Netflix brings us an anime about a dystopian utopia without people.
SUMMARY
Humans managed to destroy the Earth (and have another FIVE world wars), leaving only our AI robots to watch over the planet. However, after humans have presumably been gone for millennia, two robots, A37 and E92 (Rosario Dawson and David Tennant/Kyoko Hikami and Kentaro Ito), find a small child in a suspended animation container on the factory farm Eden 3. They keep the child, named Sara (Ruby Rose Turner/Marika Kouno), but have to keep her in hiding from the robot overlord Zero (Neil Patrick Harris/Koichi Yamadera), who believes that humans are inherently evil and must be destroyed. They join a group of renegade robots, but after Sara grows up, Zero learns of her existence and now Sara has to find a way to survive and possibly resurrect humanity.
END SUMMARY
It’s a little weird that this is a TV show, since it’s just four episodes that, if you took out the credits, add up to only about 90 minutes. It’s not like this was just a “season 1,” either, since the show pretty much wraps everything up at the end. It really seems like this could have been a movie. I guess it just came down to how the crew making the show felt about it, or maybe how Netflix felt about marketing it. In any case, you can reasonably get through this entire series in the amount of time of a regular film.
While the plot of this film is nothing particularly new, the movie does a great job of creating entertaining characters, particularly Sara’s surrogate parents. If you have ever asked, “would it be funny to have Scrooge McDuck voicing a robot,” ask no more, because it’s on full display in this film. David Tennant and Rosario Dawson are adorable as the bumbling pair who keep trying to take on human mannerisms in an attempt to be able to better relate to their new child. While they don’t quite ever manage to be “human,” they are still able to convey love and affection towards their young charge as well as most human parents.
The theme of the series, as with many such set-ups, is that humanity can always be better. Even when we screw up, all we really need to do to fix it is to finally learn to work together and move forward. Unfortunately, while this may be true, it becomes very difficult to think that humanity will ever be decent to each other when we can’t even be minorly inconvenienced to protect each other, apparently. I’m not saying that we are doomed, I’m just saying that it’s harder to not believe that. Hopefully, enough people see stories like this to be convinced that we can work together to actually try working together.
Overall, it’s a decent series. The fact that it’s short makes it a bit easier to recommend.
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When I saw the concept of the anime, I instantly thought about the late 90s anime Kurogane Communication. That series involves robots adopting a red-headed girl who was in stasis after a catastrophic world war, humanity having the possibility of being extinct, and another robot who wants humanity to end. The timing and plotting does look a bit different, but the plot points do seem very similar.
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I have not heard of this anime. Will check it out. Thanks!
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Sure thing. It’s a mad underrated anime. Kurogane Communication is also the happiest post-apocalyptic work I’ve seen.
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