[Anime Review] Enter the Gritty World of Gachiakuta, Where Trash is Treasure

If you’ve been keeping up with the trends of manga, you should have heard of Gachiakuta before.

No?

Gachiakuta is a recent manga series rising in popularity. It follows a young boy named Rudy, living in a world of immense social inequality and segregation. Anything from items to people can be deemed as ‘trash’ and thrown into a bottomless pit of no return.

The manga’s art style is gritty and captivating, written and drawn by Kei Urana, with the manga art being complimented by graffiti art by Ando Hideyoshi. If the art style feels familiar, that could be because the mangaka, Kei Urana, has worked as an assistant for Atsushi Ohkubo, mangaka of acclaimed works such as Soul Eater and Fire Force.

Recently, the manga has received an anime by none other than Bones Film, the studio behind many popular works such as My Hero Academia, Full Metal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Mob Psycho 100, and Bungou Stray Dogs.

And as such, we were invited to see a premiere of the first two episodes of Gachiakuta.

The anime does quite well in the portrayal of the manga, using bright colours for the world of the upper class, and brownish, muddier colours for the condemned. The animation is smooth, portraying key emotions and adding depth to the manga panels. The action is quite nice with lots of big explosions for all the action starved anime fans.

The power system in this series is quite unique, building from and adding on to the Japanese concept of ‘Tsukumogami’, where if you keep an object for 99 years, it will grow a soul.

At the moment, the anime has portrayed two of the many treasured objects with ‘souls’, an umbrella and Rudy’s gloves. The manga demonstrated quite a plethora of unique abilities and treasured objects, so I am quite excited to see how the anime will portray them.

Streaming on Crunchyroll, Gachiakuta is scheduled for 24 episodes, releasing once a week starting 6 July until 14 December.