Coppelion is the story of a trio of genetically engineered schoolgirls performing search and rescue in the post-apocalyptic wreckage of Tokyo. That should already be at least a little intriguing, but Haruhi knows there are countless ways it could go and only a finite number of those are good.
The first of the main girls is leader and main character Ibara, who has a hot head, irrepressible demeanor, and determined kindness. She’s the former class president, as for some reason we stick with the weird school theme for these explicitly graduated agents of the Self-Defense Force. Joining her are Taeko (who is reserved and nice and has a way with animals) and Aoi (who is loud and energetic and also kind of a scaredy-cat).
Their mission? Years ago (presumably just before all these transgenic “Coppelions” were produced) an unspecified but heavily-implied-to-be-nuclear disaster ravaged Tokyo, rendering it largely uninhabitable. However, some survivors seem to continue to lurk in the contaminated ruins of the old capital, surviving Haruhi-knows-how for the intervening years. With the advent of folks able to go in without relying on bulky “barrier suits”, they’re to find these last survivors and aid in their rescue. Seems simple enough, with plenty of opportunity for drama since it should be fairly clear that anyone still in the megacity version of Pripyat after what has to be close to two decades has complicated circumstances of one form or another. So, how does Coppelion handle the material?
One of the first things a viewer is likely to notice about Coppelion is that the backgrounds are absolutely stunning. In fact, they’re so incredibly detailed that they actually make the characters and objects that are moving around look a little out of place. Especially since big, thick outlines are fairly common and the characters are average to poor when it comes to detail, it’s somewhere between obvious and downright distracting, and lets you know that the backgrounds in question must have been rotoscoped.
For those who don’t know, Rotoscope animation is a technique that involves, frame by frame, tracing over live action footage in order to create animation with high detail and lifelike motion. There’s good and bad rotoscoping, as with all things, and the good stuff is absolutely stunning while in the bad cases… I think you got a paint smudge on that footage, there. In the case of Coppelion, I don’t want to be too hard on it since clearly a ton of effort went into the production. Even if the vision of the ruined and overgrown Tokyo is composited from photographs and filming, there was a lot of work and a lot of effort and creativity creating the run-down version, splicing and modulating the assets of a living world in order to create a believable and real ruined one.
I just wish that the same care had been shown to our leads in particular. They don’t need to be rotoscoped or “realistic” per say, they can still be anime school girls with their improbably long legs, implausibly short skirts, and big emotive eyes that take up about as much of their faces as the eyes on the classic “Gray” alien design, but they needed to have a level of detail and shading that would make them seem like part of the world they’re placed in. Even, perhaps especially, if there’s egg on my face and there was no actual rotoscope work done to create the backgrounds in Coppelion, the characters needed to inhabit their world.
That said, at least it is still very pretty. Most of the time, at least.
The story is largely in episodes or arcs, but there is some higher level structure. We start with the girls entering Tokyo and rescuing a relative nobody. As they move on they befriend a feral dog thanks to Taeko having animal empathy as a superpower, and encounter more folks with more complicated situations, still living in the contaminated ruins.
Eventually, the group finds some more influential survivors, particularly the old scientist who developed the very facility that had a Chernobyl-style meltdown in the middle of Tokyo, who naturally feels great guilt and shame over his part in the events and even tries to take the dying way out rather than being rescued. Along the way, we get some trauma for our main lot (especially Ibara) around not necessarily being able to save everyone, with a man and his wife both dying afraid they’d leave their daughter (who is, at least, saved) alone.
We also run into some conspiracies; first a company using a stealth bomber to drop off high level nuclear waste where they think nobody will notice a little more horrible pollution, and then with a group of survivors of the defense force sent in to manage the disaster when it happened. The “ghosts of the first division” end up being the antagonists of something of a meaty arc, in which we meet a group of exceptional survivors hunkered down in the old JAXA base “the Planet”, and largely have to spend a lot of effort struggling to rescue Aoi when she gets taken by the old soldiers for some unknown purpose.
This effort sees Taeko wounded at the start (recovery time: just long enough to keep her out of the rest of the arc), the aid of a “Clean-up squad” coppelion named Haruto called in (Clean-up, while believed at first to be literal, is more a euphemism for wetwork), and finally Ibara being grievously wounded when her desire to save everybody runs face first into the rotted wreck of the 1st Division leader and his willingness to order his own tank to fire on him to prove a point. This critically wounds Ibara (and knocks the white coat leader, who turns out to be just a guy and not the head honcho, out), but where as Taeko took a while to recover, some stitches and a blood transfusion and Ibara is firing on all cylinders again the next day.
This is pretty important as it’s revealed that the goal of the abandoned soldiers is to bring all the dumped waste to the “Sarcophagus” containing the core of the nuclear disaster before blowing the entire thing up, a move they believe will scatter enough nuclear waste to poison the whole world (or at least Japan, depends on who you ask) out of vengeance. They’re helped by a pair of rogue Coppelions, the Ozu sisters, but want more to help mess with the very deadly vicinity of the Sarcophagus.
