Here we go again. The misrepresentation of an anime during the quarterly season preview will always be a point of contention for me, but you know what? If you don’t know Japanese, or happen to have a vocabulary so utterly worthless in nature that you can’t write at length and cite specific instances or scenes in an anime where the dialogue’s what makes or breaks it, you should give up all those “raw watching” pretensions and stick to watching subs. Pretending you know the language never did a show or your readers any good.

It goes to show how good the so-called Japanese experts among the anime bloggers are, that none of the posts dedicated to covering the first episode at the time of writing this post have so much as hinted at to what actually happens. Spare us the rewritten synopsis that’s been floating around for months, stop looking at the pictures, pay attention to the dialogue, and actually write about what happened, will you? That’s all I ask, really. Maybe the day will come when this will no longer be an issue, but before that ever happens I feel I simply have to speak up against misinformation like this.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what exactly Kaiba’s all about, from what I could gather from the first episode it was something akin to Planescape: Torment + The Matrix + GITS:SAC all wrapped up in an aesthetic equal parts Alice In Wonderland and The Little Prince. Not too shabby a mix, don’t you think? Who could’ve known that something that’s been praised mainly for its visual style could be so complex? Not those posers who weren’t paying attention to dialogue, that’s for sure. But I digress.

in before jokes about Hollows and Bleach

First of all, let me answer the question that’s probably on your lips at this point: How am I saying this with such authority, you ask? It’s simple — I just finished editing the TL script for Kaiba an hour ago, being the first editor for Ureshii for this project and whatnot. Surely enough, it’s easy to see how all the subtle nuances flew over the heads of those watching it due to Kaiba being horrible by way of action, but a lot of what really matters, at least in my opinion, takes place in the form of exposition-as-conversations, the very ones that were callously called “haphazard” or “boring”.

The episode starts off like Planescape: Torment in that our protagonist, The Nameless One Kaiba, wakes up in a morgue on a ledge with no recollection of his past, and Morte a kid named Popo nearby. He can’t remember anything. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Just a pendant with a girl’s blurry picture in it, a hole in his chest, and a ringed triangle tattoo over his stomach. Screams can be heard not too far away, and as he looks down from the ledge he sees Sentinel-like floating things sucking away at the heads of three people.

a .gif would have illustrated this better, but it happens slowly, and the orange thing is a bullet

This is where it felt like The Matrix for me. After a two-legged ostrich thing appears out of nowhere and saves Kaiba before he gets gibbed into orange bits (in bullet-time no less) and the subsequent harrowing chase sequence that involves more of those mindsucking monsters, diving under a vehicle and some exchange off fire while in a tunnel, Kaiba is thrown into a secret warehouse inhabited by people, not unlike Zion in that respect. It was rather puzzling to see what I previously assumed to be an inhabited area actually being deserted, but I guess they’ll answer that in forthcoming episodes.

The episode strikes gold around this point, and continues doing so till the end of the entire scene. Through a series of four significant conversations (and two other not-so-significant-but-interesting-nevertheless ones) we’re alerted to the norms and values of this world, a twisted place where your memories and self are stored in this triangular chip that the machines I mentioned earlier are after. What this means is that you can transfer yourself into bodies as easily as that sock-sniffing weirdo in Darker than Black, requiring nothing more than a spare body and someone else to help transplant your chip.

All too obvious questions of memory (it’s revealed later on that they too are transferable), identity, and humanity aside, which is where the GITS:SAC similarities lie, it was an uncomfortable experience to see nameless pedestrian characters talk about things that would make anyone’s stomach turn, assuming such things were possible in real life. Wait, an anime provoking such unnerving thoughts and violent responses in a first episode? I never thought such a thing could exist either, and in such a “boring” anime at that! That’s not supposed to happen, is it? All this show is supposed to do is look different!

That aside, the first conversation takes place between a boy and his elder brother, the latter of which is revealed to have been to been captured by the machines I mentioned earlier, which are called Skonks. They “separate egg and soul”, an obvious but ambiguous and unexplained reference to how they suck the triangular chips out, and the boy, along with the other people in the warehouse have taken down the Skonk that tailed Kaiba into their hideout. Having released the people sucked into vacuum cleaner-like bags from the wreckage of the Skonk, he’s now testing the stolen chips to see which one belongs to his brother by means of a contraption that allows him to speak with the chip directly.

