Gankutsuou - The Count of Monte Cristo Boxset (Review)
Tuesday, 8th December 2009, 19:22

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Introduction

There are anime shows aplenty that never make it to the UK. They’re too niche, or would never get past the BBFC, or sometimes they just slip under the radar. Then there are the shows that are just too damned expensive to licence. They are the flavour of the month, the next big thing, and while some US companies can afford to shell out megabucks for the latest Japanese animated delicacy, it’s a whole different cricket match for UK companies. Sometimes we get lucky, and time proves the great equaliser. It’s how we eventually got FLCL, almost half a decade after everyone else. Of course it can all be put down to the heady days of the mid 2000s, when anime was about to go mainstream, and companies felt justified in charging licensing fees that were quite ridiculous, and distributors still had the balls to pay them. We’re still dealing with the fallout of that daft couple of years even now, as US anime companies fold, and just who has the rights to what causes consternation. Gankutsuou was one of the major titles from this period, a Gonzo anime from 2004 that went and won the best TV series at the 2005 Kobe animation awards. Geneon in the US picked it up, and released the series to universal acclaim. As most Gonzo titles make it to the UK eventually, it would have been fair to expect it to come here, except no one was willing to pay what was being asked. Then Geneon stopped US distribution last year, although this year Funimation picked up the rights to distribute a whole lot of their titles, and one of the first boxsets they re-released was Gankutsuou. Still no sign of it in the UK.

There’s only so much positive word of mouth a person can take, and believe me there is a whole lot of positive comment about this show. I caved and imported. If you can do so, try and find the original Geneon artbox as I did. The episodes are split across six discs, and come with copious extras. Funimation on the other hand have reformatted the series across 4 discs, stripped out the extras, and packed them in a thinpack receptacle not much larger than a single Amaray case.

Mahiro Maeda’s adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo does add a couple of new twists to it, not least of which is shifting the story to the distant future, in an aristocratic and royalist Paris that figuratively is the centre of the universe. More striking is that unlike any other adaptation that I can recall, Gankutsuou tells the story from the point of view of a young man who encounters the enigmatic Count of Monte Cristo. Albert de Morcerf finds the ennui of the aristocratic life unbearable, so with his best friend Franz d’Epinay, he leaves home to find himself. In his journey he ends up on the hedonistic capital of the solar system, Luna, just as Carnival is about to begin. It’s there that he first meets the enigmatic Count of Monte Cristo, a blue skinned man of devilish aspect, when the Count saves him from a ruthless gang of kidnappers. Much to Franz’ concern, Albert is taken with the older man, fascinated by his attitude to life, and his unique style. When the Count tells him that he is looking to move to Paris, Albert is quick to offer his hospitality, promising to introduce the Count to all the movers and shakers in the capital. What Albert doesn’t know is that the Count has ulterior motives, and that his true intentions will be made clear to the families of Edouard de Villefort, Baron Danglars, and Fernand Mondego. Mondego changed his name and his whole identity 25 years previously however, and he now goes by the name of Fernand de Morcerf, Albert’s father. Now these three men, and their families must pay for what happened to an innocent named Edmond Dantes.

Geneon presents 24 episodes of Gankutsuou – The Count of Monte Cristo across 6 discs.

Disc 1
1. At Journey’s End, We Meet
2. Until The Sun Rises Over The Moon
3. 5/22, Stormy
4. A Mother’s Secrets

Disc 2
5. Do You Love Your Fiancée?
6. Her Melancholy, My Melancholy
7. The Secret Flower Garden
8. A Night in Boulogne

Disc 3
9. I Dreamed A Dark Dream
10. The Letter From Edmond
11. An Engagement Broken
12. Encore

Disc 4
13. Haidee
14. Lost Souls
15. The End of Happiness, The Beginning of Truth
16. Scandal

Disc 5
17. The Confession
18. The Duel
19. Even If I Should Stop Being Me
20. Farewell, Eugenie

Disc 6
21. The Golden Boy’s True Identity
22. Counterattack
23. Edmond Dantes
24. At The Shore

Picture

Gankutsuou gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer, NTSC of course, so a slightly lower resolution, and (for some people) imperceptible flicker is offset by the absence of ghosting, judder and other standards conversion issues. It’s a fine transfer, clear and sharp and free of any glaring problems, although the sheer fast animation and mayhem of the closing sequence does throw up some compression artefacts. The episodes themselves are fine.

Once more, I wish that I could screencap Region 1 discs, as no description of mine is going to do Gankutsuou justice. Gonzo are well known for their fondness of eye-candy, and their willingness to invest more in the look of a show than its contents. We’ll come to the contents of this show later, but it looks like they threw everything at the screen for this one. It’s bright, it’s garish, it’s lush, lavish and rich, it’s wholly inventive and unlike anything you have seen before. This is a re-imagined Paris, full of aristocracy and extravagance, and the animation reflects that, with grand designs, enveloping CGI vistas, and a visual creativity that belongs in surrealist art. The costume designs are fabulous, and the unique way of rendering textures, patterns and colours means that only the characters skin is conventionally coloured. Their hair, or their clothing is like a window onto another texture, and as that window moves, you see different parts of that texture revealed. It’s off-putting at first, but once you get used to it, you realise that it fits in perfectly with this breathtaking universe that Gonzo have created.

Sound
This is something of a disappointment, just standard DD 2.0 stereo tracks in English and Japanese, alongside optional translated subtitles and signs. 5.1 audio would have suited the visual splendour of this show, and while it may not be loaded with action, as it is a more cerebral piece, it certainly has ambience and musically it is a warm blend of classical and contemporary pieces. Incidentally, Jean-Jacques Burnel of The Stranglers fame provides the show’s theme songs. My choice as always is the original Japanese audio, and there’s certainly nothing to complain about here. However, I did sample the American dub and found it wanting. There’s something about American accents in a future Parisian neo-aristocracy that just rub me the wrong way. If there is a show that ever demanded a UK dub, this is one. One thing that I found annoying was the translation of the story recaps at the start of each episode. In the original Japanese version, these are delivered in French, to go with the tone of the piece and a nod to the original source material. It’s subtitled in English of course, and no doubt it would have been subtitled in Japanese for domestic audiences. But the US dub ditches it and sticks in generic voiceover man instead to read the whole thing in English. Definitely stick with the Japanese on this one.

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