Someone once said – all the best stories ever told were stories of revenge.

The French novelist Alexandre Dumas is rightfully called the father of genre literature and the creator of a bunch of adventure fiction tropes that live to this day. His work marked the 19th century pop culture. Generations of readers grew up learning history from his novels, given that the glorious past of France was the endless source of inspiration for this ink slinger. He wrote only a few works set in his own 19th century – he used to say that he found the present unstimulating. However, as fate would have it, “The Count of Monte Cristo” – a novel set in the early 1800’s – would become one of his best known and most influential works. Dumas said that the topic of the novel was ripped from the headlines of a prominent Paris daily newspaper – but the claims of the man who was prone to forging history as it pleased him should not be taken at face value.



For starters, let’s have a quick recap. At the beginning of “The Count of Monte Cristo”, our hero, Edmond Dantès, a seaman from Marseilles, has everything his heart desires – a cool job, a pretty fiancée named Mercedes, and a group of loyal friends with whom he shares the good times and the bad. His best friend in the world is a guy named Ferdinand. Yet this is only an illusion – said friends are actually jealous of Edmond and his perfect life, so they’ll happily frame him up to be accused of high treason. Edmond thus ends up in jail, convicted to a lifetime sentence. In prison, he makes friends with a mysterious elderly inmate – this dude is not only happy to offer Edmond some education, turning the crude sailor into a cultivated man, but he also reveals the location of a secret treasure stash buried on the island of Monte Cristo. After a few years, Edmond pulls off a prison break. He takes the treasure and assumes the identity of the Count of Monte Cristo, and for a while he travels the world, having adventures and collecting henchmen – such as Haydée, the seven year old daughter of a former Turkish pasha, whom Edmond bought as a slave, but then released and raised like his own child. In the meantime, his former friends are having a blast, enjoying life and climbing the social ladder – Mercedes is married to Ferdinand, and they have a son named Albert.

Fast forward to Paris, fifteen years later: determined to destroy the people he once called friends and take from them everything they hold dear, the self-styled Count returns to France. By making friends with none other than young Albert, the Count gets to penetrate the highest social circles of Paris – and there, he manipulates and plots and schemes and lays traps for his enemies, watching them fall one by one.

Long story short: the Count manages to destroy all his foes – leaving Ferdinand for last – and Mercedes and Albert leave the city running away from shame. Edmond Dantès is triumphant in his revenge, but he also learns an important life lesson on why it is a Bad Thing to be so bent on destruction. This allows him to marry Haydée – and that’s so fucking creepy I’m at a loss for words, like hello, he raised her like his own daughter, but who am I to judge, those were different times. And, well, that’s it.



As you may see, Edmond Dantès, as Alexandre Dumas wrote him, ain’t no prince charming – he’s more of a Byronic anti-hero, which was a fashionable character trope back in the 19th century. However, the Hollywood adaptations of “The Count of Monte Cristo” – which is the version that most people are familiar with nowadays, when it ain’t so easy to chug down a few thousand pages of 19th century prose – took care to additionally whitewash the Count and make him more heroic and viewer-friendly. Therefore, at the end of the movie –any movie – it usually turns out that Albert is not Ferdinand’s son but Edmond’s, conceived on the eve before he got jailed. After getting rid of Ferdinand, the Count gets back with Mercedes and forgives her for all her past transgressions, while it’s Albert who hooks up with Haydée - which is, as I’m sure you’ll all agree, way more appropriate. And that’s how this story ends, because according to Hollywood, even a tale of obsessive, meticulously planned revenge that nearly destroyed the hero’s life must have a neat Happily Ever After.



In both cases – in Dumas’ novel and in later film adaptations - Edmond Dantès is presented to us as the protagonist. We watch the events unfold from his perspective – we empathize with his motivations, we admire him and we root for him. And even if there are innocent people who get hurt on his roaring rampage of revenge, we dismiss it as nothing but collateral damage – after all, he is our hero, and seeking vengeance for what was done to him is within his right.

And then there’s „Gankutsuou“ – a 24-episodes anime series produced in 2004 by the once great Studio Gonzo, which proved that the best adaptation of “The Count of Monte Cristo” can be the one that superficially resembles it the least.



The anime is a masterfully conceived post-modernist deconstruction of Dumas’ novel that operates on three levels. First, we have the setting: the story takes place in a wild, anachronistic version of the future, in which 19th century lifestyle and fashion are mixed with spaceships, giant robots, intergalactic travels and exotic aliens – for instance, little Haydée is no longer a Turk, but a pointy-eared waif from another planet. Second, “Gankutsuou” incorporates the elements from another work by Alexandre Dumas, “The Man with the Iron Mask”. The plot of this novel is used to explain the identity of the mysterious inmate whom Edmond befriends – yet it is no longer the long lost twin of Louis XIV hiding behind the mask, but a mean motherfucker of a demon who promises Edmond invincibility on his quest for revenge, in return for his immortal soul. Finally, the third – and the most interesting – post-modernist choice that the anime makes is the idea to completely restructure Dumas’ story. As it happens, in this version, the protagonist is no longer Edmond Dantès – but poor little Albert, the offspring of the unfaithful Mercedes and the evil Ferdinand.

