Pale Cocoon

Pale Cocoon is a one-off OVA that was directed and written by Yasuhiro Yoshiura. Clocking in at around twenty three minutes, Pale Cocoon resembles a classic scifi short story: Short, sweet, with a nice punch. The setting is a post-apocalyptic future where people are excavating archives about the past world and their decaying life support equipment has forced them to retreat deeper into the massive amount of construction covering the surface of the planet. Since it's so short, it's difficult to say much more without major spoilers. The art style is engaging, the character development is solid, and the pacing is spot on.

Also, the user ... interfaces of the computer systems used by the researchers are fascinating to watch. A lot of thought went into their design and implementation. And I don't just mean their visual "wow" factor. They are very well conceived. A lot of modern software designers could stand to look at them for ideas. They are almost like little mini proof of concept and use case research projects.

You can see a bit more of some of these interface concepts peeking around the edges of the studio's other major work, Time of Eve, which is an equally good science fiction series that takes a look at some of Asimov's robot concepts and gives them a distinctly Japanese/Anime spin..

[This review contains a few minor spoilers]

The OVA has a fairly straightforward message: that Earth and its beauty is irreplaceable, even by the most advanced of technologies. In the dark, gray world the characters live in, the only faint resemblance to earth among all the steel is a color -- green. The characters keep going down the levels of their own world to live closer to a fake green - the "ocean" -, yet all they ever do is lose themselves even more amid all the machinery. In the end, when one of the characters finally gets to see something natural he realizes just how ... little he knows about what the world used to be. His very own definition of natural is changed, the last word of the OVA echoing that thought.

Theme-wise it is an interesting OVA, but a good theme alone does not make a great anime. Taking care of our planet and home being irreplaceable are things that have been talked about for decades and using a grim tone to approach the subject seems self-contradictory. Instead of celebrating the life of the celestial body we inhabit, the OVA decides to persist on the idea of human stupidity and irresponsibility. It paints humans as undeserving of the perfect Earth, turning the relationship between them and the environment something almost divine-like in its depiction. The case can be also made that showing human failure and sorrow makes the point more memorable, so how much someone likes or dislikes the OVAs take on the issue it presents will be up to personal preference.

All that being said, whether I agree or not with what the anime presented does not make the way it presented it any less good. Pale Cocoon is very dull and claustrophobic, but that was its purpose all along. The animation does a good job of creating those feelings when the music does just as good of a job undermining the entire work. On the flip side, the same thing which makes it good also makes it bad when we are presented with CG that often times feels to be in all the wrong places (for example, when the screen pans over CG wires laid over a CG desk). Yet, once again, despite the shortcomings of the animation, the music is the only truly awful aspect of it, with a song towards the end of Pale Cocoon serving as the lowest point of a mediocre score that makes itself far too noticeable.

Pale Cocoon is a good watch for the people who don't mind meaning over enjoyment, but unfortunately I'm not one of those people. Although it does feel like almost everything in it serves a purpose, it is one of the least enjoyable things I've watched in a long time, and therefore not worthy of a rewatch, regardless of how well it may explore a theme or how many hidden meanings it may have.

Didn't look like there was a lot of effort, and predictably there weren't a lot of results.

Pale Cocoon is at its best right before it starts. The premise is strong, the synopsis is enticing, but right from the outset the OVA is a huge disappointment. It may even be best to just not watch it at all, and save the idea being dragged down by this result.

In the interest of parity, there are some positives to mention. The OVA has a type of confined brutalist architecture that goes a long way towards setting the tone, and some of the visuals are actually rather memorable, particularly ... by the end. That being said, and more crucially that being all, its not enough to claw the quality back up.

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Pale Cocoon has a very vague story, in that the actual instigating element doesn't really get dealt with. It is literally shelved until later, leading to a lot of plotless, aimless time over the first half of the OVA. Right by the end, though, there is something in the realm of a twist, without revealing too much of course. It's not the sort to redefine everything that came before, but it's at least a tiny bit interesting.

The characters do not get the same sort of boost in the final act. Neither or the leads have any sort of personality, and I wouldn't even call either one-note since there isn't a single defining feature between them. The presence of side characters is arguable, being as there is only a voice on the phone and another who never directly interacts with the main duo. Following suit, neither is developed either.

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And now the directing and animation, which are an utter travesty. It appears the staff have taken every opportunity to animate as little of the OVA as possible, then attempted to fill in the gaps with inexpert panning shots over 3D set pieces. The result is equal parts laughable and nauseating. The most actually drawn movement that can be spotted is the occasional moving of an arm, but even these are sparse, scattered around what are essentially just still images of characters sitting or standing around. With all other technical elements, there is nothing to say. There's a mediocre song that plays diegetically, the designs are garbage and the art is poor.

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Pale Cocoon, then, is just a failure on every front, but it especially damns itself on that of production. It may not completely deserve to be forgotten, but it could only help its image, frankly.

I can't think of some way to improve it as I normally try to, since this just isn't enough to bother with.