In 2050 engineer Derrida Yvain is famous for his contribution to “Autonomous Machine DZ,” at his father’s company, Rebuild. But when he and his colleague Nathan discover a dangerous flaw in their creation, their warnings go ignored. The next day after Nathan’s daughter Mage’s birthday party, the group barely escapes an attack by unknown forces, leading to Derrida’s unwitting captivity in cryogenic stasis. Ten years later, he emerges in a world at war with the mechanical lifeforms he helped create. Now, he fights to survive his nightmare future to make good his promise to “Take care of Mage.” – Crunchyroll
Streaming: Crunchyroll
Episodes: 12
Source: Original
Episode Summary: Derrida Yvain is a scientist working on a team developing “automata,” service robots that have insinuated themselves into many aspects of people’s lives. They’ve recently shipped the DZ model which are considered to be top quality new tech, but Derrida and Nathan, his friend and co-developer, have discovered a bug in the DZ programming that, if activated, could cause the model to go out of control. They beg Hans Andrei, project leader, to recall the units that have already been shipped so that they can patch them, but for whatever reason that plan is a no-go. Derrida will have to meet with his father, Jacques, the original developer, to hopefully work something out. That issue takes a back seat, however, to Nathan’s daughter’s birthday.
Mage, Nathan’s daughter, is a bright girl with an interest in her father’s work. She looks up to Derrida and seems downtrodden when he declines an invitation to join in Nathan’s upcoming research. As Derrida is leaving their home, she asks him one last time to reconsider, and though he’s noncommittal he hands Mage an electronic key to pass along to Nathan. Derrida meets with his father, Jacques, the next day and the meeting goes poorly; Derrida accuses Jacques of caring more about the DZ than the well-being of his own son. He learns soon enough that Hans has a hit out on Nathan and himself for “knowing too much” about the flawed DZ programming, and having “taken care” of Jacques Yvain earlier, intends to kill Derrida and Nathan and frame it as a murder-suicide to the media. Nathan comes out on the bad end of the situation, but Derrida manages to escape into the woods where in his pained delirium he begins to see strange visions of Mage appearing and disappearing as if phasing in and out of reality. The vision leads him to an underground cryogenic facility, where Derrida’s final act is to seal himself away in one of the pods. But what will he find when he awakens?
Impressions: This review contains some minor spoilers for the first 4 episodes of the show.
Though I would have liked to have gone into this viewing session clean, I happened to read the ANN preview of the first few episodes that was posted following the recent Crunchyroll Expo convention. The article certainly gave the impression that the story was a muddled mess and the technical aspects of the show were disappointing, so my expectations were definitely tempered somewhat. To be honest, when I discovered that Crunchyroll posted the first four episodes yesterday, I looked at it as an opportunity to get this first impression “over with” so that it would be out of the way by the time the Autumn anime started in earnest. I’m not sure if it was the effect of lowering my expectations or whether I’m just not as harsh a critic, but having seen the first episode I’m kind of questioning the rude audience reactions I read about in ANN’s article. The episode certainly has its share of aesthetic problems and some of the dialog absolutely has issues with emotional realism, but while it’s mediocre it’s certainly not an unmitigated disaster.
My suspicion is that many anime fans saw the name “Yoshitoshi Abe” attached to the series and became saddled with a set of expectations that the series could never hope to achieve. For those who are unfamiliar, Abe is an artist and writer who loaned his particular style to several well-known and influential series during the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The most famous and well-regarded of these are Haibane Renmei, which is based on one of his own self-published manga, and Serial Experiments Lain, to which he provided very iconic character designs. He also created the NieA_7 manga, another doujinshi effort that was later adapted into an anime, though despite being fairly charming doesn’t seem to be quite as famous. In any case, to many of us who came into our own as fans around that time period, Abe’s name brings with it a certain feeling of nostalgia and admiration; it’s not surprising that the fact of his involvement would drum up some expectations about the type of story and its quality level, no matter how small his actual contribution was.
