Myriad Colors: Phantom World - A Phantom of a Show

Myriad Colors: Phantom World is an anime by acclaimed studio Kyoto Animation, aired in the Winter 2016 season. It came out to mixed reception, with many praising it for its beautiful visuals and interesting premise, whilst a large amount of detractors point to its archetypal characters and meandering storytelling. It's currently sitting at a 7.00 average score on MyAnimeList, with 107,953 users listing it as seen.

Myriad Colors: Phantom World follows Haruhiko, a student in a high school where the students can do what essentially amounts to magic due to an incident at a research facility which caused humans to become able to perceive supernatural entities known as phantoms. He's part of the phantom hunting club, where students are rewarded in coupons and goods for tracking down and dealing with phantoms that inconvenience or endanger people. He works as a team with fellow student and local hotblooded tsundere Mai. Unfortunately, their team has the worst performance record in the school. Yep, Myriad Colors: Phantom World is a magic battle high school show, which anyone who's as much as glanced in the direction of a seasonal anime chart in the past five years will tell you is not exactly an original idea. 

As you'd expect from this kind of show, we need to populate the protagonists' team with a variety of girls, so that there's at least one girl that every weeb might want to buy a figurine or body-pillow of. Because their team is bad, Haruhiko and Mai set out to recruit new members. These include airheaded ojou Reina (who is fascinated with food, because Tsumugi from K-On! was popular and she was an ojou who was fascinated with food), ice queen-type tsundere Koito (who looks like Rei Ayanami of Evangelion fame got a dye-job), loli Kurumi (of the shy, teddy-bear wielding variety, not the sassy precocious child variety), and cancer on wings Ruru (an annoyingly cheerful genki-girl of a fairy who doubles as the show's mascot). I'd usually go into more detail about these characters, but anyone familiar with these tropes can probably write these characters exactly as they're portrayed in the show just based on the above.

I want to make clear that whilst all my problems with Myriad Colors: Phantom World stem from the fact that it makes use of overworn tropes and cliches, that sole fact is not the problem. Plenty of anime I really like is also very unimaginative and uncreative in its premise and characters. My favorite pure shonen action series, even after several re-watches, is A Certain Scientific Railgun, and it's full to the brim of stuff you'll find in a million other shows. In fact, the cast of the two shows is not at all incomparable, with several of the archetypes maping straight onto each other. My problem with Myriad Colors: Phantom World is that it does nothing interesting with the very basic magic battle high school framework it sets up. It's even more frustrating because Myriad Colors: Phantom World actually has a host of opportunities to do something like that, but never actually goes ahead and makes the jump.

The thing that should have made Phantom World special is evident from the very first minute of its first episode, which actually has a massive amount of promise. The episode opens with Haruhiko and Ruru explaining a series of optical illusions, and for the first quarter of its runtime plays with its characters' perception of the environment around them. The first scene involves Haruhiko talking to the camera about all the ways the human brain is unreliable in processing information, and how easily we can be tricked. This, combined with the premise of phantoms - supernatural beings that humanity only became aware of due to a virus leak from a major corporation  affecting everyone's brains - should have made for a fascinating ride. After all, phantoms are constantly shown to be affecting the environment around them in ways that you'd perceive even if you couldn't see the phantom. An action scene in the first episode involves a phantom destroying school property, which becomes something of a minor plot point - how come they didn't do this stuff before humanity became conscious of them? Perhaps humanity's awareness of phantoms is the only reason they exist at all, reality itself buckling in order to accomodate the complexity of the human brain, or maybe phantoms are being disturbed by humanity's awareness of them somehow. Perhaps being supernatural beings, they're distorted to fit human perception, and become violent and destructive as a result.

These are only a few of the directions that the show could've taken its premise. Note that you absolutely don't need to make this show a heavy and deep exploration of this stuff for it to be satisfying. I'm not asking for the show to abandon it's nature as a light-hearted action series and become a deep think-piece. A Certain Scientific Railgun questions its premise - the development of supernatural abilities in children through scientific means - simply by having its villains be people who either believe in the purposes of Academy City too much or too little, as well as including characters struggle with the fact that they're unable to become superpowered. It makes for a satisfying enough exploration of its theme - whether science can or should go too far - whilst keeping the focus of the show squarely on fun action scenes involving creative, vaguely scientific, powers. There's a common and highly harmful misconception out there that making a story be "about" something means the story has to be intelligent and fully dedicated to that something, abandoning fun and action. There's nothing farther from the truth. Railgun is "about" where, if anywhere, the limits of science should be, yet it's still a decidedly dumb show that's mainly there to provide explosions for you to stare at.

