Name(s): Home Tutor Hitman Reborn! / Katekyou Hitman Reborn! / Kateikyoushi Hitman Reborn! / 家庭教師ヒットマンREBORN! / Mon prof le tueur Reborn!
Format: TV series (203 24-minute episodes)
Release Date(s): October 7, 2006 – September 25, 2010
Studio(s): Artland

All right, well let me explain my history with this one. There’s a DS game called Jump Ultimate Stars (JUS) that’s a crossover between several Shonen Jump titles. It plays like Super Smash Bros. with a central gimmick where you play using assembled decks of manga panel blocks. There’s a crazy amount of playable characters and even more assist characters. It’s actually pretty awesome, so it leaves a general good first impression of all the series within it as well. I wanted to find out more about them, similar to Super Robot Wars making me watch obscure mecha series but not as useful because JUS doesn’t have any story and the series ended right there.

Still, I bought a few volumes of a lot of the shit in that game and one of them was Hitman Reborn!. This was one of the very few I enjoyed enough to buy a few more volumes, and I ended up stopping because it was long as shit, still being written and translated, and this was generally around the point when I stopped buying manga and began to just pirate anime. Viz never finished translating the series so ultimately I made a doubly economic call, but not going further with this series has always bothered the fuck out of me.

I was extremely curious about how it would pull off the battle shonen stuff. Tsuna’s attacks in JUS were pretty cool, and that was all I had to go on. Apparently anyone who has ever seen this show has no detailed opinion on it, so I had no choice but to trust the high MAL ranking at #158 and assume the minority criticizing it were annoyed at the series’s directional shift.

So, I watched 26 episodes of this in two days, rushing to get to what everyone said was the good stuff and the shonen switch. It sucks. I feel tricked, like I just signed a pact with the devil but instead of financial success he just cut my testicles off for nothing. It’s a really weird feeling, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Tsuna Sawada is a complete and utter failure at absolutely everything, and he’s so awful that his school can’t even be assed to come up with a decent nickname to bully him with. “Loser Tsuna” somehow averages 17% on tests, gets dominated in gym, and just trips randomly and all sorts of stupid shit. He sucks.

A baby (yes) mafioso hitman from Italy presciently named Reborn comes to tutor Tsuna into becoming the tenth Vongola family boss because everyone else in line has died. It sounds stupid, but keep in mind this was originally just a comedy so nothing had to make sense. The first 18 episodes in particular are wacky random comedy where Reborn does some insane shit to train Tsuna like getting him lost on a deadly mountain, and then Tsuna breaks down whining and squealing (he squeals constantly at everything) and only squeals more when it turns out the rest of the show’s entire cast somehow shows up in every single episode to make his life harder.

After character introductions are out of the way these one-off stories serve no purpose and aren’t very funny. If you’re experienced with Japanese culture you’ll know the country often loves characters whose only purpose is to make life worse for others. The best example here is Lambo, a cow baby (yes) who has a tendency to cry at every little thing as a run-off gag, says his own name in nearly every sentence, and exists just to ruin Tsuna and the others’ lives, always getting in the way of whatever objective they’re trying to pull for no reason other than to be an asshole and cry at the end. I fucking hate this character and like I said he’s in literally every episode as is everyone else.

The stories from the manga are changed in the anime adaption for no reason and always for the worse, dragging ideas that are fine in a short vacuum into 20 minute ordeals with extra shit that just wears on an idea that wasn’t meant to go on longer. In the manga the humor was endearing because the scale was much smaller and the absurdity more contained, making it funnier when it invades Tsuna’s ordinary life as opposed to the anime where everything is obnoxious, insane, and loud all the goddamn time. No voice acting also means no Tsuna squealing, and the manga has a brisk pace with no obligation to fill time.

With the manga, I kept reading because I actually enjoyed seeing Tsuna turn his reputation around and try to impress his love interest, but at the same time he accomplished it so awkwardly that a light cringe factor that wasn’t just based in sexuality actually made it fun to read. See, Reborn has a chameleon that can turn into a gun capable of firing several magical bullets.

For example, he can shoot Tsuna with a bullet that revives him with his inhibitions removed and extra strength based on his dying will and regrets, hence the title. He also revives in only his underwear. This is used every single episode in the anime and allows Tsuna to stop whining and accomplish whatever he needs to. As in aside, it bothers the fuck out of me that no one in the show can say “reborn” properly, they always say “re-bowwww” with the r and n completely absent. Fuck.

This is all very repetitive and far less likable than the manga, but I put up with it because I wanted another good shonen anime. After episode 18 a short arc begins because the author decided she wanted to do a completely different series and a bunch of escaped teens on death row try to flush Tsuna’s gang out by beating a bunch of their high school’s students to death. I was almost happy to just see them actually depict blood after how childish the stuff before was.

