My Home Hero

What is this? Tetsuo Tosu, a 47-year-old office worker, and his wife, Kasen, love their daughter Reika more than anything in the world, even though she...

The first is the confrontation that our mystery-novel-loving hero, Tetsuo, has with his daughter Reika, who is clearly the victim of domestic abuse. Tetsuo's horror at what happened also tracks, and the shift in his demeanor when he realizes that he has to kill Nobuto in order to save his child is nicely understated. Perhaps that's just a consequence of the deeply inexpressive animation and direction, but it means that Tetsuo's driving motivation—saving his family—doesn't land. It isn't too often that watching an anime makes me concerned that I am experiencing some kind of hallucinatory episode that could portend some terrible neurological diagnosis in my future, but My Home Hero is, from its very first minute, determined to make its audience question whether or not what it is watching is even real. That's a telling moment, because it shows that he's beginning to think outside the bounds of what he's been taught his whole life. The way he discovers his daughter's abusive boyfriend is by randomly overhearing said boyfriend loudly bragging about hitting her, in public, on the streets, and then telling all his buddies what her name is in case they forgot. Yet it can't accomplish that in any capacity, thanks to janky character designs, terrible compositing, and a frankly amateurish eye for lighting that makes the stiff animation all the more noticeable. Nobuto is an abuser and Reika is at real risk of becoming his victim rather than a survivor of his abuse. For all rights and purposes, what we have here is a normal guy with a normal job and a normal family. And so begins the fight of wits over life or death between "a normal, weak, middle-aged man" who is prepared to do anything to protect his family, and the fearless fighters from the underworld. Enter Reika's boyfriend, Nobuto Matori, a brute who has beaten his ex-girlfriend to death and has ties to the yakuza. The series as a whole looks to be about how our murderer attempts to get away with the crime.