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Tokyo Noir, Animal Style
a month ago
General
Nothing about ODD TAXI is beautiful. The furry character designs are crude, almost ugly, but the show has its reasons. This suspenseful animated noir crime drama, which saves its best and nastiest twists for the very end of the series, is a reminder that justice is worth fighting for, whether or not we get it -- and more often than not, we don't.
There's a large cast of characters: hair-trigger yakuza, crooked cops, manipulative pop singers, failing comedians, lovestruck fools, gamers, fanboys, and influencers with their various, all-consuming...justifications...and at the center of all their stories is the taxi driver Odokawa, a phlegmatic, deadpan weirdo whose sense of justice has him, against his better judgment, stirring a volatile mixture of other people's obsessions til they explode in all the characters' faces.
Noir is for people who like their stories ironic, and their ironies bitter. When the show ends on a shot of one character's beatific smile as they finally gain their heart's desire, it doesn't get much more bitter than that.
https://www.amazon.com/ODDTAXI-Comp.....8C?s=movies-tv
There's a large cast of characters: hair-trigger yakuza, crooked cops, manipulative pop singers, failing comedians, lovestruck fools, gamers, fanboys, and influencers with their various, all-consuming...justifications...and at the center of all their stories is the taxi driver Odokawa, a phlegmatic, deadpan weirdo whose sense of justice has him, against his better judgment, stirring a volatile mixture of other people's obsessions til they explode in all the characters' faces.
Noir is for people who like their stories ironic, and their ironies bitter. When the show ends on a shot of one character's beatific smile as they finally gain their heart's desire, it doesn't get much more bitter than that.
https://www.amazon.com/ODDTAXI-Comp.....8C?s=movies-tv
Like a lot of the Anime we've been watching, ODD TAXI represents the best of what seems to have completely escaped American style storytelling; compelling stories about characters you can care about. The very fact that this kind of storytelling surfaces so often in Anime series you find without knowing anything about them is a clear indication that "we've", lost it and the Japanese are overflowing with it. All the evidence shows that a willingness to explore ideas, characters and concepts, without the self inflicted inhibitions of political blind certainty, gives them the creative advantage to produce winners like this. Sure there are lots of hits and misses but the willingness to accept this kind of diverse thinking and translate it to this kind of storytelling is what's making the super hero genre look and feel so lame and destitute. Because of this we got SO MUCH to watch and catch up on and SO MUCH to look forward to!