Ten Years Later: Monster Anime Series

I feel I should begin by saying that I consider Monster to be the best manga ever. The only one that comes close to its level is Naoki Urasawa’s other sprawling epic featuring an immense number of characters in brilliantly interconnected stories which he was writing and drawing partly at the same time, 20th Century Boys.

That I begin a retrospective on the anime by praising the manga may indicate the anime doesn’t find itself as high up on its respective list, and that’s true. I currently place it at #37, which is by no means bad, but it’s clear that some of the quality doesn’t transfer over into anime form. An interesting note for this ten-year retrospective is that the anime in fact began ten years after its manga, making this year also twenty years after that manga. While it’s a long series and was in a magazine published twice a month, it wasn’t quite long enough to span a full decade, so the anime was able to run for its own lengthy period of 74 episodes and fully adapt the story with no real changes. As much as I appreciate that, though, it feels like the anime doesn’t really try to take advantage of the capabilities of its medium like the manga does. It transfers the panels into an easily-animated format, adding color and movement, with none of that nor the music or sound effects being particularly impressive. Fortunately, neither is any of it bad, and the story and lack of any egregious adaptation choices keeps it firmly on my top 40 anime.

But does that mean that someone like me, who appreciates so much of what anime is capable of that manga isn’t, would still like the anime, even way down at #37, better than the manga? No, there’s a reason the Monster manga is my #1. Urasawa is clearly the master of his medium, and proves better than anyone how much manga is capable of that anime isn’t. While anime can carry over designs, style, and aesthetic, it’s impossible for each of 24 frames per second for 74 episodes to include as much detail as Urasawa puts into each of his frames. He’s also perfected his panel layout and page design, even taking advantage of the sensation of turning the page to build up maximum suspense. Also indicative of Urasawa’s style is using characters whose face isn’t shown to add to that suspense, and then revealing them at just the right time to achieve optimal impact. Animation’s added element of voice acting is actually a detriment to the presentation because of this, inherently informing the audience of the character’s identity when it should be doing just the opposite. Even with the most earnest of efforts, in some ways the anime never stood a chance of matching up to its source. There’s a reason Urasawa creates manga, and his genius can’t simply be run through the anime adaptation machine and come out as flawless as when it went in. (With 20th Century Boys having been completed for seven years with no word of an anime, I would’ve guessed that Urasawa had refused to let one be made on the grounds that his original vision wouldn’t be able to remain entirely intact in anime form. Except that two years after its completion a live-action film trilogy started, reportedly with Urasawa himself involved, and needless to say anime is a lot closer to manga than live-action is, to say nothing of the much more significant changes that had to be made to fit a story even longer than Monster and equally dense into three films.)

But I didn’t sign up to write about Monster for this ten-year retrospective so I could berate it for not being a manga on screen; I chose it because it’s my favorite anime from 2004 after Maria Watches Over Us, which was already taken and my favorite installments of which didn’t come until later years. Yes, the Monster anime is definitely something special, and it deserves every bit of praise it can get.

After twenty years of universal acclaim, I’d hope that most people interested in anime and manga at least know what Monster is about. For as much as spoiling someone on the events of the story would be a terrible disservice, just about any synopsis or even advertisement will reveal the first “twist” of sorts, as it’s essential to understanding what kind of story it is after the very beginning. “What would you do if a child you saved grew up to be a monster?” That’s the pitch, and it goes without saying that it moves the plot to very different places from its medical drama opening, as well as it does even that genre. The mysteries building around our protagonist Dr. Tenma are all deeply tied into this, and when he learns the truth, it compels him to dedicate his life to his answer to that question: “I would stop him.”

That’s the setup for the entirety of an extremely varied but also quite similar and consistent story spanning a year and a half in anime form. As much as there is to take in throughout that run, the one simple message to be taken from the premise is staggering and sobering, and isn’t brought up all that often in anime and manga: making the best decisions could lead to the worst results. If Tenma had just conformed to the selfish whims of his superiors to keep his life cushy, he wouldn’t have had to watch countless innocent people die in front of him throughout his painful journey that he took on expecting to start saving lives rather than taking them. It’s a horribly unpleasant pill to swallow for characters and audience alike, and that’s why it’s so effective and, at least after that initial plot point that many are likely to already know about, unpredictable.

So how can a simple plot of a protagonist going after the antagonist carry the story for so long, remaining utterly captivating all the while? Brilliant character work and plotting certainly don’t hurt. It should be noted that Monster has an extremely unique setting for anime, taking place primarily in Germany from the mid-eighties to the late-nineties. Urasawa obviously loves Germany, and he uses countless facts from the country’s history to construct the story surrounding Tenma’s target, a boy primarily known as Johan, and with so much of the Germany in the story involved, it builds a grand scale that feels like it must’ve actually happened. Because of this, there’s nearly endless diversity in storytelling, but none of it is ever insignificant.

