Spoilers below.

I've always had this pet theory that you can, very broadly, sort all pieces of media into one of three categories, based on how closely they relate to other works in their medium in terms of shared themes, character archetypes, style, narrative elements, and so on. Most media falls into the first two categories--derivative with no major changes to the norm, or derivative with some sort of twist. This is neither a positive nor a negative and really, is just how storytelling operates, so there'd be no sense in lamenting it even if it were a negative.

Then you have a third category. Things that walk so far outside the usual orbits of their medium that their place within them is questionable to begin with. It is here where Kaiba resides, on the farthest outlands of anime as a medium, sharing more real estate with experimental a-narrative work like some of the Genius Party shorts and 60s cartooning from around the world than it does with its contemporaries, and with a soundtrack that foregoes the usual anime soundtracking tropes in favor of a moodier score dominated by surreal washes of sound and lurching one- or two-instrument tracks, Kaiba is wholly unlike anything else that premiered in 2008. '08 saw the premiers of the third Yu-Gi-Oh! Series, Black Butler, the Soul Eater anime, and reboots of the Casshern and Macross franchises. Nobody was doing anything like Kaiba in 2008, and almost nobody is doing anything at all like Kaiba now.

So what then, is Kaiba? That's a question that's surprisingly hard to answer. As alluded to, it defies easy genre classification, it mixes elements of cyberpunk, romantic drama, the Japanese genre of the "world story" (think Neon Genesis Evangelion), and even a twinge of black comedy. Kaiba takes place in a world where memories can be stored in tiny cones called "chips", and bodies are interchangeable. The consequence here is that there have come to be more chips than bodies, and the latter are themselves now a commodity. But that's not all! Memories themselves can be uploaded, downloaded, altered, erased, or fabricated wholesale. They, of course, are a commodity too. This sort of thing is really where Kaiba's cyberpunk shows through, it's positively Ghost In The Shell-ian.

The first half of Kaiba is largely episodic and here it somewhat resembles "traveler adventure" anime in structure. Things like Kino's Journey or Gun x Sword or (to give a western example) Samurai Jack. Our titular protagonist--who throughout a fair chunk of the first half of the series is stuck in bodies not his own--wakes up amnesiac with nothing but a locket containing a picture of a girl in a place called "The Underworld", whose population are oppressed by the rich living in "Heaven", physically above them, and protected by a thick smog of memory-erasing gas in between. With the help of a vigilante named Popo he escapes to a luxury space cruiser, where he travels from planet to planet on as a stowaway. Kaiba and his companion Nyon-Nyon (and their pursuer, the bearlike cop Vanilla) get into a number of….well it's hard to call them adventures, simply because most are horribly tragic.

Take the example of episode 3. When our heroes arrive on a small planet (no name is ever given), we're promptly introduced to Chroniko, an impoverished girl with long blue hair and a pair of bright purplish boots that she is quite proud of. We learn that she wants to save money so she can someday leave the tiny backwater planet she calls home. Then we learn that her body is being sold--quite literally--to help out her mother and brothers. We learn that this isn't the first time some part of Chroniko has been sold for profit, we learn that memories of her favorite books and music have been sold too.

Of course to Chroniko this all comes out in the wash. She assures herself that one day, after her brothers get good jobs, her mother will buy her a new body and she'll live again. Not long after, we are given a scene where this is quite emphatically proven to not be the case. Chroniko goes to get her procedure done, and the doctor supervising it tells her flat out that her chip will not be saved, and she will never return home. She is promptly dismantled as the horror of her situation sets in.

It is one thing for a character to be killed on-screen, and for the audience to watch them die. It is quite another for their existence to be, effectively, entirely erased and scattered to the wind as Chroniko's is. A show less interested in exploring its universe's nature might leave things at that, but the latter half of the episode is devoted to exploring Chroniko's memories, and the regret her mother feels at having sold her. Eventually, our protagonist even ends up in Chroniko's body--literally left in a trash heap by the smugglers who bought it. Ironically Kaiba-Chroniko is saved by the cop Vanilla from these smugglers (who seek to reclaim their quarry). Somewhere in here I must note that the man who sought to buy Chroniko's body was a literally duck-faced pedophile. It is a thorough gutting of her character. Someone so innocent is destroyed utterly by the depravity of the privileged rich.

These themes and ideas begin to coalesce into a wider narrative in the show's latter half. Popo returns, the girl from the locket shows up, Kaiba himself is revealed to be King Warp, who we're lead to believe is a vile tyrant, ruling from Heaven over the people in the Underworld below, and the way that Kaiba's earlier episodic elements tie into these later more connected episodes is really something special. As an example; the recurring narrative of broken mother/child relationships repeats--first with Chroniko and her adopted mother selling her body, then with Popo and his mother selling her own body to save her son's life, only to be rejected by that same son, to finally, Kaiba having once been poisoned by his own mother for apparent reasons of political intrigue (though notable this last one turns out to not quite be the case, but the repetition remains).

In the world of Kaiba, these problems--broken parental relationships, people being condemned to horrible fates in bodies not their own, the commodification of body and memory, the gap between the rich and the poor, and even the late-game menace of the Kaiba Plant (no relation except by name) threatening to devour Heaven itself--are not just related, they are the same. Each feeds into each other.

To call Kaiba groundbreaking is no overstatement.

It fills me with hope and joy for the medium that Kaiba's stylistic children are just now beginning to propagate. From Flip-Flappers--which shares its fixation on memory and mothers--to TRIGGER's sugar high crossover-fest Space Patrol Luluco, which is another peculiar take on the "world story" genre, it really feels like Kaiba's time in the sun is just starting to come. Perhaps it will remain an underground source of influence forever, but really, if you love anime or animation in general, if you love the strange and weird and wonderful, Kaiba almost certainly has something for you. There is so much I have not touched on--and have no room to touch on, really--that I simply must implore you, if any of this sounds at all interesting, to give Kaiba a go for yourself.