Kamen Rider Den-O
I, have arrived!
Incorporeal beings called Imagins arrive from the future; by possessing a person and going through their imaginations they acquire a physical form. By forming a contract with that person and fulfilling their wish, they can use that person’s most important memory to travel back in time and change history to better suit their own monstrous purpose. One day, the singularly unlucky Nogami Ryoutaro is targeted by one of the Imagins, who he dubs Momotaros, but it turns out that he is a Singularity Point, allowing him to resist possession. At the same time he is also contacted by Hana, a woman who rides the time-travelling bullet train the DenLiner in a quest of vengeance against the Imagins for destroying the future that she came from. Long story short, Ryoutaro must now work with Momotaros and a host of other Imagins in order to protect the flow of time as Kamen Rider Den-O.
Kamen Rider Den-O in no small part functions as an extended excuse to show off just how good an actor Takeru Satoh, the man who plays Nogami Ryoutaro, is; every time he is possessed by an Imagin, he has to portray that Imagins characteristics and body language, so in any given scene he can be portraying up to 5 or 6 different characters. Plus, one of the Imagins likes to breakdance, so he has to do that too, and he also sang in a whole bunch of the songs for the show. Basically, Takeru Satoh is an unbelievably talented performer with incredible range and it is no surprise that his career has been, as Momotaros would put it, always at a Climax.
The cast outside Ryoutaro is also quite good; the Imagins are very colorful in every sense of the word, Hana is a strong female lead in multiple respects, the Owner of the DenLiner is not of this world, and Ryoutaro’s older sister Airi proves surprisingly deeper than her surface appearance of the saintly-perfect big-sister would have suggested. The secondary rider for the series, Yuuto AKA Kamen Rider Zeronos, is also an interesting guy, and himself plays out a very interesting variation on the Kamen Rider franchise’s themes of alienation.
For the most part Den-O is a very silly and light-hearted character focused romp, content for much of its run to just have its cast bounce off each other while having to deal with the Imagin-of-the-week, and when I say ‘bounce off each other’ I am more often than not being literal, slapstick forming a big portion of the show’s humor. This is not to say that the show isn’t ever dramatic or that it is not good at it; on the contrary, Den-O is very skilled at ripping your heart out right through your chest and making you feel terrible, it is just that this is the exception, not the rule.
Then, in the final third or so of the show, they decide to introduce Kai, the boss of the Imagins, the one directing all the Imagins on who to target and when to go into the past to ensure that their future will come into being. Kai is just…one of the most incomprehensible characters I have ever seen in anything ever, and he has a habit of asking if his face is showing a given emotion and declaring how he feels which suggests to me that they deliberately cast the single worst actor they could find as some sort of meta-counterpart to Takeru Satoh. Whatever the deal is supposed to be with this guy, it seriously weakens and impedes on what is meant to be the super-dramatic endgame of the show; not to say that the show fails entirely, far from it, there’s still lots of really good stuff here, it’s just nowhere near where it could be.
Also, in the leadup for the summer movie halfway through the series, one of the characters from the movie will repeatedly appear to Ryoutaro and grab him and drag him into the movie, and by the time Ryoutaro’s back in the show-proper, he has no memory of what happened to him; it’s disorienting at first, but it ends up being the single best use of time-travel in just about anything ever.
So, Kamen Rider Den-O is definitely a good but uneven show, and if you liked it, I’ve got good news for you; there are seven more movies that were made for Den-O after the end of the show because of how much of a ridiculous runaway success it was.
Incorporeal beings called Imagins arrive from the future; by possessing a person and going through their imaginations they acquire a physical form. By forming a contract with that person and fulfilling their wish, they can use that person’s most important memory to travel back in time and change history to better suit their own monstrous purpose. One day, the singularly unlucky Nogami Ryoutaro is targeted by one of the Imagins, who he dubs Momotaros, but it turns out that he is a Singularity Point, allowing him to resist possession. At the same time he is also contacted by Hana, a woman who rides the time-travelling bullet train the DenLiner in a quest of vengeance against the Imagins for destroying the future that she came from. Long story short, Ryoutaro must now work with Momotaros and a host of other Imagins in order to protect the flow of time as Kamen Rider Den-O.
Kamen Rider Den-O in no small part functions as an extended excuse to show off just how good an actor Takeru Satoh, the man who plays Nogami Ryoutaro, is; every time he is possessed by an Imagin, he has to portray that Imagins characteristics and body language, so in any given scene he can be portraying up to 5 or 6 different characters. Plus, one of the Imagins likes to breakdance, so he has to do that too, and he also sang in a whole bunch of the songs for the show. Basically, Takeru Satoh is an unbelievably talented performer with incredible range and it is no surprise that his career has been, as Momotaros would put it, always at a Climax.
The cast outside Ryoutaro is also quite good; the Imagins are very colorful in every sense of the word, Hana is a strong female lead in multiple respects, the Owner of the DenLiner is not of this world, and Ryoutaro’s older sister Airi proves surprisingly deeper than her surface appearance of the saintly-perfect big-sister would have suggested. The secondary rider for the series, Yuuto AKA Kamen Rider Zeronos, is also an interesting guy, and himself plays out a very interesting variation on the Kamen Rider franchise’s themes of alienation.
For the most part Den-O is a very silly and light-hearted character focused romp, content for much of its run to just have its cast bounce off each other while having to deal with the Imagin-of-the-week, and when I say ‘bounce off each other’ I am more often than not being literal, slapstick forming a big portion of the show’s humor. This is not to say that the show isn’t ever dramatic or that it is not good at it; on the contrary, Den-O is very skilled at ripping your heart out right through your chest and making you feel terrible, it is just that this is the exception, not the rule.
Then, in the final third or so of the show, they decide to introduce Kai, the boss of the Imagins, the one directing all the Imagins on who to target and when to go into the past to ensure that their future will come into being. Kai is just…one of the most incomprehensible characters I have ever seen in anything ever, and he has a habit of asking if his face is showing a given emotion and declaring how he feels which suggests to me that they deliberately cast the single worst actor they could find as some sort of meta-counterpart to Takeru Satoh. Whatever the deal is supposed to be with this guy, it seriously weakens and impedes on what is meant to be the super-dramatic endgame of the show; not to say that the show fails entirely, far from it, there’s still lots of really good stuff here, it’s just nowhere near where it could be.
Also, in the leadup for the summer movie halfway through the series, one of the characters from the movie will repeatedly appear to Ryoutaro and grab him and drag him into the movie, and by the time Ryoutaro’s back in the show-proper, he has no memory of what happened to him; it’s disorienting at first, but it ends up being the single best use of time-travel in just about anything ever.
So, Kamen Rider Den-O is definitely a good but uneven show, and if you liked it, I’ve got good news for you; there are seven more movies that were made for Den-O after the end of the show because of how much of a ridiculous runaway success it was.