The Fall 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Negative Positive Angler

Tsunehiro Sasaki is a university student with a large debt. His doctor tells him that he only has two years left to live. Living the rest of his days in depression, Tsunehiro one day gets chased by a debt collector and falls into the sea. He is rescued by Hana, a girl who loves fishing, and her fishing friends, including Takaaki.

Negative Positive Angler is an original series from director Yutaka Uemura and scriptwriter Tomohiro Suzuki at Studio NuT. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Thursdays.

Content warning: This first episode contains a depiction of attempted suicide.

Negative Positive Angler starts off in a bit of a rough spot: an on-screen botched attempt at suicide by hanging. See, Tsunehiro Sasaki has been having a rough time, and this is only the latest in a string of challenges. He's failed at everything he's ever attempted, is deeply in debt, is about to get evicted from his filthy apartment, and has an inoperable brain tumor that's going to kill him in about two years.

It's a grim start, but you know what? A lot of excellent comedies have kicked off with suicide attempts, and if it's not a sensitive subject for you, Negative Positive Angler is worth pushing through. Unlike its protagonist, this anime-original production has a lot of life and energy. That largely comes from the script by Tomohiro Suzuki, who wrote the adaptive scripts of series including One-Punch Man and ACCA-13. He also wrote Double Decker! Doug & Kirill, which, for all its story problems, had memorable characters and snappy dialogue.

This episode comes out the gate with precisely those qualities as Tsunehiro finds himself rescued by a group of anglers after falling into the sea while fleeing a group of debt collectors. Chief among them is Takaaki, a friendly, cheerful fellow with pale pink hair. His monologue about the joys of fishing despite the drawbacks is the emotional center of the episode, and it's delivered with panache by Kaito Ishikawa. His speech doesn't just apply to fishing, though; it's about the joy you get from any hobby despite the expense, schedule demands, and everything that can go wrong, whether it be fishing, building Gunpla, or anything else.

A strong visual and audio presentation bolsters the writing. In addition to excellent voice acting, the guitar-driven musical score is unconventional enough to be interesting and builds on the mood of each scene. The character acting is just exaggerated enough to make it feel lively, which is essential to something involving a lot of standing and barely moving, like fishing. I'm not familiar with the tools of the trade, but there seems to be a lot of loving detail in the physics of the fishing lines, and the water animation, notoriously difficult to pull off, is beautiful as well. The only oddity is the photorealistic CG fish, which never quite mesh with the hand-drawn characters.

Negative Positive Angler is about finding a new sense of purpose and a lease on life. I'm looking forward to getting to know the ensemble cast better and learning how Tsunehiro's diagnosis will play into what's to come.

I've made it no secret over the years that I absolutely hate fish. Specifically, I hate the thought of having to look at and or touch one of those slimy, awful little monsters. Aquariums? I am totally fine with them! I'm the free and intelligent human in an aquarium, after all, while those stupid little ocean-freaks are stuck behind several inches of thick glass and metal; I can leave to enjoy all of the open space and possibility that life on land represents, and those suckers can just stay right in their tanks, thank you kindly. Sushi? I'm all over that like white on rice! I love to consume the sweet, delicious flesh of my slaughtered enemies; it's basically the ultimate power move. Fishing, though? As far as I'm concerned, it is a “hobby” enjoyed exclusively by psychopaths, terrorists, and whatever other kinds of fringe lunatics would actually look forward to sitting around for hours to wait in anticipation for the opportunity to hold a wriggling, dying fish in their bare hands. Yeah, that's right, fisherfolk of the world. I'm on to you.

As you can imagine, however, the fact that I am brave enough to stand against the oceanic menace that has threatened the sanctity of civilization since time immemorial has made my life as an anime critic somewhat difficult, on account of Japan being an island-nation that has somehow managed to brainwash itself into thinking that fishing is an “ancient and venerated part of its culture”, or whatever. Thus, every year or two, we get an anime that is centered around the so-called “joys” of fishing, and I am forced once again to stand as the lone beacon of sanity in a world gone mad.

This is why, dear readers, that I am horrified and ashamed to admit to you that Negative Positive Angler is, in fact, really damned good. I know, I know, and I am just as heartbroken as you are to read the words I've just typed out. I mean, how dare this anime have such lush and charismatic visuals? How dare it tell the shockingly intimate and human story of a depressed and dying man that just so happens to discover a hobby that will allow him to connect with genuine friends in what may be the final months of his life? How dare it have the gall to be funny enough to make me laugh out loud a couple of times? How dare it put enough obvious love and care into its earnest depiction of Tsunehiro's connection with his new friends that it caused me to tear up a couple of times, too?

Now, with all of that said, am I likely to ever watch another episode of Negative Positive Angler again? Oh, hell no. Did you even see those grotesque CGI fish that the episode keeps incessantly zooming in on? Those things were literally ripped straight out of my childhood nightmares. Still, while I doubt I will ever be capable of enjoying this anime, I can sure as hell respect Negative Positive Angler for doing such a good job propagandizing the world's most evil pastime.

If there is an award for “worst opening minutes in anime,” I nominate Negative Positive Angler's start for that honor. There's kicking someone when they're down, and then there's Hiro's attempt to commit suicide before going to the hospital to discover he has a brain tumor and only has two years to live before being chased by loan sharks. And then, to add insult to injury, he has to go fishing.

The deliberate bleakness is a lot to overcome, and to be perfectly honest, I simply couldn't. There's a good message here, despite that – Hiro's bleak outlook on life in many ways comes from his inability to live as he thinks he's supposed to. He remarks that he was supposed to be in society's upper socio-economic echelons, and the feeling that he's somehow not doing as well as he's supposed to be has resulted in him not being able to get out of his own way in the worst possible sense of it. He tries to kill himself, then is upset when he discovers his time is limited. He falls from a bridge into the sea, then is sad when he realizes it means that he may have succeeded in killing himself. It's all leading up to a metaphor where he sees himself as the fish struggling to free himself from the hook. He may even be a little relieved when the large sea bass he caught manages to escape because maybe that means that he, too, can shake his head and free himself from the metaphorical hook in his mouth.

All of this exists alongside some design choices that had to be deliberate, although I wonder why. Character designs range from the relatively realistic (anime-speaking) to the very cartoonish, and the fish are intensely creepy looking; if this were My Deer Friend Nokotan, they'd work, but here they're just unsettling for no apparent reason. To be clear, I grew up in a lobstering town; I'm used to seeing fish, both live and dead. Something about these still gave me the creeps. I also wonder if being raised in a commercial fishing community gave me the wrong mindset about fishing, although I do appreciate the symbolism it's going for. In any event, if you can get past the bleakness of this episode, I suspect that it will wind up paying off. Whether that means Hiro surviving (and the doctor is talking about treatment, so his death isn't a foregone conclusion) or just learning how to live, I cannot say.