'This would be a lot better if she just liked little boys.' by Kara
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 at 10:05 AM

So I've watched two episodes of Wangan Midnight, and I'm having a really hard time deciding how I feel about it.

To explain. Wangan Midnight is a relatively new street-racing anime. It looks suspiciously similar to Initial D, except with a lower budget, shinier (by which I mean modern-standard, not better -- worse, in fact) animation, and CG cars that bother me a bit more for some reason. Wangan has about three years on D in manga form, and is still coming out. We know how I feel about anime based on manga that are still running. The ending is always either too open or too happy. I can't stand open-ended stories for some reason. It always feels like a cop-out in case they get more money or something.

Anyway.

There is (from what I can tell in two episodes) quite a different plot, if this plot has a chance of lasting terribly long. Basically a guy buys a car that was involved in a nasty wreck, but he decides he's gonna fix it up and 'tame' it. The owner of the car (who was killed in the wreck) has the exact same name as our protagonist, and now the car's original owner's sister has met the new owner and is going nuts for various reasons. I think there's more to it, but like I said, that's two episodes.

It's hard for me to accuse it of coping Initial D in any way (the protagonists look awfully similar, they both work at a gas station, the whole street-racing thing in general) because Wangan Midnight came first in manga form. They also both ran in the same magazine.

Now for the anime, they're clearly playing up the similarities more than the differences, something like the lady who claims she wrote a book about a glasses-wearing kid named Larry Potter well before Rowling started her [insert sarcastic remark here]. The books were nothing alike, but they marketed it to trick Potter fans. Initial D and Wangan Midnight have very different character types, the racing style is different (they're not racing on empty streets, but they're also driving in a straight line), and the story is something else entirely, at least so far.

But the CG cars, the general art style, and the fact that the OP is done by a band that really wants to sound like m.o.v.e. ...

They're trying too hard to market it and not hard enough to actually dig around for that potential.

It gets one more episode.

If you have been, NOT AGAIN!!!