When we look back on a series, rationalising and explaining its appeal, we inevitably embrace the experience which surrounds it. Think of a Cowboy Bebop/Evangelion/Gurren Lagann review which doesn’t measure the show in terms of its popularity, or its ground breaking impact. To really examine the emotional experience of a story we have to be as honest as we can about what it means to us.

This post is way too long. The length is because it’s part review, part discussion, and part description of the experience of watching Kaiba as it came out. The way people experience this story will change as it enters the alternative anime canon. I’m trying to offer a balance to the inevitable critiques to come – what it felt like to see the show arrive. There are spoilers here, but this is aimed at people who’ve already completed the show. If you haven’t seen it, there’ll be plenty of other people (how about these four) to argue why you should.

An Experience: I have already recommended Kaiba to a couple of animehostiles. It’s the series that shows us that anime doesn’t have to be a construct of tropes and cliché, it suggests a different path. Kaiba justifies my borderline irrational faith that the Japanese animation industry is the very fount of wit and imagination. For those in the know, Kaiba is already one of the major events of the year, nothing can rob it of its place in the anime pantheon. Even if the end had been shittier than a compacted turd (it wasn’t) it would’ve gone down as one of the greatest series ever to fail.

This hasn’t proceeded like any old fansubbed series – and that changes how we, the early adopters, have responded to it. It has great subs, but they came out rarely. That’s not why it’s extraordinary, but it contributed to the place people put Kaiba in – each episode was an event. This feeling of the special in finding each new episode was reinforced by its difference from the norm, especially visually.

Kaiba advertised its own uniqueness, its lack of crowd appeal alongside its beauty. We are superficial people, we have to be when picking stuff out – Kaiba invites us to judge it as something different. It has a madcap disorienting first episode which swings between weird chase scenes and pointedly peculiar sci-fi, Kaiba only shows its true emotional power by episode 3. To start this series was to try something distinctive and intriguing – despite that (unforgettable) sex scene, to start up something not so sexy. It meant starting a show which felt oh so clever, and later finding a simple romance at its heart.

Certainly Kaiba hasn’t worked like regular TV, which is surely the aim of fansubbing, and its great gift to us, the foreign viewers. The uneven gaps between episodes split up the narrative in a show which already challenges us to peer through muddled visuals and a sometimes breathlessly spiralling plot. The fansubbing issue has, if anything, revealed that Kaiba is best when ingested in chunks. My plan, for when I rewatch, is to try eps1+2, then 3-5, 6+7, 8+9, 10-12. I saved up and watched those last 3 episodes successively, and am extremely glad I did so, because Kaiba takes some thought, and is better as a whole than as a series of episodes.

Plotwork: An episodic mode was used for several tales of travelling, journeying and learning. That planet-hopping period served a vital role in the plot by developing Kaiba from a blank slate, and in producing a more nuanced view of the universe. I think this aspect is another one of those places where Kaiba will feel better viewed quickly – because it seemed temporarily to have turned into an episodic series, but in fact had merely adopted the format as a convenience.

This deviation from straight narrative seems to have aimed at preventing a sense of the inconsequential in the early episodes by providing short-term dramatic focus. Personally I don’t think this ploy was entirely successful, and there was a lull in momentum coming from the limited continuity early on. But the feeling of journeying these episodes provided and the acceleration in pacing afforded by the transition to the finale were vital to the experience – making the whole better than the sum of its episodes.

At the start the format seemed to suggest an almost alienating experience, where each episode was its own intellectual exploration. By the end things had got a bit plotty – a bit more like action. Action = giant robot. The freewheeling adventures of the crippled boy living out his heroic dream in a new body is a notable moment in this late surge of activity. Honestly the character didn’t have the depth to make it an emotional highpoint, but the fun was everywhere in a sequence full of humour, excitement, and imagination. It was devoid of those moral ambiguities and philosophical concerns. The scene shows that Kaiba moves from meditation to good old fashioned straightforward emotion.

