TOKYO GHOUL: THE TELESERIALS (2014-18)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *metaphysical, psychological, sociological*

Often before reviewing an anime movie or TV series, I attempt to read the source material first. But since I’d heard that the animated adaptation of TOKYO GHOUL did not follow the manga that closely, and since I’d already seen the first season broadcast on Adult Swim, I decided to dispense with that practice.

Rather than a single continuing series, the GHOUL serials are more like three separate efforts, the first two with twelve episodes each, and the last with twenty-four. The story unfolds in a world where human beings have long known that they share the globe with a parallel race known as “ghouls.” I was never clear on whether the ghouls had developed independently from humankind, or whether, like vampires, they only proliferated by infecting the bodies of human beings. In any case ghouls look for the most part like ordinary people, but they can only subsist on devouring human (or ghoul) flesh. The ghouls also possess assorted super-powers, which often seem as diverse as the mutant abilities of Marvel’s X-Men, and like the X-Men, the less numerous ghouls are always on the run from human authorities who would like to stamp out the whole race.

College student Ken Kaneki knows of the existence of ghouls but has no involvement with them, until a female of their species picks him up. She attempts to devour Kaneki, but a severe accident befalls the two of them, wounding Kaneki and killing the ghoul. A physician, assuming that the dead woman was human, rashly transplants some of her organs into Kaneki to save the young man’s life. Kaneki survives, but he takes on the nature of a ghoul, unable to eat human food while craving humans as food. Yet, being a moral young man, he can’t bring himself to start preying on the species to which he formerly belonged.

Fortunately, some ghouls are more altruistic than the one who attacked Kaneki. He encounters the owner of a coffee shop (and Tokha, a sullen female barista) who furnish him with food he can eat without directly devouring human flesh. Kaneki attempts to adjust to a new life in these new circumstances. However, some of his old human friends miss him, and government agents are always looking to find the havens of hidden ghouls, so Kaneki isn’t able to live the quiet life. Particularly vexing to the peace-loving student are rogue ghouls who capture and auction their own kind to be devoured by rich flesh-eaters. One of these, styling himself “the Gourmet,” is so flamboyant that he seems sexually turned on by the idea of eating the body of a ghoul-human hybrid like Kaneki.

The first season is fairly low-key despite occasional scenes in which the ghouls manifest their weird super-powers, which brought to mind similar abilities from earlier manga like the 1997 HELLSING and the 2008 DEADMAN WONDERLAND. However, at the end of season one, Kaneki loses his memory and takes on a new identity, Haise Sasaki, leader of a special unit of human agents who have enhanced their abilities to ghoul-like levels artificially. Seasons two and three are therefore full of multiple super-powered conflicts, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the manga-creator had emphasized this aspect of his mythology in order to make the property attractive as a videogame—which did manifest in 2015, after the end of the first manga series.

The teleserial does attempt some ambitious themes. Kaneki is never only in physical peril, for by the act of defending himself from rogue ghouls, he unleashes dangerous impulses in himself, including the desire to eat his tormentors. When he finally breaks his own taboo, Kaneki loses his human scruples for a time, and late in the series he dreams that he has to wade through a sea of blood, shed by all his victims. In tried-and-true Japanese fashion, Kaneki eventually accepts the evil within himself and recovers a measure of moral perspective, so that he ends being a sort of mediator between ghouls and humans.

There are a lot of support-characters in GHOUL, but though a few have interesting character-arcs, I didn’t feel any of them came alive as consistent characters. The result is that although there are a lot of vibrant super-powered battles, the series never rises above the level of average entertainment.