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Deduce
Your Way Out Of These Bees!
Review:
Spiral
Updated: 4/9/05
Anime/Manga/Manga
Prequel /Fandom
Title
rating: PG-13,
for frequent but not particularly graphic murders
-25
anime episodes (2002-2003), complete. Currently being released
in English by Funimation.
-12 manga volumes, GanGan magazine (2000-present), still running.
-1 manga volume "Spiral Alive" (prequel) (2002), complete.
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There's nothing
quite like being outsmarted by a work of fiction. It's annoying
and entertaining at the same time, watching the events and
motives fall into place and realizing that if you were just
a little bit smarter, you could've figured who killed who before the story gave it away. That's one of the
hallmarks of a good mystery; all the facts have to be there
and it has to make sense, but it can't be so obvious that
the audience catches on right away. Spiral has a pretty
good track record in this regard. More than once while watching
the series I was impressed with how much smarter the creator
was than me. Add to this an extremely non-offensive cast
of characters, and Spiral is very much worth watching.
Kiyotaka Narumi
was pretty much perfect at everything he ever tried--from
playing the piano to solving crimes, he kicked ass and took names all while maintaining his perfect hair. It's not surprising
that his younger brother Ayumu has a bit of an inferiority
complex, particularly since Ayumu is good at all the same
things his brother excelled at, just less so. Strangely, Kiyotaka disappeared
two years before the story begins, leaving only a cryptic message referencing a bunch of mysterious and homicidal teenagers known only as the "Blade
Children." Soon enough, Ayumu gets sucked
into whatever it was his brother was attempting to do. If
this was an average shounen, Ayumu would have to fight (or
play cards, or win basketball games, or bake) his way to
the answer. But this is a mystery series--instead, people
figure out what happened, triumphantly accuse the guilty
party, then stand around while the culprit walks briskly
out the back door.
Anime
Spiral is a 25-episode anime series currently being released to the English-speaking
world by Funimation.
There's a fairly
common advertisement for the Spiral anime that has a picture
of Ayumu Narumi on a spiral background surrounded by three
questions: "What are the Blade Children? Why is Ayumu
involved in their dangerous games? Can he save the Blade
Children?" In their quest to hype the show, they forgot the most important claim: "Find the answers to none of these questions and more over the course of the entire series!" See, Spiral is one of those anime that acts like
a big advertisement for the manga: if you want any
type of closure to all the unanswered questions, that's where
you're going to have to go. Unfortunately for those of us
who don't read Japanese, the Spiral manga has yet to be bought
for translation by an American company (and good luck figuring
out what's going on in chapter after chapter of talking
heads), so be prepared for a long wait.
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Despite not
having an ending that actually ends anything, the individual
episodes and story arcs of the anime are interesting enough on their
own to still make this series worth a watch. Spiral is above
all a mystery, and although occasionally the
villains' evil schemes or the ways they're thwarted are
based too much on luck or coincidence (the victim falls
just so, or some element of the murder is assumed to be
fact when it could easily be coincidence), the mechanics
of the actual puzzles and mysteries are usually clever enough to
make sense without resorting to cheap tricks--like withholding
information from the audience, a classic mystery cop-out. Once the story
really gets underway and the main characters have to start outsmarting each other, the level of wit skyrockets and the deducing gets really fun.
The biggest problem with most mystery series tends to be the characters. Since the focus of the tale is usually on the mechanics of the mystery and not on the people involved, the lead detective is often an annoying, egotistical jerk, which is more a side effect of his being smarter than everyone else than any specific character decision made by the author. Ayumu, on the other hand, actually has subtlety. He's not the most brilliant character ever committed to paper, but enough time is spent on his backstory and personality quirks that he comes off as a well-rounded and decidedly non-annoying "angsty bishounen" who's more quiet and relaxed than angsty. Compared to the average fictional detective, he positively shines. |
 Upon hearing that there's
a bomb in the building that can only be diffused through
a combination of skill, luck, and knowledge of ancient Chinese
number games, Ayumu looks...mildly uncomfortable.
