Four Pretty Good Science Fiction Netflix Original Anime (A.I.C.O., Godzilla x 2, and Orbital Children)

There are plenty of science fiction anime out there and they're mostly okay at best, just like television science fiction in general.  Rating these shows on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being excellent, I'd be picky enough to say most rank at about 2 or 2.5 for anime and television.  Very few would rank into the 4 to 5 range. 

This week I enjoyed watching the first season of Altered Carbon on Netflix, a live action show based of a series of three novels by Richard Morgan.  I actually thought I wouldn't like it, but the production values and fairly good representation of the novel had me finish out the first season in a week.  Anyhow, Altered Carbon isn't anime, but it was a 4 on that 1 to 5 scale for me despite the violence in it.  An example of a show that ranks 5 out of 5 would be the The Expanse on Amazon.  The Expanse is based on a series of novels that just wrapped up in December 2021 by a pair of authors that go by the name James S. A. Corey.  Both scifi series portray a future with enough high tech, political, and cultural extrapolations to be well crafted and thought out.  The Expanse is the more realistic of the two because there are only two crazy pieces of alien technology that are pure speculation.  These are the protomolecule and alien ring stargates.  Altered Carbon has the needlecast to transfer consciousness/memory across space and the stacks embedded in your spine to store the consciousness (based on alien tech).  Both do a good job of speculation on how these technologies would affect humanity, so they're a good fun.  

By the way, as an honorable mention for "fun" scifi storytelling, try the Netflix series Silent Sea.  Silent Sea is fun Korean thriller set on an abandoned moon base, BUT the writers have no freaking idea about what a water molecule is and also pull a stupid deus ex machina to engineer a water shortage on Earth.  The background for the mission to the moon was pretty contrived, but it was one of those shows that was watched and enjoyed despite the shortcomings.  A gripping story line where you know people are going to die and good characters can save just about anything sometimes.

Before I get on with the Netflix anime series I'm going to discuss I'm going to disclose I like Godzilla.  I do not necessarily all things kaiju, but I do have a real fondness for Big G.  The shows I'm rating here with Godzilla will have a "bonus .5" bias just because they are Godzilla.  There are also other anime like 7 Seeds, Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2045 (this just isn't a good Ghost series), Japan Sinks, Pacific Rim: Into the Black, and Revisions (probably the best of this set I just mentioned) which are in the 2 to 3 point range.  Revisions would be about the same as A.I.C.O. Incarnation, but it loses out as it uses time travel (which is almost never done well and completely overused these days).

The four Netflix science fiction anime series I picked as pretty good are A.I.C.O. Incarnation, The Godzilla anime movie trilogy, Godzilla Singular Point, and The Orbital Children.  The Orbital Children is probably the most grounded out of the four shows as it is the closest to just hard scifi.  The Godzilla picks are obviously about monsters, and A.I.C.O. is about biological research run amok.  Even if you pass on Godzilla, give the other two a try.  The best show out of the bunch is probably The Orbital Children as it has more real space tech and extrapolation than the others.

These shows have the following things in common:

1. An interesting assortment of characters (a hallmark of anime) with various foibles.
2. They are more cerebral as there are more concepts and philosophy involved.  However, they spew a lot of technobabble so non-scifi fans are likely to go WTF?  In some ways this allows for a deeper story context, but sometimes it is just smokescreen to cover up plot holes.  Technobabble is more of a curse, but it does make these anime do more than a typical shonen anime or action anime.
3. There is an underlying mystery behind the stories.
4. The stories are fairly cohesive within their technobabble framework so they don't just keep springing more crazy stuff up as the show goes on. The Godzilla film trilogy is epic but it is the most farfetched of the bunch, and the Godzilla: Singular Point is full of strange physics and terms to build up the singularity.
   
5. Some really good animation and veteran studios, directors, and writers.
   

A.I.C.O. Incarnation

"In 2035, a biological research project to create an Artificial and Intelligent Cellular Organism (A.I.C.O.) went awry, resulting in an incident called the "Burst" which transformed Kurobe Gorge into a quarantine area infested by a rampant growth of synthetic organisms called Matter. Two years later, high school student Aiko Tachibana finds that she may be the duplicate of a girl trapped within the Matter whose family disappeared in the Burst. An enigmatic fellow student Yuya Kanzaki offers to solve the mystery by taking her with a group of professional Divers to the Primary Point which was the center of the Burst." from Wikipedia

This was a nice action-packed anime with tough soldiers, mechs, future tech, and nasty monsters made of goo called Matter. There is a good core cast of characters, which unfortunately has a constantly shocked heroine, but the story and scifi disaster elements are presented well.  Anytime there is an alien contagion on a planet, it usually can't be contained all that well, but they somehow did it anyways.  The fact that satellite surveillance and high-altitude or even low-level recon with drones doesn't work is kind of dumb, but they needed the characters to make their way to the Primary Point the hard way.  Still, with this in mind, the show can be entertaining.  This show gets a 3 out of 5.

Godzilla Anime Movie Trilogy

The trilogy is composed of:

1. Godzilla: Planet of the Monsters (November 2017)
2. Godzilla: City on the Edge of Battle (May 2018)
3. Godzilla: The Planet Eater (November 2018)
   

These movies have the remnants of humanity return to Earth 20,000 years from now to recolonize it after the planet was taken over by Godzilla.  Each movie builds upon the previous movie and it is pretty much an original Godzilla setting with a really big and powerful Godzilla.  The scripts were done by Gen Urobuchi, an accomplished SF writer, who also wrote the scripts for Psycho Pass.

