Cinnamon Ass

OP - Never (Seira) - metamorphosing arms ahoy! The music is beautiful even if the slightly Engrishy singing is a little strange.

ED - Carry Me Away (Seira) - another beautiful, strangely Engrishy song, and I think I prefer the animation to the OP; there’s a beautiful shot at the end with a plant flowering that’s particularly brilliant.

A boy/man/whatever awakens in a ruined room to discover a hole in his body, a strange triangular insignia tattooed around his navel area and his only possession a locket with a picture of a girl inside that he doesn’t remember; in fact, he’s totally amnesiac. He is attacked by flying machines that seek to harvest both bodies and memories, which are stored as tiny metallic cones, but is saved by a cyclopian astronaut emu (seriously) and his own latent pyrokinetic powers.

He escapes to a settlement where the reality of the world becomes clear - memories and bodies are interchangeable and discardable without a moment’s thought when snakes can become beautiful women in contests, brothers are discarded to clear space for data and death is shrugged off as a minor inconvenience. A man named Popo, who also helped save our mysterious hero from memory harvesting earlier, explains that the rich live among the clouds and freely trade bodies whereas the poor live in the slums below, and offers to take Popo up to see if they can find out anything about him.

In a seedy dive where beautiful bodies are being traded, our John Doe is assessed from top to tail by a mysterious lady as part of negotiation for safe passage on board a shuttle off the planet. However, a Collector sees the mysterious triangular mark and starts to ask awkward questions, demanding a quick escape for Popo and the newly named “Warp”. Warp ends up escaping on board the shuttle with the mysterious lady despite the Collector’s best efforts to stop them while the astronaut emu watches; but what of Neiro, the mysterious girl in Warp’s pendant whom Popo has stashed away whilst he tries to recover her memories?

Apologies for the long, waffly and possibly incorrect summary, but Kaiba is a confusing show. So many seeds of so many plot lines are laid out in this one episode that even without the strange visuals there’s a lot to think about (for instance, what’s the link between the kioku-sha (I can’t think of a good translation - “Memoriser”?) and Warp? It’s obviously not good given the final shot where I believe it mouths “Kaiba”, the real name of the protagonist).

First off - visually the show is fascinating. The world, as someone else has noted, like The Clangers via plasticine and CG, and it displays more imagination than pretty much anything else on the air at the moment (Soul Eater, whilst visually striking, doesn’t display the creativity seen here). The animation is unsurprisingly creative (when people die they explode into droplets, for instance) and I really hope the AstroEmu appears again as it’s a brilliant piece of character design. I know it’s not going to be to everyone’s taste but you can’t deny Kaiba’s originality this season.

Plot-wise from my babbling you can tell I enjoyed this a lot. The offhand way in which memory is treated makes for an interesting backdrop, and although the central characters being amnesiac is a bit of a well-worn narrative device I’ll be fascinated to seee how their pasts pan out; the series is, however, pitched as a “sci-fi romance”, and a lot is going to ride on how Kaiba and Neiro interact when they’re both a little more compos mentis.

Kaiba’s obviously not going to be for everyone, and I don’t know whether it’s just the novelty that makes it so interesting so far, but I am fervently anticipating finding out where the show goes from here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 12th, 2008 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Kaiba. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.