Halfway through April, this season's new fan has already produced a lot of good works.
In addition to the highly acclaimed "Spy Over home" and "Party Wanderer Zhuge Kongming", recently, a new one has joined the battle.
It is the unaired "Summer Re-enactment".
Only the first words were released, Douban is a surprisingly high score of 9.4, basically booked the best of the season, and even some people call it "the first Shenfan after Reiwa".
Such an anti-heavenly expectation value, of course, is due to the super high quality of the original manga.
Written by Yasuori Tanaka and serialized in Shonen Jump in October 2017, this manga has been unanimously evaluated by readers as the best suspense in recent years.
Even everyone has said that as long as it is honestly adapted, then, "Summer Recurrence" can be broadcast as hegemony, and the turnover rate is basically zero.
In fact, at first glance, it seems to have a lot of shadows of classic predecessors, such as the backtracking system of RE:0 and the time travel of "Gate of the Stone of Destiny".
Including the domestic drama "The Beginning" some time ago, it also allowed the domestic mainstream audience to taste the sweetness of "unlimited flow".
The Gate of the Stone of Destiny
Although the basic setting of "Summer Recurrence" is also "time reincarnation", if there is nothing new, it is impossible to stand out in a bunch of similar genres.
In the first episode that just aired, the animated version gave a very stunning OP.
At the end of the opening song, the male protagonist Shen Ping looks at us firmly, raises his left hand, and commits suicide by drinking a bullet.
As the gunshots rang out, the story officially began.
We all know that for the "reincarnation" setting, the death of the protagonist is an opportunity to reshuffle the cards, and for "Summer Recurrence", this action is a pun.
Viewers who have seen the original will definitely get goosebumps.
Unlike the protagonists of the same genre, most of them are pushed away by the cycle, and the passive death is different again and again.
"The Beginning"
Every time Shen Ping takes the initiative to end his life, it also means the beginning of a change of life against the sky.
This is also the most powerful core of "Summer Recurrence", focusing on the "fight" of the protagonist group - they fight not only the so-called villains, but also the entire time, the whole life cause and effect, and the dialectical logic of existence.
And this real, ever-expanding control, with the advancement of the plot, gradually makes people orgasm and can't stop.
Even if you don't have feelings about such stories, you have to marvel at the strength of Tanaka Yasuki's pen, he can be said to have played through the form of "reincarnation".
Of course, the most taboo of such works is nothing more than spoilers, and it is also recommended that you do not watch any spoilers and follow them with peace of mind.
Let's also try to avoid spoilers, let's first look at the basic setting of the story.
Its opening is very concise and straightforward, and with a classic "protagonist returning home", everything is indented into this isolated island.
Shinpei, a young man who went to Tokyo to work alone, returned to his hometown of Hitoshima after two years.
He came back this time to attend the funeral of his young plum bamboo horse, Chao.
But before and after the funeral, Shen Ping heard a lot of strange things.
Chao accidentally lost his life in order to save the drowning girl Xiao Li, which seems to be an accident, but the friend said that the autopsy report showed that there was a possibility that he was killed.
Sure enough, under Shen Ping's repeated questioning, Chao's sister Li said something strange.
First, the surviving girl, Xiao Li, claimed to have seen a girl who was exactly like herself a few days before the accident.
Three days before Chao's death, the sisters witnessed another girl exactly like Chao flashing on the reef on the beach.
In this way, the two people who witnessed the vision, one was almost dead, and the other had already died in Huangquan.
Just when Shinpei was puzzled, according to the old hunter of the island, Nezu, such a vision seemed to have a long history.
On this small island, there is a terroir called "shadow disease", which was very popular after the war and gradually disappeared.
Anyone who suffers from shadow disease will see another self first, and soon after, will be killed by shadow.
The shadow that inherits the memory and appearance of the original owner will directly replace the original owner in the crowd and wait for the opportunity to kill others.
That is to say, the purpose of each shadow is almost always to kill the body, and over time, the island will be occupied by a group of replicants.
You can't tell who is the shadow and who is the entity.
For the male protagonist Shen Ping, his only chance to turn over is to use reincarnation.
As a result, "shadow + reincarnation" has also become the basic setting of the whole story, and the retrospection of the first two weeks is to pave the way for the huge and complex worldview in the future.
Because of this, many original parties are worried about the beginning of the animation and cannot create the atmosphere of horror that is about to come.
But for now, the first episode has far exceeded our expectations.
The entire production exudes a steady texture of not bad money, there are almost no still frames in the first episode, and several powerful storyboards are quite smooth.
What is even more rare is that it not only realizes the horror island that the comic wants to build, but also brings a wonderful sense of flow with the advantage of animation coherence.
A large number of empty mirrors are interspersed in a slightly eerie everyday life - islands, beads of sweat, bicycles of young boys and girls, water droplets dripping from air conditioners, who is not excited by the horror that cannot be suppressed in the blue sky?
The atmosphere rendering of the first episode is very good.
