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This Week in Anime
Did Den-noh Coil Predict the Future?

by Jean-Karlo Lemus & Steve Jones,

TWIA continues its week revisiting the works of Mitsuo Iso with a look at Den-noh Coil. Long regarded as underrated, the lauded sci-fi series is available again via streaming. Steve and Jean-Karlo look at the first half of the series to see how it earned its stellar reputation.

This series is streaming on Netflix

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.


@Lossthief @mouse_inhouse @NickyEnchilada @vestenet

Jean-Karlo
We got fancy tech and weird monsters everywhere and a sassy little girl stepping on people's feet, a mysterious-yet-goofy elder citizen and a guy who's too full of himself all from a show from 2007--sounds to me like we have ourselves a good ol' fashioned DEN-NO HIJACK! 😄
Steve
Funny coincidence, I also just received an anonymous call from the number 4423 saying that we should absolutely do another entire column on Mitsuo Iso this week. A little spooky, but I think we should go with it!
Fittingly, also a blast from the past of 2007 that people didn't think we'd get in the U.S. for the longest time! But with fewer climaxes and yet the same amount of shenanigans and sentimentality. This is Kamen Rider Den-Noh Coil! And holy crap, it's been a long time coming.
Yeah, with laser-precise timing, Netflix dropped the entirety of Den-noh Coil onto its service a day before the debut of its director's latest offering The Orbital Children. Which is good news for the planet, but bad news for me, since it meant I had no choice but to do a rewatch of it before moving onto the new hotness. And by bad news for me, I really mean it was extremely good news, because Den-noh Coil is an unmitigated delight and one of anime's finest hidden gems—and finally not so hidden!
It's easy to forget that once upon a time getting every anime released stateside wasn't a given. Back in 2007, anime fans all over the internet bemoaned that Den-Noh Coil was never released in the U.S. For years and years, the show languished in limbo, never being licensed in any capacity. Maiden Japan eventually righted those wrongs and released Den-Noh Coil in the U.S. on DVD in 2016, but it's only this year that it's finally available for a wide audience. This is a victory for anime fans worldwide.
It really is. And we don't really need to reiterate all the ways in which Mitsuo Iso is such a gargantuan figure in the industry relative to his reputation abroad (you can read Nick and Nicky's column on The Orbital Children for more of that~). But suffice to say, the dude has worked on a lot of fantastic stuff, and his directorial debut is a one-of-a-kind exploration and interrogation of our relationship with technology, told through the eyes—and glasses—of a group of lovably rambunctious kids.
It's a bit of a shame given how long it took to get Den-Noh Coil licensed given how the show's fanciful AR tech was overtaken by the likes of Pokémon GO and smartphones, but on the other hand it marks Iso as extremely prescient.
It's true! Several years before Google Glass was even a glimmer in the corporation's eye, Den-noh Coil postulated a world in which ubiquitous AR glasses had, over a decade, shaped a thriving digital dimension overlaid and intersecting with our real one. It directs traffic. You can draw in it. And you can even own adorably ugly cyberpets.
You can count the people in Den-Noh Coil that don't wear the Den-Noh Glasses on one hand—and protagonist Yuko isn't one of them. I'll be referring to her as Yasako for a reason as we'll explain later. Yasako and her family are new to Daikoku City, where her father helps run the Bureau for Cyber Affairs.
The show actually has a fairly large main cast—something you can get away with when you have two entire cours to work with—but the really important part is that they're all children. For me, that's at the heart of what separates Den-noh Coil from similar speculative science-fiction. Despite the advanced technology, it's about kids doing what they always do: exploring the spaces where adults tell them not to go. It's just, in this case, those spaces have fuzzy little dark monsters.
That's what really makes Den-Noh Coil feel special to me. So much of this show just boils down to the kids playing more elaborate versions of "hide-and-seek" or scrounging for bottle caps. And those little critters up there are key to it all! They're Illegals, bizarre data entities that can propagate by infecting and killing cyberpets—cyberpets like Yasako's cyber-dog Densuke. Upon arriving at Daikoku City, Densuke has an unfortunate run-in with an Illegal after ending up in a bizarre out-of-bounds data area.
It's a great introduction to how Den-noh space "works." It's an alternate reality meant to exactly mirror our own, but like all technology, it's not perfect. It has flaws, glitches, and bugs, and those are the spaces Den-noh Coil is interested in. And I think, philosophically, you can make a strong argument that technology in general is defined not by what it's meant to do, but by what it actually does. These Illegals and the children's hacking devices are just as much a part of the environment as anything else. And that includes this guy.

