#Spy x Family 62.1 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dereksmcgrath · 2 years

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That was more animated than I expected–and a well-done adaptation getting into the minds of Twilight and Anya. But I have some quibbles.

“Operation Strix,” Spy x Family Episode 1

An adaptation of Chapter 1 of the manga, by Tatsuya Endo, translated by Casey Loe with lettering by Rina Mapa and available from Viz.

Spy x Family is available to stream on Crunchyroll. (Go anime unions!)

Spoilers up to Spy x Family Chapter 62.1.

I already wrote about why you should be reading Tatsuya Endo’s Eisner Award-nominated Spy x Family. That post pretty much summarizes why you should watch Episode 1 of the anime adaptation, too. I’m going to have less to say to summarize the plot–and there’s a lot of plot to cover–as my previous post does the job for me. So, let’s just get to what works and doesn’t work in this episode.

Getting all of that plot setup for Spy x Family done in one episode, minus Yor, would not be an easy feat. It was already a challenge for the very first chapter of the manga, and that one was a special issue, more than 70 pages long. Yet Wit Studio and CloverWorks managed to cram just about all of that first chapter into this first one, give or take a few scenes. For example, we don’t get the opening from the first chapter, an imagine spot that shows the family enjoying tea while surrounded by the targets Twilight and Yor have assassinated. (That scene is in trailers, though, so I imagine it will appear by the end of Episode 3, if not Episode 2.)

The pacing did feel rushed, especially at the end, but that’s a flaw in the original work, so I can’t quite ding Wit Studio and CloverWorks except to say that they didn’t adapt it in a way to let the ending breathe. The manga allowed a reader such a long time to sit with that adorable image of Anya curled up next to Twilight on the couch–while the anime rushed through it to set up Yor’s introduction next week. The rush was so fast we didn’t even get Anya’s surprised expressed when Twilight knocked her away.

Some connective tissue helps to prevent the rushed details from being too overwhelming.

For example, the thru-line that goes from Anya enjoying the animated show Bondman, to hearing “pistol silencer” in the show, to wanting Twilight to buy her one, to finally seeing one in action when Edgar shoots that guy in the head in front of Anya (jeez, Anya grew up a lot this week…) helped to connect the scenes despite the quicker pace. We get a similar connective tissue for Anya when we finally learn her resistance to studying for those tests is because of the cold clinical environment she was created in, getting her telepathic skills tested all the time.

The same goes for the connective tissue for Twilight and his childhood: we go from the marriage proposal at the restaurant, to Karen asking about marriage, to Twilight leaving Karen at the restaurant and saying family life isn’t for him, to Twilight’s fury over needing to acquire a child, to Twilight noticing the child looking out the window with glee, to Twilight telling the real estate agent he hasn’t a kid yet, to Twilight’s struggles understanding Anya and reading up on library books, to Twilight remembering his own childhood. (I have to imagine the reason the manga right now has created a brand new side story arc featuring Twilight’s childhood is to set that stuff up now for anyone watching the anime, so that they can read the manga right now and get where Twilight is coming from, as the anime is going to take a long time for you to sympathize with this spy’s mission and assume he and not Yor’s side are the good guys.)

There are even small touches in the background to help set up later stories. That castle that boy on the train and Anya both notice? That wasn’t in Chapter 1 of the manga. But it is the same castle that appears in a later chapter of the manga, so it should appear in a later episode, when Twilight rents it for Anya to play-pretend being a kidnapped princess rescued by a spy. That’s a good reward to audience members who already read the manga.

But this episode also felt like it amped up just how poor of a spy Twilight really is. I tend to get annoyed when a series makes the “smart” character smart only because everyone else around them is so foolish. To its credit, Spy x Family has largely avoided making everyone else ignorant, case in point how legitimately impressive it is that Twilight disguised himself as Edgar. And it’s not like some of Twilight’s incompetence was not already in Chapter 1: Twilight passes out after Anya passes her entrance test, his humanity has been part of that character even when someone like me was blinded by how amazing he is as a spy. But it still feels like this episode was making him look more buffoonish than I imagined.

Some of Twilight’s silliness comes across better depending on how scenes are animated: the manga panel of Twilight searching his new apartment for bugs is limited to just that one panel, while the anime spread it out into a longer visual gag as if frames are missing as Twilight shifts from corner to corner of the apartment. But it’s still an awkward characterization choice, that Twilight’s fixation on completing his mission makes him get this sloppy this obviously in front of people. I feel like it is only in the most recent chapters, where Twilight has been letting his guard down because he loves Anya and is growing close to Yor, that we see him doing poorly at his job. But this episode really increases the number of instances compared to the first chapter that makes him come across as more of a fool. This adaptation choice feels like a way to hook in readers who are more familiar with the more foolish Twilight, as opposed to being an absolutely faithful adaptation that has Twilight’s competence be right in your face and obvious before more and more of that competence falls apart with each chapter.

