The adage of "always leave the audience wanting more" is becoming increasingly apt for Studio Bones. Like with Bounen no Xam'd before it, Un-Go's creativity and, most of all, possibilities make the run-time almost criminally short. Especially when the concept - a detective revealing the truth of disparate then intertwined mysteries - has enough meat to last twice the petite eleven episodes.
it deals with contemporary issues through a very old-fashioned character and plot
This isn't to say it's rushed. The bite-sized opening mysteries are but a taster for the underlying one which stretches the entire latter half; unfortunately the format doesn't lend itself well to brevity. All too often the audience has to take events on faith and ride the story out rather than attempt to unravel the intrigue for themselves. Evidence is often scattered conspicuously around however the question of what the mystery is, often eludes just as much as the answer.
The recently released Eve no Jikan movie is a succinct and mostly successful retelling of the six original net animation episodes released between August 2008 and September 2009. Set in a future where commercial helper robots are commonplace, the titular "Time of Eve" café is a place where the delineation between robots and humans is removed and the problems encountered with such a blending are made manifest.
Like many robot-focused stories, Eve no Jikan's central conceit is artificial intelligence. Divorcing that from the concept of robotics, the mechanics of which are already available in various forms not least of which the famous ASIMO robot from Honda, is important. Autonomous (rather than "intelligent") robots have their own, not exclusive set of hurdles to overcome, starting with the mundane - navigating simple environments - precipitously growing more complex: speech recognition, language parsing, decision making... The list goes on.
