Japan Sinks 2020 and My Love Hate Relationship With It
This contains spoilers for Japan Sinks 2020
Japan Sinks 2020 came out July 9th on Netflix, and it caught my interest when I watched its trailer back in June. Netflix has been experimenting with original anime of adaptations, different animation techniques, and a variety of stories bound to make you raise an eyebrow. Ranging from CGI anthropomorphic high schoolers navigating murders happening around them to a princess waiting tables with knights who have baggage, but are destined to save her kingdom, Japan Sinks 2020 joins the family of Netflix anime.
The anime is an adaptation to Japan Sinks by Sakyo Komatsu, with some tweaks made to fit the current year since the original was set in the 70’s. This gives the anime a very unique story, one that’s had my left eyebrow getting the work out of its little life. The story follows a family of Ayumu, Go, Mari, and Koichiro, in Japan caught in the middle of a devastating earthquake. Trying to get to safety, the family outruns aftershocks, catches themselves from falling to their last moments, is caught into “cults,” face loss, and accepts that Japan is actually sinking.
Apart from the mess of feelings you’ll have watching characters drop one by one after a surprise natural disaster messes up their plans to seek refuge, Japan SInks 2020 had a very loose and fluid animation style I was a fan of; the team was not afraid to make things ugly, keeping character designs that reflect people you could see walking down your street and really making you look past the person on screen to see the devastating disaster that keeps getting worse as each episode goes by. However, the anime’s rush of thrill after the earthquake wears off quickly, and it starts to be less interesting as each episode goes by. From questionable story choices and filler in-betweens, I caught myself taking breaks days at a time to finish this series because I felt unmotivated to continue.
But we aren’t quitters here.
I loved Japan Sinks 2020’s characters, the characters felt like real people conveying real emotions. Mari’s unstoppable drive to get her family to safety, all while wearing a surgery support device was heavy on the heart. Go’s turmoil comparing Japan and foreign countries because of internet influence, and Kunio’s pain of loss and the process of grief he goes through are both very real situations that force you to think about how they both got to that point. Ayumu’s gradual learning to cope with the monstrosities thrown at her, while silently fighting an infection, has got to be one of the toughest tests of survival. Haruo’s development in being reserved, seeing him blossom as the series continued, to living his final moments doing what he loved left me in shambles. KITE’s charming and ridiculous ways to get out of near-fatal accidents was a nice cleanse from seeing tragedy after tragedy. I can see myself emulate the character’s actions if I were ever stuck in a similar situation (maybe not KITE as I do not have the sheer power of a successful YouTuber)
Now that art style. I enjoy unconventional designs that aren’t scared to break away from standardized designs guaranteed to make lots of money like Ghibli and KyoAni’s take on anime. Science Saru, the animation studio that worked on Japan Sinks 2020, takes a different approach of telling a story that isn’t in a Moe style and does it so well. Science Saru has other notable work with their out of the ordinary animation, like Devilman Crybaby, Night is Short, Walk on Girl, and Ping-Pong the Animation. With Science Saru’s Masaaki Yuasa and Naoya Wada on the Japan Sinks 2020 team, I knew the art was going to be phenomenal.
Japan Sinks 2020’s loose movements, minimal lining, and making characters match their ugly emotions with just as ugly designs is terrific. The artists invested in depicting details in the show’s surroundings which offered a really compelling contrast to the character’s feelings; being able to see clearly how awful these natural disasters get, along with how Ayumu, Go, Mari, and everyone else felt trying to survive. The designs are refreshing, sure to make folks dig for other nonconformist anime and see how different styles and animation can tell a story without having to spell it out for you with narration.
The hiccups in Japan Sinks 2020 were in their choices of stories to tell, trying too hard to modernize a novel from the ‘70s, and not focusing on ways to pull you in when the anime had its moments of falling off. The crumbling for me started in Episode 4, on the drive to Shan City, a safe haven proclaimed by Kunio, an old man who owns a convenience store introduced in the episode before. This city never stated to be a cult, but definitely had the boxes checked to be one; a leader with an unexplainable power, the confidence in the community and its lack of need to be in touch with the outside world, being far from any outside source of contact, the special events involving hard drugs, etc. I can recognize cults are a very real and dangerous issue for Japan, and liked that this anime sprinkled the practice of Kintsugi, the repairing of broken pottery with valuable metals. However, the almost three episodes this Shan City arc took up felt stale, it was hard to stay focused, and the back and forth catching up to what the characters were doing gave me whiplash. I needed a couple of days away from this anime. Let’s not forget Kunio’s out of nowhere morphine addiction, as well as hallucinating that the city’s oracle-type child was his grandkid, which is hinted to be an drug-induced illusion. This felt too out of the blue to add to Kunio’s character, which the anime didn’t need to. He was a well equipped man with so much story, I believe his pain of grief is a more interesting take than just drizzling addiction for the fun of it.
Japan Sinks 2020 brought up some really interesting topics in a few short scenes. Like when Mari, Ayumu, and Go, a Filipino-Japanese family, were rejected to hop on a boat to safety from Japan Nationalists, and the need to have those with exceptional skills, in this case Ayumu’s athleticism, be on board to safety first. Topics like this I would’ve loved to see more of a deep dive on as those are modern problems that Japan faces, along with other countries if they were in the country’s shoes. Instead we get a rather boring episode, that feels like a filler, of Ayumu and Go reminiscing and talking in the middle of the ocean, that drags on, lost me, and had to come back to at another time.
Cloud storage saves all was the finale’s message for Japan Sinks 2020. While we did get peeks of what the surviving characters were up to after finding refuge, that was about half the episode, the rest was showcasing how much saving things into the cloud can preserve history in pictures and videos. Which, fair, that’s a solid point, but it came across ingenuine and more from a sales point of view, I swear I was waiting for Apple to have a pop up somewhere when watching this to upgrade my storage’s memory. I can appreciate the possible creative freedom the animators might’ve had with the second half of the finale, but I can’t get over how commercialized it felt after 9 grueling episodes about loss and the push to survive through it all.
I won’t hate Japan Sinks 2020, there were parts in this series that struck a chord with me, the highs were surely high. However, the lows were super low, and I can’t love it when the anime was so inconsistent on keeping a watcher engaged and entertained. So, would I recommend it? Yeah, as a background watch to support Science Saru, but to say it’s amazing and worth the investment. Ehhh. I think for the first time in a while, I’ll have to be neutral on something.
Though, I can’t lie that this anime didn’t stay with me after my watch. How would I do during an earthquake disaster, being far from my family? Racists are bad now, how worse can they get when there are people who look like me, desperate to survive the tragedy? Jarring things to think about. How do you think you would do if this were to happen?
