What kind of media do you think kids
should be exposed to?
It’s a complicated question, with a lot
of factors to consider. How old a kid are we talking about? Do they
have any pre-existing interests? Is it a boy or a girl? Does that
even matter? And even answering those questions, I don’t think
you’re going to find a consensus of any sort and far be it from me to
supply one.
I do, of course, have an opinion on the
matter, as I must consider about this time of year when I have
younger family members. I find that I’m of the camp where I feel
that younger consumers of media can take, or possibly even need,
material that has a creative intelligence and serious approach to its
subject matter and the world even if that means going dark places or
risking some emotional confusion. I kind of think about things like
The Last Unicorn, The Neverending Story, Don Bluth films from before
the 1990s like The Land Before Time or Secret of NIMH, most if not
all of Miyazaki’s filmography… and I think Planet With belongs on
the list somewhere.
While I will be more talking about
Planet With in terms of it being for younger audiences, I do want to
say that basically every point is also valid for looking at the show
as an adult. Like all the films I listed in the previous paragraph,
Planet With’s intelligence means that while it is (in my opinion)
something that would be very good to share with children, it’s also
something that viewers of any age could enjoy and appreciate.
The basic setup of Planet With is this
– Aliens appear to be invading Earth, using a giant… thing…
that floats ominously towards a populated area. A group of heroes
activate their super mecha to fight back against the alien floaty
thing and defend humanity. Sounds familiar, right? Evangelion and
plenty of other shows have this as a familiar pattern. The rub from
the start, though, is that we’re not following the Earth-defending
heroes in their rainbow mechas, we’re following Souya Kuroi and his
guardians the vegetarian maid Ginko and the giant purple vaguely
anthropomorphic cat Sensei. Souya’s mission? Challenge the Heroes of
Earth and steal the magic bottles that let them manifest their
mechas!
If you need a moment, go ahead and take it. There’s a lot to unpack from that episode 1 stuff. First of all, the floaty thing (Sealing Device, properly) is… really weird. Not weird like an Evangelion angel that has a legitimately alien design, but weird as in it’s a gigantic piece of overdone tawdry kitsch. Defeating it involves one of the heroes going inside the Sealing Device and being shown visions that seem to be attempting to take away the character’s pain and reason for struggling, causing it to harmlessly explode when they reject what they’re being shown. Second, Sensei and Ginko. Especially Sensei. It’s not hard to guess these characters are actually space aliens themselves but you could be forgiven for, potentially, calling them too surreal to even be space aliens. Ginko loves veggies and constantly wears a maid outfit while possessing ninja-like acrobatic skills, while Sensei is, well… a purple cat twisted into humanoid form, about the size of a human, with a seriously disproportionate body, and the ability to transform into a mecha that Souya can drive in order to fight the heroic defenders of earth. He also speaks only in a dubbed-by-a-human “nyaa” that Ginko translates, like a feline Groot. Follow up weirdness, we’re following a character whose goal and motivation is to fight and disempower the heroic defenders of Earth. So, um, we’re following a villain? That’s not the case either. While it’s not clear at first what reason Souya, Ginko, and Sensei have for challenging the heroes, they’re framed in such a way that you do believe from the start that they have a good reason – and they do!
I’ll be honest here, one of the biggest
problems with the show is that the first few episodes are by far the
weakest. There are a few of them that have the same pattern of
Sealing device arrives, (remaining) heroes fight it down, Souya
fights one of the heroes and steals their bottle. There is good
stuff in these episodes: Souya’s relationship with his classmate
Takamagahara is tertiary, but cute. The personal development we get
for the heroes is also decent, seeing their time in the Sealing
Devices and to an extent what they do once they no longer have their
powers is nice, but for a while there’s not a great sense of what’s
going on in this story or this universe.
Eventually, though, we get not just
answers but really good, really compelling answers. First, the
Sealing Devices and the threat they represent to Earth: The “Sealing
Faction” of alien society, led in this instance by a white dog
equivalent to Sensei, believes that humans will choose the “Evolution
of power” becoming a violent and dangerous race, much like Souya’s
people (yes, he is a space alien, though human-like enough that Ginko
even implies he’d be compatible with humanity) who invaded and nearly
committed genocide against Ginko’s homeworld. They seek to avoid
this by “Sealing” humanity – removing mankind’s violent urges
and giving them a blissful and peaceful existence, but one that has
no future because those affected lose all interest in learning or
growing. It’s a horrific fate on some levels, but on other levels it
isn’t unkind, and doesn’t violate the Sealing Faction’s principles of
non-violence.
