Mekakucity Actors is the anime adaptation of the Kagerou Project (though it may be novelized and there may be other anime outings in the future.), a topic that I’ve been covering in the Wednesday “random” reviews including the songs (Part 1 | Part 2), the Novel series and, upcoming, the manga. I’ll likely refer to the other KagePro elements a good deal, but since this is a Monday Anime Spoiler Review, I’ll do my best to keep it largely self-contained.
We begin with Shintaro Kisaragi, a
shut-in NEET, on a scorching August 14th, as he argues
with Ene – a floaty blue AI (?) girl who lives in his computer.
After he spills a soda on his keyboard and the poor thing is rendered
an ex-peripheral, Shintaro is presented with a problem: no store will
do next-day shipping during the Obon holiday, so he’ll either have to
live without his computer for a while… or leave his room for the
first time in years. After some worried consideration, Shintaro
chooses the latter.
Things don’t go so well, as he gets
wrapped up in a terrorist attack and, together with Ene (who moved to
his phone for the outing) and some rather odd strangers, defusing the
attack. As the problem is solved, though, we cut to a different
angle on the story. Specifically, we jump to the point of view of
Shintaro’s pop idol little sister Momo… and in doing so we see a
couple of the real big traits of this show.
First, a large chunk of this episode is
a flashback, telling the story of a particular character (Momo in
this case). The main run of the story, from Shintaro’s emergence
from his room until the final curtain, runs from noon on August 14th
to midnight at the end of August 15th. It’s tightly
contained, but a lot of the run time of the show is actually spend on
the pasts of the various characters, telling their individual
stories. So while we get Momo’s adventures on the morning of August
14th, we also see her childhood and how she became an
idol.
Second, we start to see how and where
this show gets kind of weird. When we see Momo’s background, most of
the incidental characters – her classmates, manager, and so on –
are represented as inanimate objects like radios and gramophones.
This is a kind of baffling choice, but oddly enough it works in the
show’s favor… this time. The thing is, Momo feels very isolated
and overwhelmed during her childhood scenes, and the deep shadows and
constant presence of things rather than people makes the viewer feel
isolated and overwhelmed. In terms of conveying an emotional
experience, it does a very good job even if the literal imagery is
kind of insane.
I’ll say now though that not every
bizarre choice works as well. Somewhere in the middle is the fact
that each episode for most of the show ends with a post-credits
segment in an entirely different art style, telling part of the story
of Azami. It is nice to get that story gradually over the show’s run
– the tale of a monster with vast power but a desire to better
understand herself, deeply tied in with the origins of the
supernatural goings-on in the show – and the style does have a bit
of a picture book illustration quality that suits how it’s told, but
at the same time the segments are so short that it’s not as notable
as, say, Momo’s. And then there are choices like the start of
episode nine, where there’s a sequence done in CGI and… it’s kind
of tragic. Not the events of the sequence so much as the CGI itself,
which looks like something the first season of RWBY would consider
giving another round of polish (that’s pretty bad if you’re not
familiar). The worse problem is that unlike the Momo or Azami
sections, there’s no good reason for this, it just comes out of
nowhere and the show goes on like you’re just expected to forget it
did that.
The fact that this is all over the
place is pretty interesting, because Mekakucity Actors also has
another source of strange visuals: the realm known as the Heat Haze,
an other-world that as its name suggests has elements resembling a
shimmering mirage, and is not entirely “real”. You would think
that things like the Momo flashback, combined with the presence of
the Heat Haze, would make it difficult to understand what sort of
world a given scene is taking place in, consequently making it harder
to understand the story. I, however, didn’t have a problem with
that. The whole show is kind of odd; it’s from the same studio that
made Bakemonogatari and Madoka Magica and a lot of that shows in the
character motions, lighting, color choices, and all-around visual
style of the production… but the Heat Haze itself is given a very
distinctive style, so it always (or almost always) looks like
something different than the usual weirdness.
Back to the plot, Momo’s big problem is
an uncontrolled superpower she doesn’t know she has: the ability to
draw the eyes and attention of others. It has its positive elements,
like helping to make her an idol and getting her recognition, but at
the same time it both made it difficult in the past for Momo to live
a normal life and interact with others (since the attention of third
parties would be unduly redirected to Momo), and now that she’s a pop
idol she’s got a serious problem with adoring mobs forming wherever
she goes.
