August 13, 2008
Now and Then, Here and There
Now and Then, Here and There (Complete Collector's Boxed Set)
This anime depicts some messed up stuff. Pretty darn messed up. It's about a kid, Shu, who meets some weird girl, Lala Ru. She gets kidnapped and he tries to save her and I guess gets transported 10 billion years into the future where the sun is gigantic and most of the water has dried up on the earth.
From there Shu is submitted to torture, meets another girl who was abducted from his time, Sara. Sara's story is most gut wrenching. She's abducted from our present to the future mistaken to be Lala Ru. They turn her as a sex slave to be raped and impregnated by soldiers. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that the future is a fascist dictatorship run by an insane King Hamdo? They regularly go around cleansing towns and kidnapping children to recruit them as child soldiers. They make these children kill other people.
This is a totally brutal anime. Shu somehow maintains his optimism that things are going to be alright. And you know it is totally not going to be. But you praise Shu's moral rightness in the face of the practicality of survival.
The dub is playing on Sci Fi right now.
Posted by joel at August 13, 2008 04:36 PM