It occurred to me while watching the premiere of MAPPA’s original series Listeners that if Eureka Seven were released now, it would probably flop.  As that thought played in my head the background track was an assumption that Listeners would not be warmly received – an assumption seemingly borne out by the aggregator scores for the premiere.  Not that Listeners opened with as strong an episode as E7 (it certainly didn’t) but the essential DNA connecting the two is unmistakable.  And unmistakably old-school.

That DNA, of course, belongs to Satou Dai – the creator of both Eureka Seven and Listeners and certainly the person whose aesthetic is most clearly stamped on this premiere.  Going beyond the matter of broad themes of male adolescent alienation, despair over the state of the world, and mecha, we can also see Satou’s love of iconic imagery and dystopia.  Heck, we even get a very familiar-looking town (“Liverchester”, ROFL) and a grouchy but ultimately sympathetic old man authority figure.

If Listeners were a Bones series it would no doubt look more expensive – more detailed backgrounds and sakuga – but apart from that there’s nothing here that would seem out of place.  Satou is in many ways a personification of a certain element of Bones’ oeuvre, expressed in his signature fashion – an earnestness mixed with despair and an old-school hangdog protagonist swept away by an exotic magical girl.  It’s not especially at home in the modern anime landscape and as such, Listeners probably won’t find much of an audience (I don’t think E7 would either, as I said) but for fans of that bygone era this show displays a respectable amount of upside potential.

The hero is Echo (Murase Ayumu), a young boy living in the aforementioned dystopian town of Liverchester with his big sister Swell (Satou Rina).  She runs a bar called Oasis and he works at the garbage dump which basically takes up the entire town.  Strange creatures called “Earless” have ravaged the world, and only those called Players piloting “equipment” can fight them.  Echo idolises Players and even scavenges parts for his own Equipment (read, mecha), so when he finds a girl (Takahashi Rie) in the dump with a built-in aux jack – the sign of a player – he’s naturally thrilled.  But when we’re talking a boy who can talk about a girl’s input jack without embarrassment right in front of her, who’s the real player here?

Obviously we’re scratching the surface of the story.  There are allusions to an incident 10 years earlier which wrecked Liverchester, which the mayor (Chou) blames on players.  And while the girl (who Echo eventually dubs μ – “Mu”) can’t remember who she is, she’s obviously a player of some importance and has other players out searching for her.  Having music be the key to the equipment-player-mechanic triumvirate is a fairly novel approach – what Echo built is basically an amp – and musician and producer JIN is in charge of the musical side of Listeners.

The concern here, among others, is that while Dai is good at grand concepts he’s not exactly the most disciplined writer out there.  Listeners is 12 episodes and while Eureka Seven was too long as it was at 50, that still wasn’t enough for Satou to conclude the story in satisfying fashion.  But that’s another concession to anime in 2020 as opposed to 2005, and yet another reason to think Listeners is going to be an awkward fit.  Still, I can’t help but feel a certain nostalgic fondness for it, and even as it jams into an overcrowded bubble I think this series has a better chance to make the cut than most of the others in there.