Persona 4 The Animation episode 1

My usual little dis­claimer here that I have no pre­vi­ous exper­i­ence with any­thing Per­sona related, whether that be the games or that pre­vi­ous Trin­ity Soul anime that every­one says is rub­bish. So keep that in mind and real­ise that there’s no pre­vi­ous bias when I say Per­sona 4 has eas­ily the best first epis­ode of the sea­son so far. OK, not exactly stiff com­pet­i­tion, given that the pre­vi­ous best was Bak­u­man, but credit where credit is due.

Per­sona 4 is almost text­book with its open­ing epis­ode. Set the scene by intro­du­cing the main char­ac­ter, the set­ting and the vari­ous side char­ac­ters. Estab­lish very early on that there’s some­thing a little bit strange about this new place. Gradu­ally build up the mys­tery with little events going wrong, rumours being spread, strange news reports and other minor irreg­u­lar­it­ies. Have the weird­ness explode in the final act and end on a cool note, pro­claim­ing “this is the story, aint this going to be awe­some”. Everything is so delib­er­ate, from the cold open with Igor, to the first head­ache the main char­ac­ter gets when enter­ing the town. As I said, it’s a text­book way to do an open­ing episode.

Don’t take this as though that means Per­sona 4 is gen­eric. It’s simply good storytelling. Steins;Gate star­ted with some­thing sim­ilar, estab­lish­ing the set­ting, the char­ac­ters and hav­ing small details seem a little bit off. Gran­ted, Per­sona 4 moves at a much faster pace than Steins;Gate, chan­ging from minor strange things occur­ring straight into them jump­ing into a tele­vi­sion. Gran­ted, Steins;Gate was a very slow paced show in gen­eral, so speed­ing things up a bit isn’t unwel­come. I can see why the wanted to end the first epis­ode on them being in the Per­sona world. Without that, it would have simply looked like a slightly off-kilter high school anime with a mys­tery brew­ing, and I don’t think Per­sona 4 has any inten­tion of being a mys­tery story.

Still, jump­ing through the story so quickly does have its faults. It’s the usual Seiji Kishi prob­lem of not hav­ing a clue about tone. I would have liked a care­ful build up of the mys­tery sur­round­ing the tele­vi­sion chan­nel, but instead we get char­ac­ters hav­ing a reg­u­lar chat to sud­denly being sucked into a tele­vi­sion. This tonal shift works some­times, such as the scene where the main char­ac­ter non­chal­antly put­ting his hand through the tele­vi­sion in Junes and com­ment­ing on it mat­ter of fact-ly. Other scenes though, such as the main char­ac­ter sit­ting in his room, mind­ing his own busi­ness, before sud­denly get­ting attacked by his tele­vi­sion, were rather less effect­ive. Also the main char­ac­ter has no per­son­al­ity, although I’m hop­ing that changes now that he’s got him­self a fash­ion­able pair of glasses.

Everything else though? I loved it. The show oozes style from every ori­fice (please do not try to ima­gine a creature ooz­ing liquid style from its pores. I did, and now I can’t get the image out of my head). The day shifts have this almost Shaft/PenguinDrum like approach. The char­ac­ter designs are great, as are their incred­ibly fash­ion­able clothes. I don’t talk about clothes too often…in fact, I never talk about clothes, so take this as a sign of how god­dam fash­ion­able these guys are. The boy’s uni­form has sequins! I wish my uni­form had sequins. The char­ac­ters are fant­ast­ic­ally var­ied, each with dis­tin­guish­able per­son­al­it­ies, and we didn’t have to have another char­ac­ter mono­logue over describ­ing what their per­son­al­it­ies are like. I wish there was slightly more back­ground music. Not that the scenes neces­sar­ily needed it, but when the music did actu­ally play, it was funky as hell, so any­more of that would be greatly appreciated.

To sum up my feel­ings in 5 words: Finally some­thing bet­ter than Bakuman!