‘The Last Monster’ – Onyx Equinox and the Worldviews We Never See

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:

The last monster will be a Spaniard named Cortez.
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. :-)

Anime in the Covid Year of 2020 – Attack on Titan Returns, Muhyo and Roji, K: Seven Stories, Haikyuu, and Thoughts on Boruto

It’s been a year where anime seemed almost beside the point, and yet, by the end of it — for me at least — it felt relevant again in a new way.

Back in March, the production of Boruto went dark for a few months, as workers in Japan hunkered down in the pandemic as did those elsewhere.

When Boruto started up again with new episodes in summer, I recall feeling a little guilty almost. Like, there’s a pandemic on, and I missed anime, but not to the point where I wanted animation workers to go back into production offices and get sick drawing my entertainment.

There’s never been an experience like the pandemic of this year, and some of my reactions to things were all over the place. I’ve since settled down, remembering that people in Japan - like people here in the U.S. - actually wanted to return to work, so it’s okay.

The big news about Boruto is that Masashi Kishimoto is returning to write the manga. I’ve written here before about how Boruto has never lived up to Naruto, but the totally obvious reason for that never occurred to me before I heard this news.

One of the main reasons that made Naruto/Naruto Shippuuden so awesome was its storytelling, its amazing world-building. Konoha, the ninja village of Naruto and his friends, felt as real as anything with its large group of characters and all of their fascinating backstories. Not to mention the ninja universe itself, the five great shinobi nations and their histories.

When the Boruto manga began, I recall reading that Kishimoto was going to be less involved with it, but I didn’t really get that he wasn’t writing the story, and nor was he doing the art.

Well — no offense to the people who were, but — now I understand why Boruto’s storyline moved so slowly and had so much filler (or what felt like filler).

The fact that Kishimoto is taking over again would be cause for unmitigated celebration... save for a rumor I heard. The rumor is that the two most important characters in the Naruto/Boruto universe are getting killed off.

If this turns out to be true... let’s just say that I will genuinely freak out. Although it makes sense in story and mythic terms to have Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha, the two main figures in the backstory of Boruto’s universe, die so that Boruto and Sarada and others of the new generation can step up, for me personally that would leave too big of a hole in the whole universe. It would basically hollow out Boruto for me, because the series has for too long traded on our nostalgia for the old characters and their history without building its own standalone resonance with solid storytelling and character development. Without Naruto and Sasuke, Boruto would be like an aftereffect in the Naruto universe, one without a lot of meaning for me.

I can only hope that Kishimoto doesn’t do it.

On a lighter note, Muhyo and Roji’s Bureau of Supernatural Investigation had its second season on Funimation this time instead of Crunchyroll, so what I call my “emergency Funimation subscription” came in handy this summer. (I keep a paid subscription year-round to Funimation for those occasional anime series that Crunchyroll doesn’t license.)

Muhyo and Roji is one of those anime series that is enjoyable and not too cliffhangery when a season ends, meaning you can look forward to it coming back at some point without being anxious about it. It’s weird that Crunchyroll had its first season, but Funimation got its second season. Apparently, both companies will be under Sony’s umbrella soon, so I suppose it doesn’t make much difference either way in the ultimate sense.

In this covid year of 2020, a lot of us ate comfort foods while stuck at home. The same principle was followed for entertainment. People watched their favorite movies and TV shows for the enjoyment of the familiar.

I did the same with one of my favorite anime series, K, or rather K’s final iteration—K: Seven Stories, a post-series set of six episodes that beautifully finishes the K universe.

K: Seven Stories is a send-off or coda that brings closure to the entire world of K in a way that respects each character and each clan in all their quirkiness. The characters that intrigued you the most while watching the two TV seasons and the movie K: Missing Kings are explored in greater depth. Knowing how the main story ends, the opportunity to see these characters in their full humanity adds poignancy to the viewing. Even Gojo Sukuna, the young brat in the Green Clan, gets a full episode where we see how he longed for a sense of family and found it in the Greens, the most oddball clan of them all.

The final episode of K: Seven Stories is wonderful. It presents a mysterious situation where characters you know are dead are somehow alive again, and everyone is enjoying themselves in a sort of timeless Groundhog Day world where each day is fun and there are no lasting consequences for anything you do.

