Reviews for Dennou Coil (8.2)

INTRO [Kira-bugs! Got to catch ‘em all!]

Dennou Coil is one of the best family oriented action series I know of. Although it is aimed at a younger audience it also has a lot of attention in its writing, visuals, and storytelling, easily elevating it to something far more than a proxy battle anime. What sticks out the most is its great presentation of augmented reality. You know, like in Pokemon GO where the world around you is full of digital creatures you can only see and interact with by using a device. It does that here, plus it gives the players the motivation to look around for resources they have to gather so they can cash them in for digital currency and with it buy all sorts of weaponry. It’s not a throwaway gimmick, it builds an entire world around it and explores it in numerous ways, especially with the pocket worlds called Obsolete Spaces that resemble ghost towns made of two-dimensional buildings. They even bothered to include glitches and errors in the program for more realism in the unreal. It even becomes philosophical and existential at times, giving it a layer of depth you would normally not expect in such a type of a show. It’s never something nearly as heavy as the stuff you will find in Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments Lain since it’s overall light-hearted and optimistic in tone. But it’s also not like K-On where there is no actual conflict and nobody has to struggle for achieving something.

VISUALS [According to a rumor on the net Miss Michico will get you!]

Despite its age it also holds up in terms of animation and visuals by having very detailed body language and facial expressions, like they used actual actors to do the motions and then drew over them, plus very creative skirmishes when it comes to action. The setting in general feels very lively, despite being a village out in the boonies. The normal world is very detailed and the ethereal details that are added to it through augmented reality make it fun to look at and explore.

PLOT [So put your grasses on, nothing will be wong]

With that said it’s also a niche series since it doesn’t have the usual stuff that attracts most casual fans. Unless you really like science fiction, you won’t be drawn in by its simple and semi-episodic plot. Also although it has a lot of action it is never epic in scale, as is in Digimon or Yugioh. It’s not about saving the world from complete destruction; it’s more about simple skirmishes amongst children which almost never cause any actual damage or injury because everything happens in an augmented reality. That means for anyone not wearing those sci-fi glasses it comes off as elaborate LARPING. It is very important for the kids since it can damage their expensive glasses, but for the rest it’s make-belief and doesn’t actually affect the real world. Until it does in the second half of the series, when rogue AIs cause actual problems in the electronic systems. That is actually the worst part in the whole show.

The plot starts as a silly scenario about kids playing with fake guns while hunted by a huge toy. Then it gets somewhat deep with stories around AI programs causing all sorts of trouble and making the kids ponder about serious issues. And then it gets dark with a murder mystery, people falling into comas by a cyber ghost’s curse, and an avenging youth out to deal with a cover-up made by a mega-corporation. It sounds like a cool escalation, from a silly slice of life to a weird combo of .hack//SIGN and Sword Art Online but the atmosphere doesn’t change much, it remains light-hearted, and most of the weird dark web stuff come down to obscure metaphysics that don’t have a plausible explanation, which is not like the explanations you were getting in the earlier parts. Basically the final arc will not be as thriller-ish as it should be and it won’t be that down to earth or even realistic compared to the rest of the show. It can be off-putting if you were in it for the silly kids LAPRING over digital peanuts, and not for the sinister megacorporation conspiracy that covers up crimes with bizarre metaphysics.

A nice touch is the parents who actually notice something is off and eventually try to stop their kids from dealing with a game that becomes progressively more illegal and dangerous. How many shows bother to have parents, and how many of those shows with parents actually prevent the children from doing dangerous things? The main reason parents usually don’t exist or the kids are orphans is for allowing young children to do all sorts of ridiculous things that would normally be stopped by the adults. You have to appreciate the show for touching a subject almost any other anime sweeps under the rug.

CAST [Boku Satchi!]

The most average part of the show is its human characters, basically stock character archetypes of children. The lively one, the timid one, the brass one, and so on. Like in most such shows, they get fleshed out through their interactions rather their very short pasts or goals in life. It can be an issue for many who prefer characters being interesting from the very beginning because of something in their past or a certain superpower they have. You also need some tolerance with middle-aged women voicing 10 year-old boys. The support cast on the other hand, the cyber-creatures, are awesome! From cats that play ROCK-PAPER-SCISSORS with their ears to cyber-cops in the form of huge smiling toys, they are all very memorable and creative in the way they behave. Unfortunately most will just notice they are not firing energy blasts or have 52 evolution stages each and will not bother much with them.

