01. Spy "bar" ghost annihilation
Generally speaking, if a spy movie wants to be called excellent, it must have gripping tense scenes, identity or relationship changes with opposite poles, brain-burning and even incomprehensible wisdom fighting plots.
In order to render these serious scenes, the creators rarely use a lot of ink in spy movies to describe the daily life of spies or the relaxed and pleasant side, and only use a small amount of space to contrast.
However, there is such a spy war film, but it is the opposite way, with "its joy and harmony" and "healing" as the point of view, with an episode of time to seize the audience's attention, and successfully out of the circle to win unprecedented attention.
This is the "Spy × Family", which is recently known as the dark horse of April's hegemony, the story is about "Twilight", who is a spy, in order to complete an infiltration mission, and forms a family with a little girl with mind-reading ability, "Ania", who is an assassin, and "Yole", who is an assassin, and maintains the life of an ordinary family while hiding their respective identities.
It is precisely because the identity of each family member is particularly special, and they all lack the common sense to maintain family relations, so the three people have made a lot of mistakes in the process of getting along and completing their respective tasks, and on top of this, the author Tatsuya Endo has cleverly integrated his own views on various events and relationships, affecting the audience's emotions, causing them to think, and telling a warm story of family fun with an alternative spy film.
As of May 7, "Spy × Home" has only been updated to 4 episodes (due to the influence of first trial and then broadcast, Station B is currently only updated to the first episode), but its first episode on Station B has surpassed the national animation "Ghost Blade Youguo Chapter" and the industry buff-filled "Bubbles" in the same period, becoming the champion of the new list on the station.
The results of the animation are so excellent, and the performance of the original manga should not be underestimated.
As early as December last year, without the blessing of animation publicity, the cumulative sales of the manga of "Spy × Family" exceeded 12.5 million, breaking the miracle of the annual sales of Shueisha manga (the sales of the anime exceeded 1600 volumes after the start of the broadcast);
Moving forward, when the second volume of the single volume was released (October 2019), it ranked fourth in the O list with a sales volume of 110,000 volumes in the first week. Judging from the frequent landing of the "hope that this comic will be animated" list, "Spy × Family" has long been the existence of everyone's expectation.
Nowadays, the data obtained by the animation is only the result of its normal play, and it is presumably that as the story gradually enters a wonderful chapter, the number of animation plays can be further improved.
Coupled with the band "Bearded Man" responsible for the OP, itself is the top stream in J-POP, with considerable data; ed's singer Hoshino Yuan can be described as a ceiling-level figure in the Japanese entertainment circle, and his publicity effect is even more crushing most of the animation singers. The investment of top music resources also means that in the eyes of investors, "Spy × Family" does have the corresponding potential to match.
Judging from the broadcast information, one of the broadcast platforms of "Spy × Home" is TV Tokyo, and the broadcast time is 23:00 to 23:30 (Tokyo time) on Saturday night, according to the Japanese broadcast time standard, this time period can be counted as a golden file, and few late-night animations can be played at this time.
Obviously, this spy animation is deliberately impacting the status of ghost annihilation.
So what is the specific performance of the "Spy × Family" animation? Is it really capable of surpassing a nascent national animation like Ghost Blade?
To answer these questions, we have to start with the positive film.
02. A special game of passing
Although one of the protagonists, Twilight, is a spy of a country and the purpose of starting a family is to get close to the goal, "Spy × Family" does not focus too much on the work process of the spy, but focuses on the various interesting things that happen in the life of the family composed of Dusk (Dad), Yole (Mom), Ania (daughter) and Bond (pet dog).
Rather than saying that this is a spy war film, it is better to use the setting of spy war to create identity contrasts, and to highlight the warm and daily parts while laughing.
At the beginning of the story, only a short period of time is devoted to the worldview (the East and west countries in the Cold War) and Dusk's mission (to investigate the characters who threaten the peace between the East and the West), and then begins to tell the story of Twilight's search for family members.
Since this figure who threatens the peace of the East and the West is very cautious, the only way to know his whereabouts is that he regularly attends the fraternity held by his son's Eden Academy, so he can only go to the orphanage to find children who can take him into the school and complete tasks.
For Twilight at this time, the task is above all else, so the child is just a "prop" that can be returned to the orphanage after use. However, what he did not expect was that the child he fancied, "Ania", was actually a child with the super power of mind reading, and after she learned of Twilight's spy identity through mind reading, she became strongly dependent on the new father.
But the so-called emotional exchange is a two-way street, and Ania's dependence alone is not enough to make the family established. In the later incident of Ania's abduction, Twilight also changes her attitude towards Ania, vowing to carry out her original intention of becoming a spy--- create a world that will not make children cry, and protect this unrelated daughter.
Joel, who appeared later, like the "father and daughter", has two layers of identity. On the surface, she is a civil servant of the municipal government, and secretly, she is an assassin entrusted by various parties. Due to his focus on learning assassination techniques since childhood, although Joel is an adult woman, she lacks the necessary common sense of life, often makes incredible reactions, and is therefore harassed and excluded by colleagues.
Fortunately, these problems were solved after she started a family with Dusk and Ania, and through the false identity of "mother", she was able to avoid the cold eyes of her colleagues and focus more on the work of the killer; she also reassured her brother.
