While a lot of the cast aren’t likeable at first, one of the show’s strengths is that it can develop them into something more, with most of them going through some major changes as the series goes on. As well as giving us some more gory moments when they rip people’s heads off, they offer some more poignant ones as well, building up one of the side characters, Shoko Majima, as perhaps the strongest of the cast, as her story and her relation to the Heralds is revealed. The Heralds are very enigmatic beings, often being treated as gods by the cult and they work really well early on in the story as it’s not clear what they are, and as a viewer you’re trying to work it out at the same time as the characters. A lot of the show’s big reveals involve just what these things are and where they come from, as they form the main distraction from the show’s main plotline of Juri rescuing her family from the cult.
The most important of these elements is the Heralds, or Handlers as they are also called: giant floating titans made out of dust that act as the protectors of the Stalled, the ordinary people who are not able to move in Stasis, and are at the mercy of those who can.
This left it with a few episodes that were particularly light on content for example, where the two groups are chasing each other around town in Episodes 3 and 4, where instead they could have been used to space out some of the more detailed explorations of the science fiction elements. It front-loaded a lot of its core concepts into the first episode, where it had to handle introducing all of the main characters and the villains, as well as setting up several different elements of Stasis. As a result, it gave me the impression that it had a lot of things to tell, but not enough time to tell them. While it has some fascinating concepts, I often found it to be a bit messy and confusing in its execution, showing a lack of focus and jumping around between its different plot threads a lot. All the while, the mystery around what Stasis is, how it works and how it came to be unravels in the background. This is certainly one bizarre plot that combines a range of time-related science fiction concepts with a cat-and-mouse drama that sees Juri and her grandfather trying to rescue her family. While they think it will be an easy rescue, they end up falling into a trap set up for them by the Genuine Love Society where their leader, Junji Sagawa, plans to steal the stone and utilise the power of Stasis to fulfil his dream of achieving immortality. With only 30 minutes to save them and no car available, things look hopeless – until their grandfather pulls out this mystical stone and stops time, pulling Juri, her father Takafumi, and himself into the world of Stasis. With her family being pretty close to rock bottom, her father just having lost his job, her brother being a NEET and her sister being a rushed-off-her-feet single mother trying to support her son, Makoto, Juri is shocked when her brother and nephew are kidnapped and held to a 5-million-yen ransom in an abandoned apartment block. Kokkoku: Moment by Moment tells the story of Juri Yukawa and her family’s run-in with the Genuine Love Society, a religious cult attached to a miraculous stone which, when fed someone’s blood, can stop time for them and anyone else touching the stone. These attempts seem incredibly common in Japan, so it’s a surprise they aren’t used more often in anime yet here we have a series which combines a religious cult with ideas on time travel and immortality. Kokkoku: Moment by Moment is available for streaming through Amazon Prime.One story that I always hear from people who live, or have lived in Japan, is that they have survived an attempt from a religious cult to indoctrinate them. The appearance of creatures in the “Statis” is maybe the least interesting part of the episode, however-I’m not sure if this alternate world and its creatures prove to be anything new, but I am excited to see how Yuri is able to interact with this mystical power that runs in her family. The main family was flawed and felt authentic, and there are real moments of peril in this episode, which mostly went places that I didn’t anticipate. Well, I didn’t expect this! Although there are strong shades of all sorts of series in Kokkoku, including some of the more violent fare of recent seasons, episode one felt original and interesting. But in a sudden turn of events, her nephew is kidnapped, and the key to saving him is a supernatural spell known by her grandfather-and to the family’s despair, by other, more devious forces. Juri Yukawa is a graduating college student, interviewing to enter the work force, and she’s more eager than most to get her first job: her father has been laid-off, her older brother is a NEET, and her younger sister had a child out of wedlock.
0 kommentar(er)
