DISCLAIMER: SPOILERS! (BECAUSE HOW CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THIS SHOW WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT THE ENDING?)
Back in 2010, Jun Maeda, a writer and musician for Key VisualArts on modern classics such as Clannad and Kanon, and a relatively new anime studio known as Progressive Animation Works (P.A. Works) teamed up to create an original anime called Angel Beats! It was well received, ascending to one of the top 100 anime of all time on Anime Planet. Still, the anime wasn’t without its critics, with some calling the show derivative. However, despite its reliance on stereotypes, with its solid characters and nearly universally acclaimed animation and soundtrack, Angel Beats! produced an anime that newer fans to the medium could enjoy and older fans could see as a tribute to modern anime tropes. Fast forward to 2015, and P.A. Works is a much more established studio, Jun Maeda is a more experienced writer, and they decide to create another original anime together. Having learned the mistakes from Angel Beats! P.A. Works and Jun Maeda build on their previous success and create an anime that not only appeals to newer fans but older ones as well, with clever storytelling, well developed characters, excellent pacing, breathtaking animation, and rich music.
…
And then, unsatisfied with their results, they decided to use their deus ex machina time travel powers go back in time and screw it all up.
Charlotte was an anime I looked forward to from the time the first teaser dropped. I loved Angel Beats despite its flaws and looked forward to the new ideas that Jun Maeda had after 5 years of refinement. Unfortunately, Charlotte fails to improve on its predecessor, and in many ways is significantly worse, resulting in one of the most disappointing anime I have ever seen.
Yuu Otosaka: A failure of a protagonist
The core of the problem begins with the design of the main character, Yuu Otosaka. Jun Maeda has no reservations about cloning characters (Yuri from Haruhi Suzumiya, Otonashi from Tomoya Okazaki, Ayato from Lelouch Lamperouge, and Takamatsu from Yuusaku Kitamura to name a few). Unfortunately, Maeda picked a very bad character to clone or Yuu, Kirito from Sword Art Online (who in of himself is practically a wish fulfillment self-insert, but that’s for a different review). Sure I have said that Kirito isn’t nearly as poor of a character as I initially expected, but that doesn't mean that I like his design or that he's a model for other main characters to follow. Yuu actually started as an interesting character, a self-absorbed cheater who was intentionally unlikeable. Naturally this was meant to set up his growth into a character that would become a respectable hero. This is where Maeda screws up. Instead of a likable character that the viewer can root for, we end up with an overpowered, emo, whiny kid who has virtually no redeeming qualities. At least with Kirito, I was interested in how he would handle the moral dilemmas that were presented by the circumstances of being trapped in a video game. In Charlotte, Yuu never develops from the challenges he faces. He simply runs around with the rest of the cast and does what he’s told. When finally faced with legitimate adversity, he spends literally an entire episode moping about it. This may have been justified if there were some noticeable advancement in his character, but before and after his emo phase, Yuu remains pretty much the same boring protagonist he was for the entire show. At the end, he goes through an entire season of character development in one episode, which is paced so poorly that I almost want to throw it out entirely (see below). The ending only completes Yuu’s failure as a protagonist; I am amazed that he has nearly a 20-1 likes to dislikes on his character page. When your main protagonist is this unintentionally unlikable no matter how good the rest of the anime may be, the show is almost always unsalvageable.
Structure and Pacing: How to fail Creative Writing 101
The second critical problem with Charlotte is the story structure and pacing. A reddit user succinctly summarized the pacing of the show in this gif. Obviously the show rushed the important aspects of the story, the exposition of the main plot and the development of the main characters. However, it also wasted a ton of valuable screen time on meaningless tangents that led nowhere. The obligatory baseball episode was the most egregious example. At least in Angel Beats it helped develop Hinata’s character. In Charlotte, the episode served absolutely no purpose. Halfway through the anime, Charlotte falls into the beginner writer's trap that “twists are inherently entertaining” by turning the entire plot on its head out of nowhere, changing from a school life comedy with supernatural elements to a sci-fi action anime with global implications. In many ways it shares many of its problems withKill La Kill, too little focus and decisions by what seemed to be a committee rather than a focused director. And of course, the ending was absolutely atrocious. Clearly Maeda wanted a second cor to tell this story, but he ran out of budget to produce episodes. Elements that were clearly pitches for full episodes were reduced to scenes only a few minutes long. The whole “I’m basically a god now” development was way too rushed to be taken seriously. The episode should not have been made. It drags the anime from being respectable to being barely mediocre, and I felt like those were 25 minutes of my life I wanted refunded.
There isn’t much more to discuss with Charlotte. Most of the other characters were run-of-the-mill clones of already established archetypes. No particular performance stood out to me with the exception of Maaya Uchida who shows off her range by playing both Yusa and Misa at the same time. Even the music was largely unmemorable, which is one of the strengths of Angel Beats! The animation manages to look even blander than its 5 year old predecessor. The production value seemed cheapened overall, most likely due to a smaller budget, but it’s disappointing that not even the production value can salvage this anime. This anime is a classic “trap” show with promises that are never fulfilled. I was recommending it to my friends as I was watching it, but by the end of the show, I’m telling people that it’s just not worth the disappointment.
Also shoutout to Gigguk for making much of the same points much more eloquently than I could (warning: strong language and spoilers).