Tokyo Override is a collaboration Original Net Animation (ONA) produced by Netflix which collaborated with Yamaha and Honda to create a very stylised bike-centric show that took three and half years to create. It's directed by Yusuke Fukada (known for live-action such as Furaingu rabittsu) and Veerapatra Jinanavin (Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs) and features designs by relative newcomer Laura Cechanowicz.
My first viewing did not go well. It was late, I was tired and basically fell asleep halfway through, but that's on me, not the show.
On my second attempt I was able to take it in properly. It reminded me mostly of Pantheon, as in very tech heavy and philosophical in its wider worldview, though artistically characters had more in common with the models used in Arcane (even the action scenes have splashes of neon, though never as well as the League of Legends series). It's a curious use of CGI as the backgrounds, at least to my eye, looked pretty basic in comparison to the best the format has to offer. It's functional, but there's not much texture to it, what there is being an effect akin to painting. The direction is quite nice though, with interesting angles and camera movements which help to hide the somewhat stilted motion of the characters.
In the world of Tokyo Override, every citizen is monitored 24/7 and paid a universal basic income, with their interests catered to. The story is about a "non optimal cluster of points trying to survive in an optimised network", which Matrix-influenced lingo is enough to set my eyes rolling.
The series follows Kai, a young hacker who finds herself thrown in with a group if illegal couriers (Hugo and Spoke) and their operator Watari (who reminds me of Meryl Streep's daughter Grace Gummer). The first episode sees them smuggling children who have their citizenship revoked (called "tagless, referring to the device all citizens wear) across Tokyo's border via a highway that, again, has echoes of the universal automated traffic seen in Minority Report, but things go awry when the operations truck is scanned and security bots are sent after them. It's down to Hugo and Spoke to finish the job with a kinetic bike ride, explaining the input from Yamaha and Honda.
The episode ends with the police finding a dead tagless child that looks like the one Kai and her new crew were escorting, so I'm completely confused. The crew split up during the chase with Watari taking the child, so how did he end up dead? Did she kill him? Did he fall off? I assume we have to tune in next week to find out, but as an opening episode it's just baffling taken on its own merits.
Even on second viewing I found this a bit hard to watch. It sets up a communist paradise which has a seedy underbelly, inviting children into the city and then revoking their citizenship. Why and to what end I have no idea, but it's a messy setup. The dialogue is also a bit trite, so in the end it looks a bit cheap (despite the flashy effects) juggles a lot of characters (Kai, the courier team, the Ministry of health, the kid and Kai's friend, it was just a lot at once in service of a bike chase sequence with an unclear conclusion. So I wasn't wowed by it.
Suffice to say I'll be covering the full run for the UK Anime Network, but for an opening episode this is a muddled bag of mediocre that pulls from (so far) superior sci-fi sources. I'm not sure how many people will stick with it from the strength of this episode, but if I weren't reveiwing it elsewhere, I'm not sure I'd continue. I had the same issue with The Expanse and came to love that show, so hopefully the same will be true here. If it's all prolonged bike-gazing, I'm going to struggle.
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