The Ozu Sisters are encountered when they set a trap for Ibara and company, opening up waste canisters on the road to pen in the survivors Ibara is helping, meaning they can’t get the pregnant and due lady to the hospital, where at least some medical equipment might be able to help her. Their appearance also tries to step up the action. Previously, we had some sense that the Coppelions, in addition to radiation resistance, had some enhanced traits: quick healing was brought up when Taeko got wounded, and Taeko’s senses and animal empathy were also called out.
With the Ozu sisters, though, we’re let in on a few traits. First, the Coppelions are mostly clones; there’s some re-arranging but they owe a lot to a particular gene donor, which means those two (Who don’t look much alike for clones of the same base) are crazy because the actress who provided their primary stock was secretly a serial killer. Second, it becomes more clear and codified that when Coppelions have “an ability”, that does get all the way to superpowers. One of the sisters is astoundingly strong, supposedly thanks to enhanced muscles and bones, letting her do thins like punch through stone walls. Ibara doesn’t seem to be a slouch in physical strength when they fight, but it’s still well past what we’ve seen. The other sister can, with the brief hand wave of electric eel DNA, throw electric shocks around like a Misaka clone. So yeah, this bleak and melancholy show about searching for survivors in a Tokyo that’s looking a lot like Pripyat has gone full super-brawler for a bit.
After the first skirmish, a plan is made to get the Planet residents out, involving Ibara, Haruto, Aoi (once she emerges from seclusion), and the Planet robot No-Sense acting as a diversion for the First Division and Ozu Sisters, with a secondary goal of rescuing the pregnant lady’s First Division lover. Meanwhile, the rest will repair a train that should be able to drag them all out of the toxic zone fast enough to avoid contamination from the wind-blown pollutants.
Most of this gets focused on the diversion, which is an all out firefight between the squad and the evil army and psycho sisters (the electromaster of which can apparently track bioelectric signals within a kilometer). During this they find the right trooper, who was the one who previously let Aoi escape, but the wind is steadily picking up and the First division busts out their trump card: a giant mechanical spider.
By all rights, a giant mechanical spider should be a pretty cool enemy. After all it’s huge (this one is in the size categories for buildings), armed, and spiders are kind of intimidating in form. However, much like the giant mechanical spider that forms the climax of a certain lamentable Western, here… you have to kind of hold back a laugh. Okay, sure, we’ve seen some tech more advanced than the modern world. The Coppelions themselves are transgenic human clones, which we don’t exactly have right now, and the Planet has a pretty advanced indoor environment as well as No-Sense, who is technically a sapient AI robot and thus probably more part of the realm of fiction than the spider. But No-Sense didn’t feel out of place: he was a simple tour guide/butler, the physical frame of which was easy to understand as something that could be built by known engineering, even perhaps from less than desirable parts. Even after he’s upgraded to leave the planet and kick ass he has the look and feel of something that could exist in our world. The giant spider is 100% fanciful punk engineering. It looks like it’s cobbled together from random crap, moves like a predatory animal, and is so large that it’s hard to conceive of it even holding up its own weight, much less tromping around on those spindly legs.
In a lot of shows, this wouldn’t be a problem, but Coppelion has a very grounded look and feel, at least at first, which this superpower mumbo jumbo (extended as Aoi hover-flies after a moment of rage facing the sisters, who bullied her in the past and were engaged in beating up No-Sense, who she bonded with) and ridiculous fantasy mecha seeming awfully out of place against the B-line story of having to work against a nasty timer to splice high voltage cables and trace down bugs in a decaying electrical substation.
In any case, the big spider goes down like a video game boss (platform to the top to trigger the hatch on the bottom, then shoot it for massive damage) but not before Ibara gets thrashed again and Aoi awakens some sort of super psychokinesis. Haruto leaves them waiting for the train, raises his death flag, and runs off to help it get running inside the timer.
While working on that, the white coat First Division leader (briefly rescued by the Spider: it crashed into the building where he was held, suddenly he was in the pilot seat, and he wasn’t found dead when it exploded. Dude has the transition-based powers of Dr. Robotnik) and some of his mooks interrupt. The First Division shoots Haruto, but the cavalry arrives and he asks them to not shoot White Coat back. We get White Coat’s backstory, the various friendlies make the repairs to the electrical (saving the foreman and the pregnant girl’s dad with his “I was power company safety department” guilt, but possibly losing the technically minded old man to contaminated wind), but Haruto ultimately has to jump train to stop a signal from collapsing on the tracks. White Coat, having succumbed to Haruto’s and Ibara’s various friendship speeches, uses what’s left of his life to help and die a human, atoning somewhat, I guess, for his various misdeeds. Then with a pregnant woman, one Coppelion, and three men (one dying) the train speeds on towards the pick-up for Ibara, Aoi, and No-Sense.
The pickup isn’t without incident as the Ozu sisters attack again. They bring the First Division with them, but after the sisters get the tar beaten out of them the mass of troopers decides to surrender and be rescued rather than staying in the soon-to-be-overwhelmed section of the city to die, and they get on the train with the rest. The sisters are put into a world of hurt, with Electromaster Ozu near burnout and Superstrength Ozu being crushed beneath rubble too heavy for her to shift, thanks to a trap left behind by Haruto.
