Kaiba

Kaiba was screened by the anime club at uni, on the day I didn’t go, so I decided I would catch up on it as well. And that was one of the better decisions I made, because I really do believe that Kaiba is one of the most important and impressive pieces of Japanese animation I’ve ever seen. I actually put off watching the last episodes for quite some time, partly because I didn’t want the series to end, and partly because I knew it would be difficult to write these impressions and really convey what Kaiba means.

It will be incredibly sad if Kaiba goes unnoticed. Yes, the larger crowd of anime fans will ignore it. It will pass by the older guys who want to watch blushing schoolgirls pining over a clueless everyman, the girls who want angsty homoeroticism and the young guys who want nothing but fireballs shooting out of swords. Mature seinen anime, aimed at older males but with more sophisticated plots, sometimes find huge audiences but generally don’t get close to the mainstream. And Kaiba, in choosing a very simple, almost babyish visual style directly descended from Tezuka, very possibly alienated another chunk of its audience.

But Kaiba is something special. If people don’t give it a chance, that is their loss. I’ve been exposed to more arthouse animation in recent months, and this fits in there.

The story is convoluted, sometimes sloppy, but full of great characters and thought-provoking sci-fi tropes. The world of Kaiba is one where memories can be captured in physical form, whole personalities transplanted into new bodies and memories explored, even manipulated, by others. When a boy awakens with no memory of who he is, narrowly escapes being shot and ends up in a bizarre, ever-changing world where the rich may destroy bodies purely for hedonistic pleasure and the poor may toil their whole lives trying to upgrade themselves or find ways to bring their parents back into the world from a small capsule. The boy is soon adrift in this strange world of metamorphosis and debauchery. He ends up in a female body and abruptly the brutish security guard who had until then been the antagonist becomes infatuated, not only providing some comedy but eventually becoming one of the most sympathetic characters in the piece. It is this first half of the series that is its strongest, uncovering the strangeness of people living in what has become an extremely impersonal world.

The last few episodes are weaker. The climax descends into extreme cliché with the end of Popo’s story, and the final conclusion of Warp’s becomes very contrived and clumsy, concepts so lofty and overwrought that it becomes hard to continue to sympathise, but that detracts very little from the overall beauty, intelligence, daring and uniqueness of the series as a whole. I can only hope the series finds the audience it deserves.

(originally written 14.09.09)