Beatless is a 24 episode anime (not including recap episodes) that is based upon the Japanese serial novel. It takes place in the future where there are androids known as Human Interface Elements (hIE’s). These androids have been commonplace, as they take on the jobs that humans used to do. They range from high profile idols and forming a part of the police force, to assistants and nannies to normal people. While at first glance they can pass from a human, most people are able to tell the difference, particularly due to their eyes and their behaviour.
The anime follows Endo Arato, a high school student who wishes for a hIE of his own. He’s pretty normal and lives with his sister. One night while he was out doing some late grocery shopping, he encounters a life-threatening scenario and is saved by Lacia, a hIE. Interestingly, Lacia asks if Arato can be her owner, to which he agrees. Lacia moves into his house and helps out with a lot of the everyday things. Lacia, while being a hIE, is one of the higher end models, with a captivating design and elegance, often drawing attention in public.
The anime in general goes for a serious tone surrounding philosophical subject matter. It touches upon topics like the relationship between humans and AI, what happens when AI has surpassed human intelligence, and how far the population is willing to give AI control over. However, despite these heavier scenes, it constantly flips back to using worn anime tropes like Arato flirting with Lacia as he finds her attractive. It’s typical teenage boy stuff but feels out of place at times with what the anime attempts to do with its storytelling.
The first few episodes can feel disjointed, making it hard to tell where the plot is going. It’s a bit too episodical, where the current episode’s events doesn’t quite link to the next episode’s. Coincidentally, and this is where it gets somewhat hard to believe, but all of Arato’s friends are involved in something or another with hIEs, and the current events of these special hIEs appearing. Arato’s friends have clashing ideologies with him. Where Arato is more friendly to hIEs, treating them as individuals, his friends’ values align more to the general population, where hIEs are just objects and properties without rights.
It’s not that Arato begins as an unlikeable character, it’s more so that he is a bland one that’s one dimensional. He is too naïve and idealistic, he is simply too predictable and does nothing interesting. When the anime then pairs him up romantically with Lacia, that relationship is too shallow. There was too little in building up the chemistry between them. Instead, Arato had immediately latched onto Lacia when he first met her (and as always, the physical attraction comes first), while Lacia reciprocates… just because.
Despite being exclusively streamed on Amazon Prime Video, there are no less than four recap episodes. The first two are pretty bad in terms of showing up too soon, after five and four episodes respectively, but there is one point where there was only a two episode gap between the recap episodes. Then again, considering how the storytelling isn’t that great, a bit of refresher as it summarises the events so far isn’t too bad either. This in general the biggest problem of the show, it doesn’t manage to make its content interesting enough. Episodes contain a lot of slow moving scenes with dialogue that feels like filler.
Even when half the season is gone, you’re still wondering what the anime is truly about. This is because the storytelling was done so badly that we still don’t really understand each characters’ motivations. They are paired up with other powerful hIEs… just because? It was originally some sort of social experiment? They now all have to fight each other to the death? It’s not communicated well and when you have developments such as the equivalent of a zombie invasion, it’s really hard to take it all seriously, and that’s if you are able to pay attention to the glacial pacing.
As the anime builds up to its final arc, it’s as messy as it had been. Arata becomes even more insufferable, with the plot being extremely hard to follow, or maybe it’s just so boring that you cannot be bothered. It tries to liven things up with fight scenes, but when you don’t see the point, then no matter how good those scenes are, it won’t do much. That said, the fight scenes aren’t great anyway. The animation quality slips over the course of the season, and there are frequent scenes with bad animation in the second half.
The season culminates into an extended ending, where it just doesn’t seem to want to end. As the anime had a habit of dragging significant events for longer than they should have, as well as emphasizing the importance of them more than it should, the ending just felt like another one of those. It throws as much as it can to it, with all the participants fighting against each other, and vague resemblances of motives. It seems that it was supposed to highlight the future of humanity and whether AI has its place in it, but it’s hard to make sense of it all. As expected, it ends up with an extremely happy and idealistic ending, which makes it predictable.
Overall, Beatless is very average, maybe even below average. It had a good concept but pretty much immediately squanders it with poor storytelling and the desire to keep reverting back to predictable tropes. As a result, we get a story that’s hard to decipher and even harder to care about. We get characters who don’t stand out and are generic to the point of being unlikable. Then to cap it all off, there are frequent scenes of poor animation and choreography.
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