ERASED: Boku dake ga inai Machi

"You are seeing his comic book about a girl who is in Hell and her father who goes to Hell to bring her back."
- Jodi Picoult 

It's the year 2006. Satoru Fujinuma is a 29-year-old pizza delivery man who very much aspires to be a mangaka as he's a talented artist, and he happens to have another skill which no one in the world has: the ability to get strange sensations of when something really bad - a death in particular - is about to happen, and he's capable of changing the course of fate before the death happens. At the beginning of the story as he's delivering pizzas, Satoru senses something bad about to happen nearby, and he can tell it's going to happen to a elementary school kid who is about to be crossing the road. By investigating his surroundings he is able to deduce that a truck driver has fallen asleep on the wheel. As Satoru makes the driver avoid hitting the boy, he himself gets hit by a car.
He calls this ability Revival, where he's usually able to go back one to five minutes into the past after an incident has happened - and then he stops them from happening. The negatives of it are that sometimes things go bad for him.

After Satoru's accident his 52-year-old mother, Sachiko Fujinuma, stays with him for a while in his place and reminds him of a past case as they're watching the news; a case where two of his classmates and a girl from another school, from the time when Satoru was on the fifth grade, happened to disappear.

ERASED: Boku dake ga inai Machi (2016, trans. "The Town Without Me") is a 12-episode long supernatural crime-mystery animated series produced by A-1 Pictures. ERASED tells the story about a time traveler, and it handles concepts such as child abuse, kidnapping and murder. It is one of the better works of that particular studio in my opinion as I don't consider their overall quality that good. The anime is adapted from a manga of the same name created by Kei Sanbe. The original comic ran for eight volumes between 2012 and 2016, ending around the same time as the anime did.

A Revival happens as Satoru and his mother are walking from the mall, and Satoru's mother notices a man - and the man notices him - walking along the road with a young girl, getting on a car and then leaving the girl behind. Satoru's mother reminiscences back to the kidnapping cases from 18 years ago. She starts to suspect that the culprit is still at large despite there being a death row prisoner who was convicted for the crimes, and that's the person that she saw trying to kidnap the girl earlier. As she goes back to Satoru's apartment to wait for him, she gets stabbed by the culprit and the police surround the apartment after Satoru finds the corpse of his mother with the kitchen knife still stuck in her stomach; Satoru panics and tries to escape the police by running, and the next thing he notices in front of him is a young boy running next to him and the large announcement on his old school's wall saying "Ice Hockey Club 1988 National Champions."

During this time period of the grand Revival where Satoru goes 18 years to the past, to the time where the kidnappings happened is where the story takes place. The first part of the story which takes place from episode 2 to episode 8, what I like to call the "Kayo Hinazuki arc," is the best arc of the series and the most important. You can consider it the the meat and bones of the series. The arc introduces us to the past which is the main setting of the anime. The basic idea of the story is to tell the tales of the kidnapping victims from the viewpoint of a time traveler; what was going on during that time period eighteen years ago, and then see Satoru try to save them. Changing the fate of the past and avoiding the same events which unfolded back then is not an easy task however.

The story of Erased starts out pretty strong aside from the very rushed pacing of the first episode (which can still be overlooked in this show due to the quality of the first "arc"). Three kidnapping cases took place 18 years ago: Kayo Hinazuki (10) disappeared in March and her body was found after the snow had melted, Aya Nakanishi's (11) disappearance and Hiromi Sugita's (11) disappearance would soon follow suit. The kidnappings of these three young children is what Satoru is trying to prevent in order to prevent his mother's death in the present-time because Satoru believes that there must be a reason why he was thrown so far back in order to save her, as that's how the Revival apparently works. However it's too bad that the Revival was never actually truly explained in the series; it just exists. Many other people can have it, or can't have it, in the series. We don't know. All I can take from it is that it's a plot device to fix the problems of the world as Satoru as a kid aspires to be a superhero. Continuing on with the problems, after Kayo's arc, the story basically gets ready to already end as there are still three more children to save and a killer to catch in the last four episodes. As Satoru jumps between the past and the present in order to catch the culprit in both timelines, he has to face challenges and hardships which are quite well presented for what they are. The wrap-up is frankly too quick-paced and the story loses the atmosphere it had between episodes 2-8. Although the cast of characters in the story are not that great, they aren't bad either. Satoru's mother, Kid Satoru and Kayo are all great and interesting to follow. However, the identity of the killer is obvious and lackluster; there is not really any other possible person when you think about it, so the story should not be called a whodunnit, and the ending is kind of badly written from many different points of views when looking at what happened to the characters; Kayo's, Satoru's, the Killer's and Satoru's futures are pretty lame, honestly. 

The cool and rough atmosphere and modern clean style of the anime are great. In graphic novels/comic books the flashback aspects (flashback is an even which happened in the past in comparison to the current timeline of a story) are sometimes done in a way that the left-right, bottom-top parts of the panels/pages are drawn in large black lines. This is a style used in the anime of ERASED as well. During the majority of the story which is spent in the past, the anime has the bottom and top of the screen in black while the screen in which the anime is displayed is condensed in a more cinematography way. It even looks great (because it's a more fresh style) when the subtitles are on the bottom black part of the screen.

All in all: The Kayo Hinazuki arc is the only standout thing about the show from atmosphere, presentation and storytelling standpoints, but as it takes a good half of the story, ERASED: Boku dake ga inai Machi still ends up being a worthwhile watch and it still has more to talk about than many other series.

Something to take from this show:
+ Focus on the style and presentation in order to make the story enjoyable to follow.
- Too quick of a pacing can ofcourse also be detrimental to the enjoyment factor of a show; a well presented Substance - Style ratio is important to understand.