Detroit Metal City is a 12-episode OVA based on the manga series serialized by Young Animal from 2005 until present. Each episode last approximately for 13 minutes. It was later into a live-action film that starred Kenichi Matsuyama who is best known for his portrayal as L in the live-action Death Note movies.
Soichi Negishi lives his hometown in the countryside to study for college in Tokyo and to pursue his dream as a musician, to be exact, a trendy Swedish Pop Musician. However, bills don’t accept dreams so he ended up being the lead guitarist and vocals of the band known as Detroit Metal City or DMC for short.
In DMC, he is known as Johannes Krauser II, the teeth guitaring terrorist straight from hell who raped and killed his parents yesterday. Due to this nature, Negishi is ashamed top tell his job to his parents and even to his girl of her dreams. To make things worst, she hates DMC! The question is can he balance his career and his life while his band becomes popular in the indie scene?
On to the review, there are three points that I liked about this OVA. First, this is something different from the usual music themed shows that I know, which focuses more on a dream of a certain band to become very famous someday or perform into a large stage like… Budokan!
Instead, we have a shy guy who wants to be a trendy Swedish pop singer who hates this job but once on-stage, he plays the part real well… and still hates it! Probably that is the magic Detroit Metal City has aside from the fact that Negishi tries his best to hide his Krauser side which leads to this next point, his ego.
Negishi’s ego and because of this ego, he never had the chance to leave the group. Why I love his ego? First, remember that Soichi hates doing this. Next, we must remember that he is Krauser and most fans see him as a Rock God/Emperor or whatever you will like to call him, put these elements together, we have this scene.
Everytime Negishi sees someone doing a cover of any DMC song, deep inside him he is commenting on their performance, if he feels they are bastardizing his songs or destroying the rhythm or the feel of the original, he goes to the bathroom and changes into Krauser and kicks the crap out of from the posers.
Even if he already decided to finally leave DMC, because of a bad replacement and his huge ego, he was forced to be back on-stage as Krauser.
Lastly, is the animation style that has this feel like you are reading the Detroit Metal City manga. Even though the series is animated on widescreen HD, there are some scenes in which we will only see a horizontal box and the inside of it the scene of this episode. I love this unique feel in this show.
Aside from that, the show’s soundtrack is really good especially Negishi and Krauser’s vocals. Sure two VA’s do separate jobs in voicing them but that adds the personality of the characters. Negishi is the shy and soft-spoken type while Krauser is the energetic and raspy voice lead vocals of DMC.
For the disappointments, the finale because it never had this epic feel like this is the last show Jack ill Dark will do in Japan. I mean, the F*** Showdown felt lame and Jack handling Karth’s legendary guitar backstage didn’t have this feel of passing the torch. Sure, Jack learned Krauser’s identity but if Jack did it on-stage with thousands of fans seeing it might give a really chilling and cool effect for the finale.
Final disappointment, there is no proper conclusion on the plots established. Sure the manga is still ongoing when the OVA was released but look on what other titles did, they created their own ending. If there are plans on releasing a OVA sequel, hope they will give the series a proper wrap up.
Overall, Detroit Metal City has its own weak spots like it is short and a mediocre finale but it is one of the rare music themed shows that you will enjoy much. I cannot recommend to all ages due to foul language and sexual references. This series is best recommended to ages 16 onwards.