The readers have spoken, and loudly and clearly too.  Dennou Coil handily won the poll of classic series nominated by LiA patrons, so it’s time to open the vault and look back to a very different time in anime.

The first thing I should probably say it that it’s been a decade since I’ve watched Dennou Coil.  I remember it pretty clearly for he most part, maybe in part because I actually didn’t watch it until a couple of years after it aired.  That matters because it aired during the best season anime ever had, Spring 2007 , and I was following so many great shows at that time my memories of this one might have been a little fuzzier had I watched it then.  As it happens I also missed the best show of that (or any) season, Seirei no Moribito, at the time it was airing.  It was that kind of season – even in my pre-blogging days, it was hard to keep up.

Here are a couple of things I remember about Dennou Coil:

• It struck me as rather a misandrist series at first.  That impression softened considerably after a great run of episodes starting with #8.
• There were a lot of subplots that seemed to be dead-ends, which was frustrating.  Relationships were teased with the prospect of more to come teased, but never developed.
• That was on of the reasons why I found the second cour on the whole less satisfying than the first.  We tend to romanticize the fact that there were so many multi-cour series back then (and indeed they were the norm), but the flipside is that a lot of series struggled to finish on a high note.  As great as Spring 2007 was, it featured a lot of shows whose endings weren’t their strongest suit (Seirei no Moribitio being a resounding exception).

Even taking all that into account, though, I still remember Dennou Coil as being one of the best series of the greatest anime year.  While I never formally undertook the daunting task of compiling a top 10 for 2007, when I spitballed one for the retrospective post I wrote on Spring ’07 I had this show 10th, and that still feels about right.  Anywhere in the top 10 for a year like that stamps a series as a classic.

I can point to a lot of reasons for that.  This show was one of anime’s best depictions of a virtual world, and Lord knows there have been a lot of them.  The world-building here was off the charts fantastic, both in terms of conceptual design and execution.  Iso Mitsuo clearly created a fantastic reality (in more than one sense) and he and Madhouse brilliantly brought it to the screen.  There’s a certain sense of possibility in series that are one creator’s personal vision – Death Parade (also Madhouse) is another great example.  These are truly auteur anime in the best sense of the word.

I think what I foremost remember, though, is the way Dennou Coil depicted the worldview of pre-teen children.  Very few anime can compare on this score for me – there was a totally absorptive quality to this show that made you feel as if you were part of a child’s world for 22 minutes.  And the VR aspect is brilliantly tied into that, because metaphorically speaking children exist in a world largely invisible to adults generally.  I’ve never heard Iso address this issue specifically but it’s hard for me to imagine that he didn’t have this idea very much in mind when he was conceiving Dennou Coil.

Over the course of its 26 episodes (which used to be the most common number for anime, though you’d have trouble convincing newer fans of that now) Dennou Coil certainly had its ups and downs.  My personal favorite episode was #12, “Daichi’s First Hair” – and for the record, it’s probably in my top 10 anime episodes ever.  It captures everything that’s fantastic and cheeky about Dennou Coil, and also happens to be spectacularly, ridiculously funny.  As is often the case with two-cour series this middle section was the strongest run for Dennou Coil, when its possibilities seemed limitless.

Unfortunately a lot of the possibilities suggested by this stretch of eps (largely on the character and relationship front) were oddly unrealized in the show’s final third.  It’s always struck me as strange for an original series to introduce as much content that would largely go unexplored as this one did, and that’s one of the reasons my view of the whole is that for all its considerable brilliance, Dennou Coil falls short of being an outright masterpiece.  But as for a legacy, a show whose highs are as Olympian as this one’s may have more stature than a series which I might rank a little higher as a collective whole.

Iso Matsuo is finally returning to anime with another series that’s a full product of his vision – he created and is writing and directing  Chikyuugai Shounen Shoujo, which may air in 2019 but as of yet has not been officially scheduled.  Now more than ever anime needs works which are distinctive and personal rather than generic and marketing-driven, and Iso returning to the screen is truly something to be excited about.  That it may happen in the same year as the return of Kazuki Akane (whose Hoshiai no Sora is confirmed for 2019) is a happy irony, since Kazuki’s Noein is a series which for me shares many traits with Dennou Coil – a flawed and inconsistent but fantastically imaginative anime that brilliantly takes us inside the worldview of children.