At the 2019 Anime Expo, I attended Netflix’s panel on the final day of the convention. They did a presentation on Seis Manos, an anime-style animated series about young men trained in martial arts who seek to avenge their fallen master. The story was set in Mexico, and it fell into that shadow zone of a dark animated series that borrowed somewhat from anime, but which ultimately was in a category of its own.
You can call that kind of story anime inspired. There’s no connection to Japan, but it has that certain feel that comes with anime storytelling.
The reason I’m mentioning this is because Onyx Equinox is in that same as yet undefined category of animation. Created by a Mexican animator - Sofia Alexander - and produced by Crunchyroll, with animation teams in Korea and elsewhere, and set in a fantasy Mesoamerica with gods and monsters, Onyx Equinox continues this carving out of new space in animation, particularly with regard to cultures not explored before in this field.
Izel, a young boy, and his older sister Nelli are enslaved persons in a household in early pre-Columbian Yucatan.
The gods are experiencing a blood drought due to fewer human sacrifices. When Mictlantecuhtli, the Lord of the Underworld, destroys a city and steals its blood sacrifices, the gods enlist Quetzalcoatl to close the five gates to the underworld. His fellow god Tezcatlipoca wants to destroy humanity, but agrees to a bet with Quetzalcoatl: that if the “lowest of the low” of humanity can close the gates before the next equinox, humanity will be spared.
In the meantime, Izel is chosen as a sacrifice by his city to avoid the same fate as the city that Mictlantecuhtli destroyed. Nelli offers to take Izel’s place, and Izel learns of this too late, arriving in time to see Nelli’s throat cut and her body fall into the pit.
Izel, devastated, tries to kill himself later that night by throwing himself into the same pit filled with dark water. Instead, he experiences a mysterious electrification. His eyes turn teal blue, and he’s rescued by a godlike talking panther named Yaotl, having now become humanity’s champion - the “lowest of the low” referred to by the gods - and tasked with closing the five gates by the next equinox.
Izel and Yaotl travel to visit Izel’s former guardian. This guardian now has two adopted teenage twin boys, Yun and K’in. The boys are Ulama ballplayers, Ulama being a form of basketball with the hoops being affixed to walls in a horizontal instead of vertical position.
After a series of events, the twins join Izel on his mission.
Now - I need to be honest here. It’s not like I seamlessly picked up on all of the details of the above description just by watching the episodes. I had to go to Onyx Equinox’s Wikipedia page and other sites to get the details, because the exposition scenes go by so fast in the first few episodes that it’s hard to nail down everything. You get enough of it that you understand the gods have a bet going, Izel is the chosen one, that he has to close five gates to the underworld, and that the deadline is the equinox, but with everything else that’s going on visually on the screen, the rest of it sort of gets trampled underfoot.
It doesn’t help that when you first see the gods, they’re not actually in their real bodies. They inhabit recently-deceased human corpses to hold their conversations, after which the corpses dissipate - leaving you going “huh?” at first, until you catch on - which seemed like unnecessarily complicating things.
As the story proceeds, Izel’s group is joined by Zyanya and Xanastaku. Zyanya is a warrior woman and Xanastaku is a girl with paranormal powers and a mysterious and dark past.
I could go on describing the plot, but you can read the plot of the story elsewhere. Because Crunchyroll decided to upload all 12 episodes in late December, I’ve seen the entire series now. So what do I think of the series?
Onyx Equinox is a standout animated series in a number of ways. Although it follows a more or less familiar shonen storyline, the fact that it’s set in a different culture than what anime fans are used to - ancient Mesoamerica - gives it a fresh and appealing newness.
One of the things that hooked me in early and kept me hooked was the art design. The art in Onyx Equinox is absolutely amazing. The scenes are awash in beautiful teal and turquoise, deep rust hues, and orange and yellow tones. Besides the vivid colors, the architecture of the temples and cities with their distinctive Aztec, Maya and Olmec motifs captures and holds your gaze. It’s a visual feast from start to finish.
And that includes the character designs and costumes, particularly of the gods.
That’s Mictecacihuatl, the god-wife of the Lord of the Underworld, above. Although the focus at first is on the male gods and their bet, as the story develops, we find out that Mictecacihuatl is a lot more involved in what’s going on than initially appears to be the case.
The music is great, with an authentic feel of the region. I read that the opening features Mayan chants, and the ending, a lovely and soft song, is in Nahuatl.
Izel has a certain character growth arc, though he didn’t develop as much as I would’ve liked to see. But fortunately the other characters surrounding him are interesting, and they definitely change and grow through the series, making the emotional aspect of the characters work as a whole.
Because there’s scads of brutal, visceral violence - as well as sexual content and nudity, both female and male - a minimum age of 16 would be a good idea for viewing this series.
If Onyx Equinox was a Japanese shonen series, I would rate it between 7 and 8. If Izel had been better developed as a character, it would be an 8. In other words, assessing it strictly on how well it executed the basics - plot, overall story, direction, action sequences, characters, visual design and music - this would be a series worth watching, one I would recommend to others.
But really, I would give it an 8 for an additional reason.
Crunchyroll’s preview of the series got a lot of comments on You Tube. One of them stopped me in my tracks. After viewing the preview, which shows various fantastical monsters attacking humans, I read this comment:
I invite you to consider the importance of any series that would provoke a comment like that one. There’s a whole worldview behind that comment, one that clearly doesn’t get to see its point of view reflected every day in animated series, TV, or movies.
Representation is about more than being seen - though it’s about that, too. It goes beyond casting a black guy along with all the white guys in a TV beer commercial. It’s about a multiplicity of viewpoints, and unrecognized truths, and basic fairness. It’s about watching a familiar story, but told with brown-skinned indigenous characters that run the gamut from noble and good to bad and villainous - just like you’d see in a story about anyone else.
Onyx Equinox, by its very existence, widens the field of what can be done in animated entertainment, as at the same time it levels that same field for the rest of us who create “non-standard” stories. That’s the meta behind my recommendation - but feel free to watch it just because it’s good. :-)
