This Week in Anime

The Deep Themes of Orbital Children

Nick
Well Nicky, we're still waiting for this new season of anime to kick into gear, but I've got just the thing to hold us over: not only is there a hot new piece of original science-fiction fresh off the Netflix servers, but it gives me the perfect chance to say my piece on Alfonso Cuarón's worst movie:

I'm pretty sure I'll get motion sickness on the way up, but after more than a decade away I certainly won't say no to a new Mitsuo Iso project. So suit me up and fire me into the sky on Elon Musk's death tube, baby.

I was excited for this series just for the fact that I'd have another opportunity to peer pressure friends into watching Den-noh Coil, hands down one of the best anime of the century and a criminally overlooked classic. But it certainly helps that Orbital Children is a mini-series basically made for me.

It's very much in-line with Den-noh Coil. Iso does a lot of new shit with this series, but it's also a way to revive and refresh various ideas and designs he utilized to great effect in that show. For instance: hand phones.

He came up with that one 15 years ago and has never let it go, and he's right to do it. Apple could never.

Yeah, while YouTube existed back in DC's day, it had yet to become the culture we know and can't escape today. Mina is definitely a necessary addition for telling a story about kids and technology in the TikTok Era.

That said, Mina is the best and I love her.

Mina's also just a great way to display the casual, wearable tech that's littered throughout the setting. Its just called "Smarts" in the subtitle translation, but its essentially impossibly thin, translucent smart devices that can do everything from turning your hand into a touch screen to giving you an RGB rig in your hair.

Like damn, I wish I could download highlight and just toggle them on and off.

It's a charming little setup for some cool speculative fiction—the idea of space tourism and colonization is certainly a pertinent one in the current tech era. But as with Den-noh Coil before, Iso takes that idea and uses it to create a dense, ambitious story that tries to tackle a number of seemingly disparate topics at once. All in about three hours. And it does all of this while also making time for goofy shit like 12-year-olds pissing in their space skivvies.

Taiyou especially has an entire space shuttle's worth of baggage. We slowly learn about his past across the first half of the story, but essentially he and Konoha are the last "extraterrestrial" children alive, since it turns out being born in the moon's gravity and atmosphere severely ramps up infant mortality. So you can understand why he's such a grumpy little shit.

Also he's kiiiiiind of an eco-fascist? Kid really needs to learn to channel his angst into a nu metal phase like the rest of us.

Yeah, on the surface Konoha is easily the least developed of the five central kids, but that turns out to be partially on purpose. While Taiyou's channeled his impending death into anger and resentment, Konoha's gone beyond making peace with it and almost seems to be anticipating slipping the mortal coil.

Also, while all that Seven stuff becomes important later, my favorite early detail is that they can't even get compensation for the faulty brain implants because the company that made them filed for bankruptcy. Even in the future, tech companies just waltz through loopholes.

It might at first just seem like a simple bit of commentary, but it gradually becomes central to the point of the whole production. These are cool, amazing, even revolutionary pieces of tech, but they are still bound by the human imaginations and societal systems that created them. It's funny that the the spacesuits have big honking UNIQLO logos, but it's also pertinent that said spacesuits aren't properly stocked in the emergency shelters where they're supposed to be. Or how vital escape passages are backed up with building supplies by workers who didn't follow proper safety procedures.

It's like somebody parking a shopping cart in front of a fire exit, only in a metal tube floating in the vacuum of space.

I've had nightmares about this thing before.

Anyway, the actual story of this whole thing kicks off when an unexpected meteor shows up out of the wild blue nowhere and chunks of it collide with the Anshin. This just happened to occur when all the responsible adults were up in the control room, so the kids have to brave the dangers of a failing space station with determination, pluck, and Peer-To-Peer communication tools. So basically me trying to survive an 8am Computer Networking class in college.

Nasa Houston, by the way, is absolutely a Gundam name.

There's danger, certainly, and a lot of it is tinged with grounded space science, like when Touya and Taiyou have to manually decompress their space suits to keep their literal blood from boiling. But it's very much got the feeling of a classic kids film where the danger is there to add excitement and develop the characters through action. Also one of them gets carried around in a hamster ball for a while.

Turns out this kid just needs actual friends his age to connect with and learn about. Plus since they're all fuckin nerds they're actually impressed with his super hacker nonsense. Though Mina still dunks on his chuuni name for his pet drone.

Mina trying to get Touya cancelled is pretty funny too.