Just a very normal guy.
I wanna take a minor tangent from that daikon-radish-looking-guy to reminisce that back in the day, part of playing Pokémon was abusing the exploits in the game: triggering MissingNo. to duplicate items, hacking Mew into the game with the Game Shark, stuff like that. So good on Iso for recognizing that kids wouldn't take AR tech to play within the rules, they'd take AR tech to just fool around with the underlying system and exploit it for trivial gain. Not even maliciously, just as a thing to do.
That's just how kids work! The only unbelievable thing about this show is that they don't break their glasses more often than they already do.
Anyway. Radish-dude. That's the digital servant (insistently not a pet) of Fumie, a girl Yasako meets. She helps Yasako get Densuke back and also clues her in to how Yasako's grandmother, dubbed "Megabaa", sells all kinds of AR-hacking goodies at her little run-down corner store candy shop.
This is also a good place to highlight how good the character designs are. They might appear simple at first glance, but in motion they're infused with oodles of personality. For instance, Fumie is a little stinker, and she's got the eyebrows to prove it.

So much of the show, in terms of appearance and tone, reminds me of Boogiepop Phantom, which we also covered in This Week In Anime a few months back. And the simple character designs are part of it: instantly recognizable in spite of their simplicity. It helps that the series has such good face game; Megabaa is never seen without that wide grin of hers.
Kyoko is also one of the all-time great awful little sisters in anime. She's just chock-full of the bottomless yet innocent malice of a kid that age. She is only there to cause problems and call things "dookie," and I love her.
She's Yasako's little sister and all she does is run around, point at things and shout "Dookie!" She's painfully a toddler, but she's important to some events later. And hey, sometimes you just need an agent of chaos in these shows, and Kyoko is eager to fill that role.
Even their digital dog Densuke has more personality than most anime have in their entire cast.

Yasako and her friends, meanwhile, are all in the sixth grade, so they're at the perfect age for silly boy-girl rivalries that of course extends to their hacking adventures, with Fumie leading one camp and Daichi directing his own squad of rowdy computer boys.
I love how one of the kids is just a young Tochiro from Space Pirate Captain Harlock (second from the right). Look at him. All he needs is the coat.
Daichi is just a total brat but you can't help but love him too. He has a good heart, and he can't help the fact that he's 12.
Being that he also has a crush on Fumie but is 12, he and her have a beef with each other which fuels a lot of the show's conflicts. Yasako shows a lot of maturity for being able to see it from a distance.
I adore all of my dumb-as-bricks children. And that includes Isako, who might be the most tech-savvy out of the entire cast, but is clearly embroiled in a web of cyber-conspiracy well beyond her ken. She looks badass, though.
She's one of the most mysterious characters in the show right from the word "go". We see her hunting down Illegals, for one, which opens its own can of worms. Unlike the other kids who just play around the rules and limitations of the AR world, Isako is actively exploiting them for some reason or another.
She's also got her hands on a rumored technology called "Imago" that apparently lets her control her glasses with only her mind. That's cool, but it seems to take a toll on her, and beyond that, it has troubling implications about one's ability to distinguish the cyber world from the real one. On the other hand, though, the series is about the blurring of that line, so it's very fitting. And that said, I'm still not anywhere closer to letting Elon Musk put a computer chip in my brain.
And here's where one of the other shoes drops: both Isako and Yasako are named "Yuko" in the show. Fumie even dubs them "Yasako" and "Isako" to tell them apart once Isako joins their class. They couldn't be more different, too: Yasako is very invested in her peers, Isako just sees them as a means to an end. She has limits, being a 12-year-old: Isako isn't pushing anyone off of bridges, and even she cares enough to rescue Kyoko from a falling stairwell. But she has goals and she isn't letting things like "friendship" get in the way of that.
No spoilers, but the second half of the series focuses a lot more on Isako's deal and what she's doing. For now, though, she's important for constantly pushing our understanding of what these things called Illegals, Kirabugs, Metabugs, and so on actually are. They're clearly more than just glitches.