As I alluded to before, Urasawa uses a very similar structure for 20th Century Boys, reaching to all corners of the established setting (and sometimes beyond) to bring in more and more new characters and weaving all their stories together to form unimaginably beautiful patterns. New arcs will often begin by dropping you into a new setting with characters you’ve never seen before and just showing their lives play out as if it was a brand-new series each time. Sometimes entire episodes will go by without ever getting any hint of familiarity or how the story could be connected to what you’ve seen before, and yet the characterization and storytelling is so strong that you’re likely to be fully invested in these new characters before you ever realize why they’re in the story at all. Sometimes not a single one of the six or so “main characters” will appear for an entire arc, but the focus on developing so many characters that may not be the most active in the main plot means that even a relatively “minor character” showing up in a new arc will have you excitedly cheering, even without acknowledging that by the point he or she can be in that position, a character must’ve had some stronger connection to the main characters or plot. In fact, nearly every character introduced in a completely new environment like this will get the chance to show up in another new character’s equivalent, giving the feel of the rookie graduating into being the veteran, so to speak. Just as the main story opens with a lesson on cause and effect that carries it to the end, every one of these characters contributes to the overarching plot in some way, and even though it would be just as easy to care about each of them without that, it adds to the appreciation of just how meticulously constructed this story is.

That’s not to say that spending time with the major characters we follow from the beginning is any less valuable, though. As impressive as the varied and engaging development given to so many less regular characters is, a character seldom remains stagnant, and thus the more a character is in the story the more layered and fascinating he or she is likely to become. Tenma is in some ways the closest to pure good that any character in the series is, but that doesn’t make him any less interesting. It keeps him the perfect main character you’ll always get behind, to the point of saintly acts that you’d wish you could realistically choose to do in his shoes. But it’s that same mindset that allowed this horrible reality to manifest in the first place, and while carrying that burden is as telling for Tenma’s character as anything, his desire to right that wrong puts him in some situations that cause him to acknowledge the dark side of things that he’s led himself into, especially when continuing to turn the other cheek would only cause more travesty. His moments of weakness are that much more visceral precisely because you know he wants in every part of his heart to do the right thing, but that the world just won’t allow for it.

There’s no shortage of similarity between characters from Monster and those from Urasawa’s other works, but Johan is notable particularly because of how distinctive a character type he is. Going back to 20th Century Boys, he is in many ways very similar to the antagonist of that story, able to manipulate those around him to reach heights that wouldn’t be possible by anyone who was any less perfect at executing each plan. In some ways I think Johan is slightly more compelling as a character because the story is much more grounded in reality, so even if it may seem unlikely that someone could be so adept at manipulation, you can see how much he reads his surroundings and responds effortlessly and effectively, always to chillingly calculated ends. I’d somewhat jokingly liken these characters to their creator in how brilliantly he manipulates a story, although I’m not sure if he’d appreciate being compared to his most evil creations. And in a lot of ways, Tenma and Johan create a theme of dualism running throughout the story, a protagonist of pure good and an antagonist of pure evil, and yet the simplicity that such a description implies couldn’t be any less accurate. Seldom does Johan even feel human, and yet he’s one of the most fascinating characters ever written. He may sound like a Lelouch or a Light, but as great as those characters are, such comparisons don’t quite do Johan justice; even comparisons to the Friend from 20th Century Boys miss many important nuances.

Monster has a great deal of variety in its themes: there’s as much drama from the characters as from the horrible events happening all around, it combines elements of mystery, horror, and suspense thrillers into something fresh and unrivaled, and it explores a lot of deep, psychological questions within both its own characters and the world at large. It’s not action for the sake of action; the violence is as unwanted and disturbing as it should be in real life, and it’s never glorified. Ten years, twenty years later, it still holds up as a better story than most.

Too bad you can’t watch it! Ah, it’s time for the most depressing part of this ten-year tale, and that’s the availability of the Monster anime in the US. It wasn’t until halfway through the decade that we got it on this side of the ocean at all, but when we did it seemed like things were going well. Viz produced a dub for it masterfully directed by, co-written by, and acted in by Patrick Seitz, got it broadcast on the recently rebranded “Syfy” channel, and starting putting it on various online services. But as great as all that was, they only released the first 15 episodes of the series on DVD and let its license expire, causing even the streams in both languages to be taken down past those 15 episodes that were released. As such, there’s currently no legal way to watch more than 15 episodes of Monster in the US. Australian company Siren Visual has licensed the series and will have released all of it in less than two months, so those willing to import R4 DVDs now have that option, if nothing else.

The latest news of Monster came less than a year ago, with the announcement that Guillermo del Toro would be directing a live-action adaptation of the series for broadcast on HBO. Given my opening thoughts, it probably goes without saying that I don’t think there’s any chance of this adaptation being nearly as good as either the manga or anime. Perhaps more importantly, considering the track record of such attempts, I don’t think the chances of it actually coming to fruition are very high, either. But if it did happen, that would likely reinvigorate interest in the property in the US enough for another company to try licensing it.

It certainly deserves it.

Kestrel Swift

Kestrel Swift has been an anime fan since 1999 and has been getting himself deeper into that fandom ever since. Today he is especially passionate about the titles he considers the absolute best. He has been active on the Fandom Post since it started in 2011 (you may know him as GingaDaiuchuu on the forums) and began writing for it the next year. He has been the only constant member of the site’s podcast, Fandom Post Radio (also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, iHeartRadio, Alexa, Amazon Music, Twitter, and Facebook), since it started in 2017.

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