it's no surprise that a captivating factor about Kaiba for me was the fact that its themes were delivered so spontaneously to the point of tracing through several topics without necessarily being inteded, and this is largely due to how the anime's world building is located: In a world where memories exist on memory chips separate from the body, the death of the body no longer means the death of the soul. It is possible for memories to be viewed, altered, duplicated, erased and transferred between bodies. These memory chips are used by the rich to gain eternal life in carefully selected bodies, while for the poor, selling their own bodies and conserving their souls in the chips often becomes the only way to earn a living.
With our memories being able to be transmuted from one body to another, there is doubt about our own existential, after all what exactly are we? And what in fact defines us? our body? our memories? the things we do without thinking, what makes us feel good, what hurts, what we think is valuable to us.
Regardless of what that may be, the universal common knowledge is that we are not comfortable with evasion, but the act of committing it itself is something that not everyone withdraws from. In many cases in the work itself, this being a skill used many times for the system's convenience to manipulate our thinking without any kind of difficulty, but this same tool also has the potential to make us reach the understanding of others, although this means is an unhealthy way to acquire it.
All these questions are relevant and are recurrent in our lives because it is thanks to your daily life that acts as a trigger for their existence, and I think this is one of Kaiba's greatest theses after all: As there is no distinction between the interior and the exterior, the condition of one is reflected and/or caused by the other. We cannot reach mutual understanding without a minimally empathetic collectivism coming from whatever regime we are obliged to host in order to live; in fact, it is thanks to the condition of the outside world that some people even try to decide whether life is really worth living or not.
Kaiba's heightened premonition hovers far from a negativistic dystopia masquerading as "realism" or "rationalism", unlike other things I could compare to thematically-wise, Kaiba seems to have one of the most consistent balances I've seen between weight and introspective importance between the characters and their chemistry that constitute their archaeological mysticity. Despite everything I've already written, the most crucial part that makes Kaiba so special to me is how, within all of this, it still explores different concepts of the feeling of love. Affection, the thing that most distances us from scrap machines that can be built with the intention of replacing us one day, is explored in different ways and in all its due modes of existence, be it maternal or a protective instinct, whether romantic, or even unrequited, these in one way or another come into contact if not they reflect each other
Kaiba's technical qualities are another factor that makes everything about this work distinct even in Yuasa's catalogue. Coming from a director who uses so much articulation both in the animation and in the script structure that is sometimes delivered very quickly, Kaiba leaves everything about it relatively more contemplative and minimal so that the set sounds maximized and dense, but never dull.
Kaiba is like a Cyberpunk formed by fundamentals that don't match Cyberpunk and this goes beyond it's psychological posture. Kaiba's trait is something primarily thought to attract a smaller audience but that consequently is what drove that same audience away from it, in fact, Kaiba's world seems too desolate at the same time confused to declare a definitive description - it's an alienating panorama, The technology is esoteric enough to be akin to magic but grounded enough so that we can recognize it as such. Its atmosphere manages to be flourishing, cosmic and spiritual even as it veers into futurism. The characters having a delicate, bubbly and simplistic appearance, with a somewhat pastelized colorization. Its pacing differs from other Yuasa's works in addition to being more convenient in relation to what each episode focuses on, it also tries to veto something that manages to be perceptible and understood with only what happens in the framing instead of being extremely dependent on its script, thus having moments in the work with silent segments, while the dialogue itself is much simpler than its usual;
In other words, in Kaiba, Story isn't delivered transcriptively, rather it consolidates with a "Show, don't tell" style of storytelling, and this, at least for me, makes all the characters more "reachable" and consequently, it gives a lot of emphasis to the expressiveness that captivated me so much when I saw it initially.
It's impossible for me to delve into everything Kaiba delivers, I haven't even touched in the symbolic portions and other highly-interesting points, but I feel that any focus I could give on any given aspect of it is already useful enough to demonstrate what I appreciate about it. And it was really a case of having watched it "at the right time", I wouldn't be able to see the me beforehand immersing myself with genuineness, much less I would see it in the future as something as emotionally relevant to me as it is in the period I've watched it - Kaiba is not only a transhumanist commentary translated into a language I can understand, but it's also focused on exploitation and how our psyche can be affected by it; as well as a meditation on the malleability of identity, individuality and memory and how we take it for granted, repressing what's most harmful to us and moving from body to body to escape what we perceive as dangerous in itself; getting to know Kaiba's behind the scenes was quite crucial to the experience knowing that even for Yuasa this is his most personal job, and it's really understandable.
Virtually everything about this anime evokes an empathic and great feeling in me. If the second ep didn't fall to me as a brief shallow slipslide, I'd say I care about everything in this anime, even the OST (a highlight for getting away from the very flashy standard, it's something extremely sublime that mostly plays with Ambient Pop, Progressive Electronic, Glitch and Post-Industrial with a gratifying sound design) which, in particular, was the light of the 5 days I spent with a huge fever and flu at the end of the year; It was the only thing I kept hearing on certain days, and it really made me feel less worse, making all that pain all the more bearable.