Eventually, of course, everyone tires of it, and begins to seek answers and a way out. The final scene brings the curtain down on K as the mysterious observer who has briefly appeared in all six episodes reveals his/her identity as the one behind the timeloop. The universe of K ends with its most emotional episode, one that has the characters affirming life even with its painful losses as something beautiful to be treasured. I love K. It’s a seriously underrated anime series, one that I wish more anime fans would watch.

That being said — a weird thing happened recently with K’s producers, the Go Hands animation studio. Some Go Hands designers were found to have plagiarized character/costume designs from other sources for its upcoming Tokyo Babylon 2021 anime series based on CLAMP’s original Tokyo Babylon series from the 1990s.

This amazes me for two reasons. First, K had awesome character and costume designs, meaning that Go Hands is perfectly capable of doing great original designs themselves. In fact, one of the distinctive things about K was that director Shingo Suzuki was also credited as K’s character designer — which I imagine has to be the only time in anime when those two very different jobs were performed by the same person.

The second thing that makes this odd is that CLAMP has always been known for fantastic character and costume designs. Couldn’t they have asked CLAMP to do these new designs?

Go Hands is hardly the first case of plagiarism in anime and manga — it happens occasionally and it’s always unfortunate. Hopefully they will get beyond this, and we’ll all get to see Tokyo Babylon 2021 sooner rather than later.

Haikyuu returned this fall. I enjoyed this season, though I’ve lost track of which level of the tournament they’re at given the huge gaps of time between each season.

Haikyuu finally got hit by the curse that hits many anime series at some time or another: the badly animated episode. A few weeks before the season ended, there was one episode where the character faces looked a little off, and the comments ensued on Crunchyroll as you might expect.

Production I.G. is known for its quality animation, but many production companies farm out some of their animation work overseas to Korea or Vietnam. Not to blame the overseas contractors, because who knows where the fault lay this time, but it seems production deadlines affect even the best of shows.

So now, Haikyuu is over once again, and who knows when it will return for another season. There was a four-year hiatus before it resumed again this year. Let’s hope it’s not another four years before the next season.

Onyx Equinox is Crunchyroll’s first original series. The story is based on Mesoamerican mythology and represents a departure from the site’s main focus on Japanese anime.

I have a lot of thoughts about Onyx Equinox, so I’ll be doing a post on it in January.

One of the delights of anime is the short-episode series, like Yamishibai (returning in winter 2021!). It’s hard to resist a series with a good premise that gives you five-minute episodes. Who doesn’t have five minutes to watch anime?

With a Dog AND a Cat, Every Day Is Fun has even shorter episodes — about a minute and a half apiece. Astonishingly, not only is it very funny, but its more serious episodes actually have me tearing up.

It’s about a young woman and her overeager, happy-all-the-time dog, and her evil but somehow adorable cat. As one Crunchyroll commenter put it, after watching an episode about the young woman’s former dog who passed away, “GREAT, NOW I’M CRYING INTO MY FOOD.” That's a tribute to the power of anime, seriously. What other form of entertainment can do that to you in 90 seconds flat?

And finally — Attack on Titan is in its last season.

Attack on Titan is unlike any other series, defying easy categorization. It’s shonen, sure, but its alternate Earth setting and those amazing, horrifying titans put it into a category of its own. Not to mention how the show’s popularity basically saved the U.S. manga localization industry in the early 2010s, and by association, anime in the U.S. as well.

The fact that Attack on Titan is ending makes me a little nostalgic. It was around the time of Attack on Titan’s initial popularity that I began to feel out of step with anime in general. My posts on this blog were spotty from 2015 to around 2018, when I came back to anime with renewed enthusiasm.

This is the 11th year I’ve been writing this anime blog. I don’t know what the future holds for this blog or the editing work I do in this industry. Like many, I suspect, this covid year has led to some soul searching for me as to how I want to spend my time going forward.

But for now, there will be no big changes. I’ll continue to blog here on anime and manga as my work schedule permits. I still feel that anime is relevant in my life, and every year there are series that surprise me. Anime can still surprise me with its variety and artistry, so there’s life here yet. And thanks for continuing to read this blog – it is much appreciated. :-)