Tag: david production

Undead Unluck Anime Adaptation

TiberiusLeave a comment

From page to cel

Ah, f[swords clashing]k it. I’ve been putting it off long enough and my desire for perfection is clashing with my schedule so, I’m bringing the long-awaited opinion on the anime adaptation of Undead Unluck. Still got a few episodes left in this season, but I’ve reviewed anime halfway through before so there’s no reason to hold this one to a higher standard.

Immortality Misfortune is the story of a man who’s chronologically so old, his birthday is on a different calendar system going on a journey with Japan’s millionth unlucky female protagonist on a quest for the best death the world can offer. It was picked up by Viz Media in January 2020 for weekly distribution in the west and I’ve been keeping up with it leading up to my first try at Army basic training. I’m still following along to the best of my ability, and yes I still recommend the manga.

For the anime, it was picked up by David Production, the same craftspeople responsible for bringing JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure to stunning life after 25 years in limbo and Fire Force, only for that to be delayed by a few weeks due to the tragedy at KyoAni in July 2019. It’s not often that a manga I follow closely gets this treatment, but the industry seems to be enjoying a boost as of late with more and more manga I find getting adaptations later. Speaking of which, The Elusive Samurai’s next episode should be airing right now so a review of that will arrive in time. I will try my best not to delay it as long as I’ve done with this one.

Considering the year of release of the manga and that of the anime, Deathless 13 went through a few changes since it takes place in the modern era. COVID had a slight influence on the first episode as the female MC, Fuuko Izumo, was all by herself before attempting to try her own hand at death, whereas in the manga, there was a crowd gathered attempting to stop her. Then deuteragonist, Andy, shows up attempting to do the same but in style.

The series likes to have a ton of fun with body horror considering the premise: a select group of people possess supernatural abilities that negate the laws of physics. What anyone else can do normally, these “Negators” can do the opposite, hence the abilities like Untouch, Undead, Unstoppable, Unchange, Unmove, etc. No, it doesn’t match with how English works, but longtime weebs know the difficulties of accurate localizations.

A small group of Negators, known as The Union, have made it their mission to uncover the mysteries of the world they live in by challenging God himself. Many obstacles stand in their way, those being the UMAs or Unidentified Mysterious Anomalies/Animals. These beings have an adverse affect of some kind on the rest of the planet and are due in large part to The Union’s performance in the field. If successful, the repercussions are negated and things return to their normal state; but if they fail, the consequences become part of nature, in some cases permanently. Sacrifices tend to be made in order for The Union to reach their goal.

Having followed the series for the better part of 3.5 years, I recall some panels that would look astounding if animated because the action within is limited by the medium it originated from.

Of course, not every manga has that luxury, as Berserk fans know very well. When I learned that DP would be captaining the ship, I recalled their expertise in animation with JoJo, Fire Force and several other series and rested easy that night confident that their ethos of quality animation would not have to suffer. The studio promised us the Sistine Chapel once again and their hard work has paid off. Better yet, no one was breathing down their necks to meet an arbitrary standard so prepare yourselves, people. For the chefs have cooked another perfect dish.

I personally didn’t have much issue with the Stone Ocean adaptation, but I understand the argument that there was interference.

DP’s attention to details is one for the textbooks. Watching Andy regenerate severed limbs and such is phenomenal, and whatever confusion there was about how this world works is enhanced with the motion of all the pictures. No more flipping through pages for visual learners.

Having said that though, much of the series makes it a candidate for the mystery genre. Discoveries are being made all the time, characters keep their pasts well-hidden, motives change regularly, and the changes that influence the world can only be explained by a handful of people. I’d say it meets those prerequisites well with what I remember about it.

I can’t recommend enough that you check out the anime yourself. The manga got back on its feet a while back after a subpar arc, but with the anime adaptation in tow, it’s more than worth the watch. It’s available in dub and sub on Hulu and you already know what I like to frequent.