One reason for making Twilight look a bit more incompetent in the anime than in the manga owes to how tense the tone is, divided between its many genres that bring both comedy and drama. Four-year-old Anya witnessed Edgar shoot a man: that’s a hard detail to try to keep in a comedy. That’s why Edgar’s grand plan is about some politician’s toupee to use as blackmail: it’s too silly to be killing people over, so the absurdism is supposed to help the bleakest parts of the spy genre–broken trust, broken bones–go down more easily.

I think what impressed me the most upon initial viewing of Episode 1 was how fluid (and perhaps overly done) the animation was. Based on what little action was shown in the trailers, I expected the budget was retained for just Twilight and Yor’s more spectacular fights. Yet here we are in Episode 1 and I’m gobsmacked by the opening with the car crash, and the skin creases as that poor schmuck puts his hand over his face when finding out Twilight impersonated Edgar. I was expecting something more akin to the limited animation of House Husband (obligatory disclaimer: fuck off, Netflix, you TERF assholes). Instead, maybe because of Wit Studio’s work on Attack on Titan, I get some gorgeously fleshy animation and pretty good storyboarding on the action scenes. For example, they storyboarded the scene when Twilight, after removing his Edgar mask, adjusts his bangs–which is key to his Robert disguise in front of Karen. That’s incredible–I never noticed before how Twilight changes his bangs to help with his disguise, like Christoper Reeves changing his body language to really sell how Clark Kent disguises himself as Superman. I really thought the animation for Spy x Family was going to be less fluid, less detailed, and less thought out than this, so my lowered expectations may have made me appreciate this episode all the more.

But I do have minor quibbles. I wish we had more close ups when Twilight removed his masks, just to see that same level of detail to the flesh that we saw with Edgar’s blackmail partner’s face. There’s also the scene where Nguyen manages to get back up and swings his metal bar in an attempt to knock out Twilight from behind. In Wit Studio and CloverWorks’ adaptation for the anime, I really liked the metal bar coming down on Twilight in the apartment with the cut to black and a white impact spot where the hit happened. But this animated iteration is harder for me to believe that Twilight got out of that uninjured. By contrast, in the manga, the image freezes at Nguyen’s swing so that you’re held in suspense and can come up with your own ideas how Twilight got out of that mess. I think the swing of the bar and the crack of it in the anime makes it seem like Twilight indeed got hit rather than dodged–that could make him come across as more human and sympathetic, but when he’s easily up on his feet for the rest of this episode, I don’t buy it.

And there is still something else that irks me about this adaptation.

Lately, adaptations from manga to anime have bothered me in terms of fidelity to the source material. I don’t even mean, “This isn’t close enough to the plot of the manga!” I don’t care: there are some manga that made some awful choices that of course I appreciate any animation studio that can fix that mess. I don’t mean, “This storyboard doesn’t match the paneling in the manga!” I used to compare and contrast how Studio BONES handled adapting entire pages from My Hero Academia, and while I do think a good manga gives you good storyboarding, that shouldn’t stop an animation studio from plussig it with something even better. After all, the storyboarding on Twilight, as a child, sobbing in the middle of that explosion is pretty much the same as the panel from Chapter 1.

No, what I mean is, when you stick so close to the character designs of the manga, that you don’t bother to make them work for animation. (I’m looking at you, Fire Force: should’ve stuck with the Studio BONES Soul Eater designs if you were going to turn this crap into a shitty prequel.) This concern has been with me a bit, given certain series where something can look good in a still frame but fall apart once you try to animate in and out of those poses. You either keep the image frozen for so long to communicate to the audience how faithfully you captured the character’s pose and facial expression, or you constrain yourself to stick to that design that you don’t allow another creator to put their own spin on it, or simplify the design so it can be animated effectively and without depleting your budget. One recent example for me is seeing how many Bungo Stray Dogs fans get irate any time Studio BONES alters a character design: the fury over Paul Verlaine finally making an appearance in the anime style, and the complaints are all about the smile (which I find charming) or the body shape (which, fair complaint–let men have thighs and look like they can support their own weight).

Spy x Family so far has opted to stick so close to the manga’s character designs, and I anticipate that is because, in preparation for later episodes when we really see the range of Anya’s reactions, Wit Studio and CloverWorks are focused on getting Anya’s many meme-able facial expressions to look just like the manga. It’s an odd choice for just Episode 1: we get maybe only one of those meme-able faces, that being Anya on the couch memorizing Twilight’s combination.

Yet, for the most part Episode 1 gets across the same character design details in the shift from static page panels to animation. Just look at that one still image when the canned food hits that one gangster in the face: if you pause it, that is the exact same pose as how he looked when his face caved in in the manga. All the more impressive, the very first chapter of Spy x Family was before Endo really nailed down Anya’s design, and quite a bit before we get her more incredible facial expressions, so I can see the work character designer Kazuaki Shimada put in from the beginning to try to capture the most memorable parts of the entire manga, even if that means altering details when adapting the earlier stories but with the later chapters’ character designs.