CONCLUSION [Cash in your rare Meta-bugs for powerful Meta-tags.]

As a whole Dennou Coil is definitely standing out and I do recommend it, even when I know it can’t be unappreciated by most since it wasn’t trying to be too much of a single genre thus it has a hard time attracting any specific audience. It doesn’t have a lot of action for shonentards and it’s too smart for little children to follow properly. Most casuals who want a lot of action or plenty of character interactions instead of theme exploration or good directing can’t appreciate such a show, because they are not actually watching anime for the artistry and prefer easily digestible mainstream stuff. It’s why Dennou Coil went completely unnoticed during its initial airing and is considered a failure in terms of marketing. On the other hand a pile of shit like Fairy Tail is considered a major success because it made a lot of money despite having horrible writing and relying heavily on fan service.

Thanks for visiting and I hope you rate the review. No, I really do! But more than that, I hope you enjoyed the series as much as I did. The review is based on the Ureshii HD fansubs, and I may revise it once the DVDs are out.


Quick Take: Cyberpunk comes to 5th grade. What might the world look like in 20 years, when even kids can go online using just special glasses, when the net is everywhere? And when the net is everywhere, so are viruses.


The series is centered around the events that happen to a Japanese middle-school circle of friends who are confronted by a cyber-mystery. The director (Mitsuo Iso, Ghost in the Shell, Ocean Waves, Porco Rosso, Only Yesterday, Neon Genesis Evangelion) shows a Miyazaki-like interest in the interior life of children and the ability to spin a fascinating kids tale. It feels more like an extended movie than a series, and there is quality is in every cel. This series is so good that it won the media Seiun Award (Japanese equivalent of the Nebula Award for science fiction) for 2007, as well as other awards.  Don't overlook this gem, it does a great job of speculative fiction and storytelling at the same time. It's appropriate for all ages.


Animation: Animation does not get much better than this series. Madhouse Studio and Bandai combined to produce this, and with huge resources, excellent technical staff and great seiyuu comes a technically excellent animation. The faces really move; backgrounds have movie-quality detail, and thousands of cells contribute to excellent action, while the effects are clever and interesting to the eye. The first half of the series sets up the last half so well that, by the time the last few episodes are underway, you feel like the kids are family. 2D and 3D animation are seamless. No dropoff in quality. Inbetweens are excellent, and the backgrounds are awesome. The color palate looks like it was dropped in from a summer day. Well done, and no missteps, and there's a lot of gee-whiz factor too! 10 for animation, yet different from Bysoukou 5cm and Shinkai-san's work, which is breathtaking also.


Sound: I loved the soundboard work on this. Foley and sfx are seamless and immersive. Quad directionality was present, but not as front-back as I'd have liked. Seiyuu are veteran professional actors and actresses, and are extremely good at their craft (if, at 37 each for the leads, a little old-sounding for their characters, at times). In particular, the use of veteran Houko Kuwashima to voice Isako is genius, because she nails the part. Technically, it's a 10.


I enjoyed the JPOP montage op Prism (プリズム) by Ayako Ikeda but it is really short. The ending is very emotionally satisfying ("Sora no Kakera [空の欠片; A Fragment of the Sky]" by Ayako Ikeda). There are no missteps at all, and the only knock is the occasionally old-sounding leads. 9.5-10 here.


Story: Ok, it's a mystery, so I can't reveal without spoilers; if you've read the manga illustrated by Mizuki Kuze, you'll notice both similarities and differences. The director did excellent work, but the manga is a slightly different narrative, so don't expect a scene-by-scene equivalence. 

The setup is that it's been 11 years since the introduction of internet-connected, augmented reality glasses and visors. The Net is everywhere, on every street, in every shop.  Yūko Okonogi moves with her family to Daikoku City, the technological center of the emerging half-virtual world. Yūko joins her grandmother's "investigation agency" comprised of children equipped with virtual tools and powerful metatags. She quickly crosses paths with Yūko Amasawa, an expert hacker of the virtual environment, as Amasawa relentlessly seeks to "unlock" the mystery of a computer virus that emerges from an inaccessible corrupted space. The story starts small, but doesn't stay small.