Now, I want you to picture the same plot as described above, but this time from Albert’s point of view. As he’s spending his days as a young socialite, wasting time and doing all what rich, bored and angst-ridden teens do, one day, all of a sudden, he encounters an enigmatic older man. Handsome, sophisticated and seductive, cool and well-travelled, extravagant and perhaps a tad decadent, this man has aliens for friends and claims to be a Count from a distant planet. He’s willing to lavish Albert with undivided attention – something his own father has no time for – giving gifts and inciting excitement. He’s patient, and charming, and always there when the boy needs him. It’s only natural that the poor kid falls head over heels, completely losing his marbles. Infatuated with the Count as only an impressionable teen can be, Albert will allow this stranger to fully enter his life – and when he finds out that the man is lying, cheating and manipulating him in order to brutally and systematically destroy Albert’s whole world, he will be a day late and a dollar short to stop the devastating spiral of revenge.



And here lies the genius of the anime version: portrayed in this manner, the very same Count, with the very same motives, who does the very same things he does in the novel, becomes a full on villain consumed by hate and fixated on revenge, dreadful, fascinating and frighteningly selfish. To boot, the Count perfectly fits into the Japanese narrative tradition of “tragic villains with a cause”, which was always a popular trope in the anime industry. While we observe how the man who used to be Edmond Dantès loses his moral compass and sinks to new lows while battling his inner demons, doing more and more horrible things as he gets closer to the peak of his revenge, the main drama is reflected in the Count’s internal conflict – did he really cross the line beyond salvation, or maybe, just maybe, he did get genuinely attached to poor little Albert, which could allow him to hold onto the last remains of his humanity. The finale is spectacular and ripe with quality melodrama, worthy of the opus of Alexandre Dumas – even if the endgame is far and away from the outcome of the novel, let alone Hollywood’s retellings.



„Gankutsuou“ is the brainchild of Mahirou Maeda, a veteran animator who unfortunately does not receive enough opportunities to work on his own projects. In addition to personally writing the screenplay for this version of the Count’s tale, Maeda designed a new animation technique. By relying on tricks such as Photoshop layers and filters instead of traditionally painted surfaces, Maeda filled in the drawing outlines with rich textures and complex patterns – and even when the characters move, the patterns remain fixated in the background. Not only that this cheapens the animation process, but it results in an explosion of visual opulence, colors running wild like on an acid trip – as if the paintings of Gustav Klimt came to life, with maybe just a touch of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge”. The Japanese voice cast is superb, starring good old Jouji Nakata in his role of a lifetime, while the soundtrack combines classical music pieces with songs by Jean-Jacques Burnel, a forgotten icon from the 70’s alternative scene. In this way „Gankutsuou“ is one of the rare works that achieves the best of results at all levels – it’s a visual masterpiece with a remarkable storyline, memorable music, and strong, dramatic acting.

Of course, the series ain’t no flawless. While certain anime clichés fit the “The Count of Monte Cristo” like a glove – such as Albert as the teenaged protagonist, Edmond Dantès as the tragic villain, the inevitable giant robot fights (trust me, it works), or the strong homoerotic tension between Albert and the Count – some other tropes do feel a tad out of place. For instance, as we draw near the conclusion, entire Paris begins to fall apart, following the logic of “fuck anime without the world ending” – and it feels like unnecessary megalomania within a story whose strongest points are intricate intrigues and character drama. Fortunately, this is nothing but a minor hiccup, and in total, “The Count of Monte Cristo” anime is a delight to binge watch in one sitting.



„Gankutsuou“ was created in a very specific moment for the anime industry, at the peak of the so-called Golden Age of TV animation. This covers the period from 2003 to 2007, when the Japanese producers, encouraged by the success their shows had achieved among the Western fans, raced each other to prove who could attract a wider, more diverse audience and leave a stronger international footprint. This allowed the anime produced back then to push the intellectual and artistic boundaries of the medium. Alas, those days are long gone. When the financial crisis broke the DVD market in the West and devastated many major animation studios in Japan (including the unfortunate Gonzo), in order to survive, the anime industry was forced to drop the creative swagger and start mass producing junk that sold well and pandered to the lowest needs of narrowly defined target groups. This means that we won’t see a new ambitious anime project such as “Gankutsuou” any time soon, which makes Maeda’s take on “The Count of Monte Cristo” an even more unique entry in the global pop-culture heritage.

One thing is certain, however: even though the anime strays away from Alexandre Dumas’s plans for the fate of Edmond Dantès, the prolific French writer would be proud of “Gankutstou”. After all, he was also known for not being above “creative reinterpretation” of facts in order to tell compelling, more dramatic stories.