noein review

stats

also known as: noein – mou hitori no kimi e, noein ~to your other self~
# eps: 24, oct 2005 – mar 2006
anidb rating: 7.97 (1757 votes)
my rating: 7.50

thoughts

i can’t exactly remember whose review was the one that alerted me to noein’s existence, and as the review was gushing over it, i decided to give it a try..

after watching the show, i realised that some others (check this out) shared my feelings about this anime – the first half started off very promisingly indeed, but the second half’s a big letdown. am i the only one that loses interest in sci-fi flicks when it gets more and more unreal/surreal?

a really brief summary of the story before my thoughts on why it’s no way near epic standards like some others (take this for example) have described. one of the basic quantum mechanical concepts that this show is based on is hugh everett’s many-worlds interpretation – that there are multiverses where every branch of history is realised. in english, that means that there is a universe where i’m writing a noein review now, and there’s another where i’m leaping off a cliff as my exams are too close for comfort.. so on and so forth, ad infinitum. apparently, this evil timespace (a possible future of the current universe) called shangri’la is bent on destroying all other timespaces. quoting the ultra-baddie, noein, directly:

translation: watching sayonara zetsubou sensei made him realise how every timespace’s bound to have misfortunes! and to eliminate his misfortunes, he would need to destroy everything so that time can be reset. (seriously, the latter half of the explanation came directly from the show. if it sounds preposterous, you (are) not alone.)

somehow or another, the ultra-baddie’s crush, haruka, is The-Answer-To-It-All^TM. she’s special, as she has the status of the ultimate observer – those familiar with schrodinger’s cat, an observer looking into the box causes the fate of the cat to be determined – it’s either dead or alive. haruka’s able to do it on a slightly larger scale – she’s able to determine the course of the universe. if she thinks that you’re better off marrying an old spinster, sucks to be you.

with this weird setting established, the scriptwriters exploited it for what’s it worth. which other anime have had two good guys and one ultra-baddie sharing the same identity? actually, that’s not what irritated me. we’re not given subtle hints of the shared identity of yuu, karasu and noein. it’s shoved in our faces! if i were to study a page of my notes when karasu and noein screamed “i’m you!!” in yuu’s face, i’d be done with my revision when the anime ended. i’m no star wars maniac, but i think darth vader only uttered the “i’m your father” line ONCE..

admittedly, my knowledge of the quantum world is limited to what i learnt in a levels, but somehow i felt that quite a lot of techno-nonsense was uttered by the characters. for example:

uhh, ok.

story development was weak at times. for instance, why did kouriyama decide to protect uchida-sensei after he was ordered to go back to HQ? the audience is then shown a flashback where kouriyama got the short end of the stick by his !@#$-ing superiors. this time round, he decides to show his superiors that he’s da man! another idiotic scene was that when the timespaces overlapped, kouriyama was impervious to bullets but could punch the shooter in the face. make up your mind – is he made up of matter, or not?

weird character designs. i do realise each anime would have its distinctive styles, but this is just pushing it. the faces of the characters vary from being absolutely watchable to urgh-my-eyes-are-bleeding!

one last rant: some cg effects are overused! especially the one featuring haruka’s house, and the one where the dragon torque appears around haruka’s neck. give it some variability, please?

that said, the saving grace of this anime is its fluid fighting scenes. good stuff indeed!

in summary, you’ll have to get used to the character designs before being able to immerse yourself in the fairly enjoyable first half of noein. feel free to skip episodes 15 onwards, as you won’t really miss much out!

ps what’s with the organic flying machines?

my thoughts exactly, from a biological standpoint! any beast of that size would surely move very sluggishly, unless someone in shangri’la’s time has discovered ways to boost intra-cell diffusion (so that cells can respire faster, produce more energy, and move the creepy-looking organism forward faster)!