I’m starting to get comfortable with “dumpster fire”.

My goodness – just what in the world happened here?  To be clear, I haven’t come to hate Nihon Chinbotsu 2020 – I still find it entertaining in a freakshow sort of way and somehow, I still care about the characters.  But damn, I just can’t help but wonder what the hell Yuasa-sensei was thinking.  Is this the novel – it that this nuts too, or is the anime taking liberties with the material?  You just have to ask – who in the world looked at this script and said “that sounds good to me”?

Kitchen sink doesn’t even begin to cover what’s going on here.  The ludicrous death scenes, for starters, can only remind me of Blood-C – there’s no other anime that can even be drawn into a comparison.  Why is that necessary?  Then there’s the whole business with Onodera being the locked-in patient at Shan City, and his morse code predictions.  That’s sort of interesting in its own right, but this angle needs to have some exposition – it’s just slathered over the narrative like an Earl Scheib pain job.  And the degree of coincidence (which is already pretty intense with this show) really makes it a subplot that’s hard to accept.

Mom?  She’s got a pacemaker (solar, at least) after heart surgery, which she’s decided to keep from her family (presumably it’s why she traveled overseas?).  Ayumu has a gangrenous leg.  Koga-kun gets stabbed through the shoulder with a massive bolt of shrapnel.  And everything that happens with the cult, the kid, and Hikita-san (I still don’t really understand why he wanted to go to Shan City in the first place – to talk to his dead granddaughter, I suppose) – well, that’s just comic opera.

The thing is, I don’t really understand why all this English pantomime is necessary.  Isn’t the core premise itself dramatic enough?  I like the bits where the family tries to deal with this horrible new reality.  I like the exploration of issues raised by using a “My Number” lottery to decide who lives and dies, splitting up families in the process (shouldn’t some allowance be made for that?).  I certainly like seeing the inevitable rise of  nationalists in the chaos, and seeing them get what’s coming to them.  This is dramatic gold – the science, the family drama, the ethics and politics.  Why all this other absurdity?

One other question I have to ask: what the hell happened to the budget?  I was under the impression that Netflix ponies up more dough than the average production committee (evidence supports this), and Science SARU has earned a golden reputation.  But these episodes look like crap, to be blunt.  Off-model characters are everywhere, the animation is jerky and disjointed, and the direction – so help me – seems very lazy.  Was there some kind of trouble in paradise thing going on behind the scenes, perhaps connected to Yuasa’s departure from Science SARU?  The first five episodes were immeasurably better, if not always exactly lavish.

And yet…  I have no urge not to finish Japan Sinks.  It’s a hot mess but like I said, I still care about this family, and buried under the layers of pancake makeup is an essential plot that’s quite compelling.  This is not Blood-C, which was no less than an abomination on every level – it falls more under the “what a shame” umbrella.  It’s interesting, it’s oddly compelling, occasionally even moving – but Nihon Chinbotsu 2020 is also unintentionally funny, fugly as sin and not-in-good-way bizarre.  At least it’s not boring, or generic – which I guess in the anime landscape is more important than it used to be.  But to quote from “Maud Miller”, “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!'”.