Rarely have I seen a story that just decides to throw the viewer into a such a bonkers scenario without building any real investment or reason to care as Kemurikusa does in its first episode. Does that proclamation sound sudden, like it’s missing the preamble I would usually include in one of these reviews? Good! Because that means it represents the show’s opening fairly well.
So, let’s get the first episode out. We open with two redhead girls who identify as sisters and seem to have supernatural powers getting excited over the discovery of a pool of water on “the island”. They need to report back so “the roots” can gather it, and in the mean time are worried about “red bugs”. Sure enough one of those appears, the very mechanical-seeming black-with-crimson-lights insect like giant monster that one of the girls has to fight while telling the other to run back to base. The girl told to run, though, evidently didn’t and instead went for the water site again, encountering another red bug along the way.
The fighter girl (having conversed with the other sister, who has catgirl ears and mannerisms and manipulates glowing green filaments that are presumably “roots”) finds the little sister dying, having performed some kind of mutual kill with the bug. She dissolves into pink wireframe leaves as the other girl we’ve known for maybe five minutes grieves and the audience wonders how much we should really care about this mess.
It turns out not overly much as, back at base, we encounter four more identical clones of that girl (collectively, the Rinas since their names are all Rina{something}.) who are not at all put out at the death of what seems like the other member of their weird little girl hive mind. They introduce us to Midori-chan the magic tree (sort of) and begin pumping water from the scouted site. Some random flotsam comes through the glowing-green-root tap, which the Rinas seem to feast upon despite it being rusted metal parts and other junk, but as they’re talking about things we have little context for, the hose that is way too small for this disgorges a dazed and confused human-seeming boy. The girls immediately mark him as a red bug and will not be shaken from this belief as they try to chase him down and kill him, which leads to him taking several falls that should have been fatal before getting tied up and an execution prepared.
This is done via magic leaf hadoken, which should obliterate any bug but actually heals the boy. They still insist he’s a bug, he must just be immune to the leaf magic and able to talk human unlike any other bug. The boy takes this all disgustingly well, despite understanding literally nothing of what he’s in. Sorry, kid, the audience doesn’t understand much more. Another bug is sighted, and the kid is dragged along by the group that wants to kill him but can’t work out how (because apparently basic violence won’t work on a bug) to encounter the new version, a giant leech mech monster that can dive like a submarine in waist-deep red fog. It swallows another of the Rina clones, but the boy, evidently having developed the world’s fastest case of Stockholm syndrome, realizes he can sense its location in the fog, runs in to the fog that just proved burns him to touch, and rescues the mysteriously not digesting Rina. The leech bug comes out on his heels and gets beaten up for its trouble, leaving our lead native girl just plain confused. Me too, girl, me too.
So, that was episode one. Just episode one. Things happened. And I know what you may be thinking: a lot of first episodes don’t really explain anything and just open in media res. Well, that’s true, but the smart ones still spend time and effort building emotion and investment. Here? I guess there was an attempt, having our main girl (named Rin, but with no suffix unlike the clones. Which does get confusing at first) bond with the doomed clone by patting each other on the back over their water find, but it’s so soullessly by the books and quickly executed that it doesn’t really leave an impact.
It probably doesn’t help that the animation is atrocious. It has this awkward cel-shaded style that I think is trying to cover up that these are CG rigs, but instead just makes everything look like an in-engine render for an ambitious romhack of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. Motions are stiff, objects and textures are just allowed to kind of clip into each other to display what’s supposed to be going on, and depth, scale, and the effects that emphasize them are urban legends. If this really was a Gamecube game, it would look pretty good for that category, but I think even some of those had better water and more particles and polygons to spare for basic effects. Some shows have survived looking worse – sometimes you just have to make due with a final budget equivalent to what other shows spent to do their pitch meeting over lunch – but it doesn’t make the rest of this go down easy.
Going onward, we get to know our characters better and actually establish some idea of a plot in this bizarre setting. The token outsider boy, Wakaba, has amnesia and sees everything as new and wonderful, leading him to be easily distracted from even mortal peril by shiny things. Rin, as our lead, is tough and stoic and thinks only of her sisters, but is socially awkward to the point where she considers “poison” as the answer to symptoms that are clear to the audience as “Starting to like Wakaba”. The eldest, Ritsu, is as soft and nurturing as you would expect from her being bonded with a magic tree (Midori-chan, with the titular Kemurikusa seeming to encompass magic plant life of various colors). She’s also a cat for some reason. And of course the Rina set are just kind of hyper youngsters.
