So we have a first episode that pitches Mirai Nikki by way of Bubuki Buranki. Done by Yoko Taro and Jin. This is, at least, going to be a hell of a trip.
We start (after the obligatory pretentious speech) with our main character, Gorou Ono, dealing with his shark-toothed friend Yutaka Akitsu. Akitsu pranks Ono a little, they go to class, talk about Ono’s obsession with an idol singer, and then Ono runs into Honoka Sawa, who asks him to show her how to upload videos. Ono clearly has a budding crush there, but it seems like she might be out of reach
On the way home, Ono gets some psychiatric meds that will later be used to excuse his denial that this insane bullcrap is reality, sees a cat get destroyed at a crosswalk which gets some eerie focus, and then in his room recieves a strange message asking him to make a wish. He’s a teenage boy and not taking things seriously, so fooling around with Honoka maybe? Some bizarre stuff happens and we cut to the next morning where it turns out he accidental uploaded the prank video while teaching Honoka what to do, getting him some negative fame. He and Aki get suspended, but Honoka comes to apologize, feeling somewhat responsible, and ends up accompanying Ono to the abandoned arcade he and Aki use as a base. Things get a little steamy there, and as they do a weird little gremlin pops up and starts explaining about wishes and becoming god, much to an already shocked Ono’s horror. He flees, and ends up arguing with his imaginary imp about this whole death battle to become God thing, only to have Honoka catch up. Once she does, she deploys a magic weapon, bisecting a bystander whose body she then uses to turn the little magic knife into a giant butcher cleaver of doom. The entire area gets drawn into some kind of mystic battlefield, and things… get weird.
Ono spends most of the resulting “fight” screaming, crying, begging, and dodging. It’s not a good look, but let’s give him credit and say that it’s episode 1, as long as he shapes up that can be forgiven. Honoka shows a much more ruthless, violent face as she attacks, snarling in rage. Eventually the imp who is clearly this show’s version of Murmur, called Lall, gets through to Ono and convinces him to fight back, causing him to manifest his weapon (a magic tome) and call down a girder to impale and kill Honoka. In the aftermath, Lall successfully implies that Ono’s abilities are cast from lifespan, and Ono asks after something related to all the “twist of karma” talk Lall has been making.
The next day, things seem a little different for the Ono family. Mom is a savage drunk, their home is graffiti marked with lots of hate, and everyone seems to think Ono himself is some kind of trash. Lall reveals that this is the karmic backlash Ono took for making a miracle – restoring Honoka to life. He sees her at the school gate, and she looks at him with some kind of apprehension to suggest she might not fade into the background masses. End of episode.
So, the first thing to talk about right away is the animation. KamiErabi is a CGI anime, which I know is a non-starter for enough people that it’s pretty much never going to get a good aggregate rating. That said, I compared this show to Bubuki Buranki in the opening because I think that’s about what the CGI is comparable to in a lot of ways, and that’s very much on the good side when it comes to the technical aspects, as opposed to something like Shikizakura (bless its heart) or ExArm (may it rot in anime hell).
It’s also different from the kind of CGI you see in Scarlet Nexus or Revisions. Those shows tended to focus on high detail and realistic motion. I don’t think I ever really complained about the Scarlet Nexus CGI in particular, and with Revisions, while this did sometimes act against the show with its motion capture arm acting, it did occasionally work in the animation’s favor as well. KamiErabi, like Bubuki Buranki before it, isn’t particularly concerned with that. It’s more about big fluid motions, often more like you’d expect of a cartoon, and a love of bright colors or high saturation darkness. It’s not real, but it sure as hell has a particular style. It’s immediately something different from most shows you’re going to see. Interesting given that, of works I’ve previously reviewed, director Hiroyuki Sheshita was responsible for Knights of Sidonia, that largely moved human characters at least in the more realistic way.
Kamierabi is very particular in its use of color. I don’t know if it was because of budget or deadlines, but characters who don’t matter, like the mobs of assorted students and pedestrians or the teacher of Ono’s class, are extremely washed out to the point where they’re practically silhouettes. The main characters, meanwhile, are lit up with a theme color neon glow in addition to having their loud base designs. Ono is dark blue, Aki is orange, the idol Ono is into is teal, and Honoka is red. More colors, and characters with them, are seen in the opening and ending, but we’ll get to them when they actually arrive. This is a big part of what reminds me of Bubuki Buranki, which had some very loud glowing colors to mark our characters.
I can’t decide if this massive highlighting of the leads and heavy deemphasis on the extras is visually clever, or just a likely budget-saving trick attempting to disguise itself as clever. I think what will decide that will be, as the show goes on, what the themes are like. If this is a show that ends up strongly being about the impersonal and banal nature of the current world (themes implied by the scene with the cat, as well as some of Lall’s talk about how the current god isn’t going to lift a finger to save anybody) then it could be a legitimate and interesting choice even if budget was a concern, since making the faceless masses even more faceless than usual serves to create a feeling of impersonal isolation. On the other hand, if that kind of theme isn’t followed through, it will come off as somewhere between weird for weird’s sake and actually kind of sloppy.
The fight, as much as it was a fight, was pretty acceptable. We got some good shots of Honoka doing her thing, and Ono’s magic at the end was about as flashy as you would like. Naturally for this being the equivalent of the fight with Third we don’t exactly get the dramatic interplay of two individuals clashing as equals, so the jury is still out on exactly how well the show can do action, even if the evidence is promising in abstract. The conversational scenes were largely carried with the louder motions, but I feel like somebody was afraid of lip animation since they seem to avoid showing characters talking too much and when they do there were a couple points where the sync was noticably off. Maybe an artifact of reading subs? I doubt it but it is possible
So, what about the story so far? How it hooks you and where it seems to be going?
It’s Mirai Nikki.
To be fair, this is far from the first show to steal wholecloth from that vaunted predecessor, and if you’re going to steal you might as well steal from the best. I’ve talked about other rather derivative shows before, and even liked some of them like RahXephon (Evangelion) or Yuki Yuna is a Hero (Madoka). And when the main creators, asked to describe their writing in one word each, picked Love, Lies, and Death it seems a very natural place to go. The pretentious intro speech goes the route of promising you a bad time with no hero, love interest, or fun, but I somehow expect that (among other things) to be a lie of sorts, given how affection and lust are already key notes for a main character willing to sacrifice much of his existence so someone else can live.
But while Mirai Nikki’s pitch still has some grab to it, I am kind of waiting for Kamierabi to have the other shoe drop and show me something that’s Kamierabi and not Mirai Nikki. I guess the idea of karma being twisted and things changing retroactively is distinct from the idea of changing a pre-written future, but it’s still playing in the same kind of space. If Kamierabi wants to actually be a good show, it’s going to have to go above and beyond that to bring something really new and interesting to the table, if not in the basic skeleton it has clearly borrowed than in the execution that makes it distinct, much like RahXephon and Yuki Yuna at least had a critical note or two to really call their own.
If you’re following along, given the creative minds behind this one I’d want to give it at least the old three-episode try. Me? I’m going to be following it all the way because that’s what I do as a reviewer. For now, though, I’m still maintaining the optimistic outlook I had after the Anime Expo panel: I think some insanely creative people are trying to show me something insane and creative, and I’m eagerly waiting to see more of it.