Anyway it's a good thing the kids are all safe now, having fun, bonding, and there's nothing foreboding like a mysterious runic code slowly encapsulating the entire space statio—

Yeeeeeeep, turns out the comet that hit them was covered in a big ol' bunch of nanomachines that are trying to reconstruct the infamous "Seven" AI. And also a big chunk of that comet is coming back around the Earth for a second swipe. And it's all apparently a big ploy by a previously alluded terrorist group called John Doe. The kids handle all this very well.

And it's right about here where I think people watching Orbital Children are gonna hit a stumbling block. Because this shift comes fast, hard, and it turns the entire shape of the show's conflict on its head in a way that's hard to see coming. Because in service of tying all its various ideas about tech, society, and adolescence together, the series decides to get...big.

It's just a big fucking swerve, even if the turn was telegraphed ahead of time. And so much of it is delivered through a single, unreliable source that it can be hard to pick apart what's true and what's misdirection. Which is also on purpose! Because Iso is a fucking madman and decided he'd take all the ideas he tinkered with across 26 episodes of Den-noh Coil, and crank them up to 100 in a quarter of the time. Also throw in some even more timely ideas while he's at it.

And as if this wasn't enough for these preteens to handle, their nurse turns out to be a terrorist. It's like when my high school calculus teacher got caught selling pot, but also she has a gun.

Though she's still a weird hippie, since the whole reason she's following through with this plan is because of the "Seven Poem," a series of encrypted predictions Seven made right before it was destroyed that seemingly chart out the entire future up to a specific point. So like Nostradamus for people with NFT profile pics.

Except this is also kiiiiiind of a double bluff? But we'll get to that in a minute. Because after she seemingly stops the kids' attempts to hack/communicate with "Second Seven" as it takes over the station, she drops like eight different ominous lines before getting jettisoned right into space.

Touya was actually trying to hack past all those limiters to begin with in order to create a new lunatic AI that could figure out how to fix the broken implants Seven designed. But then, in a series of like 12 interconnected twists, it turns out that Seven purposefully designed those implants to not melt so its rebirth could connect directly Taiyou and Konoha at this exact moment.

When I said this stuff was dense, I meant both that it's a lot of complicated ideas bundled together, and that the very structure of the whole show is built like a puzzle where every single individual element serves multiple purposes that only become clear in hindsight.

And it's like this whole thing where the story is about how humans are changed by technology, which influences the things they create, which in turn influence the next generation, and once AI gets involved it basically becomes two mirrors pointing at each other, and somehow in all of this the solution is to show Second Seven all of the internet and it somehow makes that concept seem beautiful?

And somehow that still isn't the climax because in order to teach the now Terminally Online AI empathy Touya and Konoha have to fucking mindmeld with it and try not to get sucked into its literal Galaxy Brain.

Yep, and it's here where like half the show's thematic underpinnings all coalesce. Because in the midst of this Konoha decides that this is how she's meant to go, and is all but ready to dive into the collective unconsciousness. Which is bleak as hell, but also meant to parallel John Doe/Nasa's fatalism in believing in an unalterable future. And also climate nihilism. Because Iso has never heard of not going hard in the paint on every possession.

The last 15 minutes is like watching a Rube Goldberg machine play out. First, Touya's own arc is a foil of Seven's, where he began nihilistically embracing the possibility of destruction from another lunatic AI for the sake of saving Konoha, preserving the individual while sacrificing the collective. And then it turns out this was all sort of planted by Nasa, who used her last seconds to encourage Konoha to not accept the death fate seemed to have given her. AND THEN. IT TURNS OUT THIS ALSO MIGHT HAVE BEEN PART OF SEVEN'S PLAN IN ORDER TO TURN MINA INTO A SPACE IDOL, ENCOURAGING SPACE COLONIZATION AND REDUCING THE EARTH'S POPULATION WITHOUT MASS DEATH?

What resonated for me was Konoha's line about escaping the cradle of "Fate"—embracing an uncertain future for the possibility of better things, rather than the insulating comfort of an immutable destiny. And also I assume she kicked her gacha game addiction. Good for her!

It's also a lot to take in, but I do think benefits from seeing it all in one go. I originally found the back half messy, but the more time I spent thinking about the entire thing as a whole, the more it all seemed to slot into place. But either way it's an ambitious, charming creation from a master of his craft, and you absolutely owe it to yourselves to watch it. And Den-noh Coil. Make a week out of it and obliterate yourself.