Review: Planetes (anime)

I first saw Planetes two years ago on Anime Central. I finished the 26 episodes yesterday, streamed without few breaks in between except all the activity needed to keep my human body employed and alive and eating-disorder free.


First off - after EVA, I loved the drawing style of Planetes. It's quirky and expressive and I loved how Tanabe had purple eyes but that didn't detract from the overall realism of her appearance.

The world of Planetes is set in the future when "space debris" is a problem for the  many orbital satellites and shuttles/cargo freights operating from Earth to the Moon and back. The job of collecting space debris (disused satellites, stranded shuttle parts etc) are contracted out privately. Enter the "half section", much like Shomuni, a late 90s Josei drama - the understaffed department located in the basement of the space Technora company ship.

The goal of Planetes is basically to show what it is like for an everyday salary-man in space. Everyone has dreams - but does everyone have the means to achieve it? And the future is not necessarily glamourous, especially when being in space and having to pick up the waste of others is as mundane as the weekly rubbish disposal crew on your street/borough. In fact, the main character, Hachimaki is called the "diaper man" - astronauts need to wear diapers in case the jobs out in space are long and there is of course....no toilet.

The first 15 or so episodes follows Tanabe, a 20 year old who has just entered Technora and is assigned to the "half section", the Debris department - trials and tribulations, a bit of romance thrown in and further background for the other section members. It was a little loose in the episode with the "ninjas" on the moon but this didn't happen often and my attention was generally quite consistently focused. It made for easy viewing. The latter half provides an evenly and plausibly developed climax - issues and themes such as the controversy of space development and its impact on the world economy, third world economies and the environment (all touched upon in the first fifteen episodes) pull together, along with the characters. I finished the last 12 episodes in 2 days whilst the first 15 took about a week.

Emotional attachment to characters (the more of the cast the better) is generally a good yardstick. It's better, even, if the theme of the series keeps my mind occupied for a while after I have finished it. There were characters I hated, because they were created to be despicable bastards, characters I loved, because I saw all the troubles/trials they were going through and characters whom I felt ambivalent about because I could see that they themselves were unsure what they did was morally right or wrong.

I guess the themes of terrorism and splinter groups is tying in with what I am reading about in Eden (Hiroki Endo - BRILLIANCE manga series). What do terrorists exist for? The label "terrorist" is very different from how or what they see themselves as. The term is modern. Back in the 1930s, communist guerrillas were the contemporary "terrorists" but their vision was idealistic or at least supported by a certain idealism which believes that change for better is possible, whatever the means.

Moreover - how much do you sacrifice for your childhood dream? Your job? Your marriage? Tanabe and Hachimaki might have been married at the end but seven years is dauntingly long. Personally, I would find it difficult to believe I might be able to maintain faith in someone for seven years - but then again, I occupy the end of the spectrum shadowed in cynicism about people in general and satisfy myself through animation and fiction. Well, if a 26 episode series if going to up my levels of introspection and appreciation for my peaceful existence in the world then bring it on!

Planetes - recommended!

Review: Neon Genesis Evangelion + End of Evangelion

What would the future population be like if it fell to a 15-year-old to save the world? Evangelion provides the answer...or almost. When Shinji came back after trying to elope with his fears somewhere mid-series, I thought: "well, this will finally be settled then, there won't be anything else like that". But Shinji continues to doubt throughout the rest of the episodes, right up until the finale in End of Evangelion.

The organisation NERV is given charge of creating and directing the EVAs against the lifeforms known only vaguely as "Angels". In Anno's future, the world is being rebuilt after the 2nd impact (Armageddon) and Tokyo 3 is the headquarters of NERV. The world-building leaves a bit to be desired, mainly who SEELE are and NERV and why these groups have the jurisdiction to rig up all of Japan's electrical power in the name using the EVAs.

Neon Genesis Evangelion is one of the well-known anime series' out there and considered part of the must-watch cannon. It's also well-known for the last 2 episodes in which Gainax recycled scenes from the previous episodes to create a 40 minute long soliloquy of all the main characters a la Hamlet. Remember that you need to watch the movie to see the rest of the fucked-up plot (it gets more fucked up along the way) which reminded me of Rahephon and Ergo Proxy.

I think I will always be an Evangelion-basher. All the Judeo-Christianity just did not appeal. In the End of Evangelion, I could see Hebrew letters encircling some curious reference to the Tree of Life and was treated to an aural and visual Eton Mess of white god-flesh readying itself to obliterate the Earth. The problem is not that Shinji was an unappealing character - in fact, I sympathized with all of his fears and misgivings about being forced to be a saviour for the world but having to obey his cold, calculating father at the same time and make difficult choices that bely him with guilt afterwards. I should be discussing Shinji's fellow EVA pilots and the other characters as well. But there's been so much fandom dedicated to them, I guess I won't need to.

I actually look forward to reading some of the fanfic plots - all the angst! the sexual tension just dying to be released and consummated! etc.

