at least one fight per episode through most of the series. However, there are a couple of antagonists that are of note. First off, there is Tao Ren and his sister Tao Jun. These two Chinese siblings are both shamans, though Ren fights more like Yoh does, and acts as his darker counterpart through this part of the series while Jun opts for a creepier way to use her spirits, putting them in zombies. Ren, as the stereotypical rival to Yoh, treats his spirit as a tool at first and looks like he's either a conehead pretending to have hair or has the most epic cow lick ever. He also gets an arbitrary change of heart after losing to Yoh, which I think will make him an ally later in the show. Jun on the other hand is where the antagonists start to get a little darker. Her story is that her partner spirit is the ghost of martial arts master, and Bruce Lee
expy, Li Pailong, whose body disappeared after he died under mysterious circumstance. It turns out that she's been keeping him as a zombie against his will after he was given to her by her father. I was actually found that explanation to be kinda cool in a dark and creepy sort of way, as the episode followed Yoh's attempt to free Pailong from Jun's control and he turned on her, but then decided to stick with her as a zombie because he had nothing else to do. I dunno, I think I still woulda been kinda mad that someone had the nerve to do that to me. I mean think about it, someone walks in, kills you before you were able to develop your super Kung Fu, and then years later, you come to learn your body was stolen and you've been a zombie under the control of your killers daughter for the last decade or so? That's gonna cause some issues man! There's also another much darker antagonist, who unfortunately has only shown up once so far, whom we'll talk about below.
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Manta to Silva: Hey dude, thanks for not being there to
save me even though you knew Faust was a sociopath,
you jerk. |
So far I haven't seen anything that I know for sure to be filler, as especially once Anna shows up, the show stays pretty firmly on track. Which is kind of important since the point of the show seems pretty focused. There was one combat that I did particularly like on the one hand for the dark tones it had, but at the same time it made me want to wring some sense into the developers because of how it made absolutely none. In the preliminary rounds of the shaman fights which take place later in the show, Yoh ends up going up against this guy called Faust VIII, and I applaud the writer for having the bravery for doing something different and allowing him to lose. Especially since this guy was particularly evil, in my opinion. He spends a good deal of time before the fight officially starts tormenting Manta with necromantic magic to show Yoh how powerless he is, and considering that Manta is this tiny looking kid compared to this other guy, it is some pretty frightening imagery, bordering on body horror depending on how scared you are of mad doctors. So I found myself on the one hand thinking "Wow, this is really dark for the overall tone we've had so far." But on the other hand I'm thinking "Hang on a second though, Manta's a noncombatant, is this even legal within the context of this fight? Aren't the referee's gonna... you know... do something?" Later when Manta wakes up in the hospital I couldn't help but think when he had that talk with Silva, the Patch tribe guy who's supposed to be watching the fight that Manta was should have had some choice words for him.
As the story progresses, Anna forces Yoh to train harder and harder so he can get ready for the next fight and this continues throughout the first part of the show (in typical shonen fashion). There's a guy who surprisingly is an Ainu, who shows up at one point, and also a couple of other unexpected things, like the fact that Ren and Jun actually go up against their father after Yoh defeats Ren a second time, and the first season ends off with the protagonists going off on a rescue mission. I honestly hope the show gets better from here, because while I think there's potential in places, I haven't seen it taken advantage of to the fullest extent. I won't talk much about presentation for now, because I'm leaving that to the last part of the review, however it's still pretty obvious that the art style of the show is a bit more cartoony, falling somewhere between
Yu-Gi-Oh! and
One Piece on the scale of realism. The current intro "Oversoul" and the outro "Trust You" are both by Megumi Hayashibara who also voices Anna in the Japanese dub. They're both nice and catchy (of course, I tend to like her work, so I may be slightly biased). The Japanese dub work is definitely what I'm preferring so far. It's not annoying in the least. The Japanese cast is led by Yuko Sato as Yoh, and Inuko Inuyama as Manta (the voice of Meowth/Nyarth in
Pokemon). Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the English dub. To put it nicely, it is quite frankly atrocious, and I blame 4kids totally for that. They changed some of the names, all the background music and totally got rid of Hayashibara's theme music (*Grrrr*)! To add insult to injury, Ryu sounds like a fake Italian and Manta, now renamed Morty, is addicted to ghost stories and sounds like ear torture. I will keep checking a few episodes further in for the next part of the review to see if this improves, but I seriously doubt it, given 4kids' horrific record. At least for this season, the English-only fans are out of luck, unless they don't mind subtitles. That's it for now.
Images taken from Shaman King.
