English Dub Review: Estab Life: Great Escape “You Can’t Run from Schoolwork”

Overview (Spoilers Below):

In the future, individual districts have become isolated habitats called “clusters”. Equa lives as a student in one such cluster, the university city of Ochanomizu, but she is actually an “extractor” who takes requests from people desperate to flee to other clusters. Shockingly, her latest client is a teacher at her school.

Our Take:

The first episode of the series introduces us to a futuristic world filled with different clusters. However, most people in these clusters want to live their own lives instead of their chosen ones. Luckily, this is where this unique team comes into play.

The episode swiftly establishes the team of extractors whose goal is to free their chosen targets from a specific cluster. The group consists of three teenagers posing as university students: Equa (Julie Shields), Ferez (Alexis Tipton), and Martes (Sarah Wiedenheft). The remaining team members are Alga (Anthony Bowling), a small robot, and Urura (Cris George), a wolfman. Together, they attempt to free their teacher, Mr. Yamouda, who is chosen to remain as a university teacher for the rest of his life.

I have plenty of mixed feelings about the first episode of the series, which is part of a mixed-media project created by Gorō Taniguchi and Polygon Pictures. One cause of this is that it lacks a brief backstory of the world created for the franchise. Instead, the episode literally cuts to the chase with Equa and the others fighting to get a teenage girl to a new cluster. Of course, you can find that information online, but the other people who couldn’t access it will leave themselves scratching their heads a little bit.  

Another thing is that the episode wasn’t that enticing enough to get me ecstatic for the rest of the show. While it does have some entertaining sequences, including Martes being made out of slime for some reason, it doesn’t have a strong narrative drive to provide any high stakes for the characters and their jobs as extractors. But, of course, this is just the first episode of Great Escape, which means it should have enough time to improve its formula.

Then you have the animation, which offers CGI character designs in front of traditional-animated backgrounds. This comes as no surprise since Polygon Pictures is mainly known for crafting 3D animation in specific films and shows. At first glance, the models and their movements don’t look too impressive so far. While the animation translates the character designs nicely in 3D, their fluidity during specific sequences felt sluggish. As a result, the action scenes looked less energetic than the other action-packed anime shows with only 2D animation.

Overall, “You Can’t Run from Schoolwork” marks a reasonably average start of Taniguchi’s mixed-media franchise in terms of its story and animation. But as I mentioned earlier, the series has enough time to adjust itself for the upcoming missions. Taniguchi is planning on expanding the project with an upcoming anime film and a mobile game by Square Enix and Genki following the television series. If he wants those things to become a reality, he should probably hope that the show has enough material in its future episodes to get me excited for the franchise’s future.