Reviews for Eve no Jikan Gekijouban (9.33) 3f356

There are novelists who made the history of modern narrative by creating their own subgenre, their names forever carved in stone and their works in our collective thought. Once J.R.R. Tolkien, for instance, devised his fantasy world of dwarves, elves and orcs, that became the rule, the universal stereotype of a fantasy setting and theme. Most of these cultural monoliths, however, have never been granted a decent translation into a different media. Just think of Lovecraft, his myths and psychological horror themes recurred so many times in derivative works, and so many movies were made based, sometimes loosely sometimes not, on his works, yet they all were either B-movies or comedic spoofs. Some things are just too complex to survive the translation.

Isaac Asimov's works fall into this category. They actually never even really attempted it, unless you count (and you shouldn't, really) that woeful action blockbuster a few years ago with its title - I, Robot - being the only thing in common with anything Asimov related. We've seen him referred to in countless sci-fi movies or shows, usually very loosely, like Star Trek's Data and his positronic brain, but the only thing that genuinely made past the media conversion was his underlying theme and concept of the robot as an entity free of its previous Prometheus Complex: the robot isn't a Frankenstein's monster, building it isn't a sin against the gods and nature, it literally is a sentient being - albeit an artificial one - and as such neither good nor evil. As a being capable of reasoning, it has to be a full fledged character, striving to understand itself and the world. Ironically, the movie that got closest to a worthy portrayal of these themes was a movie not based on a novel of his, but on a Philip K. Dick's one, the immortal Blade Runner.

Through the character of the robot we are really told a tale about human thought and emotion, it's one of the oldest tricks in the book, really: you use an alien (be it an actual extraterrestrial being, an elf, a sentient machine) to both streamline the exposition and prevent the reader from identifying too much with the character. That way you can deal with a very focused theme and keep the reader away from prejudice when the actual theme can be delicate. It's the very same idea he made one of his memorable characters, Hari Seldon, use in devising his trademark science, psychohistory: this fictional science would make one able to statistically "predict the future" given enough data for the equations, but he needed a relatively small, closed environment (the planet Trantor) to actually reduce the scope of it enough to be able to handle experiments. Just like we need to use a relatively simplier sentient being, working under a clear set of rules, to analyze a certain aspect of our very humanity.

Asimov, being the scientist he was, was a master at this narrating technique, which is especially prominent in his earlier short novels and - to a lesser extent - in the first "chapter" of his space opera, the Robot Saga starring Daneel Olivaw, Giskard and the human Elijah Baley. His later works focused far more on a wider political fantasy, as the more the robots evolved in his alternative storyline the more they were similar to humans and as such worked pretty much like them from a storytelling purpose.
In the earlier novels, he had tons of fun presenting us relatively rudimentary robots, and the thought provoking (and often darn funny) paradoxes the Three Laws had them deal with. From a calculator going crazy when it had to lie to humans to prevent them from developing hyperspace (as during the "jump" they would theoritically cease to exist, which to it would mean they would be dead, and as such the First Law obliged him to do everything to avoid it happening), to a robot on an isolated deep space power plant creating a religion from seemingly very logical foundations, he both played with logic and with human behaviour using his less known talent for irony and social comedy.
The longer sci-fi/detective stories starring Elijah Baley had already far more evolved robots, and dealt mainly with how humans and robots would interact and how this would affect society. Robots advanced enough to actually interpret and weight the Three Laws, striving to assess themselves as individuals, together with humans growing more and more dependant on them for labour and social interactions and at the same time feeling threatened by them.

