The below review contains light spoilers for Season 1 of 86, which is now streaming on Crunchyroll.
A story of two perspectives, 86 is immediately striking in its disturbing engagement with fascism. Though the editing leaves little room for ambiguity about what it considers right and wrong, there’s something to be said about how it never lets even its main character get off easy, the process of unlearning unconscious bias presented with more depth of thought than is usual for shows about prejudice.
Based on the light novel series of the same name, 86 takes place 100 years in the future during wartime between two groups of supposedly autonomous machines. The drones of the “heroes,” called “Juggernaut,” are piloted from the wealthy republic of San Magnolia, showing its capital city from the perspective of, Vladilena Milizé (or “Lena” for short), a young major in the military responsible for commanding “Spearhead,” one unit of machines fighting the invading force of drones known as Legion. But San Magnolia’s spider-like "drones" hide a dark secret: they are not autonomous, but rather, piloted by an oppressed underclass of different human ethnicities referred to only as "86s," a fact known by the military but hidden from civilians. The 86s are members of an ethnic minority, stripped of their human rights and forced to fight and die in the place of the Alba, San Magnolia’s mono-ethnic ruling class.
The moment we’re keyed into something being incredibly wrong with the country comes early, an unsettling sequence quietly emphasizing how the entire populace has silver hair and blue eyes, all happily ignorant of the monstrosities committed on their behalf. It’s but one example about how smart 86 is about how it chooses to portray the machinations of fascism, where despotism is accepted as the way of the world just because it’s the law, and because it’s convenient.
Director Toshimasa Ishii highlights this through perhaps 86’s most striking touch: splitting the show down the middle with dramatic perspective shifts, observing each day from the point of view of Lena and again from the squadron she commands, these different angles revealing new truths. It becomes even more exciting as it plays with a more elliptical structure, jumping back and forth in time as it reveals how the same events played out through different eyes. Lena serves as a route into this world, but Ishii and screenwriter Toshiya Ōno smartly turn that on us by revealing she has something of a blinkered perspective. Though she’s well-meaning, Lena’s idealism is still borne of privilege; she knows that the 86 are unfairly treated, but not how this operates even on the smallest levels, that she has unconscious biases of her own. Her naivety concerning the struggles of the 86 and their lack of choices regarding resistance to their oppressors can be frustrating - but the show smartly and consistently grills her on it, the Spearhead squadron themselves often calling her out on any complicity in this same system.
The writing can often operate with blunt force, but 86 never feels truly didactic nor myopic in what it’s telling us. Perhaps it’s that aforementioned close attention to how it unfurls systemic biases, alongside the mysteries that define the conflict between the state and the Legion. It’s just as exciting to learn what each new day brings in the war with the Legion as it is to see Lena get to know the Spearhead squadron, their at-first terse relationship evolving into something much more complex. Part of this comes through in how it mounts an impossible, star-crossed romantic tension between Lena and Shinei AKA “The Reaper,” a particularly troubled member of Spearhead who takes it upon himself to euthanize dying comrades before the Legion steal their heads and use them to make more machines. Shinei serves as the series’ deuteragonist (and later, protagonist) and his harsh, perhaps fatalistic outlook does well to show up Lena’s naïveté as to her station in comparison to theirs.
As it switches between these perspectives, as well as a jumping back and forth in time, and between oppressed peoples and the privileged, the editing of 86 quickly becomes another highlight alongside its intense mech combat and sweeping landscapes. It’s perhaps heavy-handed -- and often endearingly cheesy and earnest, somehow – but that sledgehammer-like lack of subtlety never feels wrong, especially as it pays such close attention to the nuances of how its world operates. 86, despite taking place in the far future, presents its world with compelling grit. Even its most futuristic touches are fairly small at first, kept to communication devices that mentally link Lena with her squadron. The art direction for the most part envisions San Magnolia with 20th Century European architecture; its military sci-fi elements feel grounded in the present day by their relatively normal uniforms and firearms.
