My name is Its director compares Noein to Stand By Me, which initially seems absurd. Watch the below video—the opening two minutes and thirty seconds of the first episode—and you’ll see why. High above a desert, men fly and do battle with an enormous, invading creature that’s just burst through the atmosphere.
I love this action sequence because it seems so artfully designed. The creature, with its clasped hands and many faces, looks like a kind of eastern statue. Its human opponents fire magic from their hands by squeezing it painfully through their bulging wrists. The animation throughout the show makes use of occasional 3D, but at one point in this opening fight a character is so pained he devolves screaming into his pencil sketch form.
By the end of the first episode, that Stand By Me comparison makes more sense. The show follows Haruka and her group of friends, including two boys—the anxious Yu, with whom she considers running away from home, and the laid-back Isami—and two girls—the tomboyish Ai and the superstitious Miho. They each come from slightly broken homes, and the first episode involves their adventure to a nearby graveyard to search for ghosts.
Where it diverges from Stand By Me is, obviously, in the heavy fantasy elements. At the graveyard, the group encounter those flying men from the introduction. It takes around six or seven episodes before anything even begins making sense, but the explanations eventually involve alternate dimensions, the Many-Worlds and Copehnagen interpretations of quantum mechanics, and Haruka’s significance as something called the Dragon Torque.
For all the originality in its concept design, Noein is by far the most traditional of all the animé I’ve watched thus far. But it falls within a group of stories—those that juxtapose fantasy and mundane reality—that I find irresistible. The most fun of these are the Kids With Special Powers Attend Special School For Kids With Special Powers, which Noein is not, but it’s close enough to get its hooks into me anyway.
We’re bringing our own further juxtaposition, Lisa and I, by alternating episodes of this and Death Note. For an idea of the contrast: Noein puts the fantasy aside for an episode called “Friendship,” about a lost phone charm, which we watched immediately before an episode of Death Note in which Light spent its entire length attempting to murder a female widow in cold blood.
Next post will be about games, I swear.