Meanwhile, Ginko and Sensei are part of
an opposed faction who believe that Sealing a species isn’t morally
right because of how it steals their future and prevents them from
ever achieving the “Evolution of Love” that would permit them to
join galactic society. They also don’t believe in killing to achieve
their aims, and very strongly in forgiveness, as evidenced by the
fact that Ginko fully accepts Souya despite him belonging to the
group that devastated her home.
And there is a third ‘faction’ in play.
The bottles that allow humans that use them to conjure magic mechas
are based on the power of an entity known simply as The Dragon. The
Dragon was a great and noble enforcer for galactic society, who
employed his vast power to preserve peace across the stars. However,
The Dragon went too far dealing with Souya’s people, slaughtering
their species and reducing their planet to ashen ruin from which
Souya is the only known survivor, so to quell his destructive rage he
was cast into a netherworld from which there should have been no
escape. It’s because the dragon’s power manifested on Earth that the
Sealing Faction’s attention was drawn; by breaking their toys (the
Sealing Devices) while also removing the bottles that provide an
unnatural power boost from humanity, the need to Seal humanity can be
removed, and Earth enlightened and taught instead of dominated and
locked away. The Dragon, however, fell out of the netherworld he was
imprisoned in and rests in torpor on Earth’s moon, a vast danger that
will eventually awaken
One of the smartest things about Planet
With is how it handles these conflicting interests. There are no
villains in Planet With, no easy foe that’s ‘just evil’ and needs to
be punched out with no guilt assigned for the punching. Both alien
factions value peace very highly, and prefer nonviolent solutions,
but they also both recognize that sometimes fighting is inevitable
and that you can’t just refuse to provide opposition. The Dragon,
and those that are heirs to its legacy, believe instead in the use of
force to attain justice, but that doesn’t make The Dragon evil.
Instead, it’s revealed that the Dragon itself is a sad, lost survivor
of an ancient race, who stayed in the physical plane rather than
ascending to a higher existence out of a great desire to help people,
but who now can no longer find his way ‘home’. The Sealing Faction
and The Dragon need to be stopped, but that doesn’t mean they need to
be destroyed and certainly doesn’t mean they should be hated. The
struggle against the Sealing Faction is one about taking a bet on
kindness and decency winning out rather than ‘playing it safe’, and
the ultimate conflict with the dragon is not to destroy it or even
really lock it away again, but instead to redeem the creature and
free him from the burden of his power.
Unlike so many action shows where goal
is to destroy evil and the message is about using might for right,
the message of Planet With is ultimately about forgiveness, finding
common ground and acknowledging the good that exists even in those
whose methods you disagree with. Ginko doesn’t hold Souya
accountable for the decisions made by his elders and government.
Souya must ultimately find a way to make peace with The Dragon, the
being that destroyed his whole world, knowing the full story. And
that is something that’s intriguing enough as an adult… and that I
feel a kid would really deserve to be introduced to. It’s much more
challenging for a younger audience than the common fight of good
versus evil, and much more thought-provoking as well. Because the
morals in Planet With are addressed with a subtle intelligence rather
than bludgeoning the viewer over the head with them (as in many more
didactic media), they can be approached in an organic way. Because
the message is one about compromise and forgiveness, the show itself
knows how compromise and depict shades of gray. It invites, without
forcing, the viewer to understand and empathize with multiple points
of view. And that’s something that’s fairly hard for children, who
often haven’t learned how to see a situation from someone else’s
point of view.
And because the message is presented in
a nuanced way, it doesn’t lead to the broken moral implications in
other works. For instance, in the Robert A. Heinlein story for
younger readers “Have Space Suit—Will Travel”, there exists a
similar galactic society with similar interests to the one in Planet
With. They put two races (The Wormfaces and Humanity) on trial,
attempting to judge whether or not the species is ‘too dangerous’
The Wormfaces are found guilty and sentenced to be “rotated” –
their planet and people phased out of normal space so they can no
longer interact with the universe as a whole. However, it’s pointed
out when someone finds this merciful that those rotated don’t take
their star with them, making it a genocidal sentence that the
supposedly peace-loving interstellar society hands down so casually.