Episodes 2 and 3 chronicle her early
August 14th – she has a series of encounters and delays,
ending with her being late to summer school where her teacher
(Kenjirou Tateyama) berates her for critical mistakes before
releasing her for the holiday. She hopes she can escape notice by
dressing down and have a relaxing afternoon at least, but again her
problems are supernatural so those precautions end up not mattering
as much as she’d like, and she deals with the mobs anyway, making her
want to quit the idol business. This is until she runs into a weird
somebody with long green hair and a purple hoodie who seems to know
something about Momo’s troubles. That somebody, Tsubomi Kido,
introduces herself rather poorly from a social perspective, but
effectively all the same: she and her friends know about abilities
the likes of which Momo possesses and can help her both learn to
control her power and (thanks to Kido’s power being the ability to
suppress the presence of people or objects, even to the point of
invisibility) mitigate it in the meantime. This group, the Mekakushi
Dan, seems to be a bizarre but friendly assortment of young people
with powers of their own. In addition to Kido, Momo meets Shuuya
Kano (who can take on other appearances) and Marry Kozakura (who can
temporarily freeze people in place with a glance) and makes friends
with them before circumstances see the lot of them off to the mall.
Their shopping trip, however, is the
other side of Shintaro’s. The Mekakushi Dan also gets caught up in
the terrorist attack, but thanks to their abilities, particularly
Kido’s shrouding them, they aren’t effectively taken hostage. They
put their heads together and, learning that Shintaro apparently has a
way to defuse the situation if he gets an opening, come up with a
plan to give him that opening. They (intentionally or not) cause the
terrorists to fight among one another, and then cover for Shintaro by
having Momo draw all eyes to her… before Marry pops up right in
front of her and leaves the bad guys frozen while the Dan make their
escape with the unconscious Shintaro.
Then episode four comes around and we
cut to something completely different. We follow a young boy and
girl (Hibiya and Hiyori) from the countryside. Technically we did
encounter Hibiya before – he ran into Momo, didn’t recognize her,
and was a little rude in a typical little boy sort of way. Here, we
find he has a crush on Hiyori and manages to go with her on a summer
trip to the city, only to have his dreams crushed by Hiyori’s crush
on a teen weirdo named Konoha. Hibiya and Hiyori end up in the Heat
Haze. There, Hibiya watches Hiyori die over and over, time resetting
after each of her demises, no matter what he does to try to save her
as disasters repeat. Finally, Hibiya decides to sacrifice himself,
hoping that will break the time loop and save Hiyori.
Well, enough of that, we’re back to the
first story, with Shintaro waking up in the Mekakushi Dan hideout and
meeting the gang. His introduction is… not so cool. They part
ways for a moment when the Dan has an outing and Shintaro ends up
running into Konoha. Konoha, odd though he is, seems to have his
heart in the right place, since he’s looking for Hibiya and Hiyori.
Eventually they find the kids, who are in the process of being
kidnapped. Konoha jumps in and saves them from that with superhuman
strength, but a truck comes in and sends them to the Heat Haze
anyway. That’s not a euphamism, the dimensional transportation seems
to open in the place of oncoming death. On the other side, we learn
more about the Mekakushi Dan, particularly their founder’s apparent
suicide, including the ending reveal that said founder was Ayano, a
dear friend of Shintaro in the past, and who we’ve seen in the Heat
Haze and dreams.
