It’s getting harder and harder to ignore the elephant in the room that is MAPPA.  They’re for all practical purposes a black company, treating their contractors and staff astonishingly badly even by anime standards.  They’re insidiously clever about it too – snatching up huge-name manga (like Chainsaw Man) that they know animators want to work on and fans want to see in order to insulate themselves against boycotts.  They pay a few select high-end talents well to buy their silence as they exploit the majority of the staff.  They stifle attempts by the exploited to call them out publicly.  In short, they’re a blight on anime and an insult to the name of Maruyama Masao, the legend who founded the company (and left when the writing was on the wall).

I don’t know what the answer is for me as a writer.  I have thoughts on the larger issue and where any small hope it might be addressed lies, but that’s a series of dedicated posts in its own right.  For me, I’m torn on whether to cover anything MAPPA produces at this point.  But where does that leave me on Chainsaw Man, the most-anticipated series of the year?  Or Shingeki, which I’ve suffered through four seasons of to get to this point?  RE-MAIN is certainly not a tentpole show like those (which means it’s highly susceptible to total production collapse as all MAPPA’s non-priority projects are), but it is a sports anime with a big-name creator and as such, theoretically right in my wheelhouse.

There are no easy answers.  I don’t know what my answer is yet, so for the moment I’ll talk about the show itself, which I freely admit is a total copout.  The aforementioned big name is Nishida Masafumi, creator of Tiger & Bunny, who’s both writing and directing here.  And the sport is water polo, a pretty obscure one but not as much (outside India) as kabaddi.  What I know about water polo is that it’s dirty, brutal, and you have to be in insanely good shape to play it.  Better shape than you would be after lying unmoving in a hospital bed for 7 months, that’s for sure.

I don’t think it’s necessary to point out who the target audience is for RE-MAIN – the same one as T & B, as it happens.  This is a major branch of the sports anime tree now, and the problem is that these series have become so established that a lot of tropes are emerging.  Maybe Nishida is enough of an established figure that he’ll about getting too bogged down in that, and for the most part the first episode was quite good.  It’s the story of a boy named Kiyomizu Minato who’s an ace water polo player in junior high, but in is involved in a car accident with his mother and sister, and wakes up 203 days later with no memory of the last three years (effectively, his entire junior high tenure and water polo career).

This is all set in Kurashiki, a lovely old canal town near Okayama, where Minato and his family have a jeans/souvenir shop (Kurashiki is famous for jeans for some reason).  And the best scenes of the episode are the interactions between Minato and the family, all of whom are on pins and needles trying to pretend the current situation isn’t awkward and stressful.  Minato initially declares that he’s going to take up water polo again, but eventually decides that’s too much for him (see insanely good shape, above).  And besides, he’s got to figure out how to get into high school with no memory of anything he learned in middle school (where according to his sister he was a pretty bad student to begin with).

The school scenes work less well for me, especially the ones involving the very annoying kouhai Oda Eitarou.  There’s a lot of comedy that falls flat (the premiere is generally better at drama than comedy) though Nishida’s success with Tiger & Bunny gives me hope that will improve.  I do like the premise – it has a lot of pathos to it.  And water polo could potentially be an interesting sport to explore.  This was the sort of premiere that had hopeful and cautionary signs cancelling each out for its entire run, so even setting aside the whole MAPPA thing I’m still nowhere near ready to make a call on this show.