Wakaranai

Rating:    

Set in what seems to be some kind of alternate-universe Brazil, Michiko to Hatchin tells the story of Hana Morenos. Hana is routinely abused by every single member of her adopted family, who only takes care of her because the government pays them to…until one day, an escaped convict named Michiko Malandro crashes through their kitchen window on a motorcycle, claiming to be Hana’s real mother. Confused but willing to do anything to escape, Hana agrees to go with her…

Michiko to Hatchin is a difficult series to review. At times I loved it, other times it couldn’t hold my interest; at times it was stylishly and slickly produced, other times the animation was a mess. There’s so much contrast in Michiko to Hatchin, as it flings itself from mood to mood and genre to genre with hit & miss results, that it’s difficult to digest the series as a whole. I keep zooming in to particular episodes, remembering the best and worst. And it genuinely was a show with highs and lows. When it peaked, it was truly stellar, producing a handful of episodes that were amongst the most gripping and impactive I can recall from any anime. But you could get an episode immediately after that which would fail to act as even mild entertainment. Specifically, the episodes dealing with the side characters from Michiko’s past with a street gang, are far and above the most exciting and dramatic of the whole show. I often feel like recommending people watch only those episodes featuring Satoshi, the charismatic and brutal gang figure. And that’s symptomatic of one of the show’s chronic ailments: poor lead characters.

The female duo of Michiko and Hatchin, an affection-starved and stubborn kid and an even more stubborn criminal, never really become captivating enough as characters to pull the audience into their journey. Michiko, tough and sexy, is an unstoppable force, but her selfishness and immaturity leave few openings for us to get to like her. Her abrasiveness rubs off on her loli sidekick, Hatchin, who is honest and mature but not afraid to complain. She begins the series on a sympathetic footing, being pulled out of an abusive family, but by the end of the series she was about as uncute as you can get. While I appreciate that they are unique characters, and about as far from an anime stereotype as you can get, I think if we could’ve related to either of them more, or at least be more enamored by them, then their little episodic adventures would have been more interesting.

The series is largely saved by the ‘villain’ characters, who, as with any good gangster flick, exude a real sense of power and danger. The conflict that brews up between Satoshi and Shinsuke is as fascinating as it vicious, a whirlwind of greed and revenge that ends an old friendship violently. The main thrust of the plot deals with Michiko & Hatchin’s personal journey as they pursue the enigmatic Hiroshi, but it is the gang-land element that gives the show its potency and bite. Without it, I think it would have been all too frivolous and forgettable. The pacing is also to blame for its inconsistency, and was an almost constant source of aggravation, because it would use a frustrating storytelling trick of ending an episode on a cliffhanger and then, instead of delivering the climax, time-skip or enter another character to have it resolved in retrospect. That’s a jarring cop-out that crops up a few times.

The quest for Hiroshi was not enough of a story to sustain the momentum of the show (although, without spoiling anything, I was very happy with how it all played out in the end). Hiroshi may have meant a lot to Michiko, but he sure as hell didn’t mean much to me, and the search for him wasn’t enough for me to excuse the hit & miss episodic stories. Looking back, there were quite a good proportion of non-standalone episodes, but they weren’t always successful either. Mind you, there’s no law against episodic shows, just look at how amazing Cowboy Bebop and GitS:SAC are, but Michiko to Hatchin’s meandering attitude fell short largely because of the main characters and a general lack of compelling story ideas. I really think things could have worked out better if it was a shorter length.

If there’s one thing you can say about this series is that, for better or for worse, it was experimental and ‘different’. I’ll try not to sound pretentious, but, even if it wasn’t the series it could’ve been, and even if it was a mess of win and fail, Michiko to Hatchin was a refreshing break away from the all too often genre-bound anime that we mostly get. It wasn’t afraid to be strange, to be confronting, or to irreverently bound from one genre to another. It’s a shame that anime like this have to be so constrained by budget, because some of the action scenes are marred by distorted character cels and poor frame-rates. Fortunately though, aided by the excellent background art and the fantastic episode directing, there were many exceptional and dynamic visual shots throughout the series. Even if the cel animation was often quite poor, the setting of pseudo-Brazil was captured really well by the vivid background art and the upbeat, authentic score music (which was overseen by the renowned Shinichiro Watanabe). The music is definitely one of the show’s charms, and although I’d probably say it didn’t have enough of a presence, there were some really amazing tracks utilised over its run, particularly in the climax of the last few episodes. The end of the series is one of its real saving graces. In a well-written bout of episodes - the finale clashes together the main plot threads that were dangled across the series in a fierce, action-packed, and ultimately moving finish. Overall, it’s not revolutionary, and it’s definitely not perfect, but, from its outlandish characters, through to the bone of its exotic setting, Michiko to Hatchin is something you haven’t seen before and is well worth watching if you can endure some sub-par episodes for when the series gets it right and produces something great.

This is something I wish they’d kept up - the first two episodes had the ‘loli-pantsu of the week’ thing going on, but that quickly evapourated. Fortunately, Satoshi’s vile badassery completely destroys any need for fanservice. I do mourn the fact that Hatchin lost all her femininity pretty quickly in the series though. It’s that damned hair cut problem again. The general rule in anime is that if a girl cuts their hair short they become a less appealing character (Eureka, Nia, and Hatchin!).