Fifteen years to the month his last project ended, RErideD: Derrida, Who Leaps Through Time hit Crunchyroll with ABe's original character designs in tow (And three of his illustrations in the closing credits). And... well, it is nothing like the other series he's been involved with; that is, it is a generic, uninteresting piece of sci-fi junkfood programming riding on the coattails of Steins;Gate, itself fading from popularity and having a prequel released the previous season to little fanfare. In fact, RErideD might reach back in time more as a generic anime series from the mid 2000's anime boom where individual volumes have sat in Right Stuf's discount bin for over a decade, forever unloved. It might be too cruel to call it a Glass Fleet as it is too good for that. At the very least watchable, what it lacks is a script that is interested in more than what's in front of it, which almost garners a certain charm as it goes along. Perhaps it's more of a Heat Guy J.
I could go by my blog's namesake and spend hours sifting piece-by-piece through the work to say what exactly is wrong with it, but there is one question that pretty well sums up the series: What is the Trout Theory? Obviously, this needs explanation. Every time travel boilerplate at least has some kind of basis to which the traipsing about space-time hangs its hat on. We don't know what the Flux Capacitor exactly does to create time travel in Back to the Future, but we know what it is. There is hardly a time travel story that doesn't have some long-winded explanation of how they're doing it with various levels of confidence.
In this case, main character Derrida Yves is a scientist who, in his younger years, wrote a paper on Trout Theory, which explains how a person may time jump. We learn next to nothing about what's actually in the paper until the final episode, except that is has problems and was written off as the dreams of an eager college kid. As Derrida begins to time jump in earnest, he doesn't even know how he's doing it, and the rules aren't explained until around 2/3rds of the series' running time. The world building and the overall texture are dealt with in a similar manner, feeling like a show where someone tripped and lost pages of the script out a gusty window.
But let us go to the beginning of the story, where Derrida is a citizen of a futuristic country (If it has a name, it doesn't matter). He's an AI developer living in the shadow of his father, who proliferated the use of robots in everyone's daily lives. With his friend Nathan, they discover a catastrophic bug in their new batch of AIs (Called DZs) where their programming will cause them to go berserk if a large enough number of them are given a single command at once. Since war utilizing masses of DZs is a constant thing here (Between who? Places that are maybe close by, I guess....), that this incident will happen with combat models is a near-certainty.
On the birthday of Nathan's 8-year-old daughter Mage, Derrida tries to get the pieces in place to stop the catastrophe, but not before Mage engages Derrida in a weird discussion about continuing his work on time travel. Unfortunately, the head of the company, Hans Andrei, is already quite aware of the bug, intentionally made it as such, and has already shipped out the faulty models around the world to cause the robot apocalypse and control what's left. Andrei sends men to kill both of the scientists, only succeeding with Nathan. Derrida is helped by a supposed guardian angel named Ange who appears out of nowhere with the sound of clocks and guides him out of trouble, tumbling into an abandoned cryogenic chamber facility where he just lays down onto a random bed that activates and causes him to fall asleep for ten years. If you can guess the secret behind Ange, you've watched a series with plot twists before.
Derrida awakes in a somewhat watered down Terminator future where he's surrounded by DZs that kill anything that gets close, but fortunately for him, there's still a decent amount of human civilization left. In fact, the city he lived in is still pretty intact with a few walls. But as a scientist who hasn't exactly mastered self-defense techniques, he hires a handler to protect him. There are a bunch of jack-of-all-trade mercenaries here who take care of whatever task they're assigned; mostly, the violent kind. In this case, he runs across Vidaux, a former police officer who makes enough bank to have sassy talking car Graham (sass is set to 2, but it's there) with tactical weapons and babysitter support for his seemingly adopted daughter Mayuka. Derrida's re-appearance trips off alarms with Andrei, who immediately sends out his own mercenary in Donna, the supposed deadliest assassin of the area.
The rest of the series is a chase involving Derrida, Vidaux, and Mage's childhood friend and shutterbug Yuri to find Mage, who has the patch file to fix all the DZs. You might ask where the time travel is in this time traveling show. During downtime, Derrida starts experiencing what he calls time rides where he will go back in time for a couple minutes. Unknowingly at first, but then one of his daydream-esque time rides changes history a smidge to where he everyone is pretty sure he was late to a party he remembers being clearly on time for. I'm not sure how much I should reveal since it doesn't explain the rules until 2/3rds of the way through. What it amounts to is Derrida can only go back in small moments and he gets yanked to the present unceremoniously if he tries to do something too large to affect the timeline. He can put something in his pocket he didn't have before, but he seemingly can't prevent the robot apocalypse.
This is by far the most straightforward series I've seen ABe be involved with. Even with time travel, it moves like an arrow through the plot, taking on only what chooses to get in its way at the moment. There's no need to establish the city, the country, or even the world much because it doesn't matter. It's somewhere, someplace in a futuristic world. While I'm sure there is a boatload of information about everything in this world that was shared with the development team, very little of it is portrayed in the series. It has very little in the form of subtext, it constantly skips over potentially important details, and there are constant moments where I'm not sure if they're trying to imply something and making it a red herring, or if the writing is simply bad. I'm going to have to go back and look up what the freelancing job Vidaux and Donna do is called, because it's brought up and once it's established as only a means to explain what they do, it doesn't have any relevance anymore.