Undead Unluck First Impressions

TiberiusLeave a comment

This is a long-time coming.

If you’ve been following this blog since the beginning, you may recall months ago when I wrote about a manga where select people get random powers of negation, as in what would normally happen to someone else doesn’t happen to the negator themselves. Lots of luck? This person gets none. Mortal? Not gonna happen. Approachable? There’s a literal barrier that keeps you from getting close. This manga is known as Undead Unluck. Created by Yoshifumi Tozuka on January 20, 2020 (the events since, my god), it’s up to 18 volumes as of writing this with 11 currently translated for an international audience. It was recently picked up for an anime adaptation in August 2022, and it’s first episode debuted on October 7, 2023 on Hulu with weekly releases to follow.

It’s too early to tell whether it’ll run for 12-13 episodes or 24-26 episodes, so this post will be a first impression of the first episode and whenever the first season ends, I’ll review it in bulk with comparisons to the manga. If the title, didn’t give it away, I’m gonna spoil episode 1. So go watch the first episode if you haven’t already, then come back when you’re all caught up.

Speaking of which, the first episode is already markedly different from the first chapter. Being early 2020, no one could predict the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic then. On a side note: I first read about it in December 2019 and said to myself, “That’s unfortunate, but as long as it stays there [in Wuhan], we have nothing to worry about.” My words were delicious, thanks for asking.

Anyway, no one knew about the pandemic’s global impact in January, news was still getting out back then, and I bring this up because the manga starts in August 2020, deep into the pandemic with lockdown and travel restrictions in place across the world. This is reflected in the anime as the first scene shows the protagonist Fuuko Izumo set to self-delete from atop a trainline with only Andy, a.k.a. Undead watching from the other side. In the manga, she was surrounded by bystanders who were attempting to bring her back to safety but were stopped when she produced a knife.

Andy still walks into the blade and touches Fuuko’s face hoping to catch some of her Unluck ability, and like clockwork, the platform collapses beneath him, causing him to fall onto an incoming train. In the manga, they show the disruption of service due to the fall, but the anime skips past that and immediately shows Undead sprouting a new body from his head.

In the anime, members of an antagonistic agency (revealed later in the manga, I won’t spoil too much) show up to apprehend Undead, but he takes Fuuko with him and flees. In the manga, with the world still being populated, a civilian witness attempts to alert the cops on an out-of-context scenario involving a naked man and a young woman in public (honestly, much of the manga is just “Out of Context” the series; it’s unbelievable).

In both the manga and the anime, Undead and Fuuko stop at a building rooftop with Undead dangling Fuuko over the edge until she explains her Unluck ability. She explains it and although it was given a single page in the manga, the anime elaborated further on this. It starts with scenes alternating between Fuuko’s last connection with her parents before the accident, and scenes from the romance manga she was reading.

The anime had introduced them early, but by this point in the manga, after being saved from an accidental slip and fall from the rooftop, the antagonistic agency, represented by men in black suits observes their target making a run for it to an abandoned site. At the site, Fuuko’s jacket snags and she loses her beanie which kept her hair under wraps for years since no hairdresser or stylist could cut it without dropping dead. At the same time, Undead is maintaining as much skin contact with Fuuko while he cuts her hair so that he can test a few hypotheses, mainly is the impact influenced by duration or surface area?

Well, he doesn’t really get that answer since this agency of black suits tracks him down to his hideout and lops off his head. They put the head in a container and handcuff Fuuko, but the Unluck comes in clutch to save the two as one of the black suits gets zapped. Undead regenerates everything below the neck and removes the card he keeps in his head as a restrictor of sorts to cut them all down to size. Between the manga and the anime, this scene is a mix of gore and action.

