Anime of the decade: #3

RahXephon

In a dec­ade rife with stel­lar release from Stu­dio Bones, RahXephon stands out. An ambi­tious and sleek pro­duc­tion which draws upon a diverse mix of sources from obscure Mayan lore to clas­sical music to cre­ate a sym­phony of unpar­alleled beauty. Con­tinu­ously stun­ning, it deftly handles a wide cast of char­ac­ters as well as a plot laden with sym­bol­ism which boun­ti­fully rewards shrewd ana­lysis and con­stant atten­tion. At a time when the mecha genre was over­burdened, RahXephon excelled by weav­ing a story unshackled by genre tropes and cre­at­ing a genu­ine clas­sic of immense longev­ity and awe­some breadth.

“rich in emo­tion and poignancy, the deaths cut deeper, the pas­sion clings tighter”

Ayato Kam­ina lives in the last bas­tion of human­kind: Tokyo; a cata­clysm hav­ing sup­posedly wiped out the rest of human­ity. When an attack strikes the city he is aided by woman who claims to be able to explain the chaotic world he lives in. After awaken­ing the humanoid machine RahXephon he and the woman, Haruka Shitow, are trans­por­ted out­side of Tokyo and he dis­cov­ers the lies per­pet­rated by those in power: that Tokyo was for­cibly cut off from the rest of the world and a race known as the Mu are respons­ible. Des­pite his reti­cence, he is the only one who can oper­ate the RahXephon and with it the cap­ab­il­ity to defeat the Mu’s war­ma­chines, the Dolems. Through­out all of this is the mys­ter­i­ous Reika Mishima who appears seem­ingly without reason and the quiet but whim­sical Quon who seems to have a con­nec­tion to both Ayato and the RahXephon. Ayato’s pos­i­tion as an Instru­ment­al­ist may have big­ger con­sequences than simply the defeat of the Mu.

Unbe­knownst to those watch­ing the series for the first time, the open­ing is one of the most reveal­ing parts of the show, squeez­ing myriad spoil­ers into only a minute and a half. Accom­pan­ied by the sub­lime Maaya Sakamoto and com­posed by Yoko Kanno, it fore­tells many of the twists and rev­el­a­tions that only occur later in the nar­rat­ive. This type of infer­ence how­ever is indic­at­ive of a wider atti­tude whereby the series favours subtle but ret­ro­spect­ively blatant allu­sions rather than cudgel like expos­i­tion. Mul­ti­fa­ceted ele­ments lit­ter the land­scape from the name of the TERRA headquar­ters to the small blue bird that the com­mander keeps within a cage. This is a series that des­per­ately wishes to be ana­lysed, not just because of the time and detail breathed into it but because it is so rare that a pleth­ora of oth­er­wise dis­par­ate parts oper­ate in a near per­fect harmony.

Just as the ant­ag­on­ists, the Mu, are inspired by obscure Mayan scrip­tures, like­wise the enig­matic Reika and her rela­tion­ship to Ayato, while never expli­citly stated, her recur­rence through­out the story as pseudo-spectral guide hints at her import­ance both to the story and Ayato. The obvi­ous explan­a­tion for her sud­den appear­ances is a con­nec­tion to the RahXephon; how­ever it isn’t until Ayato’s rela­tion­ship with Haruka is explored that Reika’s appear­ance, as a young girl of his past clothed in a plain yel­low dress, makes sense. All of this sub­text though does not detract from or eclipse the stun­ning cast: Ayato who has a pas­sion and a matur­ity to him tempered by ongo­ing events; Haruka, driven and forth­right she is pro­act­ive to the point of fool­hardi­ness but baulks when express­ing her­self; the rejec­ted Instru­ment­al­ist Itsuki; the scorned doc­tor Megumi; the soft-spoken career officer Soui­chi. The sheer num­ber of superb char­ac­ters can over­whelm the unex­pec­ted, espe­cially with the com­plex and shift­ing rela­tion­ships that surge beneath the primary nar­rat­ive. Nev­er­the­less each is judi­ciously used and every scene is fas­ti­di­ously judged to provide as much insight as neces­sary without excess.

Metic­u­lous though it may be, this approach is far from blood­less but can at times come across as sur­gic­ally pre­cise — not helped by the ima­gin­at­ive and supremely detailed aes­thet­ics which evoke a acute futur­ism of ergo­nomic corners and spartan min­im­al­ism. Everything from the most innoc­u­ous cell­phone to the hydro­foil ships have been pored over and eli­cit not a pos­sible, but an emer­ging future aes­thetic. Char­ac­ters on the other hand have a pleas­ing angu­lar­ity to them thanks to Aki­hiro Yamada’s unique designs and anim­ate beau­ti­fully through­out. Com­bat, often the down­fall of qual­ity, is rendered with aplomb and is start­lingly fluid when given the com­plex­ity of both the mech­an­ical designs and the oppon­ents. The Dolems are each gif­ted with an oper­at­ive vocal name while their con­struc­tion oscil­lates from stony mono­lith to fleshy phal­li­cism, the lat­ter more telling when placed in con­text with the sexual ten­sion that bubbles in the chem­istry between some characters.

Far from the usual smutty fare, these are rife with under­ly­ing mean­ing whether it is between Ayato and Haruka, Say­oko and Makoto or Megumi and Soui­chi, the sub­ject is always treated with the respect and com­plex­ity expec­ted from a mature show. Age­ing the cast from the usual teen­agers to the twi­light of adoles­cence allows for a far greater scope of emo­tions and situ­ations, but most cru­cially it divorces the series fur­ther from its more rowdy sib­ling, Evan­gelion. Whereas that series is a caco­phony of clas­sical music and dis­son­ant sound effects, this is quieter affair and is and con­duc­ted with bound­less grace. Of course it does itself no favours by aping some of the iconic situ­ations fea­tured in Evan­gelion and retain­ing the cli­max of a young boy decid­ing the fate of the world — “retun­ing” in series’ par­lance — but whereas Evan­gelion wears its intel­lec­tu­al­ism on its sleeve, RahXephon presents a story first and mythos later. The pay­off is evid­ent in every story thread: rich in emo­tion and poignancy, the deaths cut deeper, the pas­sion clings tighter and there is a clar­ity and pur­pose­ful­ness to every scene no mat­ter how fleet­ing or epic it is.

In the last ten years, RahXephon is one of the most clas­sic­ally bril­liant series released. It orches­trates a story bereft of genre and draws on a cor­nu­copia of dif­fer­ent sources to cre­ate an intox­ic­at­ing con­cord­ance of char­ac­ters, nar­rat­ive, sym­bol­ism and enter­tain­ment. Cereb­ral almost to the point of being unap­proach­able, it chal­lenges the viewer to tease out the dif­fer­ent ana­lo­gies and tracks of thought until their under­stand­ing of it matches the obvi­ously monu­mental effort that it took to com­pose it. A land­mark series that will cast a long shadow for many years to come.

Vitals

First aired: 21 Janu­ary 2002
Fin­ished air­ing: 10 Septem­ber 2002
Movie aired: 19 April 2004
Epis­odes: 26 + 1 Movie
Avail­ab­il­ity: DVD  —  Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, United Pub­lic­a­tions (UK)
Ref­er­ences: MyAnimeL­ist, Wiki­pe­dia, AniDB, Anime News Network

Text­less opening