There's no texture, very little world building, and all of it is so broadly scoped that even its attempts at giving character smaller insights just vanish or are meaningless For instance, Mayuka is an avid reader who is left to bond more with Graham than Videaux as he's constantly on missions.The first book we see her reading is Pinocchio, possibly implying she's less than human. This would make sense since there's been a big advancement of robots doing human jobs and one of the characters' arcs includes an experiment where they try to make an android interact like a human. No. She's a normal girl. And I'm still not sure when they came up with Donna's backstory as it was made to explain why she goes crazy sometimes and is obsessed with eliminating Derrida. The trick in this instance is she never really DOES go crazy in the way the backstory suggests she does. She's a professional assassin who fails in her first attempt at her job, is constantly getting interfered with by other assassins Andrei sends because he's an asshole who throws money at everything, and she has a temper about it. It doesn't need the backstory she's given, and when it plays out, it feels like a way to write her out of the plot without the characters we like doing something that would dirty their hands.
But I'm getting too close to the series. This is not a show about micro inspections. These are characters that wear everything but the specific tragedy that got them here on their sleeves. We aren't meant to ponder the world around them as anything more than a situation that has to be resolved. Taken in that respect... it still doesn't work. It's watchable and there's a charm to how much the major characters get stuck in their own little world where seemingly nobody else exists for long stretches at a time, but it's sure not good.
I'll just say it: The writing is LAZY. When Derrida goes to the abandoned cryogenic facility, he randomly lays down on a bed that randomly turns on and randomly puts him to sleep for ten years. Even with what we learn later with Ange, that's still a lot she didn't and couldn't have control over that just happens because the plot requires it to. When Derrida has to sneak in his old office, they cut details about how they show up in their old city that's been walled off, get disguises, and saunter through the most lax security of any corporation that controls the fate of the world I've ever seen. How little they establish of how the world works makes it easy to get ahead of "surprise" plot twists. Of COURSE the semi-truck is going to play a role later. It's the only other vehicle they pass in the entire damn wasteland! Oh yeah, and don't act so bloody surprised when Donna constantly finds the one giant talking car driving on the few remaining main roads. These characters kind of have the incognito skills of Inspector Gadget. At least the series realizes that part eventually as they try to quietly venture into a new city and are instantly found.
The character interactions are fine, but they never reach above surface level on anything. Derrida thinks his father finds him a disappointment and keeps him at a distance because of it. Would you believe me if I told you that wasn't true and Derrida finds out in one time jump? Of course you would. Half the time travel stuff from Chrono Trigger to Frequency features some kind of reconnecting with a parent. What surprises me is how they didn't take more from all the other time travel stories. I'm guessing this likely is because of the nature of two of main characters.
We don't learn a whole lot about Mage on the quest to find her except she's smart as a whip and she undertook her mission not only to save the future, but she secretly loves Derrida. There's also the suggestion Yuri falls in love with him as she journeys with him. Keep in mind that in what was essentially yesterday for Derrida, these girl were 8 instead of 18. It thankfully keeps all of this at arm's length, but that also means nothing interesting happens between them. I'll admit Yuri gets one really good scene where she tries to deal with her conflicting feelings over fixing the past and losing everything she's come to care about on this journey, but that's about it. There's a really cool idea about Derrida and Mage in the future only being able to meet in the past, but again, it's never really broached. Series writer Kenji Konuta is pretty solid with baseball manga adaptations (Ace of the Diamond, Major 2nd). With imaginative sci-fi? Even writing a couple episodes of Texhnolyze, not so much.
By the end, there are aspects that would work if it was in a better anime. Its main message about how it's the small things that change the future instead of the wider actions would be more well taken if the series actually had smaller things. Andrei is revealed as a completely incompetent villain with no menace. Is he a commentary on Donald Trump as an idiot with horrific blonde hair who only holds the illusion of strength through throwing money and influence for people to hide behind? The bigger question is does it matter? The answer is no. After being established as THE major threat, he disappears for awhile before he's casually removed. Some guy from a seemingly one-off episode takes over with no energy or urgency to the ticking clock in the climax even when it remembers, oh yeah, there are armies of deadly robots EVERYWHERE. What happens follows story threads, but I only cared at the very base level that you care about characters. It's not that I didn't give a shit about them; it's that there's not enough here to grab onto.
Really, that's the big flaw here. The artistry is average with nothing that pops out, and the animation, backgrounds, music, and the acting are workmanlike. Even ABe's designs have all of their artistic edges smoothed out and are made bland in translation to television. The best looking part of the series is the ending credits which are just three drawings from ABe given digitally animated snow. The music works and I don't know how much else to say about it. Even similar series of similar modest aims like Plastic Memories had more ambitions, more thought into the world, and more ways to twist the premise emotionally. Here, we have one episode about an experiment where they attempted to see if they could make a robot behave like a human that's fascinating, but it is on an island. Everything else started average and ended average.
You have to go back farther than Steins;Gate to be able to find an audience for this. Maybe early 2000s when there wasn't a whole lot of anime and the basic pleasures have more resonance because everyone hasn't run this maze a time or ten. The opening and closing have that emotional grab that would be effective if it didn't remind me of a half-dozen much better series I could be watching. I can say even as something I've been waiting 15 years for, it didn't make me angry even if I was disappointed. If this is one of your first anime or one of your first sci-fi series, I could see liking it a bunch. But it can't go back in time and be that magic 2000s entry-level anime. Even then, I'd still recommend Serial Experiments Lain.
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