AKA: Amon’s Eyebrows
Sometimes anime can be a little, um, unrealistic. Sometimes eyebrows hang out on the wrong side of a character’s head hair. Other times, characters have Anime Protagonist Hair—usually of a bright and unrealistic color in comparison to their supporting characters.
Then there’s Amon’s eyebrows.
This guy has the dumbest looking eyebrows I’ve ever seen on an anime man. Seriously. Whose eyebrows turn into crochet hooks at the ends? Can he make me an afghan with those things? I’m afraid he’s going to fishhook someone’s skin when he passes people in the hallway. He could practically fight ghouls with those eyebrows alone.
Amon, the eyebrow avenger!
Weapon of choice: Killer Eyebrows
One True Weakness: Household Tweezers
Continuing from my reviews of episodes 7 and 8 here.
Episode Nine
This episode throws a bunch of new characters our way without any explanation as to who they are. The dumb bird (who is probably an animal abuse victim—there is no way that perfect star is a natural occurrence) appears with a single purpose: to harass Touka (and the viewers). Suzuya has been inexplicably turned into a kleptomaniac and gets no introduction in this episode. Akira Mado appears briefly at the grave of her father and walks off like a mysterious ghost or a character who will be important later.
Mado-san, he dead.
Mado and Amon harass a sweet old lady.
Ayato shows up briefly looking significantly older, scarier and less fun than he does in the manga. Instead of appearing deadly and dangerous, anime Ayato looks like he wants to go drink a decaf, hold the sugar, no cream (extensive list of special requests), coffee at an independent cafe (Kind of like Anteku—am I right?) and read The Wall Street Journal on his MacBook Air and blog about social justice.
Izaya wants his jacket back.
Other times his character design is just so generic that he looks like many other anime boys I could mention.
On the human side, it seems that Hide has this whole ghoul thing figured out. The anime does a more heavy handed job than the manga at implying that Hide has figured out the ghouls of the ward are organized and that he may know about Keneki’s predicament. Hide overhears talk of the ghouls searching for Rize, which could mean a number of things since, if I’m not mistaken, he knows Rize is the girl Keneki went out with on the night of the accident. Boy, he has to know what’s up. If he doesn’t know he is an idiot.
Back on the ghoul side, people are forecasting war all over the place. Awesome. It’s not like we didn’t see that coming from episode 1.
Touka expresses (moooreeee) angst over her situation and we see some of her backstory. The flashback conveniently introduces Ayato to us before we see his boring fashion model self. Banjo shows up and demonstrates that he is a moron as effectively as he does in the manga.
I think that covers all the crazy, and poorly explained appearances in episode nine.
Episode 10
Suddenly, violence.
So the Aogiri tree is out killing people and that’s great. Viewers think, with a spark of hope, maybe this time, i’ll be lucky, maybe this time he’ll stay—by which they mean: GORE?
And then they are disappointed.
At Anteiku, Banjou and the three bastard children of eminem and the Wiggles act stupid over Rize. This is pretty consistent with the manga.
Without warning (and with no clear motivation) Ayato and Yamori show up at Anteiku, intent on kidnapping Kaneki(?). At least I assume that’s what they showed up to do. They didn’t seem to be in the mood for coffee after breaking all that glass.
Bad guys just don’t understand how doors work, do they?
So Yamori starts beating up Kaneki for no reason and in the process discovers that Kaneki is a one-eyed ghoul. After that discovery they have a legitimate reason to kidnap him–but what about before? Did they just need a random body to experiment on? If so, why didn’t they just take a random dude off the street? The city is crawling with ghouls—it wouldn’t have been that hard.
Kaneki then gets beaten up even more, which also makes no sense. Then Yamori and his ragtag gang of odd people run off.
Afterwards all the employees of Anteiku decide to band together and rescue Kaneki. Although this scene sets up the coming episodes, it plays on the ridiculous side because everyone who volunteers is basically useless. Touka was taken out by her brother in seconds. We’ve already seen how utterly useless Nishiki is since he has been literally beaten into a bloody pulp after every single one of his appearances. Hinami is a child.
Conclusions
I think we’re in for some radical changes in the next few episodes since Kaneki’s kidnapping by Yamori is a major turning point in the manga. Will the anime preserve the greatness of the manga? Kaneki’s kidnapping is a major game changer in the manga. Granted, the whole event makes Kaneki lose touch with his old self, but that’s not bad because old Kaneki is wimpy and pathetic anyway. I worry the anime is too rushed and anime-only fans will be turned off to the series. The pacing is ridiculous in this show, after all.
Brace yourselves–winter is coming. *cough* I mean, white haired Kaneki. That’s what’s coming.
Watch Tokyo Ghoul on Hulu or at Funimation.com
-AI