| Overall |
6 |
| Story |
6 |
| Animation |
5 |
| Sound |
5 |
| Character |
5 |
| Enjoyment |
5 |
This one's an oddity. Set in a seemingly corrupt future, Asylum Session is focused on an aspiring art student named Hiyoko, who bonds with the residents of a tent town called Asylum who have set up their own society and are under threat of eviction by the town authorities.
Before I go into the story and characters, let me first address the rather obvious issue with this film that comes in the form of its CG animation. The rendering of it is quite rough with characters looking rather crude with how they look at many points in the film and animation looking just as crude with
stiff, awkward movements and attempts at creating special effects like paint being sprayed and smoke looking quite fake. This is perhaps the worst implementation of a fully CG-animated film that I have come across with an anime.
Moving onto plot and characters, these areas are a bit of a mixed bag. There is enough time to offer up basics to the plot with the conflict between the tent town residents and authorities. It is unique from your typical corrupt society title in that the tent town consists of residents who are heavily inspired by the arts as they try to organize a festival to defy the authorities and one resident, Akira, is the strongest in resisting the eviction thanks to his cyborg implants and having an interest in tagging. The anime takes some time to show Akira and Hiyoko strike up a sort of bond together where more of the former's beliefs and origins are revealed.
However, the anime does suffer from lacking enough depth in exploring more about its world to allow it to have more than a basic plot. There is little revealed about the corrupt elements of the futuristic society and what led the residents of Asylum to take refuge in the tent town. Also as a lead character, there is not much fleshed out on Hiyoko's character beyond her being a runaway from an argument with her father, as we don't get to know what drives her to like art and what type of relationship she had with her father before running away.
Setting aside its horrible CG animation, Asylum Session offers some unique story concepts with its futuristic society that it sadly doesn't take the time to further flesh out beyond some basic direction. It felt experimental in what it attempted to execute for its premise and sadly, the effort is a mediocre one as a result.
read more
