No.6 episode 1: [First Impression]

No.6 takes us in a Utopian City where a young boy named Shion lives the life of the elite and enjoy his peaceful life. But on his birthday a strange boy comes into his house and changes everything.

 Zero’s First Impression:

This show looks interesting, but I feel like we only got to catch a glimpse of what the show is all about. We got to learn a bit about the universe the story is set in, we learned about the main characters, but there is still no clue as to where this show will be heading to.

What should we expect? The introduction was a fast paced man-hunt, is this what the show will be about? The only thing I can say for certain is that the main focus of the show will be on character development and the development of our understanding of the universe the story sets in.

What I can say for now is that the art is wonderful. I have no idea who’s the mind behind the story, but everything is shown beautiful. You can feel how Shion feels about the world around him, you can enter his feeling and really understand how he feels the world inside of him. I know that I will be watching this anime at least for the beauty of the characters.

To be honest, the story (of what I could see up to now) looks weak. I don’t believe we will have a story out of the ordinary. I do believe the strong point and central point of this anime will be the characters and how they interact with each other. Every single character feels like a living person, there was no flat character anywhere to see. From Shion to the grandma, you could feel the background story of everyone.

Shion is an interesting piece of character. You know he is different from everyone else, to begin with he has an enourmous IQ, he is part of the most elite portion of the elite. This by itself is quite the interesting trait, but he is different from every one of his caliber too. He has this wild part in him, he is a free mind. He doesn’t seem afraid of anything and he has such confidence in himself. It is beautiful to watch.

Nezumi is quite the interesting character too, he seems to be a smart guy despite being a fugitive and he seems so curious about life, but unfortunately life seem to have given him a hard time. He might not be as awesome as Shion, but he sure has an interesting personality too.

Now I don’t have much to say about Safu except for this picture.

 

If a girl ever tell me that, I marry her on the spot. That is the most awesome way to describe a kiss, ever. A girl who talk to me and instead of saying “I’m happy to see you” she says ” I feel my body release more Luteinizing hormone each time I see you”. While the second way might be even more provocative, it doesn’t feel dirty if you say it in public, you just look like an intelligent woman, since 90% of the people won’t understand the meaning.

I’m not yet sure If I will be blogging this show, but I will be watching it. I will give the show 2 or 3 episodes so I can see where the story is going before I decide if I blog it or not.

Possibility of Watching: Yes
Possibility of Blogging: Maybe

ZeroG signing off

Silvia’s First Impression:

Now it’s my turn! No. 6 caught my attention within the first few minutes. From the start, we are introduced to a sterilized world of the future, totally peaceful, except for that part in the beginning where a kid is being shot at as he runs through the sewers. But the regular folks don’t know about that and they don’t need to know. There is a feeling in the air to the viewer that all is not as it seems, and that there is an ugly underbelly to this beautiful world. The animation and art direction both really add to the beauty as both are very well done. The world looks gorgeous, and the city, while it has a futuristic air, doesn’t seem so crazy and unbelievable. It feels like something that could take place fifty years from now, if something catastrophic happened and we had to build entirely new infrastructure a la western Europe after World War II.

On to what’s happening in the show. Sion, the boy we first meet who is daydreaming in class, leaves with a classmate and we discover it is his twelfth birthday. He has a little celebration at his friend and classmate Safu’s house with her grandmother. They eat cake, Safu has her grandmother give him a sweater she knitted, and she ominously adds that “everything is provided in number six,” so gardening and knitting are all she can do. Hmmm, granny being relegated to these tasks isn’t so unusual in our era if she were retired, but it doesn’t appear to be that way. However I’m merely suspicious with no proof, so let’s move on.

Sion heads home and while he’s in his room the kid we first saw running from the men in black sneaks in after Sion opens the window (which really is more like a door) to his room to enjoy the rain. The kid grabs Sion around the throat but Sion’s naivete disarms him, and the blue-haired kid introduces himself as “Nezumi” but from Sion’s reaction we are led to believe he really means the true meaning of the word, ‘rat.’ Who calls themselves a rat? Hmmm, that’s not normal.

We do get a tiny glimpse of backstory when Sion mentions that during the last war, most habitable areas of the planet were destroyed (and we see images of cities under water to where skyscrapers are submerged) so people banned all military action and several city-states were formed, and number six is one of those city-states, written on the city’s logo as “No. 6” like the show’s title. I kinda dig this kind of stuff, not gonna lie—futuristic utopia to dystopia. Did I mention Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is one of my favorite anime series? I feel right at home here. <3

As the show continues I can’t wait to get more in depth with the themes and the show’s own analysis of the failures of humanity. We already had a taste with Nezumi mentioning a few things to Sion. Yeah it’s a little cliché, one kid who lives on the good side of the coin meeting up with another kid who lives on the crappy flip-side of that same coin. Cliches in and of themselves aren’t bad things though, so while a story can start off the same way as a thousand stories before, it’s where it goes and what it has to say (in addition to how it is said) that matters.

Preview for the next episode already tells us we are in store for a timeskip of four years to when Sion is sixteen, and it looks like his life has taken a turn for the worse from meeting Nezumi. Hey, he aided a fugitive and got caught, so he brought it on himself—who gives a shit if the kid is twelve at the time? Admittedly I’m liking this approach, instead of say wasting a number of episodes or even an entire first season as some anime do on setting up the backstory and just barely brushing by the plot, No. 6 says “screw that” and gives you the first episode before getting into the timeskip and picking up where the action happens. I’m sure we’re in store for bad things, especially since the police force of No. 6 is called the “Bureau of Public Safety.” Big brother is watching, indeed (is that you Andrew Ryan?).

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m excited for this show. See you next week. <3