Oh, Isako is also responsible for my favorite bit of aesthetic flair in Den-noh Coil. When she hacks, she doesn't need code. She only needs magic circles.
I dig how many of the "hacking" toys in Den-Noh Coil manifest as onmyoji talismans, but Isako veers into full-on techno-wizardry. Really helps cement the show as a possible setting for a Virtual Adept campaign from Mage: The Ascension.
It's also just a really smart decision from a creative perspective. The show already has plenty of traditional hacking scenes with keyboards aflutter, so why not spice it up from time to time with something more visually engaging. That's the kind of heat Mitsuo Iso and his team bring to the table. And, I guess if we're talking about eye-popping things in Den-noh Coil...
Oh, it's a bastard
I just love how the show has this very deliberately muted color palette and down-to-earth character designs, and then you've got this giant red monstrosity representing the city's antivirus program. Searchy and his four balls patrol the streets "fixing" glitches when they pop up. So naturally, the kids often run afoul of him, and he's kinda the de facto villain of this first half—albeit a lovably squishable villain.
So, because Searchy is owned by the city's Internet Bureau, it doesn't have access to schools or houses—because those areas and their networks are overseen by their own personal bureaus. Also, they can't go into homes because of privacy laws, and they can't go into shrines because those are overseen by tourism bureaus. So many of the kids' adventures take on a playful "hide-and-seek" angle in that their forays into exploring the limits of the AR world necessitate them keeping the location of nearby shrines handy so they have a "safe" spot. Also, Isako can literally hack this by just drawing a shrine gate on the floor in chalk. Write "ELBERETH" while you're at it, why don't you...
Touches like that just make the world feel so much more authentic. Like, of course the city's big expensive cop bot is easily fooled by a simple stick of chalk. One of Yasako's clubmates, Haraken, also has limited admin privileges that turn Searchy from a menace into a big red mutt. Temporarily.

Haraken's deal is a little more serious than the show's usual goofy escapades. And, of course, prescient as heck, because it turns out the ethics of self-driving cars haven't gotten any less relevant over the past 15 years.
A belated classmate of Haraken's (whom he had feelings for) was investigating Illegals when she got into a car crash. The authorities claim it was because her AR glasses distracted her, but it's pretty obvious Bigger Things™ were afoot, and Yasako wastes no time in offering her help to Haraken—even if it means knowing her newfound feelings for Haraken might go ignored.
And just as their investigation into Kanna's accident is heating up, Den-noh Coil suddenly shifts gears and spits out three seemingly unrelated episodes that each explore a different facet of the Illegals. It's kind of a weird move, but these episodes make up my absolute favorite chunk of the entire show. This is also why we decided to cover more than our usual six or so episodes, instead going up to 13, the halfway point. Den-noh Coil is just that good.
The first of these episodes is a doozy, and fans of Futurama will find a lot of similarities between it and the episode "Godfellas". Daichi, down on his luck after being booted out of his own club, is on the hunt for Illegals given their involvement in the creation of Metabugs (which is a stand-in for currency for kids in the AR world). His misadventures infect him with a bizarre viral strain of Illegals that manifest on his face as a beard, which soon spreads to everyone wearing the AR glasses. In short order, the whole city is infected with them!
This is simply one of the greatest episodes of anime ever. A shitpost for the history books. It takes an extraordinarily silly premise and transmutes it into a microcosm of human society, all while being hilariously deadpan about it.

The tiny beard Illegals basically speedrun civilization, while Yasako and the others get treated like their gods. And Yasako at least knows how to act like one.
Eventually, the Illegals discover atheism and descend into nuclear war, not only devastating their own worlds (beards?) but also developing the tech to wage war with other worlds (beards?). The kids find themselves parroting philosophy at each other as they figure out what to do about their beard-people killing each other off. Meanwhile, everyone is sporting a 5 o'clock shadow the whole time.

I dare you to show me another anime that quotes Nietzsche and gives a toddler some face scruff in the same episode.

It's also extremely rude for Den-noh Coil to end the episode by giving the beardlings pathos, taking one last moment to let them reflect on the meaning of their existence—an unknowable question that they are nevertheless compelled to answer, wherever that search takes them, far beyond the eyes and ears of their former deities. It is messed up how good this episode is, toe to tip.
I will say that the solution the kids had found before the beardlings decided to forge their own path—letting the beards colonize the scalp of an elderly bald neighbor—was hilarious right before the rug got pulled underneath us. Godspeed, you hairy little buggers.
The episode before that one isn't quite as perfect, but it's still a really fun romp that expands our perception of what the Illegals are. Sometimes, they're a sentient beard. Sometimes, they're a very tiny fish that grows to the size of a house by feeding on texture artifacts.

Daichi's explanation of how he gets the "fish food" is another of the show's highlights. It reminds me of the way speedrunners take advantage of glitches built into a game's code, repurposing them in a constructive and transformative way.
Again, it's just like how kids went about farming visits from Missing No. Daichi most likely learned that exploit on the schoolyard. There are probably rumors that it could get your parents arrested if the cops find you.
The cops, incidentally, do find Daichi.