Together, a decision is made that despite the danger, they’ll try to venture to other islands. This is necessary because Island One is out of water, so the alternative is kind of just “wait to die here” They do this by having Midori-chan animate big roots and walk their base, a retrofitted train car in this postapocalyptic-looking world, onto some tracks and then push it forward. As the island number goes up, so too does uncertainty regarding route and the presence of dangerous Red Bugs, but somewhere beyond Island Six there’s supposed to be a lake, which given the focus on water seems to be code for this show’s promised land.
In all honestly, after you get over the rough start, the show does start to look up pretty quickly. Wakaba is annoying, but there’s this basic adventure/survival setup that we know can work, and all the various girls with their all-too-similar names play well enough that you can kindle a little hope that maybe we’ll do something worth watching. As we move, the show actually decides that it does in fact have time to breathe, and we’re introduced in a fairly nice way to ideas like the fact that the girls aren’t “human” as we understand it (they have leaves in them that are the indicator of their health, seem to need only water, and were born from the now-deceased “first person”. The Rinas even indicate that they can reproduce themselves via fission), or that water is such an issue because these Islands of city ruins are separated mainly by seas of supernatural fog.
A much as the animation is a travesty, the ideas behind some of the visuals are actually pretty good. It’s not all homogenous ruined city, we get a space center, an amusement park, and various sweeping vistas of the rails that the crew is on and off as they go along, just in the first few episodes. Eventually, when the gang gets to a massive bridge they call the Sky Bridge, we face off against a Nushi, the highest known class of Red Bug, and Wakaba finally makes himself useful both by figuring out what the mechanical monster is interested in (it’s easily distracted by Kemurikusa leaves) and by spontaneously figuring out how to invoke a shield against its disintegration laser with one of his collection of off-colored leaves.
In all honesty, the team gets to Island Six and a new phase of the show quicker than you might expect, effectively having the journey take up the first half. Along the way we introduce some little white robots with blue lights (identified as “normal bugs” by the girls) that seem to recognize something Wakaba does as administrator-ish and begin to help him. We also have Wakaba learn how to use Kemurikusa, which despite being magic glow leaves start to take on a kind of technological vibe, when he encounters one of the sisters who is supposed to be dead, Riku. Said sister doesn’t join up, but does imply there are others separate for their own reasons.
With this information, Wakaba is able to be more useful for the cast than annoying to the audience, reading records left in the tablet-like Kemurikusa by one of the elder sisters, implying things about the world and also providing guidance to help locate the location of the “lake:, and a gigantic withered Midori-chan type Kemurikusa tree. The precious water, at last, flows from its trunk to a pool in a knothole, more than the sisters know what to do with. Peace is short-lived though, as they discover a nest of Red Bugs, generated by a red tree root, infesting the base of the island, gnawing away at the place of safety. Though with some debate, they decide to fight back and try to take out the source of the infestation.
Thus begins the second quest, traveling through the terra incognito of the higher numbered islands to find the trunk of the red Kemurikusa and cut it down where it matters. On the way, that little white robot shows up again to help, and the first episode on the road even sees it bring in a bunch of its friends to take the form of heavy machinery and go out glad to have had a purpose, cutting away one of the red roots so the gang could pass.
Their next challenge is another crystal wall, but this one with a top-level Red Bug phased inside it to defend against an attempt to open up the passage. As the team rests, Wakaba scouts, and there meets the other two lost Sisters – Ryo and Ryoku. Ryo is the legendary fighter while Ryoku is the nerd… and both now exist in one body, shape-shifting based on which slowly dying leaf is dominant at the moment. Presumably, Riku is in some similar half-existence, hence why none of them fight with the gang any more. Ryo and particularly Ryoku help Wakaba open up new ideas, much as Riku did before. They bring up the “memory leaf” left by the First Person that’s now in Rin, and how they weren’t able to open it and receive its answers before, that Wakaba’s mastery over Kemurikusa might let him hack the red tree, and that Midori-chan’s core branch will have to be risked if not expended to deal with the wall monster.
