This was pretty cool, but not for the weak stomached.

What do you do when your heroine is immortal, but not indestructible? You torture and kill her in some rather gory ways. But if this anime were simply a vehicle for some nasty snuff (and it IS nasty at some points early on), I certainly wouldn't be writing it up like this, because it was actually rather intelligently written, and I really enjoyed it.

The show itself runs 6 44 minute episodes, so it takes a much different pace than the typical "Half hour" anime. It also spreads the story out over about 60 years, which leads to one of the more interesting aspects: how Rin and the few other Immortals introduced deal with regular society, and in particular, Rin's interaction with several generations of one family.

At this stage of her Immortality, Rin is playing around with being a sort of Private Investigator, with her partner Mimi, who is far older than the youthful appearance she was frozen at makes her seem. Immortality is caused by one of the tree of memory, Yggdrasil's "Timefruit" becoming lodged in the body. For women, this results in immortality, very much along the lines of Captain Jack Harkness from Torchwood being a "Fixed point in time", meaning that eventually they can literally pull themselves together from the most horrific of injuries. For men, they become fearsome "Angels" whose short lifespans are marked with super strength, blood-red wings, and an insatiable appetite for the immortal women, who are absolutely helpless in the face of desire for them - when they're not terrified of them.

But you know what, that's not what the story is about.

Eventually yes, the story becomes a plot about control over Yggdrasil, but the journey is far more interesting. We see the characters they interact with age and advance through their lives (or not), and the observations about the changes in our lives, especially in terms of technology, really comes out in the timeline. From pocket pagers in the '90's, to modern internet phones, to immersive virtual reality to Augmented Reality, and the social changes that result (The young man from the VR generation becomes the father who tells his daughter to put on some REAL clothes for once).  The Humans change while the Immortals do not.

The animation is very well done, and the visualization is brilliant, and within those six episodes all the questions are eventually answered without a single giant info-dump. I have a friend who hates it when Anime gets to its last episode and gets "All glowey" and the characters wander around on a white background spouting nonsense like a perfume commercial that is SUPPOSED to be meaningful. When dealing with the supernatural like this, it's hard to avoid falling into this trap, but Rin keeps it mercifully brief.

Oh, and it's only a slight giveaway that Mnemosyne is the Greek Goddess of memory, mother of the muses.

Posted by: Mauser at 01:51 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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