From The New World Part One
Cute and creepy
Release Date: OUT NOW! 2012 | 15 | 325 minutes | £ 29.99 ( Blu- ray)/£ 24.99 ( DVD) Distributor: MVM Entertainment Director: Masashi Ishihama Cast: Haruka Kudô, Risa Taneda, Kanako Tôjo
John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids and M Night Shyamalan’s The Village; not an obvious pairing, yet this intriguing anime recalls both ( though it definitely won’t end like The Village).
It’s set a millennium from now, in a peaceful- seeming low- tech community where people have paranormal skills. But there are strange new species sharing the Earth; stories of monsters prowling towns at night; and kids who silently vanish. When a band of youngsters take an unsupervised camping trip, they start learning what their world’s really about…
Based on a Japanese novel, From The New World aspires to the density and ambiguity of quality print SF. It mixes the idylls of childhood with hints of some terrible menace. Horror is handled subtly and elliptically; the characters’ burgeoning sexuality is shown with maturity and delicacy.
The show gets hard- going in this volume’s second quarter, with random- seeming adventuring and badly drawn alien critters – the series can look pleasant one moment, strange and eerie the next, and then just plain clumsy. However, it gets back on course, with a series of rapid- fire, interesting developments. Much of the mystery is explained by the end of the set, yet the story seems as unpredictable as ever; it’s a good sign for Part Two.
Extras: Clean credits and Japanese promos. Andrew Osmond
The show is named after Dvorak’s New World Symphony, often played on speakers in Japan to test disaster warning systems.