In setting up those last few episodes, the blackly comic Vanilla sub-story had to be resolved. Doing so as early as episode 7 was slightly surprising, but a good call. This mid-series mini-climax remains one of my very favourite episodes. Episode 8 then dropped Kaiba himself for a striking discontinuity – signalling the transition to endgame. This re-orienting shift brought Popo into clearer focus and ensured that the series had some time to readjust to and further explain this most important of worlds – preparing Kaiba for his glorious return to the fore.

In the end there were only a few strictly episodic planet hopping episodes, and the flow of the whole would have suffered from any more. It mattered that we finally returned to that first world, to the segregated underclass and the cloud which robs the poor of their memories. Because here, unlike on planets of tourism, fashion, wheeling and dealing, the conflict is most dramatic, and most suited to a showdown.

On Memory: Loss of the past gives Kaiba an opportunity for change. Revamped memories pervert the goals of Neiro. There’s an acceptance that our experiences form us, and place us in good and bad camps, which comes alongside a belief that the person exists beyond the dictates of the impetus – and thus beyond the memory. Kaiba has a head full of locked drawers. But what matters to us is his earning of more valuable memories, his movement away from blankness. Watching him as he builds a new memory makes him human to us.

Later in the series we get to see him (via flashback) as Warp. A royal elite who juggle memories are simply a dramatised version of any elite which decides human experience – dominating the impetus. At this point it is clearer than ever that Warp is a role, a product of the castle in heaven. We see that Warp was in his own trap, at war with his family. He tried to survive in a horrible world, his clone (faced with a meaningless life) is simply seeking a its own direction by embracing the role. Warp is guilty of murder. But he is also capable of love, of becoming Kaiba.

“Kaiba”, the plant that ends everything. His name is presented ironically, chosen at Neiro’s whim. At first it might remind us of the value of erasing, because he needed to be pulled away from his memories as Warp to change. But in the end he doesn’t solve the problem by wiping the slate clean, embracing the artificial. You can leap into a flying super-body, but you don’t win by remaking your mind. He wins by re-evaluating and overcoming his memories. And at a key moment, dropping toward the clouds, he chooses to save Neiro’s memories. To preserve her as she is, because memories aren’t the whole of a person – but they still define them in practise.

Devaluation is the theme. Memories which float out into nowhere, human stories which don’t add up to much but mean everything to somebody. Kaiba (the series) sings for lost stories and sneers at hollow reproduction of commercialised experiences. It believes in the purity of experience, even when it sees where our lives go wrong. This is a sort of romanticism.

Romance: What would Chroniko want? That question, asked in episode 7, is what Kaiba was building up to. That’s his great sympathetic sign, his coming of age moment. Chroniko is dead, deleted – it honestly doesn’t matter what she’d think. But he cares, he finds that natural response, to sympathise beyond the bounds of reason. The same stubbornness that makes him seek the girl in the picture, and later makes Neiro chase him against his own protestations.

Endorsing the human attitude which looks beyond the nuts and bolts, and suggesting that that’s what lies beyond memory, beyond experience – the ability to care. That we need those memories because you have to care for something. The villains then show us how the things we need can drive a person into cruelty.

A vital moment in understanding how the series works is when Popo has Kaiba in his power. He could get him asleep, lure him somewhere. He could permanently anaesthetise him in the electric cloud or exile him forever. He doesn’t have to have Neiro kill him. He has already seen Kaiba/Warp survive an impossible fall and getting shot repeatedly. His answer, a bigger gun with a pretty girl attached, is stupid. That he proceeds to attempt such an illogical and ineffective course of action shows Popo as a massively dramatised villain, an agent of despair and insanity.

He takes on the role of champion of wrong and makes a performance of his presumed victory. In a world so expressive, so liquid, we might overlook the fact that his behaviour is so demonstrative in essence – so driven by the feel of the plot. I was so absorbed in this alien universe that I could believe in a complete exaggeration of villainy. This was before his background tale had been truly completed, he was being used to keep the series exciting and to present a conflict.

