DEN-NOH COIL｜Anime

2022.10.20

“DEN-NOH COIL” is a Japanese animated television series produced by Madhouse, which aired 26 episodes in 2007.
Thirteen volumes of the novel and one volume of the manga were released.
It won the Excellence Award in the Animation Division of the 11th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2007, the 29th Japan Science Fiction Award in 2008, the 39th Nebula Award in the Media Division, and the 7th Tokyo Anime Awards in the TV Animation Division. Mitsuo Iso, who wrote the original story, script and directed the film, also won the 13th Animation Kobe Individual Award. A box set with English subtitles was released in Australia and New Zealand in 2012, and a dubbed DVD and Blu-ray in North America in 2016.

Synopsis

The year is 202X, a little further in the future than now. In the year 202X, “Cyber Glasses” were all the rage among children. These “Cyber Glasses” are indispensable items for children, equipped with a function that allows them to connect to the Internet from anywhere in town and display various information. They are as widespread as today’s cell phones, and almost every child has one. The story takes place in “Daikoku City,” a regional city with an ancient capital lined with venerable Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, but also with a state-of-the-art electronic infrastructure.
Okonogi Yuko (Yuko Okonogi) moves to Daikoku City for her father’s work before her last summer vacation in elementary school. There, she meets another “Yuko,” Yuko Amasawa. They have the same name and are the same age, but are completely different types of people. In their new school, they meet children with rich personalities and experience mysterious events that happen one after another in the cyber space.

DEN-NOH COIL | Recommendations

The entire work is somehow dark, with a lonely atmosphere of dusk, a sense of mismatch of being nostalgic despite the theme of virtual reality, a sense of the extraordinary in the everyday, and a wonderful depiction of the real in the fictional, all in a very good taste.
This is a juvenile science fiction depicting a world where mysterious glasses, which allow the viewer to see the cyber world when they are worn, have become widespread.
It is a work about augmented reality, but I think the best part is how it mixes cyberpunk future technology with the nostalgic atmosphere of an old town in a rural area with a mixture of old and new, and then constructs it as a story of unremembered memories, making it a masterpiece that anyone can enjoy. It is also nice that the tension is not interrupted until the end due to the way the pulling composition is shaken up by the mystery.

And even if you see it now, there is a slightly scary atmosphere, and it is by no means a childish production, and the drawing and quality are very high.
In the last part of the film, there are scenes that will move you to tears, and there are words that will stick in your mind as the characters interact with each other.