Anyone who misses this series will be missing one of the most enjoyable kids shows of the year. The solving of the mystery is text, but the relationships of the kids is the subtext. Except for a large number of "recap" episodes, the pacing is fine. I found the ending to be the best of last season's series, and on par with the best of the Miyazaki movies. 9 on this scale.


Character: In this series, young girls get to be the heros. The character design is similar to Miyazaki characters, so if you enjoyed his movies, you'll like this series. There is good character design, and excellent character development. All important characters are kids, so there is not much byplay with the adult world, but the themes of friendship and doing one's best are nicely fleshed out. It's a kids series, so there are no morally obscure points, and everything seems to work out fine... and characters are not the stereotyped Japanese archtypes, so I give it an 8 for design and a 8 for development.


Value and Enjoyment: I enjoyed this series almost as much as my favorite for the year, Seirei no Moribito, and it's perhaps a much better sci-fi story than Seirei is a fantasy story. The production values do not lag, the story is tight, the animation never drops off, and the characters are moe cute. From the first frame to the last, the quality is all on the screen. It's worth collecting, and you will show it to your kids with pride. It's one of the best series of the year, and I enjoyed it enough to marathon it again. 9 on value, 9 on enjoyment.

Conclusion: SNAG this one. Burn, Rent or buy it, and keep it for your kids. This one is like a Miyazaki series, and will warm your heart.

Dennou Coil is a thing of beauty, and nowhere more so than in its enchanting portrayal of a different world - a cyberspace overlaid on the real. Beautifully realized, it's fantastic without ever becoming unrealistic, and the consistency and attention to detail is staggering.

Elegant as the show may be in its own right, I couldn't help reading it as an allegory for the early days of the internet. We have playful children exploring the new reality, discovering the bugs and what can be done with them, and all the while caught in a constant arms race with the authorities. Just as occurred in real life, the latter's draconian clampdown on any minor hacking leads to a total lack of respect from the children, who realise too late that there are genuine dangers out there - although here the threat is not organized crime, but something far more sinister.

The plot is suitably convoluted, and manages to build up a genuine sense of mystery and suspense. It's slightly unrealistic that there would be this much ignorance about something artificial and recent, but the show excuses it well - collapsed companies, corrupt organizations and any number of individuals with their own agendae conspire to keep the truth behind a veil of omnipresent fog.

The literal fog - the cyberspace's response to version mismatches - serves as an example both of the realism of the show and the excellent animation. The visual effects used to represent glitches, fogging and the various cyber-tools can't have been easy, but are done flawlessly; the effort this must have taken is mind-boggling. The general animation is also well-drawn, but curiously muted; rather than using colour to draw a distinction between virtual and real a la The Matrix, here the implication behind the overwhelmingly drab browns and olives seems to be that neither of the worlds is truly vibrant. The effect is particularly acute when it comes to the characters; they appear odd, even ugly, and it takes several episodes for the viewer to adjust. For a more conventionally cyberpunk series this would be perfect, but grim hopelessness is rarely Dennou Coil's mood, leaving the overall effect rather dissonant.

Voice acting is good, and the music well-chosen; the opening theme in particular contributes greatly to the feel of mystery and unease. This feeling is the series' strength, but also its greatest weakness: too much is built up, and the ending resolution is woefully inadequate. That the series saw fit to introduce an irrelevant minor character in the second-to-last episode when it lacks the time to properly resolve its main plotline was particularly infuriating; likewise the three or more (depending on how one counts) "filler" episodes about halfway through the series, although they constitute some of the most enjoyable in terms of showing off the beautiful world.

Characters generally are well-handled; rather than a number of "primary" characters there is a very tight focus on a single lead, Yasako, and then a spread of greater and lesser others. It works; we see any number of sides of Yasako, but only know the others through her eyes, which fits perfectly with the series' mystery sensibilities; while almost everyone seems to have good intentions, our perceptions are inevitably clouded by the prejudices of the genuinely kind-hearted Yasako.

