Anime Review: Godzilla: Singular Point
It is the year 2030, and a crystal radio set in an abandoned mansion suddenly starts receiving a transmission. It’s a lullaby from India, seemingly broadcast from a government installation with a secret in the basement. The installation calls in graduate student Mei Kamino, who has a double major in cryptozoology and quantum mechanics (what would animals be like in other universes with different rules?), and a pair from Otaki Factory. Yun Arikawa, a brilliant if eccentric engineer who’s developed his own prototype artificial intelligence, and brawny mechanic Haberu Katou, an old classmate of Mei’s.
Since the government doesn’t share the secret in their basement, the source of the transmission remains a mystery for now. Yun “shares” his AI with Mei’s computer, and she names the resulting personal assistant Pelops II after her old dog. It publishes some of her work, and gets Mei recruited by SHIVA, an organization investigating a theoretical material called Archetype. Back at the Otaki Factory, Yun and Haberu help their boss Goro Otaki, an eccentric but brilliant man, build a mecha codenamed “Jet Jaguar.” It comes in surprisingly handy when a festival is attacked by a monster!
The flying kaiju is swiftly nicknamed “Radon” (Rodan in English) and though the first one expires quickly, more Rodan come out, each version sturdier than the last. Worse, other kaiju emerge throughout the world, spreading the mysterious Red Dust. Mei learns that the Red Dust is connected to Archetype, and that it may be able to bend time. But is the predicted Catastrophe something SHIVA is trying to prevent, or cause?
And if things weren’t bad enough, Godzilla rises from the sea and invades Tokyo!
This is the first ever Godzilla anime series (as opposed to mini-series or series of movies), and the first thing I have to say is man, this was made by people who love Godzilla movies. Even though it is set in a universe where none of the film events happened, there’s all kinds of references to characters, monsters and objects from across the franchise history. You don’t need to have seen the movies, but your enjoyment will enhanced if you have.
Godzilla itself is a force of nature rather than a character for this version, so most of the plot is carried by the human characters and the AIs (Yun’s copy eventually becomes the operating system for Jet Jaguar.) Mei and the Otaki Factory crew are pretty straightforward good guys, but many of the other recurring characters are some level of shady, so it’s not always clear if they have Earth’s best interests at heart.
The humans are done in 2-D animation, while the monsters and robots are CGI, which mostly works, but there are a couple of instances that don’t quite mesh. (It’s a plot point, however, that the rules of geometry change in close proximity to Godzilla, so you can just say there’s non-Euclidean things going on.)
I should mention that there’s a lot of technobabble in this series, as time travel, non-Euclidean geometries, quantum mechanics and other fun advanced scientific theories come into play. You can take a break between episodes to catch up, but if you have a low tolerance for information that isn’t recognized as information when it’s received, you may bounce off this series.
Content note: Monsters battle humans with weapons and the military, as well as each other. There are some pretty graphic injuries for the monsters, but human deaths are not shown graphically or on screen.
Overall: Godzilla fans should highly enjoy this series, though people only here for Godzilla may wind up fast forwarding through the exposition.
