Dennou Coil

I started doing some catchup work on some spring anime series. My new favorite is Dennou Coil. The show is incredibly refreshing. There was a time when nearly every anime show had a distinct look but for much of the 2000's there has been a trend towards homogenization of styles in TV anime. Dennou Coil is at the forefront of a number of programs bucking that trend. It seems to draw more from Studio Ghibli than anything from television, and manages to evoke that feeling without copying styles outright.

It takes place in a future world, sometime in the 2020's, where humans use a special system of cybernetic glasses to interact with a world of data around them - it's a world of augmented reality where virtual object exist as overlays in the real world. The exact nature of this world of virtual objects is unclear, but I'm only up to episode three myself - fortunately the mysteries feel less like mystery for mystery's sake and is more a natural evolution of the story introducing the viewer into the strange world in which humans now live. The main character is an 11 year old girl who moves with her family to the town of Daikoku where the government has, as of late, been introducing upgrades and new technology to the spaces (short for cyberspaces, the virtual 3-d areas overlaid onto the real world and seen only through visors/glasses). Shortly after arriving in town, her cyberpet dog Densuke is infected with an Illegal (a virtual organism comparable to a computer virus) and this begins her decent into an underground youth culture of Daikoku and membership in a children's detective agency armed with powerful virtual objects and metatags (bits of virtual world code given form as long post-it like notes which bestow abilities, properties, and markers to both virtual and real objects).

Dennou Coil is a real keeper. Interesting concepts mixed with a fantastically fun and original style that breaks away from the rest. Check it out if you get the chance.

On a more general note, I've added a list of the anime I'm currently watching on the side. It's a short list right now, as I've lost interest in a lot of the shows I was watching earlier in the year. Bleach and Naruto came back strong from fillers, but both went back to old tricks far too soon. As interesting stylisticly Moonlight Mile was, it just didn't hold my attention. I might try it again as the show has finished it's run and is available in whole. Given that it's getting a second season already, it probably deserves a second shot. Gurren Lagann, while a favorite, was licensed very quickly, and so I've just decided to wait for the domestic release. Claymore was always a treat, but for some reason I always dreaded starting to watch a new episode, and eventually let it fall by the way side. My mind is an odd one.

There are very few shows coming up in the fall season that I'm looking forward to. Gundam 00 is the main one, but it's a new Gundam show so that's a given. I'd probably be REALLY into seeing Genshiken Season 2, if I'd ever got around to seeing Season 1. A few others here and there I might look into, but nothing worth really mentioning till I see them....