One Button Press
There’s something vertiginous about it: you only exist because a handful of people with the will and knowledge to destroy everything haven’t actually done it. Yet. The ones who know exactly what they want and how to get there. The rest of us are just waiting.
Walking through Tokyo in summer, Arata and Toji look like any two kids should—tall and lean, or short and slight, with the kind of eyes you fall into without meaning to. They move through the noise, past the cars and people and cicadas screaming in the trees. You’d never know they stole plutonium from a nuclear facility a few weeks ago. You’d never know they’re bombing the city.
Terror in Tokyo doesn’t do what you’d expect from an anime. No giant robots, no oversexualized characters filling the screen, no magical girls or kitsch J-pop powering some impossible victory. Director Shinichiro Watanabe made something that looks like the world actually looks, sounds like it actually sounds, feels like it actually feels. Explosions in subways, buildings collapsing, civilians trapped in chaos, and the police have nothing. It’s genuinely unsettling without dipping into cheap horror movie garbage.
Nine and Twelve shouldn’t exist. Their memories start in some lab at the end of the world and end in a small apartment in Tokyo. From there they plan everything carefully, play cat-and-mouse with a detective named Kenjiro over YouTube, and deal with a girl named Lisa who wanted to be part of it and then realized she didn’t want to die. The whole thing is technically sophisticated and grounded—they hack, they tweet, they stream themselves through a laughing city. Their puzzles are clever. Their motives stay in the dark. All the threats waiting for them stay in the dark. But the story never feels overwrought. It knows when to just breathe.
Lisa is probably the closest thing to someone you recognize. Bullied at school, misunderstood at home, walking through Shibuya in the rain with nowhere to be. The neon fills her face with colors that don’t belong to her. Everyone around her is talking on their phone. She cries. You want to hold her. In a world where no one’s like her, maybe dying wouldn’t be the worst option.
The animation is genuinely beautiful—Kazuto Nakazawa’s work, Yoko Kanno’s score. If you’re tired of the standard anime waste of time, this is actually something.
Then Five shows up, and you realize you’ve been watching the wrong thing the whole time. Pale, beautiful, cold as a snowstorm, violet eyes, this girl with no mercy at all who would absolutely go all the way. And suddenly you’re not sure anymore who’s actually supposed to be the monster in all this. You’re pretty sure she would. No doubt about that.