Charlotte (シャーロット) is a 13 episode super natural series created by Maeda Jun. The anime originally aired in Japan during the summer of 2015.
Otosaka Yu discovers he has the ability to take over someones body for a limited amount of time. He decides to use this super power to entertain himself; starting fights with people he dislikes, groping girls, cheating on tests, general mischief. He cheats his way into a prestigious high school, where he becomes the top ranked student and begins dating the top girl in school. He's called out on his cheating by the student council when students from a different school show up and present evidence for how he did it. When they expose his method of cheating through super natural powers they force him to transfer to their school. The head of the other schools student council is a craft girl named Tomori Nao. She, like Yu, has a special ability, to become invisible to one person of her choosing. She used this to observe Yu to determine what he was doing. The new school Yu is forced to transfer to is specially designed to protect kids who have special abilities or the potential for special abilities from organizations that might capture them. The powers come to random children while they are adolescents and disappear once they reach adulthood. Yu is forced into the student council, who's real goal is to convince newly discovered ability wielders to cease their use or come to the school.
Yu begins to adjust to his new reality and starts to use his ability more responsibly. He works with the misfit group of council members to seek out and contain newly awakened users. The ever present danger of sinister organizations who will capture and dissect users pushes them to locate as many as possible. Little does Yu or anyone close to him understand the real dangers that await them if their powers were known to the outside world. Nor are the prepared for what ability users in other nations might be facing or plotting.
I was a little apprehensive about this one, given it comes directly from one of the brains behind Key, the production company that brought us Clannad, Air and Kanon. Yet from the beginning I was surprised that it bucked the trend of their other products which are derivatives of ero-galge visual novels. Instead the series started out fun and entertaining as we see Yu work through his self gratifying plan at popularity. The series shifts with episode 2 to focusing on hunting down rouge ability wielders, while building the characters personalities. Just as this becomes rote and boring it shifts focus again, to Yu struggling with the world around him and spiraling into self destruction. Finally, it shifts again in a completely unseen direction where it runs a few episodes of this new plot line and ends with a whirlwind conclusion. The secrets just kept coming and unseen surprises never stopped.
The artwork was OK, much better then previous anime based on Key creations. Nothing special to note really. Regarding the story...it had some good points and some bad points. The plot and tone of the series continuing to change drastically didn't help very much, but at least it kept it from getting too stale. It felt more like four different stories merged together, some sort of Harmony Gold idea of how to make an anime. The feel of the first episode had the most potential in my mind. It was silly, fast paced and a bit lewd, but lewd in a tasteful way. I could have enjoyed it if the rest of the series had kept this tone. Portions of that continued to show up, particularly with the other male member of the student council. But they became less prominent by the second half of the series. The next segment, where the group searches out new users in a serial format was the least interesting and rather boring outside of the character development that occurred. The third segment was nice and dark but it really only lasted for two episodes. The final segment came out of left field and was enjoyable mostly for the incredible shift in the story and the potential for an even darker more action based series. It did retain some darker tones but all of it was fleeting with the final episode a whirlwind of emotions and ideas being kicked around. The final episode had some interesting idea's in it but ultimately didn't do much to salvage the direction the show went.
A big problem is Yu himself, his character is rather flat, only having 2 or 3 emotions. He is easily, sometimes confusingly, persuadable to change his mindset. Through out the course of the show he shifts personality 3 or 4 times, sometimes for no real reason other than...because. The most intriguing and enjoyable character though was Nao. She played the rock that Yu didn't realize he needed to maintain control and sanity. Calm, collected, calculating yet always with a rage of emotions just under the surface. Her interactions with the other characters were the most interesting, even with her random spin kicks to the head. Yet, at times she ended up being thrown away. The final episode had some far fetched notions of how Yu would respond in situations of self awareness and they could have done better to stretch that part out a bit more. The time dilation was horrendous. How much time got covered in that one episode? A few months? A few years? It's hard to tell. Some people have suggested the events of the last episode could be an anime all in themselves. While this is true I feel it would turn into some 300 episode monstrosity of painful repetition again and again and again...something like One Piece.
In conclusion, the show was unexpected. There are moments of enjoyment and quality among other moments of confusion and poor execution. It didn't have any fan service, it wasn't a contrived romance and it touched upon some realistic emotions and in the case of Nao, an enjoyable character. Ultimately though it was a nominal series and I'm not quick to recommend it.
