Silent Möbius: The Motion Picture

PREMISE

Silent Mobius a cute girl police anime set in a cyberpunk Tokyo that also has demons in it for some reason. This movie introduces the setting and is mostly about how our main heroine Katsumi Liqueur ends up ing the youma cops.

VISUAL

Production quality is high. The background art is primarily lovely cityscapes mostly at night from a variety of perspectives in classic cyberpunk fashion. There’s a nice amount of detail that illustrates the near future (now past!) setting well – we see flying cars but not that many and mostly for official use, we see a few tasks performed by disembodied AIs ... but also people selling food on the side of the street by hand. Plenty of animation for things in the background too. The sources and quality of the light changes a lot between night and day, artificial and natural illumination, interior and exterior spaces and this is wonderfully realized – definitely the strongest point of the film.

Character designs are less impressive. The monster designs are just big balls of muscle and sinew with Alien-esque mouths and also some tentacles – adequate for the purpose but nothing special. Character designs have some detail – you can easily distinguish the age and build of the characters for example and we have some original police uniforms complete with epaulets. The scene with Katsumi and her mother embracing in her hospital room was well done but more often the character animation is a bit stiff and inexpressive and given that we are dealing with a premise clearly intended to appeal to the prurient interest the designs mostly do not fit very well. A more orthodox bishoujo art style with cuter faces and smaller proportions would have suited it better.

The action isn’t that great either – they do a good job of showing us Katsumi’s subjectivity in the monster attacks in the shower and in the alley in the first half of the movie but most of it is static incantations or blood getting everywhere.

SOUND

Nothing special. Only Katsumi and her mom have enough lines to be of any interest and of those only her mom (CV: Ikeda Masako) is worth mentioning. Music is adequate but never better than that. It does a good job of avoiding conspicuous overuse of the same sound effects we’re heard a million times so not bad there.

STORY

The main story is pretty simple. Katsumi comes to Tokyo to visit her mom in the hospital and it turns out she has a special anti-demon bloodline (or something) her mom has been hiding from her. As she reaches adulthood the demons (called Lucifer Hawks) start attacking and her. In the first half we have two plot streams: one about Katsumi and her mom’s relationship and backstory which has some pathos to it, the other about the police force trying to figure out what Katsumi’s deal is and later trying to recruit her to the force. In the middle her mom is forced to sacrifice her life to destroy one of the demons and Katsumi is not able to stop her. This ends up uniting the two streams and giving the initially reluctant Katsumi her reason to the police. The second part, about ing the police, is clearly not intended to do anything more than introduce the TV show and from the movie alone is none too interesting.

VERDICT

The classic cyberpunk art would be enough to make even an otherwise bad movie of this length (not even a full hour) worth watching and even at its worst this movie is decent enough.