Gachiakuta Review

The world is the pitch. A walled town in the sky drops everything it does not want, people included, into a hole. What lands below is a wasteland of compacted rubbish where discarded objects turn into beasts, and a crew called the Cleaners fight them with Vital Instruments, ordinary items charged by the attachment their owners felt for them. Rudo's are a pair of gloves his guardian gave him.

Kei Urana's manga is drawn with genuine anger about waste and class, and Bones Film match it. Hideyoshi Ando's graffiti covers the sets, a film grain sits over every shot, and the computer generated beasts are deliberately mismatched against the hand drawn figures so they read as junk rather than as monsters. It is the most distinctive looking shonen of its year, and it took the Crunchyroll award for best new series.

The story underneath is more ordinary than the surface. Rudo joins a team, is ranked against it, trains, meets a stronger enemy. It takes roughly half the run to find its footing, and one subplot handles a character's abuse with a clumsy amount of fanservice. Twenty four episodes, with a second season announced.