Kado: The Right Answer Review (Anime)
Kado: The Right Answer is Toei Animation’s subtle sci-fi CG anime original series. While it starts off as a masterpiece, it fails to continue meeting its own high standards by the end, and ultimately crumbles.
Kojiro Shindo is an ace negotiator for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs preparing to go on a business trip, when the plane he’s on is absorbed by a giant cube appearing over Haneda airport. Within the cube, a mysterious alien being named Yaha-kui zaShunina appears, wishing to make contact with humanity. It’s up to Shindo to act as mediator and find out what this strange being wants.
With a focus on the ‘first contact’ side of things, rather than a full-on alien invasion, Kado started out as a unique series that showed a lot of promise. Its appeal lies in discovering the life-changing gifts of alien tech from zaShunina and seeing the world’s response. Can humanity accept and master these changes to improve society, or will such power only lead to war and self-destruction?
Kado started out as a unique series that showed a lot of promise.
The first 8 or so episodes are excellent. Most of the series is done in 3DCG, which isn’t always so great in anime, but Kado looks beautiful. The soundtrack is phenomenal, and does an excellent job of presenting an underlying tension to the often low-key scenes. Though it may seem like a series where a lot of people sit around talking all the time, the philosophical and political difficulties faced by the cast make it consistently engaging. Despite its simple premise and execution, I quickly flagged up Kado as one of the most interesting series so far this year.
The first 8 or so episodes are excellent.
Then everything changed. While it was clear that there had a been a lot of setup and things left unexplained – chiefly regarding zaShunina’s motives for being so generous to humanity – when they started to be explained, the unique tone of the series began to dull and the show itself unravel. Of course there needed to be something it was all building to, and I was willing to overlook a few less inventive turns in the story, but it continued to get worse.
The brilliance of the series up until it all went kind of bad just made the deterioration more disappointing.
It’s not that I saw all the late series twists coming at all, it’s that they felt completely out of place and contradictory to the world and atmosphere it was building up until that point. I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just say that by the last episode I was ready to be done with Kado.
The brilliance of the series up until it all went kind of bad just made the deterioration more disappointing. The intensity of the series died out, and the whole first half of the series felt like a waste of time, undermined by an ending filled with reveals that made it seem like the writers had written themselves into a corner and needed something drastic to get them out again.
It saddens me that Kado: The Right Answer didn’t turn out to be the gem I’d thought it was to start with.
It saddens me that Kado: The Right Answer didn’t turn out to be the gem I’d thought it was to start with – a notion not dissimilar to the downfall of the plot itself. With the majority being so well done, I can’t even dismiss it as a bad series, and would encourage those interested to try it out for the visuals and audio alone. Just be prepared for it to fall apart.
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