The original webcomic must surely be better than this. That won two Eagle Awards for "Favourite Web-Based Comic" and was nominated for a British Fantasy Award. This, though, is a flop of a English language anime (a "Crunchyroll Original" with Japanese animators). I enjoyed the first episode, but the acting's bad and I stopped caring. They should have made a Japanese dub and had a competent cast. Voice acting is a bigger industry in Japan than in the UK and has a deeper talent pool, although admittedly I appreciated hearing authentic English accents given the setting of Whitechapel, London. British producers and voice actors lack anime experience, because English-language anime dubs are almost all American and have been that way for decades, while the UK voice acting industry is mostly pre-school, children's and family animation. We're also expensive, which dissuades producers.
The original FreakAngels was a 2008-2011 webcomic of 144 six-page episodes, written by Warren Ellis and drawn by Paul Duffield. Twelve 23-year-old psychics are living in Whitechapel, six years after civilisation was destroyed. Ellis's premise was what if John Wyndham's Midwich Cuckoos had survived and grown into disaffected and confused young adults. He announced the series at the 2007 San Diego Comic-Con by saying, "I've written two hundred pages and I still have no idea what it's about... it's retro-punk, it's near future steampunk."
How did civilisation fall? Was it destroyed by the Freak Angels themselves? Well, perhaps.
The setting's pretty cool. It feels authentically British in a way that the animated adaptation probably enhances (e.g. the accents). It's a distinctive combination of dirty street life, a flooded London, high technology in the flashbacks (especially military) and home-made toys. There's a "bike" helicopter, a steam-boat and steam-powered Gatling guns.
The plot would have been great if I'd cared about the characters. (Well, except for the non-ending.) Unfortunately, though, the animated version makes that impossible. Our anti-heroes tend to be sweary bad-tempered tossers with lots of flaws. No problem so far. I approve. It's called good writing. However, it's a show-killer for such a cast to be badly acted and sapping your interest in them. Line deliveries are colourless and lack oomph. Some actors are better than others, but no one's good and the whole thing's just meh. There wasn't a single character I cared about, or even wanted to survive.
For what it's worth, this was the last Crunchyroll Original. The brand failed. It was launched in 2020, when Crunchyroll had just walked into an anti-woke backlash over High Guardian Spice. (Crunchyroll's response was to start rejecting shows with diverse themes.) This brand became known for management issues, production disasters and communication gaps. Announced dates were missed without comment. They released this Warren Ellis series in 2022, two years after the June 2020 sexual coercion allegations had made him a pariah. (In fairness, they'd announced it in February 2020 after he'd been working with them successfully for years on Castlevania.) They released this show without subtitles, which isn't a "sub vs. dub" complaint but about providing for viewers with hearing disabilities. Then, a few years later, Crunchyroll outraged pretty much everyone by using AI-generated subtitles that damaged the original shows and in one case put on screen "chat GPT said".
This show is unsuitable for children, but in a teenage swearing and nipple-less nudity kind of way. I should probably read the original webcomic for comparison, but I can't be arsed. In fairness, though, I liked the first episode.