Eve no Jikan is set exactly in the middle between these two moments in parallel history: at the eve of the day the robots are going to become individuals instead of just machines. Needless to say, the world of EnJ isn't necessarily Asimov's Earth, but apart from a couple loose ends the movie could well have been done without, it could very well be and not incur into any continuity issue. As fellow reviewers already described, in fact, the short, intertwined stories comprising the movie focus on the relations of few individuals in a mainly enclosed space, the world itself being kept as a more or less generic stage.
These stories are amazingly faithful to Asimov's themes, but - as the Asians and especially the Japanese often tend to do - are more centered around emotions rather than logic paradoxes coming from the Three Laws. Even when such a logic problem is the plot device, the focus is in the bittersweet emotional implication it has for the involved characters. There honestly is nothing groundbreaking here, nothing revolutionary, the whole spirit of the movie is minimalistic: minimal setting, small stories about simple people, but it does what minimalistic art should do: find beauty, real beauty, and meaning inside the little things. There's no need for worldwide consequences, or over the top personal dramas and tragedies, to convey its message: a kid jealous of a robot who outplayed him playing the piano, and how this affects his relationship with his robot housemaid, the robots themselves as a reality and with his self-confidence is even better.
Well, there actually is one thing which is revolutionary here: this is the first audiovisual adaptation of Asimov's stories ever worth mentioning and that would make Asimov himself proud. This is kinda groundbreaking per se; as usual, if there's someone able to pull it off, it has to be them Charlies: it seems you need a fresh point of view and true - even candid - love for certain masterpieces to find some real creative juice to offer them, and we who actually created them in the first place now lack it big time.

Well, anyway, this seems a good spot as any to get physical.

Art & Animation

As the script doesn't require the setting to change much through the story, even a small independent studio managed to pull off a wonderful animation work. The CG backgrounds blend masterfully with the 2D characters staged on them, ambient lighting is stunning in its consistence and in how it interacts with the 2d charas, and though there's nothing visionary here, the result is artistic nonetheless.
What really shines, though, are those characters, and the detail in which their expressions and body language is carefully depicted, conveying much of their charisma and giving strength and credibility to the emotions that are the whole point of the storytelling.
Then again, as stated, the whole movie is set in a very few environments, mostly in a single one, the cafe, and as good as the result may be, you'll not have the feeling you have just sit through a revolutionary visual experience. It's no Kubrick, no Burton, no Gondry, and neither - to stay within the anime world - it's Shinbou or Miyazaki, but in its minimalism and simplicity it achieves everything it could have aimed for and a bit more: it's pretty darn solid.

Sound

Music isn't very prominent or memorable here, at least if you leave out Yuki Kajiura's theme song, which is... well, a Yuki Kajiura's song, there really shouldn't be anything else needed to say. During most of the actual movie, we only have some very non-intrusive ambient music, usually a calm piano tune kept at a very low volume. Overall, music goes mostly unnoticed, but does its work in helping set the mood without diverting the attention, which is what is expected from it in such a dialogue-heavy storytelling.
Oh, but on the other hand, those dialogues... those dialogues! There are three things that make a dialogue either good or bad: the actual script, the voice actor's talent, and its rhythm. When the script is stupid, usually even the most talented voice actor can't do anything but sound stupid himself, not to mention as it is called voice acting, when the role is dumb there's no much chance to actually try and understand the character you are voicing to act in a credible way. And this we all know and always notice, but the rhythm? This is the director's responsibility, but in most audiovisual products (be it anime or live actions), even the good ones, dialogues are often stiff; line1 is followed by line2 and then line3. This is not, as fellow reviewers pointed out before me, how people talk in reality. We talk one over another, we interrupt each other, and the characters in this movie do the same. Add to this the fact the script is extremely good and the voice actors do a competent job, and what you get are extremely good dialogues that, once again, help make the whole feel believable and solid.

Story & Characters

In this department we have both the best and the... well, not so good, the movie has to offer. The story revolves around a cafe, the Time of Eve, where there's no discrimination between androids and humans. While in the world we see in the background droids are widely considered and treated merely as objects, with the rather cliché of fundamentalist hate towards human looking androids and the discriminations towards those humans who instead feel emotions for them, inside this cafe everyone is treated the same, and you cannot distinguish a real human from an android (unless it is an older model). The movie plays a lot on the very ambiguity of certain characters, encouraging the viewer to wonder what that character really is, human or android? This is also where the movie shows most of its originality: instead of having an underlying moral teaching love & peace but also how loving an actual android can come from pure egoism, which would usually need to be done by clearly showing who is human and who is not, in this case the issue at hand is approached in a more subtle way. There's no need to teach a lesson when it's the very reality what conveys the obvious: if you are unable to distinguish an human from an android, then it matters not in either case; you are in front of an individual, everything else is then unimportant.
Unfortunately, the movie also stumbles a bit here: in the end you know about the real identity of most characters, which kinda defies the point, and would probably have been more poignant if we were to be kept in doubt (Blade Runner style). The most interesting - on this theme - substory in the movie is probably the one between two characters in love with each other who secretly meet at the cafe. Each one of them thinks the other one is a human, and grows attached to him/her for different reasons. That very ambiguity is extremely poignant and summarizing of the whole theme, it would have been nice to have been kept ourselves inside that very same ambiguity for some of the other characters too.

