You came to Eikyuu Kazoku / Eternal Family because you're on a Kōji Morimoto kick. There’s no other explanation. Maybe you started with that Dirty Pair: Project Eden opening, or maybe it was that sweet Ken Ishii music video. But at this point, you've already seen Beyond and the excellent collab with Yōko Kanno and Masaaki Yuasa, Noiseman: Sound Insect and now you're digging deeper. Digital Juice? Genius Party? 0range? (Yes, you should own 0range.)

What's this? Morimoto directed a 53-episode TV series that can somehow be binged-watched in a half-hour sitting? How can that be?

My “I read this somewhere over a decade ago” information suggests that Eternal Family was a series of TV spots that NHK slotted between programs. Like the infamous out-of-order broadcast of Suzumiya Haruhi that set the internet of ‘09 ablaze, one can’t hope to recreate the true Eternal Family viewing experience, whatever it actually was, so a marathon that nauseatingly starts & stops every 30 seconds is all we’ll ever have.

The premise resembles but predates The Truman Show by a year; the parasocial qualities of “reality” television presaged our present V-Tuber dystopia and everyone back then seemed to sense the impending doom. In Morimoto’s familiar dystopic futureworld, the titular “Eternal Family” is a reality TV show that casts, with sci-fi brainwashing, a bunch of deranged dropouts as a “normal” Japanese family whose domestic antics are broadcast 24/7 through the state’s propaganda apparatus. One day, this social experiment escapes from the TV set into the wider world of “Hodgepodge City” where all manner of super fans, government goons and other unscrupulous characters go on the hunt for our hapless, violence-prone television stars.

In practice, it’s a series of cartoon comedy vignettes with the recognizable postmodern cyberpunk stylings of Studio 4°C figureheads like Morimoto, Tatsuyuki Tanaka and others in that aesthetic wheelhouse. It’s borderline insufferable but hits something of a stride when the Family is set loose upon the city and the imaginative borders expand slightly beyond baseline potty humor.

It takes a real desire to seek out Eternal Family. Morimoto’s many shorts, music videos, freelance "sakuga" moments and other projects all give us desperate devotees little glimpses into his inner cyberworld; a world which was sadly never realized into a magnum-opus-like feature film or full-length TV series. There is no culmination into a grand conclusion — no payoff nor catharsis — for this review and Morimoto's legacy. The man is already in his 60s and I’ve stopped expecting anything beyond the hodgepodge of works that form a city we can skirt the borders of but never truly explore.

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