From there, we scurry back into the
past of the setting for the next two episodes, and some seemingly new
characters: Takane Enomoto and Haruka Kokonose, the two members of a
special needs class (both have chronic conditions that can cause them
to miss a lot of school) taught by Kenjirou Tateyama. They need to
figure out something to do for the school festival with no time and
no budget and come up with a shooting gallery video game that will
use all their skills (the professor’s coding, Haruka’s art, and
Takane’s pro gaming ability – she happens to go by the handle
“Ene”) to actually put something on. During the festival they
meet Kido, Kano, Shintaro, and Ayano. The latter two will be their
underclassmen in the coming year. Takane seems to have feelings for
Haruka, but also a bad case of Tsundere that leaves her lashing out
rather than saying anything nice. However, Haruka has a serious
episode that, combined with a conversation with Ayano about their
respective not-exactly-boyfriends, leaves her motivated to finally
say honestly how she feels. Then, to make matters more complicated,
Takane has a medical emergency of her own and passes into the Heat
Haze with Mr. Tateyama looming oddly over her. She awakens in her
new digital body – Ene. In the present, the Dan hear about the
traffic accident and go to rendezvous with Shintaro at the hospital,
but Ene and Kano stay behind: they have matters to sort out, and
Shintaro doesn’t know that Takane is Ene, or that she and Haruka also
died about when Ayano did.
Speaking of Haruka, apparently he ended
up in the Heat Haze too, where his wish for a strong body was granted
in the form of his own OC, Konoha. His rejection of that body sent
Konoha into the world as we know him, leaving Haruka in the Heat
Haze.
From there, we do sort of merge the
lines. At the Hospital, the Mekakushi Dan reclaim Shintaro and pick
up Hibiya, who has gained an ability like theirs of his own – it
would seem to be a constant for people who return from being
swallowed by the Heat Haze, as all the Dan had similar “near death”
experiences. Hibiya runs off to search for Hiyori, and Shintaro
discovers a connection between Ayano and the Mekakushi Dan.
And with that we reach episode 9, and
the beginning of answers.
For the first eight episodes,
Mekakucity Actors has a lot of stuff happening and a lot of
questions, with almost no answers and very few clues. We know there
are supernatural events going on and can generally associate them
with the Heat Haze. We kind of have a feeling, from the OP and
Takane’s backstory, that MAYBE there’s something sinister about
Kenjirou Tateyama. We don’t know the origin of the Heat Haze, its
rules, or what the fable segments at the end of each episode have to
do with just about anything. We don’t know why Ayano seemingly
committed suicide, or if there’s meaning to the web of connections
between the characters. Essentially, what we’ve done so far has all
been setup and character building.
And you know what, it’s pretty decent
setup and character building. OK, if I compare Mekakucity Actors to
basically any of the other versions of KagePro, Actors loses, but on
its own it still gets you to know these people, like them, and care
about what happens to them. You just don’t really understand what’s
happening or why; the show works primarily as an emotional
experience, which is supported by the idiosyncratic cinematography
that puts you off balance and evokes mood better than it communicates
events.
But then episodes 9 and 10 are all
about getting us the answers we need and 11 and 12 about providing an
exciting narrative (with a little overlap) and… you know, it’s good
and important that we have this stuff, but at the same time it
exposes a weakness of the anime: the pacing is insane. Not the pace
of each individual episode, mind. Those are fine. The pace of the
entire series, though, just doesn’t work as a 12 episode anime. It’s
odd, in a sense, in that I know it’s wrong but I couldn’t quite say
how to fix it. A nearly identical pace works surprisingly well in
the novel series, but because different mediums are, well, different
it doesn’t pay off here in the same way.
In any case, Episode 9 has our answers
about Ayano and the conflict of the story. It starts with her
introduction to her new adopted siblings (the future Mekakushi Dan –
Kano, Kido, and Seto). Their happiness doesn’t last forever though,
as their mother and father are caught in a landslide, and the mother
killed… or rather disappeared into the Heat Haze with dear dad
emerging in possession of an eye ability. Only his red eyes aren’t
like the others. Ayano investigates the situation, finding her
parents’ own notes of the eye abilities and their source and nature,
and learns that dear dad has basically been possessed by an entity
known as the Snake of Clearing Eyes (all the eye abilities coming
from spirit-snakes bonded with the lives of those the abilities
inhabit). Clearing Eyes gives Kenjirou a bad case of the Jekyll and
Hyde, and works to grant his “master’s” wish. For Kenjirou,
that’s to see his wife again, a feat that can be accomplished if all
the snakes are gathered in the real world and merged into a new
Medusa. This process would, of course, kill all the other hosts,
including Ayano’s siblings and the school friends, Takane and Haruka,
who have been targeted for Heat Haze encounters. Ayano confronts
Clearing Eyes and comes up with something she can do to stop his
plans from coming to fruition and thus save her friends and family:
if she sacrifices herself, enters the Heat Haze, receives a snake,
and then fails to leave the Heat Haze, all the snakes can’t be
gathered and her father’s wish can’t be granted, meaning there should
be no reason for Clearing Eyes to keep going after the people close
to Ayano.
