Beside these characters, the other major player – Airi, a deceptively cheery-seeming schoolgirl who befriends the grown-up Satoru – is merely adequate, though she’s written well enough. Satoru’s relationship with his non-conformist mum he calls “yokai” has humour and pathos. The children are shown with charm and affection, recalling the flashbacks in Ghibli’s Only Yesterday.
#ERASED ANIME DUB ONLINE SERIAL#
So far, though, the series has taken little advantage of the sinister, deathly possibilities of snowy landscapes, an opportunity that seems obvious in a serial killer thriller. A standout scene has the kids see foxes in the snow who run round them in gyring circles. The girl whom Satoru befriends in the past wears a bright red coat, reminding film fans of Schindler’s List and Don’t Look Now. All the childhood scenes in the series are shown letterboxed, with black strips at the top and bottom of the frame, while the adult scenes are full-screen. Memories are depicted as strips of pre-digital film, complete with perforated holes. This involves more doubling as the film switches between timelines – the childhood Satoru remembers, and the one that he’s living anew. The time-travel plot has Satoru trying to change history by befriending a girl in his class who he knows will be murdered in the near future. Not only is he in a child’s body, but he’s constantly reliving the memories and feelings from when he was a child the first time. But it’s ambiguous whether Satoru is an adult any more. This gives a double vision to the narrative, with moments of humour when Satoru carelessly says what he’s thinking. (As you might guess, the ten year-old Satoru is voiced by a woman in both the Japanese and English versions.) One of Erased’s best devices is to give Satoru an adult “inner voice” even when he’s regressed to a child. In both the dub and sub, Satoru is voiced by a pair of actors: one plays his child self, the other the adult. Time-travel is common in anime – we’ve increasingly seen it used as a mid-story twist – but the idea of an adult leaping back into his childhood self is potent: a nostalgic dream, a disempowering nightmare.
It’s one of anime’s chewiest thriller scenarios the first two episodes comprise one of the best openings to an anime serial we’ve seen. There’s more to the set-up than that – we’ve skipped some spoilers. This is the winter a killer stalked the city, murdering Satoru’s classmates and leaving him with the lifelong anguish he should have done something. He’s reliving his childhood, as an elementary schooler growing up in a northern Japanese city in snowblown winter. Suddenly he’s ten years old time has reversed eighteen years. He timeslips again, further than ever before. But then a far more personal tragedy explodes, and Satoru becomes a murder suspect.
#ERASED ANIME DUB ONLINE DRIVER#
In the first scenes, Satoru senses a lorry driver has just had a heart attack, and saves a child from being crushed by the vehicle. At unexpected moments, he suddenly slips back in time a few moments, a magic warning that disaster threatens. His disappointed editor suggests he dig deeper into himself, which isn’t welcome advice Satoru has repressed childhood traumas that won’t be repressed much longer. Satoru is a manga writer in Tokyo, approaching the big three-oh, whose strips aren’t clicking. Erased even begins with the archetypally “King” protagonist, the blocked author with psychological issues.
The result is often hugely entertaining in the way of King’s fiction, but has some of the pitfalls of his writing – more on that later. There’s sweet lyricism and autopsy-room horror, laced into a multi-strand story. A serial killer preys on children, and much of the story is told from the viewpoint of children. (We’re looking at the first half.) It’s a paranormal mystery thriller, whose protagonist has frightening powers he can’t control or understand. If Stephen King scripted an anime, it might look like Erased, which Anime Limited is releasing in two six-part volumes. ( Neo, Uncooked Media – I also have an article on the live-action Netflix version on the AlltheAnime site.)
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