Black Jack the Anime is a TV series about the titular character ” Black Jack.” Black Jack is an unlicensed doctor who performs medical miracles for extravagant prices. The anime is loosely based on Osamu Tezuka’s manga Black Jack, about a doctor who goes on medical adventures. Osamu Tezuka also wrote and illustrated the world-renowned manga and anime Astro Boy.
The structure of the show is episodic with a medical adventure of the week theme that is normally tied into a family-friendly moral of some kind. The show’s overarching theme seems to be that even an unlicensed doctor has a moral obligation to help those who need medical assistance and that there is no price too high to save a human life. This can be seen from the high fees that Black Jack charges his patients.
The main characters are Pinoko, Black Jack, and Largo. Pinoko looks to be about eight years old but is an 18-year-old woman trapped in a young girl’s body. She has a crush on Dr. BlackJack and seems to function as his assistant. She lives with Black Jack at his home, and they seem to have a father-daughter relationship.
Largo is a dog who can ” see” the future and lives with Black and Pinoko after they acquire him in one of their adventures. The structure of the episodes is formulaic and usually involves Pinoko meeting the patient and bringing the patient to some point to Black Jack. For the most part, the episodes are self-contained stories that play out like slice-of-life episodes. However, that does not mean that the show does not have an overall plot. The conflict in the show seems to revolve around the issue of Black Jack’s medical license.
At first glance, you might mistake the character of Black Jack for an anime version of House. Black Jack has a good heart and treats all individuals the same regardless of race, species, or gender. While Black Jack normally protests treating animals, he has occasionally saved animals’ lives. Black Jack seems to treat his patients through a whole-person approach to medicine. The underlying theme of the series is that you cannot put a price on life. The outlandish fees that Black Jack charges his patients in the series are often to remind them to value their lives.
There are certain aspects of the series that do not work well. In an anime that is essentially a slice-of-life anime with some comedic moments, it has some absurd episodes and running jokes. One such running joke is that everyone treats Pinoko as a child, but she is an 18-year-old woman.
I will not spoil the circumstances of how she gets her new body, but the joke becomes tiresome. It is not all that funny, and it is in all 52 episodes. Also, because Pinoko’s body looks so young, it makes her constant daydreaming about Dr. Blackjack a bit disturbing. One redeeming aspect of Pinoko and Blackjack’s relationship is that Blackjack does not reciprocate Pinoko’s feelings. Blackjack’s feelings for Pinoko are clear: one of a Father to a daughter.
There are also a lot of odd adventures that are odd and really do not fit well into the series as a whole. In one such episode, Aliens get shot down while visiting Earth, and Blackjack saves the planet by saving the life of the wife of the alien captain. It is never explained what the aliens are doing on Earth, and we never see them again.
The entire episode had no impact on the series as a whole and could have been cut from the season without causing any damage to the show. This episode is the only episode with reference to life on other planets. In another episode, Pinoko encounters a dog who can see the future, and it becomes her pet. The dog’s ability is never mentioned again, even though the dog is seen in multiple episodes after that. Small things like these break the emersion into Blackjack’s world.
Another problem is that there is very little character-building or progression outside of a few episodes. While the episodes minus a handful are engaging, the overall series is mundane. The majority of the characters are dry and forgetful. None of the episodes in the anime are memorable. This is the core problem with the Blackjack series. If you are like me and coming to the series expecting to see a series based on Blackjack, the movie, then you are mistaken. Blackjack the series is directed at a much younger audience and lacks the movie’s seriousness, intrigue, and action. If you are looking for light-hearted background noise, then Blackjack the series is right for you.
