Creator(s): Chu Takara, Carlos Meglia, Carlos Trillo
Director(s): Hiroyuki Aoyama, Toshihiko Masuda, Atsuko Tanaka, Nobuo Tomizawa, Kazuhide Tomonaga, Keiko Oyamada, Kenji Kodama, Keiichiro Furuya
Studio: Tokyo Movie Shinsha, Network of Animation
Finished first watch: 28/10/2020
Review contains ***SPOILERS*** for Cybersix
Ratings:
This show is so bad lol. I can hardly believe I managed to put myself through the entire thing, let alone the amount of positive things I've seen/read about it online.
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| Don't be fooled by the cool, mysterious aesthetic. |
Cybersix was a very successful comic in the late 90s and this series is based on that. But when it was adapted for TV, they changed the target audience from adults to children. This meant getting rid of all the serious and supposedly 'dark' themes of the comic. That alone should be enough reason for people not to watch it - it basically becomes inappropriate for both sets of viewers. That can definitely be felt when watching; there's no consistency in terms of the tone. Certain parts genuinely feel like somone put the wrong sound effects or music on the mixer and you're just left totally baffed. The music is honestly awful too - it's not just inappropriate but often sounds atonal or out-of-key (in a bad way). This is a pretty mean thing to say but the show could potentially be better if watched on mute. Sound design is bad enough for me to even think about sound design for the first time on this blog and the script and voice acting are so stale it's unbearable.
On the script, there's so much telling (i.e. not showing) that it actually feels stupid. Everyone explains everything they're thinking even when it's ridiculously obvious but there's almost no effort made to convey that information through what's on screen. Even the few times the directors did find good ways of showing things visually (including having things literally written out on screen), the characters explained everything they were thinking anyway - just in case. It's exhausting.
Storytelling overall is also pretty poor. First off, there's next to no story to tell; you have no idea why anyone is doing anything nor what their motivation is. The events across the 13 episodes also all seem to happen to the same 3 people in the city, who all happen to be very close to our protagonist (fair enough for a kids' show). Also lots of things seemed to just happen completely randomly with no significance later on. For example, they showed the emotional backstory of how Data 7 was created and his past friendship with Cyber 6 - but then through the rest of the series, Data 7 is literally just a normal panther. They don't even call him 29. He could have literally appeared from thin air and the series would be completely unaffected. Maybe that all comes into play in the comics but man, so much pointless stuff happens in the cartoon.
As said above, characters do things for no apparent reason and that makes it difficult to be even slightly invested in them. They also all seem to talk in one tone of voice each throughout, as well as learning nothing and changing nothing about themselves. And to top it all off, there is a completely unnecessary and totally baseless romance involving the main character (of course there is, she's female).
Animation isn't actually too bad. There are lots of genuine, good quality sequences of things like smoke, explosions, monsters and machines. But all the characters are quite poorly done in my opinin (which is mental when you see that this was animated by TMS(!)). They use a low frame rate, which isn't bad in itself, but they don't utilise it well, in my opinion. It feels like a lot of breakdowns and even in-betweens are missing from most passages. It's at its worst whenever Jose does his little soldier march. I appreciate that the show tried to create its own art style too but it didn't really work for me. The way they drew body hair was just ridiculous and designs genuinely did not fit their purpose - there was nothing endearing about Lucas and nothing sinister about Von Richter. Some of the action was decent but nowhere near good enough for this show to be worth rewatching.
In short, ignore people talking about how good Cybersix is. It was definitely progressive for its time (portraying a cross-dressing main character in the 1990s cannot be understated - that's a big win) but that says nothing of the quality of the cartoon. Equally, I imagine the comic was as successful as it was for a reason but none of that shines through to the TV series. So maybe go read the comic but do not watch this series.