Shinji was actually the character I could relate to most - his actions weren't disgusting or cowardly by my standards (I am a disgusting and cowardly person myself and I feel I could have been worse in his postion lol) but the End of Evangelion plotline was stretched so thin that I could no longer watch without wanting to crack up. (please refer to the sentence about god-flesh).

Some scenes are executed beautifully in this series - the cold, clinical hospital rooms where the characters wake up in. Shinji hates the ceilings - etc. His constantly repeating cassette player, the underground Tokyo-3 was a nice touch as were Ritsuko's relationship with the supercomputers' MAGI. So the series does have developed characters - except Rei, who is not really meant to have personality at all.

So where is the problem? I still think it's all the symbolism/plotline revolving around Adam/Lilith etc. If you're going to  produce an anime series like that, along with the ones already out there, make sure it actually holds together.

(another rough and unproofed and messy review)

Review: Denno Coil

Also known as Coil - A Circle of Children, this anime series ran for 25 episodes in 2007. I've decided to quote from Wikipedia since it makes the description easier:

Dennō Coil (電脳コイル Dennō Koiru^?, lit. Electric Brain Coil or Computer Coil), Coil — A Circle of Children, is a Japanese science fiction anime television series depicting a near future where semi-immersive augmented reality (AR) technology has just begun to enter the mainstream. The series takes place in the fictional city of Daikoku, a hotbed of AR development with an emerging city-wide virtual infrastructure. It follows a group of children as they use AR glasses to unravel the mysteries of the half real, half Internet city, using a variety of illegal software tools, techniques, and virtual pets to manipulate the digital landscape.

The series was produced by Madhouse and the quality was great, though I personally streamed the episodes. The drawings were well finished and I felt like I was watching a finished product - almost, but I'll get to that later.

The story follows Okonogi Yuko, a 6th grader from Daikoku-shi. Children in this world wear cyberglasses which gives them access to the cyber world. Through the glasses, they can use virtual screens/keyboards to type/surf the cybernet, keep track of the locations of others and communicate with others wearing cyberglasses. More importantly, the cyberglasses give visual access to all sorts of things such as cyberpets and to see obsolete data spaces. If anyone has read "The City & The City", think of this as a cyber-city superimposed on the real one, accessible only to those with cyberglasses.

This new plane (I'll just call it that from now on, rather than "cybercity") is under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Post and Cybermanagement and is patrolled by Searchmatons (Saatchis). The sole object of the searchmatons appears to be to delete any obsolete spaces - one can imagine them as antivirus'. The virtual plane is constantly updated, just like our OSs and software often automatically download new patches. However, there will always be old spaces which have not been updated or not detected. These spaces are "obsolete" and this is the focus of the series.

Yuko moves to Daikoku city and her cyberpet, Densuke becomes lost in an obsolete space. Viewers learn immediately that these spaces are dangerous to those who wear cyberglasses and also to cyberpets as it corrupts data.

As the series progresses, the darker nature of the cyberglasses are hinted at. An "encoder", a person who has achieved a high level of skill with cyberglasses and can be considered as hackers makes entry and tries to summon forces from the obsolete spaces. The company who owns and manufactures the glasses, "Megamass" seems to eager to deflect accusations of a mysterious death of a primary school child a year ago, a child who apparently died due to a malfunction of the cyber-navigation system which controlled traffic lights.

However, towards the end, the whole "cybercure" theme started to unravel, at least for me. The story had sucked me in so far - but who is Miss Michiko exactly? This figure is portrayed as a bad-ass fairy who takes the souls of children to "the other side", a parallel world in the obsolete space. How is it that Amasawa Yuko was able to create Miss Michiko? Was Miss Michiko Amasawa's double in the obsolete space?

And all of the information available to the children caught up in the mess created by Megamass and the new technology seems to come in only one form: "toshi densetsu", ie, urban legends (都市伝説). In a world where everything can be accessed via virtual libraries and the web, all the information comes from rumour and hearsay. It would appear that the single website which divulges/discusses urban legends is controlled by Megamass or has been hacked by Megamass to repress speculation. But this is rather implausible in my opinion, unless the cyberglasses are still relatively new, even in the fictional world of Denno Coil and there are very few webpages in existence. 

And the whole concept of kirabugs and metabugs remained a little flimsy. Collecting enough kirabugs would summon up an entrance to a particular obsolete space. However, this never really interfered with the story too much.

At the end of the day, is Denno Coil a message for children to stay away from the evil of the cybernet, or what one can't touch or feel? I enjoyed this anime a lot, consuming 25 episodes in 3 days or so. Still, it's left a pile of questions still to be answered and was a slight let down towards the end - I had to start skipping forward and my mind tended to wander as the concepts/premises the series was based on faltered.

Still, how often to do get a completely solid series in terms of story and still be able to raise some ethical questions about technology etc?