Den-noh Coil

The kids discover so many uses for the glasses other than what was originally intended. They've built a whole culture around manipulating the cyberspace. They've made and accumulated their own urban legends, ways to litigate and settle conflicts, and even a form of currency.

The urban legends come from the "illegals", artificial creatures that can corrupt and delete the data kept online. The show goes after all the different possibilities of the kids' makeshift culture first, and how it interacts with different characters' personalities. Only later does it get to the characters' backgrounds and the real basis of Daikoku City's urban legends.

While the show has several adult characters whose jobs involve the use of the cyberspace, for the most part there's a generational divide. In general, the adults don't see the new technology the way the children who grew up with it do. They see it as a passing fad, another distraction from reality.

The children can't fully comprehend the stakes they're dealing with, which is dangerous; the adults can't fully comprehend the ways in which the children have adapted the technology to do more than just entertain themselves. There's some resistance in the whole culture to leaving the past behind and accepting the conditions of the present. The mindset they need is the one Yasako eventually learns, to be curious about other people and not run away when you find out they have real problems.

The show does not look remarkable at a glance, but the production is very consistent and it has a tons of visual tricks and creative art design. Virtual objects are rendered with subtle differences from the physical objects depicted around them. The camera will often pan quickly toward something but overshoot it a little and adjust. One of my favorite pieces of character animation ever is in the second half of the show, where one character's whole body heaves repeatedly as they try to talk through their tears. The emotion is intense, but not overstated. There's a sense that it's not always easy to control yourself, physically, when a situation demands it.

Dennou Coil starts out as one of the more creative sci-fi adventures out there, with sympathetic characters and visual devices that never fall short of their purpose. It goes on to become the kind of mystery with so many facets that it seems impossible for them all to be tied off by the end, but they are.

Mitsuo Iso is famous for being an animator on other people's work, but between this, Orbital Children, and DIY, you see he has his own preoccupations that don't show up in those other places. He tries to be a techno-optimist who actually tries to come up with reasons to be optimistic, instead of just being a sycophant who sweeps people's problems under the rug.