Introduction:
Old Casshern was made at the time Great Robots (Go Nagai) style was the most popular format. These kind of anime were aimed mostly at kids back then. There was a neat distinction between good and evil, and the format was practically the same in every episode: Evil attacks, heroes counterattack and save the day. Meta plot is slowly developed in the entire serie, if present. Target eventually grew with decades, as anime viewer grew older and needed deeper stories and more developed character traits. Casshern, though being aimed at kids and being build with a fairly linear plot and format, showed a peculiar carachterization and environment, more suitable for an older target. Casshern has that kind of slow developing plot, but unless Super Robot anime, it had a somehow more complex story and environment to deal with. Good and Evil start to mix up in Casshern. The evil faction, the robot have their good reasons to behave like that, beyond the old boring “will to conquer the world” or such. Good faction have their weakness and dark side too. Casshern was mad by Tatsunoko as one serie in a row of three having much more deepness and dark environment than old super robot. These three series also share a common dark and desperate environment and common themes such as pollution and refuse of war and racism. So kid’s series made for the kids to reflect upon important matters like that. The three series are Casshern, Polymar and Tekkaman.

I loved the art, and a few performances–Furuya was great as Casshan–but everything else was decent at best. The uneven writing and crappy ending pissed me off; I found the dialouge wildly pretentious.

The series had a lot of potential which was never fully tapped.

Anyway, Casshern SINS had an impressive visual style but it’s a bit of a one-trick pony and the animation isn’t all too fluid, the fights are actually impressively unimpressive and lacking in variation. They also relied on many scenes with close-ups that show little detail. I actually watched Shinsen’s SD version and I can hardly imagine it’s worth watching it in HD. The visual style lives completely by the bold, glowing colours and the softened edges.

I didn’t find the dialogues natural at all, by the way. The voice actors speak as if it was a stage play in a theatre rather than a TV series. They sound slightly wooden, overly dramatic and many of the dialogues are rather dual-monologues. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate this acting style for a change once a while. Though I assume this style could imply more depth than there really is. It tried to be very symbolic. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t see much under its pleasing cover. Especially, Casshern himself would have been highly annoying if the acting had been more realistic because he comes off rather dumb-struck and often talks like a broken record. It’s just the way he actually speaks that makes him still look intelligent.

The ideas used for the plot are certainly not innovative but I doubt they wanted them to be. “Life is only meaningful by death”, the differences between robots and humans, those are actually issues that manga and anime discussed decades ago. The art was fresh, the content wasn’t.

I found Casshern SINS very pleasing visually as well as the acting style and I wasn’t bored with it for a minute even though it became a bit of static half-way through. Nonetheless, in my opinion, it has much more style than substance.

Seriously, if you thought it was soooo terrible, why did you watch it to the end instead of dropping it?