Beyond that point, in Island Ten where the world is dissolving into blue wireframe fretwork thanks to the Red Fog, they come to the last passage towards the trunk of the red tree. There, Ritsu and the Rinas go behind Rin’s back to give their water to Midori-chan, potentially sacrificing their existences to provide more weapons for her to use in the upcoming battle. Too weak to follow along, they remain while Wakaba and Rin go into what they expect to be their final confrontation.
Before they actually enter the boss fight, though, Wakaba remembers that he needs to talk Rin into letting him access the Memory Leaf inside her, and successfully does so. This is a somewhat uncomfortable proposition for Rin, but ultimately successfully unlocks the leaf and throws her into a vision of the First Person’s world and life.
Thus we see a former and presumably more understandable time, focusing on a little girl called Riri and the robots that attend her (which she dubs bugs intentionally confusing “Nushi”, which is their name and was used for the highest grade of Red Bug in the present and “Mushi”). She interacts with Kemurikusa in a world that, while still fog-shrouded, is less ruined than the present one, and greets Wakaba (her elder and seemingly some kind of scientist) who appears to have a giant excavator machine base and be responsible for growing Kemurikusa. He also may be some kind of alien, as he mentions “Earthlings” in reference to Riri.
His task is a little hard to parse, but evidently he uses Kemurikusa to “print” the Islands into existence, in this fog word somewhere over Earth, recording important cultural assets. Riri is a bit of an accident, having come over with water much like Wakaba did in episode one, but she seems like a really bright kid, and even figures out how to make new colors of Kemurikusa by combining the existing ones. She’s worried because her human parents both died of overwork, and Wakaba seems to be working too hard. However, his job only lasts as long as the Kemurikusa do, so she creates a new color, Red, with the purpose of undermining other Kemurikusa, thinking she’ll save Wakaba, who she clearly cares a lot about, from such a fate.
Naturally, Red goes entirely out of control, growing far too fast and overtaking the entire operation. Normal damage control is ineffective against the hybrid’s nature, and its red fog prevents sprouting new defenses. Thus, Wakaba seemingly sacrifices himself going against the Red Tree, sending Riri away to safety behind the newly-formed inter-island crystal walls, the giant Midori growing just a bit slower than its crimson rival in the distance.
Desperate to do something and finding both that the Red Fog is spreading and that she can’t open the crystal walls as she is, Riri turns again to Kemurikusa alchemy, resolving to change her own nature to be in tune with Kemurikusa, sinking her memories into a leaf and preparing herself to become a divided existence with the purpose of saving Wakaba and setting right her mistake.
Now, I called attention right at the start to some of the faults of Kemurikusa. Now, here at the end (the flashback ends at the end of episode 11), I want to call attention to some of its artistry. You see, I don’t think this is actually an incompetent show. Far from it. It’s a show that seems to have had the thinnest of shoestring budgets, resulting in a great deal of technical awkwardness, but a lot of artistic passion and even skill to create their world and tell their story despite that obvious, glaring limitation.
The part I want to focus on is, oddly enough, the ending credits. Each episode after the credits started rolling until episode 11 here features the same setup. It starts with a leaf taking on the hot sakura pink of the sisters, and then showing the silhouettes of all six on a black background, with a gray structure (which we now know to have been Wakaba’s work barge) behind. As the Miku song plays, the silhouettes change: The sisters who died before the show start one by one crumble into swirling leaves that vanish, and Rina does her split into six before losing two of them along the way. Based on what we know, this seems to have been the order of events, so though in an extremely minimalist way it actually tells the story of what the Sisters experienced, ending after the Rinas are dropped to four and a new figure, Wakaba in green rather than sisterly pink, appears.
In episode 11, this sequence is extended. It starts with Wakaba and Riri in white, shows Wakaba vanish, and then has Riri become the leaf forms that give rise to the sisters in the normal sequence (which still plays. Again, no budget to do it over, we’re just appending to it), representing the last bit of alchemy she did. Once again, we follow the story of the sisters, but now at the end the remaining Rinas and Ritsu fade to black, indicating their sacrifice but uncertain fate. Then, ominously, Wakaba does the same, leaving Rin alone. Post credits, we see Rin come out of her memory-leaf trance, and discover that Wakaba has been grievously injured protecting her just as she’s come to understand what she is and what he’s supposed to mean. That’s nothing if not a good moment, and it’s even extremely well executed, with a moment just before the credits, at the end of the flashback, where you can faintly hear Wakaba’s voice telling Rin to run while Riri is fleeing the red fog, so that maybe you do or don’t notice were that line is coming from.
