Orient – Irina Not Being Picky

Orient was created by Shinobu Ootaka, who is also behind Magi. I’m telling you this because the character designs look a lot alike. I actually loved them, just like I liked the ones in Magi. In fact, I will say it was my favourite part of the production aside from the voice acting. Here’s the thing though. This is one of those anime where the art was great, especially for the characters, but the animation was not at all.

Action and fight scenes would often use stills, the movements were jagged and whenever characters were off in the distance they lost all detailing and started to move oddly. The physics were sometimes off as well making any suspension of disbelief you might have mustered up, pretty much impossible to keep up. But it was and is a rather pretty anime in my opinion. I put a lot of screencaps up on Pinterest and they are super popular for what that’s worth.

As I said, the only other notable part of the production for me was the voice acting. Which was super fun. It brought a whole lot to the series! I looked it up and both lead voice actors have had some fun roles. More importantly, they’ve played off each other in a couple of series before and I think that’s why you can hear the chemistry. There’s a camaraderie there that comes from familiarity and can’t be faked.

Oh boy, where do I start? Orient is a somewhat convoluted fantasy epic. It takes place in a world kind of like our own past but there are magic swords and demon-aliens that eat rocks. It’s actually a pretty standard fantasy epic formula. The orphaned hero with a brother/best friend who seems to be straying into a different moral path. A world overrun with powerful monsters that are not what they seem to be. Heroes of legend that turn out to be disappointing at first glance. The whole shebang. It’s the type of story you have heard before and the type of characters you know well.

Orien does throw in a few twists that are to put it kindly, silly. To put it a bit more bluntly, stupid. For instance, even though the setting is analogous to preindustrial earth, there are magic motorcycles and one guy has a magic helicopter. It looks exactly like a modern helicopter with crystals coming out of it. Why? You can have dragons in this world you know? Heck, you could just have characters that teleport. Why does the one guy need a helicopter? It looks super out of place.

It’s also generally a pretty unsophisticated story. If you were to tell me the author wrote it for little kids, I would believe you. The characters are all pretty much one note and the story evolution is basic. By any objective metric, I can judge Orient, it’s an average at best anime. There are elements that are not good at all and some that are decent. That’s about it. So why is there more to this post?

That’s because I really liked Orient. A lot. Even as I was watching it, on more than one occasion I thought to myself, wow, this show is not very good, I am having so much fun. Let me be clear, I don’t think Orient is so bad it’s good. I didn’t have fun at its expense I enjoyed it genuinely for what it was.

Sure it was facile and the characters are shallow. Sure there are things that make no sense at all. But I had fun. The pacing is great. The voice acting, like I mentioned, really makes you feel like you are watching two old friends biker. The visuals are pretty. There’s a whole carefree atmosphere with just enough intrigue to make you wonder what’s going to happen next without ever asking you to get too invested in the story.

I realize this is an unpopular opinion. On AniList out of the people that I know that have watched orient, two of them dropped it in the first 12 episodes and another two gave it in the 60% range. But the last person adored it and gave it a near-perfect score. I obviously acknowledge that there is a lot wrong with the anime. I can’t bring myself to score it that high. But if we’re talking pure personal enjoyment, I’ve had more fun with Orient than a lot of other shows lately. It made me want to go pick up the manga again.

An Orient Express