The series simulcast on Crunchyroll. Aniplex has licensed it for disc release so I expect that at some point.
Otosaka Yu discovers he has the ability to take over someones body for a limited amount of time. He decides to use this super power to entertain himself; starting fights with people he dislikes, groping girls, cheating on tests, general mischief. He cheats his way into a prestigious high school, where he becomes the top ranked student and begins dating the top girl in school. He's called out on his cheating by the student council when students from a different school show up and present evidence for how he did it. When they expose his method of cheating through super natural powers they force him to transfer to their school. The head of the other schools student council is a craft girl named Tomori Nao. She, like Yu, has a special ability, to become invisible to one person of her choosing. She used this to observe Yu to determine what he was doing. The new school Yu is forced to transfer to is specially designed to protect kids who have special abilities or the potential for special abilities from organizations that might capture them. The powers come to random children while they are adolescents and disappear once they reach adulthood. Yu is forced into the student council, who's real goal is to convince newly discovered ability wielders to cease their use or come to the school.
Yu begins to adjust to his new reality and starts to use his ability more responsibly. He works with the misfit group of council members to seek out and contain newly awakened users. The ever present danger of sinister organizations who will capture and dissect users pushes them to locate as many as possible. Little does Yu or anyone close to him understand the real dangers that await them if their powers were known to the outside world. Nor are the prepared for what ability users in other nations might be facing or plotting.
I was a little apprehensive about this one, given it comes directly from one of the brains behind Key, the production company that brought us Clannad, Air and Kanon. Yet from the beginning I was surprised that it bucked the trend of their other products which are derivatives of ero-galge visual novels. Instead the series started out fun and entertaining as we see Yu work through his self gratifying plan at popularity. The series shifts with episode 2 to focusing on hunting down rouge ability wielders, while building the characters personalities. Just as this becomes rote and boring it shifts focus again, to Yu struggling with the world around him and spiraling into self destruction. Finally, it shifts again in a completely unseen direction where it runs a few episodes of this new plot line and ends with a whirlwind conclusion. The secrets just kept coming and unseen surprises never stopped.
The artwork was OK, much better then previous anime based on Key creations. Nothing special to note really. Regarding the story...it had some good points and some bad points. The plot and tone of the series continuing to change drastically didn't help very much, but at least it kept it from getting too stale. It felt more like four different stories merged together, some sort of Harmony Gold idea of how to make an anime. The feel of the first episode had the most potential in my mind. It was silly, fast paced and a bit lewd, but lewd in a tasteful way. I could have enjoyed it if the rest of the series had kept this tone. Portions of that continued to show up, particularly with the other male member of the student council. But they became less prominent by the second half of the series. The next segment, where the group searches out new users in a serial format was the least interesting and rather boring outside of the character development that occurred. The third segment was nice and dark but it really only lasted for two episodes. The final segment came out of left field and was enjoyable mostly for the incredible shift in the story and the potential for an even darker more action based series. It did retain some darker tones but all of it was fleeting with the final episode a whirlwind of emotions and ideas being kicked around. The final episode had some interesting idea's in it but ultimately didn't do much to salvage the direction the show went.
A big problem is Yu himself, his character is rather flat, only having 2 or 3 emotions. He is easily, sometimes confusingly, persuadable to change his mindset. Through out the course of the show he shifts personality 3 or 4 times, sometimes for no real reason other than...because. The most intriguing and enjoyable character though was Nao. She played the rock that Yu didn't realize he needed to maintain control and sanity. Calm, collected, calculating yet always with a rage of emotions just under the surface. Her interactions with the other characters were the most interesting, even with her random spin kicks to the head. Yet, at times she ended up being thrown away. The final episode had some far fetched notions of how Yu would respond in situations of self awareness and they could have done better to stretch that part out a bit more. The time dilation was horrendous. How much time got covered in that one episode? A few months? A few years? It's hard to tell. Some people have suggested the events of the last episode could be an anime all in themselves. While this is true I feel it would turn into some 300 episode monstrosity of painful repetition again and again and again...something like One Piece.
In conclusion, the show was unexpected. There are moments of enjoyment and quality among other moments of confusion and poor execution. It didn't have any fan service, it wasn't a contrived romance and it touched upon some realistic emotions and in the case of Nao, an enjoyable character. Ultimately though it was a nominal series and I'm not quick to recommend it.
The series simulcast on Crunchyroll. Aniplex has licensed it for disc release so I expect that at some point.
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