It’s only after her not-quite-suicide
that Clearing Eyes goes ahead and reveals that this suits him just
fine. Resurrection is no longer possible, but time can be rewound.
And as long as Clearing Eyes is working towards his goal, even one
that may never come, Clearing Eyes continues to exist as a conscious
being unlike the other Snakes that passively inhabit and provide
lives for their hosts.
So where did all these snakes come from? The story segments at the ends of the episodes have been telling the tale of the first medusa creature, Azami, so there is some information out there… but Episode 10 shows more of her life. The full story (or at least the relevant details) are like this: Azami, an immortal being, fell in love with a human. Though their life was happy, the thought that he would grow old and die was painful to bear, and so Azami (aided by the Snake of Clearing Eyes inside her) devised a plan to use her great powers to create a parallel world where time would have no power – the world that ultimately becomes the Heat Haze. As she finalizes the creation, though, a band of angry villagers come to “slay the monster” and attack her and her infant daughter in their home. Azami fights back with a pretty awesome display of what the eye powers are truly capable of, but when she finds her dear husband was beaten within an inch of his life and the attack deployed because of his association with her, she enters her never-ending world alone, isolating herself so her family won’t have to suffer rather than dragging them along to assuage her own grief.
The world, however, didn’t turn out
quite how Azami wanted. Though she had some influence, it mostly
seemed to be under the control of Clearing Eyes, who torments Azami
in her imprisonment. However, when a glimpse of the outside world
shows her daughter and granddaughter (Marry) facing death at the
hands more thugs, she’s unable to bear the outcome and has the Heat
Haze gather those who died, a poorly-worded wish that ultimately
results in the behavior of the Heat Haze as we see it. Azami uses
her last strength to grant Marry her core “queen” snake so the
girl can return to Earth and have a second chance at life, but in
doing so she loses what ability she had left to counter Clearing Eyes
or, you know, tell the Heat Haze to stop gathering those who die in
the right place and time. Eventually, Seto (whose eye ability grants
him telepathic hearing) comes across the lonely Marry and befriends
her, bringing her into the Mekakushi Dan.
Episode 11 hits (though some of the
Ayano stuff is here) and we get back to what’s going on in the
“Present”, late on August 15th. Shintaro is… having
a bad time thinking about Ayano, when an eye ability he didn’t know
he had kicks in.
That eye ability is “Retaining Eyes”
– Shintaro can remember anything and everything once the power acts
up, including events that happened on previous timelines (as shown
through cuts to images from the Manga, among others). We even see
his memory of receiving the ability as a direct gift from a very
Medusa-ized Marry, promising not to forget. Shintaro then has a
brief conversation with the Snake of Retaining Eyes (displayed as a
snake-shaped shadow on his wall, which speaks with a soft, kind,
feminine voice as opposed to the deep masculine voice of both Konoha,
who basically is a Snake, and Clearing Eyes). Retaining Eyes asks
Shintaro what he’ll do now, seeing as he understands the structure of
the whole tragedy that’s unfolding. His response is to take a pair
of scissors to his throat, presumably knowing that his suicide then
and there will bring him into the Heat Haze, and to Ayano.
If you’re just watching Actors,
Shintaro’s recollection kind of comes out of nowhere (his Retaining
Eyes ability is part of the lore from the Songs on, but isn’t really
foreshadowed in Actors), but the scene itself is actually really well
done. If you’re following along with my trip through all of KagePro,
though, I want you to remember this scene for later.
