Anime Recommendations

[robkelk]

I suspect that Dave Baranyi won't mind me re-posting his Usenet post about a current anime title (Message-ID91C3167-C0FE-4268-87D6-47ABF22D5317%anthony.baranyi@bell.net) here...

Junrui wa Suitaishimashita - Final Thoughts

"Jinrui wa Suitaishimashita" was probably the highlight anime for me during the summer 2012 anime season. This social satire sci-fi story set in a future where humanity is dying out seemed to be a sly wink at the "Collapse" theory of Jared Diamond, with a fairly generous helping of the H.G. Wells novella "The Time Machine" thrown in.

In a distant future humanity is slowly losing its grasp on technology and on cultural memory while populations continue to decrease. The story is told as the nameless narrator (as in the Time Machine) writes down her memoirs and observations of her still relatively brief life. The narrator is cynical and sarcastic – she expects nothing from other humans and only reveals herself to the Fairies, the quasi-mythical tiny creatures who appear to embody Clarke's Law that "any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic".

This is Juvenalian satire deliberately masquerading as Horatian satire. The narrator is cute, bright and outwardly friendly and harmless, but her assessment of the collapsing world around her is bitter and dark. She is fundamentally a sociopath who trusts no one but the Fairies, and yet still expects the worst from them too.

But in this future world where all of humanity is deliberately turning away from society, technology and history, everyone is a sociopath in the strictest sense. The Fairies build and mimic human societies from the past, not the slowly constricting contemporary human world. These ephemeral Fairy worlds mirror the strengths and weaknesses of humanity's past but they interest few contemporary humans except for the narrator, and she views them mostly as being personal entertainments at best and bothersome at worst.

All-in-all, the anime was brilliantly done, with surprises in every episode and a memorable, if ultimately unsympathetic protagonist. It's not a future in which I would like to live, but as a cautionary tale the series delivers its message very well.

Dave Baranyi

--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012