Generally speaking, most anime is not that difficult. After all, its purpose is entertainment, and no matter how a series might achieve that — through action, drama, design or emotive qualities, or through (ideally) a focused combination of many such elements — its main goal, as a form of enjoyable story telling, remains fairly apparent. Generally speaking, therefore, you can usually describe the premise of a series in twenty-five words or less, based on the first few episodes on the first volume.
Usually.
But Texhnolyze is a series that almost deliberately defies this ability to easily describe, and willfully ignores such straightforward conventions that make it a simple matter to label it. Texhnolyze, in fact, is a series that makes you, the viewer, work for your entertainment. It’s not about to hand you things on a silver platter to gulp down before actually tasting it, no, and it’s not pulling its punches or simplifying its issues. And for these reasons, at the very least, Texhnolyze stands along with some of the biggest names in the anime production — Shirow, Oshii, Kon — as evidence that anime is as easily as serious any dramatic feature film, and possibly more stimulating and affecting than most.
There are no real, clearly established narratives in Texhnolyze; instead it opens with a series of scenes that, in combination, obscure the premise rather than reveal it. Bordering-on-abstract, painted in dark, chiaroscuro hues, it doesn’t even try to explain what’s happening. It doesn’t give you characters you can connect with, at least not up front. There are no sympathetic heroes with whom you can immediately identify. Instead, there is Ichise, a homeless ring-fighter scratching out a life only a mongrel dog would chose to live. It’s pretty quickly apparent, through a harsh, memorable opening sequence, that this is not a man who is about to have issues; he’s already got them. He moves through his life as if he’s asleep, as if there is little to care about, including, or perhaps more accurately, especially himself. And there are no distinct lines drawn between right and wrong in his world either, but the jealously revealed plot twists begin to describe something bigger than one man’s grimy existence, bigger perhaps than the lives of the people who live on the ground, bigger even than the elite, who control the technology called Texhnolyze or the power mongers – gangsters or businessmen or both – who run the city from the shadows.
In fact, the things that Texhnolyze doesn’t have might not seem like much to go on (at least not at first) when you’re considering investing both money and time in six or seven volumes or so. However, what is there is almost hypnotising. Intense, mysterious and unapologetic, the show’s creators have used a magnetic approach to visual treatment and narrative — simultaneously abstract and heavily detailed, with stark frames and visually dense textures — and it hardly seems to matter that decoding the story is almost like hard work. Character designer Yoshitoshi Abe (Lain, Haibane Renmei) revels in the gritty realism inherent in Yasuyuke Ueda’s (Lain, Hellsing) concepts and Konaka Chiaki’s (Lain, Parasite Dolls) script. Scenes pass without dialogue, images are distorted, dissected and portioned out, colours sheer across the screen, the soundtrack sounds like experimental music and the story starts slipping out through cracks in the action and the subtle development of the characters.
Everything about Texhnolyze is serious, from the direction, which borders on feature film quality, to the ways in which violence is treated. Death, in no way aggrandized, is personal and ugly. The desensitization coded into the subtext — the artificial limbs, the society slowly strangling, the characters numbed and sleepwalking through their lives — is the desensitized self-awareness. The city is asleep, or dead, and as events sketch out meaning and meaning sketches out story, little by little something is starting to wake up. Whether that’s Ichise, or something else, remains to be seen.
Yes, its investment anime, and its probably the furthest thing from brain-candy viewing you’re likely to come across for a good while. But get through that, ride out the initially abstract story and the slow start until things start to really ramp up, and the rewards start balancing the investment. In other words, you get out what you put in, in the end.