But there is one more moment in the adaptation that I thought was lacking: towards the end of the episode, when Twilight has his gun at the back of Edgar’s head. I was more impressed with the manga version, where Twilight is just a black shadow with white eyes, emphasizing both his namesake and his ability to hide out in the open. The animated version of this scene insisted too much on keeping Twilight’s handsome face out in the open, without communicating that same fury this man has to protect that tiny girl and his nationalistic mission.

Still, there is a lot good in the show, in terms of its editing work. I appreciated how the anime represented the undercurrent of ideas: how WISE communicates messages in code to Twilight, Twilight’s thought process, how Anya reads minds. The mix of visual cues (the superimposed cipher, the sparkles around Anya’s head, the matching animations of both Twilight and Twilight-disguised-as-Nguyen having identical running/bobbing animation to let us know “Nguyen” is Twilight in disguise) and auditory cues (narration) was effective. But I think, once the room went silent, so that Anya could focus on her test, was probably the most effective use of audio. I will admit, however, unless CrunchyRoll retains closed captioning, this is going to be a pain to try to comprehend in an English dub: with the Japanese dub, the text was easy enough to follow who was speaking when and whose interior thoughts we were hearing at any time.

The camera work also caught me by surprise. I was impressed how often we take Twilight or Anya’s point of view, the camera jerking around and shifting around to show how each of them knows how to size up a room for targets to observe and take out or minds to read. Wit Studio and CloverWorks took the pretty simple manga panels of Anya reading Twilight’s mind to finish the crossword and turned it into a far more dynamic view, as the camera keeps swerving to follow Twilight’s attention to detail–and hence how well Anya can read his mind. I really hope Wit Studio and CloverWorks keep this up once Yor shows up: imagine how well the camera work could show the different mindsets of the characters, where spy Twilight’s POV is hunting for body language, telepath Anya’s for minds, and assassin Yor’s for vital spots.

The music is top-notch, all the better if this series pursues the approach of most anime, having a limited soundtrack for all episodes rather than tailoring the music to each episode. I was impressed how the trailer’s music is used for the Bondman cartoon, and the brass and saxophone approach does fuel the spy genre motifs of the series.

I haven’t had a chance to talk about the acting, and I thought it worked overall. Takuya Eguchi brings so much childish excitement to Twilight, which is something I didn’t really get from the character in the manga–but it works! I loved how proud of himself Twilight sounded when he finally barricaded Anya in the apartment: that is not the approach I would have taken for directing that scene, but it suits his personality and that pathetic sense of accomplishment he has over imprisoning his own daughter because he sucks this much at parenting.

I had wanted to hold off writing this review until any English dub comes out (I repeat: go anime unions!), but the episode was too good and offered too much to discuss to delay my thoughts. (That doesn’t mean I’m not sitting here taking guesses on the English dub casting, only to get disappointed when my predictions don’t pan out: I’m guessing J. Michael Tatum as Twilight, Monica Rial as Yor, and Sonny Strait as Franky, but as those are my guesses, I’m probably wrong.)

I had said at the beginning of this post that I already said all that was so good about Spy x Family that you need to read it. So, I’ll wrap up this post with some of the more problematic details that may await people getting into the anime.

To start: dang, Twilight, you know the moles on Karen’s body? I know you’re a spy seducing people, but, jeez, that’s going to be problematic moving forward. As the story progresses, the tension between Twilight and Yor is much more romantic than sexual, if that makes sense. Up until she met Twilight, and even after, Yor doesn’t really show sexual interest, potentially opening the story for some demisexual representation. But Twilight has impersonated people and created personas, so while the show acknowledges what he did to Karen, it’s still going to be uncomfortable moving forward knowing he is bedding people under false pretenses.

Speaking of problematic, a story like this, essentially being a Cold War story but with fantasy and new nations’ names, is all the more difficult to sit through in our post-2016 atmosphere and as Russia invades Ukraine. This kind of setting also limits the kind of representation we’re going to get in this story: it’s all very heteronormative and white-coded, give or take when Anya buddies up with her classmate Becky. And I’m not looking forward to next week with the dumb “Franky in drag” gag. While this episode includes Nguyen, and later episodes will have characters named Yor and Yuri, it’s hard not to read this as a mostly white setting. A recent arc in the manga confirms there are other nations out there, but I do shudder to imagine how Endo may handle portraying other nationalities, without it becoming “Captain Ethnic” representations.

Then again, I appreciate the anime retained the same from the manga, that Twilight is fighting a far-right political group. I’m still expecting the manga is going to find some way to try to humanize individuals like Yor and Desmond so that this doesn’t become a left-versus-right fight, especially when there is very little I would call left about WISE and its spies like Twilight. And while obviously this kind of subterfuge and political intrigue is all kinds of thorny issues to deal with, at this time when we had a right-wing insurrection at the US Capitol, I think we should all agree, fuck the right wing, I’m looking forward to see a few of them get their asses kicked in this show.

#spy x family #anime review #long post

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