Don't worry, he gets better.
Also hilarious: Daichi potentially ruined the entirety of the AR network in Daikoku City for nothing because even if his fish didn't get erased, it wasn't the kind of Illegal that produced Metabugs in the first place: all it did was eat texture artifacts. Also, that lady up there is Tamako. She's Haraken's Auntie who not only works for the Internet Bureau (with Yasako's dad), she's also in charge of the Searchys. She tends to get roped into all of the antics the kids make. And she's actually just a high-schooler, too. Must be some kind of paid intern. For the most part, her and Isako play a game of cat and mouse as Tamako looks into why Isako is so fascinated with Illegals and Metabugs.
Plus she owns a motorcycle! And I wanna give a quick shoutout to the fish episode's excellent application of shadow and water effects. It might not have the philosophical heft of the beard people, but it's a hard episode to forget.
Before we get into the best episode of the show, I also wanna shout-out the episode where the kids are trying to psyche each other out with ghost stories and Haraken, stick in the mud that he is, points out all the different ways different regions tell the same horror story involving the same urban legend. I like Haraken, we're birds of a feather.


That same episode had the kids trying to spook each other with cryptids like the Flatwoods Monster and our very own homegrown Puerto Rican cryptid, the Chupacabra (the sightings originated in Moca in 1975!). That made me happy to see.
There really is too much good stuff to cover in just one column. Pretty much all of Den-noh Coil is rich and ripe for discussion, and time has only been kind to its big questions about how tech intersects with our lives, for good and bad. But if I had to pick one story that will never vacate my heart, it's the one about a boy and his dinosaur.
Oh boy, this episode... strap in, this is an episode worth the 13-episode weight. So, the previous episode was the one with the beardlings, and it established that Illegals aren't just weird blobs of data: they can attain sentience and become digital monster lifeforms in their own right. In this episode, Denpa finds a unique long-necked Illegal that lives in an abandoned lot. It's the last of its kind, its peers vanishing from the internet. As it turns out, big Illegals have parts of their source code spread out through different servers; regular maintenance ends up just eroding their data until the Illegal just vanishes. Also, this Illegal can only survive on dark patches of ground and away from direct light. With an upcoming construction project threatening its home, the kids band together to try and lead it to a safe spot it can survive in.

This episode really brings in all of the elements that make Den-Noh Coil great. The kids have to plan a route almost like it's a kids game: can't cross over light patches of road, can't cut through bright roads, and they can't just use AR bug spray (not that kind) to make a path because there's not enough spray in the city and using too much of it summons Searchy anyway. They also have to play pranks on the construction workers to buy enough time to form their plan.
Exactly! It's not that "The Last Plesiosaur" does anything radically different compared to the rest of the show, but rather that it elegantly synthesizes everything it does well into a story explicitly about loss and grief. It's a tearjerker on emotional and existential levels. It's an argument for the fact that Kubinaga needs and deserves a home, and it's a lament of the fact that this world has none to offer.
The part that hits closest to home is up to this point, none of the adults in this world really get what it is the kids are doing in the AR world—and they ultimately don't care. It's just the kids playing around to them. All of the politicking and rivalries the kids are waging are just "games" to the adults, and any bit of danger the kids are exposed to would just be met with a snide "turn the glasses off, then!". Even if the kids began to explain everything about Kubinaga to some adult, they'd just shrug it off. Kubinaga is ultimately just an Illegal, and the system the adults imposed just isn't designed to incorporate them. There's a line in There's A Mastodon In My Living Room by Elaine Moore, I read it as a kid and it never left my mind: "Only a kid knows what it's like to be a kid."
And at the center of that is Denpa, a really sweet and sensitive kid who does everything he can to protect his friend, but all he can do in the end is be there and watch Kubinaga disintegrate. His acting, above all else, cements the episode's climax as an unforgettable and heartbreaking one.


Fun fact to distract me from the sadness: the animation director for "The Last Plesiosaur" was Kiyotaka Oshiyama, the guy who went on to direct Flip Flappers and design a lot of cool monsters and machines for a lot of cool shows.
We basically covered the first half of the show, and it's a long one, but "The Last Plesiosaur" was billed to me as the best episode of the bunch and it definitely earns that distinction. It's a fantastic standalone episode that really encapsulates all of the best parts of Den-Noh Coil, and if this doesn't convince you to watch it I don't know what will.
Yeah, if you already watched and liked The Orbital Children, then you have every reason to check this one out. And if you're at all interested in idiosyncratic anime, Den-noh Coil remains in a league of its own when it comes to the amount of personality, thoughtfulness, and whimsy written into every line of its code. We talked about a lot here, yet barely scratched the surface. This is a special one.

By the way, that's my nice way of asking you to watch it. The other way is that I get your IP address and spam you with pop-ups about how good Den-noh Coil is. The choice is yours.

Shows that can perfectly capture childlike sensibilities are rare and special; you don't see a lot of Calvin and Hobbes-es out there. This is even a show you could use to introduce anime to people who don't normally watch it. It's a delight, and we are so, so lucky it's on Netflix. Watch it, or you'll lose out on two years' worth of New Year's money.
Don't make us sic Searchy on you.
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