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| The side characters
are for the most part pretty good, with the exception being
Eyes Rutherford, the actual angsty bishounen whose scenes
completely halt any forward momentum this "talking
about things" anime has. Unlike Ayumu, who's an
angsty bishounen done right, Eyes spends every scene he's
in being upset about nothing. The major female characters,
on the other hand, are particularly well done: Hayono, the
bubbly pseudo love interest, could be really annoying except
for the fact that she's extremely useful and
is entirely good-natured (she thankfully lacks the mallet-to-the-face meanness that loud female characters often suffer from), and Madoka Narumi, Ayumu's
sister-in-law, gives Ayumu an interesting family dynamic
to deal with. Ryo, the most adorable of all the Blade Children,
also turns out to be the most competent and intelligent of them, and her attempts to outsmart Ayumu tend to be the
most entertaining.
The voice acting
is pretty good in both Japanese and English, although the
English voices of the major female characters make them
seem more annoying than they should be. The most amusing
(and distracting) part of the English dub is the voice of
Eyes Rutherford, inexplicably cast to
sound like an old British man.
Manga
The Spiral:
Suiri no Kizuna manga is written by Kyo Shirodaira and
drawn by Eito Mizuno for Square-Enix's GanGan
magazine. From what
I've heard, most of the explanations anime fans were waiting
for can be found in volume 11. |
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Spiral is one
of those series where both the anime and manga have something
to offer that the other can't provide. After watching the
Spiral anime from start to finish and finding so little
closure, reading the manga seemed to be a great idea. And
although I haven't seen an end yet (again, the Spiral manga
is completely useless if you can't read it, and translations
have been a bit difficult to find), I've heard that the
manga goes into all of the mysteries that the anime only
hinted at. Eito Mizuno's manga art is also amazingly pretty,
especially in later volumes. She even manages to make the
big, ugly, stupid detective with the thick eyebrows look
pretty, which is very impressive.
But unfortunately, in place of the subtle, quiet, anime Ayumu, we have
yet another iteration of the arrogant asshole playing lead
in the manga version. I don't know if his character mellows
out in later chapters, but at the beginning of the manga
Ayumu is meaner, more annoying, and more full of himself
than he ever was in the anime. It detracts some of the fun
from watching the mysteries unfold; I really wanted anime Ayumu to succeed at whatever task the plot
threw his way, but I cared a lot less about whether that
little bastard from the manga succeeded or not. |
Ayumu's next
case: to discover why his Y-chromosome never kicked in.
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Spiral
Alive (Prequel)
Spiral Alive
(or Spiral [elaiv], as it's often written online) is a one-volume prequel to Spiral: Suiri no Kizuna that came out
in 2002. It stars characters not found in the Spiral manga who try to solve a mystery with some tenuous connection
to the Narumi family. I've never actually seen it, so my
information is all second-hand; go here
for information.
Fandom
Besides the
official English site
and the Japanese anime and manga
sites, Spiral has a fairly extensive web community (although
there's a strangely large proportion of sites with overly
complicated layouts). Aria
of Logic is a pretty nice general info site that also
features a lot of downloadable media, including the catchy
anime opening by girl-punk band Strawberry JAM. This shrine
to the Blade Children also has some good information,
most notably manga storyline spoilers, which makes those
of us who don't want to wait for the manga in English very,
very happy. Both of those fansites have broken links and under-construction
notices up, but they're still the best pages I've seen
for Spiral info.
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"So
these stars are compensation for having to deal with loud,
obnoxious women who follow me around."
"You'll
be seeing stars when I'm through with you!"
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Overview
In any form,
Spiral is an entertaining series, though good luck figuring
out the mysteries before the main characters. Hopefully
one of the translation companies will pick up the manga
soon and give the story an actual ending. For spawning far too many
jokes about bees (yes, Ayumu is at one point forced to think
his way out of a locked room full of bees), Spiral gets
3.7 stars.
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Lianne:
3.5 stars. The mysteries are a mixed bag, but this is still a better-than-average detective story and quite a bit of fun.
Bad Jew:
4 stars. It's like Encyclopedia Brown, but with murder!
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copyright © NotHayama, April 2005. Pictures are copyright
© their respective owners and are used without permission
for this nonprofit review. |
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