The Orbital Children is a long-awaited misfire from Mitsuo Iso, the sublimely passionate and creative writer behind Dennou Coil, an underrated classic in terms of mid-2000s scifi anime. Orbital Children takes a great deal of inspiration from its predecessor, which somehow ends up being one of its weakest points; it feels like a heavily degraded version of the show people love. Nearly every aspect of The Orbital Children feels shallow and pretentious, although this could mainly be blamed on the length (or lack thereof) of this anime. Dennou Coil had a fully realised world, likeable and nuanced characters and themes that were explored over a 26-episode storyline, while Orbital Children is a theatrical release (or a 6-episode anime if you watched it on Netflix). It’s understandable that a feature-length anime film lacks the burgeoning plot of a two cour television series, but Orbital Children is 3 hours long, and it makes almost no use of that inflated running time.

The story is simple: a bunch of generic, annoying self-inserts get stuck on a space station that’s been sabotaged by unknown forces, and they have to work together to escape. None of them progress past being cardboard archetypes for children to self-insert into; rather, they just get more baffling and uninteresting as the show moves on, culminating in an ending that takes wish fulfillment to a new level. Touya is one of the strangest main characters possible for a show like this; he’s nihilistic and cold towards Earth’s humans because he believes they all consider cybernetically enhanced space-born humans a waste of resources, and through some gap in logic he wants to program an artificial intelligence to move past its technological limitations and wipe out the planet. Essentially, he’s Char Aznable but not cool. He gets less irritating later but still radiates preteen angst up until the finale. He gets stuck on the damaged space station with his psychic best friend, a fucking tiktok girl and her easily impressionable brother, and Taiyou, who is the most annoying character in the entire show and an excuse for United Nations propaganda (which still exists in the future for some reason). There are adult characters but none of them have much of an impact on the story outside the incredibly obvious, unthreatening strawman antagonist whose motivations are entirely decided by “it’s prophecy, it doesn’t have to make sense!” which doesn’t make for a compelling adversary, especially when the reveal, 99% of their character development and their death happens in the span of a single episode. There’s also some senile dude in a mascot suit. I think they were aping Pino from Ergo Proxy but I can’t be sure.

The Orbital Children tries to tackle futuristic dilemmas such as the nature and evolution of artificial intelligence, space colonization, and humanity’s need to curb their own progress with all the introspection and self-awareness of a fax machine. 99% of the dialogue during “philosophical” scenes is pseudointellectual babbling that amounts to absolutely nothing and comes to a total of zero conclusions about any of these quandaries. There is no wisdom being dispensed here; instead the writing team just wanted to stuff as much fruitless dialogue into the script as possible to sound intelligent so people will go “Wow! It’s just like Evangelion!” which the show actually tries ripping off in the last 20 minutes with an absurdly tryhard ending that would have been profound if anyone involved with the writing of this series knew what the fuck they were talking about. Instead of being like Dennou Coil, which knew when to space things out and keep viewers attention spans, Orbital Children is full scenes of characters spouting their ideologies at each other in the most lifeless way possible.

The entire series feels lifeless, as a matter of fact, and I’m not sure what happened. Iso’s input was great in Dennou Coil; we got a feel for the world through the way it was framed, through the energy and color of the series. Maybe it was the 15 year span between the two series, but Orbital Children feels largely like it was put together dispassionately; characters are constantly off-model, the direction and cinematography are bland and colorless and even the soundtrack hardly anything special. Within the first episode I counted at least 10 shots being repeated within the same 3 minute scene with little to no variation. It was just shot reverse shot every time someone spoke for the entire slog of a first episode. Iso is talented, no doubt, but Orbital Children feels like it was something he either worked on out of necessity or something that was completely butchered during production, which seems to be the more likely candidate (14 pages of storyboards were apparently cut from the second half of the show). Even Iso’s attention to detail seems to be missing; how does a man renowned for being so meticulous and passionate about science fiction forget that fires can’t start in space? Half the series feels like nonsense. Rather than a calculated, insightful anime about the near future we get talking AI space rocks, drones firing digital lasers at each other and literal fucking magic for some reason. And I know Dennou Coil leaned into pseudoscience at times, but it felt natural because of the setting. It even managed to inspire real-life breakthroughs in virtual reality because of just how well-conceptualized and intuitive it was. The Orbital Children lacks that kind of prescience. I have to make the assumption that Netflix had a hand in turning the series into the final product we have, because it doesn’t feel right. It feels like something groundbreaking could’ve come from this series, but it was curbed and turned into something safe like the artificial intelligence in the show itself. There’s something strangely ironic about that.