The main guy in a black suit holds Fuuko at sword-point and threatens to behead her too if Undead doesn’t surrender his own head. Neither of them agree to that and when Fuuko breaks free and kisses Undead on the cheek, a meteorite decimates the abandoned hospital. With just a single cell of him left, Undead regenerates full and takes the black suit’s sword as a keepsake. Putting two and two together, he realizes that neither duration nor surface area have anything to do with the Unluck reciprocated and that it may be more connected to feelings of affection. Working with that as the going hypothesis, Undead, now christened “Andy” as a play on words (works better in Japanese) by Fuuko, half-jokingly proposes that they’ll both get their desired death if they have sex… which Fuuko is clearly not keen on as they both just met. And that’s where chapter 1/episode 1 leaves off.

For my impression, I say that if follows the manga as best as it can with a few nods to real life changes. Then again, for obvious reasons, the COVID pandemic and probably by extension the year 2020 aren’t going to be referenced very heavily in media unless it’ll be for alternate changes to reflect real life or for an alternate timeline of sorts. I liked what they did in just the first episode. This being, David Production, the people who brought us JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, I didn’t worry all that much about how it would look or turn out.

This studio tends to live up to their reputation and they made Undead Unluck look pretty good for the beginning. I didn’t think they’d expand further on the origin of Fuuko’s Unluck ability with the plane explosion, but from a narrative standpoint, it’s cool to see what we’re expecting going forward. The same goes for the scenes of Fuuko’s romance manga. This is connected to the plot many chapters into the manga, but without spoiling this again, DP seems to be playing the long game of adaptation with the foreshadowing in just this episode and likely more to follow.

If the anime is 1-cour running for 12 or 13 episodes, then the last episode should air on December 23 or 30 of this year. Alternatively, if it’s 2-cour running for 24 or 26 episodes then it should wrap up its first season by either March 16 or March 30, 2024. Whichever of those comes first, I’ll save a spot in my schedule for that and cover it in a post in the future.

Call me biased in favor of the series, but I’m glad to see something I cheerlead for in the beginning get one of its dues and I hope I can say the same for The Elusive Samurai when it releases in 2024.

Tomorrow I’ll be covering a media company that is on a slow and steady decline. Stay tuned. Here’s a hint:

Undead Unluck Anime Adaptation Confirmed?

Tiberius1 Comment

An obscure manga may be due for an obscure anime adaptation.

Currently on vacation so this might be a quick post with little detail. The end summary will make all the difference.

In January of 2020 whilst browsing the Shonen Jump section of viz.com, I was introduced to that month’s debut manga called Undead Unluck. It opens with our character Fuuko Izumo finishing a romance manga and then declaring to the public that she will end her own life. Dramatic? Yes, but she does have an explanation for this. When she physically interacts with people, the person who touched her suffers a proportional amount of misfortune depending on how long, how she was touched, and with what. Brushing up against someone while navigating a crowded train might delay service; prolonged skin-to-skin contact meanwhile means unimaginably bad luck from an injury to a life-altering injury to sometimes death. And it can range from coincidentally realistic to balls to deez nuts ridiculous.

During this confrontation, the second of the titular duo, named Andy, strikes up a conversation and is initially repelled by Fuuko with the same hostility she showed to the others in the vicinity. He falls onto an incoming train and his body cracks the window, but he legit walks it off. Yep. Remember in Naruto when the Leaf ninja were sent to dispose of Hidan, but were continually baffled by his refusal to keel over? It was kind of like that, only Andy hasn’t seen the light of Jashin yet.

And this is how the manga begins. Fuuko begins it wishing to end her life and so does Andy, but his problem is he’s basically Hidan or Deadpool with different rules. As the manga goes along, it’s revealed piecemeal that Andy has a lot of baggage from his life, and he hopes to reach his goal of sweet death by wooing Fuuko along the way. The proportionality is no joke. If intimate contact can topple a building without warning, then according to Andy, rounding third base especially with no condoms should bring about the intensity of Fimbulwinter. Basically, they’re both hoping to go out with a bang. No pun intended.