On paper Dennou Coil sounds near-perfect, and it is certainly a very good show. But somehow it never quite comes together; the lack of an adequate conclusion in what is very much a mystery-style show is too great a flaw to be withstood, however good the remainder. Dennou Coil remains an enjoyable series, and it's also made real advances in the portrayal of cyber worlds; its style will no doubt be profoundly influential. But it's not quite one of the all-time greats.

Story
New technology of cyber glasses allows the viewing of a sublayer digital world that can be seen while wearing them. As is often the case, children flock to the new technology and are more attuned and hardcore, then their slow to adjust parents. This anime mostly follows the exploration of this new digital world by a group of elementary kids and how it pulls them away from reality, while they discover the darker side of it. They struggle with their lamented pasts and come around in the end to appreciate themselves, each other and the real world better for it.

Characters
The children progress very far during the story, they grow and their emotions and friendships are expressed very deeply. Yuko Amasawa was my favorite character, who is tormented from an accident that happened to her brother at an early age. Her story and quest to soothe her pain, is one of many major plot lines that wind through the entire series. She goes from being an aloof classmate to finally one that is able to accept friendship. This characters development was the most interesting to me. Yuko Okonogi is the "nice girl" who, in the beginning, appears timid, but friendly and is used in the story to explore the other characters and is usually the catalyst for their changing feelings towards themselves and each other. Other characters are nearly just important to the story and as well fleshed out making this group of characters one of the more endearing, found in a sci-fi anime.

Sound
The sound in this anime does a good job of providing an undercurrent of tension when called for. The ending and opening tracks didn't stand out in my mind. The voice actors are very good, accomplishing the challenge of conveying the children' s emotions and making them seem real to me.

Animation
I liked the animation very much. It uses creative effects to differentiate the digital world from the real one, especially in crossing over 2D textures, say for a digital wall only seen with the glasses into a perceptible form for someone using them in a 3D world. It was pretty cool how they envisioned areas that have not been recently "updated", having the digital counterpart differing from the actual world. The creators had to be creative to get the interesting idea of two overlapping worlds across to the audience and I think the techniques they invented helped me experience that world they envisioned.

Value
Do you like the Matrix or consider yourself a cyberpunk, just waiting for a virtual world? If yes to either you will definitely like this anime. Besides creating a rich living and overlapping digital world, which is an innovative idea, the complex characters and storyline should keep you interested through the entire story. The unwinding discovery of the kids inner demons and intricacies of the electric world kept me watching for hours straight.

Afterward
Not ordinary in any way. This was anime was a completely new experience. It was difficult to anticipate anything and almost everything about the series was a fresh take on technology and the future of human interaction. I was satisfied after watching this series, which is becoming increasingly rare in these days of overdone concepts and unoriginality that to me might seriously start a decline in this form of storytelling. This isn't a light hearted story, it seems very real and dark, so don't expect to come away happy, but instead introspective. FIN

I won't elaborate on each detail (animation, story, character...) too much. You can look at the other reviewers comments.

Dennou Coil was one of those anime that draws you into this different, but relatable world. The story was good in my opinion, but, like many other animes, it tended to shove too much details and terms that don't make crap sense towards the end. I mean if they wanted to introduce such ideas they should have honestly introduced it slowly each episode instead of giving a large injection of it at once.

But dont get me wrong, I really enjoyed this series. The animation quality was excellent and consistent throughout the entire series . what pisses me off is that some anime series start off with excellent fluency and style, but deteriorate after several episodes.

Another aspect that really left me with an impression is the ending. The ending was simply excellent in my opinion. I won't elaborate more, because you can find out for yourself :)

-booyah

Dennou Coil is about young teenage girls and boys being all in elementary school and stuff. It's also a better cyberpunk/sci-fi show than Matrix is. Awkward!

