And so we disappear down the rabbit hole of another Netflix-produced anime.  This time around it’s Godzilla Singular Point, a co-production of Bones and Orange (which is a very interesting thing in itself).  Covering these shows is always an adventure since they aren’t part of the usual streaming system for distribution.  Godzilla at least appears to be a weekly release rather than a batch dump like Great Pretender, but we’re still left dependent on someone deciding to fansub it on a fairly timely basis – that, or wait till the season is over and it’s released globally on Netflix.

None of that would matter much if it weren’t any good of course, but it was – in fact I thought the first episode was extremely engaging.  Godzilla is an eternal part of Japanese pop culture and one of its most popular exports, a monster (pun intended) of a franchise.  The world is mainly focused on a different incarnation of it at the moment, but Singular Point has an interesting pedigree.  And it’s following in the footsteps of several earlier anime takes on the franchise – none of them especially successful, I would argue.

This premiere didn’t feel much like a TV anime, in fact.  And that’s hardly surprising.  Director Takahashi Atsushi is mostly known for theatrical anime, and the premise and scripts are by noted sci-fi novelist Enjoe Toh.  It’s his involvement that most makes me hopeful (till blue in the face I’ve repeated – with original anime, the writer is the most important person in the production).  Enjoe-sensei has won multiple awards both in Japan and abroad (including a Philip K. Dick award for his debut novel Self-Reference ENGINE).  He’s a trained physicist with a deep interest in psychology, and it’s going to be fascinating to see his take on the kaiju genre, which superficially seems very different from his usual oeuvre.

As is customary with kaiju flicks things start off quietly.  A small town, a matsuri honoring the defeat of a sea monster called “Kashira“, a haunted house and a mysterious alarm going off at a radio observatory looking for aliens.  There appear to be two central figures in the story.  Arikawa Jun (Ishige Shouya) is a genius programmer working for a weird tech company called “Outaki”.  Kamino Mei (Miyamoto Yume) is a biology grad student specializing in “creatures that don’t exist”.  It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the paths of these two oddballs (and geniuses) are going to intersect right at the heart of the premise.

I love the way Enjoe teases out the story in a totally classic monster movie fashion.  The haunted house belongs to a mad scientist who’s disappeared, and a crystal radio in a hidden room is playing the same Showa folk song over and over.  An alarm is going off nonstop at the observatory, and they call in Mei (as her professor is in Hawaii) to try and explain why.  Eventually they deduce that it’s receiving a signal and broadcasting the aforementioned song, and call in the company who set up the wiring – Outaki – to try and explain it.  That means Jun shows up – along with his partner Kikuchi Haberu (Kiuchi Tarou) whose scientific bona fides we don’t yet know.  He does have an interesting in weightlifting, and knows Mei from their high school days.

There’s another critical player introduced here too – Outaki Gorou (Takagi Wataru), the crackpot owner of Outaki who’s obsessed with saving the world.  He’s also an obvious avatar of Ibuki Goro, a regular in the Toho Godzilla films and the inventor of the “Jet Jaguar” giant robot which has appeared many times in the series.  Oh, and one more too – Rodan, the Pteranodon stalwart of the Toho kaiju franchise.  He’s the first monster to make an appearance in Godzilla Singular Point and we know he won’t be the last, but it’ll be interesting to see how many others show up too.

As intro episodes go, I thought this was excellent.  As noted it did a great job teasing out the plot, culminating in the reveal of the secret underground base beneath the observatory.  Equally important I really liked all the characters, who were appealing and authentically quirky without being too obnoxious about it.  The only downside for me, in fact, was Orange’s contribution – which really didn’t surface until Rodan showed up.  The CGI wasn’t especially impressive, frankly, which is a little disappointing given the outstanding work Orange has done on their own series.  But it’s only a few seconds from the first episode, and we’ll just have to hope it improves.  If that gets to the level the rest of Singular Point is operating at and the show manages to stay there, we could be looking at something pretty special here.