However, Phantom World completely ignores any of the interesting ideas inherent to its central conceit. Every couple of episodes there'll be a throwaway line that hints at something interesting about some of the series' supernatural concepts, like the drama club phantom in episode 9, who is said to start living as a regular human after the episode is done despite everyone's memories of her being implanted fakes, a throwaway that gestures in an interesting direction and is completely discarded. Instead, it chooses to be more of an episodic series, starting off with a character spotlight episode for each of its main cast and then doing a few one-off stories. There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach either, but remember my complaint from earlier: None of the characters are anything beyond the most basic version of that character archetype. This may be a bit unfair, as every character spotlight episode does have at least something interesting to say about their focus. Namely, every single one of them has one factoid about their history that you wouldn't expect - like Mai thinking of herself as a lonely and shy kid as a child - that has no bearing on the character in the modern day whatsoever, and seems to be there entirely so the author can point at it and say "See, I subverted the trope!". There's nothing really wrong about these episodes, but they all go pretty much the exact way you'd expect them to. In most instances, as soon as the phantom of the week showed up and it became clear what they represent in terms of the characters' past, I was able to guess almost exactly how the story was going to play out. I will give props to one of the character spotlight episodes though - Ruru's. Despite the character being the biggest waste of airtime and one of the biggest annoyances I've had to suffer through in recent history, her episode was actually fairly nice and had a few heartwarming moments. Part of it is that stories where people are honest about how much their friends mean to them when they think they're not around always get me, but it's still got a fairly clever and unique setup to it. I still hate Ruru, but she's responsible for the only episode in the show that I never paused to check the remaining runtime.

The series then moves on to just sort of general episodic stories. A hilarious aside I want to point out here is the evolution of Koito's power level throughout the show. Presented at first as an overpowered loner who can easily solo phantoms so powerful that the rest of the core cast combined couldn't deal with them, the show spends a few minutes an episode finding a way to nerf her (usually by contriving a reason for her to lose her voice, since her power requires her to sing), before going "fuck it" and just retconning her power into being a fire attack that's only highly effective against grass monsters as soon as the character spotlights are over and it's no longer OK for her to not be part of the plot halfway through every single episode.

At any rate, this stretch is the worst part of the show, as even the vague feeling that we were getting to know the characters disappears, and the show loses any sense of purpose. Instead, every episode involves the characters fighting a usually uninteresting monster of the week. Due to the show's light-hearted tone (read: the fact that the show refuses to have anything of consequence happen), these episodes are devoid of any sense of stakes or danger. In theory this'd mean that we should be free to just enjoy watching the characters beat up the enemy, but a baffling amount of the episodes actually don't center around a big superpowered showdown, instead having the characters being forced to solve some sort of problem -get out of this magic house, undo this mysterious curse, etc. Because pretty much the only trait that all the characters actually have in common is that they're dumb as bricks, the solution is usually reached by accident (and often is made clear to the viewer way before the characters realize it). So this part of the show is pretty much just watching a bunch of morons you don't really care about fail to solve a puzzle you know for sure they'll solve after banging their head against it for about fifteen minutes - anyone who's watched gaming videos on youtube will know how frustrating an experience this is.

So up to this point, Phantom World is a series of nothing. It squanders an interesting premise, and instead chooses to explore characters that it refuses to flesh out and spend its time spinning its wheels without anything of consequence happening. It tries to go for something interesting in its final two episodes, which are the only two to really connect and form a two-part story, which involve a particularly powerful phantom posing as Haruhiko's mother. The problem is all the development we've had for Haruhiko's mother is that in Episode 3 he mentions that she left his father years ago, and a slight implication of him being hurt by her absence in the episode where he turns into a child. Episode 12 has her show up out of nowhere, and expects us to just be fully invested in their relationship, and it just doesn't work in the slightest. I'd dare say that if I'd been primed to care about Haruhiko's mother at all, I would've loved (or at least liked) the final two parter. The villain is legitimately threatening, the scenes of Haruhiko's communal life with his mother are pleasant, and I'm a sucker for stories about the power of friendship making people band together against impossible odds. Unfortunately, after 11 episodes of nothing happening, I was mostly keen to see the show end, and my reaction to the cliffhanger ending of Episode 12 wasn't excitement, it was annoyance that the show was an episode longer than I thought it was. 

Here's the disappointing truth about Phantom World: My standards for this type of show aren't exactly high. My favorite entry in the genre is A Certain Scientific Railgun, a show that barely makes MyAnimeList's top 1000, and I've greatly enjoyed shows similar to Phantom World despite large flaws, stuff like Keijo!!!!!!!! or MM!. Perhaps most tellingly, I have a soft spot for Dog Days, a show that's similarly populated with cardboard cutout characters and with a story that (in season 2, which is the best season of Dog Days and I will fight anyone who thinks otherwise) has literally zero stakes. I'm more than willing to consume some shonen garbage every now and again and have it pass through my brain without much impact. Even as that type of show, Phantom World fails me, because even motherfucking Dog Days , the epitome of bland and generic shonen, has something to distinguish itself from the crowd: It's set in a world where wars are big Wipeout type competitions where no one gets seriously injured. It briefly looks at what a world like that would look like, and even considers the impact that someone trying to have an actual violent war would make. It's the most cursory of glances, and the answers it comes up with are super uninteresting (and just plain wrong when it comes to the violent war one), but that stuff is legitimately there. Add to that the fact that the absolute lack of stakes makes the action scenes able to put characters out of comission at a whim, making them surprisingly unpredictable, and you've actually got a disposable little action romp with a pinch of heart. Myriad Colors: Phantom World really just has nothing. There's not a character that can't be entirely and accurately described using TV Tropes articles, there isn't a single episode that's interesting and innovative, there's nothing challenging. 

