One of the new shows introduced this Fall season is the anime adaptation of Yoshifumi Tozuka's Undead Unluck manga, a shonen about a man who cannot die finding his best chance at death in the form of 18-year-old Fūko, a girl who brings about calamity through skin contact.

The series doesn't take very long to take things to particularly epic proportions, and the anime has responded to the fast-moving narrative with a production so visually striking and fluid elevation of the source material that it could be the best-looking adaptation of the Fall. What exactly is so aesthetically pleasing about the animation production of Undead Unluck?

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Plot and Background

Undead Unluck begins with 18-year-old Fūko Izumo, who has lived an immensely difficult life due to a strange condition that brings bad luck to anyone who touches her, and is on the brink of ending her own life. However, she is saved from certain death by a naked man who suffers from the unique condition of being unable to die, regardless of the circumstance. This "undead" man can regenerate rapidly and desires "the best possible death" because he dislikes being immortal, and he takes Fūko with him on his journey, believing that her strange condition is the key to bringing him this death that he desires; however, they are soon pursued by a mysterious organization known as The Union, with whom the undead now known as "Andy" has some history.

Production

The Undead Unluck anime is produced by David Production (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: The Animation, Cells at Work!), with TMS Entertainment behind the production and planning. It is directed by Yuki Yase, who has worked in various roles from episode direction to storyboarding on various popular titles with notable visuals – a number of which are Studio Shaft productions like Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Mekakucity Actors, and Nisekoi. Yase was also the director of the first season of Fire Force, also produced by David Production. Other staff include character designer and Chief Animation Director of the first episode of Undead Unluck, Hideyuki Morioka (Character Design, Kizumonogatari), and Chief Animation Directors Shun'ichi Ishimoto (Character Designer and Animation Director, Thus Spoke Kishibe Rohan), Yumenosuke Tokuda (Chief Animation Director, Sengoku Basara); Art Director Keito Watanabe (Art Director, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean), Photography Director Takao Saito (Photography, Terror in Resonance), CGI Director Shin'ya Takano (Kizumonogatari) as well as a number of animation directors are also on the staff roll.

Evidently, with staff as highly experienced with creating some of the more high-end aesthetic experiences in anime, showing immense competence when it comes to the production of series with particularly outstanding visuals and animation, Undead Unluck has the makings of a particularly stunning anime series, and judging from the first few episodes released so far, the staff at David Production are pulling out all the stops. The art style of the original manga is very closely adapted in the anime, with the major visual draw coming from direction, backgrounds and photography.

DNA

With many staff members involved in the animation of Undead Unluck having been employees at SHAFT or otherwise worked on visually-striking projects, the look, pacing and feel of the Undead Unluck anime have a lot of the quintessential markings of a SHAFT work, such as varied angles and shots of characters and environments particularly during conversations; the use of varied art styles over the course of a single episode, particularly potent impact frames and interactions with their highly rendered environments. The frequency of close-ups followed by shots of the environment from a distance punctuated by highly stylized visual elements is something seen regularly in SHAFT's Monogatari Series, but is also a style seen in David Production's Fire Force adaptation, which also boasted some incredible visuals and intensity of animation particularly in the realm of impact frames, high-speed motion and of course, backgrounds. While Undead Unluck looks quite pretty from frame to frame, the anime uses a number of gorgeous shots to flesh out the scene itself. The animation is incredibly fluid when it comes to the action scenes, especially in dramatic uses of the various abilities possessed by the characters, and the high-speed animation is beautiful in the more intense moments.

Quality and Feel

Each episode thus far has had at least one outstanding scene, with the majority of these being high-speed chase scenes with lots of weaving and twisting movements, which Undead Unluck does incredibly well, not to mention the choreography of the movement adds a level of excitement bolstered by the incredible sound design. One of the best moments in the series so far was the very first, a brief exploration into the deaths of Fūko's parents, who were some of the first victims of her Unluck condition. A gorgeous wintery landscape and stylized animation of a girl meeting her lover in this desolation is paralleled with a young Fūko watching her parents depart on a plane. The huge contrast between the couple and the actual events of Fūko's past display incredible versatility from David Production, especially for a scene that acts as an emotional parallel.

As the music swells and bells ring, the couple share a final kiss before the scene returns to the plane, with a foreign object launching into one of the propellers, causing a huge explosion that engulfed the plane before young Fūko's tear-flooded eyes. The tears of young Fūko were paralleled by the tears of the present Fūko, who was crying tears of bittersweet joy at having finished reading the final volume of her favourite romance manga series, which had been the parallel for the explosion because of Fūko's profound connection to the series after shutting herself off from society in lieu of her Unluck. This first two minutes was moving between two vastly different modes of animation to carry the weight of the beginning of Fūko's pain, and her bittersweet satisfaction at seeing her favourite characters achieve the kind of happiness she could never hope to obtain.

Visual Masterclass

The biggest strength of Undead Unluck in its anime adaptation has to be the beauty of its visuals, but also the degree of visual communication the series does, even when it comes to something as mundane as the rolling of clouds. Due to Andy being naked for large parts of an episode, his nether regions are covered with a mesh of visual noise made to look like a fundoshi, which is a strange way to censor but has interesting comedic application too, with one moment in episode 1 showing the censoring comes off like an actual piece of fabric, and slap Fuko in the face. Beyond that; however, the first episode of Undead Unluck served as the best example of what we can come to expect from the show visually and with its pacing. With its highly convincing, dynamic movement within intricately composed backgrounds, David Production has left very little to be desired in this Undead Unluck adaptation, brilliantly reinterpreting the source material in an adaptation that may stand to be quite the success story when it comes to the ever-elusive objective that is the elevation of the source material.

Undead Unluck is available to stream on Hulu, while the manga can be read through VIZ Media.

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