Then the first fight comes. It’s between a good character who uses dynamite to fight and a bad character that uses yo-yos that shoot poison darts (I think half of the shonen I’ve seen now have a yo-yo fighter). Eager to see how clever the show could be, I watched this stuff with great anticipation. Good guy keeps throwing dynamite but bad guy’s yo-yos spin so fast they defuse all of the bombs. All hope seems lost when the good character comes up with the brilliant plan to actually throw two set of bombs, with the second set having some blocked off from sight by the first set. So the yo-yo guy just misses some of these bombs falling from the air and is blown up. He retreats, and the fight is over. Okay, pretty lame but that was clearly some intro scene and not a real fight, right?

The next one involves some bad kid who can gain animal attributes by changing the set of plastic vampire teeth in his mouth. He goes up against a baseball player with a magical bat that can turn into a katana when swung fast enough. This ability was given to him a while ago but he had yet to do anything useful with it, so I was kind of interested. Then it turns out the bat is broken by the other kid’s bite immediately and rendered to just a stub.

The rest of this scene unfolds as animal man hops around in the dark, taunting baseball man that he can smell where he is. Baseball man is in danger, but there’s no actual struggle going on, just a dragged out scene of “oh no, what do I do?” The fight ends as baseball man lets animal man bite him in the arm so he can hit him in the head with the hilt of his broken sword, knocking him unconscious immediately. Are you fucking kidding me?

Things are looking up as the next fight is against the cutest girl in the series so far who gets bonus points for being crazy. Her giant clarinet shoots sound waves that vibrate the atoms in something, causing it to explode as heat builds up. Fair enough. The character to fight this one is a girl who turns any food she touches into poison cooking (one of those food gags only Japan finds funny).

Here is where we really come into the problem with turning what started off as an incoherent random comedy into a more structured shonen series. It wants to repurpose all the imbalanced silly jokes into things of relative use in a fighting anime, but here’s an example of something that’s just meant to be fucking dumb in the first place so it just drains the scene of any eccentric coolness that comes from other idiosyncratic powers that aren’t based on being a simple gag.

Anyway, poison cooking girl blocks the deadly sound waves with platters of poison cooking (she pulls this stuff out of nowhere, always) which is drawn to look like she’s not even covering her full face and torso. The platters are kind of to the side of her, and besides that sound waves bend really fucking easily and after clarinet girl demonstrated how instant her power is and explained this about it poison cooking girl should be fucking dead but whatever.

Clarinet girl reveals her clarinet opens up to function as nunchaku (how the fuck does sound travel through it), but poison girl dodges. Clarinet girl is about to play the first note of the apocalypse when Reborn taunts that poison girl has already won. See, it turns out that it’s not just food. Literally anything poison girl touches now turns into poison, so this extremely careless retcon means clarinet girl’s instrument has become poisonous after being touched by poison girl. So she drops dead. what.

The next scene isn’t really a fight, but this old man who commands birds with cameras on them has Tsuna’s real life girl friends tracked and marked for murder by two serial killer twins, who have the most out of place character designs in the series so far. They look like horror monsters, with plucked out eyes, prunish skin, limber figures, stitched together mouths, and extremely long claws. It’s fucking bizarre but I was happy to just see the series try and do something edgy.

Bird man says Tsuna’s friends need to kill him or he’ll kill his girlfriends. Pretty simple stuff, but this makes no goddamn sense for two reasons. One, it’s a trick that only works one time so it can’t guarantee bird man’s safety because Tsuna has backup while bird man only has one card to play. So in a worse case scenario they lose Tsuna or the girls but bird man still dies right afterwards. Two, it’s revealed very soon after that the main villain’s entire plot for this arc revolves around Tsuna being alive for a specific purpose showing just how shortsighted and dumb this series is. Well all dragged out dramatic tension is solved by Tsuna’s other friends at home showing up to finish off the serial killers. How convenient, what a well-deserved victory.

We’re almost done now, and the next opponent is a guy who swings around a big steel ball on a chain. The ball has a bunch of grooves carved in it so it can change direction with the wind making it hard to dodge. Baseball kid goes up against him but doesn’t make it, so Tsuna is hit with a magic bullet that gives him the super strength to throw the ball right back in this guy’s face. All of this is the least flawed fight so far, but also the most ordinary so make of that what you will. It definitely wouldn’t be a good enough standard for a series.

The final villain is some psycho who has the ability to reincarnate and has six changeable powers based on his previous lives. Finally, something that at least sounds cool. Unfortunately, though the six powers are supposed to be based on the Buddhist desire realm they have no intrinsic relationship with each other. It’s a grab bag of powers without any chemistry to make this villain more than the sum of his parts. One of his powers lets him create illusions, another just lets him drop poisonous snakes from the sky, and one just lets him fight with a spear. It’s just whatever, and some are used only once for just half a minute.

Tsuna spends most of these episodes running around whining that he can’t do anything, which is just extra annoying because you think he’d shut up when he knew he was just going to die anyway. Meanwhile, dynamite man is outside the room and cornered by the half-dead yo-yo man and animal man. He’s knocked against a wall and seems pretty fucked, when he thinks there’s something in the wall behind him and bombs it, revealing an ally student who was caught by the villains earlier.

