Anime: Ao no Exorcist

Review
Ao no Exorcist is a very common type of anime. While it does not bring anything new to the shounen genre, it succeeds in bringing some fun moments and a well packed set of typical shounen situations. If you expect some masterpiece or awesomeness, be aware that Ao no Exorcist is very simple in almost every aspect. It has some action, some nice but very common characters, a simple plot, and many unfinished or unexplained parts. If you wish to watch some shounen, you can expect an anime that treats you with respect and not like a six-year old kid as many others of the genre do badly. Also, don't be tricked, Ao no Exorcist has nothing to do with demons and western mythology. The names are there, but in reality is based more on youkais and japanese monsters instead of the western "devils" as they call it.

This is Rin's tale, a boy raised by an Exorcist who learns he is the son of Satan, the strongest of all demons. However, instead of serving his fate and being useful as a creation to his malevolent father, he decides to follow the steps of his guardian and become an exorcist, one strong enough to defeat his father. For that purpose he enrolls in the True Cross Academy, where he hopes to shape his natural power and strength into something else.

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1. A decent work by A1-Studios
   Ao no Exorcist has some pretty good art and decent animation. In this aspect you won't be disappointed. Action scenes are not plenty, but when they occur you'll find some good animation and will never see ugly episodes or parts. The quality of the show is consistent through all the episodes and very rarely you'll see repeated scenes, rememberance parts, or other types of bad resource usage.
   
   A standard shounen with the annoying school
   Ao no Exorcist has a very simple shounen plot with all natural progression you should expect if you ever watched others of the genre. The guy with hidden powers, school days (oh man... school, burn these damn things from animation please), the light hearted damsel, the mixed teammates, etc. It brings nothing new here, but it's fun to watch and has potential to keep you sit for a few hours. Fillers are there, but are well mixed with important plot parts so they can be ignored os passed without much of a hassle unlike typical fillers from big shounens like Naruto, One Piece, Bleach and Dragon Ball. Surprisingly, action is not the main focus of the series and you'll see more interaction between the characters than sword-fighting, which is a good thing because the show does it with decent skill.
   
   And it has a basic shounen sound direction as well
   The openings are fine and succeeds in giving the mood of the series, which is more comical than serious. Background music never caught my attention, but I never felt the anime to be too silent for its kind or to have misplaced musics around it, so I can assure the work is this part is well done. Voice-acting can be a bit more noisy than the average, but it's still within the norm of its genre. Expect a lot of characters that abuses of expressive action and yells a lot.
   
   Creating characters for a shounen show is hard
   They're usually shallow, noisy, very limited to their sterotypes and tend to focus most on their actions in combat or comedy sequences than in character development. This is mostly true for Ao no Exorcist. You'll be seeing the typical short-tempered main character, the cool guy with serious thinking, the clumsy lady, the tsundere, the gang-type student, etc. They evolve nothing through the anime, maybe with a little expection of the main character, but that's still far from being good. You may feel the lack of a big-breasted girl for the first ten episodes, but then the anime turns the clumsy lady into the big-breasted clumsy lady and throws a new character with clothes that only this type of shows can think of. Overall, this show is like any other shounen, if you saw Dragon Ball, One Piece, D-Gray Man, Bleach, Naruto, etc, you'll they are pretty muchthe same in this department only with a cast based on their current age (the typical sterotypes of the 90's and early 00's are not the same as today).
   
   Ninjas, Vampires, Demons. You know the drill right?
   Ao no Exorcist is a well made effort for the genre. It has quality, typical story, typical characters, good audio and succeeds in merging them together. Like many other shounens, however, it tries to explore some kind of special theme. Once again, exorcists here are like ninjas are to Naruto. While they refer to western names like "Satan", "Astaroth", "Mephisto", and many others, Ao no Exorcist is more likely the typical youkai anime, more similar to Inuyasha then something remotely resembling catholic myths or demons from Solomon Key. If you think the "Exorcist" part will remind you of the masterpiece horror classic from Hollywood, you better tread carefully.
   