On the train, things aren’t easy. The old man is still dying and Ibara confirms he probably can’t be saved, while soon devastated by the loss of Haruto, who it seems she might have had special feelings for given how hard that hits. The birth isn’t going the best either, with Taeko having to perform a c-section. On a train. As an amateur medic. Credit where it’s due, the show does not downplay the danger level of this operation, and while naturally we don’t see all that much of her work, we can accept it’s a herculean effort to save two lives instead of just one.
As the train breaks through the death cloud and into open air though, we cut back to the Ozu sisters, the strong sister begging for death with how much her broken body hurts and the electromaster declaring that she’s lucky to be able to feel pain, since the electric sister herself can only feel the tingling of her electricity. We then hear ominous thumping at the train, as it seems that the electric Ozu is pursuing them, having used her powers to reanimate the giant mechanical spider’s drive train and power it herself. Honestly, it’s a trick that would be pretty cool in Railgun, so again credit where it’s due: even if the action isn’t the most fitting, it’s not bad.
In any case, this last hit of the annoying boss that won’t go down is defeated in an appropriate spectacle, using Haruto’s last gift (a grenade) to deal the finishing blow to the Spider and the sister’s ability to pilot it. Ibara insists that defeat means friendship, though, and manages to save both of the psycho sisters as well – the strong one, too beat up to resist and more willing, and the electromaster despite her nihilism trying to do her in to the very end. The birth was also apparently completed (presumably before the spider started trying to derail the train, since I can’t imagine that would have done well for active surgery) and it’s a healthy pair of twins with a living mother. Everybody gets out and is taken on the helicopter, even the remains of the poor old man who was a good mentor to everybody. Well, I suppose the Coppelions aren’t taken: Ibara, Taeko, and Aoi continue their venture in the ruins of Tokyo, and the Ozu sisters now seem to be tagging along in a friendly manner. Even the robot, No-sense, manages to get out, taking on a new role as a babysitter robot. Thus, on a mostly happy note, we end Coppelion.
So, what do I make of it?
Well, there were a lot of ways in which Coppelion was, if not a bad show, at least not a good show. Wavering in its tone and unsure of its genre, Coppelion does kind of stumble through a lot of movements. What’s more, the emotional moments, especially around Ibara, feel quite rushed at times. By accounts this show crammed nine volumes of manga into thirteen episodes (which is quite a breakneck pace) so presumably the source material was better about that latter complaint, but it’s still one that must be sustained when looking at the anime.
On the other hand, Coppelion was a show that had ambition and lived up to it. Part of why I love speculative fiction (Fantasy, Sci-fi, and all their sub-genres and branches) and part of why I got into anime so long ago was the ability of these stories to show you something really different and, in a way, wonderful. I can’t help but be disappointed when I face the umpteenth cookie cutter scenario I’ve seen before, with the game-mechanics-verse or whatever popular trend is up and coming today, even if I try to judge them fairly… and on the other side of the coin I can’t help but be a little excited when I see something like Coppelion, that’s executing its own vision. And that is a good quality that shows through.
The loving detail put into the backgrounds, the environments of ruined Tokyo, even the sky… that still shows through as real lovely effort when you’re watching Coppelion. And, let’s be honest, while this show isn’t the best thing since sliced bread, neither does it really do anything awful. How’s the story? It’s okay. Maybe a little thin, maybe just a little rushed, and not entirely unfamiliar… but it’s competently executed. We get who Ibara and her team are, who the Planet survivors are, who the First Division and the Ozu Sisters are and mostly why they do what they do. Does the raw force of Ibara’s friendship speeches go a bit overboard at times? Maybe. (Or who knows, maybe the power of persuasion is her weird Coppelion super ability and we just don’t know it). Does Ibara jump from resolute and determined to weeping and back a bit too quickly sometimes? Yeah, but that’s ultimately forgivable.
Did I kind of want a more leisurely pace more in line with the “Post-apocalyptic pastoral” look and feel of the first couple of episodes? Maybe, but the action show that was delivered is, looking back on it and being done with the weird bait-and-switch, fair enough on its own. There are some nice car chases, gun fights, and power brawls that give us battles of brains as well as brawn or firepower. There’s even some occasional comedy, like one of the Ozu sisters pursuing Aoi in a very slow-speed chase as they’re both using pedal-driven swan boats, which is farcical enough to get a smile while still part of a larger action scene with real stakes and other moving parts.
So, on the whole, Coppelion’s faults are ones I think can largely be forgiven, and it’s creativity, while not showing us something totally alien or new, is enough that I am very much glad I found this show and watched it. I feel lucky, like I got to see something worthwhile that I might have otherwise missed. For me, that’s enough to drag the show out of the doldrums and offer it a B-. I can’t exactly say it’s a superior show, and in fact I strongly considered giving it a C+ so you can kind of call it on the B/C borderline, but in the end I’m going to err on the side of the more generous grade since I think it’s more than just grace notes that are good. And it’s certainly a show that I’d recommend to anyone looking for something… a little different. Not wholly unfamiliar, but enough that there’s some of that new charm to the production.