It blows my mind how lazy of a set-up this is. If I’m reading this scene right, this other student was captured and then just sealed up behind a fucking wall so he’s in a totally closed off room? What the fuck is that? Even the wall that was blown up looked like a regular wall that had been a part of the building. Did I miss something?

Anyway, all hope is lost etc. for Tsuna until Reborn gives him a magical item. Though it just looks like oven mitts (why the fuck did they insert stupid comedy at this juncture) they actually transform into leather gloves (why couldn’t they have just looked like this) that create fire. So now Tsuna’s a fire punching cool guy for once, and he wails into the villain and I’m kind of please for once because he’s using the cool attacks he used in Jump Ultimate Stars.

He wins, obviously, but it doesn’t feel good. A general problem with Reborn! is that it’s a bad adaption to begin with. There are two things a manga adaption generally needs to follow in order to be good. One, it needs to understand its source material. Not necessarily completely recreate it, but if not that then it needs to understand it well enough to make its changes exponentially bring out the qualities that were there in the first place. With the altered comedy episodes earlier that get away from the slighter craziness in the manga, we have an example of the opposite.

Two, and even more important, it needs to enhance the narrative using the qualities unique to a visual/aural medium. This is ultimately the most important thing, as it’s what has to justify the medium switch in the first place. Reborn! fails at this due to its spectacularly bland direction. This didn’t really stand out until this final fight that’s supposed to portray a lot of direct combat and movement.

There’s a scene where Tsuna is thrown against a wall and uses his flame gloves to ignite and propel himself off of it, and then there’s a cut to show Tsuna flying in the air for 2-3 frames until it cuts back to Reborn talking and then back to Tsuna now on the ground. It should’ve depicted his entire movement so we could actually feel the power of his new ability and the high speed he’s supposedly moving at, but that would’ve cost too many frames and time I suppose so we just get a bunch of basic implications instead of accentuations.

Compare this to a well-directed series like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, where when a character is shocked by some event a dramatic reaction is obtained from the audience by things other than relying on context. A character yells in shock, a scene shifts to an unrealistic grotesque multicolor to emphasize how incomprehensible the sudden event is, and the frame is accompanied by jerky movement that mirrors their heart-pounding reaction which gives the camera a dynamic role other than just following faces and character movement.

There’s no heightened sense of drama to anything Reborn! does that allows JoJo to illicit an emotional response despite focusing even less on plot and characterization than Reborn! does. It’s all very distant, and the sound mixing is just as dry with everything lacking an oomph to it coupled with the non-existent directional style. It’s like even with the already flawed pieces Reborn! has it doesn’t play them in any exciting way which is a double whammy.

The art style is, of course, really generic. The manga wasn’t much better (though it was still better), but most characters look enough like their manga counterpart. The one major exception is baseball man, who just happens to be my favorite character and was given a pointless makeover in this adaptation. He no longer looks sharp and cool like he did in the manga, having his glaring eyes changed to big yellow ones, and for whatever reason he’s randomly been given darker skin.

What was the point? He was barely recognizable to me at first. Despite the art style being generic it at least isn’t lazily drawn. It’s all digital but avoids the usual flubs like hideously drawn faces outside of the focus of a frame. Speaking of frames, I neglected to mention this series has a really choppy framerate. Stock footage is used for a few things, namely Tsuna’s dying will transformation every episode. There’s music but I think I heard maybe five different songs in 26 episodes and none really stood out for me.

Fuck, am I done? The characters could’ve been likable archetypes but their shallow personalities are totally inexcusable when they don’t have good dialogue to make use of their narrow character traits. Interactions between them aren’t interesting, and even an old ass series like Yu Yu Hakusho made non-complex characters cool to watch and even gave each of them some inner conflict from the get go.

Yusuke’s an underachiever who’s only pretending he isn’t afraid of failure, Kuwabara is an underdog struggling to succeed with a lack of talent, Kurama wants to leave his demon life behind but it keeps coming back, and Hiei is a former villain trying to be understood by his comrades. Other than Tsuna, whose conflict is fucking annoying and sucks ass, Reborn!’s characters have no internal struggle that makes watching them just a bit more engaging.

And because I don’t think I’ll need to remember anything of what I’ve watched so far to possibly resume the series in the future, I’m putting it on-hold. The next episode preview revealing that it’s another fucking comedy episode was the last straw after everyone said that shit stopped for good after the first 18 episodes. I still want so goddamn badly to believe in this series that I’ll probably waste more of my time on it in the future. I’m also considering just reading the manga when I want to watch it again, as looking for comparison pictures of baseball man made it look way fucking better and at least it would cut out a lot of the bullshit. For now, I’m left incredibly disappointed and even feeling cheated by this unambitious series that wasted my time.