This Week in Anime

Is Exception an Exception to the Bad CG Anime Trend?

Nicky
Well, I'm not really sure how to answer the first question but even if I was a weird clone only designed to do one job does that matter as long as I enjoy it and feel fulfilled telling people about what anime they should or shouldn't watch? Secondly, they can make my chin as pointy as they'd like if they said I got to be re-designed by the esteemed Yoshitaka Amano.

Speaking of memories, haven't we reviewed an anime featuring designs from Amano together before?

God, Gibiate is so bad. When I saw the trailer for this new CG Netflix show, part of me wondered whether it was possible recreate that level of disaster twice. Like many great artists with detailed or abstract styles, it's a struggle to adapt Amano's art to motion. One of the strengths of CG models over traditional animation is the ability to maintain higher fidelity without expending as much labor. However, this doesn't stop us from receiving uncanny, poorly rendered, and stiff products—many of them on Netflix. Despite being intrigued by the premise, I was uncertain that there could be an Exception to the rule.

From the trailer, it was hard to get a grasp on how the show would actually feel. The models do have many of Amano's signature hallmarks, but his art is extremely painterly and gestural, so much that even Final Fantasy games usually take some liberties.

In many shots, the extreme stylization might seem off-putting at first, particularly the characters' bodies and shading. Exception uses a soft painted-like shader instead of a typical smooth or more realistic one. This not only applies to the characters but many of the objects or environments, including actual paintings sometimes.

It's a lot to get used to. I'm unsure if everyone will like it. But once I actually watched it, I could feel myself getting pulled in by it's dedication to detail and atmosphere.

I think it helps that the direction and the motion feel both confident and natural for the most part. There's a lot of careful attention to how characters move and talk to each other. Visually, the grandiosity of a future in space feels big, and the conversations between crewmates feel intimate. All of which goes towards creating immersion towards the high-concept sci-fi setting.

Oh agreed, both the visuals and sound design are pulling their weight to help set the moods. But even a show with gangbusters production couldn't function without a strong backbone to hold it together, that being the story. For that, we also have writer and filmmaker Hirotaka Adachi (pen name: Otsuichi), known for his horror short stories, to provide the script and setting.

The script and story are always the biggest mystery factor for any show or movie, but especially with a heavy sci-fi story like this one. Everything in Exception is a way of showcasing big ideas, and if those ideas don't deliver, then there's not really a point, is there?

But there's a reason we get very few space thrillers like those, and that's because they're hard to pull off. It's hard to set up suspense, project a future for humanity that doesn't feel like a useless info dump, and most importantly, not to sound like the writer is talking out of their ass. All those things require a lot of craft, and it's intimidating to be compared to so many other gems.

Which is why I'm surprised how well it does do all of that!

It's not that it isn't a bit pretentious but it matches the larger-than-life situation. Actually, I had to switch to the Japanese track even though the English was the original, because I thought they captured the kind of serious and somewhat broad-strokes thoughts tone better than if they sounded more natural, especially when it's obviously more about the question itself than the characters asking the question.


Not that I think the character writing is bad, but they're like purposefully vague in the ways that you can never fully know what people around you are thinking. They don't reveal a whole lot about them but only just enough to let you imagine what goes on in their heads.

I think having super detailed look at each character upfront would also defeat the point since part of the thing (no pun intended) is that we never quite know anyone well enough to know whether what they say is correct or true. In fact, we're not even sure how well some of them know themselves! Sometimes, the most we get are little reminders, or mementos, that these people are who they say they are. Remnants of their past selves, copies of trinkets or photos. They're not the same as lived experiences but they're proof that somebody lived.

This is important for Lewis too; upon the Magic Advanced Technology 3D Printer having a little freak-out during a solar flare, the characters immediately question whether he's worthy of being considered human, with Mack and Oscar demanding they throw him back in the womb-vat like a piece of garbage to be recycled against strong protests from the compassionate botanist Patty.

It even brings up one of my favorite concepts! The Womb-Tomb dichotomy, the tidbit Oscar brings up is actually true and extends to a lot of separate cultures and early civilizations, such as many urns being rounded or egg-shaped.

Being reprinted also resets a persons memories since they all stem from data taken from their original bodies that are now in cryosleep lightyears away with the rest of humanity. So a person who dies and gets reprinted really wouldn't remember anything they did during the mission, and if there happened to be two of you printed, you would basically be separate people with the same set of memories. As with Lewis and The Cooler (Monster) Lewis.

And all the unexpected outcomes create a lot of pressure because these guys have a lot of work to do in order to cultivate a place where humans can actually live!

There's some action too, such as the confrontations against monster Lewis. They're done well, but honestly they're not the highlight. The choreography and motion isn't bad but they kind of refrain from showing Monster Lewis too well early on and instead leave him obscured with a blurry filter including over much of the motion. This is probably the most "ps2 era" the show looks.

Giving the words "trust yourself" a whole new meaning.

Which is maybe trusting yourself a little too much.

But still rules! It's the wild stuff you'd only do if you aren't a coward.

Especially given how Patty is initially portrayed as being the most empathetic and naïve of the group. She was even the one who vouched not to kill Cooler Lewish and helped him restore some of his memories via the necklace of his dead lover. She's the character with the most "heart" present to to the audience.

It's great because most of the other characters seemed at least a little sus at this point. Especially Mack, who was so single-mindedly dedicated to the mission he was willing to eliminate all external threats, and even altered some unfavorable data when their new home planet wasn't quite passing the house inspection by the cute spider robots.

Similarly, both Lewis have the whole trauma of losing the person he loves that make you question if some of these guys were all right to begin with. These clones might be perfect copies free of imperfections but they still have all the errors that make up a human.

Yeah, the whopping 48-minute finale might feel a little long, but overall it's a good ride. It's not perfect, but it's risky and confident in a way that feels a bit old-school. Even some of the qualities perceived as flaws add to the overall charm. It's a bit of an anomaly that's totally not for everyone but I hope that a few more people make an Exception for it.