Anime: Seikai Suru Kado 2j3d6j

Sekai Suru Kado: A brave little show, and actually quite coherent for a runtime of five or seven episodes--if only it had one.

Sekai Suru Kado (Kado: The Right Answer) is a spring 2017 sci-fi anime by Toei Animation. It follows the story of KADO, a giant alien cube that suddenly appears in Tokyo one day and absorbing a plane full of engers. KADO's occupant turns out to be a superintelligent alien from another dimension, who has come to Earth to search for 'the right answer' and provide humanity with its technology by 'advancing' it. The alien enlists the aid of one of the plane's engers, government negotiator Kojiro Shindo, to help negotiate with humanity and help in its mission to advance humanity in the search for the 'right answer'.

At this point, normally I would go into each category of the show and discuss the various components of it piecemeal, but Kado doesn't make me want to do that so I won't. Certainly, the cel-shade art (like in modern-day Tales games) takes some time to get used to and the environs and CGI involved in KADO (the in-show object) are utterly gorgeous, to be sure the music is good and characters X, Y and Z (i.e. phycisist crazy girl) should have been tossed off a cliff to improve the character gallery, but Kado has one big problem that hangs over it like a Sword of Damocles and ruins all attempts to look into it categorically, namely the story and the central theme of it and that's what this review is going to be about. Spoilers, obviously.

The problem with Kado is that it is a story that subverts its own premise and theme with a really really stupid twist and abandons itself three-thirds through the story, and not in a retroactive "ah, I can see now how they've been pulling the wool over my eyes all this time!" clever way like certain other famous twist stories. Rather, Kado starts out as a show about how a superadvanced alien being providing humanity with alien technology could play out in real life, and the problems inherent in trying to adapt yourself to this happening, and three-fourths in... Abandons that story entirely, becoming instead an 'aliens are creepy and evil' story that tries to resolve itself with action and plot conveniences instead of thought-out cause and effect in a manner that's almost the antithesis of the way it sets up the story. It's like the writers didn't have faith in the way they had been doing things up to this point, and decided to do a one-eighty on the Way Things Are Done. The result of that reversal ends up sticking to Kado like some foul-smelling glue, ruining my overall impressions of it and whatever positive ways things were being done for most of its runtime. In the end, all this talk of how humanity would treat their sudden advancement, what future there would be for humanity, what the 'right answer' entailed... Is made entirely irrelevant, and we have to sit back and watch creepy stalker alien battle the noble human for the fate of the Earth.

Kado seemed so lovely, a breath of at least attempting to waft some fresh air into the system. Sitting down and skimming through it again, I could almost to the second decide on an exact moment the story, theme, and thus the underlying framework of the show completely broke for me. It wasn't a gradual process of disillusionment, or even a horrible first-impression, but rather one telling moment (and the inability of the show to move back from it) that told me that the central conceit was broken. If Kado had attempted to renege and go back to its original theme, this would have been a regular review with me reducing the score by one or half a point. But instead it doubled down, and thus we get this instead. A show that, to my mind, broke itself. I'll cut this short and get to the point: Kado was a disappointment. Probably the greatest disappointment a show has been to me in years, possibly since I started watching anime over a decade ago. I don't know if I can honestly recommend you watch, or not watch, this, because what got me into this show is what repulsed me from the end, and fans of the way the ending worked would probably find the first episodes immeasurably dull. I can't objectively say I disliked the components as much as a lot of other shows I've seen, but the concept of what it could have been (or even tried to be) compared to what it ended up settling for, and how those two things crashed, ends up colouring my whole perception of it. Everything else to say about Kado becomes window dressing, and the storefront behind it is on fire.

Total for Kado episodes 1-8 and 20 minutes of episode 9: 7/10. A bit slow and steady, not for everyone's taste but certainly mine.

Total for Kado episodes 10-12 and 5 minutes of episode 9: 3/10. Aliens! Lasers! Gay stalkers! Humans are teh greetest! Spare me.

Total: 4.5 (rounded up to 5) -- It's like watching the ending of Little Shop of Horrors tacked onto E.T., only without the cool music number. Just... WHY.