Review of Wangan Midnight

Wangan Midnight is a very interesting anime, but not a very exciting one. 4/10, Before I even begin with this review, I would like to say that while I'm MASSIVELY into Initial D to the point where I scraped together my paychecks to buy and modify a 90s JDM shitbox for the touge, I have a love for all things car related and if anything my bias towards Wangan Midnight was working IN its favor rather than against it. If the show's message and story was told though the lens of anything other than high performance sports cars I would have tuned out a longtime ago and wouldn't have forced myself to finish this anime, as I was burnt out of it long before the halfway mark but powered through because as a car guy I felt like I kinda NEEDED to see this one through till the end. While it wasn't a total waste of my time, I certainly wouldn't recommend for anyone else to go through with this show unless you're a diehard car enthusiast, but I'll try to lead with the positives because hating is easy and being nuanced is hard, plus I usually don't comment on media unless I have more good things to say then bad.

Story ?/10: First, the good. Wangan Midnight's strongest attribute by far is it's central premise that it never properly executes on, but basically this Nissan Fairlady Z is a bad omen to all that drive it, being something of a deal with the devil that grants it's drivers unrivaled speed and power at the cost of their lives when they, inevitably, push the car to hard and fly to close to the sun. Without fail, every single time the car gets totaled and another life is claimed behind it's wheel, it's never off the roads and without a driver for long before someone revives that 'Devil Z' to be next in line for its power, fully aware of their impending prophetic demise but fully consumed by the power of the machine and unable to stop chasing that dragon. 11/10 premise, and the way the show is able to warp basically every person in the story to acting almost hypnotized into chasing the taillights of that Z without making it seem like a forced rivalry is 100% the show's strongest accomplishment, and the respect and maturity they treat the very real dangers of racing without them being constantly in your face and just simply acknowledged as risks of the ride is done in such a perfectly nuanced way that all the big picture stuff having to do with how the characters treat their relationships to the road, their cars, and their proximity to dying is all 100% accurate to how every single car enthusiast I've ever seen that can actually back themselves up with a car strong enough to send them to an early grave carries themselves. All in all what I'm trying to say is where most people would tell you that street racing is bad and dangerous with no middle ground, and most media surrounding cars would tell you that street racing is amazing and awesome with no middle ground, Wangan Midnight is a very nuanced middle ground that acknowledges both sides of the coin and doesn't spoon-feed you with giving you a right or a wrong on whether or not the extreme sacrifices the drivers make in their lives in order to feel alive on the Wangan every night is worth it or ultimately a destructive fool's errand to everyone involved. I like that we aren't given a clear answer, and I think this style of presentation is something that is slowly becoming extinct as creators more and more want to either push a certain idea or just don't believe their audience has the capacity to insert their own interpretations into multi layered issues that don't have easy black and whites; ALL the praise here.

Now for the bad. Wangan Midnight poses a very interesting open-ended question the audience, being "how much is too much to sacrifice for one moment of happiness" and doesn't give any payoff for the characters in the show achieving that goal momentarily, doesn't give any sense of stakes for what happens if they were to fail, and doesn't give any sense of the characters being real people with lives away from their cars that they'd be losing if they were to crash and die. More on this later in the character section. As for the conclusion to the story, everything kinda just ends pretty abruptly; I understand that the manga is generally considered to be the better of the two pieces of media + they cut a lot out when they put it into the anime, but it's pretty rough around the edges in the anime and it barely feels like any progression or development has taken place in the story between the first few and the last few episodes. Really what the story suffers from more than anything else isn't that it ended suddenly, it's that it never really planned for one or set one up to begin with, and at no point in the story did we ever feel like we were working towards a central goal or even that our main characters had some sort of short term or long term endgame in mind. The wheels kinda just kept spinning for 20 something episodes, and then it was kinda just over.

