Shinsekai Yori: the anime that should have been the greatest of all time
92/100 [spoilers]
TL;DR: watch it. It’s great.
Synopsis: a group of children notice that their friends are randomly disappearing for unknown reasons, and they quietly rebel against an authoritarian government that was established to control magical powers.
Shinsekai Yori is a personal favourite of mine. It has one of the best scripts of all time, one that comes from a successful Japanese sci-fi novel that was published in 2008.
The novel tells the story of a group of children who grow up in a semi-dystopic society with psycho-kinetic powers. They are given the ability to think freely (though this is not known to them) and eventually learn the dirty secrets of the society they live in. After some introductory episodes, a rebellion led by rat people against the humans starts. This is somewhat justifiable from a moral perspective, as the humans treat the rats kind of like the way the Nazis treat the Jews. The rebellion ultimately ends in the defeat of the Jewish rats and the victory of the honorary aryans (hurr hurr hurr). The story ends with the main characters participating in the dystopian society voluntarily and mercifully killing the leader of the rat rebellion.
The plot itself doesn’t sound that impressive when I give it such a short and dirty summary; I was mostly trying to highlight two things. One, the series subverts the traditional dystopic narrative where the main characters fight against society by having the main characters eventually join it — a twist which is strongly underutilized in fiction. Two, that there is no definitive “good” or “bad” side— the humans treat the rats poorly, but they are superior to them after all.
Given that this is an older series, it got a lot of negative attention for the depiction of yuri and yaoi, which is something modern viewers will not care about. On a deeper level, this story is quite conservative, and most of the people who hate it are spiritually libtarded — people who prefer moralistic stories or ones that are told in more flashy colours.
Unfortunately, the anime was produced by A1 studios, who expectedly blundered the production. The character designs were bland, their directing was atrocious, the footage was edited very poorly, and in some cases it looks like scenes that are necessary to understand the sequence of events were removed. The camera hangs around at arbitrary angles, which feels a little awkward to watch. In addition to the poor directing, there are timeskips which skipped over a lot of character development. I must admit some of them were necessary, but it still feels cheap to watch.
The bright spot of the production are the background visuals, which look great.
This poor production seems to be notable in the first 4 episodes — it’s very difficult for me concentrate on what is happening for reasons that aren’t known to me; for what it is worth, other people seem to have this problem as well. I suspect this is part of the reason why this anime is not as popular as it is: half of the community quit watching it before it got good.
Design (6/15):
Distinguishment: (3/5)
Animation: (0/2) - bad
Sound: (0/2) - bad
OST: (1/2) - the ost itself is quite good, unfortunately they overplayed a few songs
Character designs: (1/2) - bland and generic
Backgrounds: (2/2) - reasonably good, actually
Script (45/50):
Character Investment: (7/10)
Character Realism: (2/2)
Character Complexity: (3/3)
Plot solidness: (5/5)
Plot complexity: (10/10) - maybe a little too complex? lol
Ending: (5/5)
Pacing: (3/5) - fuck those timeskips
Stakes: (10/10)
Value (15/15):
Thematic elements: (5/5)
Skill: (5/5)
Originality: (5/5)
Enjoyment (18/20):
Did I like it: (18/20)