The future of Shinsekai Yori is far from from cyberpunk's deams of neon or other dystopias' decaying concrete. It's a return to the old, a handful of villages surrounded by greenery and filled with beautiful traditional homes. It's post-apocalyptic, but really far into the post. Society has reconstructed after people used their newly acquired psychic abilities for murder and condemned civilization to collapse. WIth the intention of not repeating old mistakes, a more controlled culture has emerged, founded (theoretically) in Buddhist ideas and with a strong collectivist component. Shin Sekai Yori is about the lives of five kids growing up in said society. It's also about psychology, speculative sience, war, rats, the meaning of being human and... racism?

If it sounds like a clusterfuck, that's because it is.
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And nobody should be blamed for disliking the show on that premise. It kind of shoots itself in the foot by having a tight contemplative first episode that really sets the tone for a calm and methodical exploration of the world and the characters just to continue by having a school sports tournament in the second one. And it keeps changing in similar ways. It spends a few episodes being a war story, a few others being an Okada-esque teen melodrama and a few others going into insane exposition dumps about its world. The whiplash is even stronger every time the show goes into a new arc, having no such thing as a unified tone or genre by the time it's reached its end. For each one, the characters are rewritten to fit the new type of show they're going to be thrown into and plot holes that seem minor begin to accumulate, leaving anyone that came to the show for any kind of overarching theme or message pretty disappointed.

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___ Stylistically, the anime's even wilder. With 10 episode directors, 15 ADs and the stellar amount of 0 fucks given, every episode is tackled in an entirely different way. It seems like every director tried to maximize the impact of each scene by using every trick up their sleeve, thus resulting in episode 4 being an info dump delivered to kids completely rendered in kagenashi and episode 5 being Casshern Sins. The show goes on to use "black, white and an oversaturated colored object", distorted lenses, quick cuts, full blown background animation, color palette swaps and even some kanada-style animation cuts, all while the character design sheets are completely ignored. It can be beautiful, it is at times, but It's also all over the place. All of the show is.

And I would end here, but I should probably justify the grade at the end of this page. I really enjoyed Shinsekai Yori even though every episode ended with me asking way too many questions, and it was all because I knew what to expect (or had no expectations). Past the absolute chaos that's the show as a whole, every bit contains interesting ideas and varied visual tricks. I enjoyed it in the same way I would enjoy an anthology: by looking at what different people decide to do with a predetermined setting and relatively limited resources. It's a great show to watch with its ANN page on the side, looking at who made your favorite episodes and discovering a lot of talented staff while enjoying the little story and thematic branches on their own instead of trying to fit them all in a well rounded plot. After all, all of them try to do something with the setting and characters, whatever that may be.

Shinsekai Yori is a show that's best enjoyed on its own terms. Not complaining because it should have done something it didn't, but looking at what it actually does, which is a lot. Chaotic as it is, it has enough ambition(s), style(s) and substance(s) to be a really worthwhile watch for weirdos like me and for everyone interested in anime as a medium.

If it's not for you, congratulations: you're somewhat sane.