Title: Dennou Coil
Director: Mitsuo Iso
Original Creator: Mitsuo Iso
Number of Episodes: 26 (complete)
Plot Summary: Eleven years after the introduction of internet-connected, augmented reality eyeglasses and visors, Yūko Okonogi moves with her family to Daikoku City, the technological center of the emerging half-virtual world. Yūko joins her grandmother’s “investigation agency” comprised of children equipped with virtual tools and powerful metatags. She quickly crosses paths with Yūko Amasawa, an expert hacker of the virtual environment, as Amasawa relentlessly seeks to “unlock” the mystery of a computer virus that emerges from an inaccessible corrupted space.
REVIEW: Eventually after so many years of watching anime as vigerously as I have, one tends to follow anime ratings and trends set by fellow otakus. Thus I began scooping up titles from the top 50 lists on ANN or AniDB and soon enough came across Dennou Coil.
The animation for this series is amazing! It’s clean and yet not your typical stock looking characters from “fast-food-anime-series” like Busou Renkin (Watsuki-sensei) or Vampire Knights (Hino-sensei). And yet, it is very pleasing to the eyes as well as very realistic. I would see kids who look like the characters of Dennou Coil… not like Bleach (Kubo Tite-sensei) where you have very well endowed orange-haired bubbly-teenagers with a love for leek and red bean jam.
Music wise, I was so lucky to have found it online without having to actually purchase it because I would have… had I not found it avalible through a torrent community. It’s the kind of music you would love to study to or perhaps play during a traffic jam on the way home. It’s both soothing and relaxing, yet not sleepy. I would call the playlist “Chill Time”. As for the opening and ending theme… perfection! Soulful, enigmatic, and calming. Great lyics and composition for both songs. Both beautifully sung by the immensely famous Ayako Ikeda.
As for the story, it’s no wonder it took 10 years to make such a profound and creatively innovative series that’s both enteratining and thought provoking.
My one and only stipulation with this series is probably the fact that even though the story was great and was constantly interesting, I would have to admit that there were times during the series that I was both lost or very confused. True that by the end of the series I basically got where the story intended to take me (because emotionally I was with the plot every step of the way).
Overall: I would like to turn the mic over to Cinnamon Ass for this since I believed that she wrapped up an “overall over view” of this series quite nicely. ^_^
Top notch talent oozed out of every pore of the show from start to finish, despite the occasional shortcuts in animation and writing, and it was an absolute pleasure to watch each and every episode. Sure, it wasn’t perfect, but Dennou Coil was a whole lot of fun from start to finish and easily tops anything else that’s aired this year from my point of view – sure, there are shows out there that are more artistically daring or have cleverer writing, but for sheer consistent high-quality entertainment Dennou Coil beats the lot of them.
Overall (dub) : n/a
Overall (sub) : A-/A
Story : A-/A
Animation : A-
Art : A
Music : A-
