Japan Sinks: 2020

Cool story and concept, but was hoping for more. The animation feels cheap at times. Character development is fairly weak and the emotions of the characters are completely unaligned with how you would imagine people would be if their country is sinking. "Hey, let's all take a selfie!" Or people giggling and chatting light-heartedly 5 minutes after a major earthquake levels entire cities. Even their decision to move to another location at the beginning doesn't make much sense from a survival standpoint. If there was massive flooding, they were already on the highest ground in their city at the Shinto shrine. Why leave in the first place? It leaves us with a rather unbelievable performance. As a side note, the English dubbing is pretty terrible too.

At the beginning I was like, ok, this is interesting and has a lot of potential, by the middle I thought what the heck is this turning into and by the end I was crying like a baby.

So overall there were bad moments but also really emotional ones and that's the most important for me personally, in the end, it made me feel something.

The way this series handles the human reaction to natural catastrophes is quite unrealistic. Most of the action happens in the first episode and the way the characters deal with the situation from that moment is just disappointing. The animation style is nothing special, the characters seem promising at first but they don't develop at all throughout the story. The little brother is utterly ridiculous and annoying. The series is tiring to watch. This could have been a great anime and we were looking forward to it, the trailers were promising. Instead, we got a good start and an ok ending with a pile of junk in between. We expected a thrilling story about loss, survival and hope and were awarded with an entirely random plot, flat characters, plot holes and a jolly family taking souvenir pictures as there wasn't an apocalypse going on.

I think for the most part, we can agree that the story was great. It showed the horrors of natural disasters and how easy it was for people to die. What's also interesting is that unlike many doomsday movies, the humans here tend to help each other (safe for some individuals and later nazis). It gives a fresh new perspective, in a realistic manner to humanity when under a threat of being wiped out. Enough for the story now it is time to address the graphics and animation. Japan Sinks 2020 cannot be done without breathtaking landscapes and that's just the problem. The graphics look lazy with characters looking deformed sometimes. They also seem to not be able to draw up perspectives. The awkward sudden change to 3D (which they did horribly). Landscapes aren't amazing, let alone great. It really feels like they skipped animation school because it looks choppy and has a bad flow (like those cigarette scenes). Sometimes it feels like it's straight out of a flash game from dailygames dot com. The characters were great and had solid personalities and the only complaint for this part is that the little kid Go likes to blurt out english phrases randomly and to me it was just damn annoying. All in all, i gave this a 6/10 not because i didn't appreciate the story, it was because they tried to make a beautiful anime but minus the good drawing techniques and smooth animation. The trailer really gets you tricked in this part (I genuinely thought it was Makoto Shinkai's work). Tl;dr : so much creativity, so little technique, Go is annoying.

If you are expecting a realistic drama about surviving an earthquake apocalypse this show is not for you.

Logic and common sense started to go away during episode two. I realized that to enjoy the show I'll have to stop analyzing and questioning the actions and situations the characters go through.

The story is unpredictable and entertaining so I did not have a problem watching the show.