August 30th, 2008
Hmmmmmmm.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
It’s not the destination, it’s the journey that counts. Supposedly, anyway. It’s not as if the destination in this case is particularly bad, it’s just… a bit weird.
Yup, I’m not totally satisfied with the way Kaiba ends. “What’s new?” I hear you cry. “It’s anime, most shows end weirdly!”. But it’s been a good few weeks now since the show ended and I’ve watched episode 12 a good three or four times now to try and work out how I feel, and I’m still not really getting anywhere.
At first blush, if like me you watch it raw and your Japanese is poor to put it mildly, it’s a whole great load of mindboggling tosh. Giant blue monsters emerging out of nowhere with evil baby Warps, giant planetoids appearing out of nowhere, Neiro running through some completely unidentifiable storage room releasing giant ethereal hands that are apparently “good”… while the overall tone of the episode makes sense and the end is fairly obvious, there’s so much that appears to be just thrown in because it looks cool. Certain aspects make more sense once you take the time to consider the episode on rewatches, but on the whole it’s dissatisying that a show that has spent so much time carefully making its “world” feel so fully fleshed out just throws a lot of weird shit at the audience for no particular reason.
I suppose there’s little left to really do in this episode. The ambiguities of the story as a whole are mostly cleared up, and the characters’ emotional arcs have been pretty much played out by episode 11 - most of the characters don’t even have emotions any more, so there’s not much you can do with them! Personally I don’t think Yuasa really knew how to end the show - Copy Warp is dealt with effectively, and the Kaiba threat is well established throughout the previous episodes, but I think he thought he needed to throw in the baby Warp because a giant plant that Warp had defeated before wasn’t really going to cut it for a final episode conflict.
Baby Warp, though, doesn’t make much sense. Not only does it make the whole Warp succession thing even MORE confusing than it already was, but all his prattle about negative memories and becoming one with the Kaiba has nothing to do with anything and should realistically mean nothing to the true Warp because the whole POINT of the show has been that Warp isn’t a bad guy and that he has happy memories with Neiro. It’s ridiculous.
…and breathe. Anyway, plot issues and meaningless imagery aside, it’s hardly a BAD final episode. There’s some great animation, good action, and at least the very end is nice in an annoyingly Japanese ambiguous way.
So, the show as a whole. I have to think in terms of the whole show, not the ending, although it’s left a slightly sour taste in my mouth. So few shows show the breathtaking imagination that Kaiba did, nor the impressively secure writing, acting, music… you name it. Yuasa MOSTLY got the somewhat teenage impulses that plagued Kemonozume (in my opinion) out of his system and crafted a sensible, mature sci-fi romance like the show was marketed as. I do think he needs to spend more time on his actual stories rather than plot concepts, though - the more abstract concepts and worldbuilding in Kaiba are dealt with fantastically, but I don’t think he’s very good at properly constructing an overall story.
I don’t have a lot else to say, unfortunately, and I wish I did. I’ll pick up the show in a flash if it ever gets an English language release, but I still can’t quite put into words how the end of Kaiba has made me feel, which is a pity as it’s been by far the most interesting anime I’ve seen this year.
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August 25th, 2008
With the three elderly Copy Warps at heel and Kaiba apparently dead, Popo thinks he has the world at his feet and the monarchy in his grasp. However, his own recklessness proves to be his undoing in myriad ways as the chain of events that has led him here begins to catch up with him - and as the encroaching threat of the Kaiba plant showcases his madness, Kaiba makes his resolve clear…
This episode mostly serves to tie up Popo’s story before heading into the endgame, which makes sense. With the end of episode 9 and the reveal of Kaiba’s backstory, there’s little left to explore for Kaiba and Neiro, so before the denouement it makes perfect sense to tie up the loose ends elsewhere.
I don’t really have the same reaction to Popo that much of the Kaiba fandom has seemed to. I’ve never found him to be particularly evil, despite his attempts to kill Kaiba and poison Neiro against him. The writing makes him sympathetic in a relatively limited amount of screentime - much more so than for Vanilla in the first half of the show, whose storyline is extremely similar without the megalomaniacal aspects. The only thing I REALLY think he’s a bastard for is not letting his mum join Neiro’s family for dinner - selfish little creep, surely that one nippo isn’t really worth the hassle!
One thing I’ve given up mentioning regarding Kaiba is how it looks. We get a truly impressive action sequence as one of the skonks chases after Popo and Sate (again, another character that the show sketches out very well in a brief amount of screentimer), but it feels a little redundant to say how great the show looks. It’s a shame that a lot of people won’t have watched this show just because it looks funny when the story is generally very accessible.
