It's now the month of October, so I thought I would review a spooky horror anime! Then I realized just how few good horror anime actually exist. At least there are a decent number of God awful horror OVAs from the 1990s, so here's Judge! The manga is from the 1980s and is written by the same dude who created the far superior Gallery Fake. That manga/anime about art forgery that you've probably heard of but haven't seen because almost nobody has. The anime is a single episode, 40 minute OVA from 1991 that was animated by JC Staff. This was a few years before JCStaff graced the world with Garzey's Wing. Also like Garzey's Wing, Judge was one one of the bad titles forced on to Central Park Media because it bombed hard in Japan. Central Park didn't have a lot of confidence in Judge and released it without fanfare into bargain bins across America, where it can still be picked up for usually around 1-3 dollars on a cheaply printed DVD.
So what is Judge about? This is an anime all about the legal bureaucracy of the afterlife. Time for some background information. In the Abrahamic faiths, there is only one God and He alone is in charge of judgement. It's an open and shut case whether someone goes to heaven or hell, so there is no afterlife bureaucracy. The very concept is utterly absurd to someone brought up with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. In traditional Chinese folklore, the afterlife or court of the Jade Emperor worked basically the same as the legal courts and government of Zhou Dynasty China. The next life is just a continuation of this one, so of course the gods settle their disputes the same way as the Chinese government. That means TONS of bureaucracy, confusing power structures, bribery, and red tape. Unsurprisingly, this Chinese view of the afterlife was heavily influential on their neighbor Japan. Shinto is a very loosely organized religion that doesn't have 1 central book equivalent of the Bible or the Koran. As a result, it actually absorbed quite a bit from Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, and even Hinduism. Remember that giant red guy named Enma from Dragonball? You've probably seen him in other anime as well. He sits at a desk all day and judges souls. Enma is the Japanese translation of Yanluo Wang, which was China's regional spin on the Hindu god Yama. They're all the same dude.
Judge takes this very traditional, East Asian view of the afterlife and makes it even more ridiculous by making it function like modern, Western legal procedure. This is an anime with a shinigami called the "Service processor of darkness" who delivers legal papers and informs clients that they've been served. That should let you know what kind of fucking insanity you're getting into.
The main character is some dweeb who looks like Otacon from the Metal Gear Solid games. He's a meek salaryman who gets abused all day, but is secretly the "Judge of Darkness". At least in the English dub. He's actually not a judge at all, but rather the "Prosecuting Attorney of Darkness". His job is to deliver divine punishment to evildoers who managed to escape the law of mortals. He reads them their crimes, then tortures and kills them in this life before dragging them to Hell. His first task is to kill this bastard who forced a secretary to embezzle tons of money from his corporation, then murdered her and staged her death as a suicide. We learn this because he delivers all this information in a melodramatic monologue to himself for no reason. All while driving his dastardly foreign car. Otacon puts on lipstick, gets a perm, does his nails, and transforms into the prosecutor of darkness! He kills the first dude by drowning him wrapped in an American flag to symbolize his greed. Awesome!
In the next case, Otacon has to go after his boss because the boss paid an assassin in South America to kill his business partner. I mean his day job boss, not his afterlife boss. This time though, the prosecutor of darkness is met by the defense attorney of darkness! Despite being the prosecutor of darkness for many years, he had no idea that a defense attorney of darkness existed and was quite surprised by this. The gods decided that the whole divine punishment thing was unfair and gave permission to a Catholic priest who sounds like Droopy Dog to be the defense attorney of evil. This guy knows that his clients are guilty and the prosecutor is only going after them because they escaped mortal justice, but he believes it's his duty to help evildoers escape. You also know the defense attorney is the bad guy because he charges 500 million yen for his services while the prosecutor works pro-bono. This guy is a divine being who works directly for the gods like a shinigami, but charges heavily for his services! Why?! What does he even do with that money? I think Bennett the Sage in his review had the only logical conclusion: he blows it all at the strip club.
Here is where Judge becomes a masterpiece. The 2 spirit lawyers engage in a magical legal battle! They fire lasers at each other and summon demons all while screaming legal jargon, written by-laws, and obscure statutes. Imagine a Family Guy cutaway gag about Jewish Harry Potter. That is EXACTLY what this scene is! At this point, the boss gets served by the service processor of darkness and is summoned to appear before the 9 judges of the supreme court of darkness. I'm not going to completely spoil the ending, but what happens is just as stupid as the rest of the series. All while taking itself COMPLETELY seriously. Judge never has an ounce of self awareness throughout the entire runtime. It has no idea how stupid and insane it is!
Another highlight of Judge is the insanely terrible character art. These are some of the ugliest characters I've seen in anime. However, it's quite different from your typical, ugly looking anime. The character art in Kaiji isn't exactly pretty, but the style is very consistent. Every character looks like they belong in the same world. That is NOT the case with Judge. Some of the characters like the boss look they belong in an entirely separate anime. The boss is drawn to look like a Grey Alien, but he's not. He's just supposed to be a normal guy and nobody mentions that he looks completely different from everyone else!
I just skimmed through some of the bullshit and insanity of this anime, but I HIGHLY recommend watching the whole thing. It has to be seen to be believed. I would have probably given Judge a 1, but it made me laugh so hard that I gave it a 4. I made the mistake of visiting the MAL forums last night and met some Zoomer elitist who thought Fairy Tale was what a 1/10 anime looked like. This is exactly why more people need to watch anime like Judge. Only 1,000 people on all of MAL have seen this piece of shit and I want to change that!