After a false alarm where the wrong chip is mistakenly identified, inserted into his brother’s body and tries to escape with it, the kid finally gets around to his brother’s chip, and starts questioning him about… the meat roll he ate. After admitting to eating said meat roll (which didn’t belong to him), his brother asks a question to the people standing around him: “Was he ever of any good to us?” It turns out that this niisan of his is a pretty worthless guy, much like how false Kamina was in the Anti-Spiral’s dream world. He bullies the resident pet cat-humanoid thing with an inflatable head, hogs the toilet with his constant constipation, tries to act cool around girls, and has even made Pichipi cry too, whoever that is.

He denies all this, of course, but is immediately silenced by the thinly-veiled threat to look into his memories, since the chip is him, after all. So this loser’s fate is judged by the others and his brother to be inadequate — he’s a deadweight to the community. What do they do with him? An old geezer standing nearby pipes up and says something about having one less mouth to feed, and how they could sell his body since the young ones always fetch good money. In that split second his brother decides his fate, declares “He’s not needed!” and plucks out the chip, cutting out his elder brother’s futile protests as he does so.

The second conversation was no less unsettling, for it takes place directly after the first. A rotatable machine with faces carved into it speaks up, glowing green as it does so. It tells those around it that if they’re going to reduce the number of mouths to feed, while they’re at it they might as well do it in batches. Green Face doesn’t get to speak for long, though, since it’s cut off by the spinning of the machine to focus on Red Face, his wife, who claims that it’s all thanks to his debt that they’re there. The machine spins, revealing a differently carved face each time, glowing a different colour. Yellow Face the daughter wants to be let out. Blue Face the son wants to play.

At this point the shot pans back to the bunch of people gathered around the talking machine, who are looking up at the carved machine with an expression equal parts apathy and despair on their face, an “It’s too bad, but I can’t do anything about this” look. It then occurred to me that this was an entire family that once had human bodies, for at one point Yellow Face pipes up and says “There’s neither privacy nor freedom here!”, and Light Blue Face the grandfather sorrowfully says “Just bury me, I don’t need to talk.”

The third conversation takes place between two guys doing some work in a pit, where one pipes up and says, “The data in the house is full again. We need to delete people.” It’s done in such a deadpan manner, but the trivial manner in which he says it contrasts greatly with the reality of such an action, which would be essentially called murder by today’s standards.

His co-worker in the pit with him pipes up and asks if they couldn’t just use some of those unclaimed chips lying around — and the shot focuses on a pile of those triangular chips. The first guy clobbers him on the head and calls him an idiot while saying that they “can’t erase those unclaimed chips, no matter how much capacity they have”, which was thankfully as far as that conversation went before seguing into the next one.

The fourth and last conversation is that of a girl and her presumed boyfriend, who seem to be in an argument of some sort. It’s revealed that said girl (or is that “girl”? I couldn’t tell, to be honest) isn’t really the owner of her current body, as she won it for free somewhere. As she storms out of a corridor with her boyfriend in tow, she shouts about how sick she is of this place as it stinks, it’s terrible, it doesn’t suit her at all, and that there might be a better world for her elsewhere.

Naturally, her boyfriend gets on the defensive and says that “It’s no thanks to this body of yours that you’re acting like this!”, reminding her that before this she had the body of a hippopotamus, and before that a snake. She replies by saying “You’ll never understand how I really feel!”, before muttering some nonsense about finding happiness and a better future, proceeding to storm out of the warehouse in a huff.

Initially when bateszi was raving about the 15 second trailer about a month ago, I was as nonplussed as those commenting on his post — after all, it seemed like just another show being made to look different for the sake of being different. Actually watching the show and understanding it has made all the difference, though, and the comments that I’ve highlighted in bold can attest to this — even if they’re never fully explored, it was amazing to see how, by means of mere conversation, an entire world was fleshed out effortlessly, and in the first episode too.

Needless to say, I’m sold on this. There’s so many questions that have been answered, but even more that haven’t, and I’ll be staying for the ride. Who knew you could cram so many elements into a single show and make it look so unorthodox while still retaining what makes an anime anime? If a single episode managed to do so much for me, I’m sure the remaining 11 episodes will lift this up above its peers this season, even if they’re all solid titles in their own right.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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