Takt Op. Destiny – 01

The two studios that Murayama Masao founded and then fled for creative reasons, Madhouse and Mappa, team up on Takt Op. Destiny, part of a multimedia project that involves an upcoming mobile game, among other things.  It’s been a while since these studios have worked together but this isn’t the first time.  I have to say the visuals here are pretty great – surprisingly so, in fact.  There’s not much star power on the creative side of the staff, but the biggest name involved is animation director Kanno Toshiyuki, who’s been around for an age and is especially well-known for his action sequences.  And it shows.

In most ways the premise here is pretty bog-standard for a modern sci-fi anime.  An apocalyptic future (2047) where a meteor fall has given rise to mysterious black creatures who destroy everything in their path.  It’s only the arrival of the “musicarts” (who I’m guessing showed up in the earlier meteor event we saw) that the devastation was brought under control.  Mankind struggles to rebuild, with the remaining creatures periodically attacking whatever human settlements have clung to existence through the worst of it.

The twist, as such, is that the creatures (called D2s) especially hate music, which has caused humanity to ban it almost everywhere.  A young schlump named Takt sees a piano and plays it, a D2 appears, and a gothic loli named Cosette (AKA Destiny) shows up to kill it.  These two work together – Takt is the conductor, who somehow funnels his life force through Cosette (the Musicart), which leaves him feeling rather drained and her binging on sweets afterwards.  And a woman named Anna who says she’s Cosette’s older sister seems to be in charge of minding the pair of them.

My first read on Takt Op. Destiny is something like Guilty Crown or Kabaneri – a really pretty series that doesn’t pack a lot of wattage in the writing department.  Takt also features (like Guilty Crown) some lovely music – though that’s not too difficult when you’re sampling Ludwig van’s 5th Symphony or Moonlight Sonata.  GC sets the bar pretty high in the dumbassery department and there’s not yet any reason to suspect this show will go that low, and Kabaneri actually started out pretty well before the wheels flew off and killed everyone on the platform.  This was fun – quite silly altogether but occasionally good for a chuckle, and the fights and visuals generally were top-shelf.  Don’t think too hard and this one might have some potential.

Kyoukai Senki – 01

Jump ahead 14 years to find Kyoukai Senki, another dystopian future piece.  The difference here is that there’s an acrid whiff of Japanese nationalism to the piece, a stench that’s all too familiar to anyone who’s spent much time in the country.  It may seem as if pointing it out in an anime is making a mountain out of a molehill, but this is a scourge in Japanese society right up to the highest levels (Google “Nippon Kaigi” for starters).  If nothing else, its presence in a script tends to be an unerring indicator that the writing is going to be stupid generally, though it’s too early to say for sure here.

In the first place, the underpinnings of Japanese nationalism (I won’t go into details here) render the premise itself ludicrous in the case of Kyoukai Senki.  If Japan is in as bad as shape as the narrator says, why are these four “fictional” superpowers so anxious to invade it and make martyrs of its downtrodden, heroic populace?  Because it fits the narrative, that’s why – in fact the narrative can’t exist without it.  The reality that a Japan as described here – bankrupt, lacking in healthy young workers, never rich in natural resources and not large enough to desirable strictly for land mass – isn’t worth invading is simply an inconvenient truth to ignore.

That ludicrousness extends to the fact that the protagonist finds a perfectly intact, functioning, and stocked high-tech mecha factory abandoned in the hills walking distance from his house.  How convenient!  It’s also convenient that an “autonomous A.I.” who has the ability to do exactly what’s necessary to get the hero’s mech (called an AMAIM here) up and running (it even fits the AUX port) turns up in the woods to be found.  As teen mecha pilot origin stories go, it’s pretty far-fetched (and that’s a high bar).

On the other hand, at least the mechs and the action scenes (brief though they are in the premiere) are hand-rendered. AMAIM Warrior at the Borderline comes from Sunrise Beyond, which for 23 years was I.G. Port’s studio XEBEC before it was sold to Sunrise, so the overall vibe is very traditional mecha in a by-the-numbers sort of way.  If the politics gets toned-down I could see this show having some appeal in a retro kind of way, but given the premise that seems very unlikely to happen.  If that sort of thing doesn’t bother you, you may find Kyoukai Senki appealing anyway – I see too much of it every day to have much tolerance for it myself.