Recovering Wakaba from that is actually quick, but then round 1 against the Red Tree doesn’t go so well. They use up the last of Midori’s leaves, and then Wakaba gets smashed protecting Rin. As Rin despairs, even her core fading, Ritsu and Rina’s aid arrives in the form of the full core branch of Midori, extracted to give Rin the new ultimate weapon to protect what she loves. Round 2 goes better, but not that much better, as Rin is cut down and driven back repeatedly trying to make it to Wakaba. That makes it the Fallen Sisters’ turn (presaged when Wakaba met them), appearing to keep Rin from being reduced to paste and then burning up their last dregs to divest the Red Tree of its wrecking ball, laser cannon, and invulnerable barrier. Thus, the way is open and Rin strikes down the evil tree with Midori, rescuing Wakaba at the same time.
The fallen sisters say their final goodbyes, Rina and Ritsu are revealed to have survived to the end (perhaps thanks to the white robot protecting them, since we briefly saw it take on a giant combat form to do so. Not bad for a roomba with stumpy little legs) and at the very end Rin and Wakaba find a crack towards bright light and exit through it into a natural environment teeming with water and life, said to be “outside the ship” (I guess the fog world was all the interior of Original Wakaba’s spaceship), promising hope and plenty. Rin finally gives a precious full smile and tells Wakaba she loves him, and the show is at last at an end.
I have to say, I started out hating this thing and ended up impressed.
Kemurikusa is a lot of things. Some I’ll get into in a moment, but deep down it’s got a good adventure story, a little action that’s about as well-done as the animation permits, and characters that are… interesting, at the very least, and fairly personable despite a rocky start. It has some real wonder at speculative fiction while keeping the stakes human and relatable. The sisters largely want to live. At first the biggest imposition to this is the lack of water, with Red Bugs barring the way to the promised land of plenty at the Lake. Once they get there, we get the second act where it becomes clear that the Red Tree responsible for those bugs, gnawing at the roots of their world, is a threat that has to be answered. Wakaba, for his part, is drawn into the mystery of the world he finds himself in, and comes to bond with these girls (which is ultimately very understandable as they get over their initial hostility), so he doesn’t want to see them come to harm either.
And this is done on the backdrop of a mysterious world, Desolate ruins, out of place artifacts, crystal walls and bizarre organic technology put viewers, who are probably more familiar with Earth and “Earth except where noted” settings, out of place and in a sense delightfully off balance, as the juxtaposition of the familiar, unfamiliar, and unexplained creates and sustains a very clear atmosphere.
Though there are a fair number of struggles in the show, I would say that action is actually deemphasized. You look at something like Sabikui Bisco, and that has a very similar formula: a road trip in search of something that’s distant but dearly needed in a strange world, and there’s a lot more fighting. But see again the shoestring budget. The animators probably knew that they couldn’t afford to make the action look good all the time, so instead they saved their energy for where it was really needed with a couple major fights and otherwise let us soak up the melancholy of simply traveling across the desolation. It’s a smart call, and it makes Kemurikusa lower key than if we were having to go all out throwing superpowers against Red Bugs in every single episode. Low key isn’t bad, and in fact might be more comfortable to the ideas that the show wants to have.
Which lets me talk, briefly, about the ending twist (or perhaps reveal would be more accurate) of what the history and nature of this world is and what’s really going on. Obviously, we still don’t understand everything. The biggest “remaining mystery” is probably why there’s a younger-seeming Wakaba with no memories now when one of the last things Riri saw before she faded away (prompting her to erase references to him and lock the Memory Leaf) was a vision of Wakaba having fallen, presumably dead.