Everything seems gentle, gentle, casting a little shadow of death on the Summer Island, with a utopian atmosphere, nourishing the dark-haired and gloomy teenager, and the wheat-colored vitality girl.
In the silence of the picture and the occasional ticking sound, it seems like a foreshadowing everywhere, but you never know what will happen in the next second.
Suddenly, in the forest, a gunshot rang out, the crow flew in shock, and the next reincarnation had begun.
And when you know the plot behind, you will feel even more cold hairs.
Like the rhythm of the manga with pagination, the animated version is also trying to restore this fast, accurate, and fierce narrative strength.
The first episode of surprise began as an appetizer, and for an original like Summer Revisited, each subsequent episode will only get more and more exciting.
It can almost be said that there is no short board, and it is really too suitable for animation.
First, Summer Revisited reinforces the biggest advantage of this genre.
Condense events into an isolated island, amplify the sense of psychological oppression in a small pattern, and shorten the time to just three days before the summer festival.
After the constraints are directly framed, the internal structure can change at will.
Seemingly cyclical time can only be rotated in three days, but the story uses flashbacks of characters' memories and shadow's past and present lives to stretch the internal capacity to decades.
But you will not get tired of the information overload that "looping" brings, but you must also pay attention to every detail and foreshadowing.
Even in the end, they will come back in circles to complete this jaw-dropping worldview.
Just in the first episode, every seemingly unintentional picture will eventually become a logical and self-consistent plot point, and it can be said that there is no waste of writing.
In addition, the key to "Summer Recurrence" far exceeding similar themes lies in its villain setting.
Imagine if the pot aunt in "Beginning" could read the protagonist's memory every time she was reincarnated, how would the game be played?
But the villain in the original work is such an anti-heavenly existence.
These shadows not only inherit everything from the entity, but can also read each reincarnation.
They are not only double-quoted super high, but also like monsters, the combat effectiveness is explosive, can not be beaten and shot, which is why many people say that "Summer Recurrence" is to some extent a "giant meal replacement".
Attack on Titan
They all also bring a certain sense of absolute oppression.
In this world with zero fault tolerance, the two sides seized the opportunity to behead and kill all kinds of corpses, without any nonsense dragging mud and water, each time it was a desperate rebound, and the situation was constantly set up and then broken.
That is to say, the story completely focuses on the "battle of wits".
The high speed and brutality of the master's tricks make you accept the baptism of bloody visual scenes while marveling that you can still play like this?
Compared with simply relying on "reincarnation" to create suspense, "Summer Recurrence" completely uses this structure to play the initiative of the character.
That's why it's great for animation.
In a worldview that is so complex and astonishing, "people" are alive.
It is they who lead the story to reverse layer by layer, which has both killing and wisdom, but opening the core is still the most touching blood and innocence of the teenager.
The protagonist group headed by Shinpei, each of them is extremely charismatic.
For example, the much-anticipated animated version of Shinpei perfectly restores the manga.
He tied the head of the pill, occasionally stroked his hair, autistic and restrained and gentle and rational.
Upon learning of the death of Qingmei Bamboo Horse Chao, Shen Ping was not shocked on the surface, and at night he cried alone in the room with a headache.
He is not a typical hot-blooded male protagonist, and there is no outrageous protagonist aura.
The appearance of his personality charm comes from the bottoming out of the extreme dilemma, and the only "superpower" he is good at is to look down and think.
The so-called "overhead thinking" can actually be done by anyone, and it prompts us in the first person to try to jump out and think in the third person.
Therefore, whenever the story seems to have reached a dead end, as Shen Ping said, try to think first, learn to prepare, grasp every opportunity in the overall situation, go all out, and change your life against the sky.
Such a strong but simple spiritual core also glues together a story that combines reincarnation, love, life and death cause and effect, and even Cthulhu and Japanese strange talk.
Even when the perfect closed loop ends, it touches on more profound thinking through the setting of the "shadow".
These "shadows" of intellectuality, eager to replace the ontology, are easily reminiscent of themes touched upon in works such as Blade Runner.
Blade Runner
They are essentially replicants, but they have the same appearance and memory as the entity, and they also have their own thinking consciousness.
So, how do you define the boundary between an ontology and a replicator?
When boundaries are on the verge of collapse, what exactly can confirm the existence of witnesses? Is it the body or the consciousness?
All in all, "Summer Recurrence" is definitely not a new fan that simply talks about the time cycle, and everyone must not be deceived by its girlish comic style and miss the opportunity to witness the birth of ShenFan.
Although many people are worried about whether the content of 139 episodes can be adapted in just 25 episodes, in turn, the animated version can avoid the overly intensive fight scenes in the later stages of the manga and make the whole story look better.
Of course, the only pity is that the show was bought out of the copyright by Disney+, and the probability is that the introduction is hopeless, which also means that "Summer Recurrence" may be difficult to get out of the circle.
But the heat does not hinder its quality, whether you have seen the original or not, you can rub your hands and start chasing!
(The picture of this article is transferred from the network)