Art & Animation

Dennou Coil looks simple - a bunch of children doing realistic stuff in a warmly coloured and sparsely populated suburban world. At the same time, it's very well-made with good animation and excellent atmosphere, even if this atmosphere is the seemingly trivial world of elementary school. There are no extravagant designs, some of what is there might even be seen as sorta, well, ugly, but even these ugly bits or, rather, especially the ugly bits reveal the purity of this show. There is no moe, no lolis, these are children, this is their fat cyberdog, and that creature is their granny, god spare me from her visage. The other side of the coin - the cyber world - shares the simple and pure designs, but swaps the colour palette and portrays an often confused virtual world, glitchy, unfinished or no longer true to the world not so virtual. One might wish for some better looking designs or more intricate portrayal of cyber reality, at the same time the one we got serves the purpose of the show perfectly. I'd say that the conceptual purity and fine execution deserves a 9.

Sound

Just like with the Art section, it's a fine work done here, in the sound department. Dennou Coil uses audio hints in the show in an effective manner, characters are often guided by sounds, and this is portrayed very well. I'd say that the actors have done an amazing work, too, portraying practically children very faithfully. Not all of them are perfect for their roles, Isako's voice is just that tiny bit too adult-sounding, but the acting itself is very good. OP/ED were above average tunes, but nothing too extraordinary. They weren't annoying and even had some atmosphere, so props for that. I can't remember any particular BGM, tho, so it must have been very fitting, haha.
Solid job, but not distinctive enough to net a 9.
8/10

Story

Story is a bit confusing, and not all of it makes sense even after some thinking, at the same time it has several qualities that I find very impressive. I'll try and break it down into a few core points I find the most important.

(1) the way cyberworld is portrayed here feels like a pretty fresh way to cheat the senses enough for awesome cyberpowers and stuff, yet it is also quite plausible technologically. Well, some of it is. Servers are obscured from sight, their boring computer processes portrayed instead in an exciting graphic way with viruses (or rather the ocassional cyberbeing) being black and glitchy, but creatures very much, and things like anti-viruses looking like silly, but deadly (to viruses) laser blow up dolls or the process of formatting data being shown as elaborate digital devices wiping everything off the damn place like some sort of digital superweapons. Why do I mention this? Well, because aspects like these might seem like they're stretching the plausibility, but the concepts behind them actually remain fairly solid, and all of this does make for a more exciting watch, don't ya think. The basic tech behind this world is very plausible.

(2) the characters (well, most of them) act in a very emotionally realistic way. Children are just children - yeah, sure, they're quite brave, but they also engage in silly children like things, but none of it is overdone here (well, there might have been a "poop" too many here and there, but eh...). Their obsessions and fears and silly sympathies, it's all shown here, and it all was very genuine, I feel. Some might not be as moved by this as I was, but perhaps it's a problem with their childhood, haha (but, really, I'm sorry if this is the case).

(3) related to the previous point is the separation of the children and adult world. When it's said in an episode that some of it feels like a dream, meaning the virtual world, I feel that this can also be attributed to the whole experience of children - the bare streets, interactions only with other children, and the only adult figures being the not-entirely-grown-up Auntie and the way-past-being-an-adult Granny. The parents of Yasako play only a symbolic role, and when their worlds do collide, it's in an affectionate way, yet there's a clearly visible gap between the world of the children and the world of the adults. This gap, while portrayed only from one side, is being observed from the other, and it makes for a great display of how important their world is to the children (or, rather, early teenagers? ugh, it's such a messy age they've chosen!).

(4) the mysteries of the cyberworld are very intriguing and, while their resolution wasn't entirely satisfactory, it makes for both a material for thought and an emotional journey. Not sure how to expand on this without spoiling something, but I will say that the mystery parts are where the fiction part of the sci-fi are the strongest in the show, and, what's worst/best, is that this fiction is of the kind that people are unsure about even in our very real world. Souls, deaths, and other sides? People don't agree well on these topics at all. This show doesn't subscribe to any of the sides in these debates too clearly, but it does explore these notions to an extent, thus, making for an interesting thought material. These topics are always emotionally loaded in the real life, too, and this show uses this to great extent, squeezing out emotional, yet conceptually loaded tears. If that's a thing, even.

(5) there was a nice and consequential buildup of intrigues and questions during the show, and it even resolves and answers most of them, but some of the answers, well, might not feel adequate enough for all that buildup. The core issues get resolved pretty satisfactory, but there was some residual disappointment. But nothing's perfect, prepare for that.