It’s not explicit in the show, but the image of Dead Wakaba has some sort of plant growing from his humanoid body, and he did say before sending Riri away that it might be quite some time before he was able to see her again. For my part, I almost immediately drew the conclusion that he had some sort of plant biology as part of his alien nature, which Riri was unaware of, and the new Wakaba is some sort of regenerated fruit when the old mobile body went to seed. But thinking back on it it’s just as likely that he was preserved in Midori much as stray leaves caught the fallen sisters for a time, and eventually regenerated to the point where the Midori offshoot the sisters had was able to regurgitate him, which would also explain why modern Wakaba is green in the ending while old Wakaba was white. The point is, while it’s not explained it also seems perfectly explainable given what we do know about the setting, so I don’t think we require the precise answer.
But in general, while the “It’s all aliens” thing could be a cop-out in a worse setup, it actually kind of pulls Kemurikusa together. We have these human ruins, which are revealed to be recreations of human culture. Given what little we know about Wakaba and where he came from, I’d guess they’re like the wax models in a natural history museum, an alien race cataloging the interesting things made on the quaint backwater world called Earth. Riri seemed pretty normal, so presumably the Earth that his ship is cloaked on for museum-building purposes is more contemporary with the ruins (which weren’t supposed to be ruins; crumbling is brought up as a problem). The Kemurikusa, which would seem very out of place to the modernesque ruins setting, are explained as the alien tech underlying the recreation, giving a firm reason why we combine the mundane and the fantastical. Further, the world of fog and no water, divided by ultratech mystic walls into “islands” makes no sense as any kind of living and breathing world… because it isn’t one. It’s a fake. An artificial reproduction in artificial space.
This highlights two things I’ve pointed out in previous reviews. First, a good twist makes things make more sense. Kemurikusa’s reveal is a good twist, because everything falls into place, and you can look back at the material and see the clues inherent in the scenario that tell you it had to be this way. It actually reminds me somewhat of the film Dark City, which deploys a very similar reveal in a very well-done way.
The second is that you can have your setting be as insane and weird as you please as long as you establish and stick to your rules. Kemurikusa is a weird, weird world with strange characters, but everything about the setting, the fantastical elements, and the beings that inhabit it is cleanly established and held to with absolute precision. Thus, once you get over drowning in the deep end the show throws you into, you actually come to accept it and follow it very easily.
That drowning bit does bring me back to the negative, though. For all that I came around on Kemurikusa, it does have two huge pain points. They’re what I deservedly griped about right at the start, but they also deserve a more detailed breakdown in light of this later analysis: the Visuals and the Opening. They’re issues… but not as serious and unforced as you might think.
So, let’s talk one last time about those visuals. I stand by what I said near the start: Kemurikusa looks awful, specifically like an early 3d video game rather than what you’d expect out of a late 2010s televised anime. Granted, it looks better than Ex-Arm, but I’ve seen amateur flash animations that look better than Ex-Arm so that’s not really a metric to go by.
But, in an odd way, the visual style of Kemurikusa eventually, even relatively quickly, became something that was just there. I compare it to old video games, and one must remember that those of us of a certain age all played those games and thought they were the hottest, coolest looking things on the market. We made sense of faces that only had a few pixels of blurry smudge, feared monsters with countable polygons, and were impressed by how fluid things looked when they only somewhat clipped or popped in or of existence. It never becomes good, strictly speaking, but you learn the visual language quite quickly through immersion.
And if I’m going to bring up old video games, I might as well bring up the one perhaps most oddly relevant to Kemurikusa: Silent Hill. Now, Silent Hill is a pretty big series, but here I’m specifically talking about the original Silent Hill, which came out in 1999 for the original Playstation. In that game, the omnipresent and eventually iconic fog was an outgrowth of hardware limitations. Along with oppressive darkness, it of course served the purpose of making the atmosphere scary for the player, but more than that it gracefully disguised loading, pop-in, and all other messes that would have occurred if line of sight was not so brutally and artificially constrained.
Kemurikusa presents an environment not dissimilar to Silent Hill. The first act in particular is very urban, with most vistas being of cityscapes in a state of decay. And, of course, it’s all perpetually dim and shrouded by fog, of which the red stuff is dangerous. Like the Silent Hill fog, it serves to give the environment an emotional texture: melancholy, mysterious, and somewhat threatening. The unexplained ruins and constant mist under lead gray skies serve their purpose as the backdrop for this harrowing journey. But also like the Silent Hill fog, I have a feeling it was pretty easy to animate. Making static models of these ruined places, especially largely devoid of small foliage (other than the deliberately placed Kemurikusa leaves), was probably a lot easier than making something with aspirations towards living and breathing would have been. A featureless lead gray sky absolves the artists from positioning the sun and stars or casting relevant shadows against the dim world.
