Tokyo Override

100 years into the future, the western part of Tokyo is a utopia. 100% automated, free of all crime, magnificently beautiful, characterized by decades of prosperity and a totalitarian police state that monitors via smartly implemented tools in every small component of every small part of the city - all residents. Here lives the orphan Kai, who by day works in internet security but by night acts as a stylish hacker who can crack the most impenetrable government supercode to access information that simplifies, breaks down walls and turns things to her own advantage.

Kai runs into trouble, however, when, on behalf of a spoiled rich little teenage girl, she travels to Tokyo's eastern district, to the slums, to buy a fistful of the new drug that has paralyzed parts of Japan's capital, gets caught by Tokyo's drug police, hacks the personal clock of the leader of one of the city's motorcycle gangs and is doubly hunted by both criminals and police. Kai is simply in the shit, cannot return home and must thus join the motorcycle criminals Hugo, Spoke and Watari to slowly-but-surely uncover a government plot against the city's residents that includes smuggling and killing orphans.

On paper, Tokyo Override sounds dark. The premise is dark, in itself. The themes of exclusion, oppression, loyalty, belonging and revolt are hardly new to the manga genre, rather a given part of the entire genre itself and Netflix has here mixed fresh ingredients from Akira, Ghost in the Shell and Big Hero 6. Because even if the synopsis sounds thematically dark on paper, the tone of Tokyo Override is unfortunately far from as dark as it should be. On the contrary, there's a bright lightness here that doesn't really do the basic story justice, in my opinion. It's very much a children's program, and I'm talking Bluey rather than Arcane. Cowboy Bebop screenwriter Dai Satō has chosen not to go into depth about the oppression in Tokyo, the government corruption, Kai's background, or the personalities of the motorcycle gang, which makes the six episodes that make up season one a bit... Superficial.

In terms of narrative, Tokyo Override never takes off. It often becomes monotonous and relies far too much on the motorcycle-based chase sequences where the same curve is taken with the same Honda-based motorcycle cord 600 times before our anti-heroes reach the intended destination. It is, however, incredibly stylish, which feels like it was the focus of the Netflix production team during the three years it took to complete the 169 minutes of the series. You can tell that they've watched Arcane once or twice and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse a number of times, and I love how these two productions primarily opened the doors to a different type of 3D animation than the one that Pixar, Fox and Disney have been doing for the past 30 years. Hand-painted textures on computer-generated 3D models are so fantastically delicious and long stretches of Tokyo Override are so hauntingly beautiful. In the end, Netflix's new anime is okay but nothing more. There are a lot of (super fancy) surfaces here but not a lot of substance.