Before starting my rewatch of the animated X-Men adaptations, I had no idea this anime even existed. According to Wikipedia, the show was one of six animated collaborations between Marvel Entertainment and Madhouse studios (four series and two films in total). Airing between 2010 and 2012 in Japan and North America, the project also included Iron Man and Blade, as well as a solo Wolverine outing – which I'll get to next.
I've no idea how familiar the creators were with its direct predecessor Wolverine and the X-Men, but coincidentally or not, X-Men Anime also begins with the apparent death of Jean Grey and revolves around a mystery involving the trustworthiness of Emma Frost. It's also something of an inversion of X-Men Evolution, for whereas that show ended with a brief glimpse of Jean turning into the Phoenix, this one starts with it.
In a short flashback, Phoenix-possessed Jean self-destructs in front of her teammates as a desperate last resort, leaving Cyclops devastated and the X-Men disbanded. It's a strong opening, and one that really captures the destruction and chaos the Phoenix wrought in a way no other adaptation has – but as it turns out, this series has virtually nothing to do with The Phoenix Saga. All that matters is that Jean is dead and Cyclops is heartbroken, and believe it or not, she doesn't return to life by the final episode.
The plot starts properly when the core members of the X-Men – Cyclops, Storm, Beast and Wolverine – are contacted by Professor X and asked to return to the mansion. He has a new mission for them, one that involves a trip to an isolated area of Japan that he finds impossible to scan with Cerebro. Something is blocking his efforts, and on arriving in the Tohoku region it becomes clear that something is very wrong: not only are there deformed fish in the streams and dead trees on the riverbank, but twenty young mutant children have gone missing.
Naturally, mutants are copping the blame for the trouble (and local police aren’t pursing the case for this precise reason), though the team is surprised to find such a large percentage of mutants amidst what is such a small population – especially since Cerebro is unable to penetrate the area. And so the investigation begins...
There are twelve episodes in all, each only about twenty minutes long, so things whizz by pretty quickly, with all the staples of anime that you’ve come to expect: gravity-defying boobs for the women, a tendency for men to get their shirts shredded to reveal six-pack abs, prolonged montages of reaction shots from characters (usually punctuated with gasps or grunts), and lots of uncomfortable butt poses.
