Tokyo Ghoul is a supernatural, dark fantasy Shounen following a seemingly ordinary boy by the name of Kaneki Ken who lives in a world with both humans and ghouls. After organs of a ghoul were transplanted to Kaneki, his life drastically changed. A very polarizing anime, with large popularity but still hated by the majority.
The TV anime is produced by Studio Pierrot based on manga of the same name. The Director of the show is Shuhei Morita. During the surge of vampire anime, Tokyo Ghoul managed to stand out and leave a footprint in the industry choosing a less popular mythological creature. The opening of the first season (Unravel) is arguably the most popular opening of all time. Like many similar anime, Tokyo Ghoul took supernatural beings and made them look sympathetic despite their violent tendencies.
The main focus of the show was on two things: how the main character deals with his internal dilemma and his life being drastically changed practically overnight and the ongoing ‘’war’’ between ghouls and humans. The CCG is an organization designated to hunt down and kill ghouls. However, some ghouls eat already dead people, meaning not all of them are essentially bad. CCG’s denial of this part about them can be transferred into a lot of real-life situations with government organizations.
Main Critique of Tokyo Ghoul
The anime started pretty strong when the first season aired. A lot of hype surrounded the release and Tokyo Ghoul gained immense popularity. Season 2 upset a lot of people since it strayed from the manga material. It had a few plot holes and a bit of bad pacing. The third and fourth seasons were fully based on the sequel manga, Tokyo Ghoul: re. This is when Tokyo Ghoul became quite infamous. The anime rushed the whole story, cramming even 10 books (120 chapters) into 12 episodes and skipping the middle of the story. This was a disservice to the anime watchers since season 3 starts with absolutely no regard to what happened in season 2, which makes it hard for people who haven’t read the manga to follow.
Animation
Overall the animation was pretty good. At least for the part that we could see. Due to the gore nature of the anime, some TV channels censored a lot of the blood and ultimately disabled viewers to see the most interesting fight scenes. That is because the censoring was done horribly. Black blurry spots cover bloody or dismembered body parts and beams of light obscure wounds. During some battle scenes that were a bit more bloody than the rest, the colors were inverted causing the blood to appear a light shade of neon blue. The change from the original colors to the inverted ones was done drastically, making it seem distasteful.
The famous soundtrack of both Tokyo Ghoul and Tokyo Ghoul:re
The tracks in this show are very beautifully made. The main thing I like about them is that they are longer than the majority of tracks in other anime. Because of that, one track or song was often split up so no individual song is playing for an extended amount of time. This created a nostalgic feel whenever a part of a song that played earlier in the show reappears.
Conclusion
Despite the most confusing, unexplained time-skips, I enjoyed the anime. There are a lot of interesting characters and good developments. However, as the show progressed, they left out characters quite often which can be infuriating if you started to like them. The music is amazing and the themes of ambiguous morality are prominent. There are a lot of lessons that we could take from this fantasy anime.
