Cerberus opens episode 1 with jarring and unnecessary CGI for no reason, so if you needed that checked off on your spring anime 2016 bingo square, congratulations. Unfortunately, Cerberus also used up its entire budget of two Cheez-Its and some Miracle Whip on making those flags flap, meaning that almost nothing else in this anime is animated for the rest of the episode. This is a big problem when your episode 1 features both a chase scene and a fight scene, leading me to wonder what exactly was the point of the whole exercise in the first place.
Cerberus is based on a smartphone game, but unlike most smartphone game anime, there’s no indication of any battle system or gameplay mechanic that might tie it into its more lucrative origin. But no one in this production seems to have cared, not about the game, not about this poorly-fated tie-in, and certainly not about their craft.
Episode 1 opens with a gigantic plateful of fantasy boobs, heaving on display as their helpless chained owner awaits certain death. It turns out she’s bait for a trap which she herself springs. Nice. But this initial promise is drowned out by a dizzyingly bad profusion of CGI as an evil dragon is contained and sealed, just before one of the key participants gets sniped by an arrow in the back. Our boob queen’s brief moment of badassery is lost forever as she completely loses focus, going off-model as she does so. It turns out that guy fathered her spawn, who is part of the ceremony as well. He dies, the sealing spell is ruined, Mom disappears or something: welcome to the real world, kid.
The animation budget is so low that there’s no movement in the background and barely any shading, even on principal characters at the forefront of the scene. The characters look rough. When you have to use still shots rather than animating your chase and fight scenes, you might as well present your anime in PowerPoint slides. But I could forgive terrible animation - budgets are cruel things - if the story were any good. I’ve done it before with Gangsta , whose latter half was nearly unwatchable due to what eventually became Studio Manglobe’s tragic bankruptcy . Unfortunately, from characters to plot, Cerberus gives you nothing to care about.
Our main character is the little turd from the ceremony, all grown up into a slightly bigger turd of indeterminate age. He’s toting a generic sword as big as his mom’s tits on his back, and he must be paid by derisive chuckle, considering how many arrogant little huffs he emits. He spends most of the episode by turns aggressively threatening and befriending ten-year-olds in between warping off-model. There’s a cat girl who is so shrill and irritating she redefines everything terrible about that trope. There’s a sinister merchant who’s awful because reasons. There’s a grandly titled MacGuffin , the Grand Trowa. There’s a passel of ten-year-old thieves dressed more like Marie Antoinette’s idea of struggling picaresque boys than anything else. There’s a bodyguard for the arrogant turd who’s presence is barely explained, if it’s touched on at all.
Everywhere you look in Cerberus , your eyes rest on someone you don’t care about, moving through a world you don’t know anything about, jerking through a terribly-placed plot. When the Big Bad Dragon comes back at the very end of the episode, it’s so randomly, poorly done that it’s impossible to care. What do you do with an anime where the explosive destruction of a mountain only barely flutters the bad guy’s hair? Where the stakes are comically high and yet you couldn’t make yourself care about the characters if you were paid to?
On top of all this, the dialogue is completely daft. It is so inane it makes Hundred ’s Hayato look like he actually has two brain cells. The phrase “a swordsman must never draw his sword unless necessary” is uttered in its variants at least three times, and every single time, it is followed by an immediate drawing of swords. Other gems of wit include “a hero never leaves a good deed undone” and “don’t make me mad,” both from the same character. As though it weren’t enough to have terrible characters in an awful plot, every time they draw breath to speak you turn from not caring to actively wanting them dead. It’s not like you have any reason to root for them, so hell, why not?
Should you watch Cerberus?
My god, no. Save yourselves.
Cerberus streams on Crunchyroll every Monday at 2:15 PM EST here .