Just because you don’t kill them personally doesn’t mean you didn’t
just exterminate an entire species, guys. I know nobody wants the
Daleks in their back yard but it’s fairly hypocritical resorting to
planetary-scale genocide to deal with a regime you dislike for their
belligerence. Planet With knows better, and its take on the subject
shines out much clearer because of that (Speaking of the Daleks,
though, the Fourth Doctor story “Genesis of the Daleks” has a
similar setup. Check it out if you like this kind of stuff!)
Further, Planet With does this without
putting on the breaks for long-winded speeches and debates. We see
the moral quandaries and conflicts in the actions of the characters,
and how they regard one another. We get one fairly brief debate
between Sensei and Generalissimo (the dog. Both speak plainly
without need for interpreters for once) about where humanity stands,
and for a twelve-episode show that’s basically it for moments that
could really take you out of the story. The other discussions feel
fully like they’re part of a well-constructed narrative. There’s no
need for a formal show trial in which people have to and get to take
the stand and make their case to condemn or spare mankind, there are
just characters, showing through their actions and their words in the
moment what their stakes are and trying to make their version of the
truth shine through. You feel more for the conflict in Planet With
than you do in any number of long-winded soapboxes because you can
relate to the characters, and that’s of critical importance. Kids
aren’t stupid, and they find dry message fiction just as boring as we
do or maybe even more so. Planet With, I think, would easily keep a
younger viewer engaged not only with the rainbow magic mecha action
and surreal imagery, but also with its spirit and its message.
There are a few moments towards the
very end that I feel encapsulate how Planet With works and why it
works. After a time skip where Humanity starts to learn the ways of
the wider universe and grow to meet its bright potential (itself a
good and interesting move; we rarely get to see things actually move
forward from the world ‘we know’), The Dragon wakes up and the
universe is prepared to repeat its sentence. Souya, Ginko, and
Sensei help, and though it seems Souya might still bear some ill will
for how much he was personally hurt, he is going into this fight for
the right reasons. They all end up in the netherworld, where they
are able to confront The Dragon as a person, and hear his side of the
story and view of the universe, and debate him with the aim of
helping him rejoin his people. The first moment is in this, when
Ginko gets a chance to speak. She clearly believes that what The
Dragon did was monstrous, possibly even unforgivable in its own
way… but she still thanks him, because she knows why he did it, and
it ultimately did save many of her people. She doesn’t agree with
The Dragon’s views and behavior, but she acknowledges the good he did
all the same. Other moments come in the denouement: Souya will
always be welcome on Ginko’s home; bad history between their peoples
aside, they don’t see each other as enemies. Meanwhile, when
escaping the Netherworld strands our main trio on Souya’s ruined home
world, two things happen. For one, they find a tiny plant,
struggling through the charred and broken ground to be a symbol that
while what was lost might never return, it can be possible to heal
and move forward. And the second, Takamagahara manages to find them
(or specifically Souya), reinforcing that it’s the power of feelings
and personal bonds not notions of what’s “possible” that really
matter in this universe.
So, where do I rate Planet With?
In the end, I do think it’s somewhat
better for younger viewers, people who could stand to really be moved
by the excellently-presented good lessons that the show has to offer.
It’s nuanced, complex, and challenging. For the grade school
through middle school bracket, I’d rate it an A+. It’s better than
the respected classic “Have Space Suit—Will Travel” at doing
basically the exact same thing, more consistent and focused than
something like “Genesis of the Daleks”, and all in all I can’t
really say I could improve it in terms of being message fiction for a
younger demographic.
The final rating is a little less rosy.
Message fiction doesn’t have to be boring, and Planet With isn’t…
but it still doesn’t land as well for adults as it does for kids.
The early episodes also do drag if you’re not totally pleased with
just the visuals, something that’s not going to be a problem for kids
but that will be for adult viewers. It’s still very good, but it’s
nowhere near an A+; I’d say that A- is the more appropriate rating.
If you want a brightly optimistic drop of message Sci-fi with a heap
of “what the hell am I even watching?” visuals, check it out…
but if you have a younger anime fan, check it out and then share it,
I think it would entertain well and maybe even do a little good.