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Comments
Ao no Exorcist can be tossed aside if you are not into shounens, but if you give a chance and watch it without much expectations you can be surprised. This show is fine, the quality is there, the comedy is there, sterotypes are there, and good fights are there as well. This is no way a boring show, it's only very unoriginal. I dislike most shounens, even though I try to watch most of them, and this show somehow won my respect because unlike the last shounens I've watched (like D-Gray Man and Bleach) it didn't test my intelligence with tons of fillers, characters dumb as rocks, out-of-nothing plot turners, etc.

Blue Exorcist was very hyped when it came out, for two reasons. One being the only thing most people care about, the pretty colors. The animation was very good compared to most other anime which are cutting their budgets because they are just making cheap promotions of the source material. The other positive was the very exciting beginning, which was promising a lot, only to deliver nothing. In the first two episodes, the protagonist finds out he is the son of the devil, he vows before his foster father’s corpse to become the most powerful exorcist and to destroy him with his infernal powers. What followed that awesome premise had nothing to do with it. He just went to a school where he was shouting at his brother, reading manga, complaining about homework, sleeping in class, failing in all tests, and then hiting the beach so he could loaf around.

See past the initial hook and you get a generic shonen with a generic team of teenagers, doing generic ghost busting. There is nothing special about the setting or the way people and monsters interact with each other. The demons are not summoned because of human grief, the characters are not fusing their powers through teamwork, and heaven is just a place full of angels. Good luck making things interesting when the concept is bare bones.

It also makes no sense. I mean, they summon monsters by biting they fingers like in Naruto, or draw summoning circles on the ground like in Full Metal Alchemist. Why are they called exorcists when they are summoning demons? How are the fanatic paladins supposed to be Christians when they want to use Rin, who is full of the devil’s power? And why is a half naked bimbo able to make holy water by chanting when she never prayed to God? Why do you even need to chant anything in order to banish a monster when a simple sword slash is just as effective? And the best part is that they can’t sanctify their own school because it will drive away their own demons. As a result the school is constantly being attacked by fiends, and there is no protection against that. The defenses of Hogwarts say hello. My point is, these are definitely not exorcists. But then again Naruto wasn’t about ninjas either, so down to it this is all some lame excuse to call the characters something when they can be called anything else just as easily. Like Blue Ninja or Blue Summoner.

Besides lacking identity, the show has a lot less action than it has school comedy, making it one hell of a boring fighting shonen. Also, it’s not even good as a comedy, since the jokes are average stuff you can find in pretty much any anime.

Although it’s normal for fighting shonen to start light and humorous at first before they become heavy on action and drama later on, it never happens here because the show does not last long enough to get to that serious part. Even the sequel that came many years later failed to capitalize on that and practically nobody was watching it.

Sure, you can still watch it for the cool animation but even then there is no theme in the setting. Soul Eater had weird suns and moons, D.Gray Man had a gothic feeling. What is the theme of this world? Looks great but feels generic.

The same thing can be said about the characters who are all average. If I describe the protagonist as dumb, bored, with an OP dark side that comes out whenever he is in danger, I am basically describing 95% of all protagonists. The same can be said about the other characters which you have seen hundreds of times before.
- His brother Yukio is a dull four-eyes, who offers nothing to the overall plot other than being a complaining brother.
- Shiemi is the archetypical frail girl and token platonic girlfriend of the show. Being a girl in shonen she is typically a useless damsel in distress. She also is the healer of the group but that helps AFTER the battle is over. Beyond that she is as useless as Sakura from Naruto.
- There are lots of other students in the school but they also feel completely flat as personalities; I find nothing special in the entire cast. Especially because many of them were made to be just fujoshi bait cardboards or half-naked bimbos for the horny teens.

Then comes the cardinal sin of shonen, which is catching up to the manga and resorting to filler episodes. The adaptation came out way too soon and as a result half of the show is dead time and the rest of it is boring training sessions. It didn’t even bother to excuse the continuity, since when the sequel came many years later, the plot continues from where the fillers begin and ignores completely the anime-only changes, something which angered a lot of anime-only watchers.

Down to it, Blue Exorcist is a disaster. It gave you two great episodes and then stopped trying, before resorting to fillers nobody cared about, and then had a sequel that nobody bothered to watch. But the colors are pretty, so who cares?