Netflix Review: The Bland Life of a CAGASTER OF AN INSECT CAGE
This Netflix anime Cagaster of an Insect Cage has a lot of ups and downs. The show as a whole is either moving towards something actually interesting or spiraling down a hole of bug guts. Let’s break this down to a few things: story, animation, voice work, sound design, and characters.
The story itself starts out in an interesting fashion, a pretty normalized apocalypse scenario, but instead of zombies, humans turn into giant, super-strong bugs. When first said out loud, it can work and sounds fun enough. But as soon as you see that the bugs are as large as buses and are bulletproof, the idea that a human will just randomly turn into these super monsters is pretty ridiculous.
We follow a young exterminator (bug-killing specialist) who picks up a random young girl and has to protect her and the people of an assigned city. A bunch of political stuff happens that is mostly forgettable or overly complex, and, in the end, has no real effect on the story (at least not enough to matter in the viewing experience). Saying anything else would spoil things, but I can say that the story seemed to lead nowhere for almost the entire season. Then, the last four episodes dump massive amounts of exposition, new characters, mysteries, and resolutions. There was a lot of mostly pointless filler in this 12 episode season, why not spread out the actual storylines and episodes (which were much more interesting) through the entire season? Even with the more interesting story, a lot of character motivations, secret plots, reveals, and surprises were just short of engaging. I found myself struggling to care about any plot or just about any character.
Cagaster of an Insect Cage has two main characters, the exterminator and this girl. There is a small helping of supporting characters, and far too many low-level characters who try to be important but end up being fluff and fodder. The two protagonists are both overdramatic and terribly boring. The man is super serious one moment and then just plain goofy or overtly sexual the next. The girl is both terribly innocent and like a little sister to most and then overly sexualized and super tough. They felt like two or three one dimensional characters rolled into a single person instead of a fully fleshed out human. Also, the design of characters, save very few, were terribly generic. I honestly would mistake the main protagonist man for another character a couple of times, blueish spiky hair and a medium build? Thanks, generic anime design 101.
This brings us to the voice work. It worked well for the most part, in both English and Japanese. But as stated above, because of the odd sexual tension between various characters that would only appear when the writers wanted it too, the voices were awkwardly too old or young. This made a number of scenes honestly pedophilic or incestuous. It was just weird and didn’t work at all, making the other performances seem just okay at best.
The animation style of 3D figures appearing 2D really worked and looked good, sometimes. I am sure it is like this because it’s easier to have various bug models be used again and again and then seen from many angles for various action scenes. But a lot of the time the animation looked relatively cheap, especially the actual movements of faces or bodies. People looked stiff or awkward a lot of the time, making the rest of the story or scenes feel like a PlayStation 2 game.
Lastly, the music and sound design was really mediocre. The music itself was an interesting choice, but didn’t seem to match the the tone of the show or characters in the slightest. The sound design of the bugs was pretty good along with the fleshy and grotesque transformation, that was the most convincing part of those scenes, but every other sound effects and song was more forgettable than the side characters.
This is one of those anime that brings practically nothing new to the table except a small handful of story ideas. But the weird pacing, odd plot choices, sub-par music, and flat-as-paper characters make the show more of a chore to watch than anything else. If you like bugs, 3D anime, and an annoyingly lone-wolf character, there may be something for you here, but there are a plethora of other shows that are far more worthy of your time.