Art 8/10: Really good CG graphics even by today's standards but this shit must've looked like the absolute pinnacle of technological achievement when it first aired. Backgrounds to pretty much everything not on the Wangan that didn't have 4 wheels was stock standard anime landscape pictures; nothing to really write home about. Super impressive mating between 3d and 2d graphics though, most anime struggle to pull this off and the entire industry has a bit of a mixed bag with 3d animation even though it's improved leaps and bounds in the last two decades, but it's kinda funny to see modern big budget shows not really matching the level of graphical polish we got all the way back in 2007.

Sound 7/10: Really pleasant surprise but the classical stuff here actually works perfectly for the kinds of racing they're doing, and as much as I love the stuff, I'm really glad they vetoed Eurobeat from ending up on here and ruining the shows more serious identity. Same track gets overplayed like crazy, but I still never really got tired of it.

Characters 2/10: This is where everything positive I have to say about the show goes to die: In a show like Wangan Midnight that wants to be taken more seriously than an Initial D because it's trying to have an actual conversation with the audience about what it TRULY means to chase the dragon, you cannot reduce your characters you use to represent that conversation to one dimensional speed junkies. Having everyone be one beat like that in Initial D is fine because it's just a fun dumb show about racing, not a show about what it MEANS to race or the deeper ramifications of chasing that high day in and day out like Wangan Midnight is. Every single character has a job that exists purely to fund their racing machines, every single conversation they have with any other character in the show is about their cars or tuning or engine performance, every thought they have is dedicated to going faster on the Wangan, and if they can't measure something in kilometers per hour or brake horsepower it never even crosses their mind to begin with.

Now I can already hear you saying "but Burr, it's a racing anime. Of COURSE they're going to only talk about things having to do with cars" and to that I say no silly, Initial D is a racing anime and Wangan Midnight is, again, about the ramifications of racing and the complex relationship drivers have between their cars, the road, and their lives. It's impossible to have these deep 'is it worth it' thoughts if there's no worth to these people's lives the anime gives us to work with outside of their cars. A few times it seems like they TRY to do it, for example there's a subplot with a mechanic that fell out of the culture and gets sucked back into the street life because the Devil Z is almost calling him to return to his old ways and try to beat it, so he drops his savings on a brand new GTR to chase down the devil and reenter the nightlife, but it causes his pregnant wife to leave him when she realizes she can't rely on him to come home safely every night and provide for her now that he's risking his life every night. GREAT push and pull setup that proves the show is capable of executing on its setup, and the arc lasts for like 2 episodes before it resolves and we never see that guy again. It's not even a GOOD arc in particular; it's just something you can point at and be like "this right here is how they should've tried to get their point across for everyone else as well." Not that they all needed pregnant wives waiting on them specifically. They attempt to give a similar push and pull with some of the other characters having friends genuinely worry about them and the antics they get up to at night, but for the vast majority of the cast they're allowed to roam the highways at night completely unchecked with no real accountability of their lives being owed to anything in particular other than going fast.

The main character in particular I don't have much to comment on, he is just the embodiment of every major issue I've already stated and I don't wanna tread the same ground again, it's just disappointing because you would think he's the one person the writers would desperately try to SAVE from being a nothingburger of a blank template like everyone else is. No one has any chemistry with each other, no relationships develop at all (friendly romantic or otherwise), and everyone acts like they're zoned out on a party mix of Ambien and Xanex 24/7. There's a difference between being chill, and being absent, and the entire cast is absent for the full runtime of the show.

Enjoyment 3/10: I had to force this anime down like broccoli because of how much I love cars, and all the highway driving was really pleasant to watch but there was pretty much nothing going on to keep me invested in the races or what the outcome was. I actually almost fell asleep a few times when I was grinding out the last few episodes just so I could say I completed the show.

Overall 4/10: Wangan Midnight presents some really deep and interesting questions about what it means to seek extreme activities for extreme highs but doesn't DO anything to back up anything meaningful it tries to say. I adore all things car culture, am generally a pretty positive and forgiving guy when it comes to rating these shows, and stuck this one out to the end because I reeeeally wanted to love it. Avoid this unless you fill your cereal with high octane every morning, and even then, proceed with caution.