Review for Eden Of The East (2 Discs)

Introduction

This is just going to be a quickie. If you want to know what the series is about, then I’ll point you in the direction of my review for the DVD release. I had enough of a challenge dancing around spoilers while writing that, and I don’t care to repeat the experience. This review is about the technical qualities of the Blu-ray release, to which I upgraded as soon as my television and home cinema became worthy of such, although it’s taken a while for the discs to rise to the top of my to re-watch pile. Eden of the East is one of the best anime shows in recent years, a contemporary cyber-punk thriller from Kenji Kamiyama, who mastered the genre with Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex.

Manga Entertainment released the DVD and Blu-ray back in 2010, followed soon after by the two sequel films, which I did review on Blu-ray. Actually this may not be my first time watching the show in HD, as the Air Communication feature that was a bonus on the first film served as a recap of the series. I didn’t think much of it though, with its ponderous voice-over and retrospective point of view. Anyway, Manga’s release strategy for Eden of the East followed that of Funimation, in that the Blu-ray offers added value in terms of extra features compared to the DVD.

Eden of the East presents its 11 episodes across two discs, eight episodes on one, and three episodes plus extras on the other.

Disc 1

01. I Picked Up A Prince
02. Melancholy Monday
03. On The Night Of The Late Show
04. Real Reality, Fabricated Reality
05. This Is No Time To Be Thinking About That…
06. Eden Of The East
07. Flight Of The Black Swan
08. Searching For The Path Already Lost


Disc 2

09. A Man Too Ephemeral
10. Who Killed Akira Takizawa?
11. The East That Continues On

Picture

Eden of the East got a top notch PAL conversion for its DVD release in the UK, but the 1.78:1 widescreen transfer at the 1080p resolution of Blu-ray is miles ahead of that. The image is clear and sharp throughout, the animation is smooth and impressive, while the detail levels are a lot higher than that of the DVD. Colours too are richer and warmer than the SD showing, and the quality of the animation really does shine here. There is a smidge of digital banding from time to time, mostly in darker sequences, but Eden of the East actually makes it hard to judge, as the way that the artwork deliberately shades surfaces and larger areas is to use a gradated colour palette that looks much like digital banding. Actual banding is limited to night-time skies, and moving light sources in darker scenes.

Eden of the East is such an exceptional show when it comes to the animation. It's a high quality, big budget production, with a lot happening on-screen at all times. As usual for modern anime, it's a blending of traditional 2D and 3D CG, but you'd be hard pressed to find the seams. The character designs are quirky and individual, tending more towards the realistic, but having a stylised charm of their own, with simplistic but expressive facial characteristics. It's also a show that makes uses of exaggerated expressions more typical of anime comedies for some of the character moments, but as Eden of the East is so atypical an anime, free of any of the tropes or clichés of other shows, that such sudden transformations actually suit the tone of the show in a rather different way. In terms of detail, world design, and the thought gone into every aspect of the animation, Eden of the East excels at creating and conveying a very intriguing world, and you often forget that you are watching an animation.

The images in this review are sourced from the PR and aren’t necessary representative of the retail release.

Sound

We get Dolby TrueHD 5.1 Japanese and English soundtracks, with optional English subtitles and a signs only track. With a lot of Japanese text courtesy of computer monitors and mobile phone screens, you're going to need the signs, and probably be quick off the mark on the pause button as well, as Funimation try to overlay the signs on the text, resulting in some odd angles and aspects to the writing. However the quality of the font on the Blu-ray makes it a tad more legible, although the subtitles themselves could be a little thicker. The surround sound is very welcome on the Japanese track, which as usual was my audio track of choice, and the high definition format is very much a step up from the DVD. There is a lot of action and ambience to make use of the surround sound. The English dub is no small potatoes either, with the cast living up to the high standard set by their Japanese counterparts. Kenji Kawai provides the music, and it's very much a contemporary and even conventional music style that accompanies the series, as opposed to the more avant-garde and adventurous music styles that I usually associate him with.

That brief moment of glitchiness I experienced on the audio for the DVDs was not present here.

Extras

You get two discs in an Amaray style Blu-ray case, one disc on each face, all in a card slipcover that repeats the sleeve art (although gets the runtime wrong). While waiting for me to watch it, the glue on the slipcover perished, and I had to repair it myself. It isn’t the strongest of adhesives.

Both discs have animated menus that play clips from the show, with the options appearing from a Selecao phone in the bottom right hand corner.

The extras that this release has in common with the DVD include the 30 second TV spot, the 2 minute promo video, the 22 minute interview with Chica Umino and Kenji Kamiyama, and the 19 minute interview with Ryouhei Kimura and Saori Hayami.


Exclusive to the Blu-ray release are the following.

The Directors Kamiyama and Oshii Interview lasts 27 minutes, and sees Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii join Eden of the East director (and Stand Alone Complex director) Kenji Kamiyama to talk about the show and directing anime in general. It’s a nice interview, pretty candid where Oshii approaches the show as a fan, while Kamiyama sees Oshii as something of a mentor.

You also get a 16 minute interview with Art Director Takeda where he talks about getting the somewhat unique look of the show to work. It gets pretty technical at times, but it’s a very useful featurette.

Also useful is the Composer Kawai Interview, where Kenji Kawai talks us through how he composed some of the themes for the show. This lasts 11 minutes.

Finally, and much missed on the UK DVD release, is the textless credit sequence.

All of the extras on this release are presented in 1080i 60Hz resolution and can be found on disc 2, but they are apparently up-scaled from an SD source (That’s aside from the textless credits which are native 1080p).

Conclusion

Well let’s get this out of the way first. Eden of the East, the TV series is still one of the best, if not the best anime in recent years, it’s a cyberpunk thriller with a whole lot of heart, with engaging, likeable, and believable characters that steer clear of the usual tropes, and with a story that hooks like no other. If this isn’t in your anime collection, then send back your club membership card. Actually a lot of membership cards ought to be going back, as both the DVD and Blu-ray are bargain-bucketing for the kind of money that makes me think that it didn’t sell the way that it should have done.

Anyway, this is your chance to rectify a crime against anime, and buy it now. If you have a Blu-ray player the choice is obvious. But if you already own the DVD, should you double dip? After watching the Blu-ray, my suspicion is that it isn’t a native 1080p show, that it was animated at some lower, intermediate resolution and scaled up, as it never attains the sharpness and clarity of an anime feature film, or indeed something like Persona 4. But given the choice between SD PAL with 4% speed-up, compression artefacts, aliasing and a comparatively limited colour palette, and the HD experience we get here, clear and sharp throughout, and at its native frame rate, the choice makes itself. What’s more is that the high definition audio is a significant improvement over the DVD, again without the speed-up.


Best of all, you get almost an extra hour worth of bonus features, and none of them superfluous or ephemeral. I’d highly recommend finding a spare tenner for this Blu-ray, as it’s well worth the upgrade, and it’s a double dip that won’t break the bank and send you into your own personal double dip recession. If you wait, Manga Entertainment will be releasing a Complete Collection, with both the series and the movies on DVD and Blu-ray in February.