In the first episode of Deadman Wonderland, our protagonist Ganta is tossed in jail for a mass murder that he did not commit.
An awful way to start the school day.
Summary:
At school, Ganta is chatting with his friends at the beginning of the day when suddenly everyone notices a strange masked man in red hovering outside the window. The Red Man attacks with an unknown power and destroys the classroom. Ganta wakes up to find all of his classmates dead, and the Red Man embeds a red crystal into Ganta's chest and Ganta faints once again.
A joke of a court. Too bad the joke is on Ganta.
Ganta wakes up in the hospital and learns that he has been charged with murdering all of his classmates. Due to a fake video made by his sleazy lawyer Tsunenaga Tamaki, Ganta is convicted of the crime and sentenced to death. Ganta is sent to Deadman Wonderland, Japan's first commercialized prison/amusement park which happens to be run by Tamaki. In Deadman Wonderland, the inmates must work in the amusement park to entertain guests. All prisoners are fitting with a collar that releases poison into the prisoner, and the only way to stay alive is earn temporary antidotes (known as "candy") by competing/working in the amusement park.
Welcome to Deadman Wonderland.
At the prison, Ganta and the other new arrivals are briefed by prison chief Makina of the rules. During the briefing, a guy pushes a cart of cargo into Ganta, causing Ganta to drop his bag of provisions. The guy hands Ganta back his bag, but Makina knows the guy lifted something out of Ganta's bag and slices the guy with her sword. Makina then tells Ganta and the new arrivals that this is the reality they have to live in.
When you can't stick up for yourself, having a somersaulting girl stick up for you isn't a bad option.
Ganta is sent to work in a construction site within the prison. Thinking about the awful circumstances that he is in, Ganta thinks that he is better off dead. Suddenly, a girl with long white hair appears and starts swinging a steel rod at Ganta in order to help Ganta die. When Ganta dodges, the girl states that Ganta still wants to live in his heart. The girl calls herself Shiro and seems to know Ganta, but Ganta doesn't recognize her. The two are then approached by the other prisoners on the site who are here to bully Ganta. Shiro kicks one of the guys around but she is knocked out by a shovel to the back of her head. The other prisoners then start stomping away at Ganta but suddenly explosions sends the top of a nearby building falling down. In desperation, Ganta activates the crystal embedded in his chest and uses his own blood to form a projectile to blast through the falling debris. Ganta and Shiro survives, but all the nearby prisoners are killed.
One of the only times where something didn't go badly for Ganta.
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An okay debut episode. The production quality looked decent so far. I read and cover the Deadman Wonderland manga on this blog, so I already know the major developments. However, there are some details that I don't remember very well, so I went back to skim the first chapter of the manga, and it turns out there were some changes compared to the manga version. The most notable was Ganta's courtroom scene which was just glossed over in a page in the manga. The courtroom scene helps to add some more background to Ganta's misfortunes, but I feel it wasn't really necessary since Ganta's conviction is just so utterly ridiculous.
There are other small changes, but this episode mostly followed the first chapter of the manga. This intro episode did a decent job staring Ganta off on his journey into the hellhole known as Deadman Wonderland, and you gotta feel a little sorry for the guy. I was interested to see how the anime would handle the violence and gore of the source material, and not surprisingly the anime dimmed the lights during the introductory scene where the Red Man slaughtered Ganta's classmates. I expect the violence and gore will be toned down, but hopefully it won't be cut down too much. The action is one of the better aspects of the series.
Let's see if Manglobe will do a decent job adapting the rest of the series. The Deadman Wonderland manga isn't "great", but I like it and it's a decent action manga with a not-bad story and an extra dose of gore. Deadman Wonderland will probably be the only anime I'll blog episodically this season. I still have a month until the end the current semester, and so there a couple of finals and course projects to worry about. I'm also becoming lazier and lazier about blogging, and that's probably not a good sign lol.
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