Erased, probably my favorite anime of all time
A man with an involuntary power that drags him back in time gets sent eighteen years into his own childhood to stop a series of murders. Time travel done right, a killer I genuinely didn't see coming, and one trope I wish it hadn't leaned on.
Spoilers ahead, including who the killer is.
Erased is probably my favorite anime of all time. From here on, by the way, these are all shows I found on my own and watched in Japanese with English subtitles, which is the whole reason I got into watching so many of them in the first place.
The premise
The main character has a strange ability he doesn’t really control. Every so often it yanks him back in time, sometimes by a few minutes, sometimes much further, always landing him right before something terrible is about to happen so he has a chance to stop it. He calls it “Revival.” When his mother is murdered, the power sends him all the way back eighteen years, into his ten-year-old self, and he realizes he has to prevent a string of child abductions and killings in the snowy town where he grew up, because they are tied to his mother’s death. It is a murder mystery layered on top of a time-travel story. (Small personal note: the year he gets sent back to is 1988, which happens to be the year I was born.)
As I’ve said more than once, I love anything with time travel that is done even halfway well. Back to the Future, the time-turner stuff in Harry Potter, Steins;Gate, there are so many great ones, and Erased earns a place right up there with them.
What I love, and the one thing I don’t
I love the music. I love the intro, I love the visual style, I love basically everything about how this show is put together. The opening is by the band Asian Kung-Fu Generation, and the score is by Yuki Kajiura, who is one of the greats.
The one thing that bugs me is a trope, not the show itself. Modern TV, film, and anime have a real shortage of good, decent father figures, and they love to make the trusted older man the villain. So it stung that the person the main character comes to look up to, his homeroom teacher, Yashiro, is the one murdering the children. It’s effective, I just wish the “trusted father figure is secretly evil” well wasn’t quite so deep.
A lot of people knock Erased for being predictable, and I know that’s the common complaint. Honestly, when the killer was revealed, I had not figured out it was him, so I got to experience the twist exactly the way it was meant to land. I’m completely happy with the arc the story took. It’s a beautiful, tense, warm little show, and it sits at the very top of my list.
Image credits
The photos are shared under licenses from Wikimedia Commons:
- Asian Kung-Fu Generation, by Lau Anime X (public domain).
- Yuki Kajiura, by kajiura yuki, CC BY-SA 4.0.
