The Raid: No Redemption

I took another gamble this season by choosing to watch Active Raid. I usually follow the critics' reviews pretty close when deciding which shows to follow, and on this one they were somewhat evenly split. Mistakenly giving it the benefit of the doubt, I found Active Raid to be the kind of white noise I mentally flush about a week after the ending. But what did intrigue me now is why this show fails when other, similar shows succeed.

In Active Raid, X technology has revolutionized society, but also given rise to X crime. Enter Y, a police force that pilots their own X to counter this. But Y is actually staffed by a ragtag group of quirky individuals! Will justice prevail, or shenanigans ensue?

Sound familiar? You replace X with Will Wear and Y with Unit 8 in this case, but could just as easily substitute Labor and SV2 to get Patlabor from about 30 years ago. When comparing these two directly, however (since it's pretty hard not to), I find Active Raid falls far short in the character and plot departments.

To be fair, almost everyone is an over-the-top archetype in both shows. But Patlabor tends to feel just a tad less ethereal; while eccentric, we can still kinda-sorta see a gun nut like Isao Oota or an unpredictable prodigy like Kanuka Clancy existing in real life. Active Raid gives us diehard train otaku and former gambling legends, both cute girls of course. You wouldn't exactly find many people like this in real life, and yet these quirks are usually revealed and showcased over just a single episode.

This causes two problems: first, it kills the characters by not weaving their personalities into the show bit by bit. Haruka is a train otaku because it came in handy that one episode; personality established, moving on. Second, it kills the humor by not fully capitalizing on characters' quirks. If Haruka was constantly talking about trains, looking at pictures of trains, forcing her obsession on everybody, then maybe you'd have a decent running gag. As it stands, characters exist in a purgatory where they don't feel like real people, yet don't act out enough to work well as cartoons. How are they suppose to make an impression on us?

Patlabor lies firmly on the realistic end of the spectrum, a weird place for a comedy series. Not only could some characters be just like our own more eccentric co-workers, the world it sets up still feels like it could be our own ten years from now. The humor works because it's easy to imagine most off-the-wall scenarios happening, then being made worse by a gaggle of offbeat personalities. Even better, Patlabor can get serious when it needs to, establishing real stakes at times and introducing villains with genuinely scary worldviews. This stuff's compelling even today because it's still easy to see parallels between life and this particular piece of art.

Active Raid is anime imitating anime. You've got your easygoing slob of a male lead who always pisses off his trash-separating clean freak of a partner. You've got your good-looking hacker main villain, always smugly confident of his ideals even though we have yet to hear what the fuck they are (seriously, there is no hint of what he thinks is so wrong with society that it's okay to put thousands in danger). You've got your pop idol episode, your giant robot episode, your high-stakes gambling episode. We've seen all this done before, better, and guess what? Our investment in the show isn't really helped by the constant shifts in focus, especially since there isn't any clear message beyond “good guys stop bad terrorists!”

Despite my ranting tone, this is not a terrible series. There's no janky animation, intolerable filler arc, or backwards morality to be found. It just doesn't aspire to do anything but mimic a half-dozen shows it liked, once, without thinking about what made them work. The watered-down diet soda aftertaste it leaves is definitely preferable to other crap I've sampled, but doesn't need to be sought out by anyone. Don't settle for an imitation like Active Raid; go for a series that had ideas and did something with them.