English Dub Review: Blame!

Don’t blame us, we’re just the messengers.

As we get into an era where the growth of English dub anime is slowly but surely climbing, with revenues expected to be in the billions in the next couple of years, fans are going to want a level of storytelling that supersedes the artistic direction. The reason? Well, unlike here in America where we have the advantage of having multiple animation styles and formats at our disposal like stop motion, synchro-vox, and flash that you typically don’t see anywhere in Asia.

Where Asian animation is definitely superior to Western styles, is the range of genres that anime likes to showcase like sci-fi, action, and romance, all subjects typically left to live-action fare in North America. Netflix is probably the only real U.S.-based company that is really investing in the full production of international properties for animated use all the while using blinders when it comes to the artistic direction, i.e. seeing animation as the format, not as the genre.

However, Blame! is an example of a company still trying to find its way in a vertical. Unlike Western-style animation seen in series like BoJack Horseman and F is for Family, Blame!’s Asian roots make for an appealing property from a visual point of view, but there isn’t a lot of oversight on the actual substance of the film.

Taking place in a dystopian future where really all of mankind has been destroyed as a result of artificial intelligence, Blame follows one of the last, if not THE last, civilizations around known as the “Electro-fishers” that is trying to stay alive despite the lack of food and the constant onslaught of homicidal machines known as “Exterminators”. The story kicks off when one of the tribes from said civilization comes across a loner named “Killy” who is busy searching for humans with Net Terminal Genes, a gene that a is nearly extinct in humans, but with powers that can control the Silicon Creatures. It doesn’t take long before a Safeguard infiltrates The City and begins wreaking havoc on the citizens, leaving it up to Killy, Cibo, and the rest of the tribe to have to fend for their lives.

And this is where the film kinda goes wrong. Covered with stellar visuals and exquisite art direction seldom seen anywhere else, is a premise that heavily borrows from tried and true sci-fi franchises that have been around for decades, with obvious fingerprints by way of the Terminator, Ghost in the Shell, and the early works of Isaac Asimov. The plot kind of drags along for the majority of the over two-hour long runtime with drab dialogue that isn’t helped by the fact that no matter what language you want to watch this in, you’re going to have no idea as to what is being seen by either Killy or anything else wearing bio-tech. It’s also quite unclear, other than the uncovering of food, what the hell these humans are fighting for…most of us are merely ancillary characters.

There are a few shreds of slight romantic fervor, but for the most part, Blame! is a Tootsie-Roll pop with no chocolatey-center that asks yourself why you bother starting to lick the candy, to begin with. Netflix has some good content on the way that’s going to push the boundaries of animation that will force international markets to contend, in terms of visual, Blame! is there…in terms of any sort of substance, you’ll get better elsewhere soon.