Review of Midnight Occult Civil Servants

This is a fascinating premise that is kind of bungled and basically a modern knock off of “Shounen Onymouji”, only with mostly bad storytelling. People have pointed out that it’s a bad follow-up to “Natsume Yuujinchou”, and I definitely see the comparison (and that “Natsume Yuujinchou” does a far better job with the premise than both this and “Shounen Onymouji”), but “Shounen Onymouji” actually starred one of Abe no Seimei’s descendants (and Abe no Seimei), and focused on his abilities as a spiritualist. The art itself is reminiscent of the manga’s style, but also a bit prettied up (e.g., character models aren’t as wonky-looking, at leastin the same way, backgrounds are more detailed), while simultaneously being quite stiff and uncomfortable to watch most of the time. It actually highlights the failings of the manga, which is that the style of the Anothers doesn’t quite work with anything else in the story. In other series dealing with the occult, spirits and demons can range from being extra bizarre and goulish to somewhat artistic. But they by and large fit with the theme of the story. Here, any Another than isn’t the Tengu look… cheap. The copy-paste angels, the moth princess and her kids, the fairies, Yuki… This isn’t helped by how obvious it is that this show was hamstringed on either time, money, warm bodies, talent, or a mix, or all. The art gets rapidly worse around episode 9, and it’s even less comfortable to watch. Hands, faces, and torsos look too small or too thin, eyes are too large, characters move funny, characters standing next to each other don't look in proportion... It's not great.

That being said, it does have at least a few great human crowd shots, with a surprising variety of character models. …Which is odd, when you have shots of large number of angels that are just copy-paste the same character.

The opening is actually reminiscent of “Soul Eater” meets “Durarara!!”, and is probably the strongest in terms of art. But even it is a bit overly slow and stilted.

A lot of these shows try to have their own spin on the supernatural, but it’s kind of glaringly odd why this show insists on going to the lengths it does to stand apart, like it’s just trying too hard to be special. Canonically, Japan has a history of dealing with the supernatural (it’s got a whole agency, units, gear, and scientific study for it, as well as basic knowledge of the history of the supernatural and practitioners). But rather than calling them supernatural creatures, spirits, youkai, or otherworldly creatures, the supernatural creatures are referred to as “Anothers”, I guess because it sounds Different TM than every other show that deals with supernatural creatures. But rather than create its own system of special creatures, it’s just normal supernatural creatures that have a weird name Just Because, I guess? It’s not like the normal words don’t exist in this universe - at least one character says them - it’s just that… they wanted the Special Name TM. Because TM.

The way it handles spiritualists is also… bizarre. At first I thought all the spiritualists died out or were killed off or these agencies intentionally ignored them… but it was growingly obvious that actually, the agency does make use of the spiritual community. It’s just that none of them can communicate with Anothers. But it’s not at all presented that way for the first… 60% of the series. I also have to wonder why, with all these spiritualists and researchers… sign language was never an option? What about using pictures? We can make dogs talk in sentences, but you can’t communicate by Pictionary to another humanoid?

It doesn’t help that one plot centers on the fact that the protagonist’s style of doing things is “different” and unneeded… when it just seemed like the agency was massively out of their league and pretty incompetent. But no, they were competent… he was just assigned to the team that was bad with field missions. For some reason. It’s weird. At least “Natsume Yuujinchou” had in-universe reasons for why the protagonist only learned really late about the spiritualist community.

I think I actually benefitted from watching this before watching the manga, because the manga actually feels like a sped up version of this, with bits of the story cut out that you’re just supposed to guess at. If I’d read the manga first I would be completely confused about what’s happening. The anime steps in to make the story flows at a better pace, and give a better sense of where characters are and what their relationships are, and includes crucial dialogue to explain what’s happening and make the flow less jarring.

Unfortunately, without drastically departing from the manga, the anime can’t fix what is an okay but kind of meh plot, with a kind of underwhelming cast of characters who had potential, but overall aren’t that fun to be around. I mean Theo and Kyouichi are fascinating characters with unexplored potential (Kyouichi gets a backstory that’s kind of cliche, and ultimately has a solid ending of sorts, but his relationship with Theo is… eh; I wasn’t expecting BL from this, since it’s shoujo, but SOMETHING would be nice?). I mean, Theo walks around wearing a dog collar AT WORK! They could have done so much more with that!

Huehuecoyotl is fun…? But he feels like a bad attempt to recreate Madara or Touda, both of whom were far more compelling as characters, and got far more time to be explored in better overall stories. Huehueocoyotl all but disappears after his first two stories. And Yuki is yet another poor attempt to mimic them, but Yuki’s just annoying, with an ugly design. Miyako also had potential, and I like him. But they’re all let down by a story that has little to no interest in developing them. Dark things happen and the reaction is the equivalent of someone looking up at the sky and saying, “Oh dear, I think it might start to drizzle.” Natsume sought out help when he didn’t know what he was doing. And when he struggled because he didn’t ask for help, he learned how to do better next time. Miyako is well-intentioned, but static.

Overall it’s a meandering, kind of emotionless story with meh art quality at the best of times. Many other manga and anime have done this plot before, and they’ve done it better. It has less boobservice than some of them, but “Natsume Yuujinchou” is a long series, “Shounen Onmyouji” exists… There are other options than this.