The Fall 2017 Anime Preview Guide

Dies Irae

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In 1939 , General Reinhard Heydrich takes one Karl Krafft on as his follower, since he's a supposed sorcerer who can see the future. Through Krafft's guidance and a series of encounters with a trio of women who call themselves Valkyries, an odd couple made up of a torture-happy beauty and her priestly companion, and another pair of superpowered oddballs on a rampage, Reinhard is gradually encouraged to throw off his self-imposed limitations and take the world by storm for his own ends. Dies Irae is based on a visual novel and streams on Crunchyroll, Fridays at 1:05 PM EST.

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Jacob Chapman

Rating:

First things first, this is actually "Episode 0" of Dies Irae. Not that it matters. This adaptation of a notoriously convoluted visual novel is no less convoluted for its decision to start with a 1939 prologue. (The rest of the story is supposed to take place in modern-day Japan, naturally.) For those unaware, Dies Irae was produced unconventionally, the result of a successful crowdfunding campaign, likely because of its thorny subject matter (but I'll get to that in a minute). It raised about ¥96,560,858 (about $8.5 million USD), so there was clearly interest in this property, but I find it hard to believe that this was what fans wanted for their yen.

While not (quite) the ugliest anime in the world, the art design of Dies Irae is incredibly flat and generic, and the animation fares much worse, with embarrassingly herky-jerky fight scenes and rough off-model faces in fully half the shots, to say nothing of extremely confusing storyboarding that cuts between locations with little to no establishing information about where we are or why. At its best, the show looks merely "okay," but there's not so much as one impressive visual in the whole premiere, and set pieces like the giant floating fortress made of golden skeletons are just plain laughable. The story is nigh incomprehensible, just scene after scene of dozens of characters we know nothing about tossing off explosions to slaughter citizens and suck their souls into the golden skeleton blimp for the glory of the Reich or something. This all concludes with the company's smirking wizard opening a portal to—a superweapon? The future? A new world? Who knows. So without even getting to the elephant in the room, this is a really bad opening episode that doesn't bode well for the rest of the series unless it changes gears hard and fast when jumping to the present day.

Okay. Sigh. Now let's discuss that elephant. Since this is just a prequel to the main story, it's still not yet clear if all these Literal Nazis—yes, the swastikas on their red armbands have been replaced with a fantasy logo, and their iron crosses are shaped a little different, but these are definitely Nazis right down to shouting "zieg heil!" in German and waxing rhapsodic about the master race—anyway, it's not clear if these Nazis are meant to be the heroes, villains, or something in-between during the modern-day main story. What is clear is that Dies Irae fully glamorizes Nazi iconography and the effigies of actual Nazi officers. (Heads up, that's the wikipedia entry for a chief orchestrator of the Holocaust so don't read too deep if you want to avoid some real Bad Feelings.) Even if these guys turn out to be cartoonish baddies in the end, this episode goes far beyond anime like Hellsing that attempt to cathartically defang the Nazis by placing them in a ghoulish fantastical context as irredeemable cannon fodder. By calling back to specific real-world events and propagators of genocide while playing on the "awe-inspiring" power of a morally conflicted fantasy-version of Heydrich and company, Dies Irae is trying to have its cake and eat it too. If you're not okay with that, make a wide berth around this show and don't look back. It may not be full-blown Nazi apologia, but it's definitely Nazi fetishism.

Of course, you could also not watch it because it seems crappy and confusing. It's hard to see how the show could get better from here, but it's extremely easy to imagine how it could get worse.