The fact is, Abe’s rich, textured art style isn’t represented well in the series; if I hadn’t been told multiple times that he was involved, I wouldn’t have guessed it on my own. The character designs as they appear in the show itself are very generic, which isn’t necessarily a problem in-and-of-itself, but it does beg the question – why employ the services of a fairly famous character artist and not go to some effort to preserve the charm of their designs? Obviously anime production is more complicated than that, as anyone who’s seen Shirobako will attest. It’s not a system that allows the time or resources necessary for people to do their best work; we just happen to be lucky enough to get some great results some of the time anyway. Geek Toys, the animation production company for this series, is brand new, and with that newness comes many challenges. I can’t entirely fault a studio for simplifying some designs more in favor of ones that could be more easily animated. That said, the fact that there are a lot of off-model shots in the first episode doesn’t exactly bode well for how the rest of the series is going to look.
Some of the writing and dialog leaves a bit to be desired. I actually mistook this for a direct time-travel story; thus far the only confirmed “time travel” is Derrida’s missing ten-year gap. I make it a personal policy to look past all but the most glaring plot holes when timey-wimey stuff is involved, but judging by the first episode, time travel and its resultant paradoxes aren’t a major factor (though based on what I’ve heard that stands to change at some point). Some of the character dialog, however, feels very melodramatic, and in the “bad” (meaning: not entertaining) way. I think the best example of this occurs when Derrida confronts his father with the information about the DZ’s flawed operating system; when Jacques doesn’t give Derrida the answer that he’s seeking, the situation goes from “zero” to “you never loved me, dad!” in a matter of seconds. While I can accept the fact that Derrida and his father might have some issues to work out, introducing those issues when we know very little about either character to begin with feels more like a ploy to wring some quick, cheap drama out of an under-developed situation. I could have managed with less time spent at Mage’s birthday party if instead there would have been a few more moments spent establishing the main character’s personalty and the clearly important and probably complicated relationship he had with his genius father.
Still, I’m not ready to entirely discount the series yet, and this episode was actually fairly entertaining in spite of its flaws. At the very least, it manages to do what so few stories can; it warns us of the consequences of inaction and then, thanks to time manipulation (of a sort), proves those consequences to have been genuine.
***
Because they were available (and I decided it would be a better use of my time to watch the episodes now rather than pick them back up later), I decided to go ahead and watch episodes 2-4 of the show. It’s not my regular practice, but it’s difficult to pass on an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. In the subsequent few episodes, Derrida awakens from cryo-sleep to find that his fears have come true and that the DZ robots have gone rogue, causing mass destruction (which of course seems to benefit the wealthy Rebuild shareholders and other upper-class types, including Hans. Derrida joins up with an older man and his young daughter – two people who have the tools and survival instincts to navigate the unfriendly robot-riddled terrain. They travel to find Mage’s whereabouts, learns that she’s dead (from her friend Yuri), then learns that that was a lie. Mage is, in fact, missing. Derrida’s new goal is to obtain a copy of the software patch so that he can nullify the DZ troops and save humankind, but they learn that the robots’ malfunction was not so much a bug as it was completely intentional and entirely by design. This unsettling corruption appears to run deep and Derrida must trudge through it to find the answers that he seeks.
These episodes continue much in the same vein as the first; the show is basically competent in most respects and manages to maintain a modest amount of tension as Derrida and friends find themselves pursued by various factions (including a frighteningly-persistent female assassin who’s identity I assume is less of a secret than it first appears). Hans Andrei makes for an ineffectual villain; rather than proving to be a real danger to the protagonist, he’s mostly a bumbling rich guy who seems terrified of anything that might threaten his position. Derrida turns out to be kind of an unlikable protagonist, not because his goals aren’t sound but more because he lacks emotional range and maturity; it becomes exhausting to listen to him fly off the handle while simultaneously trying to convince (coerce?) those around him to give up their safety to help him achieve his goals.
Part of me would like to give this one a shiny “You Tried” award; I feel like this is a story someone really wanted to tell and there are definitely echoes of something bigger and better to be found within the show’s modest package. There are just a lot of aspects (visual and story-wise) that are holding it back, and as it stands it’s too much of a hard sell.
Pros: Seen from afar, the show is fairly competent, (if unimpressive).
Cons: The protagonist and antagonist are insufferable. There are many distracting aesthetic and quality-control issues.
Grade: C-