Frankenstein Family 3 & 4 (and I come out of the closet about my job)

The next two episodes of Frankenstein Family are out, and they’ve kicked my opinion of this show up a notch. Here’s why:

First, the tension/plot development. At the outset of ep 3, things seemed calm, almost SOL levels of calm. Tasiku, the boy genius, reaches out to the one adult he knows besides his parents and asks for help. The meeting with that person goes suddenly south, though, and the series turns surprisingly dark. Not, say, Berserk-dark, but definitely darker than what I had been expecting, and ending with Tasiku’s sister blackmailing the adult not for help, but to make sure she doesn’t create bigger problems for the family.

Ep 3 also sets up a critique of what the modern city makes of the people who live there, which is something I don’t ever remember seeing done in anime before.

Ep 4 gives much of the backstory to how the family wound up this way. I thought it was neat that when the police came for the parents, the parents didn’t try to fight back or run away as one might expect in such a story. Instead, they already had a plan in place to make sure their kids were at least somewhat provided for, and then calmly accepted their arrest.

The really cool part about ep 4, though, is that in lieu of the usual Voice Actresses Doing Voice Actress Things segment, they had an interview with the Japanese editor who decided to translate and publish the manga in Japan! It was really cool to see this inside perspective. Did you know that someone pitched ten different foreign manga to him, and he picked only FF because he thought it would be most relatable across cultural divides? I highly recommend this interview for any anime or manga enthusiast, quite apart from the anime itself.

(Granted, part of the reason I thought this was cool is because, basically, I have the same job. I’ve been pretty cagey on this blog about my job in the past, but now I’m going to come out of the closet, or at least peek out of the cupboard. I’m a commissioning editor: I make the same kinds of decisions to publish (or more frequently, not to publish) books that this guy makes when it comes to publishing manga. So it was exciting to see someone in a related position explaining the nuts and bolts of his business.)

Cheers!