AWN’s anime columnist Andrew Osmond enthusiastically recommends an older anime title, set in a world with smart glasses, originally broadcast in 2007, currently streaming on Netflix.
Most of my anime coverage for AWN features new titles. This week’s column is an exception, though it’s focusing on a series, Den-noh Coil, that’s easily accessible – the 26-part serial is streaming on Netflix. Originally broadcast in 2007, Den-noh Coil is a delight; it’s also bogglingly ingenious. It’s old-school cyberpunk meets My Neighbor Totoro, and how the series combines those impossibly different things is its greatest feat.
Den-noh Coil (alternatively written Dennou Coil) is science-fiction, but it’s less a future tech story than an alternate tech story. That is, it imagines real technology skewing in a slightly different way to reshape the world. Many alt-technology stories are steampunk, from Disney’s Atlantis: The Lost Empire to epic anime films like Steamboy and Laputa, full of overbuilt airships and submarines. But Den-noh Coil is set in the present day and its big tech is… smart glasses.
Yes, I see you rolling your eyes and chortling that the idea’s more than a decade out of date. But Den-noh Coil is less about predicting the future than reimagining the present and telling a radically different kind of story. I’ll explain more about that below, but first, here’s an extended promo video which gives a good idea of what Den-noh Coil feels like.
Through the VR glass
In Den-noh Coil, pretty much everyone uses smart glasses, though one group has a special affinity with them: kids. The glasses are multipurpose devices, like mobile phones in our world. You can, indeed, make calls with the glasses – crook your fingers, think of your glasses-wearing acquaintance, and you’ll be put through. But more to the point, you can see a huge range of cyber-objects through your glasses, overlaid on the world so perfectly that they’re part of the world.
For instance, there are virtual animals – loveable pets and trained minions both. Some look like real animals – Den-noh Coil’s most adorable character is a stumpy, gormless virtual dog called Densuke, with scarily convincing AI. You can’t feel his fur, but you can see him, play with him and even pick him up. That’s because the glasses project your own “cyberbody,” synched with your real body so you can manipulate virtual objects fluidly and fluently. Other people have more fanciful cyber familiars, like a scene-stealing troupe of squeaky furballs.
Okay, all that’s cute. But it’s far cleverer than that.
The point of the glasses is that the kids are almost never looking at screens, on their phones or laptops. If they need to type anything, their glasses provide a virtual keyboard in a blink. Den-noh Coil’s kids are immersed fully in cyberspace, and at the same time they’re running around their town like maniacs, with a gusto to impress an AI-hating grump like Hayao Miyazaki.
The show is set in a fictional Japanese town called Daikoku – not quite as rural as Totoro, but still very old-fashioned. There’s not much high-rise, no gaudy neon, no giant screens. The kids run round as they would have done 50 or 100 years ago, dashing down narrow alleys, exploring scrubland and empty buildings. They hunt for bugs, which is one of the most traditional Japanese kids’ pastimes imaginable. Except now they’re hunting cyber bugs, like Pokemon Go! but 10 times realer.
These youngsters are drawn with a freehand pliability and sympathy which does honor Totoro. Last week, when I was discussing the series Medalist, I highlighted how many anime series alternate between rudimentary animation and bursts of far more impressive movement. Den-noh Coil, though, raises the bar far higher in its character work, to the point that even its limited animation feels imbued with life.
Unsurprisingly, the series involved multiple animators feted in fandom, starting with its overall creator Mitsuo Ito, who I’ll say more about later. Its Chief Animation Directors included Toshiyuki Inoue, whose work is showcased at this link, and Takeshi Honda, whom I interviewed here. The third Chief Animation Director was Yoshimi Itazu, who I also interviewed: he’d go on to direct the singular anime short Pigtails, below.
The best of both worlds
Fans of anime director Mamoru Hosoda should consider how Den-noh Coil anticipates two of Hosoda’s films, Summer Wars (which opened in 2009, two years after Den-noh Coil) and Belle (2021). All of these anime work to reconcile cyber-worlds with the old, traditional Japan which someone like Miyazaki would recognize. Significantly, all three titles are grounded in the Japanese countryside, not Tokyo neon.
The difference is that Summer Wars and Belle each play across two worlds, whereas Den-noh Coil merges then into one. In part 4 of Den-noh Coil, a gang of boys fight one very resourceful girl, and it’s a full-on war, with laser beams and force shields. It’s a battle of hacks and viruses, the kind of thing you’d find in an old cyberpunk novel like William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and it looks like a bombastic firefight from Star Wars. Yet the wonderful joke is that these are still just preteen kids, fighting for supremacy in an elementary school, like the Simpsons episode, “Bart the General.”
