Weird anime: Kaiba
Kaiba is one of the most amazing and unique series I’ve watched in a long time. Despite the amount of praise that it’s gotten over the last year, I didn’t really feel the need to watch it. This was mostly because I neglected to figure out what the thing was about. So, after listening to a bunch of old podcasts and learning a bit more about Kaiba, I decided to take it on.
Kaiba is really interesting for a lot of reasons. The most obvious one is the art style. It’s definitely outside of what is generally considered the standard anime style. Even more important is that at first glance, it looks like a children’s show. It really isn’t and that is made clear pretty quickly.
One of the things that caught my attention on the podcast I was listening to was the fact that this sci-fi is really far removed from anything that we recognize. For example, Macross F is sci-fi, but a lot of it is still recognizable: we still go to shopping malls, where there are giant screens promoting popular pop stars. Kaiba is incredibly different, with the weird colours and factories processing bodies and orange gels that get shot from guns.
The most interesting part of Kaiba is the whole setup where, in the future, our memories are just data. That means that the contents of our brains can be stored, copied, and manipulated, just like we do with data on computers today. What happens when we can essentially exist forever and are able to change our physical form as we wish?
This makes the beginning a lot more interesting. Our protagonist begins with no memories and only a locket with a picture of a girl. My first thought was how this would help him, in a society where you can swap memories in and out of bodies like you would swap CDs. And yet, he’s pretty fixated on what the girl might mean for the first half of the series.
And through this exploration of these themes and the romance that leads the main character around to different planets, we’re treated to several sad episodes as we learn more about the world. It turns out, it’s very possible for society to continue sucking, even after we’ve essentially achieved immortality.
It’s not really for everyone, but it’s so outside of the usual anime space, that it’s hard to say that it’s really for anyone in particular. If you’re looking for something really, really different, this show is your ticket.