But then there’s the last episode, I suppose…
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August 25th, 2008
I’ve been putting off trying to write about these final three episodes of Kaiba for a while now. I’ve watched them a fair few times, both subbed and unsubbed, and I’ve generally just been trying to make sense of them all really. so I guess I’d better get started on that front then!
Apparently this episode was recorded before any of the others, which makes perfect sense as it’s the “backstory” for Kaiba and Neiro meeting and falling in love etc. Paying attention to this episode also helps generally in that there’s several visual cues to the…somewhat odd events of the last episode in particular - for example, the scene where Kaiba’s memory comes back uses very similar animation to his “memory pouring” or whatever you want to call it in episode 12.
On its own merits, this episode is just lovely. I’m not sure whether it would make sense to start the show off with this - not only would it obviously ruin any of the buildup of the plot, but there’s so much that only really means anything if you’ve seen the previous episodes, for instance all the Dada-sama segments and the Issoudan meeting. However you take it, Kaiba and Neiro’s romance is surprisingly effective (I particularly like the scene where they’re rolling around drunk on the table - it finally makes sense of Kaiba’s pendant and it’s genuinely rather sweet and very well acted by both the animators and the seiyuu).
In some ways, though, I don’t think episode 10 does quite enough. Once you get to the end of the show, although we get the germs of the setup for the events of the finale there are still some things that I don’t think are properly developed - there’s huge swathes of Kaiba’s backstory, for instance, which I think are left that little bit TOO ambiguous to really think about, but that’s probably a story for a later post.
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July 26th, 2008
With the various Dadas under his control, Popo starts to put his final plan to take over the planet in motion - by getting Neiro to kill Kaiba and vice versa. Having brainwashed Neiro (and Cheki, after she tries to convince Neiro not to go through with it), the two ex-lovers confront each other as Popo eggs Neiro on - and not even a last minute intervention from Kichi can stop tragic events from unfolding…
Well, except for two things. One, it’s not very tragic - we already know that the Kaiba!Warp body is invincible, so “blowing him up” isn’t going to be very effective (although I can’t remember if Popo knows that - I don’t think he does, especially as he tries to poison Kaiba). Two, Kichi’s big impassioned speech to Neiro to get her to remember the truth is rather contrived - I’ve watched this episode a couple of times and it really doesn’t hold up as a dramatic device (as we have debated in the glorious AnimeSuki thread). Why Popo sits there and lets Kichi spout off is something of a mystery - he doesn’t have a weapon, but surely he could get Neiro to shoot him? Kaiba does help to jog Neiro’s memory when he draws funny pictures in the air - something which makes a lot more sense after you’ve seen episode 10, as does a lot of the stranger imagery from this episode - but I don’t think that’s enough.
Despite this, getting to this point of the show is probably the dramatic high point thus far, and episode 10 looks to do a great job of filling in the blanks for what happened to Kaiba and Neiro before the first episode. On rewatching, there’s one rather ominous line that Fake!Warp utters, though - something about “the Fan” (which is part of episode 11’s title). And what’s with the strange machine that seems to be having problems that occasionally pops up in between scenes? It would be nice to know exactly what’s going on, after all…
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July 13th, 2008
Ah, this is the point where Kaiba starts getting even more complicated than usual…
So, Popo is running the One Thought Group (well, how ELSE are we going to translate issoudan? Leaving it in Japanese doesn’t make sense when there isn’t a single Japanese person in the cast) on a hypocritical basis - who knows how many minds he’s wiped to cover up his body switch? - and there are countless Copy Warps kept throughout the ages apparently to rule over the populace in some form. This episode doesn’t really answer what the REAL Warp - aka Kaiba - has been doing to necessitate all these copies, seeing as he is apparently indestructible, but either he loses his memory with frightening regularity or there’s more to be explored here.
Anyway, Popo stages a coup, yadda yadda yadda ambiguous ending with a Kaiba plant and HyoHyo’s ready to give Neiro back her memories.
Masaaki Yuasa “gets” how to make a show confusing without making it frustrating. It’s not that we’re not being told anything at all like a Chiaki Konaka show - we’re being given the pieces of the puzzle and we know just about what the puzzle is, we’re (or rather I’m) just not able to put them together yet. I don’t know what the climax of the show is going to be - will the Kaiba plants mutate and take over the world a la Little Shop of Horrors? Is Warp really such a bad guy? Why does Popo hate memory storage so much when all it really seems to be is that he’s jealous of the upper classes? All in good time, I suppose.
As for Popo… well, I’m not completely convinced of his general “badness”. He’s a complicated character, and I don’t really think I understand him as yet; I don’t know whether it’s the slightly disjointed nature of this episode or whether the writing’s a bit suspect, but for some reason he doesn’t seem to act very consistently. Perhaps I’m just being overly critical.
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