Cagaster of an Insect Cage is another in the long line of shows that take place ambiguously in the future, where the only terrain we see on Earth is a dead desert and some horrible occurrence has pushed humanity to the brink. In this case, our story takes place thirty years (or so it’s told) after a “disease” appears that causes humans to suddenly morph (seriously, over the course of 20 minutes) into nigh-invulnerable giant killer insects called Cagasters.
Well, contesting that point will get us nowhere, so might as well dig into the story.
We begin with a scavenger/merchant type out in the desert, picking up what “treasure” he can from wreckage… and more importantly, the Exterminator (bug-killing badass) with him. Said Exterminator is Kidow, who will be one of our main characters.
They soon encounter another car being attacked by bugs. In said car are a man, Griffith, and Ilie – a girl of fourteen, awkwardly neither exactly a kid nor an adult in a lot of ways, and who presumably has a grudge against sans-serif fonts. Griffith dies very shortly, leaving Kidow with the instructions to take his daughter to where her mother, Tania, is. Kidow slaps some sense into Illie to get her to come along rather than staying behind to be eaten by bugs, and we transition to our setting for most of the show, the city of E-05
E-05 is exactly the wretched hive of scum and villainy you’d expect out of this setup, a collection of bare stone in a desert, some of it ruined, where tempers run high, everybody hates your guts, and violence is unremarkable.
Kidow takes Ilie to the place there where he stays – Garden Mario, a sort of inn and tavern kind of establishment run by Mario, a character who looks like the designers were going for “Arnold Schwarzenegger in a pink maid cosplay”. For the record, various characters refer to Mario as he or she throughout the show, and Mario seems to accept whatever address is given as long as it’s polite. Thus I’m going to follow the show’s lead and have no consistency referring to this character if I have to.
We get settled in E-05 steadily. Ilie bonds with Mario and Kidow, and according the the former starts to develop a crush on the latter. Kidow acts standoffish and gets wrapped up in a murder investigation that, in his expert opinion, is not the work of a bug. Ilie makes some friends of the local street rats, a bunch thieving munchkins who live in the ruined West Gate district. Said munchkins are also kind of friends with Qasim, one of the military figures who’s somewhat antagonistic towards Kidow.
Kidow is called out by the serial killer, who turns out to be a strange sword-fighter who seems to be after Exterminators in particular, seeing as he’s apparently somehow half man and half bug, rather than transforming all the way like everyone else who gets afflicted. The bug man (whose name is revealed to be Acht) has the upper hand in the fight with Kidow due to getting him with a poison sting, but breaks off the attack when he realizes Ilie is here, as apparently he recognizes her. Acht delivers this information to his masters.
We then get an episode with a lot of focus on Qasim and his role in the ruination of the West Gate as well as his feelings of responsibility to the survivors. This leads up to Qasim acting as bait for a bug hunt, which despite it being a fairly sacrificial role he makes it out of, finally making up properly with the leader of the street rat kids… right before he suddenly and for no reason begins morphing into a bug. This of course gets him offed by Kidow in the end, which isn’t great for Kidow’s psychological state.
While Kidow is angsting, we indulge an episode where Mario tells Ilie all about Kidow’s tragic backstory. The flashback tells us that he was rescued by a veteran Exterminator, Lazarus, who trained and raised him. This was until Lazarus (like Qasim, suddenly and randomly with no apparent vector) bugged out, and Kidow had to kill the man who was basically his father. Lazarus also was a linchpin of peace and security in his hellhole home town, which was even worse than E-05, so having him out of the picture put Kidow in a very difficult place where he ended up choosing to leave his bribe money to the prostitute who was kind of like his big sister and skip town. Evidently he eventually made it to E-05, where Mario took him in and the rest is history.
Before we can really process this, the show decides that it’s the halfway point, might as well actually get on with that main plot! Military folks working for a sinister fellow called Adham arrive and begin to mess with E-05. A bunch of them go after Ilie, while Acht reappears to mess with Kidow. This leads to Ilie gaining some sense of what she’s really capable of, turning one of the soldiers into a bug, and commanding it to fight for her. While this protects her little friends, she still ends up going with the baddie, since this includes her real father (who she can now remember for some reason). When Acht disengages from Kidow, he hands over a key card that will supposedly get Kidow into the E-07 Insect Cage, where Ilie will be.
This leads into another whole episode flashback, this one for Ilie’s family, framed as the last testament of Griffith. We find that Griffith was brought to E-07 when it was still a prosperous city, in order to help Ilie’s future father, Franz, with his research on Cagasters.
In the process of this, Griffith meats Tania, Illie’s mother in the future. Tania, it seems, has a complicated birth where her mother was pregnant with her when she bugged out, causing Tania, a human, to be effectively born of a dead bug. Because of this, Tania apparently has an influence over Cagasters, giving her a place in the research.
Backing the research is Adham, who wants to use the power of a “queen” (making the common yet silly interpretation that the queen of social insects can control the common ones with psychic powers) to turn the Cagasters into a weapon of war. Or something – for someone only introduced really in the second half, Adham’s motivation shifts a lot. Backstory here? Use bugs as weapons. Later on? Something about making a world of pure humans by bugging out everyone who can and will bug out, as evidently it’s more of a genetic thing than a proper disease. Which is still bloody weird and arbitrary, but whatever.
