Dec 19, 2015
I would liken this anime to a peaceful dream.
I'll rush past art and sound since my years of watching anime has convinced me that they're highly subjective, so the only thing I can objectively say about them is that they draw together nicely and have a flow to them as do many anime. As for the story, the main plot line itself, the mystery about which it all revolves, I confess I did not find it too interesting and found myself asking a question at the start which proved to be the correct path of reasoning. Still, I quite enjoyed this
...
anime, and will go on to explain why I do liken it to a peaceful dream.
In this anime our primary characters are all geniuses who can perform calculator operations in their heads without a moment's thought, are well regarded by the world despite each begin a recluse in their own way, and strangely enough within this anime their genius means they're each philosophically inclined. Now as often happens when writing about people smarter then ourselves, many of the arguments, chains of reasoning, and claims of these characters could be easily poked full of holes by any deeper thought, but the real guts of the anime are the philosophical abstractions that get tossed about, or at least they are in my book. Are we really meat and bone, or are we consciousness? What can we define as a distinct individual when we collect multiple personalities within an individual, or when we acknowledge that no one personality is necessarily inherent to a body in and of itself? Now, because they're all geniuses discussing deep topics the story does not scrutinize their thoughts to the extend to riddling them with holes, but rather glides along with them, much as logic might follow in a dream where in truth the contradictions matter little in the face of the new thoughts and ideas they might give birth to, and to me this seemed to be the dominant theme of the anime. Still, having given critical and non-critical thought alike to the anime, I enjoyed the notions it expressed.
While it's not too hard to find anime that tackle the nihilism behind our not knowing precisely why we exist, this anime deviates from the grittier dark side of not knowing, and instead embraces that whilst we do irrationally fear "death", and we don't really know the answers to the big questions about life, accepting its lack of logic at times and emphasizing that that sometimes the simple seemingly random habits of life themselves are the answer to these questions however nonsense that may be. I also enjoyed that this anime did not belabor the point by lingering endlessly on just these questions, delving into deep brooding depression for episodes on end as the characters thought their way through them, but rather it somewhat playfully tossed out questions and answers both as free floating thoughts more in the spirit of a stream of consciousness then as a logically defined argument or a dramatic plot line. And that is why it is that I associate the feel of this anime to that of a peaceful dream, flowing on through ceaseless thoughts without violent refutes or blood rushing excitement. I cannot say if you'll like this anime as I have, but that is not something for me to decide, it's something for you.
Reviewer’s Rating: 10
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