Fuuko’s and Andy’s abilities of misfortune and immortality surprisingly don’t make them all that special as there are others with similar supernatural abilities that are described as a single word but with the prefix Un- in front of it. Undead, unluck, unbreakable, unjust, untruth, unknown, that sort of thing. It’s a bizarre, indescribable manga that’s best experienced by reading it. I recall going to the Viz Media website to read a chapter weekly that year as the pandemic intensified. In the summer of 2021, this became unachievable as my brief experience with Army basic training by nature limited my access to technology, and keeping up with the outside world doesn’t happen during basic training. After returning from that experience, I found trouble keeping up with the manga as I’d missed so much. These days, I tune in a few times to see what’s going on. I’ll be missing context from one or five or an entire volume’s worth of chapters, but it’s still good reading and reading between the lines as well as a summary from the wiki can help.

Fast-forward to January of this year, and I learn that along the horizon, an anime adaptation is on the table.

Normally, when it comes to burgeoning manga that I lay my eyes on, I’m a historically terrible judge of character. Some manga I wanted to succeed get cancelled twenty chapters in, and others I don’t pay much attention to seem to blow up overnight. Everyone knows who Loid, Yor, and Anya all are because Spy x Family is a massive hit with a solid adaptation to boot, but I’m pretty sure only seven people will have ever heard of Black Torch or Time Paradox Ghostwriter, and I’m one of those seven.

It’s one thing to misjudge the success of something, but this one seems to be completely out of left field until you see what studio is said to be captaining the ship. It’s the same one that fixed with A.P.P.P. broke in the 1990s, the one that got a legendary underground manga to go mainstream for the first time in almost 25 years, the same one that copied Hokuto no Ken‘s homework. You know the one.

Yes, if things go as planned and Undead Unluck goes from print to animation cel to pirate streaming site, David Production will take full responsibility for converting more anime onlies to another underground manga. David Pro has a set standard for adaptations. JoJo’s shown above and Fire Force are the only two anime that I know they worked on, but the quality of both speaks for themselves. The adaptation of Part 6 Stone Ocean can be seen as controversial within the JoJo community over the amount of CG in select episodes coupled with Netflix’s outdated batch release formula that may or may not have influenced the direction of the adaptation. The same can be said about Fire Force’s fanservice, but above all, save for a few tweaks and changes from manga panel to animation cel is nearly 1 to 1. And there’s normally an explanation for a change anyway.

Actually, changes in continuity aren’t all that uncommon or interesting when it comes to an adaptation of anything. It mostly only matters if the adaptation and the source material are on different wavelengths. For Undead Unluck, I can expect the anime to be as faithful to the manga as possible with a few changes here and there. As of writing this, YouTube and Google feed me articles and teasers with short scenes and demos of the anime to come with no real word on the adaptation to speak of in any significant detail. This can be understandable or suspicious depending on several factors. In the gaming-sphere, all the scrutiny goes to the studio and its leadership if all their hard work is shown in a pre-rendered trailer that fakes the intensity of an upcoming video game.

But anime is more or less forgiven considering how dungeon-esque working conditions can look for animators, as well as studios being notoriously tightlipped about the quality of scenes who draws them all. It’s no secret that the folks at Wit, SHAFT, Aniplex, MAPPA, Pierrot, et al outsource some of their work to Good Korea, China, Thailand, and Vietnam, but whether your favorite arc is being drawn by Saigonese Gustav Klimt or the water buffalo filling in for him while he battles a case of ligma is up in the air. r/Boruto just found out why the anime’s been getting a glow up in recent episodes and it’s not just because Eida is a sexy she-devil. If what they say is true, then the Boruto anime might’ve been used for trainees from other studios.

But as I stated before, David Pro is on the case and living up to their goal of being like their biblical namesake, I don’t expect them to miss a beat. I’ll try my best to keep an eye out for more news on Unkillable + Unfortunate.