Canaan, vendettas and girls with guns

This is probably the only post of mine that you will read where I use only pictures from the anime I’m reviewing XD

To get it out of the way, I’m not going to lie. I’m only writing this post because I feel terrible that there has been virtually no new content here for the past month except for my videos. But, I’m still going to have fun writing it so it kind of cancels each other out in a weird, illogical way. However, that being said, the writers of OP (excluding Selcouth) are once again quasi-free!! LessThanFree, SleepyNoYume and I’s prelims are over and we can post again (Disclaimer: we’re probably still too lazy to post or we don’t have time to post because we’re mugging our arse off for the “O” levels).

Either way, I felt bad for not posting so you readers can look forward to 8 posts by me soon, including this one. I’m trawling through my little notepad of post ideas and I’ve picked the 8 most promising that I’ve wanted to do for a while now. And some of them are reallllllllllllly belated. Like this one for example.

Words of Wisdom

Canaan was an anime that was on my to-watch list for a long time. I added it about 3 months after I got into the whole anime/manga/Japanese thing but I only watched it at the start of this year (That’s about 8 months despite having downloaded it immediately after I chose to watch it). As per usual, I only watched it after a period of extended boredom and realisation that I had such an anime on my MAL.

I marathoned the anime over the course of two days but I was already loving it by episode 3. I thought to myself “This anime! I like it! This appeals to me!” as I ate my lunch. So yes, if you haven’t guessed by now (Firstly, you must be really slow in the head to not have by now), today’s post would be my review of the anime, Canaan.

Cannan

I’d like to think that the title of the post sums up Canaan in it’s loosest sense but it has much more than that. But as a summary of the anime, Canaan follows the story of Canaan, an ex-child soldier and now full-time hired gun for an intelligence agency. However, she’s a bit more unique compared to the other men hired by the organization as she was a survivor of an infamous bio-terroism event that lead to the creation of mutants and her ability is that of Synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition where one’s 5 senses are linked as one, meaning one can “hear” smells, “see” sounds and etcetera which means she is essentially the perfect hunter as she can track you down from anything (Which means owing her money must be quite frightening).

Synesthesia in action.

The plot of Canaan is told from the point of view of Maria, Canaan’s old friend as Canaan attempts to shut down Snake, a criminal organization headed by the woman she has a vendetta against, Alphard (No more spoilers for you!)

Main Villain, Alphard

To get it out of the way, I’ll have to say that I love Canaan’s art style. It’s definitely not spectacular but it has a charm to it that I really enjoy. Especially the character design for Canaan and Alpahrd. They were supposed to be strong women and they surely looked the part.

Strong women that can kill you huh

As for animation, Canaan’s “fighting” scenes would actually be rather lacking but then again, Canaan uses guns so there’s not much to show except for dead bodies hitting the floor. However, there are a lot of scenes with plenty of action (not fighting though) where Canaan has to chase down fugitives and parkour with some incredible skill and they were done really well. There was no choppiness or stiffness to it and the movements were fluid, making for a much more in-depth feeling with the anime (Although, honestly, if they just did pan-zooming and sliding of the backgrounds, I would have enjoyed it anyway).

Plot wise, Canaan has what is probably a very over-used and well-worn out plot line that is prevalent in every genre of Action flicks and in fact, anything to do with action, from books to movies to anime. Main character works for someone, they are told to chase down someone else, voila, that someone else is someone they hate because that someone else did something to the main character (Choose from: Killed Family, Killed Master/Teacher. Killed Friend, left a big dent in main characters life etc etc). But it’s so frequently used because it’s tried and tested on so many countless occasions. It’s something that gives a good framework to work the more subtle nuances of the plot upon and it is forgiving enough to leave room for little mistakes here and there in the plot. And hell, it’s simple enough to understand so even the most inattentive of the viewer can still get most of what’s happening even if he/she is just watching for something else of the anime.

The mysterious man that lead to all this!

That being said, I still liked the plot a lot (even though I predicted most of it) and I was pleasantly surprised that Canaan could still surprise me at certain portions of the show with plot twists.

The characters of Canaan (and in fact, any character) is what makes up the show. You can have a great plot and all but with no characters, the plot doesn’t flow (well, duh, there’s no one to be part of the plot). Although I certainly can’t say that Canaan’s characters are the best and most developed as there is only so much character development one can do in 12 episodes with the time-consuming action scenes, I still applaud their effort for I managed to like very single character they introduced, which is probably a first because I can always find one character I vehemently dislike in any fiction. I found the characters all rather well-rounded and they blended together really well.

This is what Twilight’s character’s personalities are like

The characters of Canaan also allowed for the plot to touch upon certain aspects of each character and their respective problems. I was really happy that they went in-depth into the driving force behind each character in relation to the plot and that’s certainly an A in my books to give the backstory to anything. I love how they touched on Hakko’s feelings of rejection by society and her dependence on Santana due to her specific mutation as well as Yunyun’s reason to continue her life as she does. It gives the viewer a more intimate look into the characters that some action-themed fiction might skim over to fit in more action.

Canaan has a lot of interesting quotes. And Hakko is a really interesting character

Escape like a badass

As a summary to all the above points (many of which would probably be skipped in the initial reading of this post, I’m sure), Canaan is a great anime that deserves the 10/10 I gave it on MAL. It gave me a lot of entertainment over the 2 days I watched it and it managed to occupy most of my thought for the week after I finished watching it. The ending was VERY different from what I expected it to be and I really love the anime for it because it’s just different in that way. As a little side note, the feel of the relationship between Maria and Canaan was oh so delicious. The shoujo-ai vibes they gave off were great!!

:33333

I’ll slip in a bit more of the Shoujoi-Ai~

Some argue Canaan and Alphard go great together

P.S The OP and ED was great. Especially the OP’s animation scene. Top-notch stuff from Type-Moon eh.

OP:

ED: