CANAAN Series Review

The tale of two Canaans and the different paths they went down.

I finally did it. After months of putting it off, watching new series, and having to deal with Megavideo stopping me every 72 minutes I have finally watched the entire series of CANAAN. I mean…the series only ended September 26th…not like Chrome Shelled Regios and its 68708 months agoness.

I’ll stop patting myself on the back long enough to review this series. We also should take time to thank American TV land for being so epically boring that I have tons of extra time to catch up on my anime. Maybe one day I will catch up on some really old stuff and LOST. Poor forgotten LOST.

So…as this is going to be a review for an entire series you better be expecting some spoilers. But you can also expect some Tenchi honesty, some Tenchi ranting, and some Tenchi praising. Enjoy.





I decided that to get the whole CANAAN experience I would have to re-watch the 5 episodes I had already seen and watch all 13 episodes in one day. Now normally this would take about 5 hours. But Megavideo hates me soul and apparently I am too full of fail to use the bypass thing right. So between all the episodes, waiting, and random wasting time on the internet it took me 9 hours. That is some real dedication.

When I first started watching CANAAN I was confused. Utterly confused at times. Almost mind exploding confused. But I thought that CANAAN was one of those animes that would start off confusing and it would gradually explain all this randomness to me. So all these months of not watching CANAAN in the back of my mind I imagined some awesome answers to this complicated plot and that I was a fool for waiting so long to watch this series.

It's raining deadly viruses WOOT!

Now that I have seen episode 13…I am still just as confused as I was when I left off months ago. Very few things got answered, tons more confusion stuff got thrown our way, and the viewers were dragged through some crazy plot and we never had a chance to fasten our belts.

Part of the problem seems to be CANAAN is the continuation of the game 428: Fūsa Sareta Shibuya de. That is good and all if you played the game. Everything will make sense to someone who played the game and its complicated plot and will go YAY at the end of the day. However I am not one of those people who played the game and apparently this show does not stand well on its own.

This has nothing to do with the issue at hand. Just thought it was funny how Alphard said it.

Case in point being the Ua virus. Maria was infected with the virus two years ago (in the game). Despite the fact that Alphard would yell at Maria about how she forgot and it was insinuated that by the end of the series we would actually see what Maria forgot and Alphard was alluding to….we didn’t. We never got an explanation. Unless you count the very tiny explanation Minoru got from his boss. But there was no explanation on why Maria had no memories of the event or what the event was about.

....So why was Siam killed again?

It was also implied in the middle of the series that Alphard wanted to keep Maria alive for some reason. That reason was bigger than making Canaan so mad that her powers would go insane and Alphard would have a worthy opponent. I feel as if Maria was supposed to infect other people and all would be her fault. Perhaps that is not what was implied at all but that is what I took away from the dialogue so it was disappointing that Maria was just a “light”, that it could have been anyone.

SOOOOOOOOOOOO why was Siam killed again?

But at least the Ua Virus gets a bit of explanation late in the series. The Snakes never do. We never learn what Alphard really wanted or why the Ua Virus was created by the U.S. and the Snakes. We never get an explanation on why after the fact the Snakes try to kill the U.S. president and blow up their own facility and generally being freaks.

Why does Canaan need to be free? You killed him...

But I guess the thing that bothered me the most of the lack of information about Alphard and why she wanted to kill Siam. Was Siam training this Canaan to kill his previous Canaan? The way Alphard was acting at the end of the series about killing Siam made me think she really didn’t want to…despite the fact that she was smiling while she did so and blamed Canaan. You typically blame people for your mistakes when you feel guilty inside. But given the fact that everything was confusing about this series I might just give up trying to understand.

Canaan is shocked over the hardcore nature it takes to shoot off your own arm.

For half of the series I thought Canaan was a victim of the Ua virus. Because I am just that special. But then it turns out that Canaan was just born special and that her village also got wiped out for no reason. So my stupidity did have a bit of reasoning behind it. But I do think it is lame that the Ua virus was created to make another Canaan. There has to be an easier way than creating a virus that kills like 95 percent of the victims within 12 hours and the other 4 percent aren’t any use to the project. A lot of time and effort into a process that didn’t produce any results. Unless you think your voice being a weapon is the same as being Canaan.

Who picked this name again?!

I would like to say something like “putting aside all the confusing stuff”…but I can’t. It really impacted the story for me. So many things were left unanswered or the viewers were expected to know information based on the game. Why was the U.S. involved in this crap? Why is Alphard a terrorist and what were the terrorist after? And why are bloggers happy that Alphard lived?! She wasn’t a bad guy from a sad past turned good. She is a bad guy who still is a bad guy and killed countless people!

So….trying to put aside all the confusing stuff, the story had promise. Maybe if there had been more episodes they would have had time to hash out the characters and story lines. But for now I classify it as one big X_X.

I felt bad for that guy and how he felt guilty over Hakko. I do not feel bad for Hakko at all.

The character I hated the most was not Alphard and not Liang Qi (whom is a crazy child from hell) but Hakko. Sure she starts off as the eye candy and innocent like woman child. But then Canaan shows up and Hakko is all evil glares and half ass attempts to kill the girl. Because Hakko is insane. Sure something really crappy happened to her but be mad at the person who caused this all (see the dead guy you is having sex with). Canaan being born with a special ability isn’t her fault. She isn’t the one who paid people to spray crap all over your village and infect people with crazy juice. I understand her craziness and why she wanted to die in the end but her bitterness towards Canaan made me hate her more than the real villains.

After all she has been through she can still smile...

Canaan, despite all the confusion surrounding her, was my favorite character. A girl with a positive body type, a “killer” with a sense of innocence about her, and a genuinely good person. In this kind of anime it is hard to find someone with that mix of qualities. Some people might fault her for being so focused on Maria and Siam’s death but for some people that’s all they have. They have no reason to live for themselves so they focus on protecting one person/idea. Now I do think it was super dramatic that she and Maria can’t be together. Canaan killed (or thought she killed) the baddies so why can’t she give up being an assassin and live life as a normal girl. But we all must be sad in the end and Canaan is still a paid killer. She seems happy knowing Maria is out there alive and well so I shall be happy for her. Despite all the crazy stuff she went through.

One last pity party for the road.

I thought Maria was going to annoy me more than she did. She was annoying but not to Kuroko levels of annoying. Her amazings were cut back dramatic after she opened her eyes and saw the truth all around her (which is ironic since she became a cameraman to show people the world around them and she can’t see anything either). In fact her cheerful personality wasn’t annoying but her massive pity parties she had about not being a good person and blah blah blah. But she didn’t suck and hopefully this experience teaches her to be a better person.

As everyone stares at her weirdness.....

The other characters really didn’t get enough screen time for my liking. YunYun was fun to watch and despite the fact that she was “a bad guy” her circumstances were very sympathetic and she deserved to live in the end. Cummings not so much. And for the entire series I thought Liang Qi was Alphard real sister. Crazy bad guy was crazy. Minoru was there to try to bring Maria back down to Earth and focus on the important issues which he did well. He lost points with me though when he didn’t really grieve Hakko’s death and talked about her ass instead.

The art for this series never faltered for a minute and the music always seemed on point. There was a lot of details in the background and the mood of Shanghai was captured well, the good and the bad.

So while the show didn’t meet up to my high expectations (which only increased every time I delayed watching the series) CANAAN was still a good show. Not that I understood everything that was going on at all times but it does well to draw in a large audience. We will forgive each other, me for putting off watching the episodes and CANAAN for falling short and not explaining things better.

MMM winter anime season is letting me catch up on other things. But also BOOOO!