Anime review: Nabari

Young Miharu got embroiled in the secret world of ninjas.

This 26 episodes anime series from 2008 nominally is about a secret world of ninjas which coexist alongside our own, modern, one. In theory the protagonist is saddled with the most powerful secret ninja art in the world, with whom he can literally do anything he wants, and he must learn to control it because all the others ninja in the world want to steal it from him.

Sadly this synopsis, while true, doesn’t really reflect what this anime is about. See, in reality this is a story about teen angst and gay love, a lot of gay love. The beginning is terrible, I’m not against man love in any shape and form but when a running gag is that our protagonist, who is a young school boy, pretends that his ninja teacher, a grown man, is trying to have sex with him the pedophiliac subtext becomes so big that it’s impossible to gloss over it.

Probably the author realized that too because this relationship quickly sour while our depressed hero find solace with another young ninja, still slightly older than him, who is even more nihilistic than him and literally wants to erase himself.

Now of course this is a boy anime so they never spell out what the whole relationship is about. They simply pretend that this is an incredibly angsty form of bromance, one where they walk literally hand in hand while tears flow liberally.

Nothing bad per se but the end result is that a fairly promising story deteriorates in that Japanese evergreen of the young boy who in reality could be incredible but can’t be bothered because life is without any sense for him. They go around and gather a bunch of secret ninja arts which are all in the end useless to the final resolution of the story. The fights are all sub par and the story in the end is so hijacked by the “bromance” that the final chapter is all about that while everybody seems to forget the famous uber powerful secret art.

Maybe if I were an angry teenager I would have at least partially related with this story but as it is I only wanted to slap some sense in the various protagonists.