"In the last summer of the 20th century, giant monsters began plaguing Earth and humanity is driven to near extinction by one monster which eliminated the others: Godzilla. Two alien races with ulterior motives, the religious Exif and the technologically advanced Bilusaludo came to Earth and offered their assistance against Godzilla. After the Bilusaludo's gambit with Mechagodzilla failed before it could be activated, both the aliens and humanity were forced to abandon Earth and emigrate to Tau-e via the spaceship Aratrum. The time is now 20 years after the exodus from Earth and 11.9 light years away, and the Aratrum contains the remaining humans accompanied by Exif and Bilusaludo refugees." from Wikipedia

When this series of movies was announced I was kind of hyped, but after watching the first movie, it was cool but only okay in my mind.  I would rate this a 3 out of 5 with a Godzilla bonus.  The reason the refugee return to earth 20,000 years in the future is because of relativistic time dialation effects, but it was a little unrealistic for them to try to defeat Godzilla when all the resources of Earth could not before.  Their tech couldn't have been much better than when they left Earth as only 20 years had passed for them.  These movies were interesting from the point of view that they created an all new post-apocalyptic Godzilla setting where there were two alien species involved in both saving and manipulating humanity.  What are the true intentions of the aliens?  The inner conflict of the main character, Haruo, is nicely done as he hates Godzilla, but how far is he willing to go to destroy it?  There is a lot of philosophy / alien spirituality going on in these movies, so expect something a little different.

Godzilla Singular Point

There is a great deal of quantum physics technobabble about singularities in this series, but it builds the mystery behind Godzilla and the catastrophic threat to come quite nicely.  I actually think this was one of the better Godzilla stories, although it probably stretched out a little too long.  The show captured more of the spirit behind the movies in terms of the characters and campiness that came with many of the Showa Period movies.

"The setting is Nigashio City, Chiba Prefecture in the year 2030. Engineer Yun Arikawa of the local "do-it-all" shop Otaki Factory investigates happenings in a Western-style house, long thought abandoned. Mei Kamino, a graduate student studying imaginary creatures, investigates mysterious signals received from Misakioku, the former Tsuguno district's administrative building. These two strangers, visiting completely different places as part of completely different investigations, both hear the same song. As they become united, they are led into a battle beyond imagination involving the whole world. Godzilla Singular Point features a brand new staff and original story which depicts the young geniuses as they take on this unprecedented threat to the universe with their companions." from Wikipedia

The Godzilla movies feature Godzilla, but the stories are mostly about how humans deal with the giant kaiji.  This series has some nice quirky characters, a deep mystery that needed to be solved, and a strange musical tune that keeps occurring throughout.  I'm still not sure what the song, Alapu Upala, really means to the plot, but it is a nice piece of music sung by Annette Philip.  This series rates a 3.5 out of 5.

Most of the monster scenes come from smaller monsters as the characters race to understand the Catastrophe that is coming.  Jet Jaguar even gets reinvented and there is a device that plays a key role much like the "Oxygen Destroyer" in the original movie.  I felt the first half of the series was all build up and then it raced along in the last third compared to the first half.  The writer Toho Enjoh, an award winning SF author, built a deep story for this series and it mostly worked, but the characters did seem flat at times as they often just served up exposition.  Godzilla doesn't disappoint in this show and is big and bad.

The Orbital Children

This series has just premiered and the second part will be available after I finish writing this post.  The main character is a child name Touya who seems to be a bit of a maladjusted pre-teen at first, but his true character is gradually revealed over the next few episodes.  Him and his friend Konoha are the last surviving moon children, who have implants to keep them alive as growing up in zero/low gravity causes issues for terrestrial biology.  Their roles are likely going to be crucial as they are connected to a super-AI known as Seven. Seven invented a great deal of tech and a prophecy about the future before it went rogue and was destroyed.  The series is written and directed by veteran scifi creator, Mitsuo Iso who has worked on or created series such as Chost in the Schell, Neon Genesis, RahXephon, FLCL, and Den-no Coil.

"The story takes place in the year 2045 in outer space, where AI, the internet and social networking sites are widespread. A massive accident occurs on a newly opened Japanese commercial space station, and a group of children are left behind. With no hope of rescue from adults, their lifeline is a barely surviving narrowband, a social network, a free application of low-intelligence AI and a drone controlled by a next-generation mobile device called "Smart". Using these tools with the help of AI, they take actions to survive, and arrive at the "true meaning" of a terrifying prophecy from the most intelligent AI in history. Will they be able to survive the crisis?" from Wikipedia

After watching the first four episodes, I think this show is a winner as it has a well designed science fiction world that feels like a near future space station environment with some nicely extrapolated technology.  Right now, it does feature Touya's character within a big ensemble cast, but other characters do play some key roles, including adults.  I think this show will be quite good, despite the incorrect science/badly setup situation with the biology around the moon children.  This show gets a 4 out of 5.

 

Anyhow, that's all for now.  Everybody enjoy their anime, maybe view a few of these, and stay healthy and safe.

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