Most importantly, in the process of "getting home", she also gradually opened her heart and lived a harmonious and frequently interesting life with Dusk and Ania.
First of all, let's talk about the shortcomings, although the process of forming a family is necessary and convenient to introduce the background of the characters, which is conducive to the subsequent character development and plot development, but the animation does not grasp the rhythm of the original work, making the story of the first two episodes a bit delayed.
In addition, although the focus of the story is on the daily life, the highlight moments when performing the mission are also the key to shaping the characters, and for some animation fans, a good fight painting is one of the criteria for evaluating the quality of an animation.
However, from the current stage, the performance of "Spy × Family" in the performance of the picture is not satisfactory, and it is not even worthy of its momentum to impact the people. Except for ed, who is in charge of Nishikori Atsushi, a National Treasure of Japan, most of the main shots are directly copied from the original, without showing the charm of media conversion, and the fight scenes do not restore the compulsion in the manga, making the animation itself somewhat weak.
In contrast, in recent years, the "Devil's Blade" and "Spell Return Battle", which have become popular throughout the Internet, are all super-powered animations that facilitate high-quality combat painting, and the respective production companies have indeed pushed these two animations to the altar with several painting gods;
Even if it is about the pure daily life of "Miss Hui Ye Wants Me to Confess", the animation production team can't help but exert efforts on the ed screen, expressing their love for this animation with excellent paintings, making it a work that animation fans are talking about.
However, it is gratifying that the outstanding performance of "Spy × Family" in the literary drama has somewhat alleviated the audience's dissatisfaction.
For example, in the fourth episode, Dusk's mission is finally on the right track, leading Ania and Joel to Eden Academy for an interview, and when faced with the instructor's question of "how husband and wife came together", Dusk not only used his rich experience to answer the instructor's question accordingly, but also pointed out the main theme of the game--- spy × family.
In the plot of the first three episodes, the author has already shown their relationship with the characters' respective dark lines:
Twilight is a family formed temporarily to complete tasks; Yoel is looking for a partner to reassure her brother; and Ania is seeking refuge in the family to be close to the two. Although the three of them play this so-called family game with their own purposes, in this "fake" relationship, everyone inadvertently revealed their true feelings and expressed their yearning for family and normal life.
It is precisely because of this that Dusk can still feel the gentleness and understanding of the "wife" from Joel, who is a killer, in the case of danger, and Yoel also feels Dusk's attention to the family and the care and respect for her in this period of time. Therefore, here is also the author borrowing the mouths of the two characters, using words that are in line with the identities of the two people, skillfully shaping their respective images and relationships with each other.
In this Q&A, we can actually see the author's views on family and education.
When the instructor asked what Yoel would cook at home, Joel panicked because he rarely cooked, and at dusk, he used "most of the time to cook by himself" to save the scene. However, one of the instructors was disgusted by such a family relationship for his own reasons, so he deliberately tried to make it difficult for the two on the grounds that "his wife who can't cook is out of character".
In the face of this unreasonable accusation, Dusk also rarely violated his own calm way of handling, wanting to impulsively refute the other party. However, in order to make a good impression in front of the instructor, Joel dissuaded Twilight in time, and endured humiliation to accept such an evaluation.
However, this patience was also punctured in the instructor's advance.
In order to further disturb the relationship between the family of three, the instructor actually asked Ania to give a request to her stepmother (Joel) and her birth mother, which was undoubtedly a self-revealing behavior for Ania, an orphan, so she also wept because of the loss of emotional control. At this point, both Dusk and Yoel could not suppress their impulsive instincts, and almost "returned to their old business" and got rid of the instructor.
Thankfully, the two eventually endured their anger, did not kill each other, and finally took the initiative to end this unpleasant interview on the grounds that "the school did not take into account the child's feelings". As for the culprit who stirred up the interview, he was finally severely punished by the house supervisor "Henry Henderson", after all, he held the same educational philosophy as Dusk, and he could not tolerate this kind of behavior of not paying attention to students.
From this plot alone, we can perceive the reason why this work can attract attention before the animation: the author uses the contrast of identity to create laughter, does not forget to portray the inner changes of the characters, and also uses the characters on the scene to convey positive emotions such as family, friendship, and love, which can be said to convey a warm, healing and joyful atmosphere from beginning to end.
Therefore, although in terms of painting and plot depth, "Spy × Family" may still lack some fire, as a potential work to march to the national level, it is enough to have such a relaxed and pleasant story that can be accepted by the public.
The rest depends on whether the large amount of resources invested by investors in music and publicity can get corresponding attention and let more potential audiences tap the charm of this work.
03. Conclusion
There is an excellent original base, a national singer as a combustion aid, the blessing of the golden file, although "Spy × Family" can surpass "Ghost Blade" is still a mystery, but on the track of Japanese animation it has stood on the starting line that most animations cannot reach, perhaps it is really only a matter of time to become a national level, and it is no wonder that it rushed to the first place in the new list of the B station with only 1 episode.
Due to various reasons, we will feel the charm of this anime one step later than Japanese audiences, but in a sense, this is also satisfying the appetite of domestic audiences.
Looking at it this way, I am more looking forward to this work being able to go out of the circle with a more rapid momentum in China, so that the public can further feel the charm of animation.