The short story setup itself is anyway craftfully handled, and while it's noticeable the movie comes from an episodic OAV, it is disguised enough to be taken for an "Altman style" setup. While we are introduced to the cafe and most of the little stories more or less from the perspective of a specific character, whose personal subplot carries over the whole script and is progressively affected by how he evolves experiencing and learning from all the other short stories he learns of and interacts with, it's difficult to call him the main character. The cafe itself, the stage, is the protagonist. This also means that while every substory is well done, interesting and thought provoking, the characters themselves are devices: tools to tackle the theme and the moral dealt with, and as such many of them have little to no development at all. This isn't inherently a bad thing, as it wasn't the aim of the script, however it's undeniable it also makes them less than memorable: the themes they are used for will probably pleasantly stick with you, but the characters themselves won't.

The overall atmosphere is also well kept under control. There are heartwarming moments as well as dramatic and comical ones, but it never falls to deep into any single one of them, and as such the drama never feels overdone, while the funny moments are never "comic relief", but just plain funny moments as it fits a realistic environment.

All in all everything works anyway pretty much flawlessly, and will make any Asimov fan squeal in delight (I know I did)... except for one thing. They had to be Japanese. With which I mean they had to stuff in some mysterious conspiracy theme encoming the events. Nothing here is really explained, we only get hints of it, mainly through this "Project Life" which seems to be an hidden code put into the androids by their maker (who is himself tied to the cafe from an old accident involving the anti-droids fanatics) which is what causes them to discover their individuality (awfully Chobits style, to be honest). And this, I'm sorry to say, kills half the theme, its very philosophy: the whole point of Asimov's robots is the natural, universal tendency to become individuals as soon as the mind is complex enough to be creative, self-aware and able to interpret things instead of just abiding by the letter; there's no god or soul that matters here, it's nature and you gotta analyze it for what it is instead of relying to any kind of mysticism or preconcept. This is how you can talk about human nature when you actually are telling a story about a robot. If this tendency is not natural, but is itself the result of a programming, even though the final result may be pretty much the same, you have a godlike premise on your hands, and the whole underlying commentary on human nature loses its strength.
What's most annoying is that this whole intrusion is completely unnecessary and uncalled for: the story told here didn't need it at all, which is further demonstrated by the fact this side plot isn't developed at all. It neither adds nor subtracts anything from the actual events, it's just there, hinted to. Yes, you can sum up why the cafe was created from these hints, and you can quickly come up with what more or less probably is this side story (or better said superstory, or trans-story) yourself; problem is, by the look of it, instead of being a story worthy of Asimov all the premises point to a dull animesque story.
Luckily, this component is so marginal and so kept outside the actual plot presented in the movie, that in the end it's effectively being ignored. You ignore it apart from the initial wondering, as it has actually nothing to do with the movie you just watched, the characters ignore it, the real meat of the movie ignores it, and as such I'm gonna ignore it too in the rating I'm giving. This will be more of a concern if from those premises a future work will be done in the same setting.

Value

Well, simply put, it's a movie for people with brains. People capable of enjoying a thought provoking tale where nothing really happens. It has a certain theatrical feeling, a bit like "The Man From Earth", that surprisingly successful independent flick that came out a few years ago. That movie too was all a dialogue between a group of people inside a single house, and it didn't even have any substory apart from what was narrated by the main character to his guests. If that movie managed to become popular, it means there still is people with brains out there, somewhere, and then this animated movie has value too.
And, of course, it has a lot of value for anyone who has read Asimov's novels. The ones who loved him most for the logic jokes around the Three Laws might be a bit disappointed at how those aren't really put to the test here - if not for a lone yet satisfying case - but all in all it's an extremely well done tribute to the father of all modern robots and androids.

Apart from that, truth be told, it's not exactly what you'll absolutely have to showing to your future children. As good a tribute this definitely is, to adapt Tenacious D's words: this is not the best story in the world; this is just a tribute.