Much Ado About Everything

I watched three episodes of this anime so far and I’m intrigued by it.  The show has definitely succeeded in creating an atmosphere that a friend said reminded him of a Phillip K. Dick novel – to which I added that he should add William Gibson’s Necromancer to the mix as well.  I also heard of comparisons to Blade Runner, which also stand.  This atmosphere is created mainly by show’s very impressive visuals – there is a great contrast of dark and bright, where dark scenes are full of shadows and bright scenes have some strong colors (like glow of electronic equipment) that seem to be the only nice thing in the otherwise bleak city.  Story wise, it’s fairly mysterious and hard to follow although we seem to be getting some answers as the time goes on.  So the judgement must be reserved, because though visually it’s a five-star anime, and sound is pretty good as well, the story could be hit or miss and so far doesn’t seem to be in the same class as production values.

Which brings out a practical issue – make sure to get either a really good fansub, or simply wait for DVDs to come out.  Because of many dark scenes where shadows play an important role, if you have a highly compressed video you won’t be able to see much and your opinion of the show will suffer significantly.  Shinsen subs seem to be good, for which you pay in increased file size.  There’s another argument for waiting for official DVDs – this show is difficult to understand, and bad translation can completely ruin it for you.  And it’s easy to translate this show badly as it looks to me like advanced knowledge of Japanese is required, not to mention the translator should know what’s going on.  And until the whole show has aired, and with no access to the production team, the quality of translation will depend primarily on intelligence and language skills of the translator; this isn’t a high school show with “ittadakimasu” and “itterashai” (I’m probably misspelling Romaji here).