And, while nothing can be done for the core render quality, what little budget they had is used intelligently to make things that are supposed to look impressive actually look impressive… relative to the baseline, at least.
Now, about that other pain point: the opening episode or so. It wasn’t immediately apparent, but fairly shortly in to Kemurikusa I realized what it was, and when I did I ended up largely forgiving the opening. Put bluntly, Kemurikusa is Xenofiction.
Briefly put, Xenofiction is fiction that delves heavily into the experiences of entities that are fundamentally not human, often in terms of animals that aren’t anthropomorphized or imagined extraterrestrials. It tries to depict the world as these entities see it, and thus convey an existence that is fundamentally apart from what we know. Kemurikusa focuses heavily on the Sisters, creatures that look outwardly human but have extreme core differences. They have different needs, their hunt for water and the concept of wilting or withering governing much of their action. They have different capabilities. They aren’t just (as one could be mistaken for believing at first) super mutants. While they do seem to be higher spec than ordinary humans and possess powers that one could see as beyond us, they’re lopsided creatures that understand existence through no background of civilization or transmitted culture and the fact that each of them aside from Rin has only one primary sense, to the detriment of the other four.
There’s a brilliant little bit in one of the later episodes, when Wakaba first meets the fallen sister, Riku. She’s wowed that he has a sense of touch, and insists he scratch her back because no one else she’s ever known understands what it’s like for her to feel. Her joy and excitement over being able to connect, even with a stranger, over something so basic to a human as feeling, helps emphasize just how alien the sisters really are.
And you may ask, why does this forgive the opening? Well, to the degree that it does, it’s because it means there really wasn’t a better option. We were always going to have to reckon with diving into a setting with minimal common ground with Earth, following characters that have minimal common ground with humans. The show rips off the bandage, and that’s really the right way to do it because when you’re dealing with Xenofiction you’re going to hit that pain point of being lost anyway, so might as well set what we want and what we fear and why in this world real quick. What it means can come later, and in fact that’s part of the point seeing as there’s a solid element of the show that deals in ontological mystery (Mystery not about whodunit or even whydunit, but about the very premise of its setting or existence). But it still hurts.
Frankly, you don’t see a lot of xenofiction in visual media, and this is probably part of the reason why: when you need to tell your story with more than just words on a page, you have less leeway in your opening, and in getting your viewers prepared for what’s coming and invested in it.
Now, this is where the animation takes something that was always going to be a problem and, for all that the creators here tried, makes it worse. If this were put out by a studio like Shaft or UFOtable where the animation is able to be gorgeous and highly emotive as well as strange, it would better form a connection with the viewers through the minor conversations and silent moments we get early in episode one, so that we would feel properly when things happen. As it is, looking like an outdated video game, the visuals can’t carry as much weight as they need to. It was always going to be a hard sell and Kemurikusa just didn’t have the tools to make that bar right away. This doesn’t kill the show, not by any means, but it does lose some points.
So, in the end, what kind of grade can I give this show? A show with high ambitions and a frankly impressive amount of skill in reaching for those ambitions, held back hard by technical aspects and in lesser ways by a plethora of minor little cracks like Wakaba’s initial annoyance.
In the end, I’m settling on a B. Kemurikusa is a flawed show, without a doubt. If you’re looking for visuals as your primary means of engagement with the medium, you’re going to want to look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you’re more concerned with the storytelling, Kemurikusa can really be seen as a diamond in the rough; its lack of polish doesn’t eliminate its value. I’ve known both kinds of people, those who can’t stand anything less than smooth HD because the raw art of animation matters that much to them, and people who could be happy with a powerpoint presentation of blocky jpegs if it meant getting a really wonderful and worthwhile story. Personally, I’m more with the latter camp myself, so whether or not I can really recommend Kemurikusa comes down to how well you know your own tastes. If you’re up for something that’s mediocre to look at but fascinating to engage with, give it a try.