developed for the screen by Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldissimo, based on their comics series
When I first read the black-and-white issues of Budjette Tan's and Kajo Baldissimo's brand new comics series Trese back in 2005, I was hooked. The story of a detective, Alexandra Trese, taking on supernatural mysteries of the underworld armed was immensely appealing and for issue after issue Tan and Baldissimo just kept the compelling stories featuring creatures from Filipino mythology coming.
This was long before the days of such sprawling comics adaptations as the Marvel Cinematic Universe but I already knew I wanted to see this series adapted into another form somehow.
Therefore, when it was announced sometime during coronavirus pandemic (I don't remember exactly when anymore; time kind of lost all meaning then) that Netflix would be adapting this series into an anime, I was greatly enthused. Animation was, to my mind, the perfect vehicle as the storytellers wouldn't have to worry about finding the budget for special effects to render the supernatural aspect of the narrative. I only wondered how they would manage the comics' English dialogue with its smattering of Filipino. A Western voice cast would simply not do this series justice, I felt.
It's been nearly two weeks since all six episodes of Trese dropped on Netflix, and having seen them all twice over I'm happy to say I wasn't at all disappointed. The series boasted topnotch animation, tight scripting, and an incredibly atmospheric feel that accurately captured the uniquely Filipino sensibility of the show.
In the show, as in the comics, Trese (voiced in the English dub by Shay Mitchell and in the Tagalog dub by Liza Soberano) is a private detective who investigates, with the help of her supernatural muscle the Kambal and her trusty man Friday Hank , crimes of a paranormal nature. More than being just an investigator, she is essentially a warrior-shaman, a "babaylan" of exceptional ability and, courtesy of her late father Anton, with extensive training in the arcane arts. She maintains a tenuous balance established by her father between the world of humanity and that of the many supernatural beings that live just beyond human sight. With the sudden uptick in horrific crimes perpetrated by denizens of the underworld, however, Trese fears that this fragile balance may soon be destroyed,
I've already waxed lyrical about this show in a Youtube video but I still have other thoughts on this series that I didn't get to articulate on in the video, which was bit more free-flowing and extemporaneous than my written reviews tend to be.
As an adaptation of the first six issues of the series, Trese works like a charm. Inevitable liberties may have been taken, but they are surprisingly few and none deviating in any substantial way from Budjette Tan's and Kajo Baldissimo's original vision, and the writing team captured the very best part of the comic: the incredible world-building.
I love the character of Trese, how she bears a terrible burden along with her responsibilities but isn't terribly emotional about it, until the weight of her burden starts to get too heavy. She's believably deadpan, but every now and again her very human fragility shines through. Both the writing and the animation work together wonderfully to bring this to life. More importantly, though, they introduce the viewer to Filipino folklore in one of the canniest ways possible: they tease it, bit by bit, episode by episode, and draw the viewer in with each new glimpse of this fantastical world and the creatures that inhabit it.
My two beefs, however, are with the voice acting, particularly in the English track, and specifically with the Filipino accents, which, to my mind, worked on a 50/50 basis. Some of them were knocked right out of the park, but others came across as more Latin American than Filipino. Regardless of whether the actors' accents constitute their real-life Filipino accents in America or Canada, they owed it to authenticity to give genuine Filipino accents and not merely Fil-Am or Fil-Canadian accents. At least half of the cast got it right, but others rather notably didn't.
This latter half, unfortunately, includes lead voice actress Shay Mitchell, who gave Trese her English voice. Mitchell is a capable actress and I thought she nicely captured Trese's inner strength and the conflict bubbling within her, but whenever she spoke Tagalog I basically cringed. She could get away with the relatively short phrases, but as the spells she recited got longer and longer her Tagalog made me shrink deeper into my chair. All I can say here, as I did in my video review, is that she needs a full-time dialect coach, and not just the producer giving her notes, which, based on the "behind the scenes" special that Netflix aired, appears to be what happened. If she had a dialect coach for the first season, then she needs a better one next time, hopefully one from Manila and not LA.
This quibble notwithstanding, I still enjoyed the series quite a bit.
I also enjoyed the Tagalog dub, which I watched on my second viewing, and I have to respectfully disagree with the critiques of Liza Soberano, who dubbed Trese in the Tagalog language version. She has widely been accused of being "wooden" but in truth, she was being true to Trese's deadpan nature, which dates all the way back to her appearances in the comics. I'm no Liza fan, and in truth I couldn't even listen to her speak during the "making of" special as I fast-forwarded through all her parts, but her voice acting was not a problem, nor was that of any of the other Filipino actors in the Tagalog dub.
What I did find problematic, though, was an abrupt and ridiculous exposition dump that took place in the first third of the very last episode, the kind of monologue that would put even some of the more exposition-indulgent Japanese anime to shame. The story, which had been moving along with a nice, brisk pace at that point ground to a halt, and in an oddly "meta" moment, the setting literally went from day to night in the course of the speech. It was not a shining moment for anyone involved.
My issues with accents and last-minute exposition aside, though, I am very much a fan of this show and I dearly hope it has a future with Netflix, who are notorious for giving even popular shows the chopping block. The production value of this show is right up there with any other anime Netflix has produced, and it deserves to live to see another day.
8/10
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