I watched all 13 episodes of Phantom World over the course of two days. Part of it was that both days I had 5 hour gaps in my schedule with nothing to do, but even on days like that I don't typically get through as much of a show. Even when I'm marathoning a show with the intention of finishing it off quickly, I'll often pause for two to five minutes between episodes to consider what I just saw, or to just let my brain cool down. After particularly big moments I'll sometimes stop watching for an hour or two, just to process the new information and let it sink in. I never stopped between episodes of Phantom World unless I had to do something, since at no point was there anything about the show I needed to process. This show is completely disposable. It doesn't challenge the mind in any way. In that way, it's a complete failure in the artistic sense. Art has to be challenging in some way, it's got to change your brain somehow, be it provoking thought or some kind of emotion. Not everything has to be 2001: A Space Odyssey, but even stuff like MM!, which I'd argue is actively meant to be consumed in a few minutes and forgotten, has some interesting energy to it that makes you feel something as you're watching it. The only thing I can say about any given episode Phantom World is that it's a better way to spend 23 minutes than not doing anything. 

It's sad, really, because it would have been so simple to make Phantom World worthwhile. This is Kyoto Animation, after all, and as such this show is genuinely absolutely gorgeous. But it doesn't mean anything when it doesn't have anything going on. Just anything, any sort of nudge in any direction other than bland, generic mediocrity would likely have elevated Phantom World to something that I'd have left feeling pretty content. The way it is right now, I finished Phantom World but two days ago, and already I'm struggling to remember anything that happened in it. I'm about as able to remember things that happened in Phantom World as I am things that happened in Dog Days, a light and fluffy show I watched three years ago now. Phantom World is disposable mush, and many of its defenders say that's all it needs to be. That's fair, but check this out. Here's a list of feel-good disposable mush shonen anime that actually have something worthwhile about them, and this is just from the limited number of shows I've watched:

Dog Days

Keijo!!!!!!!!

Little Witch Academia

MM!

Space Patrol Luluco

This is excluding anything that has any significant dark moments to it, such as No Game No Life, or moments that I could see making someone sad even for a little bit, like lost matches in sports anime like Baby Steps. It also excludes stuff with bigger ideas, even if they're pushed far into the background, like Kill la Kill and Tengen Tonpa Gurren Lagann, or shows where the action is visceral and/or stressful, like the A Certain franchise and Attack on Titan. I'm also excluding shows where there's legitimate bad blood between certain characters, like Haikyuu!!. It's the incredibly specific genre of feel-good, non-threatening, non-stressful, purely dumb shonen anime. Even if you absolutely need dumb feel-good action to put in your brain, I've come up with five shows from the limited selection of shows that I've watched to completion that manage to be that and still have some substance, some interesting characters, or just something that makes them worth your time. Even slightly expand that very narrow definition, and I can double or triple the amount of shows I can list. Give me full knowledge of every anime in existence and I absolutely guarantee I can make the length of that narrow list reach triple digits with no problem.

Myriad Colors: Phantom World is not the worst show I've ever seen. I've watched true garbage like Garzey's Wing, The Asterisk War and Say "I Love You". It is, however, the last show I'd recommend to anyone. I'd legitimately recomend someone watch something irredemeably awful like The Asterisk War over Phantom World. There's nothing to be gained from it. Myriad Colors: Phantom World is the truest time-waster I've ever seen, a piece of nothing that shows up, eats up to 13 23-minute chunks of your limited time on Earth, and disappears, leaving nothing behind. Bad shows leave you angry or bored, they leave an impression and maybe teach you something about what makes art not work. Phantom World can't do that, there's nothing really wrong with it. The thing is, there's nothing right with it either, nothing to justify spending any time on it at all. I keep saying that nothing that Phantom World does is really the problem with it, but it fails to do anything to make those not-problems be not-problematic. Railgun's generic characters were OK because it put them in interesting situations. Kill la Kill's nonsensical plot was OK because it turned the intensity up to 11. Hell, K-On!, a show by the same student as Phantom World also had a yawn-worthy premise and completely archetypal characters, but it's my favorite anime because of the completely perfect character writing it displays, turning its archetypes into fully fleshed out and believable teenage girls.  Myriad Colors: Phantom World is worthless in the best way possible, a blob of grey flavorless odorless goop that just hangs out and exists. It's sort of scary, to be honest, how a show with such high production values, colorful artwork and interesting core conceit can be lacking any sort of personality like this, despite the fact that the crew that worked on it is massively talented.

Final Rating: 4/10

A 5/10 may seem more appropriate given its near perfect mediocrity, but to me a 5/10 implies a lack of recommendation either way, and I strongly suggest avoiding Phantom World. In a bizarre way, Phantom World is such a perfect example of a 5/10 that it actually backslides into a lower rating.