Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Did Den-noh Coil Predict the Future?
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Juno016
 Posts: 2387 |
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Madoka Magica surpassed Dennou Coil as my favorite anime in 2011, but for that brief 4 years, Dennou Coil held a weird place in my heart. I was the only person, offline or online, who I knew who saw it. I tried to get some friends to watch it, but they never even tried because they thought it looked ugly and uninteresting. Up to now, I still know absolutely no one who ever finished the show. I rarely talk about it because it was just so hard to find.
That changes now. Dennou Coil is ABSOLUTELY in need of attention and I think I'm going to bang my friends over the head with it until we actually watch it. BTW, the reason for those 3 random filler episodes interjecting the story in the middle was because they coincided with Christmas and New Years and they knew that unlike most shows on major networks, Dennou Coil was not going to be off the air. Presumably, they didn't want people missing out on the major plot developments that were going on at the time because of the holidays. |
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Joe Mello
 Posts: 2261 Location: Online Terminal |
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Densuke is The Best and anyone who tries to provide evidence to the contrary is just objectively wrong.
Although, I think I recall at least one callback to these episodes later on in the story, but I could be misremembering. (Aside: Oh, to be able to air continuously and not stagger 13 episode chunks) |
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Scias
Posts: 43 |
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Meh, show went over my head when I saw it like 9 years ago. Will have to rewatch it but I'm probably too stupid to understand it :/
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 498 |
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Den-Noh Coil doesn't really deal in obscure philosophy or metaphor, it's pretty straightforward in how it's largely about kids exploring and having misadventures in AR. Give it a shot, you might have fun. |
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Scias
Posts: 43 |
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Wow...I wasn't expecting such a helpful response(or any, really). Honestly, maybe I will give it a shot again. I think it's just because I watched it during a really unhappy, toxic time in my life and my heart just wasn't in it at the time. Things are still rough but I'll likely have a different perspective on it now. Sometimes things click for me the second time around instead of the first as well Thanks! |
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timber
Posts: 133 |
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Still one of my favorite shows, so inventive, so natural in the way it depict kids.
Got a friend to watch it and he loved it too. |
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NickPenrhyn
 Posts: 35 |
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I think I understand why folks might have trouble staying engaged early on, here's my attempt to explain:
So from our perspective, we spend the first bit of the show mostly watching the cast interact. We get introduced to Yasako, Fumie, Daichi, Isako, Haraken etc., we learn what their personalities are like and what their relationships with each other are and hints and pieces of their backstories. The show also spends time worldbuilding. It's converting the folklore-adjacent side to technology and establishing the Den-noh world: the AR glasses and how they function, Cyberpets, Metabugs and Kirabugs, Illegals and Obsolete Spaces, hacking/encoding, jurisdictions, and so on and so forth. On the plot: this is very much a mystery show where we get details in pieces that are significant later, as characters ask questions and the answers brings more questions. We start learning about Haraken, Kanna, and his motivations in this first half, but we don't learn the significance of it until much later. We get pieces of folklore about Michiko that we don't know what to make of. Isako's motivations is unknown until the latter half. Yasako's role isn't revealed until near the end as well. Meanwhile, characters who were there when the inciting events of the story from 4 years ago happened frustratingly keep us in the dark, can't remember, or don't tell us. I think this has the side effect of us not knowing how significant a specific event or how relevant something is until it's tied to another thing (which might also rely on a new AR concept to wrap our heads around), which could be much later. If we're spending time chasing pieces of the mystery and not knowing why or struggling to understand the implications of a concept, it's not giving us something emotional or tangible to latch onto. If we don't know a character's motivations, we can't connect to it yet, and often that's left until later. I am glad I stuck with it though. I now understand why they did such a good job characterizing the children in the show: Their struggles and frustrations with adults are believable. Den-noh Coil is fascinating, it weaves Japanese folklore with a modern technological world in order to tell a story about the obstacles kids face from society, from parents, from growing up, and from each other. It's as much a story about kids in Augmented Reality as it is the importance of listening, connecting, grieving, cherishing the people who are still with you and moving on. |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2123 |
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My college anime club screened this back in 2008, and it might sound dumb, but you know what actually kept it from clicking with me? Suspension-of-disbelief problems with how the virtual stuff behaved, and the way it was all apparently bound by meatspace rules about physical location and movement.
Maybe I'll take to it better now. It's been 13 years. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11364 |
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Huh, the hacking rune shown in this article looks an awful lot like the rune shown bearing down on the space station in the Orbital Children review.
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Gonzo_Deluxe
Posts: 21 |
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...and in the first 2:30 the show already provides two key elements of the world building through natural dialog and stupid kid tricks, not info dump presentations. It's just so...graceful.
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4576 |
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I haven't seen this series for many years but it was such an incredible experience. To this day I can't think of much else like it: it's good strong speculative near-future sci-fi, but being centered around a group of realistically-portrayed middle-schoolers gave it this sense of whimsy and joy that usually doesn't come with that genre. The beard episode remains one of my all time favorite one-offs, but somehow I'd forgotten about the plesiosaur, and now I'm having a moment. D:
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4084 |
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I agree with almost everything said here and it's why I don't and that is don't like the series. Here's the problem: Imagine someone sticking a great Sherlock Holmes story in an adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes novel Hound of the Baskervilles. "That story really is... ok... but that short story they stuck in it, that's why you should like the whole thing." It made me wish the rest of it was as good. |
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2396 Location: United States |
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I might check this out, but I am curious as to why Netflix didn't put up with the English dub. I know it was streaming on HIDIVE for a bit.
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NickPenrhyn
Posts: 35 |
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Disagree, it's a standout episode in an also good show. Is there another reason you think the rest of the show was weak? Steve even puts it well.
That's the purpose of these episodes, they give us chunks of pathos and characterization connected to the core mystery but also self-contained to tide us over. Quite well done IMO. |
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Juno016
Posts: 2387 |
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Word of God nor the text of the show haven't confirmed anything outright, but the apparent implication based on the tech (and a later cameo) is that Orbital Children takes place in the far future of Dennou Coil. It's honestly nothing more than a neat tidbit so far and not direct confirmation, but someone asked Iso on Twitter in Japanese if the world was the same and he replied, "I don't want to spoil anything before anyone watches", which is vague enough that he may be referring to the cool tidbits fans of Dennou Coil can spot in the first six episodes or if there's something more explicit in the future six episodes (out on February 11th) that will outright confirm it. We'll have to see, I suppose. |
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