8/10

Characters

I already touched slightly on this, but this is the best aspect of this show, imo. I already noted that I feel the characters are emotionally and psychologically very believable and realistic, and, even more so, due to most of them being children, I also feel that the world of a child/early teenager (messy age.... messy!) is portrayed very faithfully as well. What's more, is that the characters are kind-hearted and cute - it's easy to grow to like these kids, and the attachment makes for a nice and cathartic emotional experience. The themes this show visits and makes the kids experience are all a bit on the heavy side, even if they seem silly at first, and their experiences are genuine, and I'm not sure if you even can call them naive - well, sure, they're just children, but I don't think that even all grown up people can deal with most of this stuff effortlessly. At best, they've learned to accept that some of this stuff is sad and confusing, and you get no answers.

A special mention goes to Densuke, who carries the heaviest emotional and conceptual burden in the show, imo. You were great.

9/10

Value & Enjoyment

this show is great for both those looking for a heartwarming (and tearing) emotional fix and those looking for interesting sci-fi shows. it's an unusual combination, but one that works extraordinary well, and is an easy recommendation. it's also a good show if you're tired of edgelords and focus on tits in your anime, this show has little of that. how awesome is that? (it's 9 awesome on a scale of 1 to 10)

I personally really liked it, too, as you might have guessed by now. I was reluctant to watch this show, because of, well, elementary school, I mean, they're just kids, right? Haha, I'm glad I finally watched this. 9/10

Meh. Starts out building a nice story (if a bit aimless), turns into a monster-of-the-week for a while, then tries to wrap it all up in a couple episodes.

It doesn't work. Shock, I know! To make matters worse, a number of major threads from the first half are entirely dropped in the end for no real reason. Characters pull deus ex machina left and right and omg X is related to Y and Z saves them in the end.

This had some real potential, which is why I kept watching. Interesting world and system, interesting characters, and enough details to hint at a really carefully thought out universe for all this to take place in with possibly deep reasons, etc.

It was none of those, and the connections they tried to form were made through monologuing in the last two episodes instead of actual revelation. It's a real tease for a programmer / geek / techy, but nothing pans out, and no real insights or philosophies remain in the end.

---

Technically, the art is consistent and high quality throughout, and the CG and animation are blended better than I see the vast majority of the time. Major kudos there.

Sound gets a bit redundant, with the same ominous-woosh returning endless times. The show as a whole seems to lack a proper 'sound stage' for areas - it's background music, voice, and visual-effect-matching sfx, and nothing more. Areas don't sound like real areas because there's no echoing in the hard-surfaced hospital areas, no background 'texture' to outdoor areas, etc.

On a style note, some of the art and voice acting seem to forget that this story is set in an elementary school. Amasawa for example is extraordinarily mature-looking and low-voiced for that age.

It's really the story that ruins it, unfortunately, because it sounds like it should be good, and it looks like it could be at a number of times. But it's not a cohesive whole, and it lacks staying power for the parts that are.

Dennou Coil should have been a great series. Instead, it's merely a pretty good one.

Animation:
The animation quality is extraordinarily high. It blends cg and traditional animation seemlessly. The art style is highly reminiscent of Studio Ghibli, but with more green. The only complaint I have here is that I've never particularly liked said art style.

Sound:
The soundwork is fairly good, but a number of the seiyuu seemed to have thought that they were voicing teenagers instead of ten-year-olds.

Story:
The story is kind of a mess. The first ten or so episodes mostly focus of introducing the characters, as well as throughing out the occasional vague hint about what's going on. After that, there's three episodes of filler. Then there's a recap episode. Then the plot starts in earnest.

This is the part where it all falls apart. There's three different climaxes, and the expostion is flying non-stop. It's very difficult to keep up with what's going on, and some things appear to have had multiple, contradictory explanations. It also seems like the staff came up with three or four different plots to use, and, rather than having to pick one, decided to use parts of them all. While all of the plotlines that happen are fairly decent, it leads to a disjointed feeling.

Character:
Dennou Coil has a lot of characters. The problem is that most of them aren't important in the least. It spends a lot of time following characters that never actually affect the story, or the characters that are actually important. The characters are likable and have some depth, I just wish more of them did something.