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?