The rest of the plan for going up
against Kenjirou Tateyama, or more accurately the Snake of Clearing
Eyes, goes on without him. Ene has her Takane body back from where
Kenjirou was keeping it (though she can still project her mind into
technology to form Ene). Momo, Hibiya, and Kido get grabbed, but
Momo uses her attention-grabbing ability on a city wide scale to draw
the Mekakushi Dan together around her. The lot of them escape and go
for the goal. Hibiya can find where he is (an elaborate secret base
under the school. Don’t pretend you didn’t pretend your high school
had one.), and with all the others they can reach his lair. The
Snake of Clearing Eyes is quite happy with this outcome, because it
can possess Konoha’s body and unleash a can of super speed/super
strength beatdown on the Mekakushi Dan, pretty much killing the
others so that Marry can absorb their snakes and so that she’ll
reject the deaths of her friends and rewind time as she’s done many
loops before.
That’s when Shintaro and Ayano emerge
from the Heat Haze. With Shintaro’s memory and Ayano’s ability to
share thoughts and feelings with others, they reach Marry, giving her
both the determination and the skill to do something different. The
Heat Haze swallows up all involved yet again… but this time it’s
under Marry’s control, and the Snake of Clearing Eyes is powerless.
In a really good sequence, even better
if you know how things usually go for him, the Snake of Clearing Eyes
has a bit of a meltdown. He offers to keep working towards
Kenjirou’s wish… but he and his wife have reunited in the Heat Haze
now, so Kenjirou can thank him for his effort and disappear.
Clearing Eyes practically begs for someone to make a wish, and in a
delicious fit of irony he gets what he wanted in the worst possible
way for him: a last echo of Konoha wishes for Hiyori to have a second
chance, condemning Clearing Eyes to vanish and become just a
surrogate life for the little girl.
After our villain of the last five
minutes (even if it was a really cool five minutes) melts away, we
cut to Ayano and Shintaro out in the world in the aftermath. As they
talk to each other, clearly a little awkward thanks to all that
unspoken affection, the others appear (including, say, Haruka) and
tease the two of them about how the summer is hot enough without the
flirting. The whole gang smiles, free of the Heat Haze and ready to
go into a new day.
Or are they? Canonically, I believe
it’s established that Mekakucity Actors is the “Good End” of the
Kagerou Project, with pretty much everyone alive and in the real
world. But while it’s indisputably the “Good End”, is all the
rest of that true? Marry did absorb the Snakes of her friends, so
they should be stuck in the Haze at best, and Clearing Eyes has been
defeated utterly so there’s no more reason for it to be a nightmare
dimension. In my mind, there’s a second reading, and the strangeness
of the visual style throughout is ambiguous enough to allow it: Marry
has taken control of the Heat Haze and purified it, and has always
had the issue of not wanting to let her friends die, sort of the same
way as Azami didn’t want to see her husband die. I, personally,
think the last scene of Mekakucity Actors could be still in the Heat
Haze… or rather the Never-Ending World as Azami originally
envisioned it, realized by Marry without the corruption of Clearing
Eyes. It’s food for thought, and there are ways in which realizing
Azami’s dream is profoundly powerful. But there are other ways in
which it might seem a little sour, at least to some I’m sure, and
those people would prefer the “real world” read.
Even if there is a very interesting
read and debate to be had here, though, it’s without doubt that
Mekakucity Actors is a deeply flawed product. It was hard trying to
keep this to just what’s in the show, both because I know and love
KagePro as a whole, but also because Actors feels kind of like it
depends on coming in with at least some outside information about
KagePro. A bunch of things won’t make sense unless you already
understand them at least a little. The show tries to get across
complicated topics like the Heat Haze and the Snakes, but it doesn’t
always do the best job of not just throwing things at the audience.
And some elements, they don’t even try to cover, like the lack of
context around the Retaining Eyes ability. It’s visually engaging
and very unique to look at, but sometimes it goes too far and you
feel like you’re watching something more like modern art in motion
than the traditional art of animation. It makes a bunch of avant
garde choices, but only a few of them really pay off, while others
fall flat or just break even.
Looking at Mekakucity Actors
objectively, I think the highest I can realistically rate it is a B,
just above B-, which is the grade that I’ll notate in the end. It’s
strange, not always effective, gets outshone by Vocaloid PVs
sometimes… and is utterly unforgettable. It’s an experience that
will leave you lost in a hazy otherworld where you can’t always be
sure what’s real and what’s not. Which, considering the content of
the story, I find to be fairly legitimate. It’s without a doubt
KagePro’s weakest entry, but I’d still recommend watching it at least
once.