Beyond such explorations, it’s also just a joy to look at and listen to, with evocative use of color and even alteration of the frame through letterboxing and changing aspect ratios. When it comes to the action, the spider-like drones -- portrayed with sparing, precise use of CG animation -- are initially strange and off-putting, but the wholly unique way in which they move as well as their very nature as “steel coffins” becomes compelling in itself. The punchy sound design lends the aforementioned CG action sequences a very tangible, tactile sense to them; every impact feels heavy, and terrifying.
The military environments in which the 86 live and die mostly keep a cold color palette, all blue and green hues, their battles mostly taking place at night in bombed out towns, visually removed from the lavish architecture and golden light of the city they’re forced to fight for.
For all of the heavy, almost granular detail of every operation the Spearhead squadron carry out, there’s also a very simple visual journey going on, as the dour environments in which they live eventually give way to a freer, more natural world, the season culminating in a field covered in flowers associated with Lena, a vivid, overwhelming red to counter the cold and washed-out palette of the prior battle. There’s also a fascinating angle to how 86 perceives digital communication -- at once distancing in how it at first keeps a dehumanizing remove between Lena and Spearhead, but later facilitates connection that would otherwise be impossible, yet another contradiction among the many that Ishii’s adaptations revels in exploring. That complexity in its storytelling and visual perspectives is a big part of what sets the show apart.
Given the melancholic finality with which 86’s first group of episodes concluded, those unfamiliar with the light novel (like myself) might have been surprised that there even was a second half to this season. And with it, 86’s seemingly complete story lurches back to life and then upends itself, building out the bigger picture of its world of futuristic republics and monarchies, but still focused on the more acute personal struggles of its characters, and the rippling effects of their oppression and weaponization as child soldiers. But where Part 1 feels focused and unrelenting in its clash of privilege, prejudice and mechs, Part 2 feels messier and even meandering. The writing loses a bit of the directness that made its first 11 episodes so compelling. As it introduces new characters like the precious child noble Frederika, an introduction of strange powers tangles the show up in the metaphysical (and perhaps connects it with the Newtypes of Mobile Suit Gundam), for good and for bad.
Worse is when it begins to feel like it’s spinning its wheels, meandering along with its characters as they search for new purpose and a mess of new information about the conflict is thrown out, and new characters enter the picture before quickly leaving again. This much is perhaps exacerbated by the show’s late season production issues, the time pressure evident in some fairly static and inert scenes, various information dumps arriving with an abundance of still frames and a lack of the show’s previous detail.
Thankfully, a well-needed extended delay left the show in a better place for its finale, with three months between the climactic battle episode and its aftermath in the episode “Shin” -- one good enough to make the case for the 2nd cour of the season as a whole. As the battle of the first half continued in the minds of the characters, the second half’s conflict continues into Shin’s mind.
As ever, the visual choices made in these episodes are hardly subtle, but it doesn’t matter. The manipulation of the frame itself in “Shin” is experimental, bordering on abstraction. Ishii toys with every single element of the screen as a means of visual expressivity (one jaw-dropping moment has the constricted frame take Shin’s arm off). The black bars come to represent the prison that Shin has built for himself from his survivor’s guilt and struggle with a lack of purpose, but it’s not an immovable barrier. Ishii shows a shadow of Shin protruding from the dark edges of the film, with other characters breaking this new boundary in a sort of reflection of the breaking of both Shin’s emotional isolation, and even San Magnolia’s segregation and arbitrary social hierarchies. It’s this kind of ingenuity, a genuinely thoughtful and multifaceted union of technique and theme, that makes 86 so engaging beyond the viscerality of its action or the uncompromising tragedy of its earlier half. It’s a mighty return to form that makes the wait feel more than worthwhile, and the follow-up episode “Handler One” brings the show full circle, its perspective changing hands once more as it jumps ahead in time. That return to where it all started makes even the rockier parts of the journey feel monumental in how much things have changed. The conclusion is extremely corny in places, but that complete earnestness feels not just earned, but in step with the intense emotions of the rest of the season.
So, despite that rocky and prolonged second half, in the end, 86 stuck the landing, incredibly bold in how it unpacks the psychology of its characters through expressive visual experimentation.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/uR5sU6W
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