Anime: Chocolate Underground

Very fun show, eaten (err, viewed...;-) in small humorous bites. For such a small show, it sure does cast a broad, albeit somewhat shallow net. Touching on a lot of territory; conspiracy, political oppression, freedom, personal choice, health, joy, romance, friendship, betrayal, revolution, mystery, more?... Some of my favorite moments were the little bits of history and geography slipped in. And I thought the main characters were likable with some nice development, especially in the first half, which is not the outcome of every short episode show I’ve seen. In my view, if you don’t ask too much of the show, rather go along for the ride – the experience is great fun with potential for being thought provoking. A joy to watch.

This was a singularly disappointing series, at times seeming like the only redeeming quality is its merciful shortness. As a fan of dystopic visions of the future I'm willing to put up with quite a lot of implausibility in the name of a good tale, but Chocolate Underground veers far too far into ridiculousness. What could have been a disturbing tale of how far we're willing to submit to authorities which promise to be doing it for our own good instead turns out as V for Vendetta for six year olds.

The plot is what drags this series down the most; it fails completely to hang together. We have a totalitarian government in power with zero public support and many actively opposed; rather than showing how people join in for the sake of their own selfish interests or fears, we have an unexplained bunch of giant robots which, rather than used for military power are instead ludicrously specialised towards hunting chocolate. And that's the great fault with the adversaries - rather than using it as an excuse to keep power, to have a pretext on which to arrest anyone they dislike, the government here seems to actually care about tracking down chocolate. For all that they'll send monstrous killing machines after children, they still won't arrest people they haven't caught red-handed. And the motivations of those few we see on the "bad" side other than their leader are rather thin.

All the characters would qualify as "thin" by the standards of a full-length series, but the series often achieves an impressive depth for the five minutes available. (Unfortunately this will artificially raise the numerical score of this review; make no mistake, the show is by no means worth watching. But you should always go by the text rather than the numerics anyway). The leads are well fleshed out, and even the side characters who only appear in a couple of episodes usually manage to have more than one defining trait.

With good presentation, that might have been enough to salvage the series, at least to passable levels. Sadly, the animation is poor even by the standards of fifteen years ago; nothing is defined well enough and there are pale tones everywhere, giving the whole show a dreary, washed-out look. In a better show I might think this an (admittedly poorly executed) attempt to evoke the gloomy, hollow feeling of the world portrayed, but the overall effect on the viewer is just to turn one away from the show, and the fact that the look persists throughout the happy scenes as well leads me to suspect it's simply poor animation. I can hope that this is simply a matter of budgetary constraints and perhaps an attempt to keep the filesize small (this being a web-original animation, unless I'm very much mistaken), but the quality is well below tolerable. I'll give it credit for what would have been good character designs, but the animation means this is still a chore to watch.

Voice acting is generally competent but gets quite patchy a few times, and there's not much distinction between characters. There's also a tendency for the voices to be quite nasal and annoying, but that's entirely appropriate for the children who make up most of the cast.

I'm not really sure how this show would stand up to rewatching, and have no intention of finding out. On the one hand the plot does contain some surprises which might spoil it, but on the other hand I don't think any of what little enjoyment I was able to obtain from this show came from the plot. I haven't even begun to go into the disjointedness between the different plot sections and utter ridiculousness with which it shifts in scale, but since I'm scrupulous about avoiding spoilers even for a show as bad as this, please just take my word for it that it's bad.

Chocolate Underground is a very poor series. It's not entirely devoid of merit, but the actually quite good characterisation gets buried under a mass of visual ugliness and terrible plot. Do not watch.