Review for B: The Beginning

Introduction

What used to infuriate me as a youth was when my favourite programmes made a splash on terrestrial television, good old free to air broadcasts that I’d tune into religiously each week, and then Rupert Murdoch would come around, notice a show’s popularity, and taking advantage of a public broadcaster’s hard work at publicising a show, would poach it and stick it behind a paywall on Sky. It’s still happening of course, but now it’s called Netflix jail. These big streaming magnates like Netflix or Amazon Prime get all manner of exclusives, and they keep them on streaming for as long as they can squeeze money out of them, and prevent them being released for home media consumption. The BBC collaborated with Amazon on the first season of Good Omens, and that got a release in sensible order. Amazon went it alone on season two, and there’s no sign of that on disc, even though season three is in production. Everything Everywhere All at Once was a big streaming title in the UK, and it’s still to get a disc release here. It’s come out on disc Everywhere Else All at Once, just not here. B the Beginning is one of Netflix’s exclusive anime shows, and there are six episodes of a second season, locked up in Netflix jail since 2021, although only now has it been announced for release by All the Anime, three years later.


There is a serial killer at work in Cremona; their calling card, the letter B left scrawled somewhere in the murder scene. But given that the victims are all murderous criminals in their own right, the public is somewhat ambivalent about the killer they dub, Killer B. But murder is something the authorities can’t condone, and a new investigation team is put together to solve the crimes. A veteran detective, Keith Flick is called back to service, but he has demons of his own to deal with before he can catch the killer.

12 episodes of B The Beginning, a.k.a. Perfect Bones are released on two Blu-ray discs from All the Anime, 6 episodes on each.

Picture

B The Beginning gets a 1.78:1 widescreen 1080p transfer on these discs. The image is clear and sharp, colours are strong and consistent, and detail levels are good. B The Beginning gets quality animation from Production IG, with elegant and effective character designs. It’s a very good looking show, with solid presentation on these discs, although there is a smidge of digital banding from time to time.

Sound

You have the choice between DTS-HD MA 5.1 Surround Japanese and English, with subtitles and signs locked during playback. I was happy enough with the Japanese audio, the action comes across well, the dialogue is clear enough, and the music drives the story as required. The show’s theme tunes are tone appropriate, if unmemorable, and the subtitles are mostly well-timed and free of typos. I say mostly well-timed as this looks to be a locally authored disc release, in that it can’t show text captions and subtitle translations simultaneously. Sometimes some text captions are dropped altogether, and sometimes they get mixed up with dialogue, which is unnecessarily confusing in a mystery story.

Extras

You get two discs in a BD Amaray case, one on each inner face. There is inner sleeve art to take in. The discs boot to animated menus, and you’ll find the following extras on disc 2.

Kazuto Nakazawa Interview (23:59)
Bonus Test Film (1:49)
Textless Ending (1:57)

Conclusion

“A Netflix Original Series” That is at the head of every episode, and I didn’t think much of it when I started watching the show. But the further I got into the show, the more I got a sinking feeling at the start of each subsequent episode, as I was increasingly put in mind of the burst of the last anime bubble. There was a whole lot of money going around then, shows were getting more and more expensive, and US companies started getting into the production side of things, putting money into the kind of anime that they thought local audiences would like. Very rarely such productions would succeed, shows like Gonzo’s Witchblade. More often than not, they would go the way of shows like IGPX, high quality, big budget, quality entertainment even, but not what anime fans wanted to see in anime.


B The Beginning very much feels like a story put together for Western audiences, with a kind of Hollywood perception of what Western anime fans want to see in imported entertainment, as opposed to what the majority of anime fans actually fall in love with the medium for in the first place, which is to get away from the Hollywood clichés to begin with.


There’s plenty going on in B The Beginning that is worthy of consideration. You have a serial killer apparently on the loose in Cremona. A special police unit has been put together to investigate, although the situation is such that they have to call in the help of an ace detective who has the kind of issues that has kept him away from such work, namely his sister was murdered. It turns out that the suspect in the murders apparently has supernatural abilities, although it takes some time before we get the back story of a secret project to create assassins with ‘divine’ abilities, a project that went disastrously wrong, and a project with which that aforementioned ace detective has some history, as well as a clown-faced group of assassins known as Market Garden.


This is about half of what the story encompasses, and it is a lot to pack into 12 episodes, too much some might say. And then the show throws in some over the top character comedy. The interactions between the members of the special police unit has the kind of over the top extreme reaction silliness that you’d expect in shows where characters could become super-deformed state at the drop of a punchline, but which is completely out of place in a serious sci-fi/horror thriller. The end result is when the show should be selling its plot developments, getting the audience invested in the characters and their back-stories that motivate much of what happens, it’s dropping the ball instead to indulge in some atonal frivolity. It’s what some Hollywood production committee AI algorithm thinks anime fans want to see in anime.


This is all a crying shame, as with Production IG doing the honours, the production values in B The Beginning are at the very high end of the scale. This is a seriously good looking show, with excellent character designs, and a detailed and well-researched world design. This should be a show that grabs and holds the attention from beginning to end. Instead, this was the show where I learned that I can sleep with my eyes open staring at a TV screen.

B The Beginning is available direct from Anime Limited (indeed the Ultimate Edition is still available), from Anime on Line, and from mainstream retailers, while the second season of six episodes is now up for pre-order at Anime Limited.