Then there are the adult authorities. There are giant-sized red beanbag meanies, twice the height of a kid, zooming around called “Searchys.” They’re cleaning programs, and they don’t take much care about what they clean up. With their whirring sound effects and their chirpy cries of “Searchy!” they feel irresistibly like Doctor Who monsters.
The series eases us into this mad world. A new girl, Yuko, moves to Daikoku and becomes enmeshed with the locals. There’s the resourceful fighting girl we mentioned earlier, Amasawa (her first name is Yuko too, but she won’t answer to that). Amasawa is obsessed with collecting bugs, doing other weird things (like kidnapping Yuko’s dog Densuke), and she’s deeply solitary. So is another local boy, Harakawa, who had a friend who died tragically, and who’s morbidly fascinated by an urban-legend phantom called “Michiko.”
There are other anime about cyberspace and urban legends, like Serial Experiments Lain and Boogiepop Phantom, the latter on Crunchyroll. They’re good series, but they’re chilly affairs about intensely lonely youngsters, where Harakawa and Amasawa could have been leading characters. Instead, Den-noh Coil is a blessedly warm series. Harakawa and Amasawa are crucial to the story, but they’re surrounded by the kindhearted Yuko (our main viewpoint); the hilarious, endearing tearaway boy scamp Daichi; and Yuko’s high-energy little sis Kyokyo, who’s extremely like Mei from Totoro.
Far-out and frightening
There are many more characters, which the series sets up leisurely, followed by some far-out middle episodes. In one of them, the kids get infected by a “virus” of virtual beards that turn out to be whole civilizations of AI beings, racing through accelerated history. It feels almost like a Futurama or Rick and Morty episode that’s strayed in, but the story isn’t retconned; it’s just accepted as another side of Den-noh Coil’s world. It’s followed by a supremely sad tale of an abandoned cyber-dinosaur; you can take much of this series as an animal rights allegory.
Viewers may be frustrated by the mystery story arc running through the first half, which unfolds slowly and then gets dropped for the wild middle episodes. Part 14 is mostly a recap, though with a couple of important new scenes that shouldn’t be skimmed. The show’s second half dives back into the mystery with increasingly heavy plotting, some needless. Certain plot strands and characters could have been merged, and a few explanations are dolloped messily on us in the closing stretch.
But are the last episodes worth seeing? Heavens, yes. There’s a terrifically scary horror-film set-piece, as kids are menaced by shadow-ghosts in mist that feel inspired by the old flick The Fog (the 1980 original, not the dire remake.) But the series also makes time to reflect on death and grief through children’s eyes. A few ambiguities will displease some viewers as cop-outs, but the underlying feelings and sentiments are true. There’s also an interesting suggestion that people needn’t become friends to connect deeply, nor that broader friendship is for everyone. But by the time you finish, the characters are your friends.
In Japan, Den-noh Coil was shown on a primetime slot in 2007 – 6.30 on Saturday evenings on NKK Educational TV. That was exceptional – by then, the vast majority of TV anime was already aired in the dead of night, as I’ve explained in a previous column. The director and co-writer Mitsuo Iso is famed as an outstanding animator on titles including Ghost in the Shell – one of the most famous cyberpunk films ever made – as well as End of Evangelion. There’s a broader showcase of his work here.
What Iso did next
Netflix is also streaming a more recent Iso series, the six-part The Orbital Children, which was released in 2022. It’s about children struggling to survive when their space station is damaged. Later, the plot gets complicated by a super Artificial Intelligence which can allegedly see the future.
Like Den-noh Coil, Orbital Children is lovely-looking (Toshiyuki Inoue returned to contribute animation). Once more, there are winningly pliable-looking character designs, and action that takes full advantage of the low-gravity space station. One set-piece has two boys tussling down the length of the structure until they accelerate manically out of control, bouncing off surfaces like pinballs. The younger kids are appealing, their foibles funny and sweet. The music, animation and little details will all reward rewatching.
And yet I found Orbital Children disappointing, deflating badly in the second half. There’s surprisingly little suspense, while more than one climactic scene relies on character relationships that we don’t care enough about. The plot elaborations lead to some stodgy exposition, even as later developments can feel boringly silly and old-hat. More than once, something big happens and then afterwards the script explains that the reasons behind it weren’t as hackneyed as they seemed. But it doesn’t make the action more engaging, and the “real” rationales aren’t much more interesting or convincing than the hackneyed ones.
The last episode takes the characters into cosmic, far-out territory, but here the anime’s handsome visuals seem inadequate. It’s the kind of finale that needed the madness of a studio like Trigger (Kill la Kill) or Science Saru, and its “cosmic” visions have nothing on Akira or Children of the Sea. Orbital Children reaches for the stars, but I prefer the augmented Earth-bound visions of Den-noh Coil from nearly 20 years ago.
