While Mitsuo Iso has had many prominent roles in production, there were many times he had to leave ideas by the wayside. This is too bad, because he definitely has his own ideas that aren't present in the other people's work he contributed to.

Maybe this is why Dennou Coil, my favorite anime series, feels overstuffed. It's his first fully-realized, original work. From the beginning, it slams you with made-up words, strange and suggestive imagery, and clashing factions of characters. The first half of the show is exploratory and loosely focused, while the second half is a string of connected crises that follow up on what happened in the first half.

Coil follows children left to their own devices with advanced technology. They have a whole culture around how the technology works, complete with urban legends, ways of settling disputes, and even a form of currency. Their involvement with this culture expands their horizons. They have new ways of forming relationships and changing the balance of power between the people in their lives. But the older generation, save for a few expert computer scientists, don't understand how the children are using the technology. When they become concerned that it might be dangerous, they cut it off completely, making no attempt to salvage the value they can't perceive.

Most of the children have yet to face real problems in their lives; only a couple of them already have. Coil's main character tries to befriend them, not knowing at first about the burdens they carry. The more she engages with the culture and acts independently, the more she begins to realize how serious things can get. But instead of recoiling, she finds she wants to keep moving forward and help however she can. The long and roundabout path the show takes to this point, immersing her and us in a culture of children learning agency, makes it all the more convincing.

The Orbital Children has a lot in common with Dennou Coil, but is less than a quarter as long. It was released in Japan as two feature films, and released internationally as a six-episode Netflix series. At many points it becomes a torrent of information about how its world works. We are often suddenly asked to understand new concepts and increases in scale. It sometimes feels like it's going too fast or stalls for its volumes of exposition. Iso began writing not with the plot structure or story concept, but with ideas drawn from initial research he wanted to expand upon.

The most common complaints about The Orbital Children are that the script is clunky, the characters are uninteresting or annoying, and it moves at a weird pace. It's interesting that Mina is the character most people find annoying, for being a streamer and acting like one. You ever think maybe it's OK for people to be a little cringe when they're not hurting anyone? The annoying one is Taiyou, for being an insensitive little hall monitor. In any case, the major complaints are that it's awkward and messy. You could say the same about Dennou Coil; but in both cases it's worth at least trying to look deeper.

What we see of the futuristic culture depicted in The Orbital Children is where it least resembles Dennou Coil. In Dennou Coil, the kids blended modern screen culture with cyber equivalents of shamans, sorcerers, and cryptozoologists. Most of what The Orbital Children shows us consists of analogs of things that exist in real life. The characters use recognizable social media and have livestreams or blogs. (Maybe Dennou Coil avoided this because it released only a year after Twitter launched.) There are only two cultural phenomena that are important to the story. One of them is wholly familiar: rampant misinformation and hostility on the internet.

The other one, however, is stranger. Years before the film's events, the "Lunatic Seven" incident occurred. An advanced AI called "Seven" went out of control, causing accidents with thousands of casualties. It drastically increased its own intelligence and composed a long prophecy called the "Seven Poem." The Poem claimed, for unknown reasons, that humanity would not survive unless 36% of its population was wiped out. Seven was destroyed shortly after this.

It's implied that interest in Lunatic Seven and the Seven Poem is a fringe aspect of The Orbital Children's world, rather than part of mainstream culture. Most people think the Seven Poem is vague nonsense, but there are a few people who study it religiously. This element is why I appreciate The Orbital Children's culture being closer to reality than that in Dennou Coil. Touya is a blackhat and a conspiracy theorist. The film offers up both mainstream and fringe perspectives on its world. You can see it all as a genuine, if inchoate, attempt to create something new for children; you can equally see it as superficial corporate niceties that mask the real possibility of disaster.

There are people who embody both views. The space station staff really are invested in the well-being of the children for more than just legal or economic reasons. You can see it in the little hearts Nasa draws on their medicine bottles, and it's the only explanation for Touya's uncharacteristic respect for the old man serving as the station's mascot. On the other hand, the space station is underequipped with safety measures, built with cut corners. The instruments of other businesses—comets pulled into orbit to make bottled water—threaten to knock it out of the sky.

Again, the show moves awkwardly in fits and starts. But it goes hand-in-hand with the coexistence of honest work and neglect. Both are part of the experience of confronting an overwhelming world. People with good intentions will discover intractable problems and unexpected frictions. Cynical or detached actors can ignore such issues for profit.

The Orbital Children is basically a disaster film. This means it uses its convoluted setting as an excuse to have things go wrong in unexpected and interesting ways. Intrigue comes from the characters' advanced knowledge of the setting. The crisis doesn't totally cut off their access to technology, which they use quite naturally in their effort to survive. A lot of the solutions they need involve both software and hardware, which is largely where the kids have their strong suits. When they lose internet connection, Taiyou and Touya are able to establish P2P connections that let them retain some control of the space station. This isn't presented in a flashy way, nor are the little details showing off the Anshin's accessibility features. Here the film does resemble Dennou Coil, in which kids who were skilled hackers had ways of asserting themselves against bullies who could otherwise threaten them physically.

The Orbital Children's world is shaped by the ubiquity of smart technology just as much as Dennou Coil's is. The Anshin's amenities are compact in form but complex in function. It's colorful, partly because there's branding plastered everywhere, and information is readily available. The Orbital Children's images generally don't have the same elegiac power of Dennou Coil's best moments, but it has more to show us in less time.

All that said, the most satisfying thing about The Orbital Children is the simple fact that Touya is a very likable character, as long as you pay attention. His behavior toward Earthers is immature and petty, but it isn't just him lashing out because of his age, his health, or his lack of a social life. Despite his hostile expression, on some level he's an incurable optimist who's willing to sacrifice for the people around him. This is something about him that remains intact as he opens up more and brightens his attitude. It's implicit both when he brags about breaking the law, and when he unhesitatingly risks his own life, multiple times, to save Konoha's. It's what keeps the story moving forward. In retrospect, we can see that even the "edgelord" hacker we met at the beginning was a hopeful, compassionate person, despite random strangers wishing death on him.

Sci-fi has a bad tendency of celebrating the creativity and resilience of humanity in a facile way, taking good outcomes for granted. Iso is the rare optimist who tries to avoid this. His shows see potential in technology, and imagine specific ways in which people on the ground might display ingenuity in using it to support themselves. They also see the messiness of new cultures forming and the ways people hurt each other. What they suggest is not that the indomitable human spirit can and will overcome anything, but that those who take it upon themselves to try to make things better will be vindicated and personally edified.