After this moment of melodramatic excess the series shows us Popo’s childhood, his ambition and his neuroses. His coming to grips with the brain dead Cheki and his (I’m sorry, but hilarious) accidental matricide. We had already seen Popo as pure evil, now we went from humanising him into demonstrating how events produced a total bumbling insanity. The story then does something quite extraordinary.

Popo comes out with the craziest scheme – good old fashioned bullshit nihilist world destroying nonsense. The standard recourse of crap fantasy – setting up an external destruction as the evil. Quick, stop the crazy guy! Look out, he’s got LCL! I couldn’t believe that Kaiba was going to fall back on this guff. It didn’t. His camp disintegrates into violent acrimony. There’s a mess of murders and surprises. And we’re left with the last man standing – and it’s the old villain. The true villain. The false Warp. The selfish king.

It’s a brilliant return to the evils of domination, because that character represents the worst in Kaiba. Death looms in the form of the Kaiba plant, but the one to beat isn’t the killing organism, it’s the man who embraces destruction – the ultimate representation of selfish action. And it works wonderfully in the plot because Kaiba has to face himself, face Warp. So then he joylessly and cruelly beats down this figurehead. And is left only with what made him Warp. Left with the hole in his chest and his self-loathing. The series moves from cheap action into fundamental internal conflict. Like with Popo, only the death plant is left to him. And so, finally, the hero has to be Neiro.

The plant is beaten by flooding it with coloured memories. Flying into its sense of unbridled romance, Kaiba finally denies death. Brings back the recently deceased in unity. I found this turn a slight let down, a kindness too far. The political intrigue was discarded, the nihilism of society paused – nobody felt bad. We’re left with only a smile.

This is why Kaiba is a romance, because it leaves behind the confusion and the sci-fi and all that and contrives a conflict whose answer is love. That’s why Kaiba is invincible. There’s no nuclear spider on laboratory accident, no sci-fi logic. He’s invincible because he has to survive everything – it’s irrationality triumphing in the only way it can. It reminds us, after those thoughtful technological musings, that Kaiba’s complexities are emotional, not conceptual.

Pictures: Simplicity and looseness, the childish unpleasant in primary colours. The pictures assert a sort of magic, but in their morphing motion a lack of certainty. In Kaiba a gunshot breaks you into goo – each person is a fragile compilation of organic substances. The one scene where this convention is jettisoned is the aforementioned squabbling death parade, during which the bodies are allowed to pile up tellingly. It seems like an exhibition of death, but turns out to be a route towards the resurrection of the victims, from nihilism to soppyness. Exactly the sort of transition that suits the Kabacious feel.

Stark colouring gives extremes of mood and style to the locations, lighting overwhelming the cast into reds or blues or greyscale. An endless succession of stylised settings. It’s diverse, and importantly drawn in the same style as the cast inhabiting it. The landscape blurs into the creatures and towers over them. Inside minds there’s not so much more surrealism – the world of the body is just as alien and uncontrolled as the world of the mind, only with more potential for overcrowding. Our capacities as viewers are forever taxed by following its dynamic visual freedoms, our focus is on understanding the tone and the logic behind what is a simple honest love story.

The End: It still seems strange to be talking about Kaiba on an anime blog. It’s like we in the world of catgirls and 10 foot swords have stolen the centrepiece of an art exhibition and made it our own. Our critical language, our expectations and our interests just don’t quite fit with this show. And thank god for that, there’s no progress without breaking the mould.

We’re left with something special. Most of all we’re left with something which makes me think we should all (myself included) shut up and watch it again. Maybe get some perspective on whether those episodic diversions really did inform our final state of mind, decide whether Kaiba’s love story is really unique, or just a reductive romance that’s different in the ways that don’t matter so much. Maybe in the long run it won’t stand up to the attention. Maybe the essence of the show is in its impact, the look and the sound and the difference. The sudden experience more than the lasting value? I’m not sure. But even if that were true, it’s one of the greatest series ever to give us that.