In any case, the pursuit of a queen first results in the creation of Acht, a test-tube baby made from Tania, and then once Tania and Franz are an item, in the birth of Ilie. However, Ilie is more of a spare than anything else, and Tania is ultimately made into the “Queen” who can control Cagasters, being sequestered in a weird life support pod she’ll never be able to leave. One of the first commands she gives is to turn everyone in E-07 who can become a Cagaster into a Cagaster. This results in E-07 becoming an insect cage, but thanks to the Queen control, the humans who can’t become Cagasters (specifically Adham and his minions) are unharmed. It’s in this process that Acht takes on his half-bug appearance and when Griffith grabs Illie and scrams to the countryside to raise her as a shepherdess for the rest of the intervening time. Why was he taking her back, then? Because she apparently turned someone into a bug (strongly implied to be a brigand or rapist she encountered in the woods) with her powers and caused said bug to fly off without eating anyone, which evidently meant she was a monster that Griffith no longer had the ability to mentally deal with, so why not take her back to mom?
Back in the present, Adham’s forces are intent on taking E-05, apparently to make it a Queen’s Cage like E-07. Illie is held by Adham, who wants her to be a new queen just like mom after producing the next generation. Kidow goes after Ilie, because now he’s her knight in shining armor, while everyone else we’ve spent time with is involved in the defense of E-05.
The situation in the city is about what you’d expect: a long sequence of guerrilla warfare. In E-07, Kidow infiltrates the tower right as both Acht and Franz, independent of each other, backstab Adham and everyone else: Acht lets Ilie free and goes on a killing spree while Franz lets a booby trap that will turn the bugs against everyone be triggered. Kidow catches up to Ilie and plays the hero as they head up to where she can face mom, Adham shoots Franz and has his men pursue like stopping Ilie is going to do anything at this point, and Kidow splits off from Ilie to ignore a death flag, shoot Adham, and then head down to his grudge match with Acht.
I specify shoot rather than kill for Franz and Adham, because bullets to the gut or eye, which most people seem to regard as fatal, take a long time to do their dark work in this show, giving both Franz and Adham plenty of time to monologue while dying: Franz to Ilie through the PA system, which lets her get out her anger with him, and Adham to the audience about his past and motivation, adding another layer of inconsistency. Kidow finds and faces Acht, and while they sword fight a bunch it’s basically just to tell Acht to get over himself and stop trying to suicide by exterminator.
Ilie manages to face Tania at the end, and even communicate. Though it explicitly doesn’t matter what she does, since the life support is failing anyway, Ilie does find it in herself to end her mom’s reign by pushing a very over-the-top button. Back in E-05, everything is handled by the arrival of higher-ranked military, who take down the remnants of Adham’s forces. After finishing reckoning with Acht, Kidow catches up to Ilie again. They lay Tania to rest in the somehow intact garden in the Cage, and Acht, unseen by the two of them, also manages to have a conversation with the not-quite-dead Franz before Franz is allowed to slip to all the way dead. Acht lays Franz next to Tania, and it’s time for everyone to leave. Illie and Kidow are an item, I guess, with him now joking about having braved an Insect Cage for his bride (remember that part where Ilie is at that awkward age where she’s old enough to have romantic feelings but still reads as a youngster? Yeah. I don’t even think there’s actually that much of an age gap between them, but it still comes off as a little creepy.) and the two of them ready to go wherever. The residents of E-05 see a nice new day, Acht looks out pleased over the E-07 cage implying that this is pretty much just his house now, et cetera. That’s Cagaster of an Insect Cage.
The best thing about Cagaster of an Insect Cage is, weirdly, the atmosphere. The pacing is a bit odd and wonky, but it leads to the feeling of this being more of a living and breathing world than some. I don’t resent the time here spent with the street rats or E-05 defenders because they make this feel more real than just the core story of Ilie and Kidow and the bugs would.
Of course, I don’t want to over-praise it. Part of the reason why that buildup is the best part is because most of the other parts are mediocre at best. The cast is tolerable, but little more. The few characters and arcs that might be memorable are ones that have been done a million times, and better elsewhere. Because there are so dang many of them for a twelve-episode show, none of them really get the time to truly shine. They’re done competently, but not well. The writing as a whole is also very much a “could be worse” kind of affair. It never really annoyed me, but it wasn’t particularly endearing, and its core concept is enough on the goofy end that it kind of mellows the horror that the show was going for with the Cagaster transformation.
And then there’s the animation. I know CG anime bugs a lot of people (pun intended) and normally I’m not one of them, but the CG here is conspicuous and poor. I guess it probably saved money when it came to rigging up all the giant bugs that all look the same and making them move, but it has a very “video game” look and feel to it, like I should be doing some God of War style QTEs when Kidow is fighting to actually behead the bug. I’ve seen way worse CG, but this is somewhere south of Revisions on the whole.
I feel like part of this is the environment. Dear Haruhi, I am tired of this infinite dead desert. Even God Eater at least had some variance, and in that show the world was explicitly rendered a desert hellhole because of what the monsters did to literally all life. Here, Cagasters seem pretty bad for civilization, we’re just stuck in some sandy vaguely middle eastern wasteland of no point announced. Maybe if they didn’t make all the cities incredibly generic we could have some tie to the environment, but I think the writers actively wanted to avoid that. Here, the only breaks we get are Illie’s flashbacks to when she lived somewhere green and pastoral with Girffith, the likes of which are never seen elsewhere, and the artificial garden in E-07. Everything else, rocky wasteland.
On the whole, I think God Eater might be the most comparable show to this one, in terms of its look and feel. In terms of quality and impact, though, I’m more reminded of A.I.C.O. Incarnation… except I actually think Aico may have had more to offer? Sure, some of its stuff was dopey, but it was at least unique, and the ending twists there were surprisingly decent while here… They didn’t really have anything.
Because of this, Cagaster of an Insect Cage gets a significantly lower grade, at a flat C. I really wouldn’